Whatever had sent the Elvenlords into flight had terrified their beasts as well. Triana began to feel a certain relief that the few scraps of information she'd gleaned had not been more specific, that legend now painted the Crossing as a matter of tri¬umph rather than the tragedy it had so clearly been. She didn't want to know the details now; there were already too many de¬tails writ large in the bones of those who had not survived to become her ancestors.
She reached out her hand to steady herself, and wood went to dust at her touch, enlarging the passage that Kyrtian's peo¬ple had already made. Her very skin flinched away from that dust, but it rose in clouds about her and dried her mouth and throat, as if the dead themselves rose to make claims on her....
Don't be such a superstitious idiot! she scolded herself, but without effect. Her pounding heart, the blood rushing in her ears, her very skin were rebels to her reason.
But she forced herself past, and once out of the jam-up, the way suddenly cleared. No more bones; or at least, none that flashed whitely at her in the circle of her light. Just—things. Belongings, discarded, unidentifiable. She could cope with things. Especially things that went to atoms at a touch, collaps¬ing in on themselves and leaving nothing behind that called up uncomfortably familiar images in the mind.
The path that Kyrtian's underlings took was plainly scribed in that litter, a trail where only bits of metal shone dully in the
dust. She paused a moment to listen, and thought she caught the faintest of murmurs from somewhere far ahead; covered her light, but saw no glimmers in the distance. Wherever he was, if that was, indeed, the sound of him and his people, it was far ahead of her. She hurried on, suddenly hungry for the sight of something living, even if it was an enemy. A living enemy right now was preferable to the whispers in the dark.
"This place makes my skin crawl," Lynder muttered to Shana. "I don't see how he can stand it." He was pale, freckles she hadn't noticed before standing out clearly across his cheeks. She also hadn't noticed how young he was before this; all of Kyrtian's people were so competent and confident that she'd taken them all for mature adults. Now she saw Lynder for the beardless boy he actually was, newly jumped-up from a page, perhaps. Well, fear did that to people.
Shana didn't see how their leader could seem so unaffected by the place, either. Kyrtian had mage-lights floating silently over their heads, set to avoid collision with the ceiling but oth¬erwise lighting up this series of smaller caves with pitiless clar¬ity. The tangle of carts and beasts at the mouth of this complex had been the worst, of course; Shana had been so tempted to flee screaming away and swarm right back up the rope into the clean rain outside.
And the cart full of what had been children! No matter what the Elves had done to her, to the Wizards, and especially to their slaves—the thought of that cartload of children dying tangled up together in the dark—
It had made her throat close and her eyes sting, and she didn't care that it had happened hundreds of years ago.
They think I'm fearless, she had told herself. And that had made her clench her teeth, thrust out her chin, and pretend that her whole body wasn't flinching away from the wreck¬age, the bones. She squared her shoulders, and tensed to keep herself from shivering. These were men she had to impress; they weren't Wizards, they weren't slaves. She was a legend to them, and if they lost faith in the legend—they would lose faith in the cause. She needed them; more, probably, than
they needed her. If all it took to keep their faith was to pre¬tend to be utterly fearless, it was a small price to pay for that faith.
But Kyrtian had only directed the enlargement of a passage already there ... a passage showing the imprint of a single pair of narrow feet in the dust.
His father made it; he must have. Kyrtian knows thai. This is what he's been looking for, and all he can see is those foot¬prints leading us deeper.
Kyrtian had spent a long moment studying those prints ... then he had taken the lead, face immobile and expressionless, as the rest had to stretch to keep up with him.
"I've never seen him like this before," Lynder continued, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve, leaving behind a smudge of the dust of the dead obscuring the freckles scattered across his cheeks. He shuddered.
"He's not thinking about you—or about anyone," Keman said slowly. "He's completely inside his own head."
The three of them exchanged glances; she read in Lynder's face that he at least would rather not be privy to what was in Kyrtian's head just now. She rather agreed with him.
