Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

a timely fashion if these tunnels are as much a labyrinth as I fear they may be. You’ll surely get there sooner aboveground than we will below, or I’d wager as much anyway. Besides—if we’re wanted, it might be hard for us to buy seats. Will you take our money and purchase tickets for us?”

While Odile made a little noise of protest that I duly ignored, Lively’s expression firmed. The faint furrow of her brow, hinting at nervousness, belied a determined core.

“After what you’ve done for me and my Erdie,” she said, accepting the purse I plucked off Odile’s hip and passed over, “the very least I can do for you is this. Where should I meet you?”

“I’m not sure yet—just wait for us outside the airport as casually as you can. We’ll find you somehow.”

Nodding, Lively bent to kiss her husband. Erdwud’s expression, tight with concern, melted somewhat as his wife assured him with a wink, “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be back in two shakes. You just watch the bar…if anybody asks, I was woken up by the row and told by the innkeeper I’d ought to go elsewhere a whiles.

“You just holler if they give you any trouble,” said Erdwud, watching his wife hurry back out of the cellar and into the inn proper. Shaking his head in an affectionate way, he looked at me quite knowingly.

“These women,” he said with a shake of his head. “It’s like finding a field of flowers to discover each one of ‘ems made of painted iron. A bit unnerving, really! I think Lively could best me in a fight, you know…”

Soon, one by one, we descended into the ancient tunnel system beneath Skythorn. A mist in his eye, Erdwud called down, “Now, you lot be sure to send word to us that you’ve made it wherever you’re meant to be going…don’t want us to worry for the rest of time, do you?”

“We certainly will find some way to let you know,” I called up to him while landing upon the old concrete. One by one, my companions had already organized themselves and lit the magical lantern. Now they waved up with me as I called, “Perhaps, if ever you and Lively find yourselves inclined to travel again, you might come see us…wherever we end up.”

With that, Erdwud shut us in, and we were left alone beneath the tunnels of Skythorn. By what means Sharp so confidently traversed the dark, I could not guess only to say that he had perhaps practiced the trek on which he embarked so as to flee without drawing attention by torchlight. Whatever his means of departure, it was the last we saw of him. With Branwen at the pack’s head and me at the rear to guard from any sneak attack that might have been laid by man or monster, our party of five made our way through the labyrinth beneath Skythorn.

It is here I must make time to pause and describe how grateful I am to have known Indra and Odile. Today it is patently obvious to me how much I and my family owe to the two who found me in the Nightlands and assisted us through so much of our journey. Were it not for them and their lantern, their familiarity with navigating the darkness, even the simple tools they bore such as compasses and lockpicks, we would have been quite literally lost.

Instead, with the two of them close together in the center of our party, (just behind Valeria, where they could watch the displaced leader of their species and ensure she was in no danger), Odile and Indra navigated the tunnels for us. Amid the occasional soft squeak of a rat, they kept us going in what was roughly the right direction and held the lantern so we could see and avoid the assaults of any dumber beast that happened upon us.

And there were, in fact, things moving in that darkness—things that were not fully discernible and may at times have been human. Whatever they were, brigand or beast, they avoided us and we avoided them.

All except for one particular aggressor.

Although there were points where tunnels crossed with one another and rough passages that connected between them, the main tunnels as the ancients had envisioned them were demarked by the same mine cart-like rail system that had caught my eye from the first. As Sharp had described it, all we needed do was follow those rails through the tunnels in a southwesterly direction. After a certain point we would either run out of exit options or reach the end of the tunnels…but it would be hard to tell which was which.

We had walked for almost an hour. I was beginning to worry because of the airship’s noon departure time. Though the duel had been first thing in the morning and we still, by any stretch of imagination, had a fair bit of time still before the ship left, if we became too lost in these tunnels we might end up quite some ways away from our intended destination.

Furthermore, the exits were variable. Sometimes we might pass a set of stone or metal steps that had been installed by a previous owner and neglected by the current one; sometimes, like with Sharp’s inn, there might be a ladder up to an emergency exit. Most often, however, any trap doors or diversionary tunnels had long ago been sealed, abandoned, and forgotten.

How were we to know where to exit? What would we find at the end of the tunnels? What would happen if Skythorn guards found us down here and we had to kill a few? What then?

I was so sucked into the miasma of my own thoughts that I hardly even realized we’d been walking in the same direction, without any change of angle or noteworthy landmark, for something in the neighborhood of twenty minutes…at least, that was how long it seemed to us.

Valeria’s question broke the tense silence in which we traveled for