Elvenborn

And more elven bones, this time ones without armor. Women? Old men?

A disintegrating wagon that had been laden with small, slen­der creatures—it took her a moment to get past the disbelief to understand that this had been a wagon full of children.

It was hard to imagine. One seldom saw elven children; they were usually kept in nurseries until they were considered old enough to mingle with the rest of society. She could hardly imagine so many in one place. What sort of spirit would a child leave behind? Something wispy and melancholy—or feral and vicious?

Whatever had sent the Elvenlords into flight had terrified their beasts as well. Triana began to feel a certain relief that the few scraps of information she'd gleaned had not been more specific, that legend now painted the Crossing as a matter of tri­umph rather than the tragedy it had so clearly been. She didn't want to know the details now; there were already too many de­tails writ large in the bones of those who had not survived to become her ancestors.

She reached out her hand to steady herself, and wood went to dust at her touch, enlarging the passage that Kyrtian's peo­ple had already made. Her very skin flinched away from that dust, but it rose in clouds about her and dried her mouth and throat, as if the dead themselves rose to make claims on her....

Don't be such a superstitious idiot! she scolded herself, but without effect. Her pounding heart, the blood rushing in her ears, her very skin were rebels to her reason.

But she forced herself past, and once out of the jam-up, the way suddenly cleared. No more bones; or at least, none that flashed whitely at her in the circle of her light. Just—things. Belongings, discarded, unidentifiable. She could cope with things. Especially things that went to atoms at a touch, collaps­ing in on themselves and leaving nothing behind that called up uncomfortably familiar images in the mind.

The path that Kyrtian's underlings took was plainly scribed in that litter, a trail where only bits of metal shone dully in the

dust. She paused a moment to listen, and thought she caught the faintest of murmurs from somewhere far ahead; covered her light, but saw no glimmers in the distance. Wherever he was, if that was, indeed, the sound of him and his people, it was far ahead of her. She hurried on, suddenly hungry for the sight of something living, even if it was an enemy. A living enemy right now was preferable to the whispers in the dark.

'This place makes my skin crawl,' Lynder muttered to Shana. 'I don't see how he can stand it.' He was pale, freckles she hadn't noticed before standing out clearly across his cheeks. She also hadn't noticed how young he was before this; all of Kyrtian's people were so competent and confident that she'd taken them all for mature adults. Now she saw Lynder for the beardless boy he actually was, newly jumped- up from a page, perhaps. Well, fear did that to people.

Shana didn't see how their leader could seem so unaffected by the place, either. Kyrtian had mage-lights floating silently over their heads, set to avoid collision with the ceiling but oth­erwise lighting up this series of smaller caves with pitiless clar­ity. The tangle of carts and beasts at the mouth of this complex had been the worst, of course; Shana had been so tempted to flee screaming away and swarm right back up the rope into the clean rain outside.

And the cart full of what had been children! No matter what the Elves had done to her, to the Wizards, and especially to their slaves—the thought of that cartload of children dying tangled up together in the dark—

It had made her throat close and her eyes sting, and she didn't care that it had happened hundreds of years ago.

They think I'm fearless, she had told herself. And that had made her clench her teeth, thrust out her chin, and pretend that her whole body wasn't flinching away from the wreck­age, the bones. She squared her shoulders, and tensed to keep herself from shivering. These were men she had to impress; they weren't Wizards, they weren't slaves. She was a legend to them, and if they lost faith in the legend—they would lose faith in the cause. She needed them; more, probably, than

they needed her. If all it took to keep their faith was to pre­tend to be utterly fearless, it was a small price to pay for that faith.

But Kyrtian had only directed the enlargement of a passage already there ... a passage showing the imprint of a single pair of narrow feet in the dust.

His father made it; he must have. Kyrtian knows thai. This is what he's been looking for, and all he can see is those foot­prints leading us deeper.

Kyrtian had spent a long moment studying those prints ... then he had taken the lead, face immobile and expressionless, as the rest had to stretch to keep up with him.

'I've never seen him like this before,' Lynder continued, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve, leaving behind a smudge of the dust of the dead obscuring the freckles scattered across his cheeks. He shuddered.

'He's not thinking about you—or about anyone,' Keman said slowly. 'He's completely inside his own head.'

The three of them exchanged glances; she read in Lynder's face that he at least would rather not be privy to what was in Kyrtian's head just now. She rather agreed with him.

It was bad enough being out here. The deeper into this string of caves they got, the more the feeling of doom—whether lin­gering or impending she couldn't say—increased. She'd never been claustrophobic before, but she felt the walls of these little caves closing in on her—or was it that they seemed to pulse and heave, slowly, as if they all traveled down the gullet of some impossibly huge, sleeping monster? If the walls clearly hadn 't been rock, the floor clearly the same, it would have been all too easy to succumb to the illusion.

'Do you feel it?' Keman murmured, for her ears only. 'That kind of drone in the back of your brain? Like there's something just barely awake out there and we're touching the edge of its dreams? Or there's something singing a nasty dirge in its sleep?'

She nodded. She did; had, in fact, since they'd been here. It wasn't getting any stronger, and if Keman hadn't said anything, she'd have put it down to nerves—but it was there, a sound so

deep it could only be felt. She wondered what else Keman heard; he had the benefit of senses that could be enhanced with­out any immediate limit.

'There's nothing alive down here, either,' Keman continued, and shivered. 'Not even slime.'

Nothing alive. Unheard of. Caves always had their own little community of creatures: insects, bats, mice, and the fungi that the littlest fed on before they in turn became the prey of the biggest. Where were they all?

And what drove them away?

She couldn't see Kyrtian's face from her place at the rear of the group, but Lynder's was bleached as white as the bones they'd left back there, and she fancied her own was, as well. Life leached out of them with every step they took deeper into the maw of the mountain.

Shana suddenly felt that they would never leave this place; that they would continue to stumble along in Kyrtian's wake until they dropped in their tracks and died. That this was what had happened to Kyrtian's father—no accident, but the moun­tain sucking the life out of him as he plodded deeper into its depths, lured by its promise and threat until he stumbled and could not rise again.

Then, without warning, Kyrtian stopped.

The mage-lights under Kyrtian's control shot past them out into some vast space ahead, and they kept from blundering into him only by swerving to his right or left. Which brought all of them to stand next to him at the edge of an abrupt drop-off, star­ing out into a cavern that could have swallowed any cave Shana had ever seen without a trace. Her pulse racketed in her throat: how nearly she had gone over the edge!

At least, that was her initial reaction. As she teetered on the edge and her eyes adjusted, it became clear that the drop-off was not nearly as far as panic had made her think. She might have broken an ankle had she gone