Elvenborn

32

Triana looked up at the dim, uneven oval of grey light that marked the opening to the outer world, and absently kicked something dry and crackling from beneath her feet. There was no sign of her slave, but she hadn't expected him to linger once she was safely down. She wondered if she had surprised her forester by getting down into the cave rather handily with nothing more in the way of help than one of the ropes that Kyrtian's people had left behind; she certainly surprised herself.

Then again, it was very interesting what sorts of things one could do with magic when one was terrified out of one's wits. It had been a very long way down to the floor of the cave from that tiny entrance above; fortunately Kyrtian's own people had left all their ropes behind, ready to climb out when they returned, so at least she had had the comfort of knowing her lifeline was tested and tried.

Ah, but Kyrtian had never been taught the subtle art of Elven female magic, and if he came back he'd have the benefit of her passage. She'd had no notion she could make a rope stronger— or herself briefly stronger as well. By the time her feet touched the floor of the cave, she had imparted the transitory strength of one of her foresters to her arms and legs—and she could have used the rope she dangled from to lower a horse and wagon without worrying about it snapping.

So at a guess, she ought to be able to get herself back up the tumble of rock without mishap and no assistance; it was admittedly easier to climb when one had magic to help.

It was tempting to think about blasting her way out with levin-bolts, though; she'd been practicing for years now in secret and she was getting quite proficient. It would mean less exertion. However, there were drawbacks as well—in the glimpses she'd gotten of the ceiling, she wasn't altogether sure of how stable it was, and it wouldn't do her a great deal of good to bring the ceiling down on herself instead of blasting her way out.

Not subtle, my dear. Not your style.

Besides, unless Kyrtian came to grief in there, she didn't intend to leave any trace of her own passing, so she would probably have to get out the hard way.

Meanwhile, in the gleam of her mage-light, the only sign that Kyrtian had been here was a dead campfire and a cleared circle among the rubbish littering the floor. He must have gone off long before she even woke, and had gotten a good deal ahead of her. So if she was to discover what he was up to, she had better get moving.

She paused long enough to recover her breath and her power—she'd been hot and sweaty as well, but in the cold, dank cave-air she'd cooled down quickly and was glad of the cloak she'd brought with her, tied in a bundle about her waist.

Now for a little magic. She smiled to herself as she wove power around her; this was subtle, and not something a mere male would ever appreciate. The illusion she cast upon herself was a rather clever one; it wasn't precisely invisibility, since that wasn't strictly possible. Instead, she cloaked herself in the image of what was behind her, so that anyone looking at her would see only what her body ordinarily would have obscured—a kind of reflection, but not exactly. The illusion wasn't perfect; it couldn't be. Anyone looking closely might well see a faint outline of her body, or notice her shadow on the floor. That was why she wore a light cloak that covered her from head to toe, for a bulky irregular outline against the rough rock of the cave was less likely to be noticed than one with arms, legs, and a head.

She had a rather clever device with her as well, a cone of mirror-finished metal with a handle at its point. She brought her mage-light down and coaxed it into the cone. Now she could direct all of the light where she chose without half-blinding herself, or setting the stupid thing to hover above her head. She cast the beam of light reflected out of the cone around herself, and used it to pick a path across the debris to an opening at the rear of this enormous cavern.

She began to wish that the light wasn't showing her way quite so clearly. As the light picked out this or that object amidst the sticks and leaves and trash, she'd have had to have been blind not to spot the bits of armor—and the bones.

Bones which were not all the bones of animals, nor of human slaves, even if the armor could have been mistaken for anything but elven-made.

Her skin crawled as the empty eye-sockets of an elven skull glared at her on the edge of her circle of light. She had already known that something terrible had happened here, but it was one thing to know that intellectually, and quite another to be confronted with the evidence of utter disaster.

A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of this place settled over her, and she resisted the urge to flee back up that rope into the open'. Whatever had happened here had occurred a very long time ago, even by the standards of the Elvenlords, and nothing, not even ghosts, could linger for that long. But she fancied she caught a whiff of ancient death, of bone-dust and terror, and she couldn't keep her imagination from painting scenes that were not at all comfortable.

Nevertheless, as she picked her way across the floor, she avoided looking too closely at anything large enough and white enough to be bone.

Were there whispers, out there in the dark? Was that a movement, not in the shadow, but of the shadow? She told herself resolutely that she wasn't afraid, that only stupid slaves believed in spirits, but—

There were sounds out there in the darkness, sounds that could be echoes, but could be something else as well. She couldn't even imagine what could have killed so many Elves, so quickly—and the slaves said that the spirits of those who died violently lingered, hungering after the life they'd lost and eager to avenge their deaths on anything living.

She found herself starting at every unexpected sound, and longed for the moment when she reached the far wall and the entrance deeper into the caves. She had assumed that once she got to the entrance into the next cave she would find her path clear. In fact, she found nothing of the kind.

What had been litter on the floor of the cave was a tangled blockage here; someone, Kyrtian and his people, she assumed, had cleared a pathway through, but if the artifacts there had not already been ready to fall apart at a touch, it couldn't have been done in less than a week. Here the carts of the refugees had jammed at the entrance, and there were many, many more bones, enough so that it was no longer in her imagination that they imparted their own dry hint of ancestral corruption to the air. Big bones, these, the bones of dray-animals long since forgotten, for they had perished along with their masters, tangled in the shafts of disintegrating carts in attitudes that suggested a tide of unreasoning panic had washed over them and sent them scattering before it.

And more elven bones, this time ones without armor. Women? Old men?

A disintegrating wagon that had been laden with small, slender creatures—it took her a moment to get past the disbelief to understand that this had been a wagon full of children.

It was hard to imagine. One seldom saw elven children; they were usually kept in nurseries until they were considered old enough to mingle with the rest of society. She could hardly imagine so many in one place. What sort of spirit would a child leave behind? Something wispy and melancholy—or feral and vicious?

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 triumph rather than the tragedy it had so clearly been. She didn't want to know the details now; there were already too many details 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 people 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, collapsing 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 otherwise lighting up this series of smaller caves with pitiless clarity. 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 wreckage, 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 pretend 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 footprints 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 lingering 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 without 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 mountain 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, staring 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 confused 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 actually 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 anyone alive who could tell you. Oh, I know what they are collectively, 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, certainly. 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 ordered 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 collars with the punishment of pain. It was not enough to satisfy him, but he dared to do no more; too much and they only became 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 outside; 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 better 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 forest 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, either; 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.

Some fools might find all this horrifying. All he felt was more contempt for the weaklings who had been so afraid of pursuit—for of course, it could only have been pursuit that they feared—that they allowed their panic to turn what could have been an orderly procession into a rout. And for what?

So their bones could rot on the floor of a cave before they even saw the light of their new world, that's what.

He wondered, as he penetrated further into the cave-complex, if all of the legends of harmony and cooperation were so much rot after all. It was obvious from this decayed chaos that there had been panic, fighting, but there was no sign of whatever was the cause. Unless, of course, the Ancestors had brought the cause with them....

What if they'd begun fighting amongst each other for ascendancy as soon as they got safely to the other side?

That would certainly explain the rout—

In fact, such an explanation made more sense than the official version of the Crossing.

Suppose, just suppose, that not all of the Ancestors had given everything they had to the creation of the Great Portal? That was what he would have done, come down to it. Now, suppose that faction-within-a-faction had then turned on the rest, when they were out of magic, depleted, vulnerable?

He grinned savagely, kicking a bit of debris out of the way. Of course—that was what must have happened! It explained all of this, and explained why no one had ever come back here until the secret of just where the Portal was had been lost to memory. After all, those clever bastards who'd won wouldn't want to chance coming upon a survivor amid the wreckage, or chance on someone uncovering the real version of what had happened! And besides, things had been hard enough on those who survived, creating their strongholds, waiting to see what perils lurked in this new world and trying to defend against whatever might come.

Then, of course, the Ancestors had discovered the humans, and realized they didn't need constructs when they could have slaves instead, slaves that didn't need repairs, could breed their own replacements, and could be controlled with a bare minimum of magic.

Proper conservation of resources, that. It spoke well for the cleverness of the Elvenlords who had survived to become his Ancestors. Clever, clever fellows indeed; they would be proud of him now, who had retraced their footsteps to rediscover the secrets of their power and take what rightfully belonged to him.

Of course, that would only be the beginning. Once he had taken Kyrtian's estates, he'd consider his next moves. There were, after all, many possibilities for the future, and everything would depend on just what he learned here. Only one thing was certain; Aelmarkin, and not Kyrtian, would be the one to have the benefit of whatever lay here.

And what was more, Kyrtian wouldn't be coming out of here at all if Aelmarkin had anything to say about it.

At least, not alive.