only to feel him place a finger on her lips.
“Words prove nothing,” he admonished. “It is your deeds I will watch.”
He turned on his heel as abruptly as before and strode off, leaving Linsha mentally gasping. Doubtfully, she trailed after him while her mind replayed that brief confrontation again and again. By the powers of Paladine, she thought, what did he mean by that? Was he trying to catch her off guard, or did he know more about her than he was telling? Had she revealed more than she intended?
Lord Bight gave her not a glance but continued walking rapidly across the great cavern. At the far end, he ducked through another opening into a tunnel similar to the last. Beyond the shadowhall, though, the single tunnel broke off into a labyrinth of tunnels, passages, and halls. To the left and right, arched doorways opened into tunnels going in every direction. Half-seen stairways dropped away into gaping blackness, and countless turns and junctions left Linsha totally bewildered. It was good she had a guide who seemed to know where he was going, and she hoped in the back of her mind that he wouldn’t leave her down there to rot. She had no doubt she could never find her way back by herself.
The air was cool and damp in the tunnels, and sometimes they passed deep chambers that smelled strongly of mushrooms. Several times they crossed over shallow streams where blind fish swam in the crystal clear waters. Although they didn’t see another denizen of the shadowpeople’s realm, Linsha sensed the creatures were close by. She had an eerie impression of watchfulness, and once in a while she would hear faint voices growl in the gloom or the distant scratch of claw on stone.
They had walked for nearly two hours through the maze of tunnels before Lord Bight broke the silence. “We are under what is left of the Temple of Duerghast. From here the going becomes more difficult.”
To Linsha’s embarrassment, her stomach chose that moment to rumble a loud protest at her lack of supper.
Lord Bight shook his head. “I suppose we’d better rest so you can eat. I’d hate to have my bodyguard faint from hunger.” He jammed the end of his torch into a crack in the wall and sat on the stone floor, the box between his knees.
Still dubious of his intentions, Linsha sat out of arm’s reach. Her own torch guttered a few times and went out, leaving them in the feeble light of just one torch. Hurriedly she lit another one, then delved into the pack for food. Lord Bight sat wordlessly and watched her, his eyes half amused, half knowing.
She managed to eat a slab of bread and cheese and some figs before she lost her patience. “Why are you staring at me?” she demanded.
“You’re prettier than the stone wall,” he replied reasonably.
She snapped a few waterfront oaths, then lapsed into silence. There was no arguing with him. He was as good as Ian Durne at keeping her off-balance. What was it about these two men that made her act like a tongue- tied maid? She downed a mouthful of water, shoved everything back in the pack, and jumped to her feet in one fluid, angry motion. He followed more slowly, looking amused, and took the lead once again.
The passage they were in ran due south, then curved to the east under the flanks of Mount Ashkir. Other junctions and tunnel openings dwindled in number until the path ran on alone and gradually left the Shadowrealm behind. The feeling of watchfulness faded from Linsha’s awareness, and the echoes of voices vanished into the dark depths of the earth. The only sounds left were the dull thud of the travelers’ footfalls and the subdued swish of their clothing. The tunnel itself degraded from a smooth path to a rough opening that was barely more than a wide crack in the mountain. The walls pressed closer, and the floor became uneven and more difficult to cross. Rockfalls and boulders lay on the trail. Fissures opened up before them, some smoking with sulfurous steam. The air grew noticeably warmer. When Linsha put her hand on the walls, she could feel a quiver in the rock like a distant tremble that shook the bowels of the volcano.
Mount Ashkir was still an active volcano, and years after its primary eruption, it still belched steam and ash and an occasional stream of lava. But its main force had been dissipated, and the lava river that once threatened to engulf the south side of Sanction had disappeared, largely due-at least, so they said in Sanction-to Lord Bight’s magic. All that remained on the surface of Ashkir’s slope was a narrow flow on the eastern side that fed into the defensive dikes that protected the city from invasion from the East Pass.
