Jay woke up with a moan of pain. It was as if a swarm of nasty little beetles invaded her arms. She slipped out of Lethe’s embrace and rushed to the lake, hoping that the cool waters will lessen the pain as it did before. But instead of a soothing effect the water made it even worse. She swallowed another moan and looked over the afflicted area in the light of her orb and noticed that the skin started to crack in places, seeping pus out of broken blisters. Without thinking much, she cut off part of her shirt and made a few stripes out of the rag, tying up her arms and hoping that it would be enough to ward against an infection.
‘Now that’s downright nasty, kid.’ Lethe’s voice almost made her jump. She sighed and shrugged. What else she could do?
Lethe crouched next to her.
‘Hurts like a bastard I guess’ he said. ‘But…maybe there is something that can be done.’
He dug into one of his pouches and brought out a familiar-looking vial.
‘Here’ he said handing her the vial. Put a bit onto your fingertip and rub it into the inside of your cheek or into the roof of your mouth.’
‘What’s that?’ said Jay suspiciously. ‘Is that the same stuff you were doing at the Whaler?
‘Halkyon yeah. Ash of Halkyon Bloom in Spirit Ardent if you insist on the alchemical name. Although this one I modified myself. Gives you more of a pain-killing action and less of a lightshow.’
Jay uncorked the vial and smelled it carefully. It gave a faint flowery odour with a hint of something very bitter underneath.
‘Hey, you taking it or applying as a perfume?’
Jay wondered briefly about how effective she’d be wandering the dark corridors while high, but then another wave of burning pain in her arms reminded her that would be probably as effective as climbing with her arms getting steadily worse. She rolled a drop onto her thumb and rubbed it across the roof of her mouth. Instantly her head spun and only the wide hand of Lethe prevented her from falling face-first into the cold waters of the lake.
‘Yeah no, you don’t want to go there kid’ he snickered and took the vial out of her fingers.
Jay’s mouth felt numb for a second, but just after that she felt the pain in her hands ebbing away.
‘Can you stand? Yeah? Good’ Lethe rose to his feet and picked up the two loot bags they had left. Jay rose too, although a bit unsteadily. The numbness in her mouth spread alongside her limbs, but apart from that, she could move unhindered. She took the rolled up Sacred Bond and strapped it again across her back. She was just about to say to Lethe that she was ready to go, but in the same moment the light at her belt flickered and died.
‘I will kill the motherfucker!’ growled Lethe. ‘The lousy coin-pinching little shopkeep, he fucked us over!’
Jay giggled.
‘You think it’s funny? If your light failed then what stopping mine from failing too? Then we’d be truly fucked.’
‘Then we should go faster’ said Jay, pushing through the numbness of her face.
‘No point of delaying I guess. Just stay close to me, yeah?’
They moved slower now with one light down, walking first alongside the lake and then into a smaller tunnel that was clearly an outlet when the chamber was full of water, now though diminished to a trickle in the middle. As they walked Jay started to notice flickers in the corner of her eye, a small sparkle of light. She shrugged and ignored it. Lethe said that there might be some ‘lightshow’ didn’t he? She tried to stay as close to him, feeling a bit lightheaded and numb but otherwise unaffected much. And then it happened.
At first it was a feeling. A feeling of being followed, but not by something that had feet. It was more of a feeling that she would get when a memory is being chased, followed by her own thought. She tried to look back just in case there was something else walking with them through the dark corridor, but apart from the sparks of Halkyon-induced light she saw nothing.
Then she heard it.
‘Did you say something Lethe?’
‘Huh? What?’
‘Did you say something?’
‘No. Just keep going. I think there is a split in the corridor here. Ha! And it goes up for a change!’
Jay hurried after Lethe, trying to ignore the little eruptions of light, that seemed to intensify, and straining her ears. Now she was sure that she heard it. Voices. Whispers. Soft and barely audible but most certainly there.
‘Otherheart…’
She ignored that voice. If she was experiencing visible hallucinations then audible ones weren’t that far behind, right? She shrugged.
