Still nothing.
He wondered what it was about the xaique board that had roused someone's anger to smash it and reveal their presence.
Xaique is about war. The figure with the garland… Master Belesharon told me she has something to do with the Flower Wars, which aren't actually real wars. Whoever is here is sending a sort of message to us they want to be found though I think only Master Belesharon could understand the whole of it.
I understand enough. I understand that there's someone here who needs to be gotten rid of.
The mining-cavern was long and comparatively narrow, its floor sloping very slightly downward. Suddenly Kellen's armored sabaton skidded on the smooth stone floor.
It was wet.
He knelt down and touched the stone. A distinct sheen of moisture clung to the stone, heavy enough to make it slippery. He raised his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Water.
"Be careful," he said aloud. "The floor is wet."
And why was it wet? It was true that the Angarussa had undoubtedly been running very high in its bed this season both above and underground but if Kellen was certain of one thing, it was that the Elves would have made certain that the caverns would not flood. And if for some strange reason they did not choose to do that, Umerchiel would have mentioned the possibility of flooding.
But if there was a trap, they were supposed to be walking into it. Gritting his teeth, Kellen gave the signal to advance.
The floor in the next cavern its walls, suitably, as this was the last one before they reached the Angarussa, were carved with a frieze of selkies at play amid the currents of a river was also slick with moisture, but no wetter than the floor of the one before.
At the end of the cavern, they came to a wall.
It was nothing the Elves had made. It was well-built, of blocks of shaped stone obviously cut from someplace here in the caverns, but compared to the workmanship of the Elves, it was as crude as a child's mud-pies. It blocked the opening to the next cavern, the one that led to the Angarussa. It was not quite finished, at least if it had been meant to seal the opening completely; there was still an opening at the top, where a few courses of stone had yet to be laid.
Umerchiel had described the chamber beyond to him, and it was clearly indicated on the map. A long low transverse gallery, the Angarussa ran through it at the bottom of a deep gorge: This chamber was actually entirely artificial, created to expose the river where it traveled beneath the earth. A stone bridge crossed the river at the top of the gorge, level with the floor of the gallery, and led to the passageway to the surface, where Churashil was waiting with his guard-party.
Kellen regarded the wall with his battle-sight. Not the trigger to a trap, but part of one. He pulled off his heavy leather glove and the armored gauntlet beneath it and touched the wall with his bare hand.
The stone was damp, beaded with water.
Holding his breath, he tapped it experimentally and very gently with his sword. The stone gave back a dull thudding sound. The wall was very thick, or else the chamber beyond had been filled in completely.
"I'm going to see if I can see over the top," Kellen said.
"Komentai, let me go," Ambanire said urgently.
"No. This is a trap. I need to see more."
Replacing his glove and gauntlet, and sheathing his sword, Kellen began to climb.
He reached the top, and sent the ball of Coldfire hovering over his head out into the chamber.
For an instant he could not believe what he saw.
Water. Black and still and smooth as glass, it filled the chamber beyond to the level of the retaining wall, a vast underground lake extending into the passage to the surface.
Suddenly there was a booming crash, and Kellen saw the level of the water in the lake begin to drop sharply.
"Ambanire, sound the alarm," he said, dropping back to the ground. Whatever had been meant to kill them, he'd just found it. He drew his sword.
* * * * *
UMERCHERIEL'S forces had reached the xaique chamber a little after Kellen's party had gone on ahead. Isinwen showed him the mutilated statues, and they settled in to wait.
It was hard to calculate time so tar beneath the earth, but Isinwen thought that no more than three quarters of an hour had passed when he felt a long rumbling shake the rock beneath his feet.
A roaring sound built, as if suddenly they stood beneath an enormous waterfall, and a strong wind began to blow from the direction they had come.
He heard the sound of running no, splashing feet.
The orderly ranks of waiting Knights patted to allow the passage of the guards Kellen and Umerchiel had left on the side-galleries of the first cavern. They were as wet as if they'd fallen into the Angarussa itself.
"Isinwen! The caves fill with water!"
The ground shook again, and over the roar of water, Isinwen heard the distant notes of Ambanire's warhorn.
The water was to his ankles now, rising with a relentless surging motion. It came from the direction of the cavern's mouth.
"Follow me," Isinwen said. "Quickly!"
* * * * *
A strong steady wind began to blow toward Kellen, and he felt the rock beneath his feet shudder, as if the subterranean earth were some nightmare beast attempting to cast off unwelcome vermin. He risked one more climb up the wall. It was just as he'd feared. The water was already level with the surface of the bridge, and whirlpools eddied in its surface as the artificial lake was sucked elsewhere into the caverns. Suddenly the water that had been seeping toward them slowly but steadily began to pour into the chamber with the steady force of the Angarussa itself. When Kellen dropped to the floor again he was standing ankle-deep in a river that poured inexorably through the caverns with the steady force of a rising spring.
Dams. It was why the Angarussa had been so easy to cross. It had been frozen nearly solid because there hadn't been much water in its bed. Kellen knew from bitter experience that the Shadowed Elves were master engineers; they must have constructed a series of dams and spillways down here somewhere and diverted the Angarussa to fill them. Now they were pumping that water back up into the upper caverns, trapping Isinwen and the rest of his force.
As Kellen stared out at the rock it was as if, for a moment, it turned to smoke. He could see the dam-mechanism; the series of side and lower galleries painstakingly bricked up and outfitted with a complex mechanism of pumps and conduits over the last three moonturns.
There was no way he could reach them to disable it.
And there was worse. The vibrations he had felt were the sound of several of the side-galleries collapsing. The water roaring into the Caverns of Halacira would have even less space to fill than otherwise, and so it would fill it faster.
But though the work of the Shadowed Elves was brilliantly-conceived and sweeping in scope, it had been hastily-executed and would not hold for long. Already Kellen's battle-sight showed him that the damming and pumping mechanisms were buckling under the strain of operation and the new walls designed to seal up caverns as artificial dams were crumbling under the weight of the water pressing on them. Soon all the Shadowed Elves' careful work would give way and nearly everything would return to normal within the Caverns of Halacira.
But before that happened, Kellen and the people he had led down here would all be dead. If he could not get his army out before the water trapped them here, two thirds of the force Redhelwar had sent with him would drown beneath the earth.
And there was only one way out.
Across the bridge.
"We've got to get this wall down," he told his men. "This is the way we're going out."
He began to hack at the wall with his sword.
* * * * *