To Light A Candle ou(tom-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  Vestakia looked tired—far wearier than even a day’s hard riding could account for—and pressed her hand to her forehead as if trying to rub away a pounding headache. This close to the source of the Taint, it was obvious she was feeling its draining effects.

  “We’ll set up camp here,” Kellen decided, gesturing toward the pines. It was closer to the cavern mouth than he liked—and too close for Vestakia’s comfort, he knew—but they were losing the light, and to travel through snow this deep by night would be a bad idea. Besides, they were all cold and tired. They needed hot tea, hot food, and a breathing space to plan their next move.

  The Elves moved beneath the trees, found a clearing, and began setting up camp with quiet efficiency, clearing a space for the braziers and setting snow to melt for tea and soup. Kellen unsaddled Shalkan and gave him a quick rubdown— sweat would quickly turn to ice at this temperature—and then saw to Vestakia’s mount as well. She’d already done more than her share of work today.

  By the time he was finished, the tea was ready. He collected two cups and brought one over to her. She was leaning against a tree at the edge of the clearing, staring broodingly back the way they’d come.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Not too,” Vestakia said bravely. “More like a sore tooth than anything else. So it isn’t Demons in there. Just something they’ve touched.” She shuddered. “As if that isn’t bad enough.”

  Kellen held out the steaming cup of tea. Vestakia took it, and sipped.

  “Do you want some of that stuff? I know Idalia brought some. You know, the thing that shuts down your magical senses? That way you wouldn’t be able to feel it,” Kellen offered.

  Vestakia opened her eyes very wide. “Oh, Good Goddess, no!” she exclaimed, almost sputtering. “Kellen, I’d rather feel something a thousand times worse than this than have Them be able to sneak up on me and not know!” She reached out and patted his arm awkwardly. “I’ll be fine. Well, not fine, exactly, but I’ll be all right. It’s those children you should be worrying about. What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m not—” Kellen began.

  “And by Leaf and Star, I say you will not!” Jermayan declared.

  He had not shouted—not quite—but he had certainly spoken loudly enough to catch Kellen’s attention. Kellen’s head whipped around.

  Jermayan and Idalia were facing each other in the center of the clearing. Idalia held a small bundle in her arms.

  “I will,” Idalia said quietly. “It’s the best chance they have. And you know it, Jermayan.”

  Kellen hurried over.

  “Um… what’s going on?” he asked.

  “Your sister has this foolish notion—” Jermayan began.

  “Jermayan thinks—” Idalia shot back.

  “No.” Kellen held up his hand. Both of them stopped, looking at him in surprise. “You’re arguing. I can see that. Arguing wastes time and energy. Let’s find another way.” It was one of Master Belesharon’s favorite sayings. “Idalia, what are you holding?”

  “A… a tarnkappa,” she said reluctantly.

  “And what were you going to do with it?” He had a sinking feeling he already knew, but Master Belesharon always said it was better to know than to guess.

  “I’m going to put it on and go in after the children. I’ll be safe,” she said, sounding defiant.

  “Madness!” Jermayan protested vehemently.

  “It will work! Nothing in there will be able to sense me while I’m wearing it—and I’ve added a spell to this one to give me darksight. I’ll be able to see even if there’s no light. We can’t just go rushing in there—it might be a trap—”

  “Of course it’s a trap!” Jermayan and Kellen said, almost in chorus.

  “Then you see why I have to be the one to spring it,” Idalia said inexorably. “And—with luck and skill—come away with the bait—or at the very least, find out that it isn’t there, so Vestakia can cast about for a fresh trail.”

  “No!” Jermayan said again, a note of desperation in his voice.

  “It’s my tarnkappa,” Idalia said. “I am not only the most expendable member of the party, I’m the logical one to go. If there are any traps of Dark Magic down there, I can sense them and avoid them—can you, Jermayan? And I’m a much better tracker than you are, Kellen. If there’s a trail to be found, I’ll find it.”

  She was right. Kellen realized it even as he hated the fact. It was a trap, so the safest, the most logical thing to do was to send one person to spring it. And the person in the party with the best combination of skills to get into—and out of—the trap alive was Idalia.

  Both Idalia and Jermayan were looking at him. She might go no matter what he said. But they were waiting for his decision.

  “So you can find your way in,” he said. “But how are you going to find your way back?”

  Idalia opened one hand to reveal a thick stick of chalk. “Why, I’ll blazon my way, brother dear, just as I would in an unfamiliar forest. And I’ll use the marks to lead me home again.”

  She’d answered every objection.

  “All right,” he said, feeling suddenly old and weary. “But—” What was he going to say? Be careful? “Don’t take too many chances. If it’s a trap, they might not be there at all.”

  Idalia laughed. “Don’t worry, brother dear. I’m in no hurry to die.” She hugged him quickly, the tarnkappa a bulky softness between them, then turned back to Jermayan.

