The Howling Delve (30 page)

“Might I have the pleasure of knowing you?” Balram asked when she said nothing.

Certainly, sir, she replied, but Balram could not hear her voice. He could only follow the movement of her lips to make out her words. She tipped her spear horizontal and threw. A soft, singing chime filled the ballroom. The spear impaled the

man standing just to Balram’s left, one who’d been taking slow steps toward the base of the stairs.

Keeping his eyes trained on the woman, Balram bent to see that the man was dead. As he did so, his eyes fell on the druid’s spear. Tied among its decorations was the emerald-stone symbol of Motel. When Balram’s fingers brushed it, the woman spoke again. This time her voice rang out cleat across the hall, making Baltam startle.

am Cesira of the Starwater Six, Quiet One ofSilvanus, and the lady of this house—she inclined her head stiffly—and the doom of Balram Kortrun. She glided back a step and pressed her hand to the banister rail in a certain spot.p>

Balram’s eyes widened in shocked recognition. Gods, she couldn’t know the locations of the …

“Fall back!” he cried, much too late.

The floot tiles funning down the center of the hall creaked from years of lying stationary, but the trap still functioned.

Spikes exploded from the floor, catching the men behind him in a deadly hedge. Two went down as the sharpened edges burst through the backs of their legs. The rest managed to leap away, but the trap had cut them off from the exit.

Balram turned to the stairs, but Cesira had climbed back to the top. She stood behind the balcony rail, a second spear resting on her shoulder.

“You won’t get out of here alive, bitch,” he snarled at hef. He motioned to one of his men, who began moving along the outer wall, smashing lanterns and spilling oil in streams across the floor. Fire licked up in tall pools. “You’ll burn with this house, if we don’t get to you first.”

Then by all means, Cesira said, holding out her arms, Come to me.

The fire beast exalted in his find. Magic raged wildly above his head, fueled by the mad wizard and theif mental link. The mortals were scattered throughout his domain. He

could smell them leaving their imprints on the Delve in a complex web, moving, trying to find each other.

The woman of fire and one other—they were closest to his former prison. The beast dismissed them at once as too easy. Let them have a start on the game. He relished the challenge of two well-prepared magic wielders.

His senses drifted outward. Two more were near the thoroughfare, and a larger party was across the bridges—but wait. The beast picked out the scent, distantly, in the Howling burrow. Four fighteis, moving stealthily—deeper into the mazelike tunnels construcred by the dwarves.

There lay his hunt, a chase through the labyrinth to claim the fitst of his prizes.

The beast rumbled in satisfaction. He stretched his lean muscles and began to run, tracing the faint scents to their source.

Meisha felt as if her bones had been dashed over rocks. Perhaps they had been. She felt a hand prod her shoulder and hadn’t even the strength to fight it off.

“Meisha.”

Dantane’s face swam into focus. The wizard leaned over her with a vial in his hand identical to the one he’d given her in the portal room. “Drink,” he said, putting the glass to her lips.

Meisha drank, and gradually felt the strength returning to her aching arm and leg. The magic faded, leaving only a dull pain. “Where are we?”

“We came through a second portal,” Dantane said. His voice sounded odd, uncertain. “The chasm in the floor. I found you not far from where I appeared. I don’t know where we are, but you need to see something.”

“What is it?” she asked.

Dantane hesitated. “I believe it’s you.”

“What?” Meisha sat up, gazing over the wizard’s shoulder.

She recognized where they were immediately. The circular

chamber was crowded with pedestals of rock rising up four, six, sometimes ten feet into the air, separating the chamber into various levels. Two exits lay at opposite ends of the room. At the ends of those tunnels would be similar testing chambers. “The star,” she murmured.

Meisha suddenly realized they weren’t alone. She looked up at the shortest pedestal, where a child stood. She was bald but for a dark fuzz beginning to sprout from the top of her head. She waved her arms in the motions of a spell. Below her, a man in well-kept robes watched her casting with a critical eye.

Varan—but not the mad wizard trapped in the Delve. This Varan was whole, and appeared much younger. For Meisha, seeing the little girl was like seeing a ghost.

“We’re in a testing chamber,” she said, for Dantane’s benefit. “Varan designated one for each apprentice, arranged like the points of a star. When I was here, these caves could only be reached through Varan. He teleported us down.”

