They were alone. A dull red glow lit the center of the cavern, throwing two of the huge pillars into silhouette. Trey could hear another volley of crossbow bolts being fired, then another. It seemed that the militia were alive after all, and putting up a sustained fight. Again he wondered about Sonda and looked across toward her cave, but there lay only impenetrable blackness. He closed his eyes and went into a crouch, trying to cast himself across this disturbed space, but the mixed input from the Nax—which he had quickly been able to filter and block so that he received only a hint of the terrible sensations they were reveling in—prevented him from casting himself at all. Besides, the fresh fledge was wearing off. Perhaps when they were farther into the mines they would pause, Trey could take some fledge from his shoulder bag and try to discern Sonda’s whereabouts.

A brief flush of guilt burned his cheeks in the cool darkness. There were two thousand others down here.

“Come on,” he said to his mother, leaning close and pressing his cheek to hers. “I’ll look after you.” He hefted the disc-sword, turned and entered the mouth of the mine.

They soon left behind the noise, the slaughter, the fighting and screaming. And within five hundred paces, gone too were the dregs of the Naxes’ psychic emanations, swallowed into the rock and fledge seams that had been their home for so long, miners and Nax both. Whether they would ever coexist here again . . . that was a concern for the future.

Right now, Trey had to get them topside. He wondered what awaited them up there, and just why the Nax had risen in such a fury.

TWO THOUSAND STEPS into the new working, Trey and his mother paused for a rest. Trey had listened to her labored breathing, her grunts and groans as the landscape of the tunnel floor surprised her, twisting ankles, jarring her old bones. She tried to keep the pain to herself. He had passed this way thousands of times now and he knew the tunnel, how to navigate in the dark, the heavy sense of the tunnel walls repelling him and showing him the way. It was best they traveled as fast as him, not as slow as his mother.

He had sheathed the disc-sword and succeeded in slinging it around his shoulders. In this enclosed space he would sense danger long before it reached them.

They sat and took a drink from the leather gourd in Trey’s shoulder bag. There was very little water, he had not refilled it since his shift.

“How far?” his mother asked at last. Trey had been dreading that. He had known that this question would come, and he had felt the silence between them thickening with its weight.

Trey reached out and touched his mother’s face, not conveying anything in particular, just touching.

“Maybe two days,” he said.