Fortunately, Moptop did indeed have a supply of dry, lightweight torches, and he quickly ignited one of them and handed it to the man. “I don’t really need the fire to see down here,” he explained. “We kender can see pretty well in the dark. But sometimes a torch is good for details. I like to put in a lot of details when I’m making my maps.”
“Now tell me again: What are you doing here?” Jaymes asked. “Looking for a way into Solanthus?”
“Well, I’m making a map, seeking the best path of course. Did I tell you I’m a professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire? It’s kind of what I do.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. But isn’t it a little different, taking me to the Lady Coryn’s house in Palanthas, and poking around through some lightless cave under the ground?”
Moptop shrugged. Clearly, no difference was apparent to him. “A path is a path. Some places have better maps, is all.”
“So you know a path out of here?”
“Well, no. I never said that, did I?”
“How did you get here in the first place?”
“Well, I did come down the path that leads into here, of course.”
Jaymes drew a breath. The torch quivered slightly as his fingers clenched around the wooden length. “All right. Think about it this way. Couldn’t we walk out of here on the same path that you walked in on? And wouldn’t that make it a path out of here?”
“Well, for you maybe. But that’s not the way I’m heading. Plus that would simply take me back the way I came, when what I really want to do is find a path to Solanthus. Didn’t you say that the White Lady was trying to magic you into the city? This must be her way of telling you that you might have to go about it the old-fashioned way.”
“And this cavern, you think, will take us to Solanthus?” Jaymes asked warily.
“Well, I sure hope it does, otherwise this whole thing has just been a big waste of time. Not entirely, of course. Lots to see down here.” Moptop pulled out a piece of parchment from one of his innumerable pouches. From another he found a short stick of charcoal with one end sharpened to a point. He gestured to the torch. “Here, I’ll show you. Hold that up a bit, will you?”
Jaymes obliged as the kender slid down off of his boulder to stand on flat space between the two rocks. The man dropped down beside him, holding the light up, and studying the kender’s map as Moptop added a few notes with the smudgy black stick.
Unfortunately, to the human the sketch was simply a confusing mess of scrawled lines and shapes, often intersecting or curving around each other. In some places, crude notations were marked: “No!” “Rong turn” “Watch owt-sinkhole!” and “Oops” were among the few he could decipher. Now the pathfinder was laboriously adding “Find Guy,” next to a big black X. Abruptly, he looked up to see Jaymes observing him.
“I know you’re not just a ‘guy,’ ” Moptop exclaimed hastily. “But I couldn’t fit Lord Marshal Jaymes and all that into this little space.”
“ ‘Guy’ is fine,” the warrior said curtly. “But what about Solanthus?”
“Oh, that’s where the really interesting part comes in…”
An uncountable number of hours later, Jaymes was starting to understand exactly what “the interesting part” entailed. It meant numerous smashes of his head against low-hanging rocks, long stretches of spelunking where he had to crouch down on his hands and knees and crawl along over dust and grime and irregularities in the floor that scraped against his shins or, on more than one occasion, sent him sprawling onto his face.
The farther they continued along, the more he was convinced that Moptop Bristlebrow was simply poking around down here, that he didn’t have any real idea of where they were going, or, more important, how they would ever get there-that is, to Solanthus-through this nightmare world of darkness and stone. By the same token, he despaired of the kender’s ability to retrace his steps, so he was forced to conclude that his best hope was to simply press on and take his chances with the professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire.
Even so, more than one time, Jaymes caught himself fingering his ring. He considered activating its one precious teleport spell. He merely needed to twist it on his finger and envision a destination, and he would be out of here in an instant-an increasingly attractive option, the more time he squandered on his quest with the kender.
“Here we are!” Moptop finally announced brightly.
“What’s that?” Jaymes held the torch up as they stumbled into a small, circular chamber. He spotted at least four dark passageways shooting off in different directions.
“Well, here.” The kender helpfully raised his map and indicated a splotch on his parchment. The man couldn’t help but notice that the sheet had grown increasingly smudged and illegible as they had ventured deeper into the labyrinthine caverns. “It’s very clear. This is where we are, and we’ve been through here three times already. Well, I have; you’ve only been with me twice now. But that means there’s only one more of those caves leading out of here to check out. So we’re narrowing things down, which is good.”
“You mean-we’ve been spinning in circles? ” The marshal’s voice was very low and threatening.
“Not really.” Moptop shook his head, dismissing the idea as inane. He brandished his map as proof positive. “It’s more like a zig-zaggy square pattern. We were going north by northeast for a while, but then here we zigged straight west, and there we zagged west by southwest-or south by west-west, or something-and then we came back to north-north-east, and like I say, here we are.”
“In the same place we were before!” Jaymes’s voice rose a notch.
“Well, yeah. But now we’ve ruled out that way, and that way, and that way-and that way too-so we know that this way is probably the best way to go!”
“Probably! What makes you think that any of these damned passages leads to Solanthus?” demanded Jaymes.
Moptop looked at him in amazement, an amazement that suggested he had never been subjected to such a stupid question before. “Why, where else is left?” he asked. He plunged into the-presumably-unexplored tunnel before Jaymes could come up with a reply.
Surprisingly, this cavern seemed more passable than the others they had traversed. Right from the start the floor was smooth and relatively free from obstruction, though the occasional chunk of stone or rock had to be stepped around. Often they could discern, in the torchlight, where these obstructions had broken off the walls or ceiling. In combination, these facts suggested this place had once seen a lot of use, but it had been centuries, perhaps many centuries, since anyone had taken the trouble to clear the floor.
But there were other signs of onetime habitation as well. The narrow bottlenecks that had constricted so much of the rest of the cave network had been expanded in this cavern, even carved into regular arches and frames. The stonework was so flawless it looked almost like a natural extension of the bedrock.
“Do you suppose dwarves hollowed this out?” Jaymes asked as they passed along a section where both walls had been smoothly widened, so the warrior could easily walk without bumping his head or shoulders against the confining stone.
“Nope,” Moptop replied with certainly. “With dwarves you at least see some chisel marks. And they’re masons, for the most part, not carvers. They build with stones and bricks-those arches would have keystones, for sure, if dwarves made ’em. These look like they’re just the regular stone of the underground, but shaped somehow.”
The marshal had to agree with his guide. He was just about to say as much when the kender stopped so abruptly that Jaymes nearly bumped into him.