Through their many adventures, her bodyguard had been fearless, but it was with wary eyes that he looked at the shaft as the sides changed from dark grayish-brown rock to off-white salt with pinkish striations. He hadn’t seemed disturbed by the cave they’d found the teal ore in, but this felt tighter. More ominous.
“According to the map,” Syla said, “the deepest levels are hundreds of feet down, but I’ve only been in the topmost one, and that’s as far as we should need to go. We should be almost there.”
Fel’shmwasn’t that heartened.
“If it helps, the levels of the mine themselves are spacious.Cavernous. Wreylith could have fit down there with us—if she’d had a way in.”
The shaft around the cage disappeared as they entered the first level, the space as vast as she’d promised. Syla lifted a hand to thestopbutton but waited to press it. As she’d recalled, it was thirty or forty feet, it not more, from the ceiling to the floor, and the first level stretched into the darkness in all directions. Great pyramid-shaped pillars of salt had been left untouched, the mine carved out around them, to support the high ceiling.
Lanterns burned on some of the pillars, with a couple of carts full of salt lined up on tracks near the lift cage. It almost appeared as if the place were engaged in its normal operations, but Syla spotted a body next to one of the carts, and her heart sank. There was nothing normal about this situation.
The body belonged to a uniformed soldier, not a miner, and she hoped Oyenar had sent word ahead and cleared the place of workers. Military casualties were bad enough. Syla didn’t want to worry about simple laborers being turned into additional victims.
When the lift cage drew even with the floor, Syla reached for thestopbutton. But a boom and a flash ahead and to the left startled her, and she almost didn’t halt them. For an instant, the entire mine was lit from the brilliance of the explosive, revealing pyramid supports stretching back in wide rows for what seemed like miles, and she got a glimpse of shadows—people—hundreds of yards in the distance before the darkness returned.
Fel stepped in front of her. “It’s not safe to get out here.”
“I’ve got more explosives, and I’m not afraid to throw them!” Aunt Tibby yelled.
Syla hit the button. “Wehaveto get out here.”
She tried to push Fel aside so she could open the gate, but he threw the latch himself and ran out first. A crossbow quarrel zipped away from the direction that Aunt Tibby’s voice had come. Then another boom followed the first. Tibby was aiming at something—someone—deeper in the mine.
Syla ran after Fel as he rounded one of the pyramid supports. Lanterns flickered on it and yellow light glinted off the metal of equipment-laden wagons and large wheeled machines, a few of which hummed with magic. It took Syla a moment to spot Tibby and two guards with crossbows.
There were no lanterns lit in the depths that they faced, but the flashes of light had revealed people in black, a few with white gargoyle-bone blades.
“There are stormers already down here,” one of the soldiers told Fel when he walked up, as if he were the senior person present that they needed to report to, not Syla.
“We saw the bodies,” Syla said.
“The stormers were waiting down here for us. How did they get here so quickly? I know there were reports of ships on the way, but?—”
“These are the same people who attacked the palace and the docks—the weapons platform.”
Tibby frowned at Syla as she lowered a flat square-shaped package identical to the explosives she’d made weeks earlier to defend the shielder chamber under the castle. “Ishewith them?”
“Vorik?” Syla asked. “The last I saw, he was back on the mainland, but I’m sure he’s coming.”
Tibby bared her teeth.
“He fished you out of the river,” Syla pointed out.
“He’s the one who putmeinthe river,” she said.
Since Syla couldn’t argue with that, she only spread her arms.
“If this must be discussed with enemies about, at least stand behind cover.” Surprisingly, Fel gripped Tibby’s arm first, guiding her into a nook between a machine and a pillar.
Syla joined them while the guards stood behind the wagons and pointed their weapons over them and into the darkness. The stormers had to remain in the area, shrouded by the shadows, but they weren’t doing anything at the moment. And they didn’t make a sound. Syla sensed someone with power but didn’t think it was Lesva.
“You shouldn’t have come down here,” Tibby told her.
“Neither should you, but we have missions.” Syla raised her marked hand, then glanced from the wagons and machinery to the lift cage. “How did the miners get all this big stuff down here?”
“The things I worked on were brought in pieces and assembled down here.” Tibby wiggled her fingers.
“We need to get more men down here,” one of the soldiers said, glancing at the cage lift for a different reason. “Have more troops arrived?”
