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by Vivian Vande Velde

"Trust me," Cornelius said. He turned to Wolstan. "Better carry her," he suggested.

  Mom looked ticked-off to be talked about as though she were too infirm to have an opinion, but she didn't protest as Wolstan picked her up and carried her fireman-style.

  We followed the tunnel maybe another hundred yards. The way got narrower and shorter. Up ahead was a low, rough-hewn doorway. Carved into the stone above were these numbers: 3:17:8.

  "I don't like the looks of this," I said. Whatever we were facing, it was me, Thea, and Robin who'd have to be depended on. Wolstan was carrying Mom, and Cornelius couldn't do any other spells unless he dropped his Continual Light, and none of us wanted that. "I don't like the looks of this at all."

  Nobody seemed to care what I liked.

  Cornelius walked behind Thea, who'd taken the lead, perhaps still feeling guilty for having fallen asleep. Robin was behind Cornelius, then me, then Wolstan and Mom.

  We approached gingerly. If there was anybody there, they'd have seen our light and would have had plenty of time to prepare. So, once we got to the doorway, we leapt through, crouching, our weapons ready.

  We were in a small cavern: maybe about as big as a classroom, but the floor was squishy with rat droppings. There were little piles of straw or rags all over the place, perhaps breeding nests.

  "Well, now we know where they were taking us." I started to back out so I could breathe properly.

  But Robin put his hand on my arm. "Look over there."

  At the far end of the room were three steps and a raised platform. More than anything else, the arrangement reminded me of an altar. On the platform was a pile of bones.

  "If they were going to eat us," I said, "they could have eaten us back where they found us."

  "Yeah," Robin agreed. Without putting his sword away, he strode purposefully across the room. Halfway across he called back to us, "I think you'll want to see this."

  Cautiously we followed. Probably for once Mom was grateful for Wolstan's carrying her. If she wasn't, she should have been.

  After two steps, I could tell there was more than just bones on the platform. I could pick out shiny, glittery things. Suddenly the smell didn't seem so bad.

  We all climbed the steps then leaned in for a closer look. There were coins and gems and pieces of brightly colored cloth. "They must bring everything they find here," I said in awe. The area was clean—no droppings, though the rest of the room was thick with them. Again, the impression of an altar, of offerings, came to mind.

  Robin held a pale blue crystal as big as a golf ball to Cornelius's light. "Look at this shine."

  "Look at all of it," Thea said.

  Cornelius finally set down the box of treasure that he'd found in the puddle, and ran his free hand over the new stuff.

  "We should get out of here," Wolstan warned.

  "Yeah, yeah," I told him, letting a handful of gold coins run through my fingers.

  "Where does all this come from?" Mom asked.

  "People who've died in the tunnels," Wolstan told her.

  That put a damper on things. "Let's just take this and go," I suggested. I tugged on a large piece of satin on which some of the stuff was laid.

  I yanked, realizing as I did it that the whole pile would probably end up on me. Luckily the bones stayed where they were, but the cloth came free. Loosened, a piece of parchment fluttered to the floor.

  Cornelius snatched it up while Thea pointed to a skull and asked, "What do you think that was?"

  "Not human," said Robin.

  The thing was big. About the size of a laundry basket. I didn't speculate because I was busy tying knots in the cloth, trying to make a sack of it.

  Cornelius glanced up from the parchment he'd rescued. "They're getting their nerve back," he warned.

  Four rats were running across the room, headed straight toward us. "Stubborn, aren't they?" 1 kicked one off the steps and it rolled several feet before lying perfectly still.

  Robin stuck his blade into two more, and Thea bisected the last one.

  "I don't think they like us messing with their things," Mom said.

  "Hmmm." I tied one more knot to finish making the sack.

  We swept all the coins and gems off the platform. There was enough here that we could have bought the Rasmussem Inn and most of the town, even at their inflated prices.

  "Put the other stuff in, too," Robin suggested, a little too smoothly, I thought.

  "The box won't fit," Cornelius muttered, never looking up from studying the parchment, "and it's safer not to put everything together."

