.
Our camping spot was just barely below the tree line, surrounded by skinny aspens that looked like they were barely clinging, and too sparse to form an actual canopy.
When we arrived in this spot in the late afternoon, Talene had produced an amazing set of camping tools I had never seen before.
First, after Graham took a small aspen down with his ax– with three blows, one on the falling side followed by two on the opposite. I’m sure I could have done it in a single blow with Durandal, but not neatly and precisely the way Graham managed– she produced a peculiar cutting tool, more or less a magic chainsaw, although it was the size of a normal mage’s wand.
She quickly reduced the tree to firewood with it, then pulled out her tome, flipped to the relevant page and cast a complicated dehydrating spell on the firewood, drying it for immediate use.
Next, by driving a series of stakes into the ground around the site, she produced a small scale magic barrier. I had seen the equivalent created by combat mages in the army, to surround an entire bivouac site, but this was the first time I saw one portable enough to fit into a small pouch.
Finally, after using a quick spell to level the ground, she took out a palm-sized magic tool and activated it, creating a cabin out of nothing. It looked vaguely metallic, and my fairy sight told me that it was actually manifested Earth mana, but it had vents, operating shutters on the windows, and an actual door.
It would have been a tight squeeze for eleven people, but Dilorè and I weren’t sleeping, and the men slept outdoors. The remaining six women fit inside quite comfortably.
When I returned to this site, Graham and Arken were sound asleep on their bedrolls and Ryuu was keeping the second watch with Bruna. (Even with a magic barrier in place, nobody is comfortable enough to go completely without a watch.) I wasn’t cloaked when I approached, and twilight was turning to day, so they saw me coming and waved.
After checking my fairy sense as I arrived, I asked, “Dilorè’s not back yet?”
Bruna answered, “She checked in a while ago, but headed back out when she heard you weren’t back.”
I hid a smirk. Likely, she decided she couldn’t let herself be upstaged, as my elder. If I was still out there, she couldn’t come in, yet.
Allia emerged from the cabin while I was still deciding where to sit. She looked at me and said, “Go inside and take a nap, My Lady. Use my bedroll.”
“My Lady…” I started, shaking my head.
“You’ve been flying all night, right?” she noted. “Let your pneuma recharge a bit.”
Allia’s bossiness chafes, but I put on my Royal Knight persona and nodded. Uncle Owen had put her in charge of this mission, after all.
Just as I was about to pass through the door, she touched my arm to halt me and leaned in close. In a low voice, she asked, “Has it been long enough since my daughter last fed you, My Lady?”
I blinked in surprise at her. Ceria had been very careful to hide the matter of feedings from her mother, believing it would upset her, but here she was, bringing it up.
She met my eyes and continued, still in a low voice, “If your flight magic resembles a vampire’s, then constant flying increases your need for blood, does it not?”
Reluctantly, I admitted, at the same volume, “Not as quickly as a full vampire. My fairy half makes it less so. But, it does, yes.”
“And is it currently safe to feed on one of your slaves?”
“Servants,” I stressed. “It’s too soon for Melione. But it’s okay for Ceria. However, I don’t need it yet, My Lady.”
“Don’t push it,” she instructed. “Feed on those two as often as is safe for them. Using other magic also increases your need, right? Stay as ready as you can be.”
Although I was now fairly cross, I kept my voice low as I demanded, “Why do you know so much about this?”
“The Bray Academy has an excellent library, and I am an alumna, My Lady. When my daughter became a blood slave, I naturally researched everything I could on the subject.”
She left me at the door and went to the fire to warm her hands. I shook my head and went inside.
I thought for certain that my worries about how to explain Amelia’s location would stop me from sleeping, but habits from Tiana’s squire years have never died. In the squires, one catches precious sleep any time one finds the opportunity.
But those thoughts started up immediately, after Ceria pounced on me to wake me up. Okay, actually, those thoughts actually started up after a brief, friendly tussle and a short kiss. But I was already a mass of worry by the time I exited the cabin.
Breakfast was cooked together. Oatmeal had been in ample supply in Lisrau. Before we turned in the previous night, they had added boiling water and raisins into some and let it soak. Now they put it on the fire. That wasn’t the way I remember cooking oatmeal back on Earth, but it was good stuff. Chewy instead of mushy, the way I think of oatmeal. I made a note to mention it to Uncle Owen, because it had been a lot tastier than anything I ate for breakfast in the field while in the army.
“Well,” Allia said once everyone had eaten, alternating her eyes between Dilorè and me, “I suppose we should get a report from our scouts before we break camp.”
In order to buy just a little more time to figure out what to say, I gestured to Dilorè to go first.
“Well, the good news is, the nearest large predators are a small pack of horned wolves three miles down-river from us, containing six adults. They appear to be the only large predators in the area. Uphill on our north side there’s a thunderbear, but those don’t bother you if you don’t bother them. If we went high enough up the south side, into the mountain, we would eventually run into a few yetis. The snow is gone in this valley, so they won’t come here. And of course there are fanged rabbits here and there. When we get downstream far enough, there’s more monsters, but nothing worse than what I’ve mentioned so far.”
She finished and looked at me with a smile.
Oh, come on, Dilorè, that’s all you’ve got?
Okay, so it was a good report. I wish she had gone into more detail on the ‘more monsters farther downstream’ to buy me more time, though.
I sighed and nodded.
“First, in addition, there’s giant eagles nesting on the north slope, but we bypassed two of them yesterday, so there’s only two more to worry about.
Dilorè reacted. “But they’re so far away…”
“They have wings, My Lady,” I pointed out.
“Ah…” she responded, as she realized it wasn’t always about proximity.
“There are flying wolves in the woodlands farther downstream, which I assume are part of what Dilorè mentioned. They’ll probably not cross horned wolf territory. But the thunderbear is a momma with cubs, so she might come downhill looking for food for them. We need to stay vigilant of that. That’s it for the monsters to worry about. I found nothing dramatic, which suggests the locals downstream have good hunters protecting them. Normally, this much wild space would hold at least a few humanoid monsters. Somebