Fifty yards back, a frozen pillar of ridged ice rose from the cavern floor to a gap in the ceiling. A waterfall had tumbled through a hole in the cavern ceiling in another, warmer time, freezing in place as the cold set in, creating this strange column. Sunlight channeled downward by the ice created the impression that the column was lit from within. Kirisin stepped close and peered into the ice. Within its cloudy depths, tiny creatures hung suspended in time.
The caves grew darker after that, the sources of light fading one by one, the gloom enveloping everything. The solar torches became necessary, and the way forward could only be glimpsed in patches as the beams crossed from one place to another. The cold grew deeper and more pervasive, matched by an intense silence. If not for the crunch of their crampons digging into the ice-coated cave floor and the huff of their rough breathing, there would have been no sound at all.
Ahead, the walls of the cavern began to broaden and the ceiling to lift. Stalactites dripped and became ice-coated spears, some as thick as a man’s leg, some longer than Simralin was tall. The shadows rippled in the glow of the solar torches, and the sheen of ice that coated everything glimmered with colors that danced like flames. From deeper in, still beyond the reach of the torchlight, water rushed and cascaded over rocks.
Simralin stopped. “I think you should use the Stones, Little K.” She flashed the beam of her torch right and left. “Do you see? Tunnels branch off in several directions from here. We need to know which way to go.”
Kirisin nodded, but looked around doubtfully. He didn’t care much for the idea of trying to summon the magic of the Elfstones in this confined space. Who knew what it might do underground? But he dutifully fished out the Stones, dumped them into his palm, held out his fist, closed his eyes, and formed a mental picture of the Loden. The response was so instantaneous that it made him jump in surprise. The Elfstones flared sharply, and the blue light shot from his hand and down the corridor directly ahead to illuminate something crouched in the middle of a massive cavern chamber, something that was more nightmare than vision.
The light from the Elfstones dimmed and vanished. Kirisin stood in shocked silence with his sister, staring down the black hole of the cave tunnel.
“Did you see?” he whispered, shaken.
“I saw something,” she replied. “But I don’t think it was real.”
“It looked real to me.”
“No, it was just a carving. Out of ice and rock.”
“It was a dragon, Sim.”
She shook her head. “There aren’t any dragons. You know that.”
Well, he did, but that didn’t make him feel any better about what he had seen. He tucked the Elfstones back in his pocket beneath his all-weather cloak, suddenly wishing he were wearing something more protective.
“Let’s go have a look,” she said, and started ahead once more.
They passed down the corridor, moving from one chamber to another, winding their way deeper and deeper into the mountain. The beams of their torches cut through the darkness, giving them some reassurance that they were not about to be set upon. Time slipped away, and still the tunnels and caves continued and there was no sign of the chamber and its dragon. Kirisin began to wonder if he really had seen a dragon. He began to wonder if the altitude had affected him and he was starting to see things that weren’t there.
And then suddenly they passed out of a broad tunnel into a huge cavern, and there it was.
They stopped the moment they saw it, tiny figures in its presence. The dragon was huge, fully thirty feet tall if it was an inch, crouched down on four legs at the chamber’s very center, its body covered with scales and horns, leathery wings folded back against its body, claws extended at the ends of its crooked toes, spiked tail curled back around its hindquarters like a giant whip.
But it was its mouth—or more accurately, its jaws—that drew their immediate attention. The great head was lowered so that the lower jaw and long, forked tongue rested on the cavern floor. The upper jaw was stretched open to the breaking point, so wide that a man eight feet tall could have walked upright to the back of its throat. Teeth ridged the jaws in double rows, top and bottom, front to back, like bars across a gate leading into a dark fortress.
Kirisin stared at the monster, transfixed. Simralin had been right: a layer of ice covered over what appeared to be chiseled stone, everything frozen in place. It was not alive; it was only a sculpture.
But what was it doing here?
He looked suddenly at its eyes, cloudy orbs within its fierce face. A shiver ran down the back of his neck, and he took an involuntary step back.
–Kirisin Belloruus–
The voice whispered to him, hushed and disembodied, the voice he had heard earlier that same morning when he had used the Elfstones to find the cave entrance. Calling to him. Summoning him.
He took a quick breath. “Sim,” he whispered. “Did you hear…?”
“Use the Elfstones,” she interrupted, not listening to him. “This has to be where it is.”
Kirisin already knew that. He already knew a whole lot more than he wanted to. He couldn’t have explained it, not in a rational way. He just knew in the way you sometimes knew things. By how being close to them made you feel. By how logic took a backseat to instinct. He wished it weren’t so, but there it was. He just knew.
He didn’t have to use the Elfstones to find out where the Loden was. It was inside the dragon.
This was more of Pancea Rolt Gotrin’s work. Magic of a kind that no longer existed had been used to create this dragon and to place the Loden within. The dragon was the Elfstone’s protector. It was its keeper and its warden. If you wanted to take possession of the Loden, you had to brave the dragon’s maw. You had to accept on faith or whatever reasonable argument you could make to yourself that it would let you pass.
