Elvenborn

33

Lynder took off at a run after Kyrtian, his feet slapping on the rock floor of the cave and kicking up puffs of dust, but Shana and Keman hesitated, exchanging first a glance, then a guarded thought.

;I have a feeling that something's about to go horribly wrong,: Shana began, not at all hesitant to look like a fool— if indeed she did—in front of her foster-brother. After all, he'd seen her do and say stupid things plenty of times in the past.

But Keman nodded, confirming her apprehensions—which, of course, only made them worse. :So do I. It's not just that hum. There's something down here, asleep maybe, and I don't want to disturb it.: He paused, and his eyes flicked to one side. :Fire and Rain! Look at the mage-lights!:

Shana bit her lip, when she followed his direction and realized that Kyrtian's mage-lights were slowly pulsing, waxing and waning in strength ever so slightly and very slowly. Had Kyrtian noticed? Would he?

:I think something's draining them a little at a time,: Keman continued. :Then Kyrtian increases the power to them witkcut thinking about it, and it all begins again. And I don't think it would be a good idea to use any stronger magic in here. It might... wake something up.:

Wake something up ... so he felt it too. The sense of presence was stronger now, although the droning in the back of her mind was not. :We 'd better follow Kyrtian, then,: she said reluctantly.

They followed his tracks in the dust across the floor of the cave, passing among the odd and articulated shapes of metal and glass and stranger substances. They loomed, these objects.

They bulked above Shana's head, exuding unsubtle menace. Although how that was possible without possessing eyes or faces...

She felt her skin flinching away from them, noting a few moments later that the constructs were not arranged in quite the orderly fashion that they had first thought.

Nor were they undamaged.

Deep in the middle of the pack, they passed two tangled together, as if they'd blundered into each other. Then came one that had been smashed beneath a massive rock, perhaps detached from the roof of the cavern. Then another, fallen over on its side.

Then one that looked—melted? Yes, all down one side the construct sagged, and there were places along the leading edges where the thing looked like butter that had begun to run, then hardened again.

A low murmur of voices from the other side of the thing gave a clue to Kyrtian's whereabouts, but there was something harsh and desperately unhappy in that murmur that made them both slow their paces and edge, with great care, around the corner of it.

Kyrtian stood facing the rock wall of the cave, every muscle as rigid as the rock he faced, and for a moment, all that Shana could understand was that the rock looked as if it had melted like butter in the sun, just as the metal of the construct had.

Then, slowly, her mind encompassed the shape in the rock. In the rock, like some obscene bas-relief, like a hapless insect coated in wax and preserved for all time, like a fancy pastry enrobed in a thin glazed shell. Like, most horribly of all, like something caught in an ice-storm, preserved perfectly beneath a thin sheath of ice that replicated every detail of the no-longer-living thing.

There was a man, an Elvenlord, embedded in the satiny-smooth, melted and re-solidified rock. Not carved—not unless there had been a sculptor working here who was utterly mad. Not with the expression of utter, blinding terror that she saw on the subject's visage.

Shana could not see Lord Kyrtian's face, and for that, she was profoundly glad. The eloquent line of his backbone told her more than enough—too much, truth be told.

Desperately unhappy? That was too tame. This was a man who should, by all rights, break into a howl of despair at any moment.

This could only be Kyrtian's father. Bad enough to find bones and only wonder at how he had perished—this was infinitely worse, the moment of death caught and held on show for all time.

She didn't know Kyrtian well enough to offer comfort, but he clearly needed it at the moment, and just as clearly would not accept it from anyone standing about him now. She could hardly blame him; if she had been searching for Alara all these years only to find her like this— All of them stood in awkward silence, a silence that stretched on and on until it became unendurable. Shana's nerves shrieked under the strain of waiting, and longed for someone, anyone, to break it—so long as it wasn't her. Kyrtian could not possibly bear this—no one could!

But it was Kyrtian himself who finally did so, and with utterly unexpected words.

"Light the lanterns," he said, the words emerging as a strangled croak, but clear enough for all that.

"M-m-my lord?" Lynder stammered, without comprehension.

