To Light A Candle

the leader urged him onward with blows, causing a dispute to break out among the hunting party. During all of this, the females cowered back, hissing.

At last they moved on. They passed right by Kellen’s hiding place without stopping to look, and Kellen blessed the Wild Magic that had gone into the tarnkappa’s making. Even when he could no longer see them, he stayed where he was, waiting for Ancaladar to return.

At last the dragon reappeared, gliding down to the floor of the cavern to land soundlessly. Even now it did not speak, merely swiveled its great head and pointed in the direction they should go.

Ancaladar had told the truth when he said that the Shadowed Elves were desperate to capture him at any cost. They encountered three more patrols as they went. Each time Ancaladar quickly hid, giving Kellen plenty of advance warning to conceal himself as well.

They moved through a series of interconnected caverns. All of them weren’t as large as the first one, but Kellen quickly realized that since they were following Ancaladar’s preferred route in and out of the caves there weren’t going to be any small passages. The only real problem that Kellen encountered—other than having to hide from the Shadowed Elves—was that terrain that Ancaladar could cross with ease presented towering obstacles for Kellen to climb over or detour around. Occasionally Ancaladar would grow impatient with the delay and pluck him into the air, setting him down somewhere several hundred yards distant. Kellen hadn’t quite made up his mind yet, but he thought he preferred scrabbling over slabs of basalt to being whisked through the air in the claws of an impatient dragon.

Not that he was feeling terribly patient himself, with Idalia somewhere ahead, trapped and hurt. He didn’t know, of course, but he had the sense that Ancaladar was being forced to detour by the Shadowed Elf patrols. That wasn’t good.

Finally Ancaladar stopped. He lowered his head, so it was right beside Kellen’s.

“This is the last of the ways we can go to reach your sister,” the dragon said, in a whisper so low that Kellen barely heard it. “It could be the safest of the ways we can go, or the most dangerous—it’s very narrow, and there’s nowhere to hide, but they may not have thought to look this way yet.”

Narrow. Terrific, Kellen thought, following the dragon as he moved forward again.

But “narrow” was a relative term. The passage was narrow for Ancaladar— the dragon had to fold his wings tightly and crouch down on his belly—but there was enough room for Kellen and the entire rescue party that had started out from Sentarshadeen (if they’d been there) to ride down the tunnel.

Suddenly the dragon stopped, stretching out his neck, his nostrils flaring.

“Oh, no—” he said in dismay. “We’re trapped—”

For the first time, Kellen fell into battle-trance immediately, without having to invoke it; it fell over him as he cast off the tarnkappa, as if it were somehow taking the place of the cloak.

In a way, it was; the dual-sight allowed him to see in the dark as the cloak spell did. He saw the Shadowed creatures as they stalked forward out of the darkness just as clearly as if he were still wrapped in its folds. He did not, however, charge.

Instead, he drew his sword, and waited. Waited for his doubled-sight to show him that they saw him for what he was. The aura of threat that surrounded him was unmistakable—that he knew from his lessons in the House of Sword and Shield. He was armed, and he was waiting for their attack. Now it became their choice to fight or flee.

They saw him for what he was—and they charged. One of them threw the net it carried. As if it were floating like a puff of down, Kellen watched it drift toward him, and in that odd slowed-time, he cut it in half as it started to fly past his head, aimed at Ancaladar, evidently, and not him.

The moment that the steel of his sword touched it, the two halves of the net withered and dropped to the ground. Kellen continued the stroke with a sideways twist of his wrist, to take off the head of the unwary creature that was nearest him.

They were frail, these Shadowed Elves; he killed it, and the one behind it, then let the momentum of his blade carry him around in a spin to cleave another across the spine. He made a recovery move, blocked the sword of a fourth as he kicked a fifth in the stomach, cut under the blocked blade to eviscerate the fourth one and as the fifth staggered backward, followed, and gutted it as well. The sixth and seventh were no real challenge; he took them out as they stared at him, dumbfounded.

He whirled. Ancaladar was frozen in place, eyes wide. “Move!” he snapped.

Ancaladar managed to compress himself against the wall of the tunnel enough to let him squeeze by.

This time he did charge, catching the much larger party that thought it was sneaking up in the rear entirely by surprise. For all of the weapons that they carried, for all of their superior ability to see in the dark, they might just as well have had no defensive ability at all. They were absolutely no match for the special advantages of a Knight-Mage, not even at fourteen-to-one.