Resurgent Shadows (Successive Harmony Book 1) (4 page)

“I am called Caleb Matthews.”

“Why were you following the wizard?”

“I was trying to figure out the best way to kill the trolls he was with, and him, too, if I could.”

“They are called trulgo, human.”

Caleb shrugged and Sigvid continued his interrogation.

“Why did you kill the golgent mutant Athore?”

“He was a goblin—golgent, if that’s what you call them. That’s reason enough, isn’t it?”

Sigvid held up a hand to silence the whispers that had broken out at the table. They quieted instantly.

“You humans are a treacherous lot, tricksome and cruel, but the golgent and their ilk are worse. Since before the days of the Breaking, we dvergers have fought them at every turn, harried them, and cut them down in their sleep.”

The contempt in his voice was palpable. It was odd, though, that Sigvid spoke with much less accent than the others.

“We’ve killed thousands of them, and they have claimed many of our brothers in return. They are creatures of the god Sayrin, devoted to death and destruction. They outnumber us here, in your world, and your kind has only swelled their numbers. Our greatest weapon now is secrecy and stealth, which is hard for a dverger, but by it we survive. You know us now and where we are. We are left with but two options: kill you or enslave you, never again to see the light of day. Do you work with the Dragonhosts? Are you one of the Dragonspawn, swearing devotion to Sayrin, Lord of Chaos? Answer truly, for your life depends on it.”

Caleb knew that an immediate answer was needed, but as he opened his mouth to reply, a massive echoing explosion rocked the platform and sent it careening. It struck Sigvid with enough force to send him staggering into Caleb and knock them both to the ground.

Caleb fell hard, his bound arms inhibiting his ability to cushion his fall. His ears rang, but he heard and felt Sigvid scramble to his feet next to him. The platform trembled and cracked with the weight of falling dirt and shards of the porthole that had sealed the opening in the ceiling. Chunks of concrete struck around them. Caleb curled into a ball and brought his bound arms up over his exposed face. It was an awkward position, but it was all he could manage against his bonds.

Something crackled and hissed as it shot over his head.

“Wyrm!” someone shouted over the noise of battle and pain.

Caleb scrambled to his knees and crouched down behind an overturned chair. Peering out over it, he saw a scene of absolute chaos unfold before him.

Dust hung heavy in the air, obscuring his vision, but not enough to hide the massive, red, lizard-like creature that skittered across the platform. Its long, hooked tail flashed out in a deadly arc. It disappeared into the dust but reappeared moments later accompanied by a sudden scream. A dverger dangled from the barb at the end of the tail, pierced through the neck. With a powerful flick, the creature sent the body flying through the air and into the gloom.

Caleb watched, stunned, as the lizard thing sucked in a deep breath and then spat out a stream of hissing black liquid that narrowly missed one of the guards that had escorted him into the room. The spittle smacked into an overturned chair, which began to bubble and smoke on contact. The chair dissolved before his eyes in a matter of moments.

Caleb shouted something incoherent—dust, memory, and shadow swirling interchangeably—and studied the ground for something to cut his bonds. His training kicked in, and he realized that he could easily escape in the chaos of the battle. It was his chance. He found an abandoned knife and quickly severed the ropes that held his wrists.

Guttural shouts of anger and pain rose up around him as the bonds fell away. He chanced another quick glance over the top of the chair. Goblins slid down ropes from the gaping hole in the ceiling. A handful of the green-skinned creatures were already on the ground, curved swords meeting dverger axes.

Something inside him snapped. All thought of escape, of trying to flee, or even of his own personal safety fled before the fiery rage that swelled within him. The hunter took control.

A golgent flung itself from one of the ropes onto the floor near him. Before it could move, the hunter was beside it. He tossed the body aside without a pause and then threw the knife at another golgent that had just landed on the ground, leaving the dagger buried, point first, in its eye. Scrambling back to the ruined mess of the platform, the hunter leapt onto the remnant of the table and grabbed for his gun, which was lying half-buried in a pile of scraps. He found a loaded magazine and rammed it in place. He grabbed two more nearby magazines and shoved them in a pocket.

The lizard creature leapt off the other side of the platform after a knot of golgent at the far end of the room.

