Lords of the Seventh Swarm

Chapter 34

Maggie hurried to keep up, terrified beyond her ability to tell. Distantly, the earth rumbled from the sound of the mistwife flailing in her anger.

Gallen ran ahead of Maggie, following crazy trails, trying to go upward when possible. Time and again as she climbed, Maggie found herself grabbing wildly at ancient roots in the ground, all of them cold as ice and hard as iron.

The landscape had no color. Everything was washed in shades of gray, covered with the same dark molds and slimes.

Dully, almost constantly, she heard wild thrashing, the terrible cries of the mistwife. They were getting closer to it as they climbed.

They came to a cavern filled with iron gray molds, standing like inverted trumpets, which felt like foam rubber beneath her feet. Nothing lived here except for the odd blind insect that skittered off when it felt the ground tremble at their steps. Beyond the occasional trickle of water, she could no longer hear any sounds. The air smelled fetid, full of rot and mold. The stillness, the heavy, oppressive air weighed her down, made her feel as if she would suffocate.

For nearly two kilometers, they found no sign of sfuz but for a pair of prints in the humus, crossing their path. “A young sfuz,” he said. Maggie was no expert tracker, but even she could see detritus filling the prints; the edges around the tracks had crumbled. The sfuz that made them could not have passed this way within weeks or months. Still, it was a good sign. A juvenile had passed this way, exploring the tangle, hunting.

Gallen tried to follow the tracks back to a lair, but they led around the lip of a dangerous sinkhole, then climbed directly up a steep tree. Still, they were getting near the lair.

“Maggie,” her mantle whispered. “I have just received a message from the ship. The dronon are making a powerful sensor sweep of this area. They’ve discovered the ship’s location.” Gallen turned and frowned at Maggie. Apparently, his mantle had just relayed the message to him.

It had taken Gallen and Maggie two hours to fly their ship into this mess. They’d snaked through dozens of passages, gone up almost as much as they’d gone down. Even if the dronon knew their ship was here, it could take them hours to find a path to it. Once they did, they’d follow Maggie’s scent.

She imagined dronon Vanquishers, thousands strong, hunting through this tangle. She wondered what would happen when they met the sfuz.

“Gallen,” she hissed. “We have to stop!”

Gallen halted. The light from her glow globe cast enormous shadows, shadows that frightened her because for a moment she thought she saw something huge and black struggling toward her from a passage.

She went to Gallen’s side. “The dronon will be hunting here,” she whispered, “And the sfuz. Maybe we shouldn’t try to get so close to Teeawah.”

Gallen looked up toward the passage that had frightened Maggie. “We don’t know how close we are, yet.”

“Close enough so their children play in these passages.”

Gallen looked forward eagerly, then frowned as he glanced at the trail behind. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Maggie’s heart pounded. Her mouth felt dry. She unstrapped the canteen from her back and took a swig. She didn’t know what to do, either. The tension in the air was so thick, she could hardly swallow. She nodded, let Gallen lead them forward.

He can’t do it all, Maggie thought. He can’t lead us. He can’t fight for us. He can’t do it all. Think.… Think. She didn’t want to go forward, could barely force herself to keep up.

They hurried up the passage, came to a bend. Gallen halted. To their left, a great hole opened, perfectly round. This one was twice the diameter of the one they’d encountered earlier. Another mistwife. Huge. Huge.

Maggie’s heart pounded. Gallen and the others tiptoed ahead.

Think, Maggie told herself. She reached into her pockets, shoving her fists in to get warm; her fingers closed around glass.

She pulled it out. The bottle of scent from the perfumery. She stopped, considered it for a moment.

The dronon would follow her, chase her with their Seekers. She couldn’t let them find her.

She motioned with her hand for Gallen to come back. He had already gone fifty meters ahead. He returned reluctantly.

Maggie didn’t dare speak. Instead, she reached up, fumbled with his robe. Its nanoscrubbers could hide her scent,’ clean it from the air as she walked. If she wore his robe, she hoped, she’d be almost undetectable to the Seekers.

Gallen frowned at her, confused, tried to pull her forward. Apparently he thought she was only cold, and he considered this a poor place to give her the loan of a cloak, but Maggie refused to be led away till she had the cloak off him and over her own shoulders. She pulled the hood up over her head, then took the bottle of scent, carried it to the lip of the great hole in the ground, the mistwife’s passage.

The dirt here was slippery, loose. If she got too near the edge, she’d fall in. But she had to do this, had to reach out over that dark hole and pour a few drops, a few precious drops of her scent down that hole.

When she finished, she put the stopper back on the empty bottle and dropped it into the thick humus at her feet, covered it with dirt, then fled.

Every second, she listened for the sound of something rushing up that shaft, something shrieking and tumbling. If this monster came after them, they might not escape.

When she’d gone a few hundred meters, she sighed in relief. Yet her relief was short-lived.

If I made it safely, won’t the dronon? she wondered. She’d hoped the mistwife would kill any Seekers that came after her. She’d imagined the machines hurtling over the lip of that pit, and the dronon buzzing away, crashing into the jaws of the mistwife.

But what if no mistwife lived down that hole? The pit was vast, twenty meters in diameter. Perhaps its maker had died centuries ago.…

Maggie couldn’t know, might never know. She only knew she had to keep running. By now it was late afternoon. The sfuz would be waking, leaving their chambers. The group needed to find a place to hide.