Fantasy Serial. The team enter the Silent Caverns.
Godfrey Digbett III, to his anxiety and chagrin, is drafted into a crew of adventurers delving into an ancient elvish catacomb, which is not so silent, nor so dead, as it appears from the outside. Cleric to the minor god Halloran, he stands most of all for servants and their service, and must be a good servant himself to the Oghmian religious order that employs him.
In studying the music of the tunnels, he is forced to reckon with the things that he lacks, and the things that he aches for – and the things the god he is pledged to might give him or deny him.
The morning was very cool and dewy, the light soft and smooth and grey, droplets of water sparkling on every visible blade of grass, clinging to tent ropes and posts, dripping from canvas edges.
Godfrey had known the sort of morning it would be before he woke – in his dreams, he had been walking through the same city of tents over the Silent Caverns, but he had been alone. Every tent had been empty, and every set of chairs and tables, every outside craftsman’s table, every campfire, had been unoccupied and untended.
Godfrey had walked alone, his lute still slung over his shoulder, and just behind him had walked his ever-present companion – his lord and master, his protector, his chain and anchor: his god.
He never remembered these little chats in his waking hours. He recalled the sensations that accompanied them, the sense of being very safe and content, even when he was at his most frightened and anxious. Especially then, really. Most of the time, he was aware of the figure seated at his bedside, watching over him, rather like his nanny used to – except without the sense of annoyance or impatience his nanny’s watchful eye had always come with.
Those evenings didn’t typically involve Halloran speaking with him – occasionally he would read aloud, but it was always from some mind-numbingly dull report or administrative thing, likely the sort of nonsense King Lara was constantly beset by, but for gods instead of monarchs.
These nights were far rarer. He never remembered them, never saw Halloran’s face, never ordinarily looked back at him, even, but Halloran was always there, ordinarily at Godfrey’s shoulder, supervising his work. He played music, sometimes – Buran played the viol, but Lord Halloran played the fiddle, and he sang, and it was so beautiful, when they played together in Godfrey’s dreams.
“You’re frightened,” Halloran said in his ear. His breath didn’t touch Godfrey’s skin, but the whole of his form radiated a sort of magical warmth and heat, more impactful than any corporeal body could in the waking world. Nonetheless, Halloran’s words were communicated in the subtly respectful way that a personal servant would in some public place where they might be overheard by an audience. He had a funny habit of that sort of thing, inhabiting the position that a servant might in Godfrey’s presence, as though he were in Godfrey’s service and not the other way around.
It was funny, really – Godfrey had spent his youth trying desperately to avoid the reanimated corpses that served as his family’s own servants, and once he had grown too old for a nanny, had learned to be rather independent so as to avoid being waited on or tended to by a walking skeleton. When he’d visited other homes, cousins or other family members, he’d ended up feeling rather stifled and awkward when he waited on like the other nobles, when some well-meaning chap tried to dress and undress him or fuss about his hair and toilette, or appear beside him when he was asleep in bed or stewing in his bathwater.
Perhaps that was what made him so appropriate to Lord Halloran’s service.
“I don’t like caves,” Godfrey said quietly. “Or, or caverns. In the city, I don’t even like to use the pedestrian tunnels to avoid street traffic – I’d always rather dodge coaches and get soaked with the rain. It’s all very well for a miner to go burrowing in the earth in search of shiny ores and pretty stones. I hardly wish to follow suit.”
“You aren’t in search of ores and stones in these caverns,” Halloran intoned quietly.
“No, we’re in search of knowledge, and music,” Godfrey said. “But what will we find there?”
“I am no more diviner than you are, cleric,” Halloran said snidely, which was a lot of rot, and made Godfrey huff, although he made no actual retort. There was something oddly tight in his tone, though, one that Godfrey wasn’t wholly familiar with, and hadn’t heard before, making him tilt his head to the side slightly.
“Lord Halloran?” he asked.
“Cleric?” Halloran replied.
