nitions by the stupid dragons that one shouldn't hunt an area out, but apparently that Elvenlord paid as little heed to such things as he would have. And now that the trail was wide and beautifully clear, he was going to get to a point where he could transport himself back in a matter of moments, now—just as soon as he got past that cluster of bushes—
The violent shaking of the bushes was the only warning he got. Then he was engulfed in something horrid, and slimy, and his mage-light went out. There was a moment of absolute sur¬prise, followed by an eternity of hellish pain, and in the end, only ... nothingness.
And then there was no sound at all on the trail, except the noises of something feeding in the dark.
30
Keman and Shana elected to remain with Kyrtian and his men, but only after modifying their appearance to that of ordinary humans. That was a precautionary measure, easy to maintain, but vital just in case someone came looking for Kyrtian—or decided to scry for him.
Besides, as Keman pointed out, they'd been in these woods before. They'd helped rescue a pen full of slaves from Lord Cheynar by taking them into this forest, and even if they didn't exactly know every trail and rock, at least they knew enough about the dangers to keep Kyrtian's people from walking into trouble. Or rather, more trouble. Kyrtian had already had one narrow escape from the ambush beasts.
And they were both rather good at finding things, Keman in particular. When Kyrtian explained in detail what he thought he was looking for—the place where his father had gone hunting ancient artifacts, probably within a cave-complex—and the de¬tails he'd gleaned from the ancient journals, they both volun-
teered their services. Shana went with Kyrtian and his people, to act as a lookout for alicorns, ambush beasts, and other un-pleasantries, while Keman went off on his own.
It didn't take Keman very long at all to come haring back to the main party with a find in his hands and a grin on his face.
"Where did you find that?" Kyrtian exclaimed, seizing the oddly-shaped chunk of metal that Keman had found as if it were made of begemmed gold. It had probably been flat, once, with rolled edges on two sides. Now it was twisted and crum¬pled, like a piece of paper that had been wadded up, then smoothed out again.
"Up that way—" Keman pointed. "You know dragons can tell where caves are—"
He could tell immediately by Kyrtian's expression that, no, he didn 't know that, but he continued with the explanation anyway.
"—I've just been cruising at treetop level, probing for cav¬erns. I found a place where there had been a big entrance that led into a huge complex, but there'd been a rock-fall that blocked the entrance, and when I landed to look it over, I found that this was caught in the rocks." He tilted his head to the side with curiosity. "What is it, anyway?"
"I haven't the vaguest clue," Kyrtian replied, turning it over in his hands with every evidence of fascination. "But feel it! Feel how light it is? Is it any metal that you recognize?"
"Well, no," Keman admitted. The lightness, and the lack of corrosion, had been what attracted him in the first place. The dull grey bit of debris, twisted and distorted, had blended very well into the fallen rocks, and only a dragon would have been able to spot it at once, by the different "feel" associated with it.
"And look at this—" Kyrtian pointed to a tiny line of en¬graved figures, incised deeply enough that not even the mist collecting on the surface obscured them. "You see? That's an¬cient script—Elven script!"
Keman peered at it. "What does it say?" he asked, dubiously. He couldn't begin to guess what an Elvenlord would choose to engrave on a piece of—something that looked like nothing
more than a bit of shelf, but probably wasn't. It could be any¬thing. A bit of a poem ? "Touch this who dares ? "
Kyrtian chuckled. "It says, 'Keep this edge up.' Not what you expected, is it?" But his eyes were afire with excitement. "Ke-man, this is—must be—a piece of one of the artifacts from the Crossing! We've found the Great Portal!"
"We have?" Keman replied with surprise. He shook water off his hood with a gesture of impatience. "I didn't know we were looking for it. I thought we were looking for your father."
"My father was looking for the Great Portal, and I'm sure he found it—but something must have happened and he couldn't get back to us." The Elvenlord's expression suddenly darkened. Kyrtian didn't say what he thought the "something" was, and Keman decided that he wasn't going to ask. "How recent was that rock-fall?"