  "What have you got there anyway?" I demanded.

  "A map of the caves."

  We all crowded around.

  "1 think we must be in this area over here." Cornelius pointed.

  A little strangled sound escaped from me when I deciphered the ornate script. "You mean here, where it says, 'There be giant rats'?"

  "Sure," Cornelius said. "Remember those numbers above the entryway? Those were location coordinates. See, we're not too far from where we want to be. Do you see this long hall? If we—"

  "Psst!" Robin pointed to the floor, to the rat I had kicked. The thing was on its feet again. Its front feet anyway; its rear end dragged as though injured. With single-minded insistence it laboriously pulled itself up one step, then another. For a few moments I thought that was as far as it could go. It rested on the step, its sides heaving.

  Wolstan elbowed me in the ribs and pointed to the doorway. About a dozen rats crowded there, watching their companion's progress. Waiting.

  The rat pulled itself up, heaved itself up the last stair.

  Now what? I wondered. I had to admire its persistence. "You going to take us on all together, or one at a time?"

  The rat crawled past me, past the sack of goodies on the platform. It dragged itself onto the pile of bones and once again began climbing, inching its way upward. It reached the top of the skull, whatever it was, and balanced on the edge of the eye socket. Then it leaned forward, forward, until it tipped and fell into the skull, impaling itself on a sharp tooth inside.

  "Boy, that was smart," I said.

  "Suicide leap," Robin said.

  We turned back to Cornelius's map.

  "What I think we need to do—" Cornelius started.

  A bone rattled, perhaps loosened by the rat's fall.

  "—is go to the end of the hall where—"

  The one jarred bone seemed to have started a chain reaction. I glanced over at the noise and saw that the whole front end of the pile of bones was settling.

  "—the rats first attacked, then turn right and—"

  I did a double take. The bones were moving all right, but they weren't settling: they were rising.

  "Move!" Robin shouted. "Move, move, move!"

  We jumped off the platform as the bones picked themselves up and revealed themselves as a single huge skeleton rather than the odd collection we had assumed. "There be giant rats," the map had warned. Sure were.

  "I'm going to set you down," Wolstan told Mom as the rest of us spread out, forming a semicircle around the giant rat. "Stay back until we kill it."

  "It's a skeleton." Mom's voice shook. "How can you kill it any more than that?"

  The rat swung its huge head back and forth as though looking us over, evaluating us. It seemed to settle on Mom, though it was hard to tell, since its eye sockets were empty. It opened its jaws and snapped them.

  Wolstan said, to no one in particular, "Well, if you had a cleric with you, clerics can turn the undead."

  "You stay back, too," I told Cornelius, who was standing nearest to me. I didn't want to lose his Light again.

  As soon as Cornelius started to retreat, the giant rat lunged at me. I jumped away and heard its teeth click shut inches from my ear. I kicked at a leg, too off-balance to use my sword.

  Its leg momentarily buckled, then it recovered, coming after me again.

  I slashed with my sword across its skull. No reaction. I had to bac
k up yet again.

  Thea and Robin jumped in, and from the other side, Wolstan. They hit the giant rat with their swords, knocking loose individual rib bones.

  It swung its head to snap at Thea, who skipped lightly out of its way.

  I moved in closer, trying to sever its leg, but the creature swung back too quickly.

  "Look out, Harek!" Thea called.

  I assumed she meant look out for the rat's teeth and thought, What does she think I'm trying to do? So I ignored her. And backed into one of the rats' nests and tripped, landing flat on my rear.

  The giant rat jaws reached for me and I rolled.

  Not quite fast enough.

  The skeletal jaws clamped down on my long elvin hair, yanking out a good-sized chunk. Yelping in pain and surprise, I scrambled to my feet.

  Wolstan chopped off the rat's tail, and that momentarily got its attention.

  What we needed was something big to throw at it, to knock loose more of the bones. But what? There were no loose rocks in this cavern, only the platform with the treasure.

  Treasure, I thought. That was it. The treasure we'd gathered here was in the soft sack, but..."Cornelius. Throw your box at it."

