Rosa looked to Dominik. “Right, left, or center?” she asked.
“We know he’s going to try and kill Markos,” Dominik replied. “We need to get to Markos as soon as possible. You know he’s the one who is going to find us, not the other way around.”
She concentrated on the images that the vâlva ba˘ilor had put in their minds. It took a moment to orient herself, but as soon as she had, it was all as clear as if it was her own memory. “Left,” she said instantly, and Dominik nodded. Now that she had all the images sorted out in her head, she knew exactly where Markos was. They would have to traverse the left-hand tunnel, past one of the places where the shifters slept and ate, past one little appendix cave (and she had no idea what they used that for), and take a right. Markos was in a second little finger cave, off the main cavern tunnels.
And there were dozens, literally dozens, of places where the chief shifter could ambush them.
On the other hand . . . we know that. And we know where those places are.
Dominik closed his eyes a moment, perhaps to settle the path in his head as she had, then opened them. “Let’s go,” he said.
He took the lead; she let him. He had the crossbow ready and loaded, and had the good instinct or good training to keep it aimed where his gaze went. She had the coach gun; kept her eyes on what was behind them as well as what was to the side. The cave was as bright as if someone had illuminated it to their bespelled eyes, and there was no way that the shifter could know that.
But he had been killing for a long time. If he was the original shifter of this pack, he could have been murdering for decades. He had a lot of practice in dealing death.
So have I, she thought grimly.
Often in caves, there was the sound of dripping water. There was no such sound here. Possibly it was a “dead” cave, one where the water source that had formed it had diverted or dried up, leaving behind formations that had turned brown and lifeless. The floor was littered with trash, mostly leaves and branches; piles of what looked like leaves, dead bracken, and rags had been heaped against the walls to make what looked like crude beds. So, was this where some of them had slept?
It was hard to tell, but in the image in Rosa’s head, this cave was huge, and there was enough room for a couple of hundred of the creatures to have bedded down comfortably without having to sleep in the entrance-room.
Maybe this is where the ones supposed to be on guard slept. That hadn’t done them much good against the Old Man and the iele.
But there were those three entrances ahead of them, and the shifter could emerge from any of them at any time. So they made their way, eyes darting in every possible direction, listening hard for the slightest noise, step by cautious step toward their goal. Rosa had a certain amount of practice in keeping her heart from racing with fear, but poor Dominik must be having trouble hearing over the noise of his pounding in his ears. They both tried their best to walk silently, but the trash on the floor made it difficult.
I don’t know how the shifter could do any better, though.
Nothing leapt out at them once they reached the leftmost tunnel entrance and moved into it. Rosa kept her eyes behind, though, since there was absolutely no reason why the shifter couldn’t have been hiding just inside one of the other two tunnels with the intention of coming at them from the rear.
At least the floor was clean here. But again, that worked as much in the shifter’s favor as theirs. He could slip up on them from the rear, silently.
At least the tunnel was narrow enough here that there was no chance he could be waiting to leap out of hiding from the side.
Rosa elected to literally walk backward, mere inches from Dominik, coach gun at the ready. Step by careful step they made their way deeper into the caves, until they came to a spot where the tunnel branched.
They knew from their implanted memories that the tunnel joined up again, not twenty feet later. The trouble was that this was an excellent place for an ambush.
Dominik stopped, uncertain. She moved up next to him, sideways, keeping a wary eye behind, and touched his arm. She pointed to him, and indicated the left hand side of the tunnel, then to herself, and indicated the right. He nodded, and she mouthed the single word “run.” He nodded again. They separated, and at her signal each of them sprinted through the assigned segment, weapon at the ready.
She dashed the twenty or so feet, sweating, seeing nothing, but expecting to hear the sound of combat at any moment from his side.
But there was nothing but the sound of his boots on the stone. Her boots, of course, were soft-soled, and she had learned to run in a sort of gliding motion that barely lifted her feet from the ground. She startled him a little as they met at the join again, but not so much that she was in danger of a crossbow bolt in her direction.
She let out a sigh that he echoed, and they went back to their previous pattern, her walking backward, him forward, down the twists and turns of the tunnel. The floor had been smoothed and polished, but it looked as if it had been by water rather than by the work of man. When he stopped again, she knew they had come to the next obstacle. The cave would widen out into an actual room. There would be a rough stone platform in the middle, something like a table, except natural. Off to one side would be a narrow little tunnel the Elementals had, in their own wisdom about such things, assumed was a dead-end cavelet. That would be an excellent place for the shifter to be waiting.
Rosa had noticed, in the back of her mind, that the smell of fresh blood had been getting stronger as they approached the larger room. Now she suddenly heard Dominik making a strangled sound, and turned—
To see sheer horror.
There was a pile of bodies on that platform in the center of the room, and blood literally ran from the stone and pooled at its base. There were at least ten, because that was the number of heads she counted, in a state of numb disbelief. Possibly, there were more. The stumps of candles stood at the cardinal points around the stone platform. All the bodies appeared to be of women, most were young, and some appeared to be pregnant. None of them looked like the shifter-kin. All were dressed in rags and were in various stages of emaciation. Their faces were frozen in expressions of agony and terror.
