The ants were making words again.
Avanesh watched them crawl across the basalt of the cave and, with wretched slowness, assemble their horrid yellow bodies into the letters of a message.
“Just ignore them!” bellowed Bahadur from the darkness that surrounded Avanesh’s dwindling torch light. He had been out there in the darkness for a long while, pressing his own body against the walls, systematically touching the tips of his fingers to each square inch of every edge and surface of the neat, cubical columns that contained them both.
Avanesh had slept twice since the ambush, which was his only way to measure time inside the hellish tomb that had swallowed them. He hadn’t observed Bahadur sleep at all. Bahadur had been doing nothing but diligently inspecting the cavern ever since he’d sealed their only exit. Avanesh had given up on any attempt at escape since his first sleep and had remained more or less stationary since then.
A massive glistening lump of darkness stained Avanesh’s halo as Bahadur stepped into the torch light. He was naked except for his crown, Seek-No-Further, which was wrapped, as ever, around his forehead. He was utterly filthy, as if every particle of dirt trapped in with them had been smeared across his broad body and caked in place with unending sweat. His eyes were bright as swans on a lake at midnight, and they dipped down to Avanesh, who was sitting where he had left him on the cavern floor, exactly where he’d last seen him.
“So, what did the ants say?” he asked, almost jovially.
Avanesh swept the torchlight over to gesture at the tiny, blackened balls that the ants had become, though it would have been impossible for Bahadur to see them.
“You said to ignore the words, so I burned them,” Avanesh said. The close heat made it difficult for him to summon even the strength to speak, but Bahadur responded with an actual roar of laughter. What a luxurious way to spend their air and their energy.
“That will teach them not to write you love letters,” he said. “But I’ve got one of my own for you. It says, ‘Avanesh, I hope this finds you well. I have some good news!’”
Avanesh stared at Bahadur, a towering boulder of impossible muck and muscle standing above him. He recognised this tone of delivery and tensed against the inevitable, but good-natured, dashing of his hopes.
“Turns out you were right all along. This part of the Deep Mountain is full of adamantine. Clever old Seek has sniffed out a seam of it big enough to choke the sea.” He tapped the crown on his head with a swollen, sensitive finger and it chimed prettily. “When we find a way out, we’ll come back here with the men to dig it all up. Then, you make all that lovely adamantine into whatever it is that people are buying—we flog that—then we take our early retirement in the Glistening Crests. Much love, Bahds.”
He laughed again and rolled back into the stifling dark to resume his search for some sign that would help them escape.
Avanesh remained quite still in his damp little patch of ruined clothing. He tried to determine at which point, exactly, Bahadur’s plan to go surveying for adamantine in the Realm of Vitriol had become his plan but the shift had been subtle and sudden. He just had to accept that Bahadur had changed history with a simple statement, and that this new, revised history was the only one that would be acknowledged between the two of them. He was never sure when Bahadur was deferring credit or deflecting blame.
“Tell me when the next letter from the ants comes in, I’d love to read it myself!” called Bahadur from the nothingness.
Avanesh dragged his eyes back to the streak of soot on the cave wall. A new battalion of ants was marshalling their forces to create a further message. He knew he wouldn’t ignore it, just as he hadn’t ignored the last one.
If he closed his eyes, he could still see every squirming letter of it as if it was still there on the wall before him:
“WE ONLY WANT THE CROWN
KILL HIM AND WE WILL RELEASE YOU
AVANESH”
He didn’t know how the mage was making this happen. He was almost certain there had been a mage of some sort in the brief altercation at the cave’s mouth. He couldn’t remember what she had been wearing but she had been surrounded by a flash of colour with something reflective on her chest, a certain twirling of wind around her face.
All he knew for sure was that he’d hit someone very hard—hard enough to break their helm—but had then been knocked down. Then he had some missing time, probably not much, but he had been lying on his back when he came to and saw Bahadur raise his grandmother’s sword and bring the roof down.
That mage must still be lurking out there, carefully organising the ants through sixteen feet of collapsed rock.
And the ants continued to crawl.
There was something sickening in how the message resolved itself; how what was a seething mass of insects one moment was a clear thought in the next. Avanesh considered whether the mage was controlling the ants or controlling him. His direct experience with such things was scant but he felt he ought to know whether the messages were really there on the wall or had been placed into his mind in some way.
