The Measure of the Magic (32 page)

Both Orullians nodded somewhat reluctantly. “She would,” Tasha said. “She’s stubborn that way. She would be seeking a way to get back at Isoeld Severine and avenge her father’s murder. It begins to look more and more as if the assassin was telling the truth about the Queen. But how do we get to Phryne to find out?”

“I can show you where she disappeared!” Xac Wen announced, looking eager to depart immediately. “You just have to come with me!”

Panterra looked at the brothers. “Tasha and Tenerife have to stay here. They won’t be allowed to leave just yet. But Prue and I can come with you. Maybe we can do something to help find her.”

“Because you’re really Elves, even though you don’t look it?” the boy deadpanned.

Pan cocked an eyebrow. “Careful, now.”

“All right,” Tasha agreed. “You take little sister and go with Xac. And you, squirrel boy, take them where they need to go and make certain nothing happens to them. You didn’t do so well with Phryne, so let’s do better with our Tracker friends.”

“That wasn’t my fault!” the boy exclaimed in dismay. He turned to Pan and Prue. “It wasn’t!”

“No, Xac, it wasn’t,” Prue agreed, reaching out to touch his cheek. “It was just something that happened, and assigning blame for it doesn’t help anyone. I should know. Will you take us?”

The boy glanced at the other three as if to make certain of his footing,
and then he gave her a firm nod. “I will take you anywhere you want to go, Prue Liss. And I will make sure that nothing bad happens to you.”

He looked at Tasha. “We could leave right away.”

Tasha rolled his eyes. “Tomorrow will be soon enough for this. Some of us need our rest.”

“Not me,” said the boy, and went back to eating.

P
HRYNE AMARANTYNE EXPERIENCED A MOMENT OF
disorientation, a quick change of light to twilight and outside to inside, followed by a loss of balance and a recognition that she wasn’t where she had been even a moment earlier. She stopped and tried to regain her sense of place and time, casting about for something familiar. There was nothing she recognized. The Belloruusian Arch, the Ashenell, the tombs and markers, the buildings of the city off in the distance, the day she had walked through only moments before—all gone.

She felt instant panic, fed by the realization that she had lost everything familiar and found in its place nothing she knew. She breathed in and out quickly, and her heart raced wildly.
Be calm
, she told herself.
You’re all right. Nothing has hurt you, nothing will
.

Maybe
.

How could she know? How could she know anything?

Then her eyes adjusted to the change of light, to this new darkness, and she began to see where she was. She was in a broad cavelike tunnel,
its rock walls rugged and rough, bits of roots and vines trailing from its ceiling, broken rocks and pockets of damp littering its floor. Veins of something phosphorescent glowed softly through its length, running on into the distance until they could no longer be seen clearly. From somewhere not too far away, water dripped in slow, steady cadence. When she breathed or scraped her boots on the stone, the sounds echoed loudly.

Otherwise, everything was silent.

She looked around, taking stock of her situation. The passageway in which she stood ran both ways for as far as she could see. There was no sign of how she had gotten here, nothing to indicate the portal that had allowed her to enter. She might have been picked up and deposited by a giant’s hand as easily as not. The walls about her offered no doors or alternative passageways. She could either stay where she was or go forward or back, but that was it.

She had retained enough presence of mind to know which was which, so she chose to go forward. But then she stopped herself, turned, and walked back for a short distance. Perhaps she could return to where she had been just by reversing her steps.

But when she’d gone twenty feet and nothing had happened, she realized there was no going back. Not that way, at least.

So she turned around and continued on. She walked for a long time, the sound of her breathing harsh in her ears, her footfalls echoing in the silence. She wished she’d thought to bring food and water, but then realized she hadn’t had any to bring in the first place. What she had were the clothes on her back, the long knife Xac Wen had given her, and a desperate need to find her grandmother.

She would have felt better about things if she’d had any clue as to where she was. Sure, she knew she was in a cave passage. She knew she was underground. But where? Somewhere in Arborlon or somewhere else entirely? Magic was at work here—of that much she could be certain. But had it worked to her advantage or not? If it was Mistral’s, she was not in danger. But if it were someone else’s, how could she be sure of anything? She couldn’t even be certain she was still inside the valley. She might have been transported. She might be anywhere.

But who would do this if not Mistral?

She forced herself to think it through logically. Mistral’s avatar had come to her to warn her of the danger and of her need to retrieve and take up the Elfstones. Her message, emblazoned in fire across the air inside her little cottage, had summoned Phryne to the Belloruus Arch. So it was reasonable to think it was her grandmother’s magic and not someone else’s that had brought her to where she was. Otherwise, this was an elaborate trap set by an unknown person or persons, and that just didn’t make any sense.

She walked with more confidence now, having decided everything was happening as intended, that her grandmother had arranged all this for a reason. Phryne was where she was supposed to be and doing what she was supposed to do. She wasn’t entirely reassured there was no danger, but she did think she was better off than she had first believed.

Time passed, and the tunnel wound on. Not once did it branch or offer any other way to go but forward or back. She felt as if she must have walked miles. But how could an underground passageway—even one as big as this—run so far? Nor was there any suggestion of an end to it. Everything kept looking exactly the same, the walls never changing and the light never altering. She might have been walking in place for all the progress she seemed to be making.

