At first, the letters refused to reveal themselves, but only rested like stones in her mind. Then Nemienne, driven nearly to distraction by the sense of time rushing past them into the vanishing past and inspired perhaps by necessity, called to mind instead the pale greenish light of the caverns under the mountains. This sprang not only to her mind, but, unexpectedly, to her hands. The light gathered like water in her palms and spilled between her fingers to run across the hearth. It pooled in the kitten’s eyes, lambent green, and the little animal crouched down with its ears back flat against its skull. The light poured into the cracks in the hearthstones and filled the fireplace itself with a green light that was nothing like fire. The lines seemed to swim and rearrange themselves. They were runes, Nemienne saw. She knew because her spell told her, that the first was a rune of summoning, the second a rune of traveling, and the third a rune of breaking—summoning what or breaking what, she had only the sketchiest idea. But she had a pretty solid guess about the one connected to traveling.
“Come here, hold my hand,” she said to Karah, holding out her hand for her sister to take.
“What is that light?” Karah asked, hesitating. “What did you do?”
“Do?” Nemienne had hardly done anything, yet. She said instead, still feeling the press of passing time and still carried along by the quick stream of inspiration, “Quickly, quickly, come on, Karah!”
“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Nemienne promised recklessly. She only wished she did know more specifically what it was she was doing, or might do, or ought to do. But she felt strongly that there was no time now to hesitate; that they had to move now if there was to be a chance of saving anything from this night. She caught her sister’s hand in hers and, with the hand she still had free, traced the rune on the middle stone.
The cracks in the stone split wide. Light spilled into the fractures in the stone and darkness spilled out of them. Around Nemienne and Karah, the room seemed to twist, turn itself inside out, and stretch out—and up—and out again. When the world steadied, they found themselves standing close together in the moist chilly air of the caverns. The greenish light showed them the beautiful, strange, stone formations of the caverns. Far away, seeming to echo from every direction, there was the resonant sound of water drops falling from high above into the fathomless black water of the dragon’s pool.
Nemienne had no idea which way to go to reach that sound.
Then twin lights like miniature green lanterns caught her eye, and she made out the dim shape of Enkea, sitting statue still among the shadows. The cat’s eyes were fixed on the girls—no, on the kitten that clung to Karah’s shoulder.
The kitten leaped to the ground and bounced toward Ankennes’s cat, only Enkea wasn’t really Ankennes’s cat, was she? Nemienne studied the green light of the caverns that folded so smoothly around the slim creature and wondered how she had ever mistaken Enkea for a tame house cat. It was clear enough now that she was a creature of shadows and dim light, and nothing tame.
Karah’s kitten paused to stretch her nose toward Enkea’s face, her whiskers arcing forward—then skittered past and dashed away into the far reaches of the caverns. Enkea rose to her feet and followed sedately, her white foot flashing in the dimness.
Nemienne drew Karah after the cats. She recognized nothing. Without guidance she knew they might have wandered for hours or days… forever, maybe?… through the endless dimness and never found the dragon’s chamber. She hadn’t thought of that when she invoked the rune, and her blood chilled now at the thought. But Enkea never outpaced them, and the kitten dashed forward and back. And very soon she found she could hear, ahead of them, the sound of voices, not quite interpretable. One was light and quick, a voice that Nemienne did not know. The other belonged to Mage Ankennes. Nemienne bit her lip.
“That’s the foreign lord, Lord Chontas Taudde ser Omientes,” Karah whispered in her ear. “And the deep voice is your Mage Ankennes, of course. He sounds very… very confident.”
Nemienne nodded, and swallowed. She wished fervently that she found the mage’s voice reassuring. She would have, mere days ago—she should have, even now—he had to know what he was doing, didn’t he? He was the mage, and she only a girl who’d barely begun to learn from him.
But she was uncomfortably aware that she didn’t trust the mage at all. No matter how horribly presumptuous she was to doubt him, Nemienne couldn’t help herself. She knew that doubting Mage Ankennes was probably going to ruin her whole life. She’d loved being his apprentice—she’d longed to be a mage—if she acted against him now, he’d never forgive her. But she couldn’t be loyal to him and to her sister both. And she was terribly afraid that what her master wanted to do, sacrificing Prince Tepres to destroy the stone dragon, was just wrong. How could it be right?