Free Seven Into the Bleak by Matthew Iden Page B

made in his reedy voice, though Galdur is not to blame. We thought ourselves adventurers and heroes; in our arrogance, we believed we had conquered the world. Desperate to find new lands to plunder, truth be told, we would've entered the Bleak already had we not thought it but a fairy-tale. And continued to believe until Galdur, once he had won us over, revealed a simple hide map that showed the way.
    At the start, we swaggered through the halls of ancient cities, diving ever deeper, slaying all before us, piling the gold and gems of the Delven and the rock fiends and the three-limbed blackhearts we killed into our packs and sacks. We laughed at the ease with which we cut through them, singing songs of praise to each other. Only after a rockfall closed off the path to our homes did we realize what should have been obvious from the start: in the Bleak, the surface was home to the young, the crippled, the diseased. We had been facing the weakest their world had to offer.
    We plunged forward, having no choice, and found all the gold and blood and iron and evil Galdur had promised, and more. The creatures of the Bleak liked it no more than we if a group of killers had invaded our homes and laid waste to them. The difference is that the Bleak is a place of unrelenting misery and war, which makes every thrice-damned citizen of the World Under the World a demon looking to kill before it is killed, asking no mercy and giving none. They attacked from the dark, with poison and hate, giving no satisfaction in a battle won as they retreated into tunnels and caverns and cracks in the earth.
     Days and weeks passed, or so Galdur told us. Our lives became a dark dream of creeping from cave to cavern. We dared not speak or light a fire for fear of attracting the attention of something that our combined strength could not defeat. And those things were around us. In a world of blindness, we relied on senses that we ignored on the surface and many times we felt rather than saw the bulk and menace of a creature so strong and so near that we all prayed to gods to preserve us, as a hare hopes that the wolf passes by.
    We became creatures ourselves, eating things we found growing on walls, blind white fish we snatched from dark waters, fiends we killed and hoped were more animal than man. We became haggard and mute and sickly. Clothing and shoes rotted on our bodies until we resembled the creatures we had slain so blithely. Had we been magically transported to the surface world, we would've become the object of quests and bounties, our heads mounted on plaques and paraded at fairs. My teeth loosened until one day I pulled two out trying to bite into a biscuit saved for a special day. I wondered idly if all the devils in this blackened world had started once as thieves and priests and sages, simple men crushed beneath the unrelenting force of the Bleak.
    Galdur told us later that the night Meki was taken by the fiend marked the fifth month of our journey in the Bleak.
     
    . . .
     
    Karn shook me awake, then grabbed my wrists as I tried to draw my knives. He held me still until I awoke, then said simply, "Lilath is gone."
    I blinked and looked around our miserable campsite. We had found the lopsided corner of a cave that let us listen for threats from afar, a pocket that we could defend if need be. Harlan and Filki stood to one side, silent and forlorn, Galdur studied the ground as if looking for sign though he was nearly blind.
    I looked up at Karn. "How? When?"
    He grimaced and jerked a thumb at the other three. "She woke and told the squire she was going to see to her necessaries. The fool waited until my watch to say anything."
    Harlan strode to us, his face stony. The weeks had carved away the boyish face and his hair hung in lank blond strands where once it had been a point of vain pride. "I didn't see fit to question our priest's decision to relieve herself, Karn. You wouldn't have either."
    Karn barely glanced at him. "We have no chance