Like her companions, the sorceress found herself gasping in wonder. From one side of the grotto came a crisp breeze, carrying on its breath the musty scent of unseen passageways and the cool touch of dew. From the other side came the whisper of a distant waterfall, though it was impossible to tell whether it was draining the abyss or falling into it.
When they reached the other end of the bridge, the trail turned left and ran along a narrow ledge. To one side lay the chasm, while the other was lined with vaulted doorways, none of which came up any higher than Sadira’s chest. As she passed each one, the sorceress peered down its length. Usually, she saw nothing but twenty yards of corridor running through the same porous stone that encased the rest of the grotto.
Once in a while, though, the tunnel was short, and Sadira could see that it opened into some vast chamber. Several times, she glimpsed a magnificent arch or column rising into the darkness beyond the passageway, and once she even saw a huge room of stacked arcades.
Finally, crawling on his hands and knees, Huyar led the way into one of the side corridors. As each of the other elves followed him into the passageway, they gasped in alarm, then let out a sigh of relief and scrambled through as fast as they could.
When Sadira’s turn came, she saw the reason for the elves’ concern. The walls of this passageway were lined with notches that appeared to be crypts, though none could have held a person any larger than a child. Each hollow was faced with a strange sort of translucent stone that Sadira had never seen before, a little too cloudy to be glass with a texture as smooth as ivory. In each hollow she could make out the form of a small body, and at first Sadira feared they were the elven children.
When she peered into one of the crypts more closely, the sorceress saw that the hazy figure inside was not that of a child. Rather, it seemed to be a mature man, with skin as viscid as clay, short-cropped hair, and even features. He was dressed in a plain tabard, with a small skullcap on the top of his head. Only the fact that Sadira’s elven vision saw his body in a cold blue tint suggested that he was dead.
“What do you make of it?” asked Grissi, speaking from a short distance ahead. “An ancient dwarf?”
“No. From what I’ve heard, ancient dwarves were rugged and hairy,” Sadira said. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed them against the transparent covering, trying to get a clearer view of the little man. “He looks more like a halfling!”
“Way out here in the desert?” Grissi scoffed. “Never. Halflings are mountain-dwelling savages.”
The little man’s eyelids flittered open and a pair of dark pupils turned toward Sadira’s face. She jerked away from the crypt, a shudder of fear running down her spine. “It moved!” she gasped, starting down the passageway. “Let’s get out of here.”
They crawled past a dozen more crypts, then followed the rest of the party into an intersecting tunnel. This passageway was high enough for Sadira to stand upright, but the elves could only rise if they kept their upper bodies hunched over like baazrags.
Huyar pointed down the corridor, to a sliver of rosy light spilling into the tunnel from a hole in the roof. “That’s where the tracks lead,” he whispered.
“What’s your plan?” Sadira asked.
“If it’s the Nibenese, they probably came for you,” said Huyar. “If so, I’ll give you to them.”
“No!” hissed Grissi. “Faenaeyon named her one of the tribe. When she was the first to descend the rope in pursuit of our children, she proved it’s an honor she deserves.”
“Grissi’s right,” agreed Katza. “If you would betray her, you’d betray one of us.”
Huyar bit his lips. “You couldn’t think I really meant to give her over, could you?” he asked. “What I intend to do is use her as bait.”
The elf outlined a simple plan that stood a good chance of success, except for a single detail that he could not have realized. Sadira pointed at the porous white stone from which the cavern had been shaped. “This rock blocks the flow of magic,” she said. “I can’t prepare spells until I’m outside.”
“Then it will be up to us to make sure you have time enough,” Huyar said, motioning at himself and the other warriors.
With that, he nocked an arrow in his bow and, moving with a sort of squatting waddle, went down the corridor. At the opening, he paused long enough to let his eyes adjust to the dusky light, then peered outside. Apparently he found no one guarding the exit, for he motioned to the others to follow him and climbed through the hole.
Only Sadira stayed behind, crouching beneath the opening and holding her spell ingredient in her hand. For a long time, she heard nothing from outside. She began to fear they had guessed wrong about who had taken the children and why.
Finally, a Nibenese woman, almost certainly a templar, called out, “Have you come for your children, elf?”
“Yes,” answered Huyar. “Why did you take them from us?”
“We couldn’t hope to beat your tribe to this oasis with a full company of half-giants,” the woman replied, “so taking hostages seemed the surest way to get what we want.”
“Which is?”
“You know the answer as well as I do,” the templar replied.
“Surely, you can’t want our chief badly enough to follow us into the desert,” said Huyar, playing dumb. “After all, when you captured him the first time, you only sold him to the Shom slavers.”
“It’s not your chief we want, and you know it!” snapped the woman. “We value him no more than you do.”
“What do you mean by that?” Huyar inquired, his voice less wary than a moment earlier. “Our chief is our father.”
“Oh? Does your tribe make a habit of poisoning its fathers?” asked the templar. “Or was your chief’s condition when we captured him an exception?”
Sadira’s stomach knotted with the dread of what might happen next. For a long time, Huyar had remained silent. She began to fear he would grow so angry that he would forget about the children and return to attack her.
At last, the elf replied, “Faenaeyon may have drunk some bad wine. I assume you want the woman who served it to him?”
Although this was not the way the elf had said the conversation would go, the sorceress did not turn to leave. Even Huyar was cunning enough not to trust the templars to honor any bargain they made. No matter what Sadira had done, his best chance of recovering the children lay in executing the plan upon which they had agreed.
The templar must have signaled her reply with a gesture, for the sorceress did not hear it. Instead, Huyar said, “Then bring the children out where we can see them. Once we know they’re safe, we’ll go get Sadira and meet you halfway down the hill.”
“Then lay aside your bows,” said the templar.
“So you can kill us?” Huyar scoffed. “As long as our children are safe, you have nothing to fear. We would not risk their lives by attacking.”
“Very well, but we won’t hesitate to kill them if you break your word.”
There was a moment of silence, then Katza’s voice demanded, “Cyne, how could you let yourself be surprised by a bunch of city-dwellers?”
The demand was Sadira’s signal. She placed her spell ingredient, a small block of granite, between her teeth and scrambled through the opening. Even before the sorceress had climbed completely out of the hole, she began summoning the energy for a spell.
The exit opened into a small glade surrounded by a thicket of chiffon trees. Though dusk had completely fallen, both Ral and Guthay already hung high in the sky. The area was lit with a burnished amber radiance more than bright enough by which to see.
At the edge of the small meadow were the six templars who had brought the hostages forward. Each woman held a child in front of her body, with a dagger pressed to the young elf’s throat. Though the children were clearly frightened, they did not seem too panicked to follow their elder’s instructions. In fact, none of them were even crying.