“We found it,” she said, her voice alive with childlike excitement. “It’s a cave, just like I told you!”

Coming up behind her, Eustus saw it: a ragged opening that looked just big enough to crawl through. The ledge they were on, he saw, ran just to the edge of the hole. The rest of it had been taken down by the loosened rock that had fallen to expose the cave, and now lay somewhere under the lake’s placid surface far below.

“Enya,” he asked seriously, “do you think this is safe? I mean, whatever caused the rock to fall might happen again.”

She paused a moment, considering. “They were doing some blasting at the MacCready mine not too long ago – that’s on the far side of the mountain. I imagine that’s what must have caused it. But Ian told me they weren’t going to be doing any more explosives work for a while.” She frowned to herself. Unless Belisle betrays us, she thought. “It should be fairly stable, as long as you don’t go firing off your gun or something.”

Eustus grinned. “I already did that.”

She laughed, then began to move toward the cave entrance. Eustus, concentrating hard now, followed close behind her.

“Let me have your light,” she said.

Out of long habit, Eustus carried a variety of essential items on his pistol belt everywhere he went when dressed in his combat uniform. His blaster, of course; but he also carried a handheld light, comm link, basic medical kit, and his combat knife. Unclipping the light from his belt, he handed it to her. “Be careful,” he cautioned.

Nodding, she turned on the light and shone it as far as she could down the cave mouth. “Well, it’s not just a pocket, anyway.” She turned the light off and clipped it to her pants. Then, judging the distance carefully, she half stepped, half jumped from the end of the ledge into the low mouth of the cave.

Eustus followed quickly behind her, willing himself not to look down as he crossed the small gap. Enya took his arm and steadied him in the low opening. Crouching down, they made their way forward in a duck walk, Enya shining the light ahead of them. After a few meters of scrabbling over rough rock, they emerged into what seemed like a larger tunnel, big enough for them to stand upright with plenty of room to spare.

“Look at this,” she said, shining the light around the tunnel. “This looks like it’s been bored out.”

Eustus looked back at the section that led outside. The walls there were much rougher and rocky, almost as if someone had pressed a cap of debris into the main tunnel. “Could it be an old mine that your people dug out some time ago?”

“And be covered over with rock like that?” Enya shook her head. “No. I know we could bore a hole up this high if we really wanted to, but it would be bigger than this. A lot bigger. Besides, the rock that was covering this up looked like part of the cliff, not just debris pushed back down the shaft. If that were the case, this cave would have been filled with rocks and dirt, but it’s not. It’s too clean.”

“An airshaft?”

“With no opening to the outside?” She shook her head. “And it’s so smooth.” She knelt down and brushed away some of the dust on the floor. “It’s almost like glass. Our boring machines are good, but nothing like this.”

Eustus frowned. None of it made much sense. It’s almost as if someone had bored out the tunnel almost to the cliff face from the inside, he thought. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out what it is,” he told her.

Enya leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I love a man with a sense of adventure,” she told him.

Wondering what they were getting themselves into, he followed her into the cave.

“This is unbelievable,” she said after they had gone about three hundred paces into the tunnel.

“This thing’s as smooth and straight as a pipe,” Eustus said quietly as he followed the slight downward angle of the floor. The echo inside was becoming increasingly eerie, and he had to fight back the urge to grab Enya and head back toward the rapidly fading light behind them. “Has any evidence been found of any other sentient races having lived on Erlang before your people arrived?”

She shook her head as she walked onward, following the white beam of light from the flashlight.

“No, nothing. People have looked, of course.” She did not add that only the Raniers had had the time and money for archeological pursuits. “But only animal bones and such things have been discovered. No paintings, carvings, pottery, or any of that kind of thing, and certainly no tools or other signs of a sentient race.”

Eustus frowned. His brain knew something, he could sense it, but he just could not quite make out what it was. I’ve got all the pieces, he thought, I just can’t put them together right.

Something hard and sharp in his pants cargo pocket rubbed against his leg.

The dragon’s claw.

A tunnel made neither by human hands, nor by nature.

The dragon’s claw. A weird rock that was sharp enough to draw blood.

“Oh, my God,” Eustus groaned as he shuddered to a stop, the hair on the back of his neck standing at stiff attention.

“What?”

“Give me the light, Enya!”

Her eyes wide with concern in the pitch darkness, she handed the tiny torch to him.

Grabbing it from her, he shone it on the dragon’s claw he had carefully extracted from his pocket. “Oh, shit,” he murmured. “I knew I’d seen this before.”

“Eustus, it’s just a rock,” she told him with utter conviction.

He looked up at her, his face creased with fear, something she had never seen him show before. “No it’s not, Enya. It’s Kreelan metal, a blade from what Reza calls a shrekka, the most lethal blade weapon the Kreelans have. They can penetrate armor that’ll stop a pulse rifle cold. You said these things have been found all around here?”

Enya nodded. “Yes. I mean, it’s not like thousands have been found, or anything, but all the ones that I know of – probably a few dozen over the years – have been picked up around the valley outside. Eustus, are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Once you’ve been tagged by one of these, or seen someone else get hit with one, you don’t soon forget. I would’ve recognized it sooner, except that it’s in terrible condition, and the center hub is missing.” He thought about that for a moment. “Enya, this thing must have been here for a long time. An incredibly long time. Kreelan blade steel is the toughest material known. It lasts forever and stands up to practically anything. Some metallurgists are even convinced that it’s some kind of quasi-organic material, able to reshape itself, to maintain its edge and balance without any kind of sharpening.” He looked at her. “We’ve never been able to duplicate or reforge it.” He looked down at the blade he held gingerly in his hand. “This thing must have been here for thousands of years.” He looked up at her. “Maybe longer.”

Enya was very quiet for a moment, until the eerie silence in the tunnel made her afraid not to speak, just so her ears could hear something. “So, you think this tunnel was made… by them?”

“That would seem to fit,” he said quietly, turning the shrekka blade over in his hand.

“Then what is this place?” Enya asked. “And if there were Kreelans here at one time, where did they go? Why did they leave?”

“I don’t know. But I guess nobody can say anymore that the Kreelans have never ventured beyond the Grange. Because they were here, all right. At least they were when our ancestors were still learning how to finger- paint on cave walls.”

“Could… could they still be here… down there?” She tilted her head toward the darkness of the tunnel.

Eustus shook his head in the reflected light, but with less conviction than Enya would have liked to see. “If there had been any still alive here, I’m sure your predecessors would have met up with them. I’ve never known Kreelans to be particularly shy around humans.”

“What should we do?”

“I think we should go back and get Reza. He’s the only one who could make any sense of this, and–”

He broke off as Enya collapsed. Her hands covered her ears, her mouth open in a silent scream of pain. Even as he made a motion to help her, the sound erupted in his skull like an explosion, knocking him to his knees. The flashlight fell from his hand, went out as the switch hit the smooth rock, plunging them into darkness.

The voices had returned. The keening wail rapidly grew and multiplied into the chorus that he had heard

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