“Is there something wrong in these caverns?”
Halloran, behind him, said nothing, but there was a sense of greater immensity in his form, a sense that he was larger or greater than before, and warmer, and yet… harder.
Godfrey’s voice came out very quiet, strained to his own ears, as he asked again, “My lord?”
He came to a stop in the dream-time ghost of Siofra Dhuibhne’s encampment, standing over Jock’s fire, which was unlit, his spit and griddle empty, and yet his apron was laid over the bench and his cooking things were laid out, even his grisly crime novel pinned open to the page he’d been reading, as though he’d only stepped away for a moment.
Behind him, Halloran was still too.
“You promised me once,” Godfrey whispered, “that you would never let me be lost. Never let me tread where you might not find me.”
“I did,” said Halloran.
“You will be in contact with me, still, in these caverns? You will be able to see me, reach me, know me?”
“I will.”
“I’m still very frightened. That doesn’t— does that make me a poor servant of yours, that I am frightened?”
“Fear is but a feeling: it is neither a choice, nor an action. Only your choices define you, cleric, and the actions you take, in my name or yours.”
“And if I chose not to go down there?” Godfrey asked.
Halloran laughed – it was a rich sound, surrounded him utterly and completely, wrapped itself around Godfrey’s body as a snake coiled about its prey. He woke to the sound of it still ringing in his ears, and felt warm and comfortable despite the chill of the morning.
Buran was sitting on his bed, dressed ready in his travelling clothes, reading.
“Mr White came looking for you late at night,” he said dryly. “Inserted his head through the tent flaps and asked if he might rouse you. I denied him permission and dispatched him on his way.”
“Gosh,” said Godfrey. “Have you ever considered a position as housemaster of a girl’s school, old thing? You’d get a lot of that sort of work.”
“There is a note on my monastic file that I am unfit for teaching positions, and a note that says I am bad with children.” He didn’t say it with any sort of self-consciousness or anxiety, because he really wasn’t troubled with such things, and Godfrey smiled across at him as he peeled himself out of his bedclothes and then stood behind the screen to wash himself in the basin – likely the last good wash he’d get for a little while, as they’d not have facilities like this within the caverns. As Godfrey had towelled himself off and was getting dressed, still behind the screen, Buran asked, “Are you going to engage in a relationship with him?”
“What?” Godfrey asked, his hands faltering on the clasps of his vest, and he looked behind him, even though all he could see was his towel over the wooden screen.
“People frequently remark on his attractiveness,” Buran said. “His hair is very long – it’s evident he takes care of it.”
Godfrey considered taking him on as to if he really thought the length of people’s hair was what made them attractive or not, but he thought that this was perhaps rather besides the point, intriguing an insight into Buran’s psyche as it might be. Instead, he remarked, “You’re not ordinarily so engaged in people’s personal lives.”
“They don’t ordinarily affect my work,” Buran replied, and Godfrey exhaled shakily, doing up the clasps of his vest.
It rather made sense, of course – Buran really was a very business-like chap, didn’t spare any anxiety for anything that wasn’t already a priority. He wasn’t asking because he found Bearchán particularly attractive, or thought much about it – he was trying to assess how likely it was that it would interrupt his personal protection work, Bearchán’s presence in Godfrey’s space, his tent.
“You know I don’t, don’t do that,” Godfrey said, and he folded the screen aside and stepped out from it, sitting down on the bed to buckle up his wrist braces. “I don’t— I don’t engage with men or women. Any more than you do.”
“That’s hardly true,” Buran said, and Godfrey stared at him, wondering what exactly had gotten into him this morning, and Buran looked back at him with an expression of mild challenge writ across his features. “You drink. You are frequently intimate with men. And Mother Vizma says music is an aphrodisiac.”
“Not for me,” Godfrey retorted, feeling his cheeks burn – frequently intimate with other men? What in the world was that supposed to mean!? He’d never so much as been undressed with another man. “I don’t… I don’t, Buran. I simply… don’t.”
