Aliyah

The tunnels curved deeper into the earth. Purple spell-light cast jagged rock ceilings into twisted relief. Sand and small pebbles crunched underfoot and they passed under the occasional hole bored into the ceiling from which fresh air wafted down. On the whole, it was reassuringly uninteresting. Kionah had warned her of potentially dangerous cave animals and the possibility of caustic flora the further out they went—but for now, the tunnels were just tunnels. Slightly claustrophobic in sections, but otherwise unremarkable. They turned a corner and Aliyah promptly cursed herself for thinking so.

The tunnel roof sloped down to the floor, morphing from a walking-height corridor into a hole that looked barely large enough to crawl through.

“Through there?” Aliyah asked, mounting panic rising from the pit of her stomach.

“Unfortunately, yes. Why do you think no one’s taken advantage of this place for geopolitical gain?” Kionah snorted, though it seemed to be more in frustration than mockery. “No trade caravan or battalion’s coming through here, that’s for sure.”

“Do we really have no other option?”

Kionah pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. “I don’t like it either. Believe me, I’d love to set camp for a few weeks and sneak back into Shadowsong once the trouble’s all over. Unfortunately, word would have gotten out that we’re both treasonous traitors by now and as such, we’d be slaughtered by what’s left of the Magicians.”

“Can’t you…blast a bigger hole, or something? Use one of the spell-slips?”

“It’s solid rock,” Kionah said patiently. “I’m no heavy-hitter. I could get perhaps a half-metre in before I start coughing my organs up.”

“So you’re absolutely sure this map is trustworthy?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Who did you get it from?”

“Luxon. An enchantress fae—”

“A faery? You mean like the ones attacking the kingdom right now—”

“I wasn’t finished. I acquired the map from a highly-respected enchantress faery from Glister, one of few well-known independents from her Hive. Not affiliated with the ones chopping the army to bits back there. She procured the map from deep within the Glister Hive’s equivalent of a Library; it had a high asking price. There was no haggling, no reason to suspect ill will. I paid in full.”

Aliyah frowned. “What was the price?”

“Sixteen thousand coppers and most of a mage-chariot’s engine-parts.” Kionah looked at her a little oddly. “You provincial folk and your stories. What did you think she asked for, a stolen infant and all of my teeth?”

“Something like that.” Aliyah glanced again at the tunnel ahead. “Does the map say how long this goes on for?”

Kionah scrolled through the interlocking layers of light, frowning and moving the spell-light under her fingers. “It isn’t written, though this piece is to scale. I would estimate…fifty metres.”

Fifty metres. That didn’t sound so bad. That was, what, a third of the laundry hall? Less?

Kionah beckoned their floating luggage chest down and unlatched it. She withdrew a length of rope. “Here. Tie this around your leg. If the map’s wrong and you hit a dead end, I can help to pull you back out.”

Aliyah scowled. “You want me to go first?” Surely Kionah should go first, being the slightly shorter between them and the one who knew the map.

“You’re the one who can heal herself if something goes wrong.”

Kionah had a point, though not as good of a point as she seemed to think. It was true that if  Aliyah were truly stuck, she could break a couple of bones to free herself, like she had back in the castle garden. It was an unpleasant prospect, though. She wasn’t sure how much more she could do, as exhausted as she was. Fifty metres. Was that too far? What if the tunnel didn’t have enough air? She could consciously conserve oxygen better than most, but she was no gilled fish, no agile lamprey. She might have suffocated to death by the time Kionah pulled her out.

“Does the map say anything about the breathability of the air?”

Kionah adjusted her glasses and tapped at symbols on the paper once more. The projection shimmered, purple tunnels and red-lined pathway now blocked out in shades of green and blue and beige.

“We’re fine. Look, our entire route is breathable.”

“Is that breathable by faery standards, or our own?” she asked sharply.

“Our own. You’re right, though; lucky bastards can go without for much longer than we can.”

Aliyah exhaled slowly. It sounded safe enough. But she was tired. They had been walking for what felt like at least an hour and she was acutely aware of the poor sleep she had gotten, not to mention all of the magic she had drained.

“Can we stop here for tonight? Or morning, or whatever time it is? Deal with when we wake up? I’m tired and hungry and I’m guessing you are too.”

She half-expected Kionah to say no, to turn up that courtly nose of hers and proclaim that no, they were still fleeing a deadly flock of Magicians and that conquering this awful, claustrophobic little tunnel as soon as possible was of crucial importance.

Kionah blinked, tired eyes prominent behind the thick lenses of her glasses. “You know, that’s a good idea,” she said, and began pulling things out of the chest, a pair of bedrolls and two vials, each of them filled with a dark, chestnut-coloured liquid. She passed one to Aliyah, who stared at it quizzically.

“Portable nutrition potions,” Kionah said, sounding apologetic. “All we could fit. Damned expensive, but Alhena said they tasted okay.”

Kionah uncorked hers and drank it. She didn’t start gagging or retching, which Aliyah took as a good sign. She drank her own share; it tasted bland and savoury, a bit like a cold meat broth. Not particularly pleasant, but far from the worst potion she’d ever had. A magically-induced sense of satiety warmed her from within and blanketed her like the softest of feather quilts. 

Kionah spun a brief working of spell-light, a net that faded from shining silver to near-invisibility, and pinned it at the mouth of the narrow tunnel ahead. 

“Alarm ward. In case something comes out,” she said. “A precaution. I don’t think it’s likely.” 

Her words didn’t reassure Aliyah in the slightest.

Kionah spun more alarm wards, hung them further back up the tunnel and around their makeshift campsite. Aliyah, suddenly conscious that she was simply standing there, unbuckled the bedrolls and laid them out. Kionah handed her a toothbrush and another vial, this one labelled as a dentifrice solution, marked with some sort of Glister company insignia. They really had thought their escape plan through. Aliyah cleaned her teeth, crawled into her bedroll, and fell asleep, barely aware of Kionah doing the same.

===

She dreamed.

She dreamed of a labyrinth and a familiar voice saying—

Words.

Just words. Dangerous words. On the very edge of her hearing…

And now there was blood soaking into her collar and—

She awoke choking on air, one hand fisted into the rumpled bedroll and the other clawing at her chest.

Another nightmare. Nothing new.

She heaved a lungful of air, curled up onto her side once more, and let sleep retake her. If she dreamed any more, she did not remember it.

===

Morning came all too soon. Aliyah snapped her eyes open to a faint chiming, like that of a bell. It was dark. Early shift, she thought. Hells, I’m late. Her eyes adjusted in the gloom, traced out jagged rock and not the smoothness of a plain ceiling. It all came crashing back. Faeries. Magicians. Zahir. Rana. Kionah.

Something chimed again.

“It’s just me,” Kionah said from a little ways away. “Damned things are annoying to take down.”

Aliyah propped herself up on one elbow and rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. She winced as cramped muscles twinged in her back. Kionah was unraveling the wards. The spells made sharp sounds as they fell, mournful little musical notes which she had no ear for. They had a hasty, quiet breakfast—more nutrition potion, downed quickly and easily.

The narrow mouth of the tunnel loomed. Kionah stuck a spell-slip for light onto Aliyah’s forehead and tied one end of the rope around her ankle. She tugged at it to test its strength; the knot held.

“Call out if you need help,” she said. “Try to stay calm.”

Aliyah took a deep breath and walked further into the tunnel until the low ceiling forced her into an awkward crouch. She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled forwards. Her overtaxed muscles twinged in protest, microtears from what may have been yesterday. She urged the healing along, just a little, to save her strength. Had it really been so long ago, that she’d held the hacksaw in her trembling hand? She entered the tunnel proper, the part where sitting up would crack her skull against the curved ceiling of the tiny passage. The first metre or so wasn’t so bad. Then she realised that the tunnel wasn’t going to move.

