Shadows Without Men

Smoke from tallow torches always crawled toward an opening, and Mátyás needed an opening wide enough for five hundred freezing refugees. On his belly in the crawlway above the Great Chamber, his chin scraping damp calcite crust, he held a smudge of smoldering pine resin before his nose. The grey ribbon drifted north, slipping through a fissure no broader than a warrior's shoulder.

"Air is moving," muttered Tivadar behind him. The young scout's breath came hot against Mátyás's moccasins. "Cold air, too. Smells of frost from the high scree."

"Frost means an outlet," Mátyás said. He shifted his hips, his leather coat catching on jagged limestone teeth. Every rib protested against the press of the ceiling. Underground, the earth had no manners; out on the open ridges, rock at least had the decency to stay underfoot and leave a man the sky. "Keep the resin burning, Tivadar. Lóránt, pass the tallow dish forward."

Lóránt's grunt sounded from further back along the squeeze, followed by the clink of stone on stone as the grease lamp was handed up the line. Gergő brought up the rear, his scraping kneepads dragging through loose gravel. Four ridge hunters crammed inside a stone throat, eighty paces above the main camp. If they could verify a draft chimney with dry ledges, the clans could move their smoke-blind children out of the choked bottom floor.

Mátyás extended his hooked ridge-axe, tapping the overhead vault. A clean, dull ring answered.

"Sound rock," he murmured. "No water rot in this seam."

He squeezed through the pinch into a wider slit where the ceiling rose to chest height. Cool air washed across his sweat-slick forehead. He sat back on his calves, rolling his shoulders to work out the cramp, and took the burning tallow bowl from Tivadar's calloused hands.

Tivadar pulled a flat slate tablet from his belt pouch, scratching two notches with a flint point to record the chimney's pitch. "Two hundred paces from the central gallery. Ceiling widens ten paces ahead. We can hang meat here, Mátyás. The draft is clean."

"If we can haul the old folk up that crawl," Mátyás replied. "Rock makes a poor blanket, Tivadar. It never rolls over to warm your feet."

Lóránt and Gergő emerged from the low crawl into the wider shelf, wiping gray dust from their beards. The four men crouched shoulder to shoulder in the narrow pocket. The tallow bowl flickered between them, casting four elongated, pitch-black silhouettes against the pale limestone wall behind their backs.

Mátyás adjusted the wisp of wick floating in the rendered fat. "Mark the chimney height, Tivadar. Then we head down before the grease gives out."

Tivadar nodded, leaning toward the wall with his slate. As he moved, his shadow on the limestone did not shift with him.

The silhouette remained still, its black arms spread wide across the white stone.

Mátyás froze, his fingers tightening on the haft of his ridge-axe. The flame in the fat bowl stood tall, unruffled by any breeze, yet the shadows on the wall darkened, deepening into an inky crust that grew thicker than soot.

"Tivadar," Mátyás said, his voice flat. "Step back."

"I have the pitch marked," the young scout said, reaching out to pocket the slate.

Behind Tivadar, the shadow's painted arm reached forward from the mineral surface.

Two fingers of solid black grease hooked over Tivadar's left shoulder. The wool of his tunic bunched where the dark shape gripped him.

Tivadar gasped, his heels slipping on the slick gravel floor as his body jerked backward toward the rock. "Mátyás, my pack, it caught on something."

"Pull him!" Mátyás lunged across the tallow bowl, catching Tivadar's outstretched wrist with both hands.

Lóránt and Gergő reached out to help, but before their hands could close on Tivadar's belt, their own shadows on the wall stirred. The silhouette behind Lóránt opened a jawless mouth, reaching around his ribcage with arms made of flat darkness. Gergő yelled as two dark palms emerged from the mineral face and seized his throat, hauling him off his knees.

The limestone behind them turned soft and viscous, bubbling like hot tar beneath a thin skin of water.

Tivadar screamed. His back slammed into the rock face. The stone did not stop him; it yielded with a wet, sucking smack, drawing his spine and shoulders deep into the grey crust. The limestone swallowed his tunic, then the back of his skull, sealing tight around his ribs with the sound of cold mud taking a dropped stone.

"Hold me!" Tivadar shrieked. His fingernails clawed bloody lines across Mátyás's forearms. "It is freezing cold, it is eating me."

Mátyás planted his boots against a calcite ridge, muscles tearing across his shoulders as he leaned all his weight against the suction. He struck at the encroaching stone with the spiked pick of his ridge-axe. Steel sparked on mineral, chipping white powder, but the rock beneath the surface pulled with the relentless weight of an avalanche.

Beside them, Lóránt vanished into the wall with a muffled choke. The stone smoothed over his chest, his legs thrashing once before the pale mineral sealed around his knees, leaving only a flattened outline of charcoal soot on the rock.

Gergő's cry cut off as the wall absorbed his face. His fingers twitched twice against the gravel, and then the stone smoothed into flawless, undisturbed limestone.

The pull on Tivadar redoubled. The dark shape in the wall wrenched him deeper, dragging his collarbones into the crust. Tivadar's slate tablet tore free from his belt, clattering onto the stones between Mátyás's boots.

Tivadar's eyes rolled up toward the low ceiling. "Mátyás."

The young man's jaw slipped beneath the gray stone. The suction ripped Tivadar's hand from Mátyás's grip with a brutal snap of dislocated fingers. The limestone snapped shut like a jaw, leaving the rock surface bone-dry, pale, and entirely empty.

Where three men had stood, three dark, human-shaped stains remained painted on the limestone, their arms crossed over their chests in postures of suffocating panic.

The tallow bowl tipped over, hot fat spilling across the gravel. The wick hissed against wet dirt and died.

Total, suffocating blackness fell over the gallery.

The darkness had weight. Against Mátyás's shins, the stone floor trembled, a rhythmic grinding shivering through the soles of his moccasins like molars chewing gristle. A breath of sulfurous, stagnant air blew across the back of his neck from the solid wall behind him.

He did not call out. He reached down into the dark, his hand sweeping the gravel until his knuckles struck the flat edge of Tivadar's notched slate. He shoved the stone slab into his tunic.

He drove the hooked pick of his ridge-axe into the low ceiling above him, using the steel anchor to pull himself forward on his belly. He scrambled blind into the squeeze, heedless of the sharp rocks tearing at his shoulders.

His forehead struck a jagged outcropping. Blood welled over his left eyebrow, stinging his eye with copper and sweat, but he kicked backward with frantic force, wriggling through the narrowest throat of the chimney. Behind him, the low grinding grew louder, accompanied by the dry rustle of pigment scraping across raw stone.

He slid down the final gravel chute, tumbling out onto the rough ledge above the Great Chamber.

Light struck his eyes. Below him, forty paces down the tiered ledges, the hearthfires of the three clans burned in bright orange circles, casting long columns of smoke toward the cavern vault.

Mátyás dragged his sleeve across his bloodied brow, clinging to the ledge rope as he climbed down the terrace toward the fires.

Near the central hearth, a circle of elders stood arguing around the fire pit, their voices carrying sharp above the crackle of burning pine. Old Mihály from the River Clan was shaking a splintered staff at the empty sleeping mats of the ridge hunters.

"Four men gone up the chimney without leave!" Mihály's rasp echoed against the soot-stained dome. "They took fat bowls and rations! Runaways, slipping out through the high vents while the rest of us starve in the smoke!"

Mátyás stepped off the bottom rung of the rope ladder into the firelight. He held Tivadar's bloody slate in his hand, his clothes torn to ribbons and gray stone dust caked in his beard.

The voices by the hearth died away, every face turning toward the lone hunter who had returned from the dark.