But the voice persisted.
‘Otherheart…Re-found One…Walkpath…’
Jay grunted with irritation and shook her head. But the voice kept speaking and soon he was joined by another.
‘Pristess, pristessssss…’
More voices joined the two. Like a chorus of shadows, unseen throats were speaking from the depths.
‘Otherheart…’
‘Pristesss…’
‘Seer-guide…Lighteye…’
The voices rose in strength, the whispering filling Jay’s mind. She could hear so many of them now, each one urgent and pleading, filled with sadness but also with hope. It was as if a great crowd was following Jay, chanting their despair and longing. The small sparks of light danced before her eyes, tracing misty paths in the darkness filling her vision completely and skittering before her as she walked.
‘Shaaaadowright…Otherheaaaaaart…’
‘Walkpath, Walkpath…’
‘Re-found One Pristesssss…’
‘Liiiiight-eye…’
‘Kou-‘
‘Shut up!’ Jay stopped mid-stride and pressed hands to her ears. It was too much, the weight of the feelings of the unseen crowd were overbearing and hung heavily over her mind. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up! Don’t talk to me, shut up!’
‘Kid?’ Jay didn’t even realize how far away she was from Lethe. Now she came closer, shining his orb into her face. ‘You alright?’
‘Letheeeeee’ whispered the voices. ‘Lethheeee, Letheee, Lethe…’
There was a relief in the voices and as suddenly as they appeared they were gone, scattering back into the darkness. Jay was now standing in the silence and emptiness they have left in their wake, just the sparks of light still swirling in Jay’s vision.
‘I…uh, Lethe…have you heard…’ Jay tried to talk but felt her tongue twisting.
‘Shit kid, even that little bit of Halkyon was too much for you? Ehh talk about being lightweight.’
Jay said nothing, relieved that Lethe’s intervention scattered the voices, even though her vision was still blurred with the sparkly light.
‘Come on, kid. I think I can see the light coming from that tunnel. I’m not staying here a minute longer than we need to.’
He pulled her forward, and started to haul her behind him. Jay was perfectly fine with that as long as she got to stay close. Somehow his closeness satisfied the voices that were chasing her and now the only thing she had to do was to plough through the shiny mist that seemed to swirl around her. Putting one foot in front of another she lost herself in the thoughtless haze, unbothered and numb to everything around her.
When she came to she was sitting with her body wrapped in a blanket. The blanket smelled of horse sweat and lubricating oil, but was warm and thus she had no reason to complain. She opened her eyes wider, slowly taking the view around her. The tunnels were gone. She was sitting in a cart that was ploughing through a snowy landscape. It was quiet and serene, small snowflakes drifted down whom the overcast heavens. The only sounds reaching her ears were the snorting of the horse, and the creaking of the cart. Even the clopping of the hooves was muffled by the white carpet that covered everything- the road, the fields and the trees.
‘Mh…where are we?’ she said, overcoming the residual numbness in her face.
‘We’d be coming over the Arse’s End by my reckoning’ said Lethe. He was sitting right next to her, his back pressed into the corner of the cart. He was also covered entirely in a dirty horse blanket and only the tip of his nose was visible from under his hood.
‘Garsend!’ piped up the cartman. Jay could see his wide back stuffed into a sheepskin coat, bobbing slightly as the cart rolled.
‘Yeah, what the good man here said’ continued Lethe. ‘Form there we should be in Arklington in two hours or so.’
‘No more tunnels’ sighed Jay with relief. ‘That’s good.’
‘Yeah, we made quite a distance though.’
Jay started suddenly. The loot bags! The Bond! She looked around herself frantically.
‘Don’t you worry, about our ‘luggage’. It’s safe.’ he patted the bags and the rolled-up fabric next to himself. ‘All here except for a little ‘souvenir’ I gave to our good man over here for taking us home.’
Reassured, Jay settled deeper into the blanket, watching the countryside asleep under the blanket of snow slowly roll around her.
