The Sword of Retribution

The Caves of Shanathin - Part 6

     The tunnel slowly got wider and the roof lower from that point on, slowly, so that they didn’t notice it at first, until Thomas saw the light from his glowbottle reflected from the ceiling, now only a few feet above his head. They noticed with some surprise that the tunnel was now well over a hundred feet wide, to judge from how long it took a thrown stone to hit the opposite wall, and that huge boulders, some seven or eight feet wide, littered the now very shallow river, the water splashing over and around them and polishing them to a smooth, shiny finish. Angus examined a small stone he found lying on the path, and declared that it was creslite, a softer rock than the arrastone they’d been passing through up until then.

     “This explains the rockfalls,” he added. “Creslite is eroded away faster than arrastone, which is why the tunnel’s so wide here. Hopefully it's just a narrow layer and we’ll be through it soon.”

     “How dangerous is it?” asked Shaun.

     “Well, rockfalls will be more common here, as you can see from all them.” He indicated the giant boulders in the river, the nearest of which could be seen in the light of the glowbottle. “However, what Douglas said earlier still applies. We’ve just had a rockfall, so there’s not likely to be another like it for a few weeks, at least.”

     “You wanted to go back just now. Do you still think we should go back?”

     The trog gave a great sigh. “Well, it would be the prudent thing,” he said. “A tunnel like this near one of our cities would be sealed off to prevent foolish explorers from coming to grief there, but if this sword you’re after is as important to the outcome of the war as I’ve heard... When I think o’ my fellow clansmen dying in their hundreds to fight the Shadowarmies, it shames my heart to shy away from such a mundane danger.”

     Shaun and Matthew shared a glance. "Yeah," said the older brother. "I wonder how many of the others back Fort Battleaxe are still alive? Yeah, we’ve got to go on.”

     The one good thing about being in a layer of softer rock was that there was much less of a slope, the tunnel running almost level for the most part with only the occasional slope here and there and, although this meant that they’d be in the layer of creslite longer, they all welcomed the chance to rest their legs from the seemingly endless flights of steps. Even descending a long flight of steps could be tiring after a while, and Thomas thought with horror that to get back to the surface they’d have to climb them all again. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

     It was quieter too, the roar of the waterfalls having been replaced by the gurgling of a rocky stream. It was a pleasant sound that they enjoyed listening to and that lulled them to sleep when they reached a place where the slaver told them they could stop and which the trogs, after examining the ceiling closely, said was safe from rockfalls.

     The tunnel continued on at the same level all the next day, dropping only a couple of hundred feet between the point at which they set off for their nineteen hour march and the point at which they stopped again for their next five hour rest. The tunnel twisted and turned so much, moreover, that they estimated that they only covered about ten miles, as the crow flies, during that time. A solid bed of arrastone lay beneath the river, preventing it from eroding downwards by more than about an inch a century, but it was able to erode sideways through the much softer creslite much more quickly, forming great, wide caverns hundreds of yards across containing vast mounds of rubble fallen from the ceiling around which the river flowed in hundreds of tiny rivulets only a few feet across and inches deep.

     An enormous variety of cave life inhabited the caverns, thanks to the forests of toadstools that grew on detritus washed down from the surface by the river. They were eaten by legions of slugs, worms and giant cave beetles, and these were, in turn, food for spiders, amphibians and giant blind lizards twenty feet long that waited, absolutely motionless, for days on end for something to go past before pouncing on it with a flash of claws and razor sharp teeth. They also came across the occasional humanoid village, that they avoided, and the occasional giant amoeba, similar to the one that had given them trouble at the very entrance to the caves. None of these creatures troubled them, though. The intelligent ones recognised the slaver as a creature not to be tangled with, while the rest fell either to its mind blasts or the wizards’ magic spells.