Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [30]
Her breath came in great gasps. The light of her flare continued to flicker in the cave’s center, throwing highlights off thousands of skittering, oily bodies. She hated cockroaches. She’d invested a serious chunk of coin in a charm for her loft expressly fashioned to exterminate the little buggers. The wriggling scene before her was like their revenge.
Something occluded one of the miniature tunnels. A cockroach the size of a dog. The insect squirmed out into the mass of its tiny cousins, and began to unfold sooty wings. Two more scuttled out after the first.
Time to go!
Riltana studied the exit in the cavern’s wall, almost directly opposite the surface she clung to. She sought the wind’s regard, despite having just enjoyed its favor to save herself from a hard introduction to the cave floor. Air was a temperamental element, and calling on it overmuch exhausted its goodwill.
A breeze answered, briefly clearing the air of the cockroach odor.
She fell into it, arms wide to guide invisible wings of rushing air. Riltana flew across the chamber and out, even as two of the entirely-too-large cockroaches lifted off the ground in pursuit.
She hurtled into a tunnel larger and dryer than the one she’d been forced to bellycrawl through. The wind released her and she rolled into a landing that saw her back on her feet facing the hollow. Sure enough, the alchemical flare’s failing light outlined the shapes of two monstrous winged bugs coming after her. At least the carpet of cockroaches hadn’t yet spilled out of the teardrop hollow.
Riltana found a new dagger on her other calf.
One roach buzzed straight for her, mandibles clacking. She ducked beneath its malodorous bulk, and plunged her dagger straight into its abdomen. It squealed, sounding far too much like a genasi child. The sound startled her so much she lost the dagger.
The second roach came at her from behind, hovering like a giant dragonfly. She twisted away, but it managed to lacerate her shoulder with a pinching bite. White pain spiked across her vision. Riltana staggered.
“Shit-sucking bugs!” she screamed, and reached for the two daggers hidden along her forearms. Only one was where it should have been. She palmed it and jabbed at the closer roach, but the point skipped off its dull carapace.
It lunged for her face, mandibles straining to clutch her. She slipped left, and in a moment of inspiration, slashed her dagger through the thing’s wing. The sheared membrane twirled off one way, and the bug crashed to the floor, the intimidating drone of its presence suddenly reduced to the sound of one wing slapping the rock.
Riltana grunted with animal rage as she kicked the thing as hard as she could. Her boot tip, steel-toed to make it a weapon nearly as fearsome as a mace, crunched through the carapace. It squealed as its sibling had, and she kicked it again. The arch of her foot lofted the roach back up the tunnel toward the hollow.
Speaking of the bug’s sibling … she whirled. The one she’d stuck first lay unmoving a few paces up the rocky corridor. She sidled over to it, ready with her boot if it so much as twitched. It lay on its side. The hilt of a dagger in the thing’s abdomen twinkled in the rapidly dwindling light of her flare. Riltana snatched the dagger and jumped back. It remained convincingly motionless.
Good.
But the alchemical light was almost used up. Her sunrod was gone, probably broken.
Riltana shuffled farther away from the hollow as the flare snuffed out. The sound of thousands of roach bodies scraping on rock persisted, but in the complete darkness, seemed to grow louder. Was it really, or was it only in her imagination?
She gingerly reached out until her hand grazed the tunnel