19
Thurin
The black water erupting from the gate took away the light. The flood engulfed Thurin and a muted swirling whoosh replaced the thunder of its approach. Invisible fingers seized Thurin before he could even scream, plucking him away from Hetta and hurtling him down the corridors of the undercity at tremendous speeds.
The shock exploded the air from his lungs and confusion nearly had him try to suck more back in. Ideas like “up” and “down” lost all meaning almost immediately. The sheer volume and fury of the water overwhelmed his senses. And although it wasn’t as cold as the plunge pools beneath the Pit of the Missing, it was still a lot colder than his blood. But freezing to death was not high on Thurin’s list of concerns. He clamped down against drawing a new breath, knowing that before long his lungs would take the choice away. Directly beneath the need to breathe was the need not to get smashed into a wall. A sharp glancing blow to his hip underlined this fear.
It took Thurin longer than he would ever admit to remember that he was in his element. In fact a vision of the water flow didn’t surface amid his panic until his heart was hammering at his breastbone and both lungs brimmed with the absolute need to draw breath. His senses showed the shape of the water-filled tunnels around him, the direction of the flow, the complexity of vortices and currents left in the wake of the advancing fronts.
Here and there his ice-work revealed places where pockets of air might be trapped between the ceiling and the flood, buttressed into corners by the power of the flow. It was harder than lifting his body off the ground, but his need was greater, and somehow Thurin angled himself at one such pocket. He broke the surface and managed to hold himself there for several gasping breaths while all the time the fearsome pull of the water tried to tear him away through the nearby doorway.
Thurin knew he couldn’t resist the current for long. Dividing it around him was taking his utmost strength. And he had no idea how long the flood would last. The other side of the gate might be beneath the sea for all he knew, able to supply an infinity of water, and fast enough to drown the whole undercity within hours. He snatched another couple of gulps of precious air then let the current have him.
This time he focused his ice-work to surround himself with a protective barrier of water, a shell he carried with him to deflect and deaden any impacts. He felt ahead with his water-sense, visualizing the shape of the flow and the waiting threats that needed to be avoided.
He drew more breaths while spinning at the top of a vortex where a downward shaft swallowed away part of the flood. Even in the swirling confusion of the whirlpool it seemed to Thurin that he should follow the rising water rather than the descending currents, and that if he were to reach the speeding front of the flood he would, by definition, have air. At least as long as there were no dead ends.
Thurin spun himself out of the vortex and let the main current haul him onwards. This time he tried to take a bubble of air with him and keep it about his head, but that proved too much within the rush of water and with all the other demands on his concentration. Instead he focused on speeding ahead of the flow, pushing himself through the racing water while avoiding being smashed against walls, and all the time hoping to reach the front before the air in his lungs grew sour.
The great flood had to be pushing out in all directions, waterfalling its way through the undercity, filling every dip and dead end. But Thurin also sensed it pushing upwards, unable to drain downwards fast enough to satisfy the influx from the gate. This was the flow he followed.
He shot forward, blind, barely in control, relying on the image in his head that his water-sense supplied, a transitory model of the flooded and flooding tunnels.
Once more his lungs began to ache, his heart to thunder. The need for air began to fog the image he relied on. He was close, he knew it, gaining on the racing front of the water. It was no longer a wall but still a rush, a flood that grew from a foaming advance of knee-deep water to chest deep in two heartbeats, filling the tunnels to the roof in two more.
Thurin broke the surface with a roar of his own, though it was barely audible above the thunder of wild water. He devoted all his skill to keeping himself there amid the froth and churn, head in the air, and all the while sensing ahead to determine the flood’s advance.
The flood bore him up the long twisting slope of a tunnel, losing fury, though it was far from spent. He had time to observe that he had been swept clear of the undercity’s precise architecture and was once again in the hand-hewn passages beneath the Black Rock. Stars hung here and there in cages, their light glimmering briefly across the deluge before the tunnel filled completely and drowned them in a muddy swirl.