It was bad enough being out here. The deeper into this string of caves they got, the more the feeling of doom—whether lin¬gering or impending she couldn't say—increased. She'd never been claustrophobic before, but she felt the walls of these little caves closing in on her—or was it that they seemed to pulse and heave, slowly, as if they all traveled down the gullet of some impossibly huge, sleeping monster? If the walls clearly hadn 't been rock, the floor clearly the same, it would have been all too easy to succumb to the illusion.
"Do you feel it?" Keman murmured, for her ears only. "That kind of drone in the back of your brain? Like there's something just barely awake out there and we're touching the edge of its dreams? Or there's something singing a nasty dirge in its sleep?"
She nodded. She did; had, in fact, since they'd been here. It wasn't getting any stronger, and if Keman hadn't said anything, she'd have put it down to nerves—but it was there, a sound so
deep it could only be felt. She wondered what else Keman heard; he had the benefit of senses that could be enhanced with¬out any immediate limit.
"There's nothing alive down here, either," Keman continued, and shivered. "Not even slime."
Nothing alive. Unheard of. Caves always had their own little community of creatures: insects, bats, mice, and the fungi that the littlest fed on before they in turn became the prey of the biggest. Where were they all?
And what drove them away?
She couldn't see Kyrtian's face from her place at the rear of the group, but Lynder's was bleached as white as the bones they'd left back there, and she fancied her own was, as well. Life leached out of them with every step they took deeper into the maw of the mountain.
Shana suddenly felt that they would never leave this place; that they would continue to stumble along in Kyrtian's wake until they dropped in their tracks and died. That this was what had happened to Kyrtian's father—no accident, but the moun¬tain sucking the life out of him as he plodded deeper into its depths, lured by its promise and threat until he stumbled and could not rise again.
Then, without warning, Kyrtian stopped.
The mage-lights under Kyrtian's control shot past them out into some vast space ahead, and they kept from blundering into him only by swerving to his right or left. Which brought all of them to stand next to him at the edge of an abrupt drop-off, star¬ing out into a cavern that could have swallowed any cave Shana had ever seen without a trace. Her pulse racketed in her throat: how nearly she had gone over the edge!
At least, that was her initial reaction. As she teetered on the edge and her eyes adjusted, it became clear that the drop-off was not nearly as far as panic had made her think. She might have broken an ankle had she gone over, all unwarned, but no worse than that—the illusion of a sheer precipice was just that, illusion. After the initial drop, a steep slope slanted away from them to the floor of this new cave. It was what bulked here in
ordered rows, off in the distance, that drew the eye and con¬fused the mind.
Objects. No. Constructs. Things of metal, gears, wheels, things that might be arms or legs or neither. Big as a house, some of them. Row upon row of them, three abreast, leading back to the biggest construct of all, a huge arch of some dull green stuff that looked deader than the bones they passed but felt alive and full of brooding menace.
Over everything lay, not merely a film, but a thick shroud of dust, obscuring the shine of metal, softening angles into curves. Thick as a blanket in some places; so thick that sections had ac¬tually broken off and fallen from the sides.
"What—are—those?" Shana asked, her voice high and strained.
Kyrtian only shook his head. "I don't know. There isn't any¬one alive who could tell you. Oh, I know what they are collec¬tively, they're things the Ancestors made to serve them in all the ways that slaves do now. Magic is what made them work, but once the Portal closed, they wouldn't work anymore and they were abandoned. As to why they wouldn't work, I can't say."
"Serve them?" Lynder said, puzzlement in his voice.
Kyrtian's tone was as dry as the dust lying over everything. "Of course. You don't think our Ancestors ever put hand to tool themselves, do you? They created these things—to plow and dig, build and tear down—"
"And make war?" Keman asked, harshly.
Kyrtian glanced at him, mouth set in a thin line. But his tone was mild. "Make war?" he replied, softly. "Oh yes. That, cer¬tainly. Above all other things. The Ancestors made war among themselves, war of a sort that makes everything we did to the Wizards seem the merest game."
Shana looked away from Kyrtian's face back to the rank upon rank of constructions, and shuddered. Under the dust, metal gleamed with cruel efficiency. Were those blades? Was that a reaper of corn—or of lives? A digger of ditches—or of graves?