And the effluvia of blood magic was thick on the ground and tainting the air.
Well . . . now I know where else he was getting “children” from, she thought, swallowing down her nausea. And where he was getting the blood-power to keep fueling the shifts. Because the power had to come from somewhere, every time one of these monsters shifted form. Probably they were using their wolfskin belts as the storage point, since the copper medallions hadn’t shown any sign of being the talismans.
Scuff marks and bloodstains showed where the women had come from—that little side-cave that the Elementals hadn’t troubled to explore. It must have been a sort of prison, where the shifters had held women they had somehow captured instead of killing.
All the other, terrible reasons to keep prisoners raced through Rosa’s head, and she was pretty certain that all of them were right. But one thing was absolutely certain. The chief reason had been so that they would have a steady supply of sacrifices for blood magic.
And while his offspring had fought his battle, the chief of the shifters had been killing his captives on his altar. All of them.
So now, he had the power of ten, a dozen sacrifices, all in his hands. What could he do with that much power?
“This . . . isn’t good, is it?” Dominik whispered in a stricken voice.
“No,” she said grimly. “It’s not.”
But across the cavern, she could see the dim reflection of what must be an overpowering golden glow that was as healthy and beautiful and sane as the miasma of the residue of blood magic was sickening and hideous and insane. That was the zâne, who must have mounted an epic set of protections around Markos when the chief shifter began his slaughter. That they were still ther
e and had not left was at least an indication that Markos was still alive and being protected. She took heart from that, and strength of will from that glow.
“You see where we need to go?” she breathed to him.
He nodded. She put her hand on his arm, briefly, trying to comfort. He turned toward her a moment, and she didn’t think it was the strange Elemental sight that made him look green. She squeezed his arm.
“Then let’s go.”
It was hard, hard to turn her back on that light, on the promise of somewhere that wasn’t a home to terrible slaughter, that wasn’t literally awash with blood. But he needed that promise more than she did. He was not a fighter, he was a healer, a physician, and yet he had been fighting at her side for most of the day, only to be confronted by a sight that must be out of his worst nightmares. It was one thing to know of such atrocities. It was quite another to be thrust without warning into the middle of one. Every sense must be in revolt against such evil, and every instinct telling him to flee. He was probably holding onto courage and sanity by the thinnest of margins, and he needed that promise of goodness ahead of him.
Whereas she . . . well, while this might be the worst such slaughter she had seen, it was by no means the first. There were still patches of great evil in the Schwarzwald, in places where no man had ventured for centuries. The evil had slept, gone dormant, and almost undetectable—except to the evil that was akin to it. Man, or things that had once been men, still sought out those patches of evil, awakened them, and drew strength from them.
And then they strengthened the evil with death.
You never became inured to such sights, they never ceased to horrify, but they ceased to shock. And to a lesser extent, they ceased to sicken.
And at least those poor women are no longer suffering from their captivity at that beast’s hands. She reminded herself that she had seen people “rescued” from similar situations, and they were never able to be made whole again. Many of them had been driven quite mad, and never regained their sanity. Those that were not mad were haunted for the rest of their lives. Sometimes those lives were very short indeed, for they could not bear the nightmares, the days haunted by fear, the nights when they could not sleep and every tiny sound threw them into a panic. There was never, ever any peace for them, and they killed themselves in despair.
The priests said that those who killed themselves could never enter Heaven—whereas these poor, murdered victims surely had, having suffered enough Hell on earth during their captivity to expiate any sin.
So . . . who was better off? Those who had died like this and gone to Heaven? Or those who had been rescued only to seek death at their own hands, and were doomed to Purgatory?
She dragged her attention back to the here and now, as Dominik began his slow, painful traverse of the cavern. They were going to have to go past that dreadful altar in order to get to the next part of the cave, and the nearer they came to it, the worse she felt, and she assumed, he felt. If it had only been the emotional and the physical nausea and horror, that would have been bad enough, but they were both being infected by the spiritual horror, and, being Earth Magicians, by the defilement of the Earth itself. There had been deep magic here, that was now perverted and turned to wicked ends. They felt that and it sickened the power they held within themselves. She strengthened the shield around the two of them—suspecting that he had more than enough on his hands without trying to erect and maintain shields. That helped her; she hoped it helped him. Occasionally, they touched for a moment as they edged their way across the stone, and she felt him trembling.
Of course, that might just have been exhaustion too. It felt as if they had been battling forever. They hadn’t eaten since they had started off from the inn—she had eaten before leaving, out of experience, but she doubted that he had—and they’d only snatched moments to gulp down water from the bottles at their sides. She knew hers was empty now, and his probably was as well.
All right then . . .
“Stop a moment,” she whispered, and he obeyed. She couldn’t do this any closer to that terrible altar than they were now, and she didn’t want to wait until they were past, even though this would be much, much easier in the gentle protection of the zâne. But there was no telling what might happen between here and there, and they needed the boost now.
