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“Too far away,” Arpix growled. “Digging something else out, maybe.”

“The protection?” It hadn’t seemed that the skeer had exercised much control over their captives. The idea that they could locate and destroy whatever kept the skeer out hadn’t occurred to him.

“Or Salamonda.”

“She’s not calling for help...” Evar strained his ears.

“She wouldn’t,” Arpix said. “She wouldn’t want anyone coming after her. Two idiots like us, for example. She’d know they’d just get eaten.”

“Let’s see if we can get to her another way.” Evar started forward again, and Arpix, with a deep, trembling sigh, began to lead the way once more.

They’d covered another hundred yards or so before the screaming started. It began with the sound of earth and rocks falling. A ceiling collapse maybe, or a breakthrough. A cratalac scream followed, the first they’d heard since escaping the beasts. A cry like the earlier ones, full of rage and challenge. Then within moments the tunnels rang with multiple screams as if all five of the cratalacs to follow them into the dig were engaged in a furious battle. Evar couldn’t say how long it lasted. Moments or minutes. The sheer volume and fury of the screams undid him, turning his muscles to water and shaking his bones.

“It’s stopped?” Arpix’s question ventured into the silence that followed.

“I—” Evar stopped. He heard something new. A human’s voice?

“Salamonda!” And before Evar could react Arpix had pulled free and was running forward, presumably bent double.

“Arpix!” Evar gave chase, following the sound of retreating footsteps on his hands and knees.

At last a whisper of light from somewhere gave enough illumination for Evar to make out walls and tunnel roof. They’d left the safety of the smallest tunnels. Evar got to his feet and started to run with his head bowed, painfully aware that a cratalac could lunge from any of the dark openings he passed on either side. “Arpix! Come back!”

“Salamonda!” Arpix ran on, easy prey for the monsters.

Evar caught up with Arpix not far from the entrance they’d come in by. Enough light reached in to show the slumped bodies of at least two cratalacs. So many pieces of them were scattered around that it was hard to know whether there were three in total, or one in several large chunks.

“Arpix?” Salamonda’s voice, faint but not too distant.

“Stay!” Evar moved Arpix to the side and advanced with the white sword out before him, catching glimmers of daylight amid the gloom. Loose rock, dirt, and debris crunched under his feet, the spoils from digging done to enlarge the entrance to the side passage just ahead.

Evar turned the corner. More cratalacs lay butchered amid the piles of earth they’d dug out. Some sort of collapse had happened, enough to open a dusty crack in the ceiling through which daylight had jammed its bright fingers, not enough to explain in any way the amount of destruction visited upon the insectoids.

“Evar?” Salamonda’s voice emerged from the dust and gloom ahead.

Evar lifted his gaze from the carnage just in time to see something he didn’t understand. An animal of some kind, smaller than a human... but it looked as if it had just walked into the wall and vanished. “What... what was that?”

Arpix, who had not obeyed instructions, came to stand at his elbow. “A cat,” he said in a voice full of wonder. “I think it was a cat...”

Salamonda emerged, trembling and dusty, dirt in her hair. “He’s called Wentworth. He killed them all. I think Yute must have sent him to watch over me.”

Reading is a dangerous sport, never more so than when we turn the page and find ourselves there among the lines.

Blunt Instruments, by Joshua Semple

CHAPTER 18

Livira

Livira and Malar stood watching events that had happened perhaps only weeks before the time they’d travelled from. Evar was by the pool, talking to the Soldier among the crops. In one hand he held the book that Livira had started writing hundreds of years before. For a brief period after touching the book Livira, and then Malar, were very surprised to find themselves participants in what seemed to be one of the stories lying between its covers.

“Why did you kill him?” Livira asked.

“Who?”

Most people didn’t have so many deaths on their hands that a question like that would cause confusion. “Leetar and Meelan’s father. In the story. You were the general and he was supposed to be your friend, but you did your best to decapitate him.”

“If that means chop his head off, yes I did,” Malar replied with some heat. “I would have done it too if that sword hadn’t been so fucking blunt.”