This interest in the craft of the thing was enough motivation to move Avanesh towards the wall, pluck an ant from it and inspect it closely. His demonhide gloves jolted as the ant made contact with their surface. He cupped the ant in his hand and focused on a faint ringing in his mind. That ringing usually taught him how to work metal or clay or dough or ice or anything else he held. But now the gloves were telling him something about the potential the insect had as material.
As an experiment, he groped around for an ant that had not been press-ganged into the forming of words and held it by one of its long, spindly legs . The gloves sang wordlessly of the leathery chitin of the ant’s hide and the tinting of metal that could be achieved through treatment with a certain concentration of the formic acid held in its convoluted poison glands.
The song was short, didn’t repeat much and was sung very quietly. After all, how much could one possibly build out of an ant? But then he grabbed a handful of messenger ants from the wall and the gloves trilled as if he had picked up a book—he heard the song of persuasion, and of thought captured and projected.
They were possessed of a different sort of material, which was the material of language.
He retreated to his nest of rags opposite the wall. While it was possible for a mage to influence a mind at a distance, Avanesh’s gloves could not be fooled, befuddled or swayed. He lived his life by what they sang to him. They told him how to make wealth out of mud, where the line was between the counterfeit and the genuine, the dosage that turned seasoning into poison, or perfection into failure. The messages were real and the only control the mage had over him was from the words on the wall.
He braced himself for the next message.
“HE DOOMED YOU BOTH”
The heat of the Earth seemed to flare more intensely within Avanesh’s face for an instant. Brave, fearless Bahadur hadn’t given much thought of the risks of trespassing or of robbing precious metals from under the noses of people who would take that as no small slight. Avanesh had never known what it meant to feel invincible, but being with Bahadur had allowed him to inhale those vapours from time to time.
“BUT WE WILL RESCUE YOU”
He remembered feeling confident that Seek-No-Further would find a way out for them before his first sleep. Bahadur could train it to see the gas mixture of fresh air or the green of a leaf, and then it was just a matter of homing in on the signal.
But his optimism fell in time with Bahadur’s ever deeper plumbs of the cavern. If his grandmother’s sword hadn’t been buried under the rocks, then maybe they could have broken through to another passageway. Without it, they were forced to hunt for an exit that could not be found.
“OPPORTUNITIES COME BUT DO NOT LINGER”
That was a surprise. That was a line straight out of a sermon from the Order of Power. Avanesh had assumed their attackers had been of Vitriol, since theirs was the territory on which they were prospecting.
But the Order of Power had even less of a right to be here than he did, owing to recent events. So why were they here?
“YOU ARE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR US
MASTER CRAFTSMAN OF PERFECTION”
Avanesh allowed a flicker of pride to light the space under his ribs. So, their work had been noticed, and quite far afield. Bahadur had sourced the finest materials for Avanesh to forge into tools of exquisite manufacture, and at some point, the Order of Power had been made aware, it seemed.
He tried to recall the fragmented details of the ambush. Had it been an attack or a heavily negotiated recruitment drive?
He thought about what the Order of Power could do with Bahadur’s crown. With their resources, they could turn the world inside out. All that was buried and hidden would be brought to light where it could be seen and studied. The useless would be transformed into the useful.
“WHEN WE HEAR YOUR CAPTOR’S PULSE STOP
WE WILL PULL YOU OUT”
Avanesh wondered about the truthfulness of the messages. He didn’t know what powers the mage had at her command, or if she had confederates with her now. He entertained a thought then crawled forward and grabbed a handful of ants out of the word “WILL.” The ants lay unusually still in his cupped palm. He listened carefully for the song of the gloves and, when it faintly came, searched for a sense of what he could make out of the word, as if the word was a piece of wood for carving. He was surprised to discover that the word was solid, it was dependable. He scooped up the ants that belonged to other words, finally coming round to “CAPTOR.”
His heart sank lower than he thought it could go.
He slumped to the rough floor. The words were trustworthy. He grasped at the few memories he had of the attack: Bahadur had been the first to strike the delegation from the Order, had imprisoned them behind the rocks and was going to kill him while frittering away their few remaining minutes on a futile search for an exit. It would be a quiet killing, the weapon would be Bahadur’s own stupidity, as certain and crushing as any club.
