Goer and Tom moved the bodies of the dead pirates inside the building, and Tom took the third and final pistol for himself, leaving them all armed and ready to fight.

Of course, the five of them being armed wouldn’t mean much if it came down to a real fight. There were dozens of pirates in Kolis, who were undoubtedly seasoned fighters and killers. Not to mention that Goer was their only real guide; none of the rest of them knew where they were going or even where they were relative to the settlement. If they got separated in the tunnels, it would only end badly.

For whatever reason, the three pirates that had been on guard only had one torch between them, so Tom took possession of it and volunteered to take the rear-most spot in the group.

Oliver did his best to speed up their departure as much as possible; whatever it was that Goer had alluded to had definitely made an impact on him. Though now Rhys considered it, he remembered Oliver telling him about his home and the deep mining expeditions that went on. A chill went down Rhys’s spine as he realised that Oliver was perhaps the best informed among his crew about the dangers of being this far down.

Once their brief scavenge of the area was done, Goer led the group into a different tunnel from the one that he and Rhys had come down earlier.

‘Aren’t we going back the same way?’ Rhys asked as they entered a functionally identical tunnel to the one they had taken to come down.

‘It’s the most direct path down here and will be the first one they check. If you want to get back to your ship in one piece, we have to take the alternate route back,’ Goer said, glancing only briefly at Rhys. Goer’s mocking smirk had vanished as soon as they left the illuminated area around the building where Rhys’s crew had been imprisoned. The professional killer that had calmly gunned down Giannis was back.

‘How will we evade them when they check this tunnel?’ Lucy asked from behind them; her voice pitched low, so it didn’t carry. Rhys and Goer still had their torches from earlier, so they were leading the way, with Lucy and Oliver following behind them and Tom at the back.

‘Easily, because they won’t,’ Goer said, his tone making it clear that the conversation was over.

‘How could you know that?’ Lucy’s whisper was more like a strangled shout now, and Rhys winced at the frustration in her voice.

Goer didn’t answer her question at first, and Rhys could tell Lucy was about to lose her temper, but Goer replied before he had to intervene. ‘There’s a nearby nest of dynak, so the tunnel is off-limits.’

‘Dynak?’ Lucy and Oliver chorused at the same time, Lucy’s tone questioning while Oliver’s was harsh and disbelieving.

‘Yes, so be quiet, or you’ll attract them,’ Goer said, not looking back as he carried on forward.

‘What are dynak?’ Rhys asked softly, looking back to Oliver for an explanation.

‘The miners call them skitterers. They’re dog-sized creatures that live in tunnels like this and feed on vesp. Nasty things, with an insatiable appetite and a tendency to swarm things like a mining party,’ Oliver said, his face pale as he explained.

‘Vesp?’ Rhys queried, not recognising the name.

‘Smaller than a dynak, with claws, scales and six legs. They eat all this lichen and would normally be all over these tunnels. Archon Kassandra drove them out when she took over Kolis,’ Goer explained, seemingly giving up on not answering their questions.

‘Who’s that, and what’s Kolis?’ Lucy asked, looking to Rhys for an explanation.

‘Archon Kassandra is in charge of the settlement,’ Goer answered, still not looking back or slowing his pace. ‘Kolis is the name of the camp above us, or at least, that’s what the Kou-nak have named it.’

Rhys noted that Goer referred to the Kou-Nak separately from himself. He’d assumed that Goer was a dissatisfied pirate or part of an internal power struggle, but now he wasn’t so sure. Then again, Goer seemed determined to make himself as mysterious as possible, so who knew which it was.

‘So, to summarise, these tunnels are closed off because there’s a colony of some nasty predator in here, one that likes to swarm large groups of people?’ Lucy all but hissed, her eyes flashing angrily as Goer gave a simple nod without looking back at her.

‘Do any of you hear that?’ Tom asked, cutting Lucy off before she could say anything else. All conversation stopped as they listened out for whatever Tom had heard.

