As the last Solamnic 'alone' crossed his lips, the juggler plucked the knife from the air. But instead of hiding it away, as he had all the other objects, Shardos wheeled toward us suddenly and hurled the blade end over end through the cavern.
It glittered in torchlight as it tumbled through the air and lodged in the chest of the big bodyguard.
For a moment, everyone was stunned. The enormous Plainsman looked stupidly down at his chest, then, as though his wound was only then dawning on him, tumbled to his knees and, with a wordless outcry, onto his face.
There was a brief, familiar pause, as there often is when first blood is drawn in a skirmish between inexperienced fighters, when both sides stop, see what has been wrought, and take in the knowledge that this is real, that the fighting is for keeps and is only beginning.
Then, like some enormous fluked monster rising from the depths of the Blood Sea, Ramiro lurched free of the guards, grabbed the nearest Plainsman by his long, braided hair, and sent the man hurtling into the nearest wall, rattling a torch from its sconce in the process.
Throughout the large stone room, lights were extinguished and things hurled, and the dry curses and calls of the Que-Tana bounced off the tricky walls. I threw my first stone-at the nearest of my foes, of course, for I figured there was no point to any jugglery of my own.
The rock clattered harmlessly past the dried grass stool on which Firebrand had sat, and my target crouched and loaded a sling.
With a deft move of his hand, now glowing with a simple but surprisingly powerful clerical magic, Brithelm seized the wrist of a large Plainsman who was choking Shardos. In my brother's grip, the Que-Tana passed at once into deep, snoring sleep on the cavern floor as Brithelm turned to face further onslaught and Shardos caught his breath again.
Something blurred in the air in front of me, a dark thing flying out of the dappled torchlight, and I had no time to move or fear or even reflect…
And a dark, deft hand plucked the stone from the air, as neatly as it had once caught crockery in the wealthy halls of Palanthas and in floating palaces on the Blood Sea.
Quickly Shardos hurled the rock back into the milling Plainsmen, end over end into the rising shadow. In the vanguard of that mass of robes and pale skin, one shadow fell, clutching at its side.
Then Ramiro rushed in the wake of the stone, scattering Plainsmen as he waded in among our adversaries. His meaty fist found the face of a Plainsman warrior. Blood spouted from the pale man's septum, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he fell to the stone floor, scattering beads and teeth.
Bellowing with delight, Ramiro dodged the downward arc of a Que-Tana club, and as the wielder staggered, the big Knight planted his wide, hobnailed boot squarely on the backside of the Plainsman and propelled him headfirst into three of his approaching comrades, who toppled like drunks at a country fair. Caught up in the rampage, the big man hurdled a downed stalagmite, felling two stalactites when he leapt too high in his enthusiasm. Staggering, he caught one of the stone icicles before it hit the ground and brought the heavy thing whistling up into the groin of yet another approaching enemy. Another he struck, and then another, until his dangerous path brought him to a dropped sword. Puffing, he crouched over, picked it up, and came up in the stance that the ogres call 'the Feminator.'
Twenty Plainsmen crouched involuntarily and took a step back, which gave Brithelm a chance to reach Ramiro's side. Together the two of them, a most unlikely tandem, backed toward the shelves at the far end of the chamber, forming as they did a narrow passage through the windmilling confusion of robe and armor and weapon.
'Go on, lad!' Shardos shouted in my ear above the cries of the Plainsmen. I resisted his push, for since the Solamnic Order was closing with the Que-Tana at last, it seemed that the only fitting action was to answer their blows.
Shardos restrained me.
'We can hold them back only a little while,' he said merrily, a curious smile spreading over his face. 'And after all, who better to send burrowing after vermin than a weasel?'
He pushed me again, and this time I was on my way, straight toward the ponderous shelves at the end of the chamber.
I slipped behind Brithelm and Ramiro, the bluish arms of the Plainsmen reaching for me, clutching, grabbing. Brithelm had spread a green, unnatural spellfire through the chamber, and for a minute, our adversaries recoiled, overwhelmed by light.
Blinded a little myself by the brilliant glow, I staggered until my eyes adjusted, until the shadowy outline of the shelves emerged from the dazzlement. Recovering my bearings, I raced toward the far entrance.
But I had lost valuable time.
Ahead of me, racing to cut off my escape, a lean, fierce-looking Plainsman half again my size positioned himself and raised a glistening onyx war hammer. I took a long, gathering step and leapt into him, and the two of us crashed to the floor, the hammer skittering harmlessly into the wall in front of me.
Then, for the first time in a long time, I had my eldest brother Alfric to thank. For in the forgotten arenas of the moathouse, he had sharpened my wrestling well, in a childhood when to be a little brother was to dodge, to scramble, to grapple with things larger than yourself.
Larger the man was, but also surprisingly fragile. In a moment, I was atop him, his head in my hands. I twisted my arms abruptly, and the snapping sound that followed seemed to echo in a deep and silent chasm far from the shouting and clash of metal around me.
As I knelt there, the imagined silence gave way to the outcry behind me. Then two strong hands lifted me, and I recognized my brother Brithelm's voice as he coaxed and assured me with words that I could not recognize then nor remember now, and together we rose and raced from a land of chaos and knives into the far shadows and the cold corridor beyond.
Chapter XXI
'Steep' and 'formidable' were indeed the words for it.
With Brithelm leading, we took every downward path imaginable, all of which seemed to circle as though we descended through the whorls of a shell. My brother guided us through the torchlit passages that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves, and when a sudden gust of wind from a side corridor extinguished the flames ahead of us, he guided us by an unexpected glow from the tips of his fingers.
The walls of the corridor were scratched with graffiti in the swirling alphabet of the Plainsmen. Names, Brithelm said they were mostly, as we hastened by them-names and religious slogans in which he said he could find no clear theology.
As we descended even farther, the letters gave way to pictographs and drawings of bats and tenebrals. There was one disconcertingly deft drawing of an enormous vespertile closing its monstrous, leathery wings around a band of Que-Tana. The drawing was abstract, almost childlike, and it summoned a deep and rousing fear within me, and evidently also in Brithelm, for he clutched the front of my tunic when I stopped to stare at the scene, then pulled me onward.
I thought of Oliver, shuddered, and doubled my pace.
Those drawings gave way to yet others of surface animals such as horses and leopards and, occasionally, birds. The two moons, red and silver, careened over a herd of pegasi, Finally a city lay toppled to its foundations, surrounded by designs and patterns only, abstract and geometrical, squares and spheres and rhomboids and a strange, geometrical man astride it, his head among the clouds and a swath of soot from a nearby sconce obscuring his face and eyes.
It was the final drawing; the walls were bare as we descended even farther. We had gone too deep for tenebrals, into the very core of the mountain.
Deeper still we went, past where vespertile guano caked the walls and floors of the corridor, to a depth where bone and shards of strange pottery were all that kept the tunnels from a sort of smooth sameness of milky