Linsha tried to keep all of that in mind as the path worked deeper and deeper into the interior of the peak. Lord Bight was with her and he could handle a recalcitrant volcano, hut Mount Ashkir was quiet these days; there was nothing to worry about. It didn’t matter that the air had become uncomfortably hot and heavy, and the quivering had strengthened to a continuous low-pitched rumble that Linsha could feel through her boots with every step. Everything would be all right.
She wished she could remove her tunic again, but Lord Bight didn’t stop or slow down, and Linsha kept doggedly at his heels. Soon the path entered a long, narrow cavern that sloped upward on a steep incline. The rumbling was louder still, echoing through the passage with a dull roar like distant thunder.
They scrambled up the black slope, using both hands and feet to fight for balance on the broken rubble. At the top, the trail plunged into another opening that Linsha recognized was an old lava tube. Although old beyond measure, the tube was still passable enough to crawl through, and it bore straight and true for several hundred feet.
At the mouth of the tube, Lord Bight tossed aside his used torch and faced Linsha with a feral grin of anticipation. “You won’t need your torch here.”
Linsha followed suit, trying to ignore the nervousness that gnawed in her belly. When she climbed into the tube behind Lord Bight, she peered past his shoulder and saw why the torches weren’t necessary. At the opposite end, the opening of the tube glowed with a pulsing reddish glare that flickered with tongues of yellow. The rumbling she had heard for so long thundered down the tube to pound at her ears. Linsha’s mouth went dry; her face shone with sweat. She crawled rapidly after Lord Bight, ignoring the sharp flakes of rock that cut her hands and gouged her knees. The light intensified, and the heat beat at her face like an opened kiln.
The governor looked back once to see if she was still following. When his gaze found hers, he nodded once and pushed on without a word.
All too soon for Linsha, they reached the end of the tube and crawled out onto a wide ledge in the largest cavern Linsha had ever seen. It was immense, a vast chamber beneath the mountain, where the liquid lava rose from the depths through an unseen chasm. The molten rock gathered at the bottom of the cave in a seething, bubbling river that filled the chamber with lurid light and heat.
Fumes, acrid and bitter, burned Linsha’s throat and brought tears to her eyes. She reeled back in shock from the fiery heat. Swiftly she tore a strip from her tunic, doused it in water from the bag, and tied it across her mouth and nose. Lord Bight did the same.
Gesturing to her to follow, he made his way carefully to the right along the path that followed a narrow shelflike ledge. Rough and uneven, the ledge tenaciously clung to the upper wall of the great cavern for its entire length, snaking above the slow-moving river of lava until the stream cascaded down again out of sight into another chasm beyond sight and knowledge.
Linsha clamped her hand over her mask and moved after the governor. She kept her eyes on the ledge in front of her feet and tried to disregard the dizzying drop only a step away from her path. The intense heat made her feel sluggish and slow, but she crept on, knowing that to stop meant certain death. She thought she knew now what it felt like to be a fly trapped in a fireplace.
They were nearly three quarters of the way along the length of the cave when Linsha finally saw a narrow, dark opening at the end of the trail. She wiped her sleeve across her streaming eyes to look again and knocked her mask askew. It had dried in the intense heat, so she fumbled at its knot to untie it and drench it with water again. A wave of dizziness engulfed her, causing her to stumble into the wall. Her elbow crashed into a sharp projection, and pain lanced through her arm. Half-blind, choked with fumes, and dizzy with heat and pain, she tried to right herself, only to lean too far in the other direction. Her boot came down heavily on a cracked edge of the stone, and before she could regain her balance, the crack gave way and her left leg plunged over the edge of the shelf.
Frantically she threw her body forward to hug the ledge. The impact of her fall knocked the air from her lungs, and the pack on her back slipped over to her side, tipping her weight even more off-balance. Her fingers scrabbled on the crumbling verge, but her arms were too weak to stop the momentum of her fall. Her right leg and hips rolled over the edge and her grip failed.
“Help!” she cried to Lord Bight. In her desperate struggle to retain her place, she couldn’t see him, and in her mind she was alone as her upper body slid completely off the shelf and her arms slid inexorably toward the
