Bastial Energy (61 page)

The dirt was damp, sticking to her hands and wrists. Her lower back quickly began to ache, and soon her neck became sore from being held up to see where she was going.

“Effie, anything to report?” She could tell Terren was shouting, but his voice was muffled like he was talking with a cupped hand around his mouth. From his tone, Effie figured this was the second or third time he’d tried asking before she finally heard.

Because it was impossible to turn around, she bent the top of her head to the ground to shout between her legs. “May as well start following. I have no idea when this ends.”

When she flipped her head back up, all her hair had come down over her face and become heavy with dirt. She took a moment to shake some out before flipping her hair behind her neck so she could see in front of her. Dirt trickled down her back. She sighed, dragging on.

Not a moment too soon, the tunnel widened drastically. Not only could she now stand, so could a giant.
How could the Slugari have made this hole so big and more importantly, why?
She was still on a slope, but there was no longer only one direction to descend. She could continue forward, but there were two new pathways as well, one to either side of her.

The start of the maze,
she realized. She turned to aim light from her wand back into the tunnel, waiting as patiently as she could for the rest of them. With excitement pumping through her, each breath was clear, drawn without trouble.

Nothing is going to stop us from getting to the Slugari.
She felt all the tension drain out of her as a wide smile formed.

Chapter 60: The Moment

ZETI

Zeti watched from the hills in horror as her brother and Vithos followed the Humans underneath the tree.

“They’re ours now,” Paramar muttered under his breath, pushing himself from his stomach to his feet.

The rest of their Slugari search group was waiting behind them for their report of what they saw, but that was only twelve Krepps. They needed many more before invading the Slugari colony.

Six days ago, their search group was too overjoyed for words when the chamoline flower finally turned a deep red while they passed over the heart of northern Satjen. Even though they all knew what it meant, no one could say it aloud. The Slugari colony had been found. Already being unbelievable, it seemed as if speaking the words would push it over the edge to untrue.

Instead, they all gawked silently at the red flower in Paramar’s claws until he shouted for two of the Krepps to run back to camp to gather their army. It was a four-day walk, so Paramar demanded they make it there in three. The rest of their group stayed behind to be vigilant, watching for signs of Slugari, Humans, or the traitors Zoke and Vithos.

When they found all three, the feeling it gave Zeti was beyond her comprehension. It was unlike Krepps to feel ambivalent, but ambivalence couldn’t be more of an understatement when she saw Zoke going underground with the Slugari—going where the Krepps would be attacking as soon as their army got there.

“When will our army arrive?” she asked Paramar, trying to mask her feeling of dread with an indifferent tone.

“Doe and the rest of them should be here by tomorrow morning,” Paramar answered.

“Doe is coming for this?” Zeti couldn’t forget what he’d told her: “
When we see Zoke again, you’re going to be the one to kill him.”

“Certainly, yes.” Paramar gave one hard laugh. “He’s never wanted anything more than storming the underground colony and taking revenge on his own kind. Imagine his delight when we tell him that Zoke and Vithos are down there as well.”

Zeti thought about what Suba—the task coordinator for all Krepps and the closest thing to a mother—had told her when they’d last spoken: “
Certainty is important, remember that. When you’re put in a confusing spot, find something you’re sure about.”

Zeti fished around her thoughts for something she could be sure about. Usually it was easy—the taste of Slugari meat. But now that taste had gone sour because mixed with it was the blood of her brother.

Next, she tried focusing on her feelings for Zoke. It did no good. She felt as if she hardly knew him anymore now that he was a traitor. She wondered how it came to be that the two things she was most certain of a month ago now gave her ambivalence, even apprehension.

A question popped into Zeti’s mind. Thankful for the distraction, she asked it. “What of the Humans? Our treaty with Tenred—they want us to take arms against Kyrro. Are we to abandon that alliance now that we have the Slugari?”

“That’s up to our leaders, but if it were my decision we’d tear Kyrro to the ground. You saw it.” Paramar pointed to the tree they’d just watched the Humans crawl under. “Kyrro is with the Slugari, and the traitors are with Kyrro. That means Kyrro must be against us. If we leave them, we give them the chance to attack our underground colony after we take it over. Doe would never allow that. No.” He ripped grass from the dirt with a quick yank. “Doe said it before, he’ll say it again: Kyrro will burn. Right after we tear through the Slugari colony, we’ll turn their cities to ash.” He let the green grass blades fall between his fingers and sprinkle back to the forest floor.

With a deep pain in her heart, Zeti finally knew exactly what she was feeling. This was the moment she’d feared. This was the moment when her last bit of hope was gone. It had been dwindling, slowly disappearing like drops of water under the sun. But now there was none. The last of it left her as quickly and quietly as her next breath. A gust of wind came from behind to carry the air from her lungs down to the trees below. She could almost see her hope going with it, never to return.

Chapter 61: Size and Strength

STEFFEN

“We must have passed by twenty different tunnels by now,” Steffen commented to Shudu in her language. The slow-moving Slugari had been leading them through the massive tunnels for nearly an hour already. Every time they came to a fork, Shudu chose a direction and slithered on without a moment of consideration.

When the Slugari replied, Steffen couldn’t quite understand the exact numbers she told him. He was nowhere near fluent in the language and hadn’t practiced numbers in Slugaren for many years. He realized she was listing the amount of times the maze led to a wall, how many wrong ways the maze had, and how many times two paths circled to meet each other later. Of what he did recognize, it sounded like five hundred-something when she was describing the number of incorrect paths, but he figured he’d misheard. That many seemed impossible.

“How is the roof so high?” Steffen asked.