But how would it know who to admit? There had to be a way, a trigger for determining whom it should be.
“The Loden is inside the dragon,” he said to his sister. “I have to go in after it.”
She shook her head at once. “Oh, no. That’s entirely too dangerous. We have to be certain about this first.”
She walked forward to stand right in front of the dragon’s mouth, shining the beam of her solar torch through the rows of teeth and into the throat. The beam shone to the front of the throat and stopped as if it had encountered a wall.
“There’s nothing back there,” she announced, leaning forward to peer inside.
Kirisin knew that this wasn’t so. But Sim would have to be convinced. He reached into his pocket and took out the Elfstones. Then he walked forward to stand next to her. He let her see what he was holding, then closed his hand about the Stones, squeezed his eyes shut, and went inside himself once more, searching for an image of the Loden. He had his vision in place quickly, and his response from the Elfstones more quickly still. The magic flared within his fist, and its blue light exploded down the dragon’s throat, past where Simralin’s torchlight had stopped and then down farther still, traveling a distance too far to determine, coming to rest finally on a pedestal that cradled a white gemstone blazing as brightly as a small sun.
The light from Kirisin’s Elfstones died away, and he looked over at his sister questioningly.
“Okay,” she said. “But I’m going with you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you can. I don’t think it’s allowed. This dragon is some kind of watchdog. Pancea Rolt Gotrin and her family probably constructed it with magic. They put the Loden Elfstone inside to protect it. It keeps out everyone who isn’t permitted to enter. A moment ago, I was wondering how the dragon would know who to let in. I think the blue Elfstones are the key. I think that’s one reason Pancea’s shade gave them to me. Whoever holds the Stones is allowed inside. Everyone else gets…”
He trailed off, shrugging. “Eaten or something.”
“You think this, but you don’t know it,” she pointed out.
He shook his head. “I think i
t, but I also feel it.” He tapped his chest. “In here.”
His sister gave him a long, hard look. “I don’t like it. What if you’re wrong?”
“Then you can come get me out. That’s what big sisters are for. Meanwhile, you can wait here for Angel. She should be along any moment now. She needs to know what we’re doing.”
He could see Simralin struggling to find something more to say, still unhappy with what he was proposing. But they both knew there wasn’t any other choice if they were to have a chance of gaining possession of the Loden. And after all, that was what they had come this far to do. In the final analysis, that was what they must do.
She gave a deep sigh and nodded. “Be careful. If there’s magic at work, you won’t have much protection.”
“About as much as I had in the tombs of Ashenell,” he replied, smiling. “Keep the faith, Sim.”
She smiled back. “You keep it for me, Little K.”
He turned back to the dragon. Its jaws yawned before him, an invitation to enter the blackest of maws. He gave a quick glance at its rows of teeth and then at the strange glassy eyes, wondering again if he had seen them move.
Then he started forward, the blue Elfstones held out before him like a talisman.
THIRTY-ONE
W HAT HAPPENED NEXT caught Kirisin Belloruus completely by surprise. As he stepped onto the dragon’s tongue, across the front row of teeth and into the mouth itself, everything behind him disappeared. Simralin, the cavern chamber with its stalactites and layers of ice, and even the smallest hint of light vanished as if they had never been.
The boy stopped where he was, barely across the threshold of the great mouth, and looked back in disbelief. He swung his solar torch in a wide arc, seeking to penetrate the darkness, but he might as well have been pointing it at a blank wall. The powerful beam failed to reveal anything beyond the inside of the mouth. He shone it ahead, into the dragon’s throat, and was surprised all over again. Unlike before, when Simralin had tried unsuccessfully with hers, his solar torch shone down a darkened corridor, deep into the interior of the dragon. The corridor was ridged and cored out like an animal’s throat, but he could not determine where it led.
Presumably, into the beast’s stomach, he thought. Where he might end up as dinner.
But he preferred to think that this was where he would find the Loden. He considered briefly stepping back across the dragon’s teeth, but the idea of going back at this point seemed wrong. What if he couldn’t get back inside again? Now that he was here, he should continue on and see what would happen.
He started ahead, walking carefully, making sure he was on solid footing. He need not have worried. The tunnel or throat was as solid as the rock of the caves outside. But he noticed that it wasn’t as cold in here, as if the dragon was alive and kept warm by its body heat. That prospect was too troublesome for him to consider for long, and so he pushed ahead into the blackness.
He walked for a long time—much longer than should have been possible. The corridor twisted and turned, and that didn’t seem possible, either. Now and again he could hear a rumbling sound, the sort that a big animal makes. He tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about anything but what he was trying to do, putting one foot in front of the other, keeping an eye out for what might be waiting ahead.
He also tried not to think about the fact that he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Despite all his walking, everything around him looked exactly the same.
Then abruptly, his torch went out, and he was left standing in complete blackness.
