Fight. If he was going to fight, he supposed he’d have to get up. Didn’t any of them understand he had a right to be bitter—to be more than bitter? He hadn’t asked for any of this—not the terrible injury to his arm or the curse of his father’s blood, not the war with the fairies or the attentions of an insane demigod. Didn’t all the women who were demanding he do this or that—go on a mission, come home safe, fight against despair—didn’t they know he had a right to all that misery?

But they just wouldn’t leave him alone.

Barrick sighed, coughed until he doubled over and spat out blood and ash, then climbed back onto his feet.

Many of the tunnels started out with an upward slant, but soon tilted back down again. The only certain way to know that he was climbing was to find stairs. But Barrick Eddon was not the only one with that idea: half the lost, shrieking creatures in the smoky depths of Greatdeeps seemed to be looking for a way to the surface. The others, for reasons he could not imagine, seemed equally determined on rushing down toward the place where Gyir and the one-eyed demigod had died, a cavern that had already collapsed in fire and black fumes when Barrick had crawled away from it perhaps an hour ago. Sometimes he actually had to wade through a tide of maddered shapes, some of them as big as himself, all hurrying as fast as they could down toward what must be certain death. He had lost the ax when the ceiling fell; now he found a spadelike digging tool that someone had dropped, and used it the next time the tunnel became frighteningly cramped, clearing his way with it, hitting out when he needed to against the claws or teeth of frightened refugees.

As he climbed higher through the mine the stairwells opened onto rooms and scenes of which he could make no sense whatsoever. In one broad cavern which he had to traverse to reach the bottom of the next stairwell, dozens of slender, winged creatures were savaging a single squat one, their voices a shrill buzz of angry joy—their victim might have been one of the small Followers like those that had attacked Gyir in the forest, but it was hard to tell: the silent creature was too covered with blood and earth to be certain. Barrick hurried past with his head down. It reminded him of his own vulnerability, and when he saw the dull glow of a blade lying on the stairs where its owner had dropped it, presumably in panicked flight, he dropped the digging tool and picked this up instead. It was a strange thing, half ax, half poniard, but much sharper than the spade.

A couple of floors up the stairwell suddenly filled with small, pale skittering things which seemed to care little whether they were upside down or right side up; just as many of them raced across the ceiling and walls as along the floor. Their bodies were bone-hard, round and featureless as dinner bowls, but they had little splay-toed feet like mice. The scrabbling, clinging touch of those tiny claws disturbed Barrick so much that after the first one landed on him he hurriedly brushed off all others.