The Elves of Cintra (20 page)

They passed out of the smaller markers into a forest of sepulchers, crypts, and mausoleums, aboveground tombs that hunkered down in the darkness amid the towering old-growth trees. There were bold carvings of runic symbols and strange creatures on stone doors and lintels. These tombs were very old, so old that some of their dates designated times before the advent of the human race. Many were written in ancient Elfish, a few in languages that were unrecognizable. They had the look of stone giants, monsters that slept, waiting to be awakened.

Kirisin glanced at Simralin, but she seemed unbothered by the tombs, her face calm and her movements relaxed as she strode ahead of him. She had always been like that—so under control, so confident in herself—and he had always envied her for it.

Erisha had reached a section of Ashenell that was dominated by a huge stone mausoleum, the crypts and sepulchers surrounding it left diminished in its shadow. The names on all of the mausoleum’s lesser children were carved in the same heavy block letters:
GOTRIN
.

They spread out to cover as much ground as possible, working their way through the maze of markers, reading names and dates, searching for mention of Pancea Rolt Gotrin. It wasn’t until they had gone through all the markers once and were working their way back again that Kirisin, drawn to the intricacy of the carvings on the walls of the large mausoleum, noticed a strange symbol carved in an otherwise flat and unmarked surface on one side of the tomb. He stared at it a moment, wondering what it was, started away again when nothing suggested itself, and then stopped and turned back for another look, recognition flooding through him.

The symbol, if you looked carefully, was decipherable. It consisted of three letters in Elfish imposed one on top of the other. The letters were
P, R,
and
G
—the first letters of Pancea Rolt Gotrin’s names.

“Erisha!” he hissed.

She turned at the sound of her name and hurried over. He pointed at the symbol, mouthed the three letters, and traced them as he did so. She nodded at once in agreement.

“Why is it here?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Simralin and Angel Perez had joined them by now, and Kirisin revealed what he had found. Simralin understood and explained the nature of the symbol to Angel. The Knight of the Word brushed at her short-cropped hair and frowned. “Is this her tomb?”

“Doesn’t say so,” Simralin replied. “It is a family crèche with the remains of dozens and dozens of lesser Gotrins. A Queen would have her own tomb, separate from the others.”

They fanned out, rechecking every marker within twenty yards. They found no mention of Pancea. Reassembling next to the symbol, they spoke in low, cautious voices, the night their only witness as they deliberated the puzzle.

“It’s a symbol, but maybe it’s something else, too,” Kirisin suggested.

“What sort of
something else
?” His sister took a closer look. “It seems an ordinary carving.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He touched the symbol with his fingers, tracing the letters, then pressed them to see if there was any give and felt around the ridges for anything he might have missed. He shook his head again. “It’s something else,” he repeated, the words a mumble that ended in a question mark.

“Could it have another meaning besides what the letters suggest?” Erisha asked suddenly. “Could they stand for something besides her name?”

Kirisin was looking all around now—at the other markers, the distant shadows, the leafy boughs of the trees surrounding them, and the ground, strewn with twigs and leaves and woodsy debris. Was he missing something?

Angel Perez stepped forward. “Wait a minute. You said Pancea had command of magic and that she was probably a witch. Maybe she provided for that. Maybe it takes magic to summon magic.”

She placed the tip of her staff against the Gotrin Elfish symbol, and her dark features tightened in concentration. The runes carved in her staff began to glow, turning bright with fiery light. Almost immediately the symbol responded; it, too, began to glow.

Then a deep grating sound broke the stillness of the night, the heavy rasp of stone moving across stone, and an entire section of the earth, not a dozen feet from where they stood, began to move. A huge slab, concealed beneath layers of dirt and debris, dropped slowly into the earth and out of sight, leaving a gaping hole.

The four stepped over to its edge and peered down. It was as black as pitch in the hole, but they could see that the slab formed a platform onto the steps of a stairway leading down.

“What do we do?” Simralin asked.

Angel Perez shook her head, the runes of her staff gone dark once more. Erisha started to say something, then stopped herself.

It was Kirisin who spoke the words that the rest of them couldn’t.

“We go down,” he said.

A
T THE WEST ENTRANCE
to the burial ground, hidden back in the shadow of the trees, Ailie caught a sudden whiff of demon scent. It was borne on the night breeze, coming out of the darkness north along the berm that designated the boundary to Ashenell. A second later, she saw a long, sinewy form leap out of the darkness, clear the earthen rise, and drop soundlessly inside the grounds. Ailie recognized it at once: it was the creature that had tracked them all the way from California, the creature that had twice done battle with Angel and twice been thwarted.

Now it was here.

Ailie wasn’t surprised that it had found them. It was a skilled hunter, a feral beast that could track anyone or anything. What surprised her was the timing. How had the creature happened to find them now, in the middle of the night?

Something about it didn’t feel right. Ailie watched the beast slouch through the markers, sniffing the ground, its big head turning this way and that, casting about for further scent. She wasn’t worried about being discovered. Tatterdemalions left no scent, and she was much faster and more elusive than the demon. She could fly from her hiding place anytime she wished. But she was curious to see what it would do. It would have a purpose in mind, but its wanderings amid the markers seemed so aimless.

