Dream of a Vast Blue Cavern

Chapter 3: Sealed for Siege: Larc

“All Icers we can spare are to report to the city. The wounded must be healed there and sent back to the lines.”

Larc closed her eyes and concentrated on the healing. When it was done, she began to stand, but the woman grasped her arm. Her grip was strong, her color healthy, but her eyes were empty. “You could have at least let me bury him.”

Larc almost corrected her, stopped herself just in time. She pulled the woman’s hand, her grip weakening quickly, from her arm, squeezed it gently, and released it. “I’m sorry. This was better for your health. The babe is part of you again, at least.”

She took a large piece of chamois from her bag and began sopping up the blood. “Any we can spare? We can spare exactly none, Princess.”

“Larc.” Pasten paused as if considering her words carefully. “I know the situation here as well as you. But if we do not keep the lines strong, there will be no one to protect the burial chambers, and all this will be for nothing.”

Larc beckoned a hale woman who stood nearby and handed her a fresh rag with instructions to finish cleaning up and watch for complications. The patient lay quietly now, her face covered with salty tear streaks, her body shaking with grief. Larc thought of the innocent life that had lain there, killed by the caustic conditions of war. She thought of fire advancing up the tunnels into the burial chambers.

“Is there a plan for escape, Pasten?”

“We are working on a tunnel from here to the Outer Tunnels. I don’t know if we will be safe there, but at least we won’t be trapped.”

Larc nodded. Best if it did not come to that. The Outer Tunnels were wild, and even if the Flames didn’t follow them, there were other dangers, rockfalls and deadly animals, that the people of Iskalon were in no condition to face.

“I have told the other Icers. You are the last. You must go now. Take a raihan from one of the messengers at the cavern entrance; you will need to conserve your strength and vaerce. Report to Maudit’s officers. They have set up triage in the Council Hall.”

Larc curtsied and rose above the unusually solemn bladderball game. She tried to ignore the sounds of pain and suffering as she left them and Pasten behind and floated toward the entrance. Once she had passed through the narrow tunnel, she settled onto the ground and released T'Jas.

The main tunnel to Iskalon, intersecting several other tunnels from nearby burial chambers, was open, guarded by two Icers. Nearby, several Scribes with their pale, slender raihan awaited orders to take messages. Larc saluted the Icers, fist to heart. She turned to the nearest Scribe and asked him, apologetically, for his beast. The man was petite for a human, as most Scribes were, and he handed the raihan over courteously but with obvious reluctance. Messenger Scribes forged strong bonds with the animals they rode. Larc promised him she would send the raihan back with the next messenger.

Raihan were small and looked so delicate that Larc felt even her meager weight might crush them, but this one stood meekly while she mounted and gripped its upright blue horns. When they left the purple light of the burial ice behind and entered the long, dark tunnel to the city, Larc did not waste vaerce on an icelight; the raihan itself glowed with phosphorescence in the darkness. It glided like an Icer over the ground, swift and silent; Larc did not feel a single jolt from the rough stones of the tunnel.

Soon, the downward curving Bridge of Ancestors stood before her, towering magnificently over the lake. A heavy fog, mixed with dark smoke, hung over lake and city. The Guild houses and the top of the Council Hall stood in the fog like a thousand tiny islands. The Palace looked dark and empty. The air was chokingly stale.

Larc used T'Jas to create a bubble of oxygen over her mouth and the raihan’s. They must have closed off the tunnels, sealed them against attack. Then she saw something that made her heart skip a beat. Straight across the lake, where the Fire Bridge had once floated, joining the island of Iskalon to the tunnels that lead downward, was only water. The same gaping absence loomed where the Bridge of Prosperity had floated, and the King's Bridge was gone as well. Iskalon was sealed up and cut off, ready for siege.

Larc could not help thinking about the fungal tunnels and the livestock caverns beyond the sunken bridges. How much had been harvested, how many cababar brought into the city, before it was shut off? Would she have to worry about her patients starving now, in addition to waiting too long for healing? How long before the food ran out altogether?

When she was halfway across the Bridge of Ancestors, there came a grinding sound, and the walls of Iskalon shook. It came again, and again. The Flames meant to breach the sealed-off tunnels. Surely, if they did, the lake would stop them. But Flames could float through the air just like Icers, and if they swarmed over the lake, they might gain enough ground on the island to do real damage. The sensitive raihan picked up Larc’s sudden urgency and broke into a run. If there were not wounded piling up now, there soon would be.