Page 37 of Sightwitch
Please, Sirmaya, please be a tunnel on the other side—
A thud rattled through the earth. It shook right up to my knees, and a blast of cold seared over me from behind.
“Don’t look back!” the man roared.
I looked back.
A mistake, for the shadow wyrms had landed on the ledge, and with the flat, smooth stone beneath them, they were accelerating.
Bya lot.Shadowy legs tendriled back and forth. Centipedes of pure darkness with no distinguishing features. Simply silhouette and hunger.
Briefly, as my gaze flew forward once more, I met the man’s eyes. They bulged and shook, the whites swallowing everything. I could only assume that mine looked the same—
I tripped. My left heel slipped over icy scree. My pack tilted toward the abyss.
This time, though, when the man grabbed the pack and yanked me upright, I did not say a word. I just pumped my legs faster.
I also did not dare look backward again.
We reached an inward curve in the ice, and the outward bend was approaching fast. So were the wyrms, though. Their hundreds of legs kept an endless vibration running through the stone, and with each breath that ripped from my throat, the vibrations shook harder.
“You called them shadow wyrms before!” the man shouted.
I offered no reply because by the Twelve, I did not understand why he was trying to speak.Icould barely breathe and run at the same time, and he was panting much harder than I.
Yet still he continued: “So this isn’t Noden’s Hell, then? And those aren’t His Hagfishes?”
“No,” I huffed.
“That’s a relief—”
“STOP. TALKING.”
He stopped talking.
We hit the bend. The Rook had already swooped around—I took this as a sign that there was nothing dangerous ahead.
I was wrong.
A third shadow wyrm crawled over the ceiling, just like the one from before, and at its current pace, it would intersect with our one and only escape.
But there was a bit of gold to coat all the chaos: a doorway, almost identical to the one in the Crypts, waited a few hundred paces ahead.
If we could just get there before the wyrms got to us.
The Rook seemed to think the same, and, blessed bird, he gave a vicious screech before flapping right for the shadow wyrm on the ceiling.
A moment later, the wyrm screamed.
And its brethren behind us screamed too.
There it was again—that gut response. The urge to vomit welled hard in my throat, and I had to slow … then stop entirely, a hand planted on the wall to keep from losing my balance.
“Your bird is going to get itself killed!” the man said. He latched his hands firmly to my pack to keep me from toppling headfirst over the ledge.
“He knows … what he’s doing!” I answered between gasps for air, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true. What had worked in the Crypts might not work here.
I couldn’t dwell on it, though, just as I couldn’t stay stopped for long. The Rook had bought us a precious few moments with his sweeping and swinging.
