Orisino went off to gather a few things to eat and a torch to light his way. Tavis simply asked Basil to paint a rune of light on the blade his dagger. While he waited for his friend to finish, the high scout peered into the shaft, studying the spiraling trail and its awkward steps. It did not take him long to decide that it would be safer, and faster, not to trust the cockeyed staircase. He removed a short length of white rope from his satchel and dangled it over the shaft.
“suordnowsilisaB.”
A silver spider climbed from the cord’s end and dropped into the pit, trailing a single filament of white silk. The strand began to sparkle and grow steadily larger in diameter, becoming as thick and sturdy as any rope. Tavis waited until he could see several feet of line lying loose on the shaft floor, then looped his end of the cord around a small boulder and tied it off with a secure anchoring knot.
Without waiting for Orisino to return, the high scout straddled the rope. He wrapped it around one hip and over the opposite shoulder, running the line parallel to his bow. He sat over the edge of the pit and rappelled down with slow, easy strides. As he touched bottom, the sweet, stale odor of old age wafted from the cavern mouth behind him. He kept a careful watch over his shoulder, but the grotto itself remained as silent and still as a crypt.
Tavis untangled himself, then took a few minutes to examine the area. The floor was covered with six inches of glassy ice, so clear that he could see a pair of yard-long bootprints frozen in the mud underneath. The tracks had been old and weatherworn even before freezing. They revealed little now, save that the giant who had left them was not very large and seldom left the grotto. There was no sign that anyone else lived in the cave, and that troubled the high scout. Only ettins were solitary by nature, and the two-headed giants seldom viewed visitors as anything but a convenient meal.
A loud rattle sounded from the rim of the pit, then Galgadayle cried out, “Watch yourself!”
Tavis looked up, expecting to find a stone plummeting toward him. Instead, he saw several stones. Close behind came Orisino’s gangly figure, bouncing down the wall in great, barely controlled arcs. The verbeeg was clearly an inexperienced mountaineer. In addition to wrapping himself into the rappelling line backward, he was trying to slow himself by squeezing the rope with his guide hand, while his braking hand clutched at the cliff in a frantic effort to keep himself upright.
Tavis retreated into the cavern, then grimaced as first the stones, then the verbeeg crashed to the bottom of the icy pit.
“So much for being quiet!”
“Karontor take this rope!” Orisino sat up and hurled the tangled line at the wall. “It did nothing to stop me from falling!”
“It did too much,” Tavis retorted. “If it hadn’t slowed you down, I wouldn’t need to worry about all the witless things you’re bound to do inside the cavern.”
Without waiting to see if Orisino could hoist his battered frame off the ice, Tavis drew his glowing dagger and started into the cave.
The place was a confusing web of dark, jagged voids that shot off in all directions, with the sharp corners and broken edges of huge talus boulders jutting into the passages from every angle. In the distance, curtains of wayward sunbeams hung across the skewed corridors, like gray tapestries concealing the private halls of some madman’s castle. If not for the deep grooves of the ancient giant trail, the high scout would have been as lost as a child in a fen. Within the area lit by his glowing dagger alone, he saw at least fifty corridors, and off each of those there would be fifty more.
Unlike true caverns, whose depths were kept above freezing by the mountain’s warm heart, this jumbled maze of angles and corners was as frigid as a glacial crevasse. The cold air seeped down from above like drizzle down a chimney, riming the granite with hoarfrost and leaving the listing, sloping path as slick and treacherous as a ribbon of frozen stream. Tavis moved slowly and carefully, leaving his sword sheathed and Mountain Crusher on his shoulder, never taking a step without first finding a secure hold for his free hand. In this tangle of monoliths, any fall could be a fatal one, shooting the victim down the jagged mouth of an impossibly deep pit, or lodging him forever between a pair of granite boulders.
Orisino came up behind the high scout, clattering and groaning as he struggled to maintain his footing on the icy trail. The verbeeg had not bothered to light his torch, which left him both hands to maintain his balance. This was just as well. If the verbeeg happened to fall and injure himself, Tavis would feel compelled to offer help. Until the chieftain actually violated their agreement, the law demanded that he be treated as an ally, and allies did not leave wounded comrades to die in cold caverns.
“Be quiet, fool,” Tavis growled. “The giant will hear you coming a thousand paces away.”
“It hardly-ahhhh!” Orisino clutched Tavis’s arm, nearly falling and sending them both off the edge of a monolith. The verbeeg regained his balance, then said, “We can’t use this shortcut. We’d lose half our warriors on this ice.”
Tavis disengaged himself from the chieftain’s grasp. “You go back if you want. The trail may dry out up ahead.”
“Dry out? This whole place is one… big…” Orisino let his sentence trail off, then his voice grew sly. “What are you looking for? It’s no shortcut.”
The high scout did not reply. He continued forward, finally stopping at the head of a steep chute where one boulder stood against another. The corner between their two faces formed a long, angular ravine that descended into inky darkness beyond Tavis’s light. Some ancient giant had cut a series of huge, zigzagging stairs down the trough, but the frost-rimed treads were spaced at eight-foot intervals. Anyone as small as Tavis or Orisino would have to jump from one icy platform to the next. The only alternative was to climb down the center, using the seam between the monoliths for fingerholds. If either of the ’kin slipped, there was no telling how far they would fall.
“We’d better get our rope,” Orisino suggested.
Tavis did not bother to remind the chieftain of the line’s true ownership. Verbeegs considered private property an uncivilized and archaic concept, claiming instead that all things belonged to all people.
“If you want my rope, you fetch it,” Tavis said.
“And I suppose you’ll wait here until I return?” the verbeeg scoffed. “You go down first. I’ll watch how you do it.”
The wily chieftain was proving more difficult to scare off than Tavis had expected. The high scout sighed in exasperation. “If I don’t want you falling on me, I’d better teach you how to do this.”
Tavis passed his glowing dagger to the verbeeg, then removed his gloves and demonstrated how a person could support himself by jamming his fist into a narrow crack, such as that between the two boulders. Though the concept was simple, the art itself was full of nuances. Depending upon the width of the seam and the climber’s position, the fingers had to be folded into all manner of different configurations to lock the hand securely in place. Orisino paid careful attention, and was quickly able to run through the standard positions.
“You can twist your boots against the sides of the seam to wedge them in place, but don’t trust any footholds on the walls themselves,” Tavis cautioned. “The stone is too slick. Stay in the crack and you won’t have trouble.”
The high scout retrieved his glowing dagger and slipped the handle between his teeth, then lay on his belly and swung his legs over the chute. He wedged a foot into the crack and climbed down a short distance to wait for Orisino. The verbeeg reluctantly dangled his toes over the edge, kicking blindly at the crevice and grunting in frustration. For a time, Tavis thought his unwelcome companion would turn back, but the chieftain finally locked a boot into the crack and started to creep downward. After that, it did not take long for the verbeeg to gain his confidence, and soon the two ’kin were moving at a steady pace.