Buran looked doubtful, and Godfrey felt himself bristle.
He’d gone to bed rather early the night before – after finding himself mildly threatened, or possibly complimented, by Passon’s king, he’d returned to camp, eaten quietly with the party, and retired to his tent. After making a few notes, he’d gone right to sleep and rested through the night.
Dinner had been a modest enough affair. He hadn’t said much, had focused on eating as Siofra, Eleanor, Jock, and Missy had sat at the table and talked over it to one another, about books and supplies that they had on order, what they were in need of; Bearchán hadn’t eaten with them, had been on the other side of the camp; Buran had eaten whilst in surprisingly engaged conversation with Alfa and, mostly, Harrow, listening to the latter talk about horse-rearing and behaviour.
He had stayed out in camp, when Godfrey had retired to the tent – he wasn’t actually as antisocial as people thought he was, really, he was just a prickly bastard, and he liked to socialise on his own terms. “Socialising”, on Buran’s terms, typically involved a somewhat interrogative approach to dialogue, and he was never happier than when someone was talking at length about an area of their expertise or knowledge that he was unlikely to find in a book, or that a book couldn’t communicate as well as a living person could.
He didn’t usually gossip.
“Was it Harrow that implied I was after Bearchán, in some way? You heard me tell him no, Buran, in the caravan.”
“Alfa seems to know a lot about this sort of thing,” Buran said quietly. “I know that I am not… attuned, to the signals other people give one another—”
“Nor am I!” Godfrey hissed, and Buran leaned back slightly on the bed, his jaw set, his lips very thin. He didn’t meet Godfrey’s gaze for a few moments, and Godfrey felt a horrid pang of guilt, and went on, “Sorry. Just— Well. I’m not signalling, nor, nor receiving signals. Bearchán can flirt as well as he likes, but it will go nowhere. I’ve never so much as carried on a conversation with Alfa, I hardly see what business she has making her assessments of me and my likely doings.”
Buran made a dismissive sound, and rather than allowing him to continue the conversation, Godfrey got to his feet and dispatched himself swiftly to break his fast – Jock had an array of things available, and he sat away from everybody else and got on with as much reading as he could before they made their way down the hill.
They walked down the cleft in the valley toward the passage entrance: it was a rather narrow pathway, requiring them to walk in double file at the very most, and Godfrey particularly was walking very close to the cliff wall, unwilling to be anywhere nearer to the unshored edge of the path than he needed.
In summer, some of the locals had said, the valley ran almost dry with scarce a trickle of water down at the base of the gorge, and in winter, it was turbulent with streaming rivers that came off the mountains: now, being spring, there was a healthy river cutting through the canyon, but it was rather a long way down, and Godfrey hated the way the wind whistled as it sank down into the valley, sharp and whistling and rather hard at their backs, until they got low enough, beneath enough stony overhang, that they were spared the effects of the natural wind tunnel.
Seville was largely flat plains, the majority of the forestry concentrated around the tall mountains to the east or along the paths of rivers, and when he had first begun to travel farther afield, his head had been made to spin with the immensity and strangeness of the world – how far an ocean could stretch before your eyes, the horizon a whispered promise some many miles over the watery swells and waves; how truly thick and tangled a wood could be, how ancient, how nearly solid; and most of all, how there were harder things to imagine than flat plains with mountains in the distance, how some people somehow lived and walked into and out of and over canyons and valleys and gorges like this one.
It seemed to him somehow more unnatural than simply tunnelling under the ground and living in a cave or mine or what-have-you, as dark and wet and cold and miserable an existence as that could be. Most every ancient elven settlement was in the bowl of some gorge or valley, and he had stepped into various ones in the course of his research, but it still felt…
He didn’t know.
