Somehow, I was underground again. This is probably diagnostic of some advanced, degenerative brain disease. Presumably the same one that would later see me through a long and undeserved career of heroics spanning every scrap of the continent. If I were given a knife, and the precise location of whichever bit of my brain were responsible for this, I would cut it out within the minute and not bother being gentle as I did. But I had no such look, and so I was underground again.

  It wasn’t all bad at least, this time I had about a dozen other men with me besides Gruin. On the other hand, we were all injured too.

  “How far?” I hissed to Gruin, earning myself a barely-perceptible glare and a barely-audible shush. Hearing him speak so quietly was a stark reminder of how well sound carried down here, how sensitive any cave-dweller would be to it, and how deadly letting such noises race ahead of us could be.

  Not that there was much point in me worrying about it of course, the miners at our backs were some of the loudest fuckers I’d ever met or heard of. You might have replaced their limbs with pickaxes and still had a quieter group at the end. If shygarin were awaiting us deeper down in these caverns, they’d know we were coming a long way off.

  I wanted to point that out, moron that I was, but even I knew better than to speak after seeing Gruin’s furious call for silence. Good thing too, because bringing that sort of problem up in present company would only fray nerves and eat away at the meagre courage of my make-do comrades. I’d need that courage intact if I was to maintain a healthy amount of meat between myself and the monsters.

  Which of course meant putting myself between them and the direction. It was a much safer position, right from the front, than they were probably picturing. Gruin was still ahead of me, meaning that I had perhaps the most dangerous fighter I’d ever met—possibly excluding Jeeves—to fend off an attack from the front. Meanwhile the men trailing behind me were blissfully unaware that if a shygarin came from the rear in ambush, something I knew the beasts tended towards when underground, they would suddenly become our front line.

  All in all, not a bad place to be. We kept moving.

  My growing claustrophobia—not an irrational fear in my case, rather a simple capacity for pattern recognition—was flaring up as we delved deeper and felt the air chill. Every step we took semed to make the miners behind me more agitated, louder, clumsier. It was getting on my bloody nerves.

  Only Gruin remained unshifted, growing if anything more alert and dextrous as we ventured farther. It really was clear to me how natural this environment was for him, how alien above-ground landscapes must have been to a being so thoroughly at home beneath the earth. I followed him closely of course, both physically and by watching his footing to improve my own.

  We weren’t stuck traversing it for as long as last time, either. A single journey through the underground depths of these mines and the connected systems seemed enough for Gruin to have memorised our previous route and, apparently, figure out our new one through some instinctual genius I couldn’t at all follow.

  It meant we had a bearing, and Gruin’s confidence turned into everyone else’s confidence. I was actually surprised to see us not hemorrhaging men as we ventured deeper, though perhaps the difficulty of navigating a path back up to the surface was more to thank for that than any inspiration or courage.

  The cave we’d first found the little horrors in loomed out, seeming to appear suddenly with how gloomy the space around us was. I gripped the handle of my sword tighter, thankful again for the few inches less length it boasted than a more conventional duelling weapon, and watched Gruin delve into the cavern.

  “Alright you bastards!” he called out, smacking his hammer down onto the hard stone and waving a fist in the air, “where are you! Come on! I’m waiting!”

  Nothing happened, and the seconds ticked by. I felt a sigh of relief bubbling up from my lungs right when movement suddenly exploded across all sides of the cave, and the shygarin were on us again.

  It was just as Gruin had said; they were fast, desperate, savage. Sluggish, clumsy, exhausted. I could feel their fatigue even as I leapt out from the cramped corridor—where even my shortened hacking blade might snag on walls—and met them in the open with my back shielded by stone.

  The miners were somewhat less tactical than that, which is to say half of them fucked off and ran then and there while while the others went into some weird berserk frenzy and sprinted out as if they were trying to get killed. One of them succeeded instantly, throat torn up down to the spine.

  I was in no great rush to join him in his gurgling demise, and fought somewhat more sensibly. Even Gruin did, in that there seemed to be a semblance of control to his madness as he never quite allowed himself to be cut off from the rest of us, and committed only to dispatching those shygarin that were immediately attacking.

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  Not that there was any shortage of them, the creatures’ enfeeblement by exhaustion and nocturnal habit had done little to make them less vicious, and still they threw themselves our way with a savagery I’d not have expected to find in any natural animal. I kept my sword tightly gripped and held close, not wanting to send the swings off-kilter, not wanting to unbalance myself and leave an opening for death to slip through.

