troubled the high scout. Only ettins were solitary by nature, and the two-headed giants seldom viewed visitors as anything but a convenient meal.
A loud rattle sounded from the rim of the pit, then Galgadayle cried out, “Watch yourself!”
Tavis looked up, expecting to find a stone plummeting toward him. Instead, he saw several stones. Close behind came Orisino’s gangly figure, bouncing down the wall in great, barely controlled arcs. The verbeeg was clearly an inexperienced mountaineer. In addition to wrapping himself into the rappelling line backward, he was trying to slow himself by squeezing the rope with his guide hand, while his braking hand clutched at the cliff in a frantic effort to keep himself upright.
Tavis retreated into the cavern, then grimaced as first the stones, then the verbeeg crashed to the bottom of the icy pit.
“So much for being quiet!”
“Karontor take this rope!” Orisino sat up and hurled the tangled line at the wall. “It did nothing to stop me from falling!”
“It did too much,” Tavis retorted. “If it hadn’t slowed you down, I wouldn’t need to worry about all the witless things you’re bound to do inside the cavern.”
Without waiting to see if Orisino could hoist his battered frame off the ice, Tavis drew his glowing dagger and started into the cave.
The place was a confusing web of dark, jagged voids that shot off in all directions, with the sharp corners and broken edges of huge talus boulders jutting into the passages from every angle. In the distance, curtains of wayward sunbeams hung across the skewed corridors, like gray tapestries concealing the private halls of some madman’s castle. If not for the deep grooves of the ancient giant trail, the high scout would have been as lost as a child in a fen. Within the area lit by his glowing dagger alone, he saw at least fifty corridors, and off each of those there would be fifty more.
Unlike true caverns, whose depths were kept above freezing by the mountain’s warm heart, this jumbled maze of angles and corners was as frigid as a glacial crevasse. The cold air seeped down from above like drizzle down a chimney, riming the granite with hoarfrost and leaving the listing, sloping path as slick and treacherous as a ribbon of frozen stream. Tavis moved slowly and carefully, leaving his sword sheathed and Mountain Crusher on his shoulder, never taking a step without first finding a secure hold for his free hand. In this tangle of monoliths, any fall could be a fatal one, shooting the victim down the jagged mouth of an impossibly deep pit, or lodging him forever between a pair of granite boulders.
Orisino came up behind the high scout, clattering and groaning as he struggled to maintain his footing on the icy trail. The verbeeg had not bothered to light his torch, which left him both hands to maintain his balance. This was just as well. If the verbeeg happened to fall and injure himself, Tavis would feel compelled to offer help. Until the chieftain actually violated their agreement, the law demanded that he be treated as an ally, and allies did not leave wounded comrades to die in cold caverns.
“Be quiet, fool,” Tavis growled. “The giant will hear you coming a thousand paces away.”
“It hardly-ahhhh!” Orisino clutched Tavis’s arm, nearly falling and sending them both off the edge of a monolith. The verbeeg regained his balance, then said, “We can’t use this shortcut. We’d lose half our warriors on this ice.”
Tavis disengaged himself from the chieftain’s grasp. “You go back if you want. The trail may dry out up ahead.”
“Dry out? This whole place is one… big…” Orisino let his sentence trail off, then his voice grew sly. “What are you looking for? It’s no shortcut.”
The high scout did not reply. He continued forward, finally stopping at the head of a steep chute where one boulder stood against another. The corner between their two faces formed a long, angular ravine that descended into inky darkness beyond Tavis’s light. Some ancient giant had cut a series of huge, zigzagging stairs down the trough, but the frost-rimed treads were spaced at eight-foot intervals. Anyone as small as Tavis or Orisino would have to jump from one icy platform to the next. The only alternative was to climb down the center, using the seam between the monoliths for fingerholds. If either of the ’kin slipped, there was no telling how far they would fall.
“We’d better get our rope,” Orisino suggested.