For a moment, he just stood there, not quite believing what had happened. He worked the power switch back and forth a few times and slapped the light’s casing with the palm of his hand. Nothing. He experienced a moment of sheer panic, but quickly fought it down. He hung the solar torch back on his belt and was starting to reach for one of his flares when he suddenly had an idea. Impulsively, he held out the blue Elfstones; using what he had learned from the other times he had done so, he called up their magic.
Blue light flared in his fist and filled the corridor ahead. To his surprise, it didn’t seek out the Loden as he had thought it would. Instead, it simply brightened the corridor enough for him to continue on. He did so, following its steadily advancing wash into the ice dragon’s throat.
The minutes clicked by, too many to count, time an intangible he could not measure.
Then without warning the tunnel ended and he was standing in a chamber that might have been a cave or the dragon’s stomach or another world entirely. It didn’t look quite like anything he had ever seen or even imagined. The moment he stepped into it, light exploded all around him, coming from the floor, the ceiling, and the walls, enveloping everything in its white luminescence. It felt as if he were standing at the very center of the light; he could see nothing of anything else.
Except for the stone pedestal that appeared suddenly right in front of him and the Loden Elfstone resting upon it.
It wasn’t difficult to know what he was looking at. He had already seen it in the visions shown him by the blue Elfstones. But even beyond that, he would have known. It was so distinctive that it couldn’t have been anything else. It rested in the cradle of a tripod formed entirely of white fire, its facets gleaming. The fire snaked about the Stone in rippling bands, licking at it with flames that shone as bright as bursts of sunlight, their look smooth and unblemished, clear evidence of the magic that generated them.
Kirisin walked forward tentatively, got to within a few feet of the pedestal, and stopped. He had come to take the Loden back with him. But what would happen when he tried to do that? The Gotrin witches had placed the Stone within the dragon to keep it safe. Would the magic that they had created to ward it permit him to interfere? The blue Elfstones had allowed him to find the Loden, but he could not be certain they were meant to give him possession, as well. It might be that something more was required, some other demonstration of his right to claim it.
He had no idea what that something might be.
He stood there for a long time, trying to decide what to do, aware of time slipping away. He watched the white fire twist about the Stone protectively, and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to put his hand in that fire. He didn’t think anyone was meant to do that. He needed to find a way to block the fire, to make it go away long enough for him to snatch up the Stone. He wondered suddenly if the blue Elfstones were the key to this as they had been the key to finding his way here. He took a steadying breath, held the Elfstones out in front of him, toward the pedestal, and envisioned the flames guarding the Loden fading away.
Nothing happened. Not only did the flames not disappear, but the magic of the Elfstones failed to respond to his summons.
Disappointed, he lowered his arm again, thinking it over. Maybe he was approaching this in the wrong way. The blue Stones were seeking-Stones. They were meant to find what was hidden. What if he used them to seek out a way to make the flames disappear? Would the magic respond to him then?
It was worth a try. He stepped back, clearing some space between himself and the pedestal. The light from the chamber surfaces glimmered brightly all around him, a shimmering cushion. He tried to ignore the feeling of displacement it created, the sense that he was disconnected. Instead he fixed his gaze on the flames surrounding the Loden and imagined them vanishing, snuffed out completely so that the Elfstone sat atop the pedestal unprotected.
This time the magic flared to life, a bright blue ball of light about his fist, chasing back the glow of the room. The light brightened, steadied, and then shot forward to a place midway down the pedestal on the side he was facing. In the raw glare of the magic’s light, he caught a glimpse of markings that were little more than faint smudges. As the light faded, he rushed forward, not wanting to chance losing sight of what he had been shown. Shoving the Elfstones into his pocket, he knelt down, his fingers searching the stone surface of the pedestal, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that at a
ny moment he might sink through the room’s strange glow to whatever lay beneath.
He found what he was looking for right away. A small indentation, not large enough for more than the tip of a single finger. Then he found another, and another, until he had located a place for all five fingertips of one hand. Carefully, he filled all the indentations and pressed.
Instantly the bands of fire atop the pedestal disappeared. When he climbed to his feet, the Loden lay on its side, unprotected. Cautiously, he reached out, hesitated, and then scooped up the Elfstone and lifted it clear. No fire appeared to stop him; no magic surfaced to punish his intrusion.
His grin was bright and fierce as he tightened his fingers about the Stone. He couldn’t know for sure, but he reasoned that somehow the magic had identified him through the touch of his fingertips, either as a bearer of the blue Elfstones or as a bearer of the blessing of the shade of Pancea Rolt Gotrin. Either way, he had been recognized and accepted, and the Loden Elfstone was his.
He took a moment to loosen his grip enough that he could study the Stone more closely. It was a perfectly clear gemstone, smooth and exquisitely faceted, all bright mirrors that both reflected and refracted the chamber light. Within its depths, small traces of color swirled and vanished like tiny fish in deep water.
“What is it you can do?” he whispered to the Stone.
Then, tightening his grip anew, he turned back the way he had come, retracing his steps toward the wall of light. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he attempted to walk into it, but he knew his only choice was to try leaving and see what happened.