Chapter Six
Just when Bethany thought they might be lucky and avoid any encounters with the night horde in these catacombs, ahead of them came the sound of whispers. Moans. Rhythmic chanting.
She extinguished their lights, and Ronan shifted into his werewolf form again. Stronger and healthier than before. He growled in a rumbling, primal way, and Bethany found herself linking hands with the younger Yelena.
A faint, pathetic light wavered in the web of tunnels ahead. Weaker than a torch, weaker than regular lightweavings. But perhaps enough for a night horde creature to see by easily, with those huge eyes that seized the faintest trace of light, that shrank back from anything brighter.
Silent as the grave, they advanced. Really they should be running away as far as possible, but no one seemed to voice the thought. Several times Bethany almost did, but a masochistic sense of wanting to see what was happening at the other end of the catacombs drove her on.
Drove them all on, probably. They'd already been through so much in a short space of time. They'd slept a few times, but without the guidance of the sky above, their sense of night went off-kilter. And now they possibly crept towards a new death. Oh, the fear writhed inside Bethany. It made her mouth dry, her throat sore, and her heart beat in her stomach. But she kept moving on.
There's a fine line between bravery and stupidity...
Now they saw shadows dancing on the walls, shuffling with a rocking motion. The moans and hisses grew louder.
The dim light revealed a small chamber, full of the night horde creatures. Pale, bony, human-like things. Others still misshapen, with deformed limbs or over-swollen bodies that made them tower above everything else.
Bethany barely held back the gasp of alarm that wanted to escape her lips. The creatures formed no words. They moaned, hummed, hissed, and all seemed to be surrounding a figure made out of mud and sticks.
Built up on a kind of bonfire, shaped vaguely like a kneeling human, with flint-tipped spears sticking through its chest.
The night horde creatures swayed around the figure, some collapsing in bows, others wringing their hands to face the ceiling.
Worshipping the shadow man. His creatures.
The pathetic sight left a lump in her throat. All three of them crouched just out of sight. The night horde didn't bother with sentries. Didn't bother with any kind of higher intellect. They just swayed and contorted their bodies in front of the effigy.
The light came from more paintings on the walls, though much of the original colorings had chipped and worn out, leaving smudges of its former glory. History lost to time. Perhaps the creatures avoided the much brighter mural room.
Plus, seeing how many of them dotted the catacombs might explain why not many people had bothered to search out such a place before. And this must only be a tiny fraction of the creatures that lived underground, with black smoke wisping from them.
Did these creatures do nothing else? Did they rest? Did they eat, drink, love? Or were they miserable things, long since driven mad by whatever twisted magic had changed them?
A long, grating moan boomed through the room, distinct and heavy compared to the wordless sounds.
The howl made all the creatures stop. Then, all of them turned to face precisely where the three were crouched, believing themselves to be relatively well hidden.
Oh, well then.
Time to get going.
The creatures became more frenetic, moaning and growling, huge black eyes glaring. Angry. Offended, perhaps, by their intrusion.
“Time to activate that super light of yours,” Yelena hissed, even as the creatures began to lumber towards them, some surprisingly fast.
Some of those creatures were awfully large. Bethany triggered all light containers she could see, making their boots glow, necklaces glow, the effigy glow...
The creatures howled, screamed. The smaller, misshapen ones covered their faces and whimpered. The bigger ones, however, got madder, and broke into a sprint.
“Nights,” Yelena said. “That wasn't supposed to happen.”
Before Bethany could respond, Ronan had scooped them up again, and he chose a random direction to run in, since no one knew where they were. It risked them running into more creatures, but right now, those swollen monsters actually seemed to be gaining ground. Why didn't they shrink away, like the others?
Ronan sprinted them through a startled pack of night horde creatures which were sprawled about on the floor, perhaps sleeping. Some curled up from the sudden light, and others, like the tall ones, began to bellow in anger.
“I don't think all of them react the same way,” Bethany hissed.
“OH? YOU THINK?” Yelena glared at Bethany. “I couldn't work that out for myself, thanks!”
Ronan let out a kind of grunting laugh, still choosing random directions for them to run in. Amazing, really, how he was able to remain so agile despite both his arms being hindered. Werewolves certainly had a feral grace to them, something that no human could manage. But really, they were doing this too much.
Why couldn't things just stop chasing them or trying to capture/kill? Was freedom too much to ask or something?
Bethany focused on extinguishing the lights, wanting to keep the reserve of lightweaving for as long as possible. She didn't exactly have an unlimited source of light. Already, she felt her reserves running low, since she couldn't grab every one.
“I'd help,” Yelena shouted, “but I have no clue what I'm doing!”