She strengthened the shield until it was as good as anything she might build ritually, and extended herself down, down into the earth at her feet, forcing her magic and her senses far past where the Earth had been profaned and polluted. She did not have to venture as deeply as she had feared she might. And to her weak-kneed relief, she was lucky; one of the great power-courses of Earth lay directly below them!
Small wonder these mountains were the home to so many uncanny creatures, so many Elementals . . . small wonder they were far more numerous than in her homeland.
She touched that great power source, tapped into it, and brought it up as if she had tapped into a deep spring. She let the power flow through herself and into Dominik, taking the place of the food he had not eaten and the water they were both feeling the lack of. It wasn’t a perfect replacement, but she sensed some of his trembling ease, and felt him standing up a little stronger, felt his stance firming. When she had brought up as much as her own power could safely control, she let go of that mighty stream, and she heard him sigh.
“Thank you,” he whispered. She nudged him with an elbow to signal he should continue, and their painfully slow progress began again.
Past the altar, and she tried to look at it no more than she had to.
The floor of this cavern was clean of everything but blood. She suspected that the chief shifter deliberately kept his “family” out of here, to avoid having confrontations over his captives. That shifter she had killed in that other part of these mountains came from this “family”—so what had happened? She doubted he had gone on his own. This was too . . . ideal a haven for their kind. Plenty of victims, shelter, everything they could want. Surely he had been either driven out over conflict, or sent out to look for a new hunting ground and another secure cave like this one.
Driven out, I think. If this is like a wolf pack, a strong male will inevitably challenge the father, and his choices, if he lost that fight, would be to die, submit, or flee.
Just as she thought that, she caught a flicker of movement at the entrance to the captives’ cave.
And that was all the warning she had.
One moment, that flicker of movement. The next, all the breath was driven out of her as something hit her across the midsection, knocking the coach gun out of her hands and sending it across the room. It hit the floor and discharged, knocking a shower of rock bits out of the ceiling as she hit the wall of the cave and saw stars.
She fought to get her breath, gasping with no result for several agonizing moments before she managed to get her lungs and chest muscles working. Then she sucked in a breath of air with a sound like someone dying; sucked in another, and frantically looked back at where she had come from.
The shifter was in the middle of the room, glowing a sickly black-red with blood magic. She had never seen anything moving as fast as he was moving, and had never seen anything imbued with that much blood-power. He must have slapped the crossbow out of Dominik’s hands the way he had slapped the gun out of hers, because Dominik didn’t have it in his hands anymore. Somehow Dominik had managed to get the boar spear off his back and was being chased backward by the thing.
The shifter must have been watching his children fight, and learning what not to do. He didn’t try to bite Dominik. Instead, he kept raking his claws at the healer, forcing him back each time. It would probably hurt him when his claws encountered the cloth-of-silver, but nothing like the way it would hurt when he bit. She fumbled at her belt for a pistol, but her hands were cold, and she couldn’t feel the butts, and for a panicked moment, she thought she had lost both of the guns.
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As if in a nightmare she saw Dominik’s foot slip.
“Hey!” she shouted, jumping to her feet as the shifter instantly reacted to her shout, just as she realized her belt had twisted and the pistols weren’t where they should have been. “Hey!”
She pulled her pistols as the shifter whirled, saw her up, and launched for her. She fired both. The first missed completely. The second hit his shoulder. He yelped for a moment, but kept coming, and before she even had a chance to dodge out of the way, he backhanded her into the wall again. Both pistols went flying.
She hit the wall, and saw more than stars; for a moment she blacked out, and came around to the sound of a pistol firing. This time the shifter screamed, but there was as much rage as pain in the sound. The scream was followed by the meaty sound of flesh-on-flesh impact, then stone-on-flesh impact, and the clatter of metal on stone. She shook her head violently to clear the darkness from her eyes and saw Dominik slumped against the wall of the cave opposite her, head sagging forward on his chest. With a sensation of being stabbed in the heart, she saw he wasn’t moving.
15
THE shifter turned, and she fumbled out her silver dagger. It seemed pitiful against something that could move faster than she, and had been able to throw a big man into a wall with a single blow. She was absolutely galvanized with terror now, energized rather than paralyzed. Her heart beat wildly, but her hands were steady, and she kept her eyes glued on her enemy. Chills ran down her back at the look in his evil, yellow eyes, and her clothing and hair were damp with fear-sweat.
She scrambled to her feet, and backed her way along the wall. The shifter seemed in no hurry to attack her this time. And despite runnels of blood dripping down its shoulder in two places, he didn’t seem to be handicapped by his wounds at all.
It had to be the blood magic, keeping him from feeling much from his injuries, even though they had been caused by silver.
The same deformed skull that the other shifters had sported marked this one, although its fur and skin didn’t seem diseased. Its muzzle was more human in the half-form than theirs had been. It lifted its lip in a snarl as it stalked toward her.
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