At least in a mine or tunnel or cave or cavern, there was a stone roof over your head, even as you descended into the wet bowels of the earth: traversing a canyon like this one, you were funnelled lower and lower, deeper and deeper, and yet still visible to any watching eyes in the skies above you. It felt vulnerable, somehow. He imagined it was how a lizard or a mouse felt, when dropped in the midst of a big sandy expanse or a spread of tile or stone, and it skittered forth in the hopes of hiding against a wall or a corner, frightened of being scooped up from some monster flying above it.
What with the stories he’d heard of the Silent Caverns, all his life, he had rather expected a somewhat grand and imposing entrance, a gaping maw inviting in fresh victims, to send them mad or simply to swallow them whole.
The entrance was no such thing: it was nearly unobtrusive, a channel opened up from what had once perhaps been a natural fissure in the brown stone wall, the overhanging rock half-shielding them from the painfully broad sky over their heads pushing back the light a bit, shadowing it.
He wouldn’t have seen it, if he had just been walking here of his own accord – it was only with Mr Harrow directly ahead of him and turning left and into the fissure that he knew it was there, and saw the mage lights inside, illuminating the tunnels.
To his left was this, a recess in the stone leading to some literal ghost story; to his right, over the cliff edge which here, at least, had a few fence posts and a little balcony that you couldn’t pay him enough to step onto, you could see the water rushing below them.
“Surely, when the waters are high, the tunnels are overrun?” he asked; Siofra, who walked confidently onto the wooden platform and laid her elbows on the fencing, staring beneath them, shook her head.
“The entrance is protected from the river – not the path down the side of the canyon, though. Either the path used to have some sort of magical shoring in place that was destroyed, or they just never entered these caverns when the rains came.”
“Neither entered nor left,” remarked Alfa darkly, and Godfrey swallowed, rubbing at his throat as though it would soothe the anxiety he felt at the very idea. “The ancient elves died so rarely – if these were indeed burial grounds, if this is a crypt we’re walking into, it’s possible that the attendants of the dead, whatever amounted to their priests, were trapped inside with their charges every year until the waters died down again.”
“What a cheerful thought, Alf, thanks for that,” said Bearchán mildly – quite casually, he had one elbow rested on the balcony railing and was looking over the river below, then he glanced back and gave Godfrey a winning smile. “Ready to plunder the depths of the earth, Godfrey?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Godfrey said weakly.
Eddie Flowers, being so very tall, had to bend his knees to pass through the fissure, and whilst Godfrey wasn’t quite so strapping as he was, he did have to ease his pack off his back to pass through without snagging himself on the edges, but once through that hewn entrance, the cavern opened outward, and especially upwards, in a way that took Godfrey by surprise.
In his childhood imaginings at his nanny’s knee, he had imagined the Silent Caverns as twisting and labyrinthine, but most of all had imagined them as dark and cramped and narrow, such that you scarcely had space to flee from some pursuer. The corridor he stepped into now was no narrower than the corridor of any temple, a good amount of space over his head, easily space for them to walk four or five abreast and with their arms spread out like wings, if they chose – a great deal of space indeed, contrasted with the narrow pathway they’d just walked down.
The stone walls and ceiling were a dark brown stone, and it was really quite smooth under his fingers when he reached out and touched it, not nearly so rough as he had been expecting, nor as damp to the touch.
“Limestone?” he asked of Maven, who had appeared at his side as the others walked further down the corridor and inside – he could hear the noises and discussion of an inside camp at work, the sound funnelled toward them by the cave walls.
“Dolomite, largely,” Maven said, leaning on their staff as he looked up at the rounded arches of the ceiling over their head, and then down at the floor, which had been paved with terracotta tiles, great slabs of orange that contrasted with the paler brown of the walls and ceiling, and at the same time, reflected their own colour. “These first few corridors only go a quarter of a mile or so into the mountain and all on this level – this entranceway, an open vault ahead of us where the primary archaeological camp is set up, and then a few offshoots to the right and left. Each of them slopes upward, leading to smaller vaults and carved out rooms, and then there’s another tunnel that goes forward and slopes downward, and that’s the impassable one. There’s no signage or writing in here, but the little rooms have symbols and carvings, and ditto in the central entrance hall.”