“The tunnel was made by a Dajrik,” Shudu replied.

“They really exist?” Steffen blurted out in common tongue without thinking. He took a breath to compose himself and then asked the same question in Slugaren. Implication was not enough in this case. He wanted Shudu to answer definitively.

“Yes, you will meet ours soon. We are almost there.”

“There’s one here?” Steffen shouted this time, again in common tongue.

“Why are you suddenly so excited?” Reela asked. “What’s here?”

“A Dajrik! What a day! I get to meet a Slugari, travel into their underground colony, and even see a Dajrik.”

Reela said something, but Steffen was too busy trying to ask Shudu a question to listen. “Is the Dajrik really…” He stopped himself. He wanted to ask if it was twenty feet tall, but he couldn’t remember the number for twenty and didn’t even know if the Slugari used the same measurement system. “Is it really as tall as the roof of these tunnels?” He pointed above them.

“Yes,” Shudu answered calmly.

“Does it truly have skin as tough as bone?”

“Yes.”

Exhilaration was bursting through his body. An involuntary squeak escaped from behind closed lips.
It’s true. All of it’s true!
Everything he’d read of Slugari, their language, their history, their Dajrik, it was all accurate. He was so thankful he didn’t listen to his mother when she’d told him not to fill his brilliant mind with books of silly fantasies.

He was ten when he spoke Slugaren to her for the first time. Her eyebrows bent as she tried to understand his words.

“What are you saying?” she finally asked after he repeated it three times.

“It’s Slugaren. It means you’re my mother. It’s so fun to speak!”

“Slugaren, where could you have read about that?” Her tone was bitter.

Immediately, Steffen knew he shouldn’t have brought it up. “The last book we bought. It’s about the language of the Slugari,” he admitted.

“That’s what you had me buy for you, a book about a made-up language? I don’t want you wasting time with that. I thought you loved history.”

It would take him four more years before he’d start convincing his mother of anything about which she disagreed. He couldn’t remember how that conversation ended. He probably had agreed with whatever she’d said, only to change his mind later, back to what it was before. It was the usual result to a disagreement between them until he got older and she started listening to logic.

“It is just past this bend,” Shudu said after what felt like a mile through a maze so long and elaborate that Steffen had no chance of remembering the way out without careful attention to their route, and it was too late to start now.

The only light to guide them thus far was a faint glow emanating from Shudu’s body as well as Effie’s wand. But as they came around the last turn, the tunnel became lit with what looked to be natural sunlight.

Ahead was a sight Steffen only thought he’d see in his imagination—a great underground chasm with hundreds, no thousands, of glistening Slugari. The pillars that connected the ground to the ceiling had a melting-candle look that made it appear as if the pillars were dripping. But upon closer investigation, Steffen saw they were sturdy, composed of hard clay.

As he came closer to the end of the tunnel and the beginning of the colony, Steffen could start to see around the many pillars. He found the sources of the light that looked just like that of the sun. There were balls of burning white that were just bright enough to bring a tear to his eye, but not so bright that it pained him to look.

“Are those caregelows?” he asked Shudu, pointing at the flowers. He already knew the answer but wanted her to say it.

“Yes.”

“So beautiful,” he whispered back. Something deep in his stomach began to ache, not painful, but warm and gripping. It swelled slowly up to his chest, and the moment it touched his heart, he felt raw and exposed, ready to laugh and cry at the same time.

The caregelows were everywhere, some of them brighter than others. Each was surrounded by bursts of unreal mixtures of blue, red, green, and everything in between. It took finding a dim caregelow to realize the source of these hallucinatory bubbles of colored light: All around the caregelow were plants so pure and bright it felt like Steffen was finally seeing true color for the first time.

While he was watching the dim caregelow, a Slugari wiggled its fat body through the mass of fantastic flowers and held its claws over the caregelow in the center. The caregelow grew brighter until its white light overtook the Slugari nearby, completely hiding him from view until he slithered back out of the cluster.

“Wait here,” Shudu told Steffen as they were just about out of the tunnel. “I need to get the leader before you come in.”

Steffen translated for Terren and the rest of them but couldn’t even be sure he was heard. Their heads were stretched forward, eyes wide open. Even Zoke, who claimed the Fjallejon Mountains didn’t amaze him, had a look of sheer astonishment.

“How can such a place exist?” Reela was first to speak.

“Because it’s their only way of surviving,” Steffen answered. “Above ground, they would be destroyed by the Krepps. They needed to live underground, so they found a way.”

“What is that?” Zoke asked with a claw extended. Steffen didn’t need to see where he was pointing. He already knew what Zoke saw, for it had just come around a pillar and was impossible not to notice.

“That’s a Dajrik,” Steffen replied, letting out a knowing grin.

Everyone’s awe was palpable.

The twenty-foot-tall creature was even more marvelous than Steffen had seen in drawings. From afar, its skin looked just like rock but molded around the figure of a man like a suit of armor. Its face was like that of a Human but with horns of rock protruding upward from the sides of its head instead of ears. Steffen had seen helmets of war with the same design.

There was no color to the black and gray Dajrik except for a radiant red jewel that hung on a necklace it carried around its thick neck.
The ruby of a hundred rujins,
Steffen realized. Of all that was written in his books about Slugari and Dajriks, the story of the rujin ruby necklace to cure the Dajrik’s terrorizing nightmares was the least believable to him. He’d never been happier to be wrong.

There was a crash like a boulder falling from a small peak with every step the Dajrik took toward them. An entourage of Slugari followed behind. If Shudu was among them, Steffen couldn’t pick her out.

Terren stepped ahead with a hand on the hilt of his sword. Vithos and Reela took to his sides.