“You didn’t know the portal led down here?” asked Dantane.

“No. I didn’t know Varan knew of the portal,” she admitted. “The markings on it don’t match his sigils. Perhaps that was how he discovered the secret tunnels,” she murmured, half to herself, “through the portal.”

“There are more caverns?” Dantane prompted. “Do you know where?”

“Varan said they adjoined the testing chambers somehow. We looked, as apprentices, but the entrance was magically concealed. I suppose it’s possible, now his othet magics are breaking down, that the connecting passage has been revealed.”

“So we’ll have to explote each chambet,” Dantane said. “Our companions might be there, or in the other tunnels.” He looked at het. “Do you know what they contained?”

Meisha laughed humorlessly. “Whatever.great Art the Howlings saw fit to stote. You were deposited in the wrong place, Dantane, if you seek treasure down here.”

The wizard grimaced. “Such seems to be the course of my life,” he said.

Meisha stood up, her eyes drawn back to the phantom image atop the pedestal. She watched, fascinated, as the air in front of her double seemed to split in two. Out of the breach came the head of a being that only vaguely resembled a human. Hairless, outlined in white flame, it stared at its summoner curiously. Though she felt no heat, Meisha recalled well how the air around the creature rippled with burning. It was the first time she’d ever interacted with a fire elemental.

The scene blurred and faded, leaving them alone in the chamber.

“What was that?” asked Dantane.

“A memory,” answered Meisha, “from soon after I came to the Delve. I was a Wraith—half-feral—in Keczulla, when Varan found me. He took me on as an apprentice because he sensed my talent. I remember when he brought me down here to converse with the fire elemental. I could feel it burning, just like I burned inside. It’s part of every savant’s training, to recognize how their spirit matches the element they’ve chosen. With proper training, eventually, the spirit melds with that force and becomes part of it,” Meisha said, her voice oddly hushed.

“Is that what you aspire to?” Dantane asked, “to join with the fire and become as an elemental crearure?”

She glanced at him. “It’s what every savanr wants.” “But do you?”

Without answering, Meisha stood up, her eyes scanning the floor where the phantom images had been. “There.” She bent down, lifting a small piece of glittering crystal from the floor. “The source of the memories,” she explained.

“Your master’s work,” Dantane said, impressed. “He has great power.”

“Obviously, not enough,” Meisha said, “01 he failed to follow his own teachings.”

Had Varan recorded all his past sessions with his apprentices? she wondered, and if so, how many crystals, how much Art would be required for such a task?

“Why do you despise him so much?” Dantane asked. “He awoke the power in you. Without it, you might have died a Wraith.”

“I know,” Meisha said. “He cared about me, as much as he was capable of such feelings. He offered me magic and a place in his world, but I couldn’t accept it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I hadn’t possessed that power and if Varan hadn’t sensed it, he would have passed me by on that stteet without looking twice. It was the power that fascinated him most, not any of us. And yet, I still wanted to love him.”

“Then why did you come back?” Dantane asked. “Why help him now?”

“Because he was right. He was the only one who understood me, and I still love him for that,” Meisha said bleakly. “That bond—the one I see teflected in Kail’s group—I’ve known nothing like it, not since the night Shaera left the candle in my room.”

“Shaera?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Meisha waved the memories away. “She’s gone now—they’te all dead—and Varan is not the mastet I knew.”

“What about the boy,” Dantane persisted, “the one who followed you?”

“Talal,” Meisha said, and something inside her constricted. She’d avoided thinking about the boy. “Talal is … he has no scrap of magical power in him, and yet I find myself wanting to mentor him, in life, if not in the Art. It’s sttange. Then, in the next breath, I remember what I am and what I could do. When I remember, I want to put him as far from myself as I possibly can.”

“It seems he would choose otherwise,” Dantane observed.

Meisha shook her head grimly. “I pray that choice doesn’t bring about his doom,” she said, “if it has not already.”

She touched the ctystal, and the phantom Varan appeared again, drawing Meisha’s attention back to the pedestals. This

time the apprentice was not Meisha, but a young man with short blond hair cropped in a bowl shape.

