brief moment, steadying himself against the stone wall, his first step seemed more sure.
“Perhaps take a moment to find your feet again,” Preter suggested. “It might not be long before we are running.”
Ardyl looked to him sharply. “Is the wraith nearly through the door?”
“Almost.”
“Then you’d best find your feet while we’re walking toward that torch.” Kelir pointed into the distance. “And I know not what sort of man you are, but I am friend to the most stubborn of fools who would not ask for help until his heart was rent from his chest. Do not be as he was. If you are too weak to run, we will carry you.”
The man nodded from beneath that tangled fall of hair, and Lizzan was abruptly reminded of Aerax as a young boy, emerging from the forest with his knotted, dirty hair and his body streaked with blood. Though unlike Aerax, he did not seem a man who’d grown up feral . . . but perhaps he had become that way.
They started out, Preter walking past Lizzan and discreetly coughing into his fist before saying, “I see the festivities have taken place.”
Laughing, she nudged him aside a step. Apparently he’d noted that she wore no brocs now. It hardly mattered; her tunic was long enough to preserve even a monk’s modesty.
Aerax returned from a visit to Seri with handfuls of more fruit. Happily she ate with him as they walked, and it was so wonderfully familiar. So many times they’d walked in this way together after foraging through the forest. Though here, the forest was the stone columns that vanished into the darkness overhead.
They were not far from the passageway when a snap of cracking wood echoed through the vast chamber. Lizzan’s stomach dropped and then shriveled when the screech reached them across the distance. Immediately they picked up the pace, and with Aerax beside her, she kept a careful watch on the scarred man. To her eyes, he seemed to be learning to run as he went—or remembering how to.
Kelir grabbed up the torch when they reached the corridor, and nothing was there to see beyond the glow of firelight. No indication of how far they might run. Only darkness, ahead and behind.
Until the sound of the stone wraith’s steps joined them as it entered the corridor. Not screeching yet. Only the click-click-click-click that their labored breaths and racing footsteps made near impossible to hear or to know how far behind it was.
“Here!” Preter shouted joyously, and new energy surged through her limbs.
The quality of the darkness changed, not pure black but the dark of a clouded night sky that shrouded the moon and stars. Cool air hit Lizzan’s overheated face, and she followed the others through an archway into another immense chamber, too dark to know the full size but everything within her was directed upward, where the darkness was not a ceiling but the open sky.
“There will be a stair carved into the side,” Preter told them between hard breaths, “though I know not which side.”
“It will follow us out,” Ardyl said, panting. “We are not done running.”
“We are not,” Aerax said grimly. “But if we must face it, I prefer to face it out there.”
As did Lizzan. “Let us find that stair,” she said, taking Aerax’s hand and striking out toward the far wall—then pausing, for directly ahead was an obstacle that seemed darker than all else . . . and of enormous size. A statue? She did not wish to run at full speed into that.
Lizzan called to Seri to bring a torch as she moved forward, feeling for where the statue began. Her fingers encountered smooth stone carved with rounded grooves . . . scales, she made out even as the light fell over them.
Baffled, she called to Preter, “Do these monks invoke Stranik in their magic?”
“If they do, then no ally should we make of them,” said Kelir.
Abruptly Aerax wrapped his arm around Lizzan’s waist and hauled her back. “Away from it, Seri,” he barked at the girl.
She stumbled back, and in the flickering light from her torch the scaly hide slithered past. Lizzan’s heart stopped in her chest. For the thing was not a legless crawling snake, and as it shifted position, she could not see it turn but she could feel it turn, as if nothing so large could move without affecting everything near to it.
“There’s a dragon in here,” Seri breathed.
Into the silence that fell came a click-click-click-click. Lizzan turned with Aerax