That Giliead would go, with help or without it, had been certain; it wasn’t just that he had taken the duty of Chosen Vessel personally ever since he had first discovered what being one meant. Ranior, who had been his father before Giliead had been named a Vessel, had died from a wizard’s curse. It had been the first real curse that Giliead had ever faced and probably the first time he had started to blame himself for things he had no control over.
Ilias took another drink from the waterskin, slung the strap back over his head and shoulder and pushed himself up to follow. “That’s rivers and streams that shades can’t cross, not seas.”
“Seas don’t run?” Giliead countered.
He had a point. Ilias thought for a moment, feeling for the next handhold. “They’re salty.” But as he leaned against the warm rock, he felt a vibration. He hesitated, pressing the side of his face against the stone. Somewhere, deep inside the mountain, something was thrumming. Like a giant heart beating fast in panic.
“What would salt have to do with—”
His throat suddenly dry, Ilias whispered tensely, “Gil, listen.”
Giliead stopped. Ilias could sense him listening silently to the telltale vibrations in the stone. After a moment he answered softly, “I feel it.” He let his breath out in resignation. “I hate being right.”
“I hate you being right too,” Ilias told him briskly, bracing his feet and feeling for the next handhold. At least they didn’t have to wonder about it anymore; knowing for certain was a relief. Though it sure cut all the joy out of the debate over the seaworthiness of shades. “And Halian thought he wouldn’t have anything to worry about the rest of the year except the drainage problem in the hay fields.”
“Well, that’s a pretty serious drainage problem,” Giliead said, deadpan, as he resumed the climb. After a moment, he added, “It’s not him. It’s another wizard that came to take his place.”
“I know.” Ixion alive had been bad enough. Ixion, dead, headless and really, really annoyed was unimaginably worse.
After another long stretch of darkness and groping for hand-and footholds and occasional slips on the slimy rock, Ilias realized he could make out Giliead’s outline above him.
Nearly there
, he thought.
Too bad this was the easy part
.
The gradual increase in light let their eyes adjust from the impenetrable darkness to the dim grayness of the upper cave, just visible through the cracks above. Giliead found an opening large enough for them to wriggle through and paused, listening intently, then cautiously edged upward to peer out. There was room for only one of them at a time and Ilias waited below, braced awkwardly, nerves tight with tension. Giliead’s heritage as the god’s Chosen Vessel made him proof against curses, but not Ixion’s curselings. If something had heard them climbing up through the cave wall, if it was waiting up there like a civet at a mousehole, all he would be able to do was pull Giliead’s body back down after it bit his head off.
Giliead motioned that it was clear and climbed up through the crack. Breathing a little easier, Ilias followed, pulling himself out onto a ledge in the large cavern. The dim light came from above, through shafts and cracks that led up to the surface of the mountain. Conical columns of rock hung from the cave roof like icicles, hundreds of them, the light-colored ones glittering with myriad crystal reflections.
It courted terrible luck to say “so far so good” so Ilias just knelt, dumping the coil of rope off his shoulder and unclasping the climbing hook from his belt. Giliead paced along the edge, looking for the best spot to go down. The cave was about four or five ship lengths across, the far side hard to see in the dim light. They knew it was just like this one, sloping down into the abyss, pocked by cracks and crevices, ledges and sheer faces of rock. They had no idea how deep the cavern was and personally, Ilias didn’t care to find out. The dank cold air drifted up out of it like a breeze from the netherworld, raising gooseflesh on his sweat-slickened skin. They would use the rope to go down the cliff to the inner passages’ entrance, about forty paces down this side.
Ilias took a deep breath as he tied off the climbing hook. Except for the rush of wind through the shafts higher up, it was silent. Last time they had been able to hear the pounding of Ixion’s engines all through this part of the caves. “At least it’s quiet,” he said, keeping his voice low. He glanced up when Giliead didn’t answer. His friend was sitting on his heels near the edge, head cocked to listen, his brows drawn together in consternation. “What?” Ilias asked softly.
Giliead glanced back urgently. “You hear that?”
“The wind?” Except it was growing steadily louder. And it didn’t howl and moan like it should through the narrow rocky openings. It was more like ... a roar.
