She hesitated, her thoughts frozen, and a flash of insight whispered to her. Jair! It was Jair! She took a deep breath to steady herself. There was no logical explanation for such a conclusion—it was simply there. But how could that be? How could her brother… ?
In the tunnel behind her, something moved.
She had come some distance from the causeway, a slow and cautious passage through darkness with the aid of Cogline’s flameless torch. She had neither seen nor heard another living thing in all that time. She had come so far without sensing other life that she had begun to wonder if perhaps she had been mistaken in taking this tunnel.
But now there was something there at last—not ahead of her as expected, but behind. She turned guardedly, the feeling of being watched forgotten. She thrust the torch forward and started in shock. Great, luminous blue eyes blinked at her from out of the gloom. Then a massive whiskered face pushed its way into the circle of her light.
“Whisper!”
She spoke the moor cat’s name with a sigh of relief and dropped to her knees as the beast came up to her and rubbed its broad head against her shoulder in friendly greeting.
“Whisper, what are you doing here?” she murmured as the cat dropped down on his haunches and regarded her solemnly.
She could guess readily enough the answer to that question, of course. Discovering her absence, the others must have backtracked to the stone bridge. Being unable to follow farther themselves, they had sent Whisper after her. Or rather, Kimber had sent Whisper, for Whisper answered only to the girl. Brin reached out and rubbed the cat’s ears. It must have cost Kimber something to send Whisper on like this without her—as close as they were, as much as the girl relied on him. As was her nature, she had chosen to give the moor cat’s strength to her friend. The Valegirl’s eyes misted, and she put her arms about him.
“Thank you, Kimber,” she whispered.
Then she rose, stroked the cat for a moment and shook her head gently. “But I cannot take you with me, can I? I cannot take anyone. It is much too dangerous—even for you. I promised myself that no one would be exposed to whatever it is that waits for me, and that includes you. You have to go back.”
The moor cat blinked up at her and remained where he was.
“Go on, now. You have to go back to Kimber. Go on, Whisper.”
Whisper didn’t move a hair. He simply sat there, waiting.
“So.” Brin shook her head again.“ As determined as your mistress, I guess.”
She was left with no other choice; she used the wishsong. She sang softly to the cat, wrapping him close about with her words and music, telling him that he must go back. For several minutes she sang, a gentle urging that would not injure. When she was done, Whisper rose to his feet and padded back down the corridor, disappearing into the dark.
Brin watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and started ahead once more.
Moments later the darkness began to dissipate and the gloom to lighten. The passageway, narrow and close before, broadened and lifted in seconds so that her small light could no longer reach to the walls and ceiling. But now there was light ahead that rendered her own unnecessary, filling the passageway with dusty gray brightness. It was the sun. Somewhere close at hand, the tunnel was opening back into the world without.
She hurried forward, Cogline’s flameless torch dropping to her side. The passageway turned upward, a stairwell honed and shaped from the tunnel rock rising far ahead into a massive, open-air cavern. She went up the stairs quickly, her weariness forgotten, sensing that her journey was nearing its end. Sunlight spilled down into the cavern above, silver streamers thick with swirling bits of dust and silt that danced and spun like living things.
Then she reached the last step, walked clear of the tunnel onto the broad ledge that lay beyond, and stopped. Before her, a second stone bridge spanned a second chasm, this one twice the size of the first, rugged and massive. It dropped away down the mountain rock thousands of feet into an abyss so deep that even the sunlight streaming down through crevices in the cavern ceiling could not penetrate its blackness. Brin peered downward, her nose wrinkling against the stench that wafted up. Even with Cogline’s salve to numb her sense of smell, she felt nauseated. Whatever lay at the bottom of the pit was much worse than what passed through Graymark’s sewers.
She glanced across the stone bridge to what waited beyond. The cavern stretched back into the mountain several hundred feet, then opened into a short, high tunnel. Yet it was not a tunnel so much as an alcove, she thought—hewn by hand, shaped and smoothed, with intricate symbols carved into the rock. Light streamed down at its far end, and the sky stretched away in a dim and hazy green.
She looked closer. No, it was not the sky that stretched away. It was a valley’s misted wall.
It was the Maelmord.
She knew it instinctively, as if she had seen it in a dream and remembered. She could feel its touch and hear its whisper.
She hastened forward onto the bridge, a broad arched causeway some two dozen feet in width with wooden railing posts pegged into its rock and linked with chains. She moved forward quickly, passed the apex of the arch, and started down.
She was almost across when the black creature rose suddenly from a deep crevice in the cavern floor a dozen feet in front of her.
Muttering irritably, Cogline shuffled to a halt, Rone and Kimber crowding close behind him. Ahead, the sewer bisected into a pair of tunnels, each exactly like the other. There was no indication of which offered passage to wherever it was that Brin had now gone. There was nothing to suggest that either was the better way to go.
“Well, which do we follow?” Cogline demanded of Rone.
The highlander stared at him. “Don’t you know?”
The oldster shook his head. “No idea. Make your choice.”
Rone hesitated, looked away, then looped back again. “I can’t. Look, maybe it doesn’t make any difference which one we follow. Maybe both end in the same place.”
“Sewer tunnels run to the same place, not from the same place! Any fool knows that!” the old man snorted.
“Grandfather!” Kimber admonished sharply.
She edged forward between them, scanning the tunnels in turn, studying the blackened waters that flowed through the grooved channels cut into each. At last she stepped back, shaking her head slowly.
“I cannot help you,” she confessed, as if somehow she should have been able to do so. “I have no sense of where either leads. They appear the same.” She looked over to Rone. “You will have to choose.”
They stared at each other for a moment like frozen statues. Then Rone nodded slowly. “All right—we’ll go left.” He started past them. “At least that tunnel seems to run back toward the chasm.”
He hastened into the sewer corridor, his flameless torch held firmly before him, his face grim. Cogline and Kimber looked at each other briefly and hurried after.
The black thing rose from the split in the cavern floor like a shadow come alive out of night’s dreamworld and crouched down before the bridge. It was human in look, though as hairless and smooth as if sculpted from dark clay. Hunched. over until it rocked forward on its long forearms, it was still taller than Brin. There was an odd, shapeless quality to its limbs and body, as if the muscles beneath lacked definition—or as if there were no muscles there at all and it not a thing of flesh. Sightless, deadened eyes lifted to find hers, and a mouth as ragged and black as the creature’s skin yawned in a deep, toneless hiss.
The Valegirl froze. There was no way to avoid the creature. It had clearly been placed there for the purpose of guarding the bridge, and nothing was to pass it. Probably the Mord Wraiths had created it from the dark magic—created it, or called it to life from some nether place and time, as they had done with the Jachyra.