Gord and Leda took what little of their equipment they would need and returned, at her suggestion, to the treasure chamber below. He wanted to move out immediately, to be free of this forbidding place, but she actually seemed relaxed in the same environment. "Let me rest a bit first," she told him, "and then I will be able to heal your burns and the wounds you still have before we set out."
"You can do that so easily? Why, then, did you not tend to Achulka and his fellows?"
Her expression turned abruptly cold. "They deserted us," she said disdainfully. "Let time care for them." Gord was a bit bewildered by this sudden change in her attitude, but attributed it to the fact that she really did need to rest.
"Now, let me sleep and regain my powers," she said tersely. "I'll have to use them to see to our food and drink too, probably, so stand guard while I rest and recover."
"As you wish," the young thief replied in an equally curt manner, but if Leda noticed his tone, she chose not to react to it. By the time he had put the bar in place across the door, she was prone and well on her way to sleep. He soon forgot about her cool demeanor and had a fine time for the next few hours browsing through the great piles of treasure that remained in the stone coffers. He knew he could not take any of it with him, but for the time being, at least, it was all his. What more, he thought to himself wryly, could a thief ask?
Chapter 13
THEY HAD BEEN FOLLOWING an old passage leading away from the pool for only a few hundred yards when a pile of broken rock loomed before them – a cave-in that, at first glance, seemed to keep them from going farther. Then Leda saw a small opening in the ceiling just in front of the heap of stones and rubble. "Look, Gord," she said, pointing to the hole. "That is how the apes and pygmies come and go."
Gord scrambled swiftly up the pile of rock and hoisted himself up into the vertical passageway. It was a very snug fit, but that actually enabled him to climb better because he could exert constant pressure on the sides of the tunnel. He disappeared from Leda's sight for a couple of minutes, then came down feet first and dropped lithely back into the chamber where she stood. "There is a maze of passages above," he reported. The hole in the ceiling seems to be an escape tunnel, Leda. Above it are what were sewers, subcellars, and who knows what else. Some of the work is newer than the rest, so the pygmies must have made them. Those places are only about four feet high, and narrow too."
"Do any of the routes go in the direction we want?" the dark elf asked.
"Yes, but only one of the little ones, and it heads upward, too."
"Then let's see if we can clear away the debris here and move onward in this tunnel."
"What makes you think we can do that, girl?
Those white midgets would have done so long ago if it was possible."
"Why would they bother if they had their own egress from the area? Just be still, and watch while I use a little trick to discover if there is a way," Leda told him.
She knelt and, using a sharp stone, scratched a strange symbol on the tunnel floor. It was composed of three swords, two pointing downward at angles and one perpendicular, point upward, to form a starlike symbol. The girl began to chant under her breath, and then from within her robe she produced a tiny bead of quicksilver. As she intoned her chant, she worked the stuff into a bit of clay she had picked up from the temple's cistern. Then she smoothed the mixture out onto a large piece of the fallen rock, sang out a strange series of syllables, and stepped back. Gord was about to ask her what she thought to accomplish with her actions of the last several minutes when Leda spoke – but she did not address him.
"Tell me, stone, what lies beyond you?"
A hollow, toneless voice, barely audible, replied, "More of the passage you stand in."
"Between it and you – how much more stone?"
"Ten times the length of your arm."
"Everywhere?"
"No."
"Where is there less?"
"Above."
"Where above?"
This question-and-answer routine went on. The very rocks would speak, it seemed, to those clerics able to employ the correct power to enable or compel them to do so. Finally the weird voice related that in the far corner near the roof of the passage, only an arm's length of fallen rock was between them and the continuing tunnel.
"But is there more loose stone above that place, which might come down if we clear away what lies there?"
A long pause. "Yes," the slab of rock finally admitted.
"What of the corner on the opposite side?"
"But little more, and above there the roof is solid," the hollow voice told her. Gord sensed a grudging tone in the sound. At this, Leda turned away; the communication was apparently ended.
"How can a stone speak?" he asked as she motioned him toward the place where they could clear a way.
"The stuff is of the plane of earth. The spell awakens an elemental who can read impressions within the rock as you or I would read a book," the dark elf explained impatiently. "Let's get on with clearing the stones away now."
Leda stood well away as Gord accomplished the work. It wasn't too difficult once he freed the first couple of chunks. The remainder were loose, and then it was only a matter of working them free and tumbling them down, first on this side, then shoving them away to fall into the passage beyond the pile. "Whew!" Gord said after about ten minutes of work as he contemplated the small space he had made. "That was heavy going, but there's a hole big enough for us to use now. Shall I give you a hand?"
"No," Leda said. "I can manage myself." She suited action to word by climbing nimbly up the heap of rocks to a place just behind him. "Go through, and I'll pass you our gear. As soon as you have it all, go on down the other side, and I'll follow."
The corridor continued for another hundred or so paces beyond the cave-in, then it divided in a rough T-shape. One branch seemed to head almost due west, so they took that one in preference to the route that veered to the east. This tunnel slanted upward, and in a short time they had moved aside a concealed stone and were gazing down on a circular pipe cut through the sandstone that prevailed here.
"It is an underground aqueduct, Gord. See there. A trickle of water still flows along it."
"That seems to be what we've found, all right," he agreed. The flow goes back toward the temple and whatever urban complex was around it. Even though this conduit leads southward, Leda, I think we should take it. Going back and heading east is certainly no better."
"Agreed. If this brought water to the town and temple, it will take us a long way. We'll have water, too, as we go."
"How in the Nine Hells could the Ancient Suloise have managed something like this? This tunnel is almost twenty feet across and, if we are correct, it must run for miles!"
Leda laughed at Gord's wonderment. "Any kingdom so powerful as to make a fertile plain into a place of arid devastation, and to get in retaliation a burying coat of dust upon them, could do something like this as easily as you and I walk along it now. Think of the powers they possessed! Had I but a trifling of those old ones' strength, I would be queen of… Oh, no matter."