Tavis did not bother to remind the chieftain of the line’s true ownership. Verbeegs considered private property an uncivilized and archaic concept, claiming instead that all things belonged to all people.
“If you want my rope, you fetch it,” Tavis said.
“And I suppose you’ll wait here until I return?” the verbeeg scoffed. “You go down first. I’ll watch how you do it.”
The wily chieftain was proving more difficult to scare off than Tavis had expected. The high scout sighed in exasperation. “If I don’t want you falling on me, I’d better teach you how to do this.”
Tavis passed his glowing dagger to the verbeeg, then removed his gloves and demonstrated how a person could support himself by jamming his fist into a narrow crack, such as that between the two boulders. Though the concept was simple, the art itself was full of nuances. Depending upon the width of the seam and the climber’s position, the fingers had to be folded into all manner of different configurations to lock the hand securely in place. Orisino paid careful attention, and was quickly able to run through the standard positions.
“You can twist your boots against the sides of the seam to wedge them in place, but don’t trust any footholds on the walls themselves,” Tavis cautioned. “The stone is too slick. Stay in the crack and you won’t have trouble.”
The high scout retrieved his glowing dagger and slipped the handle between his teeth, then lay on his belly and swung his legs over the chute. He wedged a foot into the crack and climbed down a short distance to wait for Orisino. The verbeeg reluctantly dangled his toes over the edge, kicking blindly at the crevice and grunting in frustration. For a time, Tavis thought his unwelcome companion would turn back, but the chieftain finally locked a boot into the crack and started to creep downward. After that, it did not take long for the verbeeg to gain his confidence, and soon the two ’kin were moving at a steady pace.
The stones grew colder as they descended. After a few minutes, Tavis’s bare hands felt so numb that he had difficulty feeling his handholds. It was impossible to tell how far they had come, or how far they still had to go. There was nothing but darkness below, with shadowy boulders and jagged, murk-filled passages advancing on them from all sides. In the bewildering array of gray corners and gloomy hollows, only the faithful tug of gravity prevented Tavis from losing his bearings and becoming completely disoriented.
A startled shriek broke from Orisino’s mouth and skipped through the crooked labyrinth in all directions, nearly concealing the clatter of the chieftain’s boots slipping free of their holds. Tavis pulled himself tight against the rock and twisted his hands and feet into the crack, locking himself in place. He gritted his teeth against the coming impact and silently cursed his companion’s clumsiness. Despite the frosty walls, the chute was no more difficult to descend than a ladder; as long as a climber kept a hand and foot lodged in the crevice at all times, falling was next to impossible.
Orisino did not land on him.
“Tavis, did you feel that?” The verbeeg’s voice was shrill with panic.
Tavis looked up and saw his companion dangling by a single arm, the soles of his hobnailed boots scant inches away. The chieftain was looking over his shoulder into a lopsided triangle of empty air.
The high scout freed one hand to take the dagger from his mouth. “The only thing I felt was you-almost knocking us both to our deaths. What’s wrong?”
Orisino gestured at the dark triangle. “Something pushed me! I felt a gust of warm air-a giant’s breath, maybe-then something big reached out of there and tried to push me off!”
Tavis raised his glowing dagger, illuminating the mouth of the dark passage Orisino had indicated. The high scout could not see far, but it was readily apparent that while a giant’s arm might squeeze through the hole, not even a verbeeg could actually crawl into it.
“I don’t see anything now,” the high scout said. “Maybe it was a bat.”
“It pushed me, like a hand!” Orisino insisted. “I’m not imagining this.”
“I didn’t say you were,” Tavis replied. “But we can’t do much about it now.”
The high scout returned his dagger handle to his mouth and continued downward. Orisino kicked his feet back into the crevice, then drew his own knife and followed. Their descent slowed significantly. Not only did the verbeeg insist upon keeping one hand free to hold his weapon, he spent more time peering into dark crannies than he did