  Kellen moved quickly away to give the two of them a little privacy.

  “You did well,” Shalkan said, moving up to stand beside him. Even through his armor, Kellen could feel the heat of the unicorn’s body, as if Shalkan carried his own private summer with him.

  Kellen grinned without mirth. “I just pretended I was Master Belesharon. Besides, I knew she’d go anyway, and there was no point to wasting the time that would be spent as she and Jermayan shouted at each other.”

  “Ah,” Shalkan said dryly. “The beginning of wisdom.”

  —«♦»—

  IDALIA moved over the snow in the direction of the cavern mouth, the tarnkappa wrapped tightly around her. Only the footprints she left in the snow betrayed any hint that someone moved here; while wearing the magical cloak she could not be seen, or heard, or scented.

  She hoped it would be enough to keep her safe once she entered the darkness—both figurative and literal—ahead.

  She was not quite as confident as she had let on to Jermayan and Kellen. Everything that she’d told them was true—she was the logical candidate to explore the trap—but she wasn’t sure that getting in and out again would be as simple as she’d made it sound, especially if that was a natural cave. Idalia had a little bit of experience with natural caves, and knew that they could stretch on for leagues, twisting and turning more elaborately than any Elven-crafted labyrinth. Despite her tracking skills, she might well get lost, and if she needed to cast a spell of the Wild Magic to find her way out…

  It might very well bring the enemy right down on top of her.

  Idalia shrugged beneath the tarnkappa. There was no use borrowing trouble before it came to call. Her life was already forfeit to the Greater Powers. When They chose to claim Their price was Their business.

  Hers was getting the children out of danger. If they were even there.

  When she reached the mouth of the cavern, Idalia pulled the hood of the tarnkappa well forward. She could see through the fabric as if it wasn’t there at all, and through the magic’s aid, everything became sharp and clear, the dim twilight vanishing to be replaced by a bright, clear—though monochromatic—landscape.

  She took a deep breath, touching the long knife at her belt, and stepped inside.

  She walked a few feet down the passage—it was narrow, and except for the levelness of the floor, looked very much like a natural cave—moving carefully and listening intently for sounds from within. Except for the sound of the wind whistling over the cavern opening, she heard nothin
g, and as she moved deeper into the mountain, even that sound stopped.

  At first the path was simple to follow, for there was only one possible way to go. But soon the passageway opened out. She quickly took the chalk and made a small arrow, low on the stone, pointing back the way she’d come.

  She stood for a long moment, gazing out into the day-bright darkness. Passages opened out to the left and the right, both bearing recent marks of use. The one to the right seemed to have been more heavily trafficked, though, and taking a few steps along it, Idalia could see traces of scrape-marks along the walls, as if something large and heavy had been brought this way fairly recently.

  Good enough. She went to the right, making another mark on the wall to indicate her choice.

  At one point she stopped and lifted her hood. Utter blackness enveloped her, and she could smell no trace of lamp-oil torch-smoke in the air of the cave. Whatever lived here did not need light to move through the darkness. She lowered her hood, relieved to be able to see once more.

  At intervals she paused to mark her way, for if the signs were too far apart there was a danger of missing one. As she moved deeper into the caves, she saw signs that Nature’s work had been improved upon—stone had been crudely cut away, paths had been widened and leveled. All these things were signs, not of a temporary hiding place, or even a carefully-constructed trap, but of a place where something made its home.

  And that should not be—not if what lived here was Dark-tainted enough for Vestakia to be able to track it.

  By now she had penetrated quite far into the cave system, and though she was on the trail of whatever lived here, she wasn’t sure she was any closer to finding the children.

  Suddenly she became aware that there were faint sounds, coming from somewhere ahead—though the direction of sounds could be misleading underground. They were barely louder than her own breathing, but she wasn’t making them.

  Idalia moved faster.

  The path led to the edge of a cliff. Here the cave opened out into the largest space Idalia had yet encountered. Crude stairs were cut into the cliff face, leading down to the space below.

  Below lay a sort of village, and Idalia got her first good look at what must be the mysterious hooded figures that Kellen had described.

  From where she stood, she counted about twenty of them. They were gathered around a central cooking fire, where some indeterminate carcass smoked and sizzled over a bed of coals. When Idalia risked another peek without the tarnkappa, she could see it was a bed of carefully banked charcoal, giving as little light as possible, and none of them looked at it directly. She pulled her hood back down and continued watching.

  Their garments were primitive, consisting of little more than a crude loin-wrap for males and females both. The half-dozen children that she could see wore no clothing at all.

