Page 36 of The Goblin and The Dancer
“Don’t give up now,” Grik whispered to them. “We’re so close.”
It was Grik who kept them going. A few times, Paul and Rosanna were on the verge of turning around—though Grik knew that if they tried, the elves would only be hopelessly wedged in the tunnels. Finally, as his own agitation grew and drained his meager well of encouragement, he began singing a goblin mining song in a hoarse whisper—a song about the mining shift being nearly over—anything to cheer the others on.
Somewhere in the middle of that interminable crawling, he suddenly felt an air current as something in the atmosphere of the tunnel shifted.
His heart gave a great leap. But it wasn’t fresh air. It was merely a shifting of the stale air within the tunnel, the breath of movement far behind them, and Grik suddenly realized what was happening.
Someone was coming through the tunnels in a pneumatic tube.
The tube that he had thought—hoped—would be inactive, was being used.
Grik froze for one instant. The flying tube would smash them to a pulp and splatter them against the sides of the tunnel.
“Crawl!” Grik screamed to the others. “Crawl as fast as you can; don’t stop!”
They rushed forward, but it was pointless, useless. They could never out-crawl a pneumatic tube—he ought to know. They would be killed any moment.
Behind him, Grik could hear Paul’s labored breathing—his leg was failing him. Grik’s mind spun with fear.
As they scrambled blindly onward, Grik wasn’t paying attention to the tunnel around him . . . and the solid ground in front of him suddenly disappeared into a deep maw.
Rock and earth tumbled around Grik in a cascade so great he couldn’t hear his own screams. They were falling, unable to stop. He reached out for the others but could feel nothing but air and falling dirt. Grik had a shattered sense of fur and claws. They were in a tunnel of some animal’s burrow, sliding down and down and down . . .
* * *
Grik shovedrocks and dirt off of himself and sat up, feeling like a corpse that had suddenly come back to life and was trying to dig its way out of its grave. He crawled over to Paul and Rosanna and helped them shift the rubble off themselves and sit up.
They didn’t speak for a long time.
They were deep underground. Horribly deep. Grik suddenly knew, with a sinking certainty, that they had now sunk down farther than they had been before.
They were alive, but alive for what purpose?
Grik shook his glow stick and clutched it to his chest, curling around the reassuring glimmer. He thought about what must have happened. The force of the tube rushing through the tunnel must have caused part of it to simply shake to pieces. As the tunnel had collapsed, they must have fallen through several layers of rotted buildings beneath, and then, by horrible irony, tumbled into the immense burrow of some animal that Grik could only hope was dead. It would be just their luck if they were all eaten now.
He wondered if the goblin in the tube had made it, and he got up and spent a few minutes looking around for another dazed body or the shattered remains of the tube itself, but he found nothing. It was reasonable to believe that the tube had built up enough speed to clear the hole it had created.
The unknown goblin had had all the luck.
“How far down,” Rosanna said faintly, “do you think we are?”
Grik didn’t respond. It wasn’t fair! They had been so close, perhaps within minutes of going home. And now they were farther away than ever before.
How long had they been in the dark? It was only that morning that they had been living their lives, walking under sky, and breathing fresh air. But it felt as if they had been down here for months, even years. And it was all his fault.
“Well,” Paul finally said, obviously forcing the word out. “We can’t just sit here. We’ll have to . . .” His voice trailed away. Even a war hero, a leader of men, had run out of solutions for his followers.
Grik put his head in his hands. He had held on to his anger against Paul to keep going, but now that anger was gone, and in the vacuum it left behind there was nothing—only an emptiness as dark as this burrow.
It wasn’t entirely his fault, surely. If Paul had not tried to ruin his life, Grik would have never lost his temper. Grik swallowed as the truth wormed up inside of him in an accusing whisper that he could not deny.
He knew where the blame really lay.
The glow stick in his hands dimmed, like a fading firefly, and all the light sank down into the faintest smudge. Grik didn’t have the strength to shake it back to life.
“It’s my fault,” he whispered into the dark.
Paul turned to him. “What?”
