by Andre Nolton
Everything instinctive in her screamed to go back, forget what she saw and go, flee, now. This was nothing like what she had expected—there was something horribly wrong here, and if she stayed she'd find out what it was. All of those things out there, staring without eyes, waiting for just the right trigger, the right action to set them free....
But... but if she left, she would leave empty-handed. Only Kyrtian would know the secrets that lay here. And that was insupportable.
Will triumphed over instinct, and she forced herself to go on. She decided at that moment to approach the place where Kyrtian and his people were by taking the long way around the edge of the cavern, dropping down from the ledge as silently as possible, then making her way around the cavern with one hand outstretched against the rock wall to guide her. She would pass by the Great Portal, and that alone might hold some useful information. And she wouldn't have to walk among those—things.
The Great Portal—it had enabled the Ancestors to travel from another world. Perhaps it still held enough magic to take her home—after all, some of the oldest Portals could be used to go anywhere that one held a key, and she had the Prime Key to her own Portal in the form of the signet ring on her right hand. If that was true, then she wasn't trapped here; if anything went wrong, she could escape in a heartbeat!
That thought, when it occurred to her, brought a sudden ease of her fear that almost made her stagger, and she caught herself with one hand on the cavern wall. Relief suffused her, making her a little lightheaded. The hulking shapes of the Ancestors' chattels no longer seemed to stare at her with insensate menace. They were just—things. Old, dead things. No matter what Kyrtian had found, or thought he had found, these relics couldn't threaten anything or anyone—if they ever had. Her imagination had run away with her, and she was as bad as any nursery-bound child in conjuring up nightmares for herself.
Whatever had slaughtered all those people back in the main cave couldn't have come from here, anyway. When the Portal closed, the constructs had all died. Everyone knew that. It was in every version of the Crossing that she had ever read. That was why it had been so important that the Ancestors find or create a source of slave-labor, since they no longer had their constructs to do their work for them.
With renewed confidence, and a purely internal laugh of scorn at her own foolishness, she continued on, feeling for each step as she took it, since she could no longer see where she was going. And all the while, she strained her ears for some hint of what Kyrtian was saying, watching the enormous shadows cast on the opposite wall by the wavering light of his lamps moving in a gigantic puppet-play.
Aelmarkin doused his mage-light with a curse when he realized that the faint glow ahead of him must be caused by Kyrtian's people in the next cave. He'd finally caught up with them— only to come perilously close to blundering into them. He swore at himself for being so stupid—how could he have let something that simple catch him? He only hoped that none of them were bright enough to have noticed his light behind them.
The rough circle of light ahead seemed awfully dim—and very yellow. Odd, that. Why would Kyrtian go out of his way to create a yellow light when the natural blue-white of mage-lights was so much better and truer?
Then again, it was Kyrtian. It might be firelight; he might have found what he was looking for and decided to camp. It might be lamplight, because he wasn 't as good a mage as Ael-markin had thought and he was running out of energy to keep the mage-lights going. He was perfectly capable of doing without mage-light altogether, for some other peculiar reason of his own.
It was only when Aelmarkin actually reached the mouth of the next cavern and only just saved himself from tumbling over the edge that he understood that the lights were indeed lanterns, and that Kyrtian had elected to use them instead of mage-lights, and he cursed again (but only in his head) when that simple fact came near to undoing him.
It was a very near thing; one moment, he was easing himself along the cavern, and the next, his questing foot met empty air, and unfortunately, he had already trusted some weight to it, not anticipating that there would be a drop-off. Aelmarkin teetered on the brink for a heart-stopping moment before his flailing hand caught the edge of the wall and he was able to steady himself.
He burned the air with a flurry of mental curses before his heart stopped racing and he was able to really look at what lay below him. But then—oh then, his heart raced for an entirely different reason!
There below him, ranked and waiting like so many placid, sleeping bullocks, were the ancient constructs that the Ancestors had brought with them. Row upon row of them, waiting for the proper touch to bring them alive and call them to service.
His touch. Never doubt it. He could hardly wait to get down among them! What need would he have of slaves or gladiators or even armies with these powerful creations at his command?
His mouth gone suddenly dry with anticipation, he ascertained that the drop was nowhere near as long as he'd thought, and eased himself belly-down over the edge. The rock scraped him even through the tough leather of his hunting-tunic, but he hardly felt it in his haste to get down among those things out of another world and time.
Besides, he needed to get under cover, in case one of Kyrt-ian's slaves came snooping. It would be a disaster to come this far and then be tripped up by one of Kyrtian's wretched slaves.
He felt better with the bulk of several of the things between himself and Kyrtian's lamps. Safe enough to kindle a very, very dim hand-light of his own, one which could be hidden in his fist and used only, held close to the metal sides of the constructs, to see if he could decipher any of the ancient script. He hoped to find instructions there—surely not everyone who was asked to control the things in the past actually learned how to do so before attempting to operate them! Failing that, he hoped for labels, or some evocative name that would tell him what the things were used for.
