Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [222]
“I’ll catch you,” he promised Leorin for the second time. She fell into his arms and fainted from the pain. Cauvin chafed her hands and cheeks to rouse her. “Don’t you froggin’ die on me!”
The golden-amber eyes fluttered open. “I won’t, Cauvin, I swear I won’t. Help me up.”
He did. “You’re sure you can find the way?”
“Just stay behind me. Walk where I walk, nowhere else.”
“What about torchlight?”
“What about it? They know we’re here, Cauvin. The temple belongs to Dyareela. There’s always someone watching.”
That stopped Cauvin in his tracks as he recalled his earlier visits. The Hand must not have recognized the Torch, or maybe they weren’t as vigilant as Leorin believed.
Steadying herself with her right hand against the tunnel wall, Leorin led Cauvin into a maze. Cauvin had never imagined that Sanctuary was built on a hollow hillside, but that seemed the best explanation for the wormlike passages. The torch he carried revealed shiny ribbons of stone that looked like silken draperies. He longed to run his hands over them, but Leorin, with her right hand always touching the passage wall, limped on.
Though most of the passages were bone dry, several were flooded to ankle depth. The water flowed from cracks in the passage walls or seeped up through the raw-stone floor. Living near rivers and the sea, Cauvin thought he knew all the ways in which water could kill, but he’d never imagined that a man could drown underground until they entered a cave that was little wider than the stream roaring through it. A waist-high rope had been slung across the turbulent water, leading from the natural arch where they stood to a dark keyhole carved out of the opposite wall.
“When it rains above, the water flows here,” Leorin explained. “Yesterday, we couldn’t have come this way, but it’s safe now—slippery, but not very deep.”
Leorin hitched up her skirt with a moan and grasped the rope with her free hand. Her feet had no sooner touched the rushing water than she lost her balance. A hard fall left her stunned and sliding toward the hole where the stream reburied itself in stone. Cauvin didn’t have hands enough for the torch, the guide rope, and Leorin. He let go of the rope. The stream wasn’t deep—the water didn’t cover his knees—but slippery didn’t begin to describe the stone over which it raced. He lost the torch during his struggle to grasp Leorin and keep his balance.
If the Hand was watching—Cauvin could have used some help finding the way out. He was drenched before he found first the guide rope, then the keyhole exit.
“Ice is slippery,” he complained as he helped a shaky Leorin into the pitch-black passage. “That was worse. Can you get through that?”
“Yes,” Leorin said grimly.
The carved passage was meant for crawling, not walking, and on their palms and knees. But it was no more than twenty feet in length—the longest twenty feet Cauvin had ever crawled—and ended in a cave that was lit by a pair of oil lamps hung from a ceiling too high to see by their light. They picked up an escort coming across that chamber—at least one man whose footsteps echoed in the darkness. Cauvin loosened the bronze slug from his neck, but the escort stayed out of sight.
There was another keyhole passage, this one high enough for walking, and at the end of it, a well-lit chamber. Leorin had told the froggin’ truth about one thing, at least—Cauvin had just two choices tonight: submit or sacrifice. There would be no turning around.
The Hand’s bolt-hole beneath Sanctuary was a sprawling cavern some twenty feet high and divided by a rushing stream, probably the same stream Cauvin and Leorin had crossed earlier. Lashed and floating planks bridged the stream. Judging from the length of the bridge and the high-waterline shining on the sloped floor, the stream had been a foot higher not long ago.
On the far side of the stream, at the limit of torchlight, the Hand had raised an altar to the Bloody Mother of Chaos. It was a small altar compared to the one Cauvin remembered at the palace, barely longer than a man’s spine,