"There have been several, I think." Now Keman was on firmer ground; if there was one thing that a dragon knew, it was rocks and caves. "I managed to get this bit out from under the bottom layer, but it looks to me as if there was one large fall quite some time ago, and several since then. There's still an opening big enough for a person to squeeze inside, but the opening used to be—well—big enough for my mother, much less me! I didn't find anything like—well, bones," he added hastily, realizing only then that he might well be describing the place where Kyrtian's father had died. His addition didn't reas¬sure Kyrtian in the least; Kyrtian's expression darkened further.
Kyrtian handed the artifact to Shana, who examined it curi¬ously, but paid more attention to the Elvenlord than to the piece of metal. It suddenly seemed very quiet, in their little
"Two days, I think, over the trails," Keman told him, after a moment to try and gauge distances. "I could fly you there, one at a time—"
But both Shana and Kyrtian shook their heads. "I don't want
to divide the party," Kyrtian said first. "And Lashana, I know that you can use magic to bring us there, but—"
"But I'll fall on my nose afterwards," Shana said bluntly. "And if you need me, I won't be able to do anything. No, over¬land it is." She sighed, then smiled, and tried to make light of the situation. "Ah well. I haven't gotten nearly enough hard ex¬ercise lately, and you do have horses to help. Keman and I will be the only ones who have to walk—"
Keman burst into laughter, as she hit her head with the heel of her palm.
"I don't think you'll be walking, Shana," Keman told her. "If you'll just give me a chance to 'change' into something more suitable—"
Kyrtian got the hint immediately. It was only a moment of work—as Kyrtian hastily averted his eyes—and an "extra" horse stared at Shana mockingly.
"What color would you like, foster-sister?" he asked shaping the mouth and larynx a bit off the horse-form, so he could talk properly. "Roan? Bay? Black?" With each suggestion, he changed his color to match. "How about a nice buckskin? Or spots? Stripes? Checks?" The changes flashed across his hide in bewildering succession.
"Ew!" Shana wrinkled her nose at the last. "Brown. Please. Brown will do very nicely."
"Not even alicorn-white with pretty blue eyes?" he teased, fading out the checks into a uniform brown. And, for good mea¬sure, making the hair much better at shedding water. By this point he had concluded that he should have taken to the guise of a horse a lot sooner—no need for rain-capes and, in fact, the rain felt rather good! It certainly kept the biting flies away.
Their exchange had lightened Kyrtian's mood a little, but it was very clear as he gave his men their new orders to move out that he was tense. Keman didn't have to ask why; it had been clear when he'd told them of his missing father that he didn't expect to find his parent alive. After the initial burst of excite¬ment faded, how could you possibly look forward to finding a body—or what was left of one?
He hurried them all into packing up the camp; it was inter-
esting to Keman that even under the press of urgency, Kyrtian's people worked efficiently and without fumbling. In far less time than Keman would have thought possible given his expe¬rience even with the Iron People, everything was packed prop¬erly, stowed on the horses, and they were ready to leave.
The others looked to Kyrtian for orders; he gestured to Ke¬man, who obviously was the only one who knew where they were going, and Keman and Shana took the lead. Kyrtian rode behind them, and everyone in his party gave him a respectful distance. With a stony expression, and his mouth set in a grim line, it was pretty clear that he didn't want to talk to anyone, and it seemed best to leave him alone.
It was a very, very quiet ride. None of the men wanted to break the silence, and even Shana didn't talk. The rain started up again shortly after they took to the trail, obscuring the dis¬tance behind a veil of grey, but Keman wasn't worried. Dragons couldn't get lost; he knew where he was, exactly in relationship to where their goal was. The only thing standing between them and that rock-covered cave entrance was the trifling matter of several leagues.
It would have been funny, if it hadn't been so important that Triana keep the presence of her party secret, not only from Ael-markin, but from Kyrtian as well. As it was, when everyone else suddenly packed up for no apparent reason and began to move, Triana's group had to scramble to clean out their camp and move deeper into the forest.