  My shout drew the rat's attention again.

  I glanced at Cornelius, who hadn't moved. "Cornelius!" I dodged a swipe by the rat's giant claws. "Cornelius, stop thinking about it and do it."

  The rat swung its paw again, and one talon scraped across my leather breastplate. "Cornelius!"

  "Oh, all right," he cried in exasperation. He flung the metal box, our first treasure from this expedition. It struck the undead rat's skull and knocked it right off the backbone.

  The rest of the body collapsed into a motionless heap of unconnected bones. The treasure box cracked open and flung gems across the room.

  I sat down heavily on the cold, filthy floor and rubbed the tingly spot on my scalp where previously a lock of hair had been. "Gee, this is so much fun," I said.

  21. SAND HANDS

  With Cornelius's map we found our way back to the main tunnel. Cornelius was moaning and complaining about the lost treasure; we'd refused to give him time to look for more than three or four of the scattered pieces.

  To shut him up, I'd handed over the sack from the rats' altar, but he still kept on griping until we reached the place where we had been attacked by the orcs. There we found the remains of cookfires and stacks of bones. The orcs had eaten our horses right there in the tunnel. Our saddles were pushed off to one side, slashed and useless. Apparently our provisions hadn't looked as appetizing as the horses, for those were still there. But the orcs had thrown them to the ground and stomped on them and—to put it as politely as possible—used them as a toilet. The weapons were gone.

  Cornelius must have realized that we had gotten off easy, and he gave the complaining a rest.

  About two hours later—it's hard to judge time when you're nervous something might be ready to jump out at you from every shadow, and you're worried about your mom, and you're exhausted and haven't had a decent meal in days—we rounded a corner and saw a grayish light streaming in through the back entrance to the Shadow Caves.

  "Stop!" Thea jumped ahead of me and threw her arm to block my way.

  "What?" Suddenly I realized I had been so excited to see this part of our journey end that I had gotten several very long steps ahead of the others. It would be Thea who caught me at it.

  She pointed to a slender thread, which stretched from a crack on one side of the tunnel to another crack on the other side.

  The others crowded behind us.

  "Trigger wire." Robin, examining the spot where one end of the thread disappeared into the stone, motioned for Cornelius. "Can you bring your light over here?"

  "Do we need to know what kind of trap it is?" Mom asked from Wolstan's shoulder. "Can't we just step over the string?" She sounded dangerously close to tears.

  Robin looked bitterly disappointed. "I suppose," he said. That he was willing to forgo one of his character specialties—trap detection—was a real tribute to Mom. I wondered if she knew it.

  In the lead, I high-stepped over the thread. My foot came down on a slab of rock floor that wobbled almost imperceptibly.

  Fake out, I realized. The thread wasn't the trap: it was the means to make sure we'd step right where I'd stepped. I threw myself backward, catching my heel on the thread. I felt it yank out of the wall, and I tipped dangerously past my center of balance.

  Suddenly everything went dark, and I wondered if I'd knocked myself out. A moment later there was a click, then a hiss and thud that my elvin ears recognized as being about two dozen crossbow bolts releasing and slamming into the tunnel wall.

  "Arvin!" Mom's voice was frantic.

  "I'm all right," I assured her. Harek, I thought. Is Harek so hard to remember?

  "Harek, you clumsy idiot," Cornelius said, right in my ear. "Can't you even step over a string?" He'd caught me, I realized, dropping his Continual Light to do so. But we were close enough to the entryway that we weren't in total dark, and already my eyes were adjusting.

  I pulled myself back up onto my feet. "It wasn't the string," I said. "The trap was in the floor just beyond the string."

  "Yeah, yeah, sure," they all said, chuckling and jovial now that the danger was over. Shaking their heads, they made for the patch of light.

  "It was," I insisted.

  Robin patted my back as he passed.

  "Morons," I muttered.

  Outside, it was cold and drizzly. The sun was a patch of milkiness behind the gray sky, a pearl in a mother-of-pearl setting. Midafternoon, I calculated, with a skill I didn't have back home in the city. We hadn't had anything to eat for more than twenty-four hours.

