Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars 7)

At first, pausing, she listened; then at length called; then, receiving no answer, walked down a corridor whose walls reflected back the ruddy glow of the smoldering rope she carried. In the next chamber, which was also the next branching, she waited, but no one and nothing came into view.

Yet she did feel them. She knew they were there. She knew what they were, because her grandmother had told her the tale.

For a while she stood, motionless, and felt the weight of the earth, the weight of family, resting as on her entire body. To think of having a living grandmother still stunned her. She could not quite grasp that even knowing it was true.

The whispers—not of voices but of muted, skittering movement—ceased. They were waiting, as she was waiting.

Because she could not go back, she walked on.

The chief thing she learned after some hours of wandering: The knife edge of the spell woven in ancient days had severed this hidden world into two. On one side of that cut stretched tunnels and branching corridors whose walls were planed as by an adze; she emerged into spacious chambers, each proportioned with geometric precision, or happened upon narrow waterfalls pouring over sheer walls into fathomless pools.

Yet the other side, crossed into with a single step, had sustained immense damage: here a rockfall, there a ceiling collapsed that blocked the passage, and in another place a chasm where the ground had actually split apart to leave a gash far wider than she dared leap.

Pausing on this lip, she dropped a fragment of rock into the darkness and listened, but she could not hear the splinter strike bottom. A distant burning odor welling up from the deeps, a sour taste on the palate.

Up to now, the creatures had continued to track her at a distance, heard but never seen. They had kept a strict and precise distance from her except in this one case. They had not followed her down this particular branch, even though the corridor split by the chasm was large—a thoroughfare like the regnant’s road—and must surely once have seen heavy traffic.

She had made the detour because of that strange taste in the air wafting from one of the tunnel openings. Backtracking to the last chamber she had paused in, she halted to lick dust off her lips and consider her choices.

Mother Obligatia had called the creatures living in the tunnels beneath St. Ekatarina’s Convent “the Ancient Ones.” Liath had heard other tales as well, speaking of goblins, small people, who lived in caverns deep underground, who mined the mother lodes, and who, perhaps, nourished themselves on human flesh. Diggers and hewers of stone, the folk who scuttled in the earth and in the rock, where darkness reigned.

Ancient Ones had spoken to her before, when she lay entombed in rock beneath the central crown, waiting for the night when the Crown of Stars crowned the heavens. But these did not feel the same as those slow voices. These felt restless, skittish, sharp, metallic.

She blew hard on the glowing end of the rope, and put it out. Now she saw them—not their bodies, but a faint gleam, as though their recent presence left its trace as a phosphorescent glow. Any true human would not have been able to distinguish them at all, but of course, Liath herself had more than once been told that she emanated a breath like light off her own body.

Was there some aetherical connection between her and these earth people? It was hard to imagine there might be.

Of the six corridors that branched off this chamber, only one had in its dark mouth that scantling blush, the luminous trace of their retreating presence. Of course, they were leading her; they had been all along, and she had missed it because of her dependence on the lamp she had made of her coil of rope.

It was, really, the only choice left to her. She would never find her way back to the cavern in which Kansi had imprisoned her, nor did she want to return there.

On she went, walking, trudging as she tired, on down a broad tunnel that shot straight—with perhaps the slightest curve to its trajectory—as though an arrow had bored this passage. On and on, until even the trace glow faded and she had perforce to call fire to the rope. She had learned to finesse the fiber, burning it at such an ebb that the smoldering ends gave her just enough light to see the ground, so that she might not step unwittingly into a chasm.

But walking with no break, no light, no known destination, and in solitude, demanded its cost in the end. Just ahead, the tunnel branched like a forked stick, splitting into two corridors each one the same as the other. Nothing to choose between them. No hint of where to go next. No light but her own.

Her guides had vanished.

Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She sank down and sat against the wall, snuffed out the red sparks on the fraying end of the rope. In complete darkness she rested, and ate, and considered her situation. If she kept her mind busy, she would not panic.

A labyrinth lay beneath the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning, as complex a network of pathways as the ones woken within any woven crown. It was, she supposed, like the earth’s equivalent to the network that existed in some manner in the aether, to which she had had access when she had walked through the burning stone, which was both crossroads and gateway. Somehow, when it existed in exile in the aether, the Ashioi land had become intertwined within these aetherical pathways; that was why, when she had wandered in the mist of the borderlands with Eldest Uncle’s rope tied around her, she had emerged on distant hills and in unknown marshlands in the far regions of Ashioi country, places she might otherwise only reach by many days or weeks travel on foot.

Yet this world below the world was not simply a trap of closed tunnels. The air she breathed was not stale, although it was a little dusty and sometimes flavored with a tang. There was nothing here she could recognize, nothing familiar, nothing to grasp, not even grandmothers. The sides of the tunnels ran slick beneath her hand; she could not imagine what kind of stone this was, or how these roads had been carved out of the rock. Where the knife’s edge had cut off the land in ancient days she found debris. That was the old side, the lands that had remained on Earth after the first cataclysm. Where the creatures led her, beneath Ashioi country, the labyrinth was revealed as a sterile place seemingly untouched by the passage of time.

Rapping sounded behind her, a warning or a welcome. She scooted up, breathed fire onto the end of the rope, and turned as the air around her lightened from an unseen source. She waited; she even held her breath, not meaning to.

A creature shuffled into view. Its skin shone with the glamour of pewter, mottled here and there by crusty growths very like the stunted stalagmites she had seen years ago in a cave in Andalla where she had plumbed the depths with a careless guide and her inquisitive father. Had they descended farther, in that Andallan cave, would they have found a long-forgotten entrance to the great labyrinth? Did the maze weave its interlace below the entire land of Novaria?

Bulges marked the creature’s face where eyes should be. Movement shifted within those bulges like the gathering and shredding of clouds. It wore a necklace of metal scraps that rang lightly when it halted. Wound around one arm, a copper armband gleamed brightly.

“I am called Liath,” she said. “I pray you, friend, help me find my way out of here. I intend no harm to you and your people.”

It shuffled past as if it had not seen or heard her, but as she turned to follow, she realized her mistake: it had avoided her, shifting sideways.

She followed it down the right-hand branching, which proved no easy task. Despite its awkward gait it covered the ground efficiently. She walked briskly to keep up. Fortunately, the floor remained so level that even in blackness she would not have fallen. The ceiling was too high for her to touch, but Sanglant might have been able to brush it with the tips of his fingers. Four or five women could walk abreast. Any wagon master would adore such a road, plain and wide and only gently curved where it did not push straight on.

Stairs opened beneath her feet, spanning half the corridor while the other half continued a level course onward. Following Pewter Skin, she descended. The creature took a turning and came into a triangular chamber that three corridors opened off. She paused to lay a marker of rock slivers so she could, if necessary, find her way back to that second set of stairs. Although she hurried to catch up, this new tunnel branched at sudden and awkward intervals, without benefit of geometric chambers, and by the seventh or eighth branching she lost track of her guide except for the fading nimbus trailing behind it.

Then even the memory of that light dissolved.