Mercedes Lackey - Elvenborn

Then again, it was very interesting what sorts of things one could do with magic when one was terrified out of one's wits. It had been a very long way down to the floor of the cave from that tiny entrance above; fortunately Kyrtian's own people had

left all their ropes behind, ready to climb out when they re­turned, so at least she had had the comfort of knowing her life­line was tested and tried.

Ah, but Kyrtian had never been taught the subtle art of Elven female magic, and if he came back he'd have the benefit of her passage. She'd had no notion she could make a rope stronger— or herself briefly stronger as well. By the time her feet touched the floor of the cave, she had imparted the transitory strength of one of her foresters to her arms and legs—and she could have used the rope she dangled from to lower a horse and wagon without worrying about it snapping.

So at a guess, she ought to be able to get herself back up the tumble of rock without mishap and no assistance; it was admit­tedly easier to climb when one had magic to help.

It was tempting to think about blasting her way out with levin-bolts, though; she'd been practicing for years now in se­cret and she was getting quite proficient. It would mean less exertion. However, there were drawbacks as well—in the glimpses she'd gotten of the ceiling, she wasn't altogether sure of how stable it was, and it wouldn't do her a great deal of good to bring the ceiling down on herself instead of blasting her way out.

Not subtle, my dear. Not your style.

Besides, unless Kyrtian came to grief in there, she didn't in­tend to leave any trace of her own passing, so she would proba­bly have to get out the hard way.

Meanwhile, in the gleam of her mage-light, the only sign that Kyrtian had been here was a dead campfire and a cleared circle among the rubbish littering the floor. He must have gone off long before she even woke, and had gotten a good deal ahead of her. So if she was to discover what he was up to, she had better get moving.

She paused long enough to recover her breath and her power—she'd been hot and sweaty as well, but in the cold, dank cave-air she'd cooled down quickly and was glad of the cloak she'd brought with her, tied in a bundle about her waist.

Now for a little magic. She smiled to herself as she wove

power around her; this was subtle, and not something a mere male would ever appreciate. The illusion she cast upon herself was a rather clever one; it wasn't precisely invisibility, since that wasn't strictly possible. Instead, she cloaked herself in the image of what was behind her, so that anyone looking at her would see only what her body ordinarily would have ob­scured—a kind of reflection, but not exactly. The illusion wasn't perfect; it couldn't be. Anyone looking closely might well see a faint outline of her body, or notice her shadow on the floor. That was why she wore a light cloak that covered her from head to toe, for a bulky irregular outline against the rough rock of the cave was less likely to be noticed than one with arms, legs, and a head.

She had a rather clever device with her as well, a cone of mirror-finished metal with a handle at its point. She brought her mage-light down and coaxed it into the cone. Now she could di­rect all of the light where she chose without half-blinding her­self, or setting the stupid thing to hover above her head. She cast the beam of light reflected out of the cone around herself, and used it to pick a path across the debris to an opening at the rear of this enormous cavern.

She began to wish that the light wasn't showing her way quite so clearly. As the light picked out this or that object amidst the sticks and leaves and trash, she'd have had to have been blind not to spot the bits of armor—and the bones.

Bones which were not all the bones of animals, nor of human slaves, even if the armor could have been mistaken for anything but elven-made.

Her skin crawled as the empty eye-sockets of an elven skull glared at her on the edge of her circle of light. She had already known that something terrible had happened here, but it was one thing to know that intellectually, and quite another to be confronted with the evidence of utter disaster.

A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of this place settled over her, and she resisted the urge to flee back up that rope into the open'. Whatever had happened here had occurred a very long time ago, even by the standards of the

Elvenlords, and nothing, not even ghosts, could linger for that long. But she fancied she caught a whiff of ancient death, of bone-dust and terror, and she couldn't keep her imagination from painting scenes that were not at all com­fortable.

Nevertheless, as she picked her way across the floor, she avoided looking too closely at anything large enough and white enough to be bone.

Were there whispers, out there in the dark? Was that a move­ment, not in the shadow, but of the shadow? She told herself resolutely that she wasn't afraid, that only stupid slaves be­lieved in spirits, but—

There were sounds out there in the darkness, sounds that could be echoes, but could be something else as well. She couldn't even imagine what could have killed so many Elves, so quickly—and the slaves said that the spirits of those who died violently lingered, hungering after the life they'd lost and eager to avenge their deaths on anything living.

She found herself starting at every unexpected sound, and longed for the moment when she reached the far wall and the entrance deeper into the caves.

She had assumed that once she got to the entrance into the next cave she would find her path clear. In fact, she found noth­ing of the kind.

What had been litter on the floor of the cave was a tangled blockage here; someone, Kyrtian and his people, she assumed, had cleared a pathway through, but if the artifacts there had not already been ready to fall apart at a touch, it couldn't have been done in less than a week. Here the carts of the refugees had jammed at the entrance, and there were many, many more bones, enough so that it was no longer in her imagination that they imparted their own dry hint of ancestral corruption to the air. Big bones, these, the bones of dray-animals long since for­gotten, for they had perished along with their masters, tangled in the shafts of disintegrating carts in attitudes that suggested a tide of unreasoning panic had washed over them and sent them scattering before it.

And more elven bones, this time ones without armor. Women? Old men?

A disintegrating wagon that had been laden with small, slen­der creatures—it took her a moment to get past the disbelief to understand that this had been a wagon full of children.

It was hard to imagine. One seldom saw elven children; they were usually kept in nurseries until they were considered old enough to mingle with the rest of society. She could hardly imagine so many in one place. What sort of spirit would a child leave behind? Something wispy and melancholy—or feral and vicious?

Whatever had sent the Elvenlords into flight had terrified their beasts as well. Triana began to feel a certain relief that the few scraps of information she'd gleaned had not been more specific, that legend now painted the Crossing as a matter of tri­umph rather than the tragedy it had so clearly been. She didn't want to know the details now; there were already too many de­tails writ large in the bones of those who had not survived to become her ancestors.

She reached out her hand to steady herself, and wood went to dust at her touch, enlarging the passage that Kyrtian's peo­ple had already made. Her very skin flinched away from that dust, but it rose in clouds about her and dried her mouth and throat, as if the dead themselves rose to make claims on her....