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 ascen¬dancy 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 offi¬cial 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 un¬til the secret of just where the Portal was had been lost to mem¬ory. 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 mini¬mum 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.
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 real¬ized 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 pres¬ence was stronger now, although the droning in the back of her mind was not. :We 'd better follow Kyrtian, then,: she said reluc¬tantly.
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 mo¬ments 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 to¬gether, as if they'd blundered into each other. Then came one that had been smashed beneath a massive rock, perhaps de¬tached 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 cor¬ner of it.
Kyrtian stood facing the rock wall of the cave, every mus¬cle 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 en¬robed 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 infi¬nitely 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 ut¬terly unexpected words.
"Light the lanterns," he said, the words emerging as a stran¬gled 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. Some¬thing'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 or¬der, 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 redou¬bled 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 extin¬guished 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 do¬ing 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 some¬how 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 in¬supportable.
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 An¬cestors' chattels no longer seemed to stare at her with insen¬sate 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 her¬self.
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 cre¬ate a source of slave-labor, since they no longer had their con¬structs 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.