“Me neither,” Bethany yelled back, now gripping Ronan tightly because a sudden twitch in movement had made her slide more down his back, making him only hold her by the back of her knees. He paused to grip her better, and barely dodged out of the way of a thundering boulder-like creature, which slammed into the cave wall with a manic scream.
“Move, move, move, move, move!” Yelena beat Ronan's arm as if that might make him run faster, and the werewolf snapped a growl in response. He dashed sideways, through a wide tunnel, right, forward, changing direction if he saw anything ahead. The caves blurred by. The voices all melded into one another, and Ronan's deep, panting breaths suggested he was nearing the end of his burst of strength. Poor werewolf was having a pretty awful time with his newfound freedom. He probably would have gotten closer to home without them.
But he also never would have gotten free without Bethany. As for Yelena... something about her warranted inspection. She needed to return to Kanthus, mix in the highborn society again.
Though she probably wouldn't fit. Just like Kiara. Kiara never fit in anything, except boyish clothes, and trees.
Bethany's thoughts kept drifting, then snapping back to reality. The panic and exhaustion scattered some of her thinking process, making her want to think about better things, better places. To be anywhere but here. Hadn't the world been a much simpler place when she was stuck as a princess back in Fjordan? Maybe that was the curse of seeking something more in life.
You ended up getting that, and then some. Adventures with werewolves and lost bandit girls. Abandoning other people to their fates. Using forbidden weavings. Sucking light from her surroundings to deny it from everyone else. The darkness was both her best friend and worst enemy in this place.
But I met Ronan, she thought. If it hadn't been for me, he would still be back there. And Yelena still would be ignorant of the truth at the heart of her family.
Did those good acts outweigh the bad?
One of the muscular, grunting giants swiped at Ronan again with a large, wooden club, and he dodged the attack by a whisker. They didn't act as paralysed to light as the others, but surely...
Bethany concentrated her dwindling lightweaving on the club in the creature's hand. The weapon burst into light and heat.
The creature's piggy black eyes widened at the club, and it dropped the weapon with a loud thunk, screaming. The time it spent scrambling for the weapon gave Ronan the time to hurtle onwards and leap over a frightening gap that led down into deeper caverns, perhaps death if he failed the jump. He didn't. He landed with a heavy thump on the other side, staggered forwards a few paces, and hesitated next to a slimy mud wall. His nose twitched violently.
Creatures poured in from the sides and piled up on the edge of the pit. Ronan growled and lunged at the wall.
They sank through it.
Not again, Bethany thought, as the thick peat mud enveloped her skin and robbed her of the ability to breathe. The werewolf's muscles strained against the suction, until the resistance lessened, and they tumbled out the other side, into the swamp, into open sky and trees and the bubble of living bogs.
“I hate doing that,” Yelena complained.
“Let's try,” Bethany said, before coughing, “not making a habit of that, okay?”
“The habit of constantly running for our lives might be a nice one to break, too,” Yelena said, before spitting out a fleck of green.
“You know you still have swamp fever, right? I told you to be warm, and,” Bethany hesitated as Ronan pressed forward, his footsteps uneven, “not exert yourself so much.”
Incredulous laughter greeted her statement. “Sure. If you can turn back time and not set fire to my camp, or draw the night hordes and get us trapped in underground caves, I'll take a nice rest.”
“We'll get you to the damn palace. You can rest in silk sheets and have fancy grapes fed to you all night long.”
Yelena laughed again, before falling silent. Ronan soon put them down when they reached a wide, running stream, unhindered by mud. Again, they all washed off the muck, and Bethany used the last of her magic to bind warmth into their clothes, thinning out the light so that it only touched the edge of their vision.
Yelena washed out her backpack as well, and drew some rather soggy fruits out for them to eat. They badly needed to rest, but they also needed to put some distance between themselves and the night horde gathering, and possibly find the lightwoven path.
Though escaping the reach of the night horde might be difficult, given that they had an entire network of caves underneath. That kind of knowledge made it difficult to sleep easy. Along with the images of the shadow man on the walls, sucking the light out of the sun. The stars.
“Back when I was younger,” Ronan wheezed, taking another gulp of water, “I used to be part of the palace patrols that go into the swamps, killing any night horde stragglers that had made it too close to Kanthus. We might patrol up to two dawnnights’ distance all around, but no further. And it never occurred to me that the bastards might be underground.”
“I don't think it occurs to anyone,” Yelena said, examining her slowly drying clothes. “We just think they pop out of thin air or something.”
“We don't get any sightings in Fjordan,” Bethany said. “Rumors about them appearing on the mountains, but I don't think anyone in Fjordan has spotted them in years.”
Now they walked together, talking quietly, since they wanted to keep moving, and Ronan no longer felt up to the task of carrying them around.
