the knife. It come close enough that the tip of it ripped a hole in my shirt.
“Ursala!” I cried out. “It’s me.”
“Koli,” she panted. “What are you standing there for? Go! Go!”
I went. I was crying for what I seen, but Ursala was in the right of it. We had got to carry on, for if we stopped then we was most certainly dead.
The time we spent in the tunnel was the hardest thing we did. For me it was anyway. Ursala had told me about the train and the iron bands it sit on – that it was a way people travelled around before the world was lost. Just as a wagon runs on a road, a train would run on them bands that was called tracks, and it would take the people from one village to another in less time than it would take you to say your name.
And back then, if you was laying down those bands to carry your train, and you run into the side of a hill, you didn’t stop. You went right into the hill, ripping it open with great big engines and the fires of the dead god’s hell until you got to the other side.
That was what the tunnel was. So most likely, Ursala said, if we just kept on going, we would come out by and by in another place. The first time she told me this, I took hold of that “most likely” and shaked it to see if it rattled. “So you’re not certain sure then?”
“There might have been a cave-in somewhere along the way. It’s a great many years since the tunnel was dug, and the earth moves from time to time even in places that are generally stable. We might find our way blocked.”
“And what happens then?” I asked.
“Why, we die, Koli. What do you think?”
So what with that, and the terrible thing I just seen, my thoughts was all in a moil as I headed on into the dark. I could hear Ursala’s breathing now, loud and ragged, so I knowed she was with me. Monono was with me too, though her voice was getting faint.
“I’m running out of charge again,” she said. “Sorry, Koli. The alarm eats a lot of power. I’ll stay with you as long as I can.”
“Thanks,” I whispered. “I’m somewhat scared of the dark, Monono. I spent too long there lately, one way and another.” My leg was paining me too, and I was somewhat light-headed from fasting the whole of the day before. I was afraid I might fall down before we got to the end of the tunnel and not be able to get up again.
“You’ll be out soon, dopey boy, and you’ll never look back.”
Ursala spit out a curse. “There are torches behind us,” she said. I looked back, and it was true. There was some lights there, maybe five or six of them. They wasn’t getting no closer, but they wasn’t falling back neither. I fell quiet, concentrating on where my feet was going and on keeping to a steady pace. Every time I gun to slow or stumble Monono urged me on. And then of a sudden she shouted out to me to stop.
“Not that way, Koli-bou.”
“But it’s the onliest way there is!”
“No,” she says. “You’re getting turned around in the dark. That’s a side tunnel, and the sonar ping I sent came scampering right back to me, so it’s a dead-end. Go to your left.”
She told me left or right a few times more, and I passed the word along to Ursala each time. But her voice was dropping lower and lower each time she spoke. “I gotta go, Koli,” she says to me at last. “I stayed with you as long as I could, but this is me signing off for now. I’ll see you on the…” There was a few more words that was whispered too low for me to hear, and then she was gone.
I got real scared then. “How far is it?” I asked Ursala.
“There’s no way of knowing,” she muttered. “Be quiet, Koli, please. If I can hear you, they can.”
We walked and walked and walked. The lights behind us disappeared after a while, which I was very happy to see. It seemed like the shunned men was reluctant to follow us any further, maybe because the other end of the tunnel had sort of a holiness to it in their eyes. Then a worse thought come to me,