Unyielding rock on all sides. No space to turn her head and look back. She bumped her shoulder and scraped her knee through the fabric of her trousers as she crawled. The shallow roof brushed against her head as she went. There was no flex, no give. It was pure hard stone and she was only human. The tunnel twisted to the right, ever-so-slightly. And then a sharp bend to the left. Bad enough that it was so long; worse still that it didn’t have the decency to lead her straight on. A choking panic rose in her throat like bile.

How deep underground were they? How many tonnes were above her head, borne by the roof of this little tunnel? The weight of the earth could collapse the path in front of her, leaving no way forwards. It could collapse on top of her, a makeshift executioner, crushing her flesh and bones; perhaps her meagre skill at healing could keep her alive for a few seconds longer, every nerve screaming in agony before she succumbed. Or perhaps the tunnel would collapse behind her, severing the rope and any way back. Perhaps she would crawl onwards, wander the labyrinth of faery tunnels, hallucinating as she died of dehydration.

“Kionah,” she called out. She hated her voice, how thin and uncertain it sounded as it bounced off the walls of the tunnel.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just wanted to check that you’re still here.”

She cursed her own foolishness. No doubt Kionah still thought her a stupid apprenticeling, afraid of killing people and of dying alone in tight spaces. If she died here, right now, would Kionah die, too? Would she find some other route, or would she haul Aliyah’s corpse out of the way and continue alone? The rope felt rough against the skin of her ankle.

“I’m here. Everything okay?”

“Yes. It’s just…narrow in here,” was all she managed. She kept crawling.

The light on her forehead merely illuminated more rocks, jagged veins of mineral deposits running through the surface. She felt like a blind worm, squirming through the calcified esophagus of a gargantuan creature disguised as a mountain, ready to suffocate and die, to rot there for all eternity. She put a hand forwards, scratched her palm on sharp stone that felt, for a second, like a sharpened incisor. She hissed, rubbed the grit off onto her knee and sealed the skin back shut. What if there were stinging insects further in? Or worse? She thought of a part-spider creature, lurking and hungry in the darkness at the end of the tunnel, ready to take a bite. Half-remembered things and pure nightmares skittered to the forefront of her mind; of blood in her mouth and impossible daemon-creatures and—

Fifty metres, Kionah had said. The tunnel was supposed to be fifty metres long. It felt like more. Was that meant as the crow flies? She should have asked. Or perhaps Kionah had misinterpreted the scale of the map. Perhaps it was five hundred metres, far longer than the length of the rope, her only tether to a world where things like daylight and fresh air and spaciousness existed.

Perhaps it was a league. Or fifty. 

No. Stop being foolish. It had to end soon, right? Exit or dead end or monster ready to bite her head off, it had to end soon. This was an unbearable void, a limbo, a—

An opening. The spell-light illuminated an opening around the corner, a clear space beyond. Thank the stars. Thank whatever geological process or ancient fae had carved out this opening. She scrambled forwards, emerged from the hellish tunnel into a clearing, a vast cave-cavern with a ceiling blessedly far over her head. She took in deep lungfuls of air. Diffuse shafts of daylight streamed down from holes above, holes that looked like they had been cut there—long, thin chimneys up to the surface. The light gave the cave a semblance of cheer. Here she was, looking around a dusty cave as though it were a royal suite. A few minutes of uncertainty and a mountain’s worth of rock pressing at the back of your neck would do that to you. Aliyah untied the rope from her leg.

“I made it,” she called down the tunnel to Kionah. “There’s a really big clearing on this side.”

“You best not just be saying that to encourage me,” came the faint response.

The rope jerked slightly in Aliyah’s hand. A few minutes—an uncomfortably long while to be standing alone—later, Kionah clambered out of the tunnel, blinking frantically and brushing dust off her clothes.

“Thank the stars,” she muttered. “That was horrendous.”

