The blackness around him was absolute. Elves are gifted with the ability to see even in lightless conditions, yet Hytanthas could see nothing at all. He feared he had been blinded. Fighting back panic, he concentrated on his other senses. His questing hands encountered hard stone arching overhead and stone walls on either side, but open air in front and behind. He was in a tunnel. He recalled the Lioness describing the tunnels her expedition had explored beneath Inath-Wakenti. The return of that memory brought the rest flooding back.
He had been flying night patrol on Kanan. A group of will-o’-the-wisps appeared, trying to surround him. At his command the griffon dove. Down and down they plummeted, Kanan never wavering although it seemed they would smash into the blue soil. They leveled off only yards above it. The lights were left behind, and Hytanthas did a foolish thing. He relaxed, exulting in his triumph over the mysterious lights. A trilithon loomed out of the shadows, two tall, white stones supporting a third laid horizontally atop. With Hytanthas’s hands slack on the reins, Kanan chose to dive under the lintel. His rider didn’t react in time. Hytanthas’s forehead struck the stone, and he fell from the saddle, unconscious. Awakening a short time later, he saw no sign of Kanan, so he shucked his dented iron helmet and leather skullcap and prepared to walk back to camp. The instant he dropped the helmet, a will-o’-the-wisp appeared. It touched him, and next thing he knew he was here.
Was that what happened to all the others who vanished? Were they whisked away and deposited in the maze of tunnels underneath the valley floor?
Time enough later to worry about such things. He didn’t know how long he had been here, but his throat was parched and his belly protested its emptiness. He had only the gear attached to his person: a fighting dagger, a light grapnel with thirty feet of thin rope (commonly carried by griffon riders for retrieving messages from the ground), and a bit of hard biscuit rolled inside a bandanna. Sword, water bottle, and flint and steel had been lost with Kanan.
The hard biscuit eased his hunger pangs, and he explored his surroundings more carefully. The wall had a slight curve, which increased the higher he explored. The ceiling curved above him. The opposite wall, some seven feet away, was exactly the same, made of small, cleanly cut blocks fitted together without mortar. Which way should he go? There seemed little difference. He felt no breeze on his face, so he chose a direction and started off, feeling his way along the wall and shuffling his feet to avoid tripping over unseen hazards. The stone wall was smoothly dressed, but his sensitive fingertips noted tiny imperfections. Like some grades of marble.
Every now and then, he heard the Lioness; she was talking to Hamaramis and Taranath by the sound of it. Hytanthas called out periodically but never earned an answer. He had no idea why be was hearing his commander but was certain he owed his life to the sound. Her voice had brought him back from a place he suspected he might never have escaped otherwise.
In the perfect darkness, his sense of time became confused. He seemed to have been walking for ages. At times his booted feet crunched through loose gravel or sent larger fragments skittering aside. From the lack of strain on his leg muscles, he deduced the tunnel was continuing straight and level, neither climbing nor descending.
When a faint, purplish glimmer appeared far ahead, be feared it was no more than a mirage conjured by his light-starved brain. The glimmer persisted. Relieved beyond words at the return of light, be put aside the puzzle of his inability to see in the blackness and forced himself to hold to his slow but steady pace. He didn’t want to risk a fall.
The glimmer was not an exit. It was another will-o’-the-wisp. The fist-sized purple light appeared to be hovering in place. Despite his approach, it never moved. He poked at it with the tip of his dagger. His probing dislodged the globe and it began to fall. Without thinking, he reached out and caught it in midair. The globe was weighty for its size, smooth and hard, and slightly warm. By its amethyst light, he saw that the column on which it had sat was extremely slender, no thicker than his finger, about three feet high, and made of some sort of polished black stone. When he bent low to study its base, he got his first glimpse of the debris on which he’d been walking. The shock caused him to drop the smooth globe.
The tunnel floor was covered with bones. Most were the remains of large animals, but here and there he saw the tiny skeletons of birds and rodents.
When the globe hit the floor, its light had grown brighter, changing from purple to indigo. He picked it up and carefully dropped it again. The impact brightened its light considerably, to a sky-blue shade.
Whatever else its purpose, the light made the going easier. Resuming his trek, he ate the last of his dry bread and pondered the significance of the bones. Could they be the remains of Inath-Wakenti’s missing animals?
He’d not traveled far when the light illuminated something more substantial than dry bones. A body lay near the right wall. Its posture told Hytanthas the person was dead, although there was no smell at all, only the dry, dusty odor of the bones. He intended to pass the corpse quickly but pulled up short when he realized the body was that of an elf. Metal armor was easily discernible beneath the sun-bleached geb. Hytanthas crouched to see the warrior’s face.
The dead elf was known to him—a Qualinesti named Marmanth who had ridden out of Khurinost with the Lioness so long ago to search for Inath-Wakenti. He must have been taken by the will-o’-the-wisps and left in this tunnel, just as Hytanthas himself had been. But Marmanth had died, while Hytanthas lived. Why? Did the will-o’-the-wisps sometimes kill their victims outright, or had Marmanth never awakened from the strange sleep?
Elves dislike touching their dead, but Hytanthas steeled himself and searched the corpse. It showed no signs of violence. The debris around it had been disturbed by nothing but Hytanthas’s own footprints. It was as though Marmanth had appeared there from nowhere and never got up again.
Hytanthas stood and resumed walking. Hungry, his throat achingly dry, he knew that if he couldn’t find a way out, he’d end up like poor Marmanth, like all the creatures trapped down there: a corpse, slowly drying and turning to dusty bones.
Night came again. The elves camped near the huge circular platform amid the dense gathering of monoliths. A defensive perimeter was created by filling the gaps between standing stones with barricades of brushwood. Kerian and the professional warriors thought it futile to erect barriers to keep out ghosts and flying spirit lights, but the rest of the elves took the effort seriously. Barricades and bonfires had kept the phantoms at bay before. The civilians trusted they would do so again.
The elves tried cutting sod to strengthen the barrier, but the sandy soil fell apart on their spades. Turning the dirt revealed the soil’s strange sterility. No worms wiggled in the cuts, no pill bugs turned armored carapaces to the intruding light. For its top three inches, the dirt was blue-green and very sandy. Below that was black loam of the finest sort. Elves who had been farmers in Silvanesti and Qualinesti grew quite excited when they saw that. Kerian crushed a handful of dirt in her fist.
“How will you grow anything without insects to pollinate it?” she asked.
“Some things do grow here,” Gilthas countered. Vines and bushes propagated through their roots, and trees could pollinate with the wind. Still, her point was a valid one. A lack of insects would make it difficult to grow fruitful crops.