“But...Salvator?! They’re coming! We...we have to...”
Before Shen could finish his whimper, Kai grasped his pale cloak and dragged him off down the corridor.
They faltered through the rough stone darkness, Kai’s hand chafing against the walls as the corridor wound this way and that. The air turned icy cold. The pursuit grew louder behind them — screeching, cackling, scraping, hunting.
Kai stumbled as he wrenched himself and Shen round a corner; his hand smacked hard against the wall to steady himself — but the rasping sound of rock was replaced with a dull squelch.
He stopped. Shen tumbled in behind him.
“Salvator? What is it?”
Kai took Shen’s arm, and pulled back his sleeve — the corridor lit up around him. Their mouths opened as one in shock; from Kai’s came wisps of rimy dread — the walls were lined with bodies. Parts of bodies. Preserved. Frozen. Stockpiled. Tattered remnants of white fabric hung from bones, peeled from filmy skin and sealed sunken eyes.
After a seeming eternity of frozen shock, Shen suddenly erupted into a scarlet scream; it echoed through the crimson chamber behind them and mixed with the scrambling sounds of pursuit. Kai thrust a hand over Shen’s mouth; the cry remained — sound seemed to be oozing from the mesh skin of his throat.
Then, without warning, Shen flushed over green. Kai snapped his hand back as though the change of colour would sting him, but Shen was now another Shen!
“My goodness. They do say ‘Give yourself fully to the Way and stay with us forever!’ Needless to say, however, my dear Salvator, this was not quite the way I had imagined!”
A grisly wail pierced the air, and Shen flicked immediately back to red. Before he had time to scream, Kai dragged him down the corridor.
The hunter was closing in. As they passed a junction, Kai heaved Shen into a narrow side corridor — no more than a fissure. They squeezed through the rock walls of the cramped space, but stopped short as scuffling sounds brushed past in front of them.
In Shen’s rosy light, at the end of the cleft where it opened out into another murky corridor, an eerie file of sallow hoods bobbed past. Kai tried to drag his arm up past the rock to cover Shen’s mouth, then realised the futility — he could only hope.
The soulless line of pale marched past and away.
Kai closed his eyes and let out a long, trembling breath.
When the procession was safely out of sight and sound, Kai forced himself out from the rift into the corridor and pulled Shen away in the opposite direction.
After only a few rapid breaths, however, the passageway began to descend. Shen suddenly clutched at his own throat, fighting his own impulses to scream, stifling his voice into a hoarse, agitated whisper —
“Up, boy, not down — up! We have to get out! We...”
Another vile shriek stabbed through the air from behind. Kai hauled Shen away.
The walls of the corridor had returned to stone, but were no longer flat — rows of chiselled sculptures of countless races watched them coldly as they scrambled along in Shen’s rusty aura. The passage opened out again at another crossroads. The shriek returned, now disconcertingly close.
They looked around, trepidation growing. By the feet of one of the statues, an almost imperceptible light was blinking red. Before Kai had time to even guess at it, a terrible screech almost deafened him. The hunter was closing in. They darted into another sculpture-lined corridor and tore along it as quickly as they dared in the darkness, until they almost smacked straight into a stone effigy; the passageway curved sharply round to the left. They dashed in — then stopped cold!
Trapped in a dead end of eerily looming statues, Kai and Shen looked around in panic as dreadful footsteps scraped into the corridor where they had just been. The hunter slowed to a sadistic saunter. Kai desperately tried to cover Shen’s glowing skin, snapping the buttons at his throat back into place and pulling the cloak over his head. A soft, hissing cackle dribbled through the dark, and closer the predator came, sniffing at the air. Kai held his breath; Shen held his emotions. In the lightless passageway, a shadow blacker than death seeped slowly towards the corner.
“Little one,” came Lúez’s evil hiss, “Come out, come out.”
Kai and Shen groped silently along the dead-end wall for something, anything that might save them, release them, defend them. A faint gust of air brushed strands of Shen’s light-filament hair out from under his hood. In the wisp of fresh dim light, their eyes peeled wide and they looked up at a towering alabaster statue of a Truth Warrior.
“Oh, my,” whispered Shen, almost inaudibly, “That looks just like...”
Onnd shot out her arms silently from within her sculpted cloak and plucked Kai and Shen from the corridor into the void, just as Lúez slithered round the corner into the dead end.
He licked at the empty air, then snarled to himself in disgust —
“Menial tasks!”
Next chapter — Convergence
Sunday 8 May 2011
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