“Yes,” Kellen said with certainty.
“Then let’s use lanterns. Because I really don’t want to miss you warning me about the next trap because I can’t hear you. And they’re easier to put out quickly than Coldfire.”
They lit their lanterns and went on, stepping carefully over the trip-wire after marking its position with chalk-marks on the floor to either side of it.
The corridor opened out into a small chamber. Long thin poles were stuck into the rock at intervals, jutting out into the room. The only way through them was a narrow corridor down the middle.
Disturbing one of those would bring a jar of acid pouring down.
“Don’t touch any of those unless you want a faceful of something bad,” Kellen said grimly.
They went on.
Each of those traps—the pit-trap and the acid-trap, would have caused losses. But they could have built a bridge across the pit—or even jumped it—and once the acid jars were empty, that trap would be harmless, too.
Neither was bad enough to make the army turn back. And from there on, they’d be alert for more traps.
But if the Shadowed Elves were attacking at the same time, they wouldn’t have the chance to spot them. They’d be forced into them.
The next trap was a patch of corridor that looked like stone to the unaided eye, but when Kellen threw a coin into it, it sank beneath the surface instantly. He chalked a mark at the near edge, Saw where the far side was, and jumped it. Idalia did the same, chalking a mark to indicate the far boundary.
“It must have taken them a long time to make all of these traps,” Idalia said consideringly, looking back at the pool of artfully-disguised quicksand. “Moon-turns, maybe.”
“There weren’t any of these in the first cavern. Did they build these just for us? And if they did, how did they know we were coming?” Kellen wondered aloud. He was glad of the breathing space. The need to be constantly alert—and the knowledge of the penalty if he wasn’t—was draining.
“And where are they?” Idalia asked, putting into words what Kellen had been wondering since they’d begun to descend into the cavern.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Kellen said grimly. “These traps—bad as they are—aren’t enough to stop the army—only to make it pay dearly for every foot of tunnel it takes. Let’s keep going. We need to find the village.”
It seemed they could not go more than a few steps without encountering another trap. Some were as simple as poisoned spikes jutting out of the walls, or a rain of stones set to fall from the ceiling when a trip-wire was broken. Some were as complicated as the jet of air rushing between two low holes in the walls—they crawled beneath that one, and didn’t stop to find out what would have happened if they’d interrupted the flow of air. Some trip-wires seemed to have no purpose at all that Kellen could see—that probably meant they triggered more distant traps, perhaps to seal the whole army into the cave system, so it could be dealt with at leisure.
And no matter how far they went, they saw no sign of the cavern’s inhabitants.
Several side caverns had been hastily filled-in with rubble, as if the Shadowed Elves did not wish the invaders to get lost—or to find shelter.
“They’re leading us right to them,” Idalia said. “Or to the village, at least.”
Kellen had no doubt of that. And the army, having gotten this far, having sustained horrific losses, would be thinking of nothing but closing with its enemy.
The corridor they were following made a sharp left turn, and suddenly they were there.
The last village had been at the bottom of an enormous cavern. This time, the corridor opened directly onto the village floor. Though their lanterns cast very little light, Kellen had a sense of vast open space stretching off in all directions—all directions but overhead, because the ceiling was still only a few inches above his head.
The lanterns did give them enough light to see the same cluster of stone huts as before, and in the distance, the banked embers of the communal firepit glowed redly.
But to Kellen’s battle-sight, the whole of the low ceiling glowed with the evil green of a Shadowed Elf trap.
He swallowed hard, realizing what he was seeing. Here—somewhere—was the trigger that would bring the whole ceiling down, crushing everyone beneath it as a man might crush an insect between his two palms.
“Idalia—” he said, turning.
And stopped.
Idalia wasn’t there.
—«♦»—
OH, good, now we can go home, was Idalia’s first exhausted thought when they reached the edge of the Shadowed Elf village and she saw the cluster of stone huts. Following Kellen into this chamber of horrors had been nerve-wracking; at times only the thought of the lives they would save had given her the energy to push herself on. She knew she hadn’t seen all the traps that Kellen had; it had been bad enough seeing the ones he’d pointed out. For a while tonight she’d begun to think that the time had come to pay her Mageprice, the one she had offered up to save Sentarshadeen.
But dying down here would serve no greater good, and she had the faint suspicion—no more than that—that when the time came to pay her Price, the Gods would see to it that her death counted for something.
At least so she hoped. Accidents—if anything in war could be called an accident—were still possible. But when she died, she hoped it would be in the light and air, and not buried beneath tons of rock…
Someone was calling her.
Idalia heard it clearly. A voice, off to her right, a voice that claimed every bit of her attention, and made her weariness vanish as if it had never been. Without thought, she set her lantern aside and moved toward it. She didn’t need light to see where she was going.
—«♦»—
KELLEN looked down. Idalia’s lantern rested on an outcropping of rock at his shoulder.
“Idalia!” he shouted.
The echoes almost masked the scrabble of claws against stone.
Kellen whirled back, tossing the lantern he held at the first of the creatures emerging from the rock and the darkness. It broke against the creature’s skin, engulfing it in flame.
He recognized them from Jermayan’s description. Goblins.
They were less than half the size of the Shadowed Elves, but bore a horrible resemblance to them. Their frog-wide mouths gaped as they sprang toward Kellen, exposing multiple rows of glistening, needle-sharp teeth, and their skins were bruise-dark. They squinted their bulging pale eyes against the light of the remaining lantern as they bounded toward him, running on hands and feet both. They seemed to rise up out of the stone itself, as if it were like water to them.
And they could spit poison. A unicorn could heal it, but Shalkan wasn’t here.
And this was not the time to think of any of that.
Kellen let all thoughts and questions drop from his mind, slipping into battle-trance now without even realizing he had done so. The goblins ceased to be goblins, and became targets for his sword.
In the back of his mind, where some part of him made cold calculations and plans, was the knowledge that he dared not move very far from where he stood, for to enter the village might be to bring the entire roof down. No matter how his attackers came at him he spun and pivoted, backing and turning only in his own footsteps—he knew that was safe—and hacked away at the goblins.
For every one he killed, three more took its place. There seemed to be an unending supply of the creatures, but for all their vaguely manlike shape, they didn’t seem to be even as intelligent as the coldwarg, and they kept interrupting their attack to devour their own dead and fight with each other.
But no matter how many were diverted, there were always more than enough to take their place.
In his brief breathing spells, Kellen grudged every moment he had to spend on them, but he dared not leave any of them alive. They were creatures of the Dark, and if he broke off the attack, they might have been given orders to trigger the collapse of the cavern roof.
He dared not stand too close to the cavern walls, either. As far as he was able to tell in the midst of fighting them back, they could move through rock, hiding themselves within stone as easily as Elves could hide within a forest. Time and again Kellen felt hands reach up out of the stone on which he stood to clutch at his ankles, trying to pull him down so that the goblin horde could devour him. He could feel their teeth grate against his armor, searching for any way through its defense, even as he cut and kicked at them.