“Somehow I don't think we'll be getting scholars to go in there. We'll have to tell them what we saw,” Bethany mused. At this, Ronan made a tsking sound.
“Scholars want proof. Your word isn't enough. They get enough fairy tales about historical events to shrug your explanation off as well.”
“But...” Bethany wrung her hands, “surely, this will make them stop and question.”
“Mmm, no.” Ronan's breath curled in the air. In the faint light shared between them, all of them had heat gradually rising, thanks to the contrast of their warm clothes to the bitter cold that might have endangered them otherwise. “We'll just have to wait and see.”
“What do you think about it, Yelena? The images of the shadow man?”
The bandit girl shrugged. “Before I saw you take the light from my necklace, I would have dismissed it as nonsense. But now... who knows? Maybe someone did get powerful enough to steal all the light. Not sure why they'd do that, but...”
“Most effective way to destroy the world,” Ronan replied. “Instead of raising armies and laying waste to those you conquer—if you take away the sun, the world will simply die by itself.”
“Except he seemed to forget about the lightweavers. Despite, well, being one himself.”
“Maybe he didn't think the lightweavers would band together. Or learn heat transference. I think that discovery only became active post-sun. Not that I know a whole lot about our history. But in our constant praise of lightweavers, we like to talk about their 'timely' discovery of heat.”
They walked on further, carefully picking their way around shivering, wet ground. All of them wore rags. Bethany doubted the Kanthians would recognize her as a Fjordan princess, simply because she no longer looked the part.
“There's more magic than I thought,” Bethany said then. “We have lightweaving. And I believed that to be the only kind of magic.”
“Hmm?” Ronan flicked up an eyebrow with interest at her words.
Bethany's right palm brushed by a rough bark tree, then a small leafed bush. “Werewolves don't use light magic, do they?”
He smiled. “No. We don't. But it does seem to be an inherited magic. We don't know exactly where we come from, but I'm inclined to believe we might have been part of the night hordes a long time ago.”
“Huh. Okay.” Bethany digested this information, finding it fascinating, before saying, “And then, we have... the magic that was sustaining the fruits. The night hordes. That black wispy stuff.”
“That's right!” Yelena said suddenly, yellow eyes wide. “I was just thinking about that. Clearly, something's going on that we don't get.”
Ronan sniffed. “I wish I could tell you. But I don't even know about myself, really.”
No, Bethany thought. We really don't. A shame. She wouldn't have minded learning more about Ronan and how he worked. Though she didn't believe about his connection to the night hordes. He seemed too human. Too kind. With perfect lips and a smile that managed to light things up. Despite all that he went through.
It sent a shivering kind of sadness inside, to realize that. How must it feel to go so long without any help? How long before you just gave into despair?
She wanted to reach out and touch him, to comfort him, somehow. But she didn't. She kept those thoughts to herself.
They stopped to rest a short while later. The constant traveling soon bled them of words to say, leaving them just to focus on the journey, on taking step after step, of dealing with hunger and thirst when it came.
She didn't feel much like a princess, or anyone important at this moment. Just a person doing her best to survive. Using the tools at her disposal, legal or not. Though she didn't want to breathe a word of her sins to anyone else.
Kiara would likely be disappointed in her older sister. But then again... Kiara would be disappointed if she was Bethany.
I bet if I told her about stealing all the light, she'd just clap me on the back, actually, and ask me to go into detail. She's nothing like me at all. And that's a good thing.
Bethany had to smile at that thought. Yes. That sounded more like her sister. Ronan looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable.
“Do you think,” Yelena panted, stepping over a sunken branch, “I'll be accepted in Kanthus? I mean, my mother isn't around anymore.”
“Your mother had family,” Ronan said. “Who are likely still alive. When we get there, we can make sure you're united with them. I'm sure they'd like to see your mother's daughter.”
“She ran away from home, though.”
“Oh, I highly doubt your family blamed her,” Bethany said, with a hiss of anger in her voice. “Your father probably hid her from them. He likely groomed her and whisked her away before her family had a chance to realize what was happening.”
“Yes...” Yelena's lips drooped. “I can see my father doing something like that. He's... he's not a nice man.”
No such drama existed in Bethany's family. Well, aside from the fringe relatives who wanted to get their claws closer to the throne, and the heavy expectation that the population looked up to the royal family. She was supposed to represent the best of them.
“Look!” Ronan grabbed Bethany's arm, making her halt in place. “We made it!”
“What?” Bethany's heart pounded as she focused on what Ronan saw. Lights. Yelena gave an exasperated finally, and they trudged out of the uneven ground at last, spilling onto the well-lit path. The main road’s interconnecting cities. The main road that would lead them to safety.
Just as long as they didn't get captured by bandits again.
That would be nice.