Giliead came to his feet suddenly, staring toward the north side of the cavern, where it wound deeper into the mountain and the darkness was absolute. Something was moving there, something very, very big. Ilias’s breath caught. “Not the wind.”
It was already too late to get back down into the crevice. Giliead flung himself against the wall as Ilias rolled back to crouch against it. They both froze. The roar that sounded like rushing wind grew louder until it hammered off the stone walls and inside Ilias’s head. Heart pounding, he pressed hard against the rock.
It came out of the darkness with a steady, inexorable motion, an unbelievably huge oblong shape, black as night.
It was narrow at the front, but the middle swelled to take up almost half the cavern. It had to be walking on the cave floor, however far below that was, but its gait was smooth and impossibly even. Ilias couldn’t see anything that looked like an eye or worse yet, a mouth, but it wasn’t featureless; he could see pockmarks and the long ridges of ribs running horizontally through its body.
Giliead’s thigh brushed against Ilias’s shoulder and he looked up, startled, to see his friend easing away from the wall. Ilias reached up to grab his belt. “Gil,” he whispered through gritted teeth.
“I want a closer look.” Giliead mouthed the words, though surely the thing couldn’t hear their voices over its own hollow roar.
“Are you crazy?” Ilias mouthed back, and tightened his grip.
Giliead pressed his lips together in exasperation but didn’t force the issue.
It was already moving past, the bulk of its middle part narrowing again at the rear. It had a jagged ridge along its back and a cluster of long sharp-edged fins where the tail should be. As its mass slowly vanished into the darkness at the other end of the cavern, Ilias let go of Giliead and they both eased to the edge to watch the slowly disappearing bulk. His voice hushed, Ilias said, “That’s . . . that’s . . .”
Giliead drew a sharp breath. “Bad.”
“Bad,” Ilias agreed. He leaned out, trying to see the creature’s legs. It was too dark in the bottom of the cavern to make them out. “You think it was here last time? Maybe in those tunnels we couldn’t get to from this side?” Like all wizards, Ixion had used his curses to make things. Live things. Distorted awful things that were always hungry. With Ixion dead, there was no way off the island for most of his curselings and the waterpeople tended to kill the ones that could swim.
Giliead frowned. “Maybe. I thought cutting off the water to the vats would take care of anything he had down there.” He swore under his breath. “I wonder what else I missed.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ilias said, though he knew Giliead wouldn’t believe him. “Besides, most of them should have eaten each other by now. Maybe it came from somewhere else.” The idea that it wasn’t dangerous wasn’t worth suggesting.
Giliead watched the last glimpse of the thing disappear in the cavern’s shadow, his mouth twisted ruefully. “We’re going to have to do something about this.”
“All right.” Ilias nodded. “How?” he asked, just to hear what Giliead would say.
“We’ll think of something.” Giliead turned back, picking up the fallen climbing hook and setting it in a solid chink of rock. Ilias leaned on it to keep it anchored and Giliead tested it cautiously with his weight, then swung over the side and started down. “We killed that leviathan, didn’t we? It was . .. almost as big.”
Watching him climb down the sloping wall into the dark abyss, Ilias whispered after him, “That was mostly an accident and you know it.” It was crazy, but this new thing made Ilias think of a flying whale. It had moved like a whale too, sliding smoothly through the air. Except it was far bigger than any whale he had seen around the outer islands or washed up dead on the beach. The leviathan that had gotten confused in the spray and unintentionally murdered itself on the spar of the
Dare
, and not done the ship a lot of good either, hadn’t been half so big.
Ilias waited until Giliead reached the shaft about forty paces below, then went over the edge after him. It was a quick, scrambling climb, requiring you to place your feet carefully to keep from sending loose fragments of rock skittering down the wall. He reached the wide square-cut mouth of the shaft where Giliead was anchoring the bottom end of the rope and dropped to the floor. “What does something that big eat? People?”
“It could eat everybody in Cineth and it wouldn’t be enough to fill a belly that size,” Giliead argued, leaning out of the opening to yank at the hook until it came loose.