Aliyah squinted back at the tunnel. Faint banging noises drifted from its depths. “Is the luggage chest going to make it through?”

Kionah swore, far more colourfully than Aliyah would have thought possible for a court lady.

A very long while, a snapped rope, and several used spell-slips later, they were once again trudging through better tunnels, wide enough to walk side by side. A considerably more battered luggage chest bobbed along behind them. 

And so it went; walking with a little talking, followed by more walking. The muscles of her legs ached. She nudged the healing along. It didn’t help much; the lingering aches faded, but the burn of lactic acid in her working muscles persisted with the constant motion of walking. They marched through bland grey cave after bland grey cave and crossed a tepid subterranean lake which echoed with the dull drip of lukewarm water. After Kionah had cut her hand open on a sharp stalactite, she’d fixed it, flushed out the contaminants before sealing it shut.

“Pretty handy magic you have after all,” Kionah had said with the ghost of a smile.

“Convinced of my usefulness yet?” She couldn’t help the tinge of bitterness that snuck into her words.

“Ah, pardon?”

She clenched her jaw. No use backing down here. “Am I going to be useful enough to accompany you? I mean, if I’m not, you probably should have said so before we went through that horrible little tunnel. I could’ve turned back, disguised myself and hidden somewhere in town, something that doesn’t compromise your escape plan.”

A pause, and then—

“You really think I’d run off with the luggage and the map?”

“I know you’d much rather have a—a real apprentice here.”

“Is that what you know, or what you think?” Kionah exhaled slowly, with all the pedantry and poise of a disappointed governess. “I’d rather no apprentice of any kind had to be here. The plan was for Alhena and her big fuck-off harp to have been here. But plans change. You got past the warden and the Magicians didn’t kill us, which is all that I can ask for, given the circumstances.” She rubbed her eyes with her newly-healed hand. “Look. You’re free to dislike me—traitor to the crown and all that. But I’m not going to turn traitor here of all places, not when it’d probably kill me just as much as it’d kill you.”

“Right. Okay.” She shoved away her lingering anxiety, let it thrash around aimlessly in a small, locked box at the back of her mind.

Things were a little less tense after that.

Every now and again, Aliyah spotted artificial chimney-tunnels drilled into the roof, catching glimpses of daylight far above as she wondered about the ancient faeries who’d made them. But mostly, they walked through darkness, lit only by the pale purple spell-light of the faery map.

They avoided hissing plants and dark patches of slime mould as they began to pass beneath the Killing Fields; she recognised a few of the species from her botanical books—creeping widow’s lichen, ruffles of deadly toad blossom, sticky, pullulating tangles of queen’s claw that would open blisters upon one’s skin if touched. She mentioned them to Kionah over the course of a sparse, slow, day-long conversation. There was little talking to be done as they clambered up piles of rock and wriggled through tight passages—ones that were thankfully not as hellish as that first tunnel had been, but dread-inducing all the same.

Of the talking that did happen, though, Kionah gave little stories like peace-offerings; Princess Alhena’s argumentative court sessions, days spent sailing on the salt, walking in on a petty lordling rifling through a desk and extorting him of coin for her silence.

She seemed oddly unbothered when mentioning Alhena. Aliyah wondered if she’d had any hand in revealing the so-called traitor-princess’s plans to the Magicians. But no, she had said that Alhena was meant to be in Aliyah’s place. And she had clearly been tortured, back in the dungeon; those wounds had not been a falsehood. There was a chance that Kionah had betrayed and miscalculated, but in any case, there was no use speculating on court politics, not when she had to trust Kionah’s spellwork and her understanding of the map if she wanted to get out of these faery tunnels alive. Still, for a supposed right-hand courtesan-spy, Kionah didn’t seem as if she were suffering much grief over Alhena’s death.

