He closed his right eye, the dominant eye, the one that told him where to stab and slash. Light blazed and washed over stone, a broad beam fuzzy in the dank fog. Her police flashlight could focus tight or spread to cover a wide area, and she’d set it as broad as possible back in the gallery. Dark stone, gray, fairly smooth, rippled, a squashed tube about ten feet across that meandered away down-slope into blank gray that told him nothing. Fog. Floor and ceiling curved gently to meet walls with a tighter arc. It looked natural, no tool marks. Looked like hot stone had sagged before it froze, maybe.
Darkness. He opened his other eye, closed the dazzled one, picked out the fireflies again. They seemed to have retreated, vaguer in the fog.
Don’t like light? Nocturnal or underground species?
He hadn’t counted, but there seemed to be more of them. They kept an even spacing, grouped by threes, the whole mass moving like a school of fish. The threes were grouped again in threes that moved as one, and he got a sense of a still-larger grouping of nines. They moved too much for him to sort it out.
This coordination bit bothered him. It looked too much like intelligence.
Three groups of three broke from the mass and darted forward, toward her side of the tunnel, throat-high and belly-level and low. Attacking the light? Checking to see if the two of
them
could coordinate? He inched forward and stabbed across with his sword-cane, out beyond her reach, breaking two of the sparks into fragments with one thrust. They hadn’t staggered in depth as well as height and width. The others froze in mid-air, she caught one and then another, lightning cuts and firework bursts, and the five survivors retreated. Fast.
He retreated, too, keeping their defense tight. The backpack bumped against the grit of the wall, cutting into his sense of where he stood. He’d never liked fighting, but liked it a lot less when he felt awkward, didn’t know his balance. That pack was
heavy.
It threw him off when he tried to move fast. They’d better damn well
need
every ounce of it.
They act like they don’t like light.
“Turn on the flashlight again. Leave it on. They retreated when it was on.”
“Yeah.” Her voice growled like she forced the word past her teeth. “Light . . .
now!
”
He scrunched his right eye shut just in time. Blazing brightness, not as dazzling, his left eye hadn’t recovered night-vision. But he couldn’t see the things. “Aim the light toward the floor.”
“Got . . . it.”
Definitely gritted teeth over there.
But he could pick out the orange specks against the darker tunnel now. Cave. Abandoned sewer. Whatever. The things had floated further back. No, they didn’t like the flashlight beam.
“What’s wrong? One of those fireflies get through to bite you?”
Another growl off toward her side, like a caged leopard. Then, harsh voice, “We’ve got a mile of fucking
rock
on top of us, wanting to squash down, and you . . . ask . . . what’s . . . wrong.”
Oh. The claustrophobia.
Only way he knew to treat
that,
was get her out of here. He checked the buzzing ache in his teeth, found the Seal’s whine in front of them. Beyond the fireflies.
“We can back out, if you have to.” He glanced behind them, over his right shoulder, shadowy gray doorway in the gray stone. “The gate’s still there.”
Idiot thought, he wondered if she had pulled the door closed behind her as she came through. If they’d have to reach through
that
to turn the knob. The Finland door had closed itself . . .
“Where’s . . . the . . . Seal?”
“Ahead. I can feel it. Not close. Closer than it was.”
“Then . . . we . . . go . . . ahead.”
He glanced over at her, letting the fireflies go hang for a moment. Sweat glistened on her forehead. The flashlight, now, that was steady. Just like she’d held her arm steady while he cut the cast off her wrist. Even though she hadn’t trusted him.
“MOVE IT!”
He jumped, then snapped his gaze back to the fireflies, still glowing out there away from the light. “You have another flashlight in this pack?”
“WHY?” Stress apparently made her shout.
“I think we can herd those things ahead of us. Two lights, more force. Plus, I like backups. One burned-out bulb, we have a
real
problem.”
“Main . . . pack . . . left . . . side.”