Ilias collected the rope. There hadn’t been any word of large numbers of sheep or cattle going missing, so the thing hadn’t left the island. Yet. “It’s got to be eating something.” Even if the thing didn’t eat people now, after living in this place something would probably teach it.
Ilias slung the rope over his shoulder and they started down the shaft. It had been hollowed out of the cavern wall, perhaps as an air passage to the chambers of the old city, and sloped steeply down. There was just room for them to walk abreast and the ceiling was only a little above the top of Giliead’s head.
The light was gray and dim by the time they reached the first cross passage and they both paused, listening. “Something’s different,” Ilias said softly.
Giliead stood poised in the join, brows knit thoughtfully, one hand on the wall of the shaft. “The air’s coming from the wrong direction.”
The breeze came from up the cross passage instead of down, not from the lower caves where Ixion had done his work. Ilias had gotten almost used to the taint of corruption in the air, but now he could smell hot metal and an overlay of something bitter and acrid. “Smell that?”
Giliead nodded, unslinging his pack to dig out one of the pitch-coated torches they had prepared earlier. “This part of the passage was closed off before. I thought it might go to the other caves, the ones closer to the surface, but it was blocked.” He took a step down the cross passage into that damp cool breeze. “It’s not blocked now.”
“That’s odd.” Ilias stared into the darkness, thinking it over. Giliead was talking about the time when he had been alone down here. Ilias’s memory was hazy on everything that had happened after Ixion had caught him and Giliead had never spoken of the details. Whatever was down here, Ilias could do without the return visit to Ixion’s workroom.
They got the torch lit with flint and tinder and started down the passage, wary of sudden pitfalls or traps in this unknown territory. Soon the shaft lost its square shape and began to look more like a natural tunnel, the walls growing rougher and narrowing until they had to turn sideways to slip through. It slanted down, first gradually, then dramatically, and they had to scramble down nearly vertical slopes.
When the passage widened out again it was abrupt and they suddenly found themselves in a larger chamber. Ilias fell back a pace, drawing his sword to cover Giliead’s back as his friend lifted the torch to check the knobs of rock overhead. Things often hid in the ceilings of the big chambers in the lower caves, waiting to drop on whatever passed below.
As they made their way cautiously forward, Ilias’s foot knocked against something that rolled away. He spared a quick glance down and reported tersely, “Bones.” His eyes widened as the flicker of light revealed more of the chamber floor. It was covered with bones. “Uh, lots of bones.”
Giliead turned around, trying to look in every direction at once. There were two other tunnels intersecting here and it was a good spot for a trap. “What kind?”
Ilias glanced around, studying the remains with a practiced eye. The odor of decay that hung in the air all through the caves made it impossible to judge how recent the death was. He nudged a skull out of a pile with the toe of his boot. It looked human, except for the elongated jaw and the fangs. The bones didn’t appear that old, but the scavengers in the lower caves would strip any carcass they found within hours and many of the long bones were broken or chewed. “Howler,” he said. “Nothing looks fresh, though.” He frowned at a skull, then leaned down to pick it up. It had a neat hole drilled through it, just above the right eye. “What does that look like to you?” he asked Giliead, holding it out.
Giliead spared it a glance, brows quirking. “Like something bored into its head and ate out the insides?”
“That’s what I thought.” Mouth twisted in disgust, he tossed the skull back into the pile. “Which way?”
“The air is coming from this one.” Giliead picked the tunnel on the far left. “What’s that smell?” he muttered.
“I still can’t place it. Bitter, isn’t it?” Ilias paused to sheathe his sword and while Giliead kept watch, he used his knife to scratch a trail mark on the floor. The trail marks were a language all their own, the individual lines telling which direction the maker had come from, which direction he went, what his name was and what he was looking for. Hias wrote the mark to say they were looking for trouble, which he thought summed up the situation nicely.
Not that Halian or anybody else will be coming through here to appreciate it, I hope
, he thought, getting to his feet and following Giliead into the next tunnel. Giliead had made Halian swear on his grandmother’s ashes not to come after them if they didn’t come back. Ilias hoped that Halian would hold to it, even if it meant their bodies were lost and their souls trapped here forever.