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Dusk—and Shana looked up through the gloom and the drizzle at the mountain of rubble marking the site that Keman swore hid a major cave-complex.
Well, if it did, the original cave-mouth must have been bigger than anything Shana had ever imagined, much less seen. It looked from this perspective as if half the side of the mountain had come down over the years, and it wasn't a small mountain. Steep, though; very steep, covered with trees and brush that clung to the slope with vegetative stubbornness, and probably kept the rest of the mountain from losing its outer skin.
The most recent fall had been quite recent indeed, and had added bulk to the pile on the left-hand side. There were trees, large trees, crushed under all that rock, with the remains of dead leaves still clinging to the branches.
Mage-lights hovered over the pile as Kyrtian's men looked on apprehensively. Keman—back to human-form—and Kyrt-ian climbed the rock-pile to the single opening that Keman had discovered near the top of the mound.
"Is he going to be safe?" one of the men asked dubiously, as Keman offered Kyrtian a hand-up over a tricky bit. Shana was dead-certain that he wasn't worried about Keman.
"Keman's a dragon," she reminded him. "They don't know rock, they live rock. Keman feels where each pebble is rubbing and might be loose. He'll know if something is going to slip before the rock knows."
"You'd better be right," Lynder muttered darkly. "I climb—I explore caves all the time—and I wouldn't go up there without spending weeks checking my path."
"You're not a dragon," she retorted, and turned her own at-
tention to the base of the pile. There, in a place where rock had been melted and reformed to stabilize the area (the indisputable mark of dragon stone-shaping), was where Keman had found the strange piece of metal. Shana examined the spot on her hands and knees with her own little mage-light, and in a few moments, there was no doubt in her mind that what he had found was not a random bit of something that might have been dropped by a curious Elvenlord long ago. There was more of the stuff under that original rock-fall. As she brought her pinpoint light in close to the ground, she saw a thin edge of something squashed along the boundary of rock-pile and dirt that didn't look anything like the fractured edge of a rock. What it did look like was another sheet of metal.
Just what was under that pile of rock?
Just what is inside this cave? That's what I should be asking....
She looked back up again. At that moment, Keman turned and waved back down at her. They must have found the entrance. A mage-light left the formation and swung purposefully towards the two figures up on the pile, then vanished, seemingly into the rocks. There was some activity up there, as the two bent over something. A moment later, the first figure followed the light into the tumbled rocks. Keman remained bent over while Kyrtian's men fidgeted restlessly, then eventually started back down the pile. Clearly Kyrtian had gone down inside the cave by rope, and Keman had remained just long enough to see that he was safely down.
"Now what's Kyrtian thinking?" the man beside Shana murmured, fretfully. "We ought to be making camp, not climbing around in caves."
"Kyrtian's probably seeing if we can camp in the cave," one of his fellows pointed out. "It would be a lot drier, and we wouldn't have to worry about—Things."
"Unless, of course, those Things have been coming out of the cave," Shana warned, darkly. The more Kyrtian had explained what he hoped to find, the less she'd liked the idea of crawling around in there. So far, every sign had pointed to the conclusion that Kyrtian was right, and this was the site of his race's entry
into this world. What if that Great Portal hadn't quite been closed—or had been reopened? From what Lorryn had told her, Evelon was hellish at best; there was no telling what kind of horrors lived back there. The ambush beasts and the other weird things in this forest could be coming out of Evelon—or been sent by the Elvenlords' enemies, the ones they had fled here to escape.
Fire and Rain! If they were the losers in their fight, I don't want to meet what the Elvenlords we know thought was so bad they would risk running into an unknown world rather than face it or surrender to it.
Kyrtian's men didn't look very happy with her observation, so she didn't share any more of her thoughts. Forewarned was forearmed, but no point in making them too nervous.
Keman came down the slide a great deal faster than he had gone up; more sure-footed than any goat, since he needn't trouble himself about the stability of the surface he trod on. He looked as gleeful as only a dragon could, with the prospect of a new set of caves to explore. "The outermost cavern has a lot of things in it, but they all look like personal belongings that people dropped while they were running away. Kyrtian wants to camp in there," he told them, as he leapt down from the last boulder. "Right now, we need some ropes to get down inside."
"And just how are we going to get the horses up that mess?" one of the men demanded. "They won't go, and I don't blame them."
"Oh." Keman clearly hadn't thought of that, and obviously, neither had Kyrtian. "I could stabilize it, but that would take time—"
"And then what are you going to do? Lower them on a rope? Hobie and Lynder can go with my lord, and the rest of us will stay out here," the man replied firmly. "They're the ones that go mucking about in holes, not us. You just put some of those magics on our camp to keep the horrors away, and we'll be fine waiting in the open."
