It didn't lead far. After about five hundred paces, Ryld spotted a black, gaping hole in the snowy ground. About three paces across, it looked as though it had been punched open from below. A scatter of rock and loose earth encircled it. Halisstra's footprints led to the edge of the hole, paused - then continued, as if she had descended into its depths. The trail of droplets also led to the hole's edge.
Drawing Splitter, Ryld crept forward, studying the ground. The hole sloped down into the earth ata gentle angle. Scuffs in the snow showed where Halisstra had placed her feet on the slope, but the droplets ended at the hole's edge. Whatever had led her to the hole hadn't gone inside.
Squatting at the edge of the hole, the weapons master used the point of his sword to prod the debris that had been thrown up around it. The soil was frozen solid. The pit had been created some time ago.
Cocking an ear to the hole, Ryld listened, but if Halisstra was moving around down in the black depths it was impossible to near her above the moan of the wind. Snow had started to fall again. The flakes landed feather-light upon his head, then melted, sending trick-les of icy water down his neck. His breastplate was cold even through the padded tunic he wore and his vambraces creakedeach time he moved his arms. At least the tunnel would provide shelter from the wind and snow.
Clambering over the lip of the hole, Ryld cautiously descended the slope. Frost on the floor of the tunnel made the footing tricky for the first dozen paces or so, but after that it widened out, and the floor was clear. As his eyesight adjusted to the darkness inside, he saw that the tunnel forked. One path led off to the left, another straight down.
Knowing that Halisstra's only means of levitating had been her brooch, Ryld chose the left fork. He was relieved to see, after a pace or two, six pebbles that had been set on the ground to form a triangle, pointing out of the tunnel. Halisstra had indeed gone that way - and she'd left a marker to guide herself back out.
Ryld walked briskly for some time, following a more or less hori-zontal course for some distance but not in a straight line. Instead the tube snaked back and forth in a series of wide, gentle turns, often doubling back over itself again. At each of those junctions Ryld paused and searched carefully and found a triangle of pebbles. Thanks to Halisstra's marks he was able to make good time.
Eventually the cave veered off in a fairly straight line for nearly a thousand paces, only to abruptly bend downward at a steep angle. There, Ryld paused. He'd been trying to decide what would have cre-ated such a sinuously curvedtunnel. He'd once seen Pharaun use a spell to bore a path through stone, but the end result had beenlance-straight and oval, with walls whose stone looked highly polished. The tunnel he'd followed Halisstra into was round, and rougher, with occasional jagged-edged niches that looked like something had taken a bite out of the wall, and its floor was littered with patches of loose stone. Bending to examine one of those, Ryld saw that the stones were rounded, like river stones, but pitted. Mixed in with them were fragments of metal - scraps of armor from the battlefield above - that looked as if they had been tumbled in a stone-polishing drum filled with acid instead of water. The edges of the metal were smooth, yet the metal itself was deeply pitted and crumbled when Ryld stepped on it.
Ryld stood again and tightened his grip on Splitter. The cave hadn't been created by magic; it had been bored through the rock by a living creature.
He'd been praying that it was an ancient pathway, and not fresh-ly made, but the lingering smell of acid in the air told him otherwise. The fact that the odor was getting stronger the farther along he went didn't bode well. And if he was right in his guess about what kind of creature had made the tunnel, Halisstra shouldn't have been facing it alone.
Cautiously, Ryld picked his way down the slope ahead. He moved slowly at first, aware that any tiny avalanche of stone caused by a misstep could alert the creature below to his presence, but half-way down his ears caught a faint noise: the sound of