explained as she quickly gathered her things and hurried for the cover of the boulders and stalagmites above the waterline.
Quenthel followed a step behind her. They splashed ashore and settled behind a large rock just as the prow of the first duergar boat, still glowing red with embers left from the fireball Pharaun had hurled at it, nosed through the deadly mists. The dark elves drew theirpiwafwis close around them and held still, watching as the duergar stirredand broke from what-ever shelters they'd managed to find from the acidic fog.
One of the gray dwarves pointed and shouted, and the others joined the clamor. Turning sharply in the water, they slewed around the ship's bow and set off after Coalhewer's vanishing boat.
Good, signed Pharaun. I was afraid they were using magic to follow us. It seems that Master Coalhewer will render us one last service after all.
What do you think will happen when they catch him? Ryld asked.
The duergar boats pulled out of earshot.
"I suppose it depends on whether or not he can swim," Halisstra said.
Chapter NINE
A long day's march later, pausing only long enough to allow Pharaun to fi-nally craft a sending to pass news of Gracklstugh's army to Gromph, the company came to the Labyrinth. They emerged from winding, unexplored passageways into a series of miles-long natural tunnels interspersed with long, hewn ways and small, square chambers. Coalhewer, his boat, and the pursuit from Gracklstugh they'd left twenty miles or more behind them.
The tunnels were black basalt, cold and sharp, the frozen remnants of great fires from the beginning of the world. From time to time the party encountered great vertical rifts hundreds of feet high, where tunnels ended in blank walls with rough, perilous steps cut up or down to a different level where the path continued. Whole sheets of the world's crust had sunk or fractured in places, shearing off the old lava tunnels and leaving behind vast, lightless chasms deep in the earth. A few of these places were spanned by slender bridges of stone, or circled by crude paths hacked from the hard rock of the walls. Everywhere they turned, more square passages and twist-ing, smooth-floored tunnels branched from their line of march, so that in the space of an hour Halisstra was forced to concede that she'd become hopelessly lost.
"I see why they call this place the Labyrinth," she said softly, as the company threaded its way along a narrow ledge overlooking another of the chasms. "This place is truly a maze."
"It's worse than you think," Valas replied from the front of the party. He paused to examine the path ahead, and another of the ubiquitous openings on one side. "It's close to two hundred miles from north to south, and almost half that from east to west. Most of it is exactly like this, a confusion of lava tubes and hand-cut tunnels with thousands of branch-ing turns and twists."
"How can you hope to find House Jaelre in all this?" Ryld asked. "Do you know this place so well that you've mastered it?"
"Mastered it? Hardly. You could spend a lifetime here and never see the whole thing, but I do know something of its ways. Several well-traveled caravan routes exist along some of the straighter paths, though we'renot near any of those. Few travelers approach the Labyrinth from the east, as we have." The scout stepped a little ahead and brushed his hand against the wall, near the place where the other tunnel opened up. Old, strange symbols glowed with a greenish light beneath his fingertips. "Fortunately, the builders carved runes to identify their secret ways. It's a code of mark-ings that holds true throughout the Labyrinth. I solved the puzzle when I last journeyed here. We're not in tunnels I traveled before, but I think I know how to reach them from here."
"You are a lad of many talents," Pharaun observed.
"Who carved these tunnels?" Halisstra asked. "If this place is as big as you say, it must have been a powerful realm in its day, but I can tell at a glance those marks aren't ours. Nor are they duergar, illithid, or aboleth."
"Minotaurs," Valas replied. "I don't know how long ago their realm rose or fell, but there was a great kingdom of them here at some point in the past."
"Minotaurs?" Quenthel sneered. "They're bestial savages. They could hardly have the wits or the patience to undertake work of this scope, let alone build a great realm."
Valas shrugged and said, "That may be