The hunter snapped off three quick shots, though only one found its mark. He took cover behind one of the chairs as the echoing retort of the gun reverberated through the room and drew even more golgent toward him. He emptied his remaining five rounds into the closest group, then dropped the magazine and replaced it with one of the spares in his pocket. He emptied another magazine into the group and watched bodies fall.

“Human,” Sigvid’s voice rang out over the echoes of gunfire. “Look out!”

The hunter reacted instinctively. He dropped to the ground and rolled to one side. Sizzling acid crackled over his head. The lizard creature, drawn by the sounds of shooting, barreled down on him with the force of a small train. The hunter dropped the empty magazine and struggled to lock his final one into place. It clicked home at the last possible moment. The slide racked forward. He pulled the trigger and shot, point blank, into the creature’s face.

Time seemed to freeze and reality distorted. He was no longer there with dwarves, no longer facing down a massive, red-scaled lizard. He was back there on the night when his world had come crumbling down around him on a goblin’s blade. He was firing, not at the lizard, but at the goblins that had come crawling in through his hovel door.

He fired shot after shot, unloading the entire magazine, as the creature’s momentum carried it into him, crushing him under the weight of its massive bulk. He struck his head on the concrete floor and his vision blurred. Thought vanished; memory and reality changed places and then switched back again. Pain flared. He kept on pulling the trigger mindlessly. Tears streamed down his face.

Rough hands grasped at his shoulders and pulled him out from under the dead weight of the carcass with surprising strength. A dverger face appeared before his eyes. Caleb could tell that his mouth was moving, but he didn’t hear anything that was being said. Images of Rachel, the distant echoes of gunfire, and the sound of crackling flames played across his mind.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” he cried. “I’m sorry!”

A sharp slap across the face pulled him mostly out of the fog. It was like bursting onto the surface of the ocean, gasping for air in stunned disbelief and denial of what had just occurred. He let his handgun hang loosely from his hand. The slide had locked back, every round spent long before he stopped shooting.

“Move, human!” Sigvid barked. He half-supported, half-carried Caleb across the room. “There’s another way out.”

Heavy fighting continued around them. Caleb forced himself to focus as best he could but failed to completely banish the fog and memory from his mind. Pain from a number of smaller wounds stung and burned as he ran, but he pushed through the haze and continued on.

“I’m all right,” he lied. He picked up his pace so that the dverger didn’t have to support him.

Sigvid grunted and broke into a run, letting out a shrill whistle that pierced the din of battle with amazing clarity.

Caleb hurried to follow, pausing only for an instant to holster his empty gun and grab one of the long knives that lay abandoned on the floor. Other dvergers joined them in response to the whistled call for retreat, matching their pace as they ran. They thundered into the long hallway and slammed the door shut behind them. One of the dvergers shoved the haft of an axe through the locking wheel, securing it in place. A handful of other dvergers broke off from the main group and darted down the first passage that branched off from the main hall. The remaining dvergers, all of whom bore wounds from battle, snapped fists to chests in a salute toward those who were fleeing.

Sigvid motioned for them to continue onward as echoing bangs resounded from the doorway behind them. “They’ve gone to collapse the bunker!” he shouted over the noise.

Caleb nodded his understanding, all his focus intent on keeping pace with the swift dvergers’ flight. Something didn’t seem right, something about the dvergers and the salute, but he didn’t have the mental capacity to do more than put one foot in front of the other without falling. Though he was taller and longer legged than the dvergers, images and memories flashed across his vision, slowing him down no matter how desperately he fought to keep them at bay.

“Come on, human.” Sigvid tugged him into a side passage and slammed the door closed behind them.

The other dvergers ran in front of them. Caleb had been so engrossed in his own inner turmoil that he hadn’t noticed them dart into the branching tunnel.

The picture of a long curved sword, wet with deep red blood, flitted through his mind and then vanished again.

“What was the red lizard thing?” he asked in an effort to force his mind to focus on the present.

“A wyrm.”

“It looked more like a giant lizard to me.”

