To Light A Candle

“I’ll need it to see underground,” Kellen said, wrapping it around himself again.

“Then it is good that you should wear it,” Ancaladar said. “Humans find these caverns very dark.”

The dragon turned his attention to the cliff face. Several yards up the icy rock wall, Kellen could see a wide slit in the stone. Ancaladar stuck his head into the gap and squirmed in, furling his enormous ribbed wings tightly against his sides. And that was possibly the strangest thing that Kellen had seen in—well, a long time. The dragon shouldn’t have been able to fit in there. What could it do, disjoint all its bones?

My turn. Kellen flexed his gauntleted hands, and began to climb.

Elven armor, it was said by its makers, was flexible enough that its wearer could dance in it, and certainly the combat form practiced by the Elven Knights was very much like dance. Kellen also knew, from previous experience, that you could climb in Elven armor, but he’d never tried climbing a vertical ice-covered wall in it.

He managed to get halfway up, though, before a long black-scaled arm tipped in golden talons appeared out of the darkness and plucked him into the cave.

“You take too long,” Ancaladar said.

Oh.

“Um. Sorry. I’m a lot smaller than you are. It takes me longer to get places.” Kellen squirmed past the dragon’s body—fortunately this entrance to the cave system was fairly wide—and moved forward until he was in front of Ancaladar’s head. Even though he was technically in front, the dragon was so enormous that it was still in the lead—it had only to stretch out its long sinuous neck to put its head several yards in front of Kellen.

The passage here was fairly straight, without any side passages, and the tarnkappa’s darksight spell ensured that it was as bright as day, even though Ancaladar’s body blocked all the light from the outside. Kellen started forward confidently.

Soon the passage opened out into a cavern. It was so large that he could not see the far side of it, even with the aid of the tarnkappa’s magical sight. He could feel a faint steady breeze blowing over him—from deep in the earth toward the outside air.

The path ended in a drop-off, but fortunately it wasn’t a sheer drop. There was a slope—steep, but manageable. Kellen gritted his teeth and started down it.

It was steeper than he’d thought, and he ended up making most of the journey to the bottom on his rump. Behind him, he saw Ancaladar step neatly to the cave floor—the dragon’s size made the drop-off no more than a single step for him.

Kellen was about to ask which way they went now, when Ancaladar’s head suddenly shot up. He saw the dragon’s nostrils flare—just like Shalkan’s when he smells something bad—and then, without a word or a sound, Ancaladar gave a great bound and launched himself at the nearest cave wall, climbing quickly and silently until he’d vanished into the shadows.

That was good enough for Kellen, even though he heard nothing. He scrambled quickly to his feet and looked around for a place to get out of the way. He saw a niche between the edge of the cliff and the cave wall—not much, but it would have to do. He quickly moved toward it and pressed himself back into the corner.

Just in time, it turned out. He’d barely settled himself when he began to hear faint noises, as of a large group of people moving quietly, but not entirely silently. A few moments later they came into view.

There were eight of them. Six were male, the two bringing up the rear were female. It was easy to tell, because none of them was wearing much more than a hip wrap. All were barefoot as well.

The two females were both carrying large bundles of netting. The nets were made of some substance Kellen had never seen before—a shiny, silvery-grey substance that looked something like silk.

All of the males were armed, both with long spears balanced for throwing— Kellen’s Knight-Mage gifts told him that—but also with a variety of looted weapons. Kellen recognized swords and daggers that had belonged to his friends from the House of Sword and Shield, and felt a dull surge of anger.

These must be the Shadowed Elves Idalia mentioned—what Ancaladar calls “Tainted mock-Elves”

They were horrible in their own right, but to anyone who counted Elves as friends, they were especially horrible. There was no doubt of their Elven blood, but just as Idalia had said, somehow it had been mixed with Goblins to produce those fanged muzzles, receding jaws, and pale bulging eyes. Their hands and feet had talons, not nails, as well.

No wonder Vestakia had been able to find this place. And Idalia had said there was a whole colony of these creatures here.

They were obviously searching for Ancaladar. Every few feet the one in the lead would squat down and sniff the ground, then speak to the others in a strange guttural barking language. He was not the leader, apparently, for