Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

He rummaged in the pack he was still carrying and pulled out a water bottle. She drank gratefully, then handed it to him so that he could drink, too.

They were still in a tunnel. The cold, damp smell was stronger. The only way to go was forward, unless they wanted to climb all the way back the way they had come.

Merris strained to remember the maps she had studied. Her memory was good, but the darkness muffled it. She should be at the level of the underground river, or just above it, but she was not sure which. The tunnel branched—at least, she thought it did. One way wound through a succession of caves to a blind end. The other led to the river.

First she had to get to the branch. Then she had to remember which direction to take. She raised her torch, though her arm was as tired as the rest of her, and pressed on.

Right, she thought. No, left.

The tunnel branched as she had thought. But which way? The wrong one would lose them both in the bowels of the earth.

She closed her eyes. In the dark behind her eyelids, she tried to picture the map. It had been in a book that Master Thellen gave her to study, tucked away in the back with the dry notes and the endless rambling appendices. She could feel the book in her hands, the worn leather cover and the crumbling pages.

There it was. She almost lost it, she was so glad to have found it. She struggled to keep it steady, then to focus on the part that she needed.

Right. She should turn right. She almost turned left out of sheer doubt and panic, but she gritted her teeth and followed her first inclination. The cold smell was stronger in that direction, or so she told herself. It must be the smell of the underground river.

The passage widened some distance past the turn. Coryn moved up beside her. Her hand reached out and clasped his. His fingers were as clammy as hers, but they warmed with the contact. Hand in hand like children, they went on into the dark.

The tunnel did not divide again, which gave Merris hope that it was the right way. It twisted and turned like some vast worm’s trail, sometimes doubling back on itself. Their torches began to burn low.

Merris was beyond exhaustion. One more turn, one more doubling—just one more. Then she would worry about the one after that.

She walked straight into a wall that should not have been there. Only slowly did she realize it was a door. She pushed. It gave, swinging outward.

There was the hall she remembered from the map, and there was the dark, oily slide of the river running through it. If the tunnel had been a worm’s track, this had the look and feel of a dragon’s lair.

All the stone in the Keep and the tunnels had been black, but this hall was golden red: the same color as the stone that Mistress Patrizia had given Merris. Curtains and streamers of waxy stone streamed down the sides and pooled in columns on the floor. It almost looked like flesh—even to the veins that ran through it.

It was calling to Merris. Even the little time that she had worn the stone had been enough. It had marked her—bound her. And, she realized in a kind of despair, it had brought her here.

Coryn’s fingers tightened on Merris’. His breath hissed.

Merris willed him not to speak. There was something in the center of the hall. It looked like a depression in the floor, a long, shallow oval, with a statue standing over it.

The statue moved. Like the crows on the arch of Darkwall Keep’s gate, it was alive. Slowly, in the fading torchlight, it took shape as a tall, narrow figure in a dark cloak.

The hood slipped back. Darkwall’s Lady looked directly at Merris. She was the same as Merris remembered: gaunt, aging, not beautiful, though her features had a certain stark elegance. Her graying hair was loose, falling on her shoulders.

She smiled. “Welcome, my child,” she said. Her voice echoed in the cavern, reverberating from wall to wall and back again, over and over.

Merris gasped and clapped her hands to her ears. Coryn had fallen flat.

“Your eagerness is charming,” the Lady said. The echoes were fainter now, fading away. Merris dared to lower her hands from her ears.

The Lady spoke again, this time without echoes at all. “Come here.”

Merris found she could not resist. She left Coryn lying and walked slowly across the hall. It must be her imagination that the Lady’s cloak was made of dark scales, and the bottom of it wound away in a long tail. It was her shadow, that was all.

The torch was guttering badly now. Both of Coryn’s had gone out when he fell. That must be why the river looked as if it ran not with water but with blood, and the basin in front of the Lady brimmed over with glistening darkred liquid.

“There’s no one in the keep,” Merris said. “All your gold and soldiers—where did they come from?”

“I do have a manor,” said the Lady, “and loyal men in my villages.”

It sounded like an answer, but it did not feel like one. When Merris tried to back away, she found she could not move.