"Light the lanterns. I'm going to kill the mage-lights. Something's feeding on them and I don't want to give it anything more—"

He didn't finish the sentence, but with that in front of them, he didn't have to. Lynder and the other hastened to obey his order, breaking out the candles, the oil, and the lanterns, and the moment that the first wick was kindled, Kyrtian extinguished his mage-lights completely.

This, of course, left them huddling around a lantern that in no way gave a fraction of the light that the mage-lights had, while the others hastened to light the rest of the wicks with a spill kindled on the first. Shana was just glad that Kyrtian had had the foresight to order lanterns brought in the first place—and that even in the midst of a grief she couldn't even begin to understand, he hadn't lost himself to mourning, madness, or both.

She hurried forward to help the others; the lamps were kept dry until needed, so she filled them while the others lit them and set the transparent chimneys in place to protect them from drafts. When she looked over at him, Kyrtian still hadn't moved, except to place one hand on the breast of that terrible figure in the wall.

She still couldn't see his face. She still didn't want to. But she wished with all her soul that he would weep.

Triana was surprised when the glow of mage-lights ahead of her winked out.

She dimmed her own light in automatic response, lest it be noticed. Now there was barely enough light coming from her little metal cone to let her see her way without stumbling, and she used one hand on the cave wall to steady herself as she crept along. Why had Kyrtian doused his lights?

Then, as a faint yellow glow came from the opening ahead of her, she understood that although he had doused his lights, he wasn't in darkness. The light coming from ahead was poor and weak, and she wondered if some disaster had befallen Kyrtian, or his men, to make him lose control of his mage-lights.

The feeling of unfocused horror that had stalked her from the moment that she entered this place washed over her in redoubled strength. It was only by stopping long enough to take a few deep breaths and swallow a sip of water from a flask at her belt to ease her fear-dried mouth that she forced herself to go on. Whatever was out there hadn't devoured Kyrtian yet, or where would the light be coming from?

As her pulse pounded in her temples and her hands grew cold, she reached the mouth of the next cave, and as she extinguished her own mage-light lest it betray her, at last she heard voices. One of them was Kyrtian's, with a harsh, grating tone to it she'd never heard before, but the low tone and the echoes made it impossible to understand what he and the others with him were saying. Still, he was talking, and he wouldn't be doing that if something had attacked him. She wondered wildly for a moment if he was talking to something that belonged here—

But no. That didn't make any sense. There had been no signs of life here at all, not even bats, so what could such a thing live on? And there were no tracks in the dust except Kyrtian's people, so nothing was going into or out of this cave-complex.

In the flickering and uncertain light she barely made out the bulky shapes of huge objects the size of garden sheds and larger ranged in utterly still and silent ranks in front of her. Great hulking shapes—-frozen into immobility now, but somehow not dead; they crouched, waiting, watching. And at the edge of her vision, the arch of the Great Portal—for that was all that the soaring arc of greenish-black at the rear of the cave could be—brooding over them all. Moving shadows of men performed an incomprehensible pantomime against the right-hand wall, where lanterns must be. There was a whisper of acrid scent to the air here, a faint taste of metal and the flavor of lightning.

Everything instinctive in her screamed to go back, forget what she saw and go, flee, now. This was nothing like what she had expected—there was something horribly wrong here, and if she stayed she'd find out what it was. All of those things out there, staring without eyes, waiting for just the right trigger, the right action to set them free....

But... but if she left, she would leave empty-handed. Only Kyrtian would know the secrets that lay here. And that was insupportable.

Will triumphed over instinct, and she forced herself to go on. She decided at that moment to approach the place where Kyrtian and his people were by taking the long way around the edge of the cavern, dropping down from the ledge as silently as possible, then making her way around the cavern with one hand outstretched against the rock wall to guide her. She would pass by the Great Portal, and that alone might hold some useful information. And she wouldn't have to walk among those—things.

The Great Portal—it had enabled the Ancestors to travel from another world. Perhaps it still held enough magic to take her home—after all, some of the oldest Portals could be used to go anywhere that one held a key, and she had the Prime Key to her own Portal in the form of the signet ring on her right hand. If that was true, then she wasn't trapped here; if anything went wrong, she could escape in a heartbeat!

