Subversion

The woman and the survivors mourned the loss of their companion only for a short while. They could not linger in this place. Their light was not infinite. They refilled their partially emptied satchels with the belongings of their fallen companion. They stripped their companion. What they could not fit into their bags they bundled up in their companion's clothing. They tied the clothing together to form crude bags that they carried in their arms.

They left the corpse of the crawling horror to fester and rot. The wounds the woman had inflicted upon the creature stank and bubbled viscous slime. None of them wanted to risk contracting sickness from consuming the pale thing's gelid flesh.

The woman retrieved her lantern. They resumed their exploration through the crevasse. Its walls were broader than those of the tunnel above. They were too regular and straight to have a natural, geological origin. The floor remained uneven and continued to shift beneath their feet as they progressed.

The woman and her companions could easily walk three abreast here. They did not. They proceeded in a loose, triangular formation. They used the butts of their weapons to prod the path before them. They were methodical and careful. He trailed behind all of them at the edge of their light.

The tunnel they followed ceased running parallel to the tunnel above after a distance. They regrouped and discussed how best to attempt returning to the upper level. The walls slanted gradually closer together as they rose and the rubble from the collapsed floor was neither piled high enough nor in a favorable position to scale it. One of the woman's companions flung the rope up into the darkness, still hoping the loop at its end would catch on something. It would not reach the full vertical distance to regain the upper tunnel, but it might serve as a useful anchor with which to start the climb. The slap of the braided fibers on the cold stone echoed back down to them.

It caught on something eventually. The woman's companion gave a whoop when it did. The rope was pulled taut. They tugged on it hard to see if it would hold.

It did not.

It came loose in a rumble of stone and they leaped back to avoid the jagged hunk of rock which plummeted down. It crashed into the gathered stones. Dust filled the air. The woman and her companions coughed. They bled from many small wounds inflicted by flecks of shattered stone that exploded outwards in the impact.

Everything went dark. The lantern's fire was extinguished in the cloying cloud of debris. He heard the woman and her companions shout. He knew they groped blindly for one another. He saw sparks as the woman labored to relight the lantern by striking a stone against a strip of metal. She made muffled, painful sounds.

She kindled the flame, in time. He saw her fingers were bleeding from where she had rasped the stone's sharp edges against her flesh. The woman's companions checked her wounds and helped her to bind them. The strips of cloth turned bright red with her blood. He was reminded of the mantle she had worn once.

They appraised their new situation. The fallen chunk of stone had embedded itself in the irregular piles of rubble which comprised the floor. It was fairly large, perhaps twice as large as the woman. Despite its intimidating size, it seemed easily climbable using the series of handholds jutting out along its broken edge. It leaned at a lopsided angle.

The rope lay partially buried under its bulk and the three struggled to shift the heavy mass enough to extract it. Two of them used their metal bars as leverage to pry up the stone, bit by bit. The third reached down and pulled the rope loose. It slithered across the stones like a worm left to expire beneath the uncaring, unceasing light above.

The rope could not be entirely freed. Loosing the last bit of it would require shifting the boulder so much that its weight would cause it to topple over. As it was now, it stood mostly upright. One of the woman's companions squirmed into the crack made through the efforts of the woman and the other companion to pull the rope's length as taut as possible before cutting it. He watched. One lapse of fortitude and the woman would lose a second companion.

The woman and her companion's strengths held. Only a comparatively small length of rope was left trapped under the rocky mass. Another loop was tied at the rope's end, and one of the woman's companions scaled atop the boulder. It wobbled as additional weight rested at its apex, but it did not fall.

The rope failed to catch on anything this time. The woman's two companions tried for some time. They switched off duties while the woman further sorted and reorganized their belongings, arranging them to use the least possible space in their satchels. They gave up.

They faced a choice. They would either return to their settlement or they would follow the new tunnel which crawled away in a different direction from the tube they had been following. They would lose the guidance of the tube along this path.

They took stock of their supplies. They could afford to press on. They left the crevasse with its uncertain footing behind them after consuming some of their supplies and resting. He watched them as they did. He followed them when they rose from their seats and continued their search.