Keman looked at Shana, who just shrugged. These weren't
her men to command. "Go see what Lord Kyrtian has to say about that," was her only advice.
So back up the pile went Keman, and back down again, just as quickly. "He says it's all right, but camp away from the rock-fall area," he called as he leapt from rock to rock. "So we need to scout a secure area—Hobie and Lynder, though, he wants you to bring up the climbing gear he asked for."
"What about the camping stuff?" Lynder asked immediately. "How are we going to get that down?"
Keman just laughed.
"Leave that to Shana and me," he said; so the two men Kyrtian called for gathered up a pack apiece, and several coils of rope, and began the climb while Shana and Keman and the rest went to look for a good place for the others to set up.
They found it soon enough, an indentation in the side of the hill, too small to be called a valley, too large for a ravine. More of a pocket in the hillside that Shana could fence off with magic for them to keep the horses confined and screen the camp from view.
That was easy enough for her to do; an illusion of solid hillside and vegetation, layered onto a barrier that would only let people pass. She kept the mage-lights going while they set up camp, then once they had a fire and their own lanterns going, dismissed all but one of her lights. Then she and Keman collected all of the gear they were going to need inside the cave. He had taken the form of something rather grel-like, with a broad, flat back to carry a great many packs, and four strong, limber legs ending in claws.
It was a very good thing that he had taken all the gear, because Shana had a hard enough time getting herself up that slope. It was as much of a scramble as a climb, testing each foothold only to find her feet skidding as loose scree dislodged, grabbing desperately for a handhold until she could get her feet firmly planted again. Fortunately, once they reached the top, Hobie and Lynder were waiting with ropes set up to bring down everything a bit at a time. Keman himself carried Shana, pick-a-back, with her arms wrapped around his neck, legs wedged
under the muscles where wings met shoulder. He was in his own shape, of course, climbing down with the agility of a fly on a wall, disdaining the use of rope. She kept her eyes shut; if anything, it was a lot farther to the floor of the cave than it had been to the ground outside, and the rock-fall had piled up into a much nastier barrier on this side.
Once they were down on firm soil, though, she opened her eyes to take her first look around.
Mage-lights up near the vaulted top of the cave imparted a soft glow that was as good as daylight. There was rubbish everywhere, about half of it being wood, leaves, branches, and other detritus that had blown in or washed in before the cave was so totally sealed up. But the other half of the litter wasn't. It looked, just as Keman's brief description had suggested, as if a great many people had come through here laden down with personal belongings, and for one reason or another, had simply dropped them or left them here.
Quite clearly, the mess had been poked at, dug through, and nested in by all manner of animals over the course of several centuries. Anything of fabric or leather had long since gotten so close to the point of disintegration that all you had to do was poke it and it fell apart, leaving only bits of metal and less-identifiable substances that had been used as ornamentation or fastenings. Some of it was armor; recognizable breastplates and greaves, helms and vambraces poked up here and there among the wreckage. There were boxes that fell to bits at a touch, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of what their contents might have been before those, too, fell into piles of dust and fragmented flakes. There were swords and knives and axes, but also less recognizable objects and some that Shana couldn't make out at all.
It wasn't so much the metal objects themselves that were fascinating, it was the metals that they were made of. Living among the Elvenlords as she had, Shana was familiar with the ways in which they made bronze, brass, copper, silver, and gold serve any number of purposes—but the objects she found weren't made of any of those metals. Most were constructed of
the dull grey stuff that Keman had found, very light and strong, but clearly nothing familiar. Other objects were made of something equally light and thin, and looked like ceramic or glass, but whatever it had been it was brittle and shattered when flexed. It couldn't always have been that brittle; presumably age had rendered it friable.
This sad litter lay among the leaves and sticks that had blown or been carried in over the years, the mounds of dirt, of dust and cobwebs, the bones of little animals who had lived and died here or had been brought in and eaten.
But there were other bones here as well that were not of animals—and when Shana accidentally kicked a helmet and it rolled and disgorged a skull, she decided that she'd had enough of exploring and hurried back to the spot that Hobie and Lynder had cleared of debris and were making into a camp. Kyrtian had already gathered a small pile of things there, and was going through them while the other two put together a fire and the makings of a hot meal. There was certainly no shortage of fuel for the fire, anyway.
"It's a pity nothing of the books survived," Kyrtian said, looking up, as she approached the friendly warmth of the fire. "They've all gone utterly to bits that not even Moth could reconstruct."