‘Dynak,’ Goer said grimly, picking up the pace and glancing over at Rhys to make sure he was following.

Rhys started to question Goer when he heard a distant sound, like a mix between someone scratching a rock against the wall and rubbing two pebbles together. It was coming from down the tunnel behind them but, thankfully, sounded quite distant.

Goer’s new pace was a punishing one, but the four of them kept to it, conscious of the potential danger behind them as they ascended toward Kolis once more.

Twice more over the next few hours, they heard the distinctive skittering of the dynak, once close enough to them that Goer had to take a different turning to bypass the area. Thankfully, their odd guide seemed to know the area well, so though it added to the length of their journey, they weren’t in danger of getting lost.

‘We’re nearing Kolis,’ Goer said at length, speaking aloud for the first time in at least an hour as far as Rhys could tell. ‘This is the most dangerous area. You all need to remain as quiet as possible. Turn your torches down as low as you can and stay close.’

Rhys did as he was told and lowered the light source to be little more than a dim spot of illumination, just enough that he wasn’t going to trip on anything. Tom and Goer did the same, the dark encroaching in on them and surrounding the group.

Goer started them forward again but at a slower pace now that they had lost most of their illumination. The luminescent mushrooms helped slightly, but they weren’t bright enough to navigate by.

Long minutes crept by at their slower pace, the obscuring darkness around them making Rhys feel like the tunnel was closing in around them and that they had far less room than he knew they did.

‘I’m telling you, this is stupid. Only an idiot would wander these tunnels when the dynak are around,’ a voice echoed down the tunnel from somewhere ahead, making Rhys and the others freeze mid-step.

‘If you want to go tell the Archon that, you go ahead,’ a second voice said.

‘Both of you, shut up. There’s no way he’d know there’s a colony round here, so just do your abyss-damned job,’ a third and somewhat familiar voice growled, silencing the other two.

It took Rhys a moment to place it as the voice of the aggressive woman who’d been on the ship that captured them. Running into her down here would be unpleasant, to say the least.

‘Silent. Follow.’ Goer whispered each word distinctly, making sure they all heard him before creeping forward.

With the layout of the tunnels, it was hard to know how close the other pirates were, but Rhys had a creeping feeling that they were much closer than he was comfortable with.

With the little illumination they had, Rhys could see a junction in the tunnel up ahead, with Goer moving toward the left-hand opening.

‘I still think this is stupid,’ the echoing voice of one of the pirates came from up ahead, followed by a flicker of light along a distant curve in the tunnel. The pirates were far closer than Rhys had feared.

Goer hurried forward toward the opening, beckoning for them to follow as he went. Rhys hurried as quietly as he could after Goer, racing against the growing light up ahead that represented the approaching pirates.

In the dim light of the tunnel, Rhys struggled to see all that was around him and his careful movements were replaced with haste as they moved to slip down the tunnel.

Goer was inside the new tunnel, and Rhys was only a few steps behind him when he blindly placed his foot on a loose rock and stumbled as it gave way, the rock skittering off and hitting a few others in a series of impacts.

Rhys’s stumble had come in a moment when the pirates were talking, letting the sound of the rocks hitting each other ring loud and clear.

Cursing and the sound of running came from the pirates as Rhys’s group abandoned their attempts at stealth. Goer hissed for them to follow him before brightening his torch and rushing down the tunnel he’d chosen.

Shouting voices echoed through the tunnel as the pirates gave chase, too distorted to allow Rhys to pick out individual voices but seemingly more than the three they’d originally heard.

A few more offshoots went past as they fled, but all of them went to the left, and Goer ignored them, pushing on down his chosen tunnel. Hopefully, some of the pirates would head down one of those side passages. The fewer of them chasing Rhys, the happier he’d be.

