A temblor shook the earth so hard that Anna had trouble keeping her feet. The Kerayit healer moaned, fighting sleep but not quite able to wake. Thiemo and Matto didn’t stir at all. The blue fire had become so bright she had to squint. The cavern shone, walls gleaming. The stone sweat as heat swelled. It was like being trapped inside a box that had been thrown onto a fire.
“No one is listening to me!” shrieked Blessing. She pounced on Thiemo and shook him. “Wake up! Wake up!”
Without warning, the Quman soldier leaped to his feet, knife in hand as he assessed his surroundings. Over the last months Heribert had picked up the rudiments of the Quman speech. He spoke now, and the young man nodded abruptly, lowered the knife, and knelt beside Matto, shaking him. The Kerayit healer opened her eyes and, with a grunt, scrambled to her feet. She pointed to the fiery blue net whose brightness by now made the light in the cavern almost unbearable.
“Sorcery,” she said in halting Wendish. “Go now. Go quick.”
“Do you know the way out?” asked Heribert.
“I don’t,” said Berthold. “It’s all changed. It wasn’t like this at all yesterday when we crawled in here—”
“I know how to go!” exclaimed Blessing.
“Take her,” said Heribert to Anna. “We’ll have to carry Thiemo and Matto if we can’t wake them up.”
“Do you really think she knows anything?” demanded Berthold, more in disbelief than in anger. He had begun, finally, to appear nervous.
“I do know! I do!”
“Have you a better plan?” asked Heribert in his mildest tone. “I haven’t. One is as good as another. We’d best hurry.”
Thunder shook the cavern, a stalactite shuddered loose from the ceiling, crashed to the floor, and shattered into stinging shards. Anna caught one on her cheek. Blood trickled down her skin.
“Lord Berthold!” A young man no older than Villam’s son staggered out of a passageway. He shaded his eyes, brought up short by the blinding net of light. Another tremor shook them. A second stalactite cracked and fell, and the poor youth leaped aside and shouted out loud as he flung up his arms to protect himself. Dust and debris scattered.
“Where are the others?” demanded Berthold. He, too, was pale now. He, too, looked frightened.
“I can’t wake them!” said poor Jonas, who had been crying. “I don’t know what’s wrong!”
“This way!” cried Blessing, who had run to a different passageway, one opposite the tunnel that Berthold’s companion had just emerged from. “I said this way! We’ve got to hurry! The storm is coming. It will crush us if we’re in here!”
She shot off a quick command in the Quman language, surprising both Heribert and Anna, who hadn’t known she could speak any language other than Wendish. The Quman soldier got Matto under the arms and began dragging him.
“Here!” Galvanized, Anna ran forward and got hold of Matto’s ankles, heaving him up, but after ten paces his limp weight was too much for her, and she wasn’t weak.
“Help us, I pray you, Lord Berthold,” said Heribert. “Let’s carry these two free and come back for your companions.”
Berthold hesitated, then fixed his mouth in a grim line and ran over to Thiemo. “He looks familiar,” he mused, grabbing him under the arms. “Here, Jonas. Help me!”
The Kerayit healer came to Anna’s rescue, taking Matto’s ankles, and Anna after all had to pursue Blessing, who had already vanished up the passageway. The floor was seamless, swept clean of debris, pebbles, dirt. Threads of light pierced the stone itself, woven entirely through the underground labyrinth. With each tremor, with each pulse, tiny cracks fissured the stone. At any moment the entire place might splinter and collapse. This was not the fate she had expected. Panic lent her wings, and she raced on Blessing’s trail and would have plunged to her death had Blessing not screamed out loud just in time for Anna to stumble to a stop beside the girl, at the edge of an abyss.
The passageway ended in a wide, deep hole. It was as if a giant had stuck a spear far down into the earth and drawn it up again, leaving this empty shaft behind. The net of light that illuminated the labyrinth did not penetrate into its depths. There was no way across, and no obvious way down or up.
“Look,” said Blessing, pointing to the cliff face opposite them. “There’s a ledge there, and a passageway.”
“No way to reach it, Your Highness,” said Anna, barely able to speak. She couldn’t catch her breath. “We’ll have to go back and find another route.”