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—"