‘Stop,’ Goer said, coming to an abrupt halt and cocking his head to one side as he seemed to sniff the air. Rhys glanced behind them when it was clear Goer wasn’t moving on straight away. There was no sign of the pirates for the moment. They didn’t have long, though.

‘What is it?’ Rhys asked in a hoarse whisper after a few moments of waiting.

‘Dynak,’ Goer replied in a soft tone, looking back at Rhys with a frown. ‘I’m not sure where, but I can tell that they’re nearby. If we push on, we might encounter them.’

‘We have little choice unless you want a firefight with the pirates chasing us,’ Rhys said tensely, conscious of how little time and how few options they had.

‘Follow me, stay quiet and don’t rush,’ Goer said, heading forward once more at a fast walk.

The tunnel they were in widened as they moved forward, becoming an entrance to a cavern that was several times the size of the one where Rhys’s crew had been kept. Of course, it had nothing on the gargantuan area that Kolis was built into, but it was larger than anything else Rhys had seen so far.

Interestingly, the cavern also had the highest density of mushrooms that Rhys had seen so far. The clumps of the luminescent fungus were both larger and more numerous, their illumination outlining the distant portions of the cavern.

Unlike the cavern at Kolis, huge formations of rock jutted out of the ground and down from the ceiling, forming a maze-like area that they would have to navigate through.

Goer was barely three steps into the cavern when a series of loud clicks came from the centre of the cavern, echoing strangely from the rocks around them. Goer and Oliver froze at the sound, and Goer looked back with a grim expression.

‘Light’s off, hands on shoulders, we go slow,’ Goer’s voice was little more than a breathy whisper as he turned off the light from his torch. Following suit, Rhys reached out with a fumbling hand and found Goer’s shoulder, someone else’s hand reaching his own a moment later.

After a brief moment of ensuring they were all together, Goer started forward at a slow walking pace. How Goer could see clearly was baffling to Rhys, there was only the occasional patch of dim light from the mushrooms, far too little for Rhys to see what was going on.

Nonetheless, Goer was moving with purpose through the cavern and from the few things Rhys could see, he was guiding them around some of the rock formations along the outside of the cavern.

A few minutes after they arrived, Rhys heard the pirates pursuing them reach the cavern, though they were no longer running by this point. It seemed that even their pursuers knew better than to charge headlong down these tunnels.

Risking a glance over his shoulder, Rhys could see the light from the pirates as they came into the cavern. Thankfully, there was a rock formation between them and the pirates, so though the light came near them, they weren’t revealed directly.

‘Spread out, search the area. Artema will kill us if it turns out they went this way, and we missed them.’ One of the pirates called out, the sound of movement following the order as the pirates spread out.

The clicking sound Rhys had heard when they first came into the cavern returned, this time louder, much louder. Goer had frozen in place as soon as the pirate began to talk, and Rhys felt Goer tense as a click came from their right.

A large patch of mushrooms grew along the wall where the click had originated, and Rhys’s blood ran cold as he saw something skitter past the mushrooms. The luminescent fungi were just bright enough to give Rhys the impression of something the size of a large dog, with a chitinous exterior and short segmented legs that ended in sharp spikes.

For a long moment, there was only the sound of the pirates moving, with the occasional click from somewhere nearby punctuating it. The stillness was broken by a pirate coming their way and shining her torch on the wall where Rhys had seen what he assumed was a dynak.

The blue light of the pirate’s torch played over the black chitinous body of the dynak, and it jerked away, rushing down the wall as the pirate cried out and fired her pistol, instinctively tracking the creature’s motion with her torch.

A heart-stopping screeching sound came from the dynak as the pirate’s hasty shot clipped it, sending shards of chitin and blood across the rocky wall as one of the creature’s legs was blown off.

Rhys winced in pain and clutched his ears as the same screeching sound echoed back from all around the cavern, followed by shouts of alarm from the pirates.

‘We go, now!’ Goer hissed urgently, all but grabbing Rhys and dragging him away.