Marsheila Rockwell - Skein of Shadows

“You know, sometimes being direct really is best. ‘Very.’ That’s all you had to say. ‘Very.’ ”

The drow apparently took her literally, for he did not speak again for some time. Though that could have been because clambering up and down the jagged chunks of stone took all the breath out of him. It certainly did her.

What seemed like an eternity later-but probably was really only the entire day, and maybe part of the night-they finally reached the far wall of the huge cavern. Sabira was sure they’d traveled so far they must be halfway back to Zawabi’s Refuge by now, or else out underneath the Thunder Sea. She was completely turned around and had no sense of what direction they were traveling in. She considered asking Greddark, then decided against it. The idea of millions of gallons of water or even tons of sand sitting somewhere above her head, with nothing separating them but the cavern ceiling, which might or might not be all that thick, made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention.

Some things it was better not to know.

Several tunnels opened up before them like choices in a rigged shell game. Except in this case, Sabira figured the loser was the one who picked the right shell. Lucky for her.

Xujil turned to them, his face grave.

“We are entering territory patrolled by the Spinner’s followers. You must be quiet as the tomb, and if I gesture to you to move or to stay put, you must do as I say quickly and without question. Otherwise, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

Like he’d guaranteed Tilde’s, Sabira wondered? But there was no point in baiting the drow. He was the only one who could get them where they needed to go.

“You will also need to extinguish the lights on your helmets and use only your goggles from this point on. Unless one of you has other magic that enables you to see in the dark? Donathilde cast a spell on herself and her companion.”

Companion. Singular. One of Deneith’s most powerful sorceresses and thirty of its best Blades, and by the time they’d made it this far, there were only two of them left. She felt a flash of anger at her House’s patriarch. What artifact could possibly be worth so many lives? But she knew the answer, as sure as if Baron Breven himself were here to whisper it in her ear.

One that could save-or end-many, many more.

She and Greddark thumbed their lamps off and pulled their low-light goggles up. They were instantly engulfed in darkness, for this part of the cave had none of the luminescent fungus that had lit their way previously. Sabira couldn’t see the dwarf next to her, or even the hand in front of her face. She hadn’t realized how dependent on the blue glow of the everbright lanterns she’d become down here, and she felt a moment of stark, primal fear before she was able to detect the faintest light emanating from the mouths of some of the tunnels.

As her eyes adjusted, she was able to make out Xujil’s silhouette against the nearest of these, and Greddark’s at her side. The drow motioned for them to follow and led the way into the third tunnel from the left, which seemed to Sabira to be no different from any of the others. More and more patches of glowing green fungus appeared as they went on, and soon she could see as well as if she’d had been using the everbright lantern; maybe better.

In addition to the mosslike fungus, they began to encounter spider nests and webbing with increasing frequency. There’d been spiders during most of the trip, of course, but they’d generally been small and of no great concern. Sabira was not one of those people who had an unnatural loathing for the eight-legged creatures, and she was willing to leave them be if they did the same for her. But these egg sacs were bigger and promised less aloof inhabitants. When one began to tremble as she passed, she didn’t hesitate, stomping on the sac before its inhabitants could burst out and make their acquaintance.

Xujil looked back at her, his usually placid face tight with anger.

“Quiet as the tomb, Saba?” Greddark whispered as she scraped the pulpy mess off her boot and onto a nearby rock.

“Sorry. I thought he meant a Karrnathi one.”

Karrnath had turned to the dead to bolster their forces during the Last War. Even now, most of her citizens considered it a great honor to have one of their fallen relatives restored to unlife to continue to serve their country. There was a saying in Karrnath: A quiet grave is a disgraced one. Which was part of the reason she wanted her body burned when she died. She loved her country, and her House, but she’d already made far more than her share of sacrifices for both of them. She had to draw the line somewhere, and if duty dictated that line could not be drawn in life, she was going to make damned sure it was in death.

Of course, she supposed if she died down here, she wouldn’t have to worry about it. There was always a bright side.

When her boot was clean enough that she wouldn’t leave a trail for any vengeful spider lovers to follow, she waved for Xujil to continue.

The relative sparsity of cobwebs and the occasional boot print in patches of strange, spongy rock attested to the fact that they weren’t the only ones to use these passageways, but aside from more egg sacs that wisely stayed still in Sabira’s presence, they saw nothing else in the tunnels for hours. Xujil did have them hide in crevices and side passages a time or two, but she neither saw nor heard what prompted the drow to take cover. Given that at one point she had to squeeze into a crack coated with bat guano-which Greddark promptly collected off her clothes afterward-Sabira had a sneaking suspicion the guide might just be doing it out of spite.

They came to another fork in the tunnel, and Xujil led them down the smaller of the two passages. The luminescent fungus was meager here, and the webs thicker, though there were no spider nests that Sabira could see. At one point, the tunnel narrowed so that they had to crawl for about ten feet, and Sabira had a sudden flashback of that other crawlway, and the voice that she’d heard. She braced herself for a repeat performance, but whatever had called her name before remained blessedly silent.

It had probably only been a figment of her imagination, anyway, brought on by the claustrophobic tunnel and the general madness that was Tarath Marad. She didn’t really believe that, but she was nevertheless grateful for the reprieve.

Then they were crawling out onto a thin ledge that overlooked another vast cavern. But this one, instead of housing a forest of sentient mushrooms and a black sea, held something stranger still.

A city.

But it was not the sort of city she’d come to expect from the drow of Xen’drik’s surface, primitive and disorganized. No, this city was a veritable fortress metropolis that would rival the craft of Krona Peak and the might of Karrlakton, the Sentinel Marshals’ base of power.

Towers carved from enormous stalagmites jutted up from the ground like Khyber’s own teeth. Sheer walls crowned with massive iron spikes spanned the distances between, and Sabira could see dark-skinned figures marching along their tops in crisp, orderly lines. A wide road, busy despite what her exhausted body was telling her must be either a very late or very early hour, led up to a set of gates. The tall metal doors were each adorned with a huge, red-eyed spider whose legs ended in blades. It took several moments for Sabira to realize that the arachnids were not, in fact, carvings. They were real, and as she looked on, one of them snatched a passerby up from the road and devoured it. None of the other drow even slowed.

“The City of Shadows,” Xujil intoned quietly, and Sabira suppressed a groan. She was a Marshal, not a spy or an assassin. If she needed to enter a city, she didn’t try to infiltrate it, she flashed her badge.