He shed the pack, opened the flap, found another police-style metal flashlight, long and heavy, club as much as light, just like the one she held. That made sense—be able to swap parts between them if she had to. This one looked unused—the one in her hand had the black finish worn off to bare silvery metal in places, years or decades of use, a couple of fresh scrapes probably from his knocking it to the ground, back however many nights ago at the synagogue in a world beyond the gate. He pulled the spare out and closed and re-slung the pack.
“Help any if you close your eyes?”
“NOT A DAMN BIT!” Then he saw her swallow. Take a deep breath. “Sorry. I can still feel all that rock squeezing in on me, eyes closed or open.”
Another thought. “You have anything in the pack we could use to mark this gate? I wouldn’t be surprised if we find more of them. Or need to mark corners to find the right path back.”
“Fat crayon, upper right pocket. Lumber crayon, we use them when checking ruins in disaster areas. Flood, tornado, earthquake, whatever. You leave a mark—this building has been checked, three bodies, no survivors. That sort of thing. Marks on damn near any surface, won’t run in the rain.”
Apparently having problems to solve helped take her mind off the space squeezing in on her. It freed up her tongue, anyway. He dumped the pack again, found the orange crayon just where she’d said, marked the door with three quick strokes for an arrow, slung the pack again and tightened the waist-belt, sticking the crayon in his right jacket pocket.
Maybe he’d just marked an illusion, and the arrow would vanish as soon as they moved out of sight. He shrugged at the thought. If so, so. You do what you can, and move on.
“So. Forward the Light Brigade?”
He could feel her glaring at him. “I don’t much care for your choice of literary allusions. Go back to the Blessed Qur’an.”
“What? Just because the Noble Six Hundred got slaughtered?” Hey, if it got her mad, that helped. “How about, ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.’ Shakespeare work any better for you?”
He sheathed his sword in the cane, freeing his left hand for the flashlight—the cane itself was a weapon and he’d just proven that it killed “fireflies”—then switched the flashlight on, aiming it low so he could still see the fireflies. They started forward at a slow walk. The bugs matched their pace, backward. So far, so good.
“I think Hamlet’s suicidal ‘To be or not to be’ depression fits us better. If I thought those things could actually kill me, rather than playing Prometheus on my liver . . . ”
Great. The whole reason I got involved in this was that I didn’t want to die just yet. Now I have to trust
her
to guard my back.
Then, a tangent thought,
Could Legion actually
kill
a god? Was that all bluff? More illusions? I’ve just seen how real they can be.
Never trust a demon.
Meanwhile, literary criticism had moved them a few hundred feet down the tunnel. Lava tube. Whatever. It definitely felt like down, anyway. They walked a slow slope that varied less or greater, but always the one trend. Gravity had helped make this, whether with water or molten rock. More important, that meant they headed for some kind of exit. Water or rock, it had to flow somewhere to leave this empty space behind.
The fireflies continued their retreat from the light. They didn’t make any sound. Or, none that he could hear—he had no idea what
she
got from them. Or what her winds could hear. They didn’t find any branches in the tunnel, any other doors to confuse the route. No echoes from their boots thumping on the clean stone.
Just a tube burrowing through dark gray rock, wider and narrower and taller and shallower, with smooth ripples on the rough-smooth surface. The fog stayed constant, too, moist stagnant air. Now he smelled a taint of death in it, carrion, not heavy but enough to make him wish for another choice of route. He could understand why her winds weren’t happy.
“This fog has to come from somewhere.”
Apparently she was fighting her internal demons back. She was right—seamless stone, no cracks, no water on the “ground” under their feet. The chill air and stone wouldn’t create fog without a source of vapor.
He sniffed. Just water vapor and old meat and cold damp stone tickling his nose. No sulfur, no touch of swamp or even earth. The fireflies didn’t leave a trace behind them, either. He’d caught some char and bitter musty squashed-bug-smell from the ones they’d killed, but nothing since.
They weren’t retreating anymore. They’d stopped and spread out in a cloud across the roof of the cave, denser, as if they’d run up against a wall. But the flashlight beams just continued on—the light picked up bones on the cave floor beneath the glowing bugs. Lots of bones.
