Seven Into the Bleak by Matthew Iden

 
     
     
     
    THE TEETH AND the claws came flashing in the dark, like everything else in the Bleak, stealing breath and blood and life from us. The fault was our own. Like idiots, we had sung songs of home and family--our voices soft and low, but Death itself takes care to be quiet in the Bleak, the World Under the World, the Mother of Caverns. The end of us all.
    It was Filki, the fool, who had started us to singing just after we had made camp. I clapped a hand over his mouth to stop him and Galdur the Sage stood and forbade the frivolity in his quavering voice, but hope and longing had almost devoured the other four, so sing we did. "Hearth Hath the Home Made" and "Fires With Our Longing Heart" and a handful of others remembered from a life gone by. Filki ended with a song of the Fey that none but he could begin to understand, but the words made sense somehow and the elf's plaintive voice brought tears even to the eyes of Karn the Axe, a killer of a hundred men. As the last note died away, barely a whisper, I gripped the two bone-handled knives that gave me my name and listened until the blood roared in my ears and my own heartbeat sounded like a drum.
    I looked around in the gloom made possible only by the muddy, heatless light of Filki's magic, a dull glow that marked the center of our camp in a damp and freezing cave. The others were tensed and ready, as well, listening like a huntsman's dogs for the whisper of feet upon the rock or the slither of tentacles that would be the only warning we would have of yet another attack in this land of horrors. Lilath even began the small hand motions that I recognized as the Devotions to Belal the Divine, a healing prayer that had saved my life more than once.
    We crouched, ready to spring, for many long moments. Time has no meaning in the Bleak and it could be that we remained that way--hunched, stooping, squatting--for an hour. Finally, Galdur raised his hand, to signal for us to stand down. The old man knew things beyond my ken, so I finally--truly--relaxed, my hands cramping and my legs aching. I laid back on my bed roll and tried to find sleep. You would think in a land of perpetual darkness it would be an easy hunt.
    Our only warning that our carelessness had been fatal was a slight gasp and a sound like dice being thrown on a gaming board. I was on my feet, my knives clear of their sheathes, before I was awake. With a shout of sorcery, Filki made the dormant light flare into brilliance. What greeted us was a nightmare.
    At one end of our small cave, Meki lay on the ground, folded in half like the two leaves of a book. But it was the wrong way, the wrong way, the wrong way my mind screamed at me as I saw that the back of her head was touching her sandaled feet. Her red hair spilled over the ground and her face stared at the cavern's ceiling, wide-mouthed and pale in shock. Hair I had touched, a mouth I had kissed. There was only a split second to mourn, then the ground itself seemed to shift and a rock fiend--like a roach or a beetle, but the size of a man on his belly--leapt towards me.
    Its four-jawed mouth opened wide and I met it with crossed knives and a curse, the only defense I had. Its momentum carried me backwards and I stumbled and tripped, landing on my back. My knives kept it from ripping my throat out, but the thing hissed as it bit, dripping juices that ran down my arms and stung my eyes. I kicked and scrabbled desperately, choking back the panic, trying to slide from under it, feeling its back legs lifting to rip into my belly.
    The thing gave a roar, then, and I felt it shudder as Karn's axe crushed its spine. He struck again, then a third time. In the back of my mind, I saw him aim his swings as only Karn could, aiming for the joints in the fiend's shell. Harlan yelled his war cry and brought his bright blade uselessly down on the thing's hide, trying to bash his way through. Despite the damage done to it, the fiend's hind claws worked their way up my legs and