"Hold on, we have to deal with the light situation," he called.
"Why not use that?"
"Because I have to work to keep it going," he said. "I have a better idea."
His idea was two little balls of light that were created by Sorcery, not Druidic magic. He wove the very simple spells, some of the very first spells that Initiates learned, and set them in a way so that they couldn't unravel when he stopped concentrating on them. The flows would pull against each other in a delicate knot of sorts, and that would keep the spells going for quite a while after he stopped maintaining them. Since they were such simple spells, he figured that they would last for six or seven hours before the flows of Fire and Air finally worked themselves free of one another and disrupted the spell. It was the trick that the Sha'Kar had taught him, a trick that he'd been very hard on himself for not figuring out on his own. Tarrin cleverly set one over each of their heads, hovering just over and between the tips of their ears, so its light didn't shine right in their eyes, and they would also serve a vital purpose in warning them when their heads were getting too close to the ceiling. The lights would go up into the ceiling and wink out when they were very close to it, and the sudden darkness was a warning they were about to bang their heads.
"Cute," Jesmind said, trying to look up to see the ball of light, which only dipped back with her head as she moved it. It would stay firmly where it was set in relation to her body, just over and between her two white-furred ears, illuminating everything around her without a part of her body getting in its way. It did create two dim spots to each side of her head, shadows from her ears, but the ball of light was so close to them that it diffused light into those shadows well before it reached the walls. The white fur of her ears served to reflect the light as well, much better than his black ones, which made the area of light surrounding Jesmind much brighter than the one surrounding him.
"Now that we have that fixed," he said, rolling the fur coat into a bundle and tying it onto his back, a possible cushion should he rise up and into a ceiling, "let's go find a clean place to rest a while, then we'll set out."
They moved just beyond the constricting tunnel and found something suitable. It was a slightly wider section of tunnel that was straight and with a rather flat floor, but still with a ceiling only about four spans off the floor. They spread the fur coats on the hard stone and rested for a short time, then started out.
The passage through the caves was much warmer than travelling the mountains above, but that lack of cold was countered by the sheer effort of travelling like that. True to his observation about caves, the tunnel they followed was almost whimsical in its dimensions. Sometimes it would be dozens of spans wide and high, almost like chambers, sometimes it was so narrow and small they would have had to literally wriggle through bending zig-zags on their bellies had they not had the advantage of being able to shapeshift into a much smaller form. In fact, in no less than four places they encountered that first morning, they were forced to shift into cat form to wriggle through tiny holes, which would have stopped any other spelunker that hadn't brought a pick and a shovel with him. The floor was rarely even, with shelves or fissures in it, higher on one side of the passage than the other, making footing a serious business for both of them. They occasionally had to climb up or down sheer rock faces, cliffs underground, vertical shafts that sometimes twisted and turned like the deranged machinations of some insane Wikuni plumber's most feverish fantasies. Tarrin could swear that one particular strange loop in the tunnel was almost like a thread inside the stone of the mountain tying itself into a knot. It went up, then down, then up, then down, and slid from side to side as it did so, giving it the illusion that it turned back on itself, like the floor of the passage actually rested right on the other side of the ceiling over their heads. Though the tunnel rose and fell in turns, the down parts were longer than the up, and Tarrin realized that they were descending deeper and deeper into the mountain's core. Stalagtites and stalagmites were everywhere, posing a very real hazard to their heads, and the caves were surprisingly wet, with water dripping from the ceilings or oozing from the walls. There were patches of actual mud in some places, and there was part of the tunnel where they were forced to swim along a narrow channel, a flooded part of the passage. It was a swim through water as cold as ice, and left both of them soggy and with chattering teeth when they got to the dry tunnel on the other side of the fifty spans of submerged passage.
"T-This was a b-b-bloody b-b-bad id-d-d-dea," Jesmind said, her teeth clicking as she hugged her arms to her sides.
"That wasn't very pleasant," he agreed with a shiver, then he used Sorcery to strip the water off of them, then warmed them with a gentle weave of Fire and Air, warming the air around them. "But at least we didn't have to go totally under the water."
"Oh, that's a relief," she snapped shortly, then she sighed as the warmth of his spell started seeping into her cold skin. "You're a handy fellow to have around," she smiled as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the warmth.
"Thank you. Someday I aspire to be more than your slave."
"Don't count on it," she winked.
Though the effort was exhausting, neither of them wanted to stop. They both seemed not willing to stop until they got so deeply into the mountain that neither the Demons nor the blizzard could find any way to reach them. They continued on, steadily descending deeper and deeper, and Tarrin noticed that the properties of the tunnel were changing. The narrow areas were becoming further and further apart, and the tunnel grew noticably wider and the grade of the passage less severe as they got deeper inside the mountain. Almost like the caves in the heart of the mountain were older, and had more time for the water to dissolve away the rock and make them bigger. That made the going much easier and faster, almost like they were walking through a carved passage than a natural tunnel.
It was about then that he noticed the peculiarities of a deep underground passage. It was pitch black, which was normal for such a place, but the air and the rock almost seemed to swallow the light. The little dim lights he made only illuminated a very small area around them, but their night-sighted eyes let them penetrate deeply into the gloom beyond that light, but even that wasn't a tremendous distance. Tarrin found the idea of having the range of his vision impaired extremely irritating, and not a little unsettling. He was a creature heavily grounded in his senses, and a limitation on one of those senses made him jumpy and nervous. The air, though fresh, still had a strange stagnant quality to it. It did move and it was fresh, but it moved in and out of caves that all had the same musty smell, making the air heavy with dull scents that were hard to make out, since the same scents had been drifting around down here for years. Smells of rock and dust and dirt, and also strange plant-like smells like mold, lichen, and fungus. Rare, strange plants that could survive in a world without light. And sound was very curious. They moved quietly, as was only their habit, but ever whisper of sound they made echoed and re-echoed up and down the passage, and the sound of dripping water carried down the passages for longspans. A loud noise would carry for a long way and echo for a long time, and if there was anything down there with them, it wouldn't take it long to find them if they made alot of noise. The sound was trapped, bouncing endlessly off the walls, and he realized that a sound could linger down here in these tunnels for days after the maker of the sound was long gone. Since there was no light, he figured that anything that lived down here that was carnivorous hunted by sound. That was another good reason to be as quiet as possible, though the simple fact that every sound they made lingered around them so long it made both of them unsettled was reason enough.
They travelled for quite a while, and Tarrin realized that being under the ground was going to make it hard for him to track time. He was never very good at keeping time, because of the nature of the Cat, and being robbed of the stars and moons and sun to serve as reference points, he would quickly lose count of the days. And knowing how many days he had to go was very important. When he thought that it was pretty close to sunset, he pulled up when they entered a huge chamber that had the sound of running water in it, like a bubbling brook, though wherever the water was, it was beyond the illumating range of the little balls of light. "We should camp a while," he told her lowly, looking at the cave that he could see. It was a large chamber, with an irregular dome-like roof that was about thirty spans off the floor, the chamber roughly circular in shape. The water turned out to be a small underground river that flowed from north to south through the chamber, with their passage extending on towards the northeast, a decline hiding the passage and letting them see nothing but its ceiling almost as soon as it left the chamber.