Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [29]
At least none of Kalkan’s hired goons had washed up near—
The tunnel gave way beneath her.
Riltana found herself falling in a wide expanse. She gasped, and the sunrod dropped from her open mouth.
She was in her element! Air streamed past, and she folded into it. Oh, gods—that was good! She threw her arms wide and asked the wind to bear her up. Though dank and cold, it answered, and her plummet slowed.
Without the sunrod, it was absolutely black, except for a spark somewhere below. How close was the floor of whatever cavity she’d fallen into? That spark was coming up quick! She strained to bring herself to a complete stop.
Not soon enough. Something came up beneath her and smashed her like a hammer. The blow knocked the air out of her, and she curled up and gasped like a fish out of the sea. Dull pain resolved from the shock of the fall in her ribs and her left foot. Once again, she was out of her element.
When her breath came back she groaned and blinked several times. Eyes open or closed, everything looked the same. The spark, probably of her dropped sunrod flickering out, was gone. Black was her whole world.
Moving air brushed her cheeks and tickled her nose with dust and old rot, reminding her of the cellar below her grandmother’s home. Like that, but wider, wilder … and more ominous. Plus the tang of something unpleasant. Riltana strained her head one way, then another, sniffing, and caught the offensive odor, musty and sickening, even stronger.
She wrinkled her nose. At least she’d found a place the Akanawater hadn’t recently flooded. She hated the water.
“Well, isn’t this a pretty picture,” she croaked. She was lost somewhere in the labyrinths of Airspur, probably in ruins of a city that had squatted there before the Spellplague had dropped a piece of Abeir over half of Chessenta.
The sound of a pile of sliding pebbles riveted her attention.
“Who’s there?” she called. Riltana heard an ugly note in her voice, the desperate keen of fear. Hold it together, woman. She took in a deep breath and stood. Ouch. She was going to have some bruises.
She tried again, louder, “Is anyone there?”
Her voice echoed into a surprisingly large distance before failing. Dread trailed cold fingers down her spine. Had she fallen all the way down to the Underdark?
Another clatter jerked her head around. Her eyes tried to open beyond the capacity of her skull.
She reached for the short sword sheathed on her back, and found it gone. It had been washed away! Her other hand automatically went to her calf sheath, and found the leather-wrapped pommel. A dagger was in her hand an instant later. The hilt was wet, but thank Tymora, it was good to hold honest steel.
“All right, come on, stop hiding in the dark like a coward, I’m ready for you!”
Nothing. Her heart thundered, and her spit dried to dust.
Another clatter, closer this time. And a strange chittering, like the sound insects make … What was it?
She cursed herself for a simpleton and snapped the fingers of her free hand. The curve of a miniature ceramic pot slapped into her palm. She raised it, and dashed it on the ground.
Blue-white incandescence exploded from the alchemical flare. It was blinding, but she turned her head at the crucial instant.
A heartbeat later and the flare’s illumination faded to a bearable level. Riltana saw that she stood at the bottom of a hollow shaped like an elongated teardrop, open on her left to a larger gulf of darkness. Besides the single large opening, dozens of miniature tunnels punctured the nearest wall at floor level, each one running off into lightlessness. Dust lay heaped everywhere.
She shifted her foot, and the dust crunched.
It wasn’t dust; the heaps were made up thousands of disintegrating cockroach casings.
“Gah!”
The musty odor intensified, clogging the air. A thrum, as of hundreds of tiny feet, vibrated through the soles of her boots as each of the miniature tunnels spewed a bristling swarm of squirming black cockroaches.
Riltana leaped upward as the swarms converged to carpet the cavern floor. The attar of roaches was like