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the riggers unconscious in their cocoons of energy. He was mystified, but
pleased, by his successful mission on behalf of Master Rent. In his guise as
an iffling, the words had come to him as needed, welling up out of his
unconscious like waters from an underground stream. Rent, exactly as he had
promised, had provided him
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with everything he had needed to deliver the message to that terribly strange
riggerbeing, Hodakai-along with the ludicrously simple spell of persuasion.
If he didn't precisely understand the reasons for that mission, he put the
question out of his thoughts now. He had his primary mission to think of, and
that was to lead Jael to the Pool of Visions.
Emerging from the underrealm near the spaceship, he found all as he had left
it@except for the presence, gum mering in the hills on all sides of the ship,
of the new warrior-sprites sent here by Rent. They were watching, doing
nothing.
Excellent.
jarvorus moved past them to take charge once more.
Chapter 22
A BATTLE IN THE DARK IT SEEMED as though half the night had passed, by the
time Windrush gave up on sleep and blinked his eyes open to the dark form of
the draxis in the cold hearth. He sighed.
It was useless. There was too much to do, too much to learn. Too many duties
weighing on his mind, including the many dragon guardian holds he knew he
ought to inspect as leader. He thought of the minor lumenis groves throughout
the held land, each with loyal dragons standing watch; and the Grotto Garden
of the Forest Mountains, to the south, perhaps the only surviving dragon
garden in the realm; and the
Deep Caverns, far to the east, where powerful, ancient spell-weavings were now
only a memory, but a potent memory ...
And yet with all these places to visit, he knew that the place he had to start
was right here in his own cavern. There were two more underrealm windows that
he had not yet explored.
He stretched, unkinking his neck. He let a breath of steam rise toward the
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ceiling, then blew a flame into it, warming the cavern.
Finally he sank back into the underrealm and smelled about for spies or
intruders. Satisfied that he was alone, he considered his next action.
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Of the two windows, he was tempted by the one that smelled of woodland and
salt sea. But something seemed to tell him that it was not yet time to look
that way; there was something he needed to see first. He felt himself drawn
toward the window of glowering underground fire. He didn't know why. But he
sensed that someone, or something, was calling him from that dark place.
He smelled the sulfur, even before his kuutekka was fully formed in the
window. Stretching his thought out through the weave of the underweb, he
found himself entering what seemed a labyrinth of underground pathways, a maze
that seemed to increase in complexity as his thought ranged out, trying to
find an underlying pattern. It was a place of darkness, and somewhere in the
distance, a place of fire. He smelled danger. It made him think of the
Enemy, but he did not think that this place was a creation of the Enemy.
Perhaps, he thought, it was a natural feature of the underrealm that now bore
the mark of the Enemy's passage and use.
Windrush felt more than a little anxious as he probed down one pathway, then
another. Would there be drahls? r, Would he find
Tar-skel, waiting to draw him in to his death? He fought to clear his
thoughts of such questions, to keep from radiating his apprehension like a
beacon through the underrealm. He wished he knew what he was looking for, or
which direction to look.
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