The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [94]
The horses slowed as they grew too weak to carry them, so Aspar and Winna dismounted and led them, trying to stay off the poisoned ground. Ogre’s eyes were rheumy, and Aspar was afraid for him, but he knew he couldn’t spare any of the potion, not with Winna at risk. He could only hope that the beasts hadn’t been exposed directly to the woorm’s breath, that they were suffering from a lesser, perhaps survivable, poisoning.
The trail ended at a hole in a hillside. With a faint shock, Aspar recognized the place.
“This used to be Rewn Rhoidhal,” he told Winna.
“I wondered,” Winna replied. She was familiar with the Halafolk dwellings, having been with Aspar in another such place: Rewn Aluth. That one had been abandoned. All of them had.
“Is this—is this where Fend was from?”
Aspar shook his head. “So far as I know, Fend never lived in a rewn. He was one of the wanderers.”
“Like them that raised you.”
“Yah,” Aspar said.
Winna pointed at the gaping entrance. “I thought the Halafolk concealed their dwellings a little better than this.”
“They do. This one used to be pretty small, but it looks like the woorm has burrowed a hole big enough for itself.”
“Burrowed through rock?” Winna asked.
Aspar reached and snapped off a chunk of the reddish stone.
“Claystone,” he said. “Not very hard. Still, it would take a lot of men a long time with picks and shovels to widen the hole this much.”
Winna nodded. “What now?”
“I reckon the only way to follow it is to go in,” Aspar said, dismounting and starting to work the saddle off Ogre.
“Have we any oil left?”
They left the horses again and picked their way down a talus slope. The debris was recent, most likely from the woorm’s entry.
Their torchlight billowed as uncertain air wagged its flame, and Aspar was able to make out that they were descending into a large cyst in the earth. Even underground, the woorm’s trail wasn’t difficult to follow. They soon moved from the claystone antechamber down a sloping hall to ancient, sturdier rock, and even there the drag of the beast’s belly had snapped stalagmites at their bases. In one place where the damp ceiling stooped low, the creature’s back had shattered the downward-seeking stalactites, as well.
The rewn was silent except for the crunch of rock as they descended and the sound of their breath. Aspar stopped to look for any sign that Fend had dismounted there—he must have, after all—but what sign hadn’t been obliterated by the woorm was confused by evidence of the passage of hundreds of slinders.
They pressed on and soon heard a stir of voices, muffled by the enclosing stone. Ahead, Aspar could see that the passage was opening into something much larger.
“Carefully,” he whispered.
“That noise,” Winna said. ”It must be the slinders.”
“Yah.”
“What if they’re allies with the woorm?”
“They aren’t,” Aspar said, his foot slipping a bit on something slick.
“Can you be certain?”
“Pretty certain,” he replied gently. “Mind your feet.”
But it was a useless comment. The last few yards of the tunnel were smeared with blood and offal. It looked as if fifty bodies had been pounded fine in a mortar and then spread on the cave floor like butter on bread. Here and there he could make out an eye, a hand, a foot.
It smelled utterly foul.
“Oh, saints,” Winna gasped when she realized what it was. She went double and began gagging. Aspar didn’t blame her; his own stomach was heaving, and he had seen a lot in his day. He knelt by her and put his hand on her back.
“Careful, lubulih,” he said. “You’ll make me sick doing that.”
She chuckled ruefully and shot him a look, then went back to it for a while.
“I’m sorry,” she managed when she was done. “The whole cave knows we’re here now, I guess.”
“I don’t think anyone cares,” Aspar said.
The scriftorium had to be entered through a door so low that it forced him to crawl, to “come to knowledge on his knees.” But it was in rising that Stephen felt humbled