Thurin even had time to think about how cold he was. He was swept down a long unlit section of tunnel and up ahead his straining senses found two small but distinct bodies of water. Human bodies. Cries rang out as the leading edge of the flood swirled around them. Crashing around a bend, he glimpsed many stars, seemingly hanging in the air, and a large figure, almost blocking the tunnel, the current breaking over it in a wave. It looked wrong for a gerant, too uniform in the torso, too skinny in the limbs. Impossibly, it was holding its position despite the weight of water, long arms reaching for purchase on the walls. With just yards to go, Thurin was bracing himself for impact with the creature when suddenly its grip failed and it too was swept away. More stars lit the tunnel ahead and in their faint light Thurin saw a single man-sized figure, swirling this way and that and losing the fight to keep its head above the rapidly deepening water.
The pain splitting Thurin’s brain told him that his strength was at an end. Just keeping himself alive would be difficult enough. Part of him wanted the man to vanish beneath the churning water and be lost—to remove him from consideration—to let Thurin focus on his own survival. The man’s head went under, almost as if the gods had taken him down in answer to Thurin’s secret prayer. He was probably a priest. That thing with him had been made of metal. A hunter. Better that both should be lost in the flood. But with a snarl of frustration, Thurin reached for whatever power remained to him and thrust himself forward faster than the current. He knew the horror of drowning in the dark, and something in him wouldn’t allow him to do nothing while another suffered such a fate—even a priest of the Black Rock.
“Why. Are. You.” Thurin hauled on the sodden bulk of body he’d grabbed hold of in the flood. “So. Damned. Heavy.” With a last grunt of effort he dragged the man up to join him on the shelf of rock, then fell back, gasping and shivering. The man lay facedown, streaming murky water. The flood had almost reached its full height, in the main chamber reaching to chest or neck height. The shelf remained dry, though scattered with painfully angular chunks of rock from some abandoned mining effort. Three small stars burned in cages on the walls a couple of feet above the water, filling the upper portion of the cavern with shimmering twilight.
Thurin groaned and forced himself into a sitting position. His skull throbbed from base to brow and from ear to ear. He felt emptied, utterly spent. He reached out and jabbed the man in the ribs. “You’d better not have drowned.”
The man, clearly no priest given his clan hides, didn’t so much as twitch.
“Damn.” Thurin spat into the slow swirl of the stalled flood. He doubted he would ever be rid of the taste of it. Something rank and organic. “I should have let you go under.” But he knew that if he’d made no effort to save the man something of himself would have been lost too, and that he would never have been able to reclaim it.
He rested his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, letting out a long sigh of exhaustion over the gurgle of waters now arguing about which way to go.
The explosive splutter from the man beside Thurin startled him so badly that he almost pitched into the lake.
“Here!” Thurin took hold of a solid arm. “Easy. Let me help— Quell?” Thurin almost dropped him on his face. In sudden cold shock he realized that Yaz was probably one of those he had heard crying out at the flood’s arrival. “Where’s Yaz? Was she with you?”
Quell could only cough for several minutes, pausing twice to vomit a black torrent into the receding waters. Eventually, red-eyed and hoarse, he managed to croak out, “Erris?”
Thurin shook his head impatiently. “Was Yaz with you?”
Quell’s turn to shake his head, taking a weight from Thurin’s heart.
“What about Zeen? And Maya? And Kao?” Thurin hated to think of any of them drowned. “Was Yaz nearby?” She could still have drowned, or be trapped in an air pocket.
“Kao.” Quell fell into a coughing fit, then forced himself to halt. “Just Kao and Erris.”
“I didn’t see them . . .” Guilt took hold of Thurin. He’d been too busy saving himself to help the others.
Quell shook his head again, the black shock of his hair still dripping. He raised his bloodshot white-on-white eyes to Thurin. “Kao was already dead. The Watcher killed him.”
“And Yaz?” Thurin repeated.
Quell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Erris wanted to go up.” He pointed at the ceiling.
“At the top,” Thurin muttered.
“What?”
“She’s at the top of the mountain.”
“How do you know?” Quell eyed him suspiciously.
Thurin scowled and looked down, turning his gaze across the water. “Witches told me.”
Thurin and Quell stood together, each as unsteady as the other. “We should go then,” Quell said.
Thurin nodded. “Yes.”