Kionah did not speak much of herself; Aliyah learned that she was a couple of years older—just past two and twenty years—and that she preferred games of cards over dice. Mostly, Kionah seemed to prefer answering Aliyah’s questions about Glister. She described the shimmering spires of the Magister’s towers against the sordid underbelly of the city. Gold changing hands and silk-clad richlings killing each other in the course of grey-market trading. The Undercity, too, was regaled to her vivid detail; smoky teahouses and gambling dens crammed side-by-side beneath the surface, egg-like safehouses grown over with razor-wire and apartment blocks whose entrance-levels rested a quarter-mile under the surface. She revealed little detail regarding her life there, only that she had been one of six children, and the only one still alive. 

Aliyah had offered, hesitantly, that she had an unknown number of so-called siblings.

“Ah, a scion? A low-prince and his mistress, then? Or the other way around?” Kionah had asked, evidently familiar with the system—the system that, several years ago, Aliyah had begun to think of as a system solely dedicated to churning out unlovable bastards—meaningless permutations, a test, a machine. A heartless machine with several gears loose, spinning ever-onwards on the whims of the court.

Kionah seemed more preoccupied with the twisting tracery of purple tunnels on her map than Aliyah’s response that her progenitors—a good-for-nothing Shahriyar and his concubine, not important—were dead and that she did not especially care. Still, she spoke of being brought to the court nurseries and undergoing standardised schooling. When the time came for magical and vocational testing, she had scored low and chose maidservant over kite-handler. She did not elaborate upon why and Kionah had not asked.

Shahriyar, she found herself thinking. Aliyah Shahriyar. She’d thought it many times before—mostly when she was young, on dull days under the impassive eyes of lowborn carers—and it had never sounded right. If she’d been born a full-blooded daughter…but there was no use thinking about it.

They’d walked onwards, encountered a tunnel fringed with pale roots—withered tendrils that hung down from the ceiling like tassels. Aliyah had taken barely two steps under them before she felt the moisture being pulled from her body, epithelial skin cells turning hypertonic. She’d stumbled back, dry-eyed, dry-mouthed, and the beginnings of a headache creeping along her temples. 

“They worm their way down from the Killing Fields,” Kionah had said as she’d rummaged for a jug of water in their luggage. “What did you expect?”

“You knew that they’d hurt me and you still let me walk under them?” she’d countered.

“Well of course not. I gathered that after you jumped like you stepped onto live coals. But you’re a Healer, aren’t you?”

“Not like Zahir,” she snapped. “I can die almost as easily as you can.”

Kionah snorted and started pacing the length of the cavern they were in, head tilted back, eyes roaming over the ceiling and avoiding her gaze. “I saw what you did to that warden. If those things had killed you instantly, I would be doomed regardless.”

Aliyah bristled. “That’s not how it works. Being able to knock someone else out isn’t the same as having the water drained out of you. If that were the case, then I wouldn’t have been worried about the Magician’s spell of mass-bloodletting, would I?” Then she winced and shied away from that thorny cluster of memories. “How are we going to get through? There’s an alternate route, right?”

Kionah turned her gaze down from the ceiling and strode over to the enchanted floating chest. 

“I have something that might help.” 

She pulled out a small, square box, about the size of her palm.

“What’s that, a magical plant-destroying device?”

Kionah grinned, a sharp and vicious curl of the mouth that made Aliyah’s stomach flip in trepidation. “In a manner of speaking. It’s a matchbook. Summons fire, you know.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” she said, more bluntly than she meant to. “We’ll perish from smoke inhalation.”

“There are chimney-holes in the ceiling. I checked. See?”

She’d glanced up and frowned. “Small chimney-holes, rather far up. Still looks risky to me.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No. But those things might not even burn.”

“They seem dry enough. We can’t know until we try.”

Kionah had lit the roots ablaze and hacked at the remaining tendrils with her shortsword as they walked through the hot, ash-stained ruins of the root tunnel. Afterwards, Aliyah soothed the smoke-wrought inflammation in both of their lungs, forced secretions of mucus to catch stray particulate matter, and purged them with hacking, phlegm-filled coughs.

