Crown of Stars (Crown of Stars #7)

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.

She was alone, trapped, lost. Abandoned.

She padded forward with a sick feeling in her stomach and cold fear along her skin. Deep in the earth, with no way out, no recourse. She could never find a way home.

Maybe the only way out is through.

The tunnel jinked three times within a short stretch. She blinked in surprise as she emerged into a broad, oval cave with an uncomfortably low ceiling, not quite so low that she had to stoop but low enough that she kept ducking anyway.

The walls of the chamber were pricked with holes that had a diameter as thick as her leg and, between collections of holes, were riddled with alcoves stuck off at odd angles. The floor extended, on the level and on all sides, about ten steps inward before sinking steeply into a large, central hollow. A still pool marked the center of the hollow. This basin was filled with what might have been water but which seemed to her eye too brilliant and too hard, for it cast outward a blue incandescence as if a strong light burned in its depths.