Ivory-white bones picked clean and then gnawed, until the bottom layer looked like dust and gravel. That explained the smell of death hanging in the dead air. Horned skulls topped the freshest layer, looked like goats or sheep. Some skulls that didn’t have horns.
They stopped moving down the tunnel. So did the fireflies. The orange dots packed closer together and milled about faster. They still kept the group-by-three going.
“Your winds say anything about that?”
“Which?”
“The fireflies. They won’t go farther. They crowd up against the ceiling, getting away from the light, but we’re at least ten feet closer than they used to let us get. Something stopped them.”
Her flashlight beam panned across the floor. “Something dumped a bunch of bones. I get the feeling those weren’t just bones when they arrived. Now we know what the fireflies live on when they can’t eat wandering gods.”
“Your winds?”
She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to voices only she could hear. Which was probably true.
“Moving air.” A sigh, audible tension flowing out of her. “Something slows it down, doesn’t stop it completely. Like a filter. Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why we can breathe here. Slow air exchange.”
Albert stared at the floating glows. “Can
we
get past it?”
“Don’t know. Depends on which way those bones came, before they were bones.”
He glanced behind them, sweeping his flashlight beam over the cave floor. Bare stone, not even dust. “You’d think, if they came down our way, we’d have found bits and pieces before this.” Then another, closer, look at the pile of bones. “I can’t see goats working their way through the doors. No thumbs.”
“Maybe those goat skulls were avatars of the Great God Pan. Or goat-headed demons. With hands.”
Pan didn’t have a goat skull, just horns. But thanks so much for the image.
“If the . . . something . . . stopped bones completely, they’d pile up against an invisible wall. They don’t. They taper off, and the ones further down haven’t been chewed. As if the fireflies can’t go there, but anything falling off the pile can. I think I can see wool and dried meat, even.”
Which could explain why some body parts lasted long enough to rot before the floating piranhas ate it to dust . . . and he was shading the truth on wool. It looked more like hair, human hair. Hanging off a half-stripped human skull.
The fireflies had oozed forward a bit while his flashlight beam scanned their back-trail. They’d kept to the far wall of the cave, though, the part where he’d been aiming before. Maybe . . .
“Can we force them to one side and slip past them? They
really
don’t seem to like light.”
She played her beam down and up along one side of the cave and focused it tighter with a twist of her wrist into a sharp almost-laser-beam through the fog. The fireflies flowed away from each move, hugging the shadows.
“Don’t think we have much choice. Except for going back. The Seal still out in front of us?”
He checked the buzzing in his wisdom teeth. “Yes. As far as I can tell. Not any closer, yet.”
She answered him by pressing her back against the right side wall of the cave, her coveralls scraping along the rough stone as she inched forward. He pointed his flashlight at her feet and followed, the backpack forcing him further out from the . . . basalt? Granite? He wasn’t a geologist.
The fireflies packed tighter against the opposite side. They milled around faster. They flowed back toward the entry gate, away from their hoard of bones. And then they swarmed . . .
Fiery needles lit on his skin, his hand and face and side of his neck, any place they could reach flesh. He pushed along, slashing at them with his cane, bursting the glows into sparks, but more and more rushed at him, always in threes, replacing each kill with another trio, another trio squared, and the sparks from her slashes had just as little effect. She turned and backed over the pile of bones, inching out from the wall to leave space for him, and he felt like he was pushing into a feather bed, a wind, and the fireflies weren’t at his right side anymore, and he also turned his back to the pressure of whatever blocked them and shoved stumbling backwards until he thumped down hard on his ass and the things hovered beyond his face and he sat there staring at what was left of a human hand, gnawed down to sinew and bone and still clutching the pitted remnants of a femur in a death-grip.
Literally.
The wrist bones tapered to nothing. That probably marked the farthest limit the fireflies could push into whatever was stopping them.
He looked at his own hand. Blazing pain, five bites he could see, blood flowing and then ebbing and then stopping as his god-powers started to heal him. He touched the left side of his face and then his neck and his fingers came away with fresh blood there.