“Not worm, wyrm,” Sigvid snapped, and this time Caleb heard the difference in inflection. “Wyrms are dragon-kin, throwbacks of breeding between Reds and Browns, bred for the purpose of hunting down and killing dvergers. There’s a deep hatred between the two races, dragon and dverger, that is as ancient and powerful as the stone itself. Don’t you know anything at all, human?”

Caleb ignored the quip. He hurried along in the crowd of dvergers, swept along in their mad scramble to escape. They came to a ladder at the end of the passage and quickly clambered up it, Sigvid at the rear.

The ladder led them out into the warm night air, in the lee of a large hill, through a thick hidden door that rested in its side. Not a sound broke the nighttime silence, evidence of the fact that they were far from the Raleigh city-fortress and the battle that waged there.

Sigvid, climbing up out of the bunker behind Caleb, slammed the door shut behind him and pulled ash and sand down over it to cover it up.

“Are there other doors like this one?” Caleb asked. His thoughts were on the group that had broken off earlier to collapse the tunnels.

Sigvid glowered at him. “They knew what they were volunteering for,” he snapped, pulling twin battle-axes from his belt. “Now move, human, or they will have died in vain.”

Caleb glanced over his shoulder at the empty land around him. For just a moment the hunter reared up within him and ordered him to flee. He almost took that first step.

He swung the long knife he had picked up in the tunnels experimentally. It was well balanced, if a little small. He turned back to the dverger and met Sigvid’s gaze. There was something in them—anger, pain, sadness, curiosity. But there was also a note of understanding that Caleb could not escape.

He nodded at the dverger once and followed him into the night.

Eric fiddled with the hose, careful not to detach it from the rest of the filtration system. The water started flowing more swiftly and he let go. He still needed to change out the filters. The omnipresent ash and debris had an annoying habit of clogging those things on an almost daily basis, but he’d have Dan come and do that later.

Eventually, Eric knew he’d have to come up with a way of making the filters last longer, but right now he simply didn’t have the time or energy to add one more project to his plate. Natalie already complained about the number of unfinished projects sitting around their cramped rooms. Was it his fault that there was always so much to do? He hadn’t chosen to lead this little group of survivors, but since he was the smartest and most educated, the role had fallen to him.

Eric sighed and got to his feet. He ran a finger through his longish blond hair, not caring that it smeared grease and grime in it. Before the cataclysms, he’d just finished a master’s degree in both electrical and mechanical engineering, so getting his hands dirty was actually cathartic for him. He was two steps away from the filtration system before he remembered to go back for his rifle.

Feeling bashful and glad that no one else was around to see, Eric picked up his AR-15 and slung it over one shoulder. He wasn’t a warrior, not at all, but no one was safe unarmed anymore. And no one could really claim not to be a fighter, not anyone that was still alive anyway.

He strode through the tunnels and culverts with the strong steps born of familiarity. The tunnels that they called home were an odd place, riddled with unnatural irregularities. Parts of the interconnecting warren of tunnels, passages, and caverns appeared to be modern, manmade hallways with pieces of sewer machinery or pipes and electrical wire within them. But these connected seamlessly with old, red brick passages that had antiquated sconces set into the wall to hold torches or lanterns, though none of those remained. They were ancient. Incredibly so.

Still other passages appeared to be chiseled out of the rock itself, with tracks down the center for carts or perhaps a tiny train, though none of these were tall enough to admit any but the shortest of men.

And on and on.

The tunnels seemed to continue on for miles, stretching under the mountain without end. It was as if someone had grabbed a hundred different puzzle pieces from a hundred different puzzles.

They had come to accept the oddities. It was simply a fact of life. There were more important things to wonder about, like where there next meal was coming from, or how they were going to find get enough clean water to drink.

Occasionally, though, Eric still found himself thinking about it, though never long enough to puzzle out any meaning behind it. Despite the odd circumstances around which they had been discovered, the tunnels were home. Utah had missed the brunt of the onslaught when the Dragonhosts—the hordes of monstrous creatures led by dragons and their riders—had begun their marches across the land. Provo had remained unscathed through the first few months. But then the hordes had swarmed over the city like a pestilential plague, destroyed the garrisons, and burned all of Utah and Salt Lake Counties to the ground.