“Actual text made illegible?”
“Completely. We’ve tried to restore some of it, but it was all scraped out so dedicatedly, so completely, you can’t even make out individual letters, can’t guess at them, even, let alone words.”
“Not unusual, I’m afraid,” Godfrey murmured, walking very slowly over the terracotta stones and feeling the slight change in the depressions under his feet – they were attached, or had been once, to some sort of toll or bell system, but they weren’t playing any tones now; he could only hear the slide of stone on stone. “The ancient elves were very careful about wiping out the names of their gods, when they abandoned them – their names had to be forgotten, eradicated, to take their power away from them. Many of the ancient elves changed their names or even went nameless for the rest of their lives, because they had been named for or in reference to their gods. Scrubbing out a word on a wall is nothing compared to that.”
Their expression was unreadable as they walked alongside Godfrey forward – he was aware, faintly, of Buran trailing nearly silently behind them, not making a sound, scarcely even taking up any physical space, as frighteningly unobtrusive as he was capable of being. Maven’s lips were pressed tight together, more tension on one side of their face than the other.
Finally, they asked, “They feared them that much? Their gods?”
“Oh, yes,” Godfrey murmured, looking across at them. “The eternal children that they were, kept in valleys and gorges like this one like fish in a bowl, their movements toward self-liberation, to emancipation, were very harshly punished. It’s not very easy to piece together what their lives were like, exactly – we know the ancient elves had very rich crafts and technologies, but that was because the same people were able to innovate and build on their own expertise over decades, centuries. Outside of traumatic injury or accident, these people did not, could not die – their gods would not permit it. They were forever youthful, forever beautiful, perfect and untouched and unageing; there’s actually one or two scant references to the idea of their not even being permitted to have children without being given permission, or doing so in secret, hidden from their gods’ eyes, although we don’t know if that’s literally true or if it was metaphorical. The songs that information is from are from surviving music outside of the forest elves in Gros and Lin, and it could well be apocryphal. Gosh.”
The central cavern was really very large – around the edges were carved pathways that led to the different offshoots, and ahead of them, on the other side of this cavern, Godfrey could see the much wider tunnel that led deeper down into the Caverns proper, where no one had yet managed to penetrate.
The entrance hall had been lit with a pair of mage lights, hovering balls of white-blue magic that one of the archaeologists must have put up ahead of Siofra and her team coming to join them, but here in the cavern were more permanent lights – oil lamps were set on posts and plinths, and down on the main floor of this open hall was a set fire around which were arranged tables and temporary desks, as well as rows of camp beds. He could feel the enchantment on the air that was funnelling out the fumes from the fire and the burning oil out toward the entrance, and the effect was a little disorienting, because he could hear and see bacon sizzling in a pan, see the steam rising up toward them, but couldn’t smell it from here at all.
“Anyway,” Godfrey said, looking up at the ceiling and seeing how it glittered with embedded gems and veins of shining material – not natural ore veins, he didn’t think, but carved ones. The stars have obviously changed a good bit since, but he’d seen old star charts, could recognise the historical night sky as he saw it depicted now, and he wondered at how difficult it must have been to create, at how much time and labour it must have demanded. “Their gods were very angry at the betrayal – the exodus was all at once, as best as we know, somehow coordinated, that the ancient elves all began to abandon their settlements after destroying any text or history, and their gods flooded the valleys in which their settlements were in vengeance, to drown any who were too slow to get away from them.”
“And they’re dead now? Those gods?” Maven asked.
“Gods do not die as men or elves or orcs do,” Buran said from behind them, and Godfrey looked at Maven’s slightly strained expression, then reached out and patted them gently on the back.
“Don’t worry, old thing,” he said quietly. “We’re quite safe here, I’m sure.”
And he let Maven lead the way into the archaeologists’ camp.
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