Fae, Flames & Fedoras by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989674031
Publisher: Faolan’s Pen Publishing
Published: 2019-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

“Keep going,” Celia said to the two Fae desperately, and Talus laughed.

“What else were we going to do?” he demanded before taking off up the tunnel after her.

Caleb was running hard, to the point where Talus was, with what energy he had to spare, worrying about what the Noble was going to do to himself. It took a lot for a Fae Noble to do the equivalent of “pulling a muscle”—but it was also a lot more severe of an injury.

The other Seelie Fae passed Talus and Celia, conjuring a bright faerie light to bring the tunnel to the brilliance of day. Talus was about to tell him to shut down the light and then realized it didn’t matter—nothing they could warn they were coming could be more dangerous than what was chasing them, and until the dragon was through the cave-in, it didn’t matter.

The next several side tunnels were the same as the ones before, collapsed several feet back from the entrance. Talus said nothing to the others, just watching his steps before him, but it didn’t ring right to him—if the dragon had closed off the side tunnels, the beast’s magic would have left no trace of them, but there was no way the tunnels had all been sealed by natural process.

His paranoia kept him watching the tunnel ahead of them, which was why he saw the tripwire before Caleb ran into it.

“Stop!” he snapped, filling his words with the command of a Fae Noble. Caleb, despite being a Fae Noble himself, stopped in his tracks—inches from the tripwire.

“There are traps in the tunnel,” Talus told him, pointing at the tripwire. It was a thin wire, painted black to disappear in the gloom of the underground tunnel, and suspended at about the level of Talus’s abdomen—ankle-high on the dragon.

“That’s set for the dragon, not for us,” Celia observed. “What the fuck is going on?”

“As soon as I work it out, I’ll tell you,” Talus snapped. “Just watch for more traps—I want to escape the dragon and find who set them, in that order, not be crushed or blown to smithereens.”

Caleb took the lead again, a stormy look on his face as he ducked under the tripwire and took off again. Talus watched Celia follow, making sure she made it under, and then ducked through himself.

He was the last to start running again, and he heard a sound behind him he thought the others missed—the rhythmic thumping and fluttering of the dragon’s odd run.

With a muttered curse, he took off.

Another fifty or sixty meters up the tunnel, Talus had to leap another tripwire at chest height to a man. Two more came along afterwards, and now he could smell the cordite and explosives they were set to trigger.

He ducked under the fourth then rounded the corner into an open chamber, only half the size of the dragon’s lair but still huge for under the city. Roots of a hundred trees were woven together across the roof, helping explain the size and the presence of the strange chamber torn from the earth.

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