Eric had been ready, though, and had escaped into the sewers and tunnels he had discovered underneath his university. It had kept him and his family safe during the majority of the battle. The few monsters that had managed to make their way into the tunnels had been easily dispatched, and the dragons were far too big to get into even the largest of the passages. In the beginning, most of the antennae and communications arrays had worked and he and Dan had been able to maintain radio contact with the outside world. Eric had even been able to place a few calls on his cell phone to friends and family throughout the country. He had only been able to reach a handful. He harbored a silent hope that some of them were still alive, but that hope was buried beneath the layers of rage that had consumed him since he had been forced to take refuge in the tunnels. Natalie was the only one who could penetrate his barriers, and even then with difficulty.

One day, though, even the radios had stopped working. Now the only electronics that worked were those that ran on batteries, which were becoming scarcer every year. They stockpiled those they could find amongst the burnt-out remnant of the overcity, which is what they’d taken to calling the ruins of Provo. He’d taken in the refugees they’d come across in their scavengings, but as their numbers had grown, it had forced more and more frequent trips into the city above, and further and further distances to travel in order to find areas that hadn’t already been picked clean.

Light filtered down through openings in the ceiling—old drains from the street above—signaling that he was getting close to the Commons. Occasional piles of ash hid small nests of rats and diverted the thin stream of water that ran through the tunnel. As Eric strode by, a particularly large rat squeaked in annoyance, picking up a rotting apple rind and disappearing into a pile of ash.

It was an interesting cycle. He scavenged from the dead to stay alive, and the rat scavenged from the living to keep from dying.

The sound of echoing voices rolled down the tunnel toward him. He smiled and grabbed the strap on his rifle to hold it in place so he could break into a run. His smile faltered when he realized that the voices were raised in alarm. Otherwise he would not have been able to hear them—he was still too far away. He slipped his AR-15 off his shoulder and ran down the tunnel without a second thought.

He burst into the Commons onto a scene of confusion and anger. Most of the people were massed near the far entrance, the only opening large enough to admit the wagons that their foraging teams used. The crowd was massed around one of these wagons, surrounding five bruised and battered men who were being treated by the few medically trained personnel they had among them.

Eric hurried over to them, a sense of dread spreading through him like a bucket of icy water. There had been six men in the group when they had left that morning.

Dan, the leader of the party and Eric’s younger brother, pushed aside the hands that were trying to clean blood off his face and got to his feet as Eric approached.

“What happened?” Eric asked. He shouldered his rifle and gestured for the gathered throng to begin unloading the wagon.

They hesitated but reluctantly started shifting boxes and bags of supplies out of the wagon and into waiting hands. Just because something bad had happened didn’t mean they shouldn’t still be pragmatic about their life-saving supplies.

As the crowd drifted apart Natalie appeared and hurried to Eric’s side. She picked up one of the discarded rags and gently brushed the blood and grime away from Dan’s bruised face.

“We were on our way back from the old barracks down on Freedom Boulevard with the land mines and other equipment when we were ambushed by a group of those armored troll-things and a giant red lizard-creature.” Dan massaged his temples, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. “The lizard thing was at least seven feet long and spat acid. Kevin took a stream of it to the face and was dead before he could scream. The rest of us opened fire on the trolls, and I think we were able to take a few of them in the chaos that followed. The lizard took off after the first shots were fired, and the trolls ran off after it. We secured the wagon and hightailed it back here. We took the long route and circled back in from the north.”

An icy hand gripped Eric’s stomach and twisted at his insides, as it did every time he lost someone. This was supposed to have been Eric’s patrol, Eric’s mission. But he’d traded with Dan and Kevin so he could look after the filter. Patrolling was a fighter’s job. Fixing broken things was his.

“Did you cover your tracks and make sure no one was following you?” Eric asked out of reflex, before realizing to whom he was speaking.

“Of course I did,” Dan snapped.

Eric raised a hand and placed it on his younger brother’s shoulder. Losing someone made his brother surly. Who wouldn’t be?

“Who’s on perimeter guard, Natalie?” Eric asked, glancing over at his wife.

She made a wry face. “Roberts.”