It was a near thing. Kyrtian's party didn't ride in on top of where Triana's camp had been, but they came closer than Tri¬ana liked, and Aelmarkin's bunch did just blunder on through. If his foresters had been half as good as Triana's slaves, they'd have spotted the signs of recent occupation for certain.
But after that, it was a simple enough matter to trail behind Aelmarkin. He was leaving a trail as broad as a highway and making no effort to hide it—but interestingly enough, Kyrtian wasn't going to any effort to conceal his trail either.
He must have found something. That was the only possible explanation. Triana wished she knew what it was.
Only when they pushed on past dark was she certain that it couldn't be Wizards—because Kyrtian kindled mage-lights and sent them up above their heads to illuminate the trail. Her own scouts reported it—and when her group was on the top of a hill, she could often catch a glimpse of the lights flitting among the branches of a valley below, like impossibly huge fireflies in the distance.
He wouldn't have betrayed his presence this way if he thought he'd found signs of the Wizards he was supposed to be looking for. At least, she didn't think he would.
The trouble was, he could use lights, but neither she nor Ael-markin dared.
That had her gritting her teeth in frustration, until it occurred to her that there was one thing, at least, that she could do. She could make mage-lights of a different sort. Not powerful enough to light their path, but tiny things that would mark where Kyrtian's horses, and Aelmarkin's, had gone by follow¬ing the scent in the air. If the others saw them, they'd either as¬sume they were ordinary fireflies or were some bizarre creature native to these forests.
It took her the better part of an hour to get the magic right, but in the end it was worth it; the trick was to set the spell to seek "horse," but with the specific exclusions of the horses she and her group rode—otherwise, all the little motes did was cluster around her. So even if they were stumbling down the path in the darkness now, they had something to follow. What a miserable experience, though—wet, cold, the endless mizzle in the face, and it seemed as if there were entire trees just waiting until they passed beneath to drop a load of water on their heads. They didn't have to worry about moving quietly, though—there were so many frogs calling in a dozen different tones through¬out the woods that they could have blundered about thrashing through the bushes and never been heard.
Presumably Aelmarkin came up with something that worked equally well, since they didn't run right into the back of his group. Triana was dreadfully afraid for some time that Kyrtian was going to ride all night, for he showed no signs of wanting
to halt. The rain poured on past dusk, and only slackened to the usual mist long after dark, but still Kyrtian road on.
By this time she was convinced that Kyrtian had gone quite mad, but her best forester assured her that no, not even some¬one as driven as Kyrtian was going to be foolish enough to press himself and his men that hard. And the slave was proved right; after what seemed like half the night, her foremost scout came back with the intelligence that both Kyrtian and Ael-markin were settling in for the night, and with the profoundest relief, Triana directed her own men to do the same.
But the moment that the first thin light showed among the trees, the scouts who watched the camps came back and roused them, and they were out of bedrolls that had just gotten com¬fortable and off again into the fog of pre-dawn. Kyrtian was pushing hard, and Triana needed to make a decision. She called her best man to ride alongside her.
"Can we outflank my cousin—get ahead of him without him realizing that we're out here?" she asked. Not for the first time, she was glad she had bought these men from Lord Kyndreth. Whoever had trained them had done such a good job that she didn't have to give them exact instructions—she had only to ask for what she wanted done, and they worked out a way to accomplish it if they had the skills. Unfortunately there was one thing that they did not have the skills for. They weren't very good cooks. They didn't seem to mind eating squirrel and hare that was half raw and half burned, but she had begun eat¬ing the leathery journey-bread in preference to the game they provided.
The slave pondered her question, then nodded. "I believe so, my lady, but—" he looked uneasy, and wiped a film of moisture from his forehead that wasn't from the mist. "—it isn't the for¬est that's the problem. It's what's in the forest. We know of al-icorn herds at the very least, and the outriders have seen signs of other things. Worse things, my Lady, than alicorn stallions."