Page 121 of Bull Moon Rising

ASPETH

I wake up to a small, sticky hand patting my face, and a throbbing pain above my ear.

Everything aches. I open my eyes, whimpering when it’s just as dark with them open as it is with them closed. The tunnel collapsed on us. Magpie turned against us. Barnabus tried to kill us. Maybe he succeeded. Maybe I’m in the death god’s entrance to hell.

The small, sticky hand pats my cheek again. “Kipp? Is that you?”

This time he gives me a little squeezing pinch on the cheek, like an old grandmother. I suppose that’s him reassuring me. I flex a hand, and rocks clatter away from my fingers. Everything seems whole, if a little bruised. I think that’s a good sign. I’m lying against something warm and soft.

I try to sit up, only to smack my forehead against rock. “Ow!”

Kipp pats my cheek again, and then I hear the sound of rummaging. There’s the click of a striker, and then light flares. Kipp has a stub of a candle in his hand, and he holds it up.

It’s worse than I thought.

The pocket we’re in is surrounded by tumbled rock. The rocks themselves are oppressively close to my face, and if I sit upright, I’ll be face-first into the rubble. I stretch an arm out and touch a toppled Prellian column, against which Lark’s shield and Kipp’s house and my quarterstaff have created a kind of triangle of protection for us. The top of Kipp’s shell house is broken into a dozen pieces, but the little guy seems none the worse for wear. He holds the candle stub up to my face, peering, and I realize that my spectacles are broken.

For some reason, that makes me angrier than anything. Does Magpie realize how fucking hard it is to find spectacles that fit just right? Ugh. I pull them off and toss them aside, and as I do, I notice I’m lying atop another person.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I scramble away as best I can—not easy considering that the room I have is less than the size of my clothing trunk—and try not to panic. Gwenna and Mereden are under Lark, who tried to protect them with her body. I roll Lark off of them and she groans, her clothing torn. We wake each person up as best we can. Gwenna has a bloody nose and Mereden is scratched up, her ankle swollen. Lark clutches her ribs but considering that we’ve just survived being buried in a cave-in, we’re doing amazing. “Is everyone all right?” I manage, wiping at a strand of blood trickling down my cheek. “No one trapped under anything?”

“I’m trapped under a shit ton of rock with four other people,” Lark jokes, and then winces, pressing a hand to her waist. “Oh, fuck, that hurts.”

“Let’s not think about the shit ton of rock, all right?” I offer. “Let’s think about how we can get out of here.”

“We can’t,” Gwenna states, holding a length of ripped sleeve under her nose to stem the bleeding. She hunkers down between myself and Mereden, and we’re all crammed in here like matchsticks in a tinderbox. “If we move something, we could collapse the entire tunnel on us and die for sure.”

“Well, we can’t stay here.” Already the rocks just overhead feel oppressive. I want to stretch my legs and stand upright, and the longer I can’t do it, the more I feel the intense need to do so. I focus on Kipp and his tiny candle, already burning down to nothing. “Let’s think. Where are our supply bags?”

“Buried,” Mereden says in a small voice. “Just like us. I can examine everyone but I don’t have anything to treat you with.”

“It’s fine. We’re fine.” I keep a bright smile on my face. “I’m good, but look over the others.”

Mereden does a quick check, but there’s nothing to be done for Gwenna’s busted nose or Lark’s ribs. They need a guild healer.

“I’m good,” Lark says. “Had worse in a bar fight.”

“I just want out,” Gwenna moans.

“We’re working on it.” Gwenna whimpers with distress at my reassurance, and I reach over and grab her hand, holding it tightly. “Kipp. What else do you have in your house? Anything we can use for light?”

He scrambles up to his shell again and digs into the side, squirming his way under a broken piece and tossing out a few more bits. There’s a bag full of stale cookies, a bundle of string, a handful of nuts, and one more tiny candle. We have no water to drink, very little food, and I’m trying hard not to think about how much rock could possibly be over us.

“Thank you,” I tell Kipp, and hand the cookies to Mereden and Gwenna, because they’re both looking shaky. “You two eat these.”

I expect Lark to complain, but she doesn’t. Even clutching her ribs, she seems more settled than both Gwenna and Mereden, who look like they might fall apart at any moment.

I keep talking in order to seem like I have everything under control. “I think with the nuts and a bit of ripped fabric, we might be able to make a candle that will burn longer. In Prell, they used nut oil in their candles and that’s why it left greasy smears on a lot of the paint in the ruins—well, it isn’t important. The important thing is that we’re not going to run out of light, all right? We’ll figure something out.”

Lark nods. “Once I catch my breath I can try to see if any of the rocks are loose.”

“No, you stay where you are. Kipp, are there any cracks in the rocks that you can squeeze through?” I shift my weight, nearly hitting myhead on the oppressively low ceiling again. “If so, see if you can figure out the best way out. If not, just let me know. We’ve got options.”

“Options?” Gwenna lets out a hysterical bark of laughter. “What fucking options do we have? Die fast or die slow?”

“No,” I say firmly. “First of all, if we can’t find a solution out of the…rubble, then we wait here.” I don’t use the wordscave-inorburied aliveeven though it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Since Gwenna is still panicky, I decide to go further with my lies. “There was a team about thirty years ago that lived in the tunnels for a month before they were rescued. They ate moss and drank trickles of water that came in through the rock. We’ll be fine. People survive in the ruins all the time. We can wait for rescue.”

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