  Death was giving its best to do just that, I could see. The shygarin were at a mix of attacking and circling above, those more cautious beasts hanging near the back evidently scrutinising my group for the weak among us. I kept an eye on them, saw one of them draw closer and closer to one of the men straggling at our side, then right as it came for him I lunged and cut down in a wide arc—my only fully committed swing of the fight—that clumsily took one of its wings off.

  The man screamed and threw a swing of his own, several swings in fact that made a messy end to the creature and spat blood in thick rivulets. I turned away from the carnage, and rejoined the greater butchery happening elsewhere. Maybe a dozen shygarin were dead now, their numbers starting to truly thin.

  However many were left—I couldn’t count easily—were soon getting new and exciting ideas about living to fight another day. I saw them peel back, begin heading to the various tunnel mouths littering the wider chamber and disappearing back into the dark.

  “Oh no you don’t, you little shit-fucks!” Gruin roared, barrelling after them.

  It would have been a comical sight, were I not so thoroughly used to the Grynkori’s suicidal insistance on doing such things. Before his second stride had even finished I was already following after him, shrinking the space between us in two of my own bounds and coming up to run alongside him.

  “Are you mad!?” I growled, catching a glint in Gruin’s eye that told me he was, in fact, just that.

  “We need to give chase before they can disappear fully,” the Grynkori snapped. As usual talking and running at once did not seem to be of any great concern for him. I knew from experience how little that was true for me, and kept my mouth carefully shut as I paced myself.

  The next hour or so was the most mundane, boring life-or-death struggle I would experience in years. This, I now know, is how most killing work ends up. No epic battles and glorious charges, no. The fighting is over quick, then it turns into a slaughter more quickly still. In this case the most difficult part was actually navigating the caves.

  Well, at least we were cutting down city-eating monsters instead of clubbing children to death. That’s how a lot of the slaughters end up panning out I can tell you. We racked up bodies and started keeping count now that the chaos was abating, but eventually Gruin just spat.

  “That’s it, I reckon,” he grunted, “might be one or two left but if the people here aren’t idiots—or more idiotic than they’ve already been—that won’t turn into any huge problem. A few guards can solve the rest of this, eventually.”

  I let out a breath which had started to burn my lungs as I held it, noticing the pain only when it ended.

  “So we can—” something scattered my words before I’d even finished spitting them out, grabbing my mind by both edges and dragging it back to have me looking down the tunnel we’d stopped short of searching. Without really thinking about it, I started walking down.

  “What the bloody fuck are you doing?” Gruin demanded, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer. He came after me of course, hammer still ready, and tried grabbing my arm. I surprised even myself, then, and definitely him. I twisted from his grip, overcoming strength with lightning-fast surprise, and turned my meandering walk into a full-blown run.

  Well, you can imagine what happened next. Gruin tried to pursue but he had no chance at all, and every second I put another two or three yards between us. He was calling after me, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to listen.

  It wasn’t that I was possessed, or having control of my body snatched away. I just…knew I had to be somewhere down that tunnel, knew that it was important I made my way there, and, knowing that Gruin intended to stop me, knew that haste was the only way I could. Does that make sense?

  No, I suppose it wouldn’t.

  Despite my current frenzy urging me to sprint around at full-speed in the dark, I did not manage to smash my face into a wall at twenty miles per hour and die like an idiot. No, something much worse happened instead. I found what I was looking for, pulling up to stare at it with the strangest sense of…familiarity.

  Have you guessed what it was? Another carving in the stone, just like the one I’d seen down in the Dungeon. This time I studied it more, though hardly by choice, and found the symbols depicted on it oddly…unsettling. Humans, I thought, or at least humanoids, they seemed to be in the midst of either a great fight or a greater flight. I reached it before figuring out which, held a hand out and put my fingers against it.

  More images, twisted, these ones, distorted. The blur I’d seen before was thinner but everything felt wrong, uncanny. It was like everything was just a shade short of my recognition.

  “It worked, we…we did it.” One voice began, excited, exhilarated. It was tempered by another, more cautious. Fearful.

  “We can celebrate after we’ve verified what it is.”

  I frowned, though couldn’t really feel my face. What the fuck were these people talking about?

  “Can’t you just be happy for once?” the first one asked, annoyed now, “our people are safe—”

  —”our people have a chance, let’s leave it at that.”

  That was when I woke up, or stopped hallucinating at least.

  Something big and flat smacked across my face. It felt like being hit with a brick, repeatedly. Certainly, it was as heavy as a brick, and as hard. And I took long moments of scrambling panic to realise that Gruin was just slapping me. By the time I did, panic and frenzy had already banished my fatigue.

  “Oh good, you’re up,” the Grynkori growled. “What the shit was that?”

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