Her thoughts drifted to the events that had brought her to this place and time, beginning with her impulsive decision to go with her cousins and Prue Liss and Panterra Qu to Aphalion Pass and ultimately beyond into the outside world. How different things would be if she had stayed in Arborlon. She was aware of how everything in life could be changed by a single choice, had known it to happen to others, but had never thought she would experience it herself.

Now she wished she could take it all back. Her father might still be alive and her stepmother nothing more than the baker’s daughter who had married an Elven King and worked with the sick and injured. But Phryne guessed that she was dreaming. Events would still have turned out somewhere close to where they were. The Drouj would still have found their way to the valley, Isoeld would still have found a way to murder her husband so that she could make herself Queen, and her own sorry state of affairs would still have come to pass.

Of course, there was no way of knowing for sure and nothing to be
gained by speculating. You lived the life you were given, good or bad. She let the matter drop.

Ahead, the tunnel began to narrow. She hurried a bit to see what was going to happen and soon found that it tightened into a much smaller passageway that branched in three directions—one each to the left and right and a third between the other two that became a stairway leading down. She hesitated a moment before choosing the middle path. She couldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed to her that something was tugging her that way. Not a voice or a presence or anything quite so substantial; it was more instinct than anything, and she decided to heed it.

The stairway descended in circular fashion, the walls close enough that Phryne could feel the cold radiating off the stone and could see the damp glistening in broad patches. The dripping continued as well, droplets falling on her head or striking her face in icy splashes. The tunnel was windless, the air stale and damp to the taste. She had to duck to avoid low spots in the spiraling underside of the stairs. But she pressed ahead, determined to find an end to her journey.

She found it almost before she was ready. The stairs ended in another tunnel, this one as narrow as the passageway leading down, and she was forced to proceed in a crouch. Water ran all along the floor in tiny rivers and dripped steadily from the ceiling. She was soon very wet about her head and shoulders and shivering with the cold.

Then, suddenly, she heard a faint, dry hissing, a sound flat and empty of life, as if snakes held imprisoned might be pleading for release. It was vast and endless, and it grew in strength the farther down the passageway she went. She tried to make sense of it, but failed. It might have been snakes, but she knew it wasn’t. It might have been the sound of water falling in a thin, soft sheen from a great height, but it wasn’t that, either. It might even have been a dying breath, the sound of life leaving the body, but she knew that was wrong, too.

Now the passageway was widening out and taking on a different look. Stalactites appeared on the ceiling, each larger than a man, great stone spears on which mineral deposits had found purchase, their encrusted lengths shedding water in slow drippings that stained the tunnel floor. A forest of these formations filled the spaces above her head
and left her feeling as if she were in a deadly trap with jaws that might close on her at any moment.

She quit looking up, directed her eyes straight ahead, and pushed on.

When the tunnel finally ended, she was standing at the opening of a massive cavern, a chamber so vast she could not see its far walls and could only barely make out the stalactites clustered on its ceiling. Torches burned through the darkness like tiny fireflies, their glow revealing bits and pieces of the chamber’s terrain. A lake at its center dominated everything, broad and sprawling, its waters a strange greenish color, their surface flat and still, mirroring the ceiling and parts of the walls. Massive rocks chiseled into rectangles and pillars rose here and there along the perimeter, remnants of another age.

But what drew Phryne’s attention instantly were the tombs clustered around the lake’s edge, markers and sepulchers of all sizes and shapes, some with script cut into the stone bold and deep, some with tiny runes she could only barely make out, and some with nothing more than one or two huge letters carved in the ancient Elven language. She had studied that language and learned its characters, and so she could identify what she was looking at, even if she could not interpret its meaning.

She stood for long moments at the cavern entrance, trying to decide what to do next. Then slowly, cautiously, she began to make her way down toward the edge of the lake.

But she had not gone more than a dozen yards before the hissing that had tracked her progress with its steady, insistent buzzing—the hissing she had gotten so used to she had almost forgotten it was there—suddenly increased in intensity. The volume rose abruptly, as if to acknowledge her presence and make known that it recognized her purpose. She stopped where she was, realizing suddenly what she was hearing.

It was the sound of voices whispering—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all speaking at once.

She held her ground a moment longer to see if anything else was going to happen, but after a few minutes in which nothing did, she moved ahead once more. Shadows layered the cavern floor in strange shapes, elongated and twisted in the bits and pieces of light, and she
could have sworn that some of them moved. But she could find nothing living in the mix of light and dark, and even the sources of the whispering refused to reveal themselves. She walked alone, down through the tombs, down through the shadows, down to the edge of the green, still waters of the lake.

There she stopped, waiting.

Phryne
, a voice called out to her.

Even though she had been expecting something to happen, she nearly jumped out of her skin. She wheeled right and left, searching for the speaker, the sound of her name echoing all through the chamber so that it was impossible to trace.

I am here, child
.

And there was Mistral. Her grandmother stood next to a huge stone marker not twenty feet away, wrapped in her favorite cloak, the one into which she had woven impressions of the flowers of her gardens. She looked diminished standing in the shadow of the marker, a tiny figure, frail and old, her years a weight upon her shoulders.

She also looked dead. The faint light of the torches passed right through her, revealing her transparency, her changed state of being. She could no longer be seen as one of the living, even by Phryne, who very much wanted her to be. Whatever had happened aboveground, she had crossed over into the spirit world, her life come to an end.

Phryne gave a low moan of dismay and felt tears spring to her eyes. “Oh, Grandmother, no,” she whispered.