  They were no race that Idalia knew, or had ever heard described. Their skin was a dull fish-belly white, save for a long dark stripe down their spines, and a matching one that covered their lower face and extended down their stomachs. Their hands and feet seemed to be a darker color as well, though whether that was natural pigmentation, or just dirt and callus, Idalia wasn’t sure. Their bodies were entirely hairless, but shaggy dark hair, left long and untended, grew from their scalps. From everything she could see, they existed at the most primitive tribal level.

  Their faces were the most unsettling, as if someone had taken something familiar and cruelly distorted it. Their eyes were large, round, and bulging. They were practically chinless, upper and lower jaws pushed forward in a muzzlelike fashion, and when one of them opened his mouth to speak a few words in a curious low barking language, Idalia could see that the mouth was filled with long discolored fangs.

  And their ears were pointed.

  When she saw that, the nagging sense of almost-familiarity Idalia had felt when she’d seen the creatures settled into place with a sense of almost physical force. It was as if… it was as if someone, somehow, had managed to breed Elves and Goblins together, and this was the result.

  Oh, that isn’t possible, Idalia thought with a wave of nauseated faintness. But she knew it was. The Endarkened delighted in perverting any of the creatures of the Light that fell into their hands, and they were masters of Dark Magic. The creatures they had created to fight their battles in the Great War still plagued the world today—the coldwarg were just one sample. Why not these… Shadowed Elves?

  And it would explain how they could be here undetected, she told herself with brutal pragmatism. If these debased creatures possessed Elven blood, it was more than likely they could circumvent the ancient wards against intruders placed upon the Elven lands. They would, after all, be Elves, in a sense, able to come and go within Andoreniel’s domain as they wished. The could have brought the ice-trolls and the frost-giants over the border through their own caves. No wonder no one had seen them until it was too late!

  Idalia stared down into the Shadowed Elf village with cold horror. How many of them were there? It had been centuries since the Endarkened had possessed Elven captives to experiment upon. And more important—where were they? This couldn’t be the only encampment of them.

  She hesitated, on the verge of turning back right now to warn the others. This was a greater threat than the missing children—a Dark-Shadowed race living undetected within the borders of the Elven realm itself.

  Suddenly a chorus of furious barking down below drew her attention back to the village. An argument had broken out at the central firepit.

  Several of the Shadowed Elves were standing in front of it. One had a large basket at his feet, filled with what looked, from this distance, like large mushroom caps or flat loaves of bread. He was gesturing at the roasting carcass, and speaking urgently.

  The other, facing him—the chief?—was speaking equally imperatively, underscoring his words with gestures that Idalia had no trouble in interpreting as a refusal. No meat, then. But for who?

  The argument concluded, and the first Shadowed Elf picked up the basket and walked away. His companion—a female—followed.

  Idalia watched as they paused to don long hooded cloaks that covered them all the way to the ankles, and for the female to pick up a large jar of the sort that might contain wine or water. From the way she moved, it was heavy.

  That was curious. They obviously weren’t going outside—they hadn’t put on boots, or gloves, or any undergarments. The cloaks were plainly for concealment.

  Feeding prisoners on “bread and water”? Prisoners that they didn’t want to see them?

  Idalia’s heart began to beat faster.

  Once they were cloaked and provisioned, the two Shadowed Elves began ascending the steps. Idalia moved quickly back along the rim, looking frantically around for a niche to hide in. They couldn’t see or hear her, but nothing would save her from discovery if they walked right into her.

  She found nothing, and was forced to retreat back the way she came, hoping that wouldn’t be the direction they ended up coming. But luck was with her, and when the two Shadowed Elves reached the top of the steps, they headed away from her. Idalia chalked a quick trail-sign and followed them.

  Fortunately—because the water-jug was heavy and fragile—they moved slowly, and Idalia was able to follow them at a prudent distance, making marks along the way. The only danger was that they might hear the sound of the chalk against the stone, but she was well behind them, and apparently it did not occur to the Shadowed Elves that there might be any interlopers within their stronghold.

  Without them to follow, Idalia wasn’t sure she would ever have found the prisoners, for the path they took involved a number of twists and turns. But at last they reached their goal, a pocket cavern deep within the bowels of the mountain.

  The doorway to the cave stood open. The Shadowed Elves had trusted—and rightly so—to the darkness outside to serve as a more perfect jailer than any doors or locks. Only the truly desperate would try to find their way through that blackness, and i
f the captives did not fall to their deaths over an unseen precipice, they would be easily recaptured before they ever found their way to the surface.

  Chapter Eight Prisoners of Darkness

  LAIRAMO DID NOT know how long they had been here. It was hard to measure time even by sleeping and waking. Their cloaked captors had fed them seven times since they had arrived—baskets of flat tasteless fungus, and jars of stale water—and so she had scratched seven marks upon the wall. But the meals, such as they were, might not be coming at regular intervals, or if they were, those intervals might not be the same as a day.