“Prieces,” Meisha said. “The earth savant. I’ve never seen this.”

The young man appeared pale and drawn, even by the blurry magic illuminating the memory, His gestures wete not as crisp as the child-Meisha’s had been. His arms weighed heavily with fatigue, but he pressed on under Varan’s encouraging gaze.

The earth elemental crawled up from the ground opposite Varan, but it was bigger—twice as broad as the creatute Meisha had helped to summon. The force of its arrival shook the cavern, knocking Prieces from the pedestal. Varan reacted instantly, throwing out a spell to keep the apprentice from injuring himself. He didn’t see the earth elemental smash the pedestal Prieces was standing on in half. Stone shards flew, striking Varan in the back. The wizard turned, intending to banish the creature, Meisha thought, but the thing rose up, crashing headfirst into the ceiling. Cracks fissured through the stone, and the chamber, unstable from all the tunnels carved in one place, began to come apart.

The elemental thrashed wildly, seeking release. It picked up the shattered pieces of the pedestals and threw them. The flat portion hit the wall and fell back, crushing Prieces beneath it.

Meisha cried out and ran forward. Dantane caught her arm. “It is an illusion. It isn’t real,” he hissed in her ear.

“But it did happen,” Meisha whispered. She watched helplessly as Varan shouted an incantation that blew the stone aside, into the earth elemental. The force of the spell knocked the creature backward off its massive feet, giving Varan time to levitate Prieces to safety, but it was too late. The body of the unfortunate apprentice hung limply in the air, his neck broken.

Varan turned, chanting a spell that finally banished the elemental. The wizard collapsed to his knees next to Prieces. Stone continued to fall, but he erected a magical barrier that deflected the falling rock.

“Look there,” said Dantane, pointing across the chamber.

The back wall of the cavern had completely caved in, revealing anothet set of passages that curved and split off in the darkness. Within them, a light burned, but Varan was oblivious to it.

“Is that another testing chamber?” asked Dantane.

Meisha shook her head. “There should be nothing behind that wall but solid rock.”

They watched the strange light grow brighter, and as the rumbling gradually ceased, another sound filled the silence— the tap-tap of what sounded like rain on a campfire.

The light flickered and went out, but only because an object had passed in front of it, a swift, blutry movement not unlike the fire elemental.

Not rain, Meisha thought, as the thing coalesced, taking on shape and substance, but claws.

Dantane gasped when he saw what the walls had imprisoned. “Impossible,” he said.

Laerin hauled Morgan to his feet. The rogue’s boots skidded on a pile of bones. Morgan regained his footing and cursed a loud, long streak that echoed down the tunnel.

“See how you corrupt the children,” Laerin tutted, shooting a wink at Talal.

Talal didn’t share the humor. He was still on the ground, shards of broken bone digging into his knees.

“Where are we?” he asked. He dislodged an oblong skull from a pile. “What are all these?”

“Animal remains,” Laerin surmised, taking the skull from him. “Wolves of great size. They all died here together.”

“In pieces,” Morgan said. His head perked up. “Quiet.”

Talal listened and heatd the echo of footsteps. Swiftly, Morgan picked up the remains of a battered rib cage and smashed it into the face of a Shadow Thief as he came around the corner.

The thief went down, and Motgan put his boot on the man’s neck.

“Brittle pieces.” Morgan sniffed. He cast away the shredded bone cage.

“Is he harmless?” Laerin asked. The squirming thief was trying to reach a dagger clipped in his boot.

Morgan pressed harder, until the man choked. “As kitten teats.” he grinned.

“Let me talk to him.” Laerin squatted next to the thief. “Where are the others?” he asked calmly.

“Your friends or mine?” the thief rasped. He spat blood in Laerin’s face.

The half-elf wiped the dripping red trails. “This one’s as lost as we are,” he told Morgan. “Have you ever been down here before?” he asked the man.

“No,” the thief said, for he couldn’t shake his head under the weight of Morgan’s boot. “We’ve never been in these tunnels.”

“Think Meisha knows about this place?” Talal asked hopefully.

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t wager on finding her soon,” Morgan said, “if this place’s as vast as it seems.” He pointed to three tunnels splitting off the cavern, all stretching an indeterminate distance before branching again.