Her guides had vanished.
Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She sank down and sat against the wall, snuffed out the red sparks on the fraying end of the rope. In complete darkness she rested, and ate, and considered her situation. If she kept her mind busy, she would not panic.
A labyrinth lay beneath the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning, as complex a network of pathways as the ones woken within any woven crown. It was, she supposed, like the earth’s equivalent to the network that existed in some manner in the aether, to which she had had access when she had walked through the burning stone, which was both crossroads and gateway. Somehow, when it existed in exile in the aether, the Ashioi land had become intertwined within these aetherical pathways; that was why, when she had wandered in the mist of the borderlands with Eldest Uncle’s rope tied around her, she had emerged on distant hills and in unknown marshlands in the far regions of Ashioi country, places she might otherwise only reach by many days or weeks travel on foot.
Yet this world below the world was not simply a trap of closed tunnels. The air she breathed was not stale, although it was a little dusty and sometimes flavored with a tang. There was nothing here she could recognize, nothing familiar, nothing to grasp, not even grandmothers. The sides of the tunnels ran slick beneath her hand; she could not imagine what kind of stone this was, or how these roads had been carved out of the rock. Where the knife’s edge had cut off the land in ancient days she found debris. That was the old side, the lands that had remained on Earth after the first cataclysm. Where the creatures led her, beneath Ashioi country, the labyrinth was revealed as a sterile place seemingly untouched by the passage of time.
Rapping sounded behind her, a warning or a welcome. She scooted up, breathed fire onto the end of the rope, and turned as the air around her lightened from an unseen source. She waited; she even held her breath, not meaning to.
A creature shuffled into view. Its skin shone with the glamour of pewter, mottled here and there by crusty growths very like the stunted stalagmites she had seen years ago in a cave in Andalla where she had plumbed the depths with a careless guide and her inquisitive father. Had they descended farther, in that Andallan cave, would they have found a long-forgotten entrance to the great labyrinth? Did the maze weave its interlace below the entire land of Novaria?
Bulges marked the creature’s face where eyes should be. Movement shifted within those bulges like the gathering and shredding of clouds. It wore a necklace of metal scraps that rang lightly when it halted. Wound around one arm, a copper armband gleamed brightly.