“I told you there would be too much smoke,” she coughed.

“We didn’t perish,” Kionah wheezed, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “That’s what counts in the end, don’t you think?”

===

At the end of the fifth day, the tunnels opened up into a cavern, and the cavern contained a forest.

Not a faery-tale forest of gnarled oaks and dappled sunlight, but a forest of fungi and fallen, petrified tree trunks—the smooth, bark-textured stone was pale, gleaming, and opalescent. Slender, coal-black mushrooms towered over lush, velvety mounds of moss and lichen. The stretch of bare ground leading to the edge of the fungus forest was dotted with small, murky puddles that reminded her of tar pits.

Kionah stopped walking and frowned down at her map. “This isn’t supposed to be here,” she said slowly. “The forest, that is. See here, the whole cavern is marked as barren territory.”

“The map’s rather old, isn’t it?”

“Still. There’s a touch of fae about this place.”

“Why? The mushrooms?”

“Those pools.” Kionah pointed at the tar-like puddles, furrowing her brow. “They resemble a particular material. Luxon—the one I bought the map from—she made cocoons out of the stuff. I could be wrong, of course, but it’s…uncomfortably coincident.”

“You said the mountain fae came from the North.”

“Their Hive is in the North.” Kionah tapped a finger thoughtfully against the map. “It could be an outpost, a very far-flung one indeed. Or, more hopefully, a Glisterian outpost. Could be a completely unaffiliated hive with a new queen. Could be anything.”

Aliyah eyed the map, the red line that marked out their path to freedom. “Do we have to find out?”

“Perhaps. Stay alert. Keep to the shadows.”

“No illusion slips left?”

“Alhena didn’t pack any—I suppose she thought her skill with the harp would do the trick—and I used up what your master gave us on the boat. I can silence our footsteps, but that’s about it.”

“I suppose we’ll have to be careful, then.”

“Indeed.”

Aliyah clenched a fist, packed vasodilation there like a coiled spring. Kionah rolled up the map and tucked it into her belt. They crept down the slope, past the field of tar-puddles, and into the forest of black mushrooms. Worms writhed under her shoes. The silhouettes of small creatures chirped and moved in the shadows further out; the air was cool and smelt of wet earth.

They walked for some time, long enough for Aliyah to wonder at the size of the cavern which housed this forest, when Kionah held up a hand and drew to a stop. Ahead of them, whorled, organic-looking beams criss-crossed the trunks of the black mushrooms. They looked as if they had been sculpted from the tar-like substance Kionah had pointed out earlier. Some of them still dripped, fresh droplets oozing down in slow motion, thicker than any natural liquid ought to be.

“Faeries, right?” she whispered uneasily.

“Yes,” Kionah murmured. “Look there. I doubt they’re from the Glister Hive. Too small, too crude.”

She followed Kionah’s gaze. The whorled beams coalesced and formed a web higher up, meeting at a central point far above them, anchored onto the caps of the tallest mushrooms. The nest was disc-like, with small spiked towers at the periphery and little openings dotted around its curve.

“No one’s here?”

“Mm, no, look. There.” Kionah frowned, squinted. “That faery’s holding something. It can’t possibly be…does that look like a copy of our map to you?”

A golden faery glinted in the distance, half-hidden behind one of the outer spikes. Aliyah sharpened her vision. The faery was holding and appeared to be reading from a large sheet of paper, yes. She could make out a tangle of purple spell-light, too.

“Maybe. Maybe it’s something else?”

“The map changes things,” Kionah muttered. “It’s more likely that they’re Glisterian, though it’s possible another Hive might have a very similar artefact.”

“Are you going to talk to them?” Aliyah asked, scrutinising the faery up above.

“What? No, we don’t know for sure. Best we sneak past.”

Still perched upon the spike, the golden faery turned and looked directly at them.

Aliyah froze.

That was when the arrow punched through her gut.