She wasn’t wasting time, she told herself. It would be a moment before the others had collected themselves enough to seek deeper in the cave.
Huddled in her makeshift blind, Bijou crept out into the light.
Even through the fabric, she could feel the heat instantly. It collected in the folds and scorched her fingers where she held the gather closed. But the suns—when she risked a quick glimpse—oh, the suns.
She had expected, perhaps, something like the suns of the veldt and the mountains—shining disks performing a stately courtship across the endless pale plane of the sky. But these were pinheads, negligible circles with an angular diameter no bigger than the sprocket-holes in a strip of silent-movie celluloid. The larger flamed a savage orange; the smaller burned actinic blue. It seemed as if only a diameter or two separated them, and a ceaseless tendril of flame curved across the space between to conjoin them. The fourth sun, as white and inoffensive as the nightsun, was a bright speck off to one side.
The heat was too much. Gasping in her shelter, Bijou ducked back inside the cave. How could that trifling thing drive her—already, after no more than a second or four—back into shelter, her skin prickling and sore where it had brushed the cloth? How could so much heat and brightness fall from so small—or so distant, more likely—a set of suns?
She groped for her water bottle and drank, swishing the water around inside her mouth so it would do the most good.
Back in safety, she folded cloth and lens and put them away. Her companions had gathered around Salamander, who crouched by the waterside. Bijou hoped they had remembered the warning not to drink. The dead stallion stood further down, sloshing water noisily with his skull as he tried to slake a thirst in flesh that no longer existed, but he was dead already: Bijou could not imagine the water would hold any terrors for him.
“That’s something,” she said, coming up to them. “Anyone else want to look?”
“Shhh,” Kaulas said without rancor. “Salamander has found a guide for us.”
Bijou looked down to see what the white Wizard held perched on her cocked forefinger. Orange as embers, and glowing softly in the shadows between a spatter of coal-black-dots…
“Of course,” Bijou said. “It’s a newt.”
“An eft, actually.” Salamander straightened up, licking her pinpricked finger again. Although it wasn’t her place to judge another’s magic, Bijou hoped there wasn’t too much newt slime on it. “She came this way.”
“Then by all means,” said Prince Salih. “Lead us, my lady.”
Five
After the fire of the outside, the cavern with its echoing, plashing water was a cool relief. Kaulas convinced the horse-skeleton to stand rearguard, and they arrayed themselves and continued downward, along the shore of the underground lake.
Now they needed the torches—even the necromancers, once they passed around a curve or two and out of sight of the entrance’s reflected light. Bijou allowed the beam of hers to play out over the lake briefly, too entranced by curiosity to mind her own earlier cautions. The outer part of the cavern was raw and rough, wind-carved—but as they progressed backwards and it narrowed, they found themselves passing twisted filigrees of flowstone: stalactites, stalagmites, candelabras of stone that looked as if candles had melted and slumped down over them. The colors streaked and faded like the sandstone above, but this was something else—limestone, dissolved away and redeposited by millennia of water.
“We’re under a sea,” Bijou said suddenly, surprised. “A fossil sea. Limestone and sandstone.”
“Imagine,” said the prince. “This desert was water, once.”
The chime of Ambrosias’ zills halted abruptly. Bijou turned to track its jeweled gaze and saw something blunt-ended and swift coiling away among the twisted gardens of stone. Two bright spots in a light-banded black body caught the light of her torch before it vanished.
“Have a care,” she said. “I just saw an amphisbaena.” Then she realized that the guests might not have such things in their wet Northern lands. “A two-headed snake,” she explained. “Extremely poisonous.”
“And I,” announced Prince Salih, from further down the lakeshore, “just found Dr. Liebelos’s footprints. Or at least, the footprints of a woman with Northern boots, and not a ghul’s bare feet and claws.”
Salamander and the prince led them through caverns and chambers for what seemed a long time. This was a natural cavern system, but Bijou could see the marks of the chisel here and there where it had been retouched to make passage easier. Still they walked hunched over or sometimes crawled on hands and knees, drenched in the cold, cursed water, struggling to keep the electric torches dry. The sand in their boots grew wet and wore the skin in the crevices of their feet raw. Bijou worried about infection—and about the curse.
The floors were uneven, the flow of the stream in many places dammed up behind what looked like constructed terraces. Bijou knew they were the result of mineralized water evaporating and leaving a precipitate behind, but that didn’t change the wonder with which she observed them.
The caves were loud, resounding with running water and the footsteps of all of them. Confusing echoes fluttered all about. She wasn’t sure half the time if she was hearing the footsteps of her quarry, or her own, or those of her party.
Half an hour in, Kaulas muttered, “Who puts a forge in the bowels of the earth?” The tallest, he was obliged to proceed in a painful hunched shuffle. They’d given him the last position.
“The eft is confident,” Salamander said.
“And the footprints persist,” the prince said, pointing one out where it was smudged into a muddy patch.
Riordan said, “It seems logical to me that we are seeking no ordinary anvil, but rather one with a special connection to some underworld god. Perhaps they only used it in ceremonies, and those were carried out here.”
Bijou glanced at Maledysaunte. The necromancer’s face was mostly a pale blur in the gloom, but Bijou was sure it betrayed concern. Whatever Maledysaunte knew—whatever her Black Book told her—she kept it to herself.
Bijou’s eyes caught on a moving silhouette at the edge of the torchlight. “Halt!” she cried, her breath steaming in wet cold. Soaked clothes clung to her, and she shivered.
Everyone whirled, weapons ready.
But it wasn’t Dr. Liebelos. The shadow that detached itself from among shadows was the outline of a naked man. His head was shaved, his face clean-shaven. In the torchlight his skin shone glossy dark, browner than Bijou’s. Perhaps almost true-black—the red-black of a dark-hided horse, not the blue-black of Maledysaunte’s hair or a raven’s wing.
As he came closer, picking his way barefoot through the running water, the group of adventurers reflexively drew together. He didn’t raise his hand to shield his eyes from the beams of the torches. Bijou found herself staring at his face, unnerved by something about its structure or expression. She took an involuntary step back when she realized what it was: even the whites of his eyes did not shine—because his eyes had no whites. They were simply inky pools from lid to lid, and within them, she imagined she could see a faint shimmer like the schiller albedo of the huge, sooty moon that had so recently set.
“Don’t be afraid,” the man said. “I mean you no harm. It’s just been a long while since I saw your kind in the house of my ancestors.”