  Gone were the woods. Behind us were huge cliffs through which we had traveled. In front of us, there was a river, wide enough that maybe—maybe—a major league pitcher could just throw a baseball across it. On the other side of the water, and for as far as the eye could see, the land stretched flat and featureless except for little clumps of quack grass.

  The first thing we all did was kneel at the river's edge and take long drinks of water. Our waterskins, of course, were gone with the rest of our equipment. I hadn't known how thirsty I'd been until I saw the water and realized my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  "Which way to Sannatia?" I asked Wolstan as soon as I was able to talk.

  He nodded ahead but off to the left. "I've never come through the Shadow Caves before," he said between gulps. "I've always gone around the Sand Cliffs."

  I looked in the direction he was looking. The cliffs stretched on forever. Already the drizzle had penetrated my clothes; already I was shivering from the cold.

  "At the end of the cliffs," Wolstan said, "is Miller's Grove. You can just see Sannatia from there."

  Thea said, "So all we have to do is follow the cliffs."

  Wolstan shook his head. "You could. But that's making extra work for yourselves." With his finger, he drew a diagram in the grit. "We're here. Miller's Grove is here. Sannatia is here." He was showing us a triangle. The straight line between where we were and where we wanted to be cut off the angle where Miller's Grove lay.

  "If we don't get lost," Robin said.

  "Can't," Wolstan assured us. "All we have to do from here is walk straight into the sun."

  Or where the sun would be, if it weren't for the rain.

  We all looked at each other. "We certainly don't have any time to spare," Cornelius said. Which we all knew already.

  "Well, I think," Robin said, "we should take the short way, but first"—he stared meaningfully at the sack tied to Cornelius's belt—"we should divide the treasure." He threw Cornelius's words back at him: "It's not safe to keep all the treasure in one place."

  "Look," I protested, "can't we—"

  "I agree," Thea cut in.

  "Fine," I said, throwing my hands up in disgust.

  We sat on the ground and divided our treasure. First we drew
blades of grass to establish the order in which we'd choose. Then we went round and round, each person picking one piece till all the pieces were gone. Wolstan got to pick, too, because nonplayer characters have to be included or they mutiny. We each had belt pouches, and nobody ended up with more than those could hold.

  I was just pulling tight the drawstring on mine, when Cornelius squealed, "My boots!"

  I saw that he was standing looking down at his feet in dismay. On his feet were his old regular boots, the ones that he'd been wearing under the ones he had gotten from the troll statue.

  "Those stinking rats stole my boots!"

  "Hmmm," I said. The thing was, Robin was sitting between us, his legs outstretched before him as though he had nothing in the world to hide. On his feet were Cornelius's boots.

  Robin saw me looking and winked.

  "Well," said Thea—and as far as I could tell, she hadn't noticed the boots on Robin's feet—"easy come, easy go."

  Cornelius kicked at a rock but missed. "Foul stupid thieves," he fumed.

  At least his use of the plural indicated he meant the rats, not Robin. I assumed Robin had stolen the boots last night, when he'd offered to take the first watch and the illusionary torch had still been giving some light. If Cornelius was too unobservant to have missed them till now, I figured that was his problem.

  "Come on," I said. "Let's get going. Maybe we'll find a nice lizard or snake on the way, and we can fry it up with some crab grass and divide it six ways and have a wonderful feast."

  "Oh, shut up," Cornelius grumbled. He kicked at a clump of grass that was no farther than spitting distance from Robin's feet, then walked to the river's edge. He raised his hands and said something in whatever language it is that wizards speak.

  "Going to part the Red Sea?" Robin asked.

  "No," Cornelius answered. "Fishing."

  For a moment I thought he was being sarcastic. Then I scrambled to my feet and joined him, as did Wolstan. One very large fish was swimming around a group of smaller fish. Herding them, I realized. Bullying them toward the shallow edge.

  "The trout's an illusion," he said, which I'd already guessed. "Grab the smaller ones."

  "Fine," I said. "How?"