Eric almost groaned. While he probably wasn’t a very good leader, he at least knew he couldn’t show his true feelings about the man with everyone around them, especially not in light of what had just happened. They were scared enough.

Eric turned back to Dan, who was already getting to his feet.

“Dan, can you—” Eric began, but Dan was already waving a hand at him and picking up his rifle, a smaller p90, suitable for close-quarter fighting.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dan said, gesturing to one of the men who’d come to help unload to follow him. “I’ll go check on the
Captain
.”

Eric waved his thanks and then assigned one of the men to oversee the rest of the unloading. He nodded significantly at Natalie, who handed her rag to another of the women and followed Eric out of the Commons.

“What are you thinking?” Natalie asked softly once they were out of earshot.

“Hmm? Oh, at that particular moment I was wondering if an ionized carbon barrier in the filtration system would help with the ash buildup. A bacterial algae would probably work better, but I’m not sure where . . .” Eric trailed off when he saw Natalie’s face.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Eric scratched at his head. “I know. But that
wa
s
what I was thinking right then. Maybe if we looked in an old pet store—no, sorry. I think we’ll be safe here in our home, Natalie.” He turned down a side tunnel toward their personal rooms. “I have some new ideas for the perimeter, and I think the new phosphorus mines and grenades will work well to deter anything that comes too close.”

“What about this new thing, the giant lizard Dan was talking about?” There was a note of impatience in her voice, which was never a good sign.

“Those are new,” he said. “But that’s not unexpected. We see new things crop up all the time as they pass back and forth between the realities. Maybe if we could find one, we’d be able to cross over to where the dragons came from . . . that would be interesting, wouldn’t it—”

Natalie cut him off. “Only if your theory about part of our world getting sucked into theirs is true. If not, we’d be dead before you could say, ‘Oh look, there’s another dragon.’”

Eric shook his head, his motions so exuberant that his rifle clanked against one wall. “I have a theory about that too. There must be humans in their world, too, or some form of us. That would explain the massive numbers of men and women among the Dragonhosts. When they started messing with the ‘God Particle,’ they set off the chain reactions which allowed divergent realities to come together in . . .” He trailed off again.

Natalie had stopped and was staring at him with hands on her hips, which was an even worse sign than the earlier irritation in her voice.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You warned them not to mess with what God had created and they ignored you since you were just a PhD student and hadn’t given up on your ‘misguided religious intolerance of fact.’ I’m going to go talk to everyone, spread the word that everything will be all right and arrange a small service for Kevin. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but maybe you should go check the perimeter with Dan or something.”

Eric recognized that tone. It meant he’d done something wrong again.

“What did I do?”

Natalie shook her head and turned back the way they’d come.

Eric stood and watched her retreating in the semi-darkness for a few moments, scratching at his bare chin absently. He could name the entire periodic table, disassemble and reassemble machinery of any size, understand and write papers on quantum mechanics that changed the view of an entire field, but sometimes his own wife was as foreign to him as Mandarin Chinese.

Shaking his head, he turned and headed for his rooms. When he reached them, he quickly lit a lamp with one of the phosphorus matches he’d made a few weeks earlier. He was almost out and would need to make another batch later.

Leaning his rifle against the wall, Eric picked up the lamp and walked through the sleeping chamber to the other room behind. The light glittered off his tools and projects in various states of incompleteness. He hung the lantern on the wall, sat down at one of the tables, and picked up one of the modified trip mines he’d been working on for about a month now. He had a feeling his little group of ragtag survivors would need them soon.

*              *              *              *

Several hours later, Eric looked up from his work to notice that Natalie was sitting at the other table. He started and Natalie smiled.

“Do you ever get tired of doing that?” Eric asked.

“Not when it makes you jump every time.”

Eric grinned and set the grenade he’d been working on to one side.

Natalie waited for him to dust off his hands and put his tools away before speaking again. When she did, she picked at the bench she was sitting on, not meeting his eye.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier,” she said, sheepish. “I was just frustrated, scared, and emotional. We’ve always been safe here. You know I get edgy every time something new shows up.”

Eric smiled and nodded, reaching out a hand to her.

She got to her feet, all five feet and two inches of her, and seemed to bound over to him.