But as he moved silently from one huge bulk to the next, brushing off a literal coat of dust that fell to the ground in a sheet, he was disappointed. Though he looked as high as he could reach, instructions there were none; nor names, either— at least not on the sides that he examined. He didn't dare move to the side facing Kyrtian's lamps; bad enough that he was a moving shadow among unmoving ones! The murmur of voices suggested that all of Kyrtian's people were still with him, but was by no means a trustworthy way of telling for certain.
He cursed the Ancestors now—how stupid could one be, to neglect to leave instructions for the uninitiated? Unless those instructions had been in one of the books back in the main cave, books that crumbled at a touch....
For a moment, he despaired. But then came a stroke of luck so incredible he hardly dared believe it.
As he closed his fist around his hand-light in disappointment at—again—finding nothing, he caught a fugitive hint of glowing green out of the comer of his eye.
He turned, with painful slowness, to his left, and for a moment felt nothing but a wash of disappointment when there didn't seem to be anything there except another construct, and this one utterly without anything like writing on the side. It did have a set of blades and claws that suggested warlike intentions, not that knowing its purpose would do him any good unless he could get it moving, which he obviously couldn 't without instructions. But then as he stared, his eyes adjusted, and he saw it.
A faint glow of green, in the midst of the blank side of the construct, exactly like the glow of an activated Elf-stone.
He sidled up to the thing, staying in the shadows, and quested over it with a finger. Only the glow and a subtle change in texture from metal to stone informed him that the thing was there at all! It had been inset flush with the surface, and in the dim illumination from the hand-light, he wouldn't have seen it except for the glow. It was an Elf-stone, or something very like one. And when he opened his fist to bring his hand-light up to it—the hand-light dimmed, and the green glow brightened.
He could have pummeled himself for stupidity. Of course
! Why would you need instructions to manage one of these things? All you needed was the Elf-stone, both to power it and to control it! And, of course, that was why all of the things had collapsed into inertia when the Great Portal closed! The magic powering them that was a part of the Aether of Evelon ran out, and the Elvenlords who'd built and sustained the Portal had nothing left to supply them! Utter simplicity, but, of course, the Lesser Elvenlords who'd held back their own power either hadn't known how the constructs worked, or had been so busy eliminating their dangerous rivals that they hadn't bothered to try to learn to use the things!
Or perhaps they had been so afraid of pursuit that they just abandoned the brutes.
Or—well, it didn't matter. The point was, they had been abandoned and they were there for the taking and now Ael-markin knew how to take and use them!
It couldn't be any simpler. And it didn't matter what this behemoth was originally intended to do, either. It was big, it had to be brutally strong, and it was certainly brutally heavy. It could kill Kyrtian simply by stepping on him.
Aelmarkin smothered a howl of glee, and placed the hand holding his hand-light against the Elf-stone embedded in the construct's side. It sucked in the power greedily. The hand-light vanished.
And then—Aelmarkin felt it wake and—look for more. And felt its fierce concentration focus on him.
He tried to pull his hand away in a flash of alarm. But by then, of course, it was already too late.
Kyrtian had finally allowed Lynder and Keman to lead him to a seat on a nearby outcrop of rock. He felt—hollow. And exhausted. As if he had wept for a year, although he was dry-eyed.
At least mother isn 't here. That was all he could think of. At least she can't see—this. I don't think she could bear it. I think she 'd go mad.
"No, don't try to chip—it out," he said with difficulty in answer to Lynder's question. "I don't ever want Lady Lydiell to see him. Not like that, anyway. Maybe we can find a way to cover him over—"
He shuddered, a spasm of a thing that left him sweating and shaking. What must have happened? He must have somehow wakened one of those—things. Maybe it fed off his mage-lights, and he didn 't realize what was happening. He must have been so excited—too excited to think clearly.
He buried his head in his hands, shuddering all over, in spasms he couldn't control. He wanted to howl, to rail at fate, and above all things, to weep. Why couldn't he weep?
Which one of these hulks had done the deed? He wanted to know that, suddenly, with a fierce anger that took him and left him shaking. That, above all, he had to find out! He'd find the thing and take it to bits with his bare hands, and grind the bits to dust and scatter the dust over the barren desert, by the Ancestors, he would!
He stood up, still shaking, and turned towards them—just in time to see one of them slowly rising up from among its fellows, towering higher and higher, with something doll-like and screaming clenched in one fearsome claw.
34
Fear struck tines of ice deep into his gut, but Kyrtian had not spent all these years training for battle in vain. Before the thing had finished standing, he barked an order, which, if his voice cracked, was nonetheless loud enough and authoritative enough that everyone reacted.
"Take cover!" he shouted, even while he himself was diving for shelter beneath the sloping front of the nearest construct.
Even Lynder and Hobie, though they had not actually fought with Kyrtian's troops against the Young Lords, had trained long and hard with all of Kyrtian's men and reacted immediately to his barked order. By the time the construct had gotten to its full height, Kyrtian, Lynder and Hobie were all out of its field of vision—or so he hoped—under a slope of metal that cast a deep, black shadow.
And I only hope this thing doesn't decide to come alive, too—he thought, squeezing as far out of sight as he could, though his skin shrank from contact with the chill and slightly greasy metal.