He remained almost motionless until the ants skittered from his hand and returned to the wall.
“WE HAVE MADE THE DECISION EASIER FOR YOU”
Avanesh let that message crawl all across his overheated mind while he watched the words dissolved and its constituents return to their usual ant business. The distribution of pain and numbness in Avanesh’s body, as well as the scattering of debris from his final torch, told him he had been watching these messages slowly form and fade for hours. He gradually became aware that Bahadur was calling to him.
“Come here and look at what we’ve found!”
Avanesh unfolded his body, massaged out the pain and groped about in the fading light for his maul. He told himself that he needed it as a crutch for his unsteady legs, but mostly he was trying to think of how hard decisions could be made easier. He didn’t have to stumble much of a distance towards Bahadur’s booms before he heard the water.
Bahadur was bathing in a thin trickle falling from the roof of the cave. The accumulated muck of the underground was streaming from his body, leaving rivulets of his umber flesh to reflect the torchlight.
Avanesh smelled brine and iodine; that was seawater coming in. As he leaned heavily on his maul and watched Bahadur clean himself, he saw the trickle become a stream, and then a flow.
“It’s a bit less warm than we are, and that’s refreshment in my book,” he beamed. “Cool off and you’ll get your strength back.” Bahadur moved out of the water, his bare feet slapping on the stones. “Come now, ‘cause we haven’t long before the entire Vibrian comes down on us.”
Avanesh froze. The mage had started a flood. They no longer had the luxury of waiting for the air to run out or to die of thirst. A torturous, abstract death had been replaced by a very sudden and very material one. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He felt the mist and doom and dark of the atmosphere that submerged him. He felt the rising water and the dead end before them.
He felt Bahadur’s hidden panic and his own hidden fury.
He felt the way out and he felt the opportunity.
He stepped towards the shower and then spun towards Bahadur, his maul sailing through the black and thudding against Bahadur’s head. Seek-No-Further fell and fluttered and gasped on the wet floor, spraying Avanesh’s shins as it tried to tie itself into knots.
He had dropped the torch with his swing. He stared wide-eyed into the dark where Bahadur had been. Then he felt gentle pressure on his forearms and Bahadur’s breath falling on his face as they sank together to the ground. Sat face to face with Bahadur, Avanesh twisted his weapon hand free, raised the maul again and closed his eyes.
And Bahadur brought Avanesh’s empty hand up to his face, so Avanesh could again understand the material he was working with. It was flesh and blood and thought and love. There was hope he could use and help he could take.
“The water . . . the water made it easier to focus,” whispered Bahadur. “I found a crack in the ceiling, Avvie.”
Avanesh dropped the maul. His mouth opened in a silent, dry yelp of anguish.
“You could wriggle through, and find help maybe,” Bahadur.
Avanesh allowed himself to be led a short distance in the darkness, to be lifted, and to be pushed. His hands found a sharp edge in the rock and, as he felt its interior, his gloves told him how to turn this passage into his escape.
Suddenly, his feet were dangling. Bahadur had sat down again with a small splash. The pale light from his crown cast a formless shadow of Bahadur, a blot of ink to punctuate their time together. He was saying something, but Avanesh could not hear him over the rushing of water.
He pulled himself up. The rocks pinned him tightly and scoured his skin, but he pushed on.
Opportunities come but do not linger.
The water rose and rose and rose.
FIELD REPORT FROM AREA OF INTEREST #1854
Events of the “Fallen Cavern”
Drafted by Procurer Sayadaw
For the Judge of the Reliquary of Power
“Our will was diverted. Agent Kader is injured. She will be repaired to the infirmary in Kezkiisch.
Crown of Interest “Seek-no-further” (listed as Søkpå-Avvztand in Archive records) remains to be recovered in this Area of Interest.
Demonhide Gloves of Interest (unlisted in the Archive) remain in possession of Avanesh Tipanis Angle (House forsaken) at large in Realm 2889 (‘Nuiknaauiena’)
A long sword of Extreme Interest (listed as Foldbrjótaand/or Qimirlask and/or esanyakazisa-uzhlaba-ngobudlovin the Archive records) has been identified in this Area of Interest, formally in possession of Prince Bahadur al-Din Susukot of the House of Sword Fish Page.
Request for permission to redouble will towards this Area of Interest, with related request for necessary resources.
The will of Power be done.”