She was still watching when she became aware of a second presence, this one much stronger and closer, approaching her from behind. It took her only a moment to remember that there was another demon, the one from the Council chambers, the one disguised as an Elf.

She had time for a single thought.

Flee!

And then there was no time at all.

D
ELLOREEN PADDED
over to where the remains of the Faerie creature were already fading, sinking back into the earth from which she had been formed, leaving only the thin white garment she had been wearing. Delloreen licked at the cloth, tasting its dampness, and then glanced over to where the second demon was wiping its hands on the grasses of the burial grounds.

“Remember what I told you,” the other said, fastidiously cleaning away what remained of Ailie. “We have a plan, and the plan is not to be changed. Kill only the one. Leave the others for later. Can you remember?”

Delloreen snapped at the air between them, showing all of her considerable teeth. She could remember as much as she needed to.

Head hunched between her shoulders, body stretched out so low that it almost touched the ground, she crept toward the deep shadows and her unsuspecting kill.

TWELVE

A
S
K
IRISIN AND HIS COMPANIONS
stared down into the black hole left by the opening of the stone slab, two things happened in immediate sequence. First, torches fastened in iron stanchions secured to the rock walls of the stairwell flared to life, allowing them to see that the stairs themselves wound so deep underground that their end was invisible. Second, as they took their first cautious steps down those stairs, leaving Ashenell behind, the stone slab slid back into place with a fresh grating sound that froze them in their tracks. There was no time to turn back, and no chance to escape. The slab filled the gap anew, blotting out the night sky, and they were left shut away in the earth.

“Already, I don’t like any of this,” Simralin said.

“We are not meant to go back,” Angel said. “No mistaking that.”

They glanced at one another. Then, reaching an unspoken common consensus, they resumed their descent. Kirisin had started out in the lead, but Simralin quickly passed him by, giving him a look of warning as she did so. If there was to be any sort of trouble, the look said, she was better equipped to deal with it. He found that hard to argue with and dropped back to walk beside Erisha. He was thinking that they had brought almost no weapons at all with which to defend themselves.

“It would be good if we stayed close together,” Angel observed from just behind them.

Kirisin glanced back at her. The runes carved in her staff glowed faintly in the dark, pulsing softly. Her face was tight with concentration, and her eyes shifted restlessly as she descended, her footfalls soundless in the near silence. Perhaps in the company of a Knight of the Word, they needed no other protection.

He listened to his own breathing, which seemed to him the loudest sound in the stairwell. He tried to quiet it and failed. The pumping of his heart was a steady throbbing in his ears, and he tried and failed to quiet that, too. The air grew steadily colder with their descent, changing from a dry woodland smell to the scent of damp rock and rain-soaked leaves. Somewhere farther down, he could hear water trickling over rocks. It reminded him of the mountain caves he had explored as a boy and of the graves of the dead on days when burials had to be held in the rain.

The stairs tunneled downward for a long time before ending in a narrow corridor that leveled off into what appeared to be a natural opening. Burning torches continued to mark their way, small flickering dots disappearing into the darkness. They moved ahead cautiously, listening to the silence that surrounded the soft sounds of their breathing and their footfalls, their senses strained and their expectancy heightened. There was something down here, something they were meant to find once they had made the decision to enter. The still-unanswered question, the fuel for their doubts and fears, was whether it was something that would prove dangerous.

Suddenly Simralin held up her hand, bringing them to a stop. “Wait.”

They stood silently, listening. After a moment, they could detect a faint sound from somewhere ahead, a soft, sibilant whisper. Kirisin tried and failed to identify it. He felt instinctively and for reasons he could not explain that it was a warning, but he could not tell what it warned against.

Simralin held them in place a moment longer, glanced back to make certain they were alert to the strange sound, and then started them forward once more. The passageway turned sharply left and straightened right again. It began to open up, the ceiling rising and the walls widening. Stalactites began to appear, small at first and then large enough to dwarf the people passing beneath them, huge stone spears from which droplets of water fell, stinging with cold as they struck Kirisin on the face. He glanced up and found himself staring into a forest of tapering stone spirals clustered so thickly that he could no longer see the ceiling at all.

The passageway ended at a cavern dominated by a black water pool that filled a broad depression at its center. The surface of the water was flat and still, as if it comprised not liquid but opaque glass. The chamber itself was so large that its walls receded into blackness, invisible save where tiny pinpricks of torch fire burned bravely in the heavy gloom.

But it wasn’t the chamber or the pool that drew everyone’s eyes. It was the cluster of stone crypts and sepulchers that sprouted from the cavern floor. Those that were closest had writing that could be read in the flicker of the torchlight. Some had been carved with the letter
G.
Some bore the name
GOTRIN
.

Kirisin stared openmouthed. How many of them were there? Dozens and dozens, it seemed. Perhaps more than a hundred.