When they had all tucked in and gone immobile, he risked a glance at the wall and the half-circle of lanterns. Shana and Ke-man were nowhere in sight, but at least they were nowhere in his line-of-sight. He had to hope that if he couldn't see them, neither could the construct. If it "saw," that is. It might use other senses....
"Now what?" Lynder hissed into Kyrtian's ear. He sounded as desperate as Kyrtian felt.
"I'm thinking!" he hissed back. He wasn't worried about that thing hearing them; the victim it had in its claw was making enough noise to cover just about anything. The screaming was horrible, but worse was the feeling that he knew the tortured voice.
The victim—An Elvenlord; he'd seen enough in that moment of horror to know it wasn't a human. But who? Who could have followed him here, and why? Not any of Lord Kyndreth's people, since none of them knew where he was going, precisely, and surely none of his own.
The victim blubbered between the screams, incoherent in his terror. It was sickening to listen to.
No, none of them would have trailed after me, simply because none of them could have. They 're all totally unsuited to tramping about in the wilderness, thank the Ancestors.
As frightening as the screams was the silence beneath it. The construct made no sound at all.
The only person likely to have followed him, and with the skills to do so, would have been Gel, and it certainly wasn't Gel in that monster's claw!
Yet the voice was familiar.
Who then? He strained to make out anything in the screams and babbling to give him a clue, as his mouth dried with fear and his insides seemed to turn to water. An enemy, then? But what enemy would have followed him on what was supposed to be a fairly dangerous mission to hunt out Wizards? An enemy looking for something to discredit him with—perhaps? An enemy planning to find, or plant, something to Kyrtian's harm. Or even an enemy hoping to arrange an "accident" out here where there would be no witnesses? That was something that Aelmarkin—
Ancestors! he thought, stunned, now hearing what was familiar in those screams and wails echoing across the cavern. It's Aelmarkin!
That Aelmarkin hated him enough to try to discredit or murder him was no surprise, but that he'd actually dare the wilderness to do so was something so out-of-character that he couldn't berate himself for not thinking of it before. His worst enemy—
Who has managed to blunder into this.
Fortunately, he did not have the time to battle his conscience over whether or not to attempt a rescue; there was a whine, and a flash of light sweeping across the cave floor, and the screams cut off with dreadful finality. The three sheltering beneath the still (thankfully!) lifeless construct became very quiet, hardly daring to breathe, as silence descended with leaden suddenness.
Kyrtian fought down the urge to bolt for the mouth of the cave that had brought them here. Who knew what sort of weapons this thing had?
No magic, Kyrtian decided. Especially not levin-bolts. If this monster was what had been feeding on his mage-lights and draining them, what sort of power would a levin-bolt give it? Or worse—what if another of the constructs absorbed the power and came awake? He was fairly certain that this one wasn't the one that had gotten his father—though his father must certainly have awakened one or another of the behemoths, probably by using mage-lights. This one was now a proven killer; they certainly didn't need to awaken a second!
So what could he use against this monster, if not magic?
Not bows and arrows. Not swords. And we 've precious little else.
There was a whir, a creaking of metal, and suddenly something like an enormous upturned bowl attached to three metal struts slammed down onto the stone where he and his men had just been, sending up a cloud of dust. A second followed the first, smashing one of the lanterns.
A moment later, Aelmarkin's limp body dropped down beside the second disk. There was no mistake, now that Kyrtian could see the terror-twisted features. It was Aelmarkin, all right. And there was no doubt in his mind that his cousin was quite, quite dead. Not when his backbone bent that far, or at that
angle.
Kyrtian froze; almost directly above them, he heard that peculiar whining again. He couldn't see anything but those two metal legs, but his imagination painted a picture of the construct somehow turning the top part of itself to peer down at the ground below, searching for them. He felt like a mouse hiding in a log in a field, watching the legs of a cat. Only he had no idea just what arcane senses this monster was using to look for them.
And as if to reinforce that imaginary image, twin beams of light swept over their hiding place and passed over the floor where they had all been standing.
If I knew what its weapons and its abilities were, I might have a better chance of figuring out what to do about it—
A shout broke the ominous silence, making all three of them start and clutch at each other in involuntary reaction.
"Hey!" Shana called from somewhere to the right, her own voice cracking.
The whine became a whir; something clacked angrily overhead—and in mere moments, the thing had taken two earth-shaking strides that got it out of Kyrtian's field of vision. He heard and felt each footstep; it was bipedal, from the sound. And it was definitely after Shana.
Shana! What are you doing?
It wasn't quiet in the cave any longer. The construct must not have been a very graceful thing; it sounded as if it was stumbling into or kicking aside every obstacle in its path in its effort to get to the Elvenbane. Lynder winced with each crash; Hobie just sat as frozen as a frightened sparrow.
Then it stopped. The whining noise began again, and it sounded frustrated. Kyrtian held his breath again, and so did the other two. If it heard them—
"Ho!"
It was Keman's voice this time, from another part of the cave. The construct was away again, blundering its way through the lifeless forms of its fellows. It might be bipedal, but it obviously wasn't unstable; he hadn't heard anything that sounded like a stumble or a misstep yet.