She decided not to ask a question to which she did not want to know the answer.
But Kyrtian made a strangled little sound, and abruptly jumped down from the edge of the cave-mouth, landing in a crouch only to sprint off to one side of the huge cavern, where there were a few of the mechanisms that were not in such or¬dered rows. With a muffled oath, Lynder followed, then the rest of them, trailing along behind.
Aelmarkin cursed the men who lowered him down every time he collided with another rock, lashing them through their col¬lars with the punishment of pain. It was not enough to satisfy him, but he dared to do no more; too much and they only be¬came clumsier. He'd assumed—foolishly, in retrospect—that they could simply lower him down comfortably to the bottom of the place. Instead, he was having to practically walk down the tumbled slope of rocks that was the mirror of the pile out¬side; just as difficult as being hauled up that slope, but more painful, since the idiots above kept dislodging rocks that fell on his head and they kept lowering him in a series of jerks. Each one endfcd in a collision with more rocks since each time he was caught off-guard and off-balance.
Idiots! He would certainly leave some of them behind as bait for the monsters in this benighted place, and at that it was bet¬ter than they deserved. He'd suspect they were doing this on purpose except that his punishments were worse than anything he was enduring.
When he finally bumped down with a painful thud onto the floor of the cave, he gave them all a final reminder of his power over them that made them yelp. The echoes of four howls of pain reverberated long enough to give him a fleeting moment of satisfaction. He picked himself up out of the dust and kicked the trash he'd fallen on out of his way angrily before sending his mage-light up to illuminate more of the area.
No point in looking up to glare at them. They were gone, of course, Scuttling back to the shelter of their tents and their fire, where they would stay, probably lazing about and trying to find
non-existent supplies of wine among his belongings. He knew they wouldn't leave the camp; they were more afraid of the for¬est than they were of him. Foresters they might be, but this wasn't their forest, and they were superstitiously terrified not only of the very real monsters among the trees, but the spirits they swore they'd heard in the night. They'd be waiting for him when he returned, all right... not knowing that if his hopes were fulfilled, he wouldn't need them. He'd have power enough to blast this place open or create a Gate home. Or fly, if he chose. That would be novel; there were old legends of how the Ancestors flew, on the backs of metal-beaked birds with razor-tipped wings and scythes for talons, how they would duel in the air until blood fell like warm rain on the faces of those below. Perhaps there were constructs like that waiting here....
Well! He wasn't finding them standing about and kicking trash. Nor was he discovering just what Kyrtian was up to if it wasn 't hunting relics of the Ancestors or the Wizards he was supposed to be pursuing.
He turned. It was clear enough where Kyrtian had gone, the path through the debris was plain enough for a woman to pick out. It was also clear that this cave wasn't littered with just the trash that the wind had blown in. So—Kyrtian had found the place where the Great Portal had made an entrance into this world!
"By the Ancestors!" Aelmarkin said aloud, and his own voice repeated his astonishment in echoes that whispered in the cave as if a crowd mimicked his surprise.
A skull—an Elven skull, by the high-arched forehead and the narrow jaw—lay directly in his path, glaring at him, as if daring him to pass.
Aelmarkin sneered at it. What matter a few bones? Bones were nothing. Those of the Ancestors that died here weren't Ancestors at all, were they? They hadn't gotten their bloodlines any deeper in this world than the floor of the cave. What matter that Aelmarkin's path led over those bones? That way lay his fortune, and he wasn't going to let the bones of a few dead fools stop him.
"You," he told the skull, contemptuously, "are a nothing. A dead-end. You can't even manage to block my way."
He brought his booted foot down on the skull deliberately, smashing it. It broke with no more effort than destroying an egg. His next step took him past the fragile fragments, and he didn't look back.
The demi-barricade at the tunnel's mouth didn't stop him, ei¬ther; in fact; he took a great deal of grim pleasure in bullying past it, kicking at the carts and the bones of the legendary dray-lanthans and seeing them disintegrate. Not as much pleasure as he might have, since the wreckage pretty much fell to bits at a touch, but enough.