That thought, when it occurred to her, brought a sudden ease of her fear that almost made her stagger, and she caught herself with one hand on the cavern wall. Relief suffused her, making her a little lightheaded. The hulking shapes of the Ancestors' chattels no longer seemed to stare at her with insensate menace. They were just—things. Old, dead things. No matter what Kyrtian had found, or thought he had found, these relics couldn't threaten anything or anyone—if they ever had. Her imagination had run away with her, and she was as bad as any nursery-bound child in conjuring up nightmares for herself.

Whatever had slaughtered all those people back in the main cave couldn't have come from here, anyway. When the Portal closed, the constructs had all died. Everyone knew that. It was in every version of the Crossing that she had ever read. That was why it had been so important that the Ancestors find or create a source of slave-labor, since they no longer had their constructs to do their work for them.

With renewed confidence, and a purely internal laugh of scorn at her own foolishness, she continued on, feeling for each step as she took it, since she could no longer see where she was going. And all the while, she strained her ears for some hint of what Kyrtian was saying, watching the enormous shadows cast on the opposite wall by the wavering light of his lamps moving in a gigantic puppet-play.

Aelmarkin doused his mage-light with a curse when he realized that the faint glow ahead of him must be caused by Kyrtian's people in the next cave. He'd finally caught up with them— only to come perilously close to blundering into them. He swore at himself for being so stupid—how could he have let something that simple catch him? He only hoped that none of them were bright enough to have noticed his light behind them.

The rough circle of light ahead seemed awfully dim—and very yellow. Odd, that. Why would Kyrtian go out of his way to create a yellow light when the natural blue-white of mage-lights was so much better and truer?

Then again, it was Kyrtian. It might be firelight; he might have found what he was looking for and decided to camp. It might be lamplight, because he wasn 't as good a mage as Ael-markin had thought and he was running out of energy to keep the mage-lights going. He was perfectly capable of doing without mage-light altogether, for some other peculiar reason of his own.

It was only when Aelmarkin actually reached the mouth of the next cavern and only just saved himself from tumbling over the edge that he understood that the lights were indeed lanterns, and that Kyrtian had elected to use them instead of mage-lights, and he cursed again (but only in his head) when that simple fact came near to undoing him.

It was a very near thing; one moment, he was easing himself along the cavern, and the next, his questing foot met empty air, and unfortunately, he had already trusted some weight to it, not anticipating that there would be a drop-off. Aelmarkin teetered on the brink for a heart-stopping moment before his flailing hand caught the edge of the wall and he was able to steady himself.

He burned the air with a flurry of mental curses before his heart stopped racing and he was able to really look at what lay below him. But then—oh then, his heart raced for an entirely different reason!

There below him, ranked and waiting like so many placid, sleeping bullocks, were the ancient constructs that the Ancestors had brought with them. Row upon row of them, waiting for the proper touch to bring them alive and call them to service.

His touch. Never doubt it. He could hardly wait to get down among them! What need would he have of slaves or gladiators or even armies with these powerful creations at his command?

His mouth gone suddenly dry with anticipation, he ascertained that the drop was nowhere near as long as he'd thought, and eased himself belly-down over the edge. The rock scraped him even through the tough leather of his hunting-tunic, but he hardly felt it in his haste to get down among those things out of another world and time.

Besides, he needed to get under cover, in case one of Kyrt-ian's slaves came snooping. It would be a disaster to come this far and then be tripped up by one of Kyrtian's wretched slaves.

He felt better with the bulk of several of the things between himself and Kyrtian's lamps. Safe enough to kindle a very, very dim hand-light of his own, one which could be hidden in his fist and used only, held close to the metal sides of the constructs, to see if he could decipher any of the ancient script. He hoped to find instructions there—surely not everyone who was asked to control the things in the past actually learned how to do so before attempting to operate them! Failing that, he hoped for labels, or some evocative name that would tell him what the things were used for.

But as he moved silently from one huge bulk to the next, brushing off a literal coat of dust that fell to the ground in a sheet, he was disappointed. Though he looked as high as he could reach, instructions there were none; nor names, either— at least not on the sides that he examined. He didn't dare move to the side facing Kyrtian's lamps; bad enough that he was a moving shadow among unmoving ones! The murmur of voices suggested that all of Kyrtian's people were still with him, but was by no means a trustworthy way of telling for certain.

He cursed the Ancestors now—how stupid could one be, to neglect to leave instructions for the uninitiated? Unless those instructions had been in one of the books back in the main cave, books that crumbled at a touch....

For a moment, he despaired. But then came a stroke of luck so incredible he hardly dared believe it.

As he closed his fist around his hand-light in disappointment at—again—finding nothing, he caught a fugitive hint of glowing green out of the comer of his eye.

He turned, with painful slowness, to his left, and for a moment felt nothing but a wash of disappointment when there didn't seem to be anything there except another construct, and this one utterly without anything like writing on the side. It did have a set of blades and claws that suggested warlike intentions, not that knowing its purpose would do him any good unless he could get it moving, which he obviously couldn 't without instructions. But then as he stared, his eyes adjusted, and he saw it.

A faint glow of green, in the midst of the blank side of the construct, exactly like the glow of an activated Elf-stone.

He sidled up to the thing, staying in the shadows, and quested over it with a finger. Only the glow and a subtle change in texture from metal to stone informed him that the thing was there at all! It had been inset flush with the surface, and in the dim illumination from the hand-light, he wouldn't have seen it except for the glow. It was an Elf-stone, or something very like one. And when he opened his fist to bring his hand-light up to it—the hand-light dimmed, and the green glow brightened.

He could have pummeled himself for stupidity. Of course! Why would you need instructions to manage one of these things? All you needed was the Elf-stone, both to power it and to control it! And, of course, that was why all of the things had collapsed into inertia when the Great Portal closed! The magic powering them that was a part of the Aether of Evelon ran out, and the Elvenlords who'd built and sustained the Portal had nothing left to supply them! Utter simplicity, but, of course, the Lesser Elvenlords who'd held back their own power either hadn't known how the constructs worked, or had been so busy eliminating their dangerous rivals that they hadn't bothered to try to learn to use the things!

Or perhaps they had been so afraid of pursuit that they just abandoned the brutes.

Or—well, it didn't matter. The point was, they had been abandoned and they were there for the taking and now Ael-markin knew how to take and use them!

It couldn't be any simpler. And it didn't matter what this behemoth was originally intended to do, either. It was big, it had to be brutally strong, and it was certainly brutally heavy. It could kill Kyrtian simply by stepping on him.

Aelmarkin smothered a howl of glee, and placed the hand holding his hand-light against the Elf-stone embedded in the construct's side. It sucked in the power greedily. The hand-light vanished.

And then—Aelmarkin felt it wake and—look for more. And felt its fierce concentration focus on him.

He tried to pull his hand away in a flash of alarm. But by then, of course, it was already too late.

Kyrtian had finally allowed Lynder and Keman to lead him to a seat on a nearby outcrop of rock. He felt—hollow. And exhausted. As if he had wept for a year, although he was dry-eyed.

At least mother isn 't here. That was all he could think of. At least she can't see—this. I don't think she could bear it. I think she 'd go mad.

"No, don't try to chip—it out," he said with difficulty in answer to Lynder's question. "I don't ever want Lady Lydiell to see him. Not like that, anyway. Maybe we can find a way to cover him over—"

He shuddered, a spasm of a thing that left him sweating and shaking. What must have happened? He must have somehow wakened one of those—things. Maybe it fed off his mage-lights, and he didn 't realize what was happening. He must have been so excited—too excited to think clearly.

He buried his head in his hands, shuddering all over, in spasms he couldn't control. He wanted to howl, to rail at fate, and above all things, to weep. Why couldn't he weep?

Which one of these hulks had done the deed? He wanted to know that, suddenly, with a fierce anger that took him and left him shaking. That, above all, he had to find out! He'd find the thing and take it to bits with his bare hands, and grind the bits to dust and scatter the dust over the barren desert, by the Ancestors, he would!

He stood up, still shaking, and turned towards them—just in time to see one of them slowly rising up from among its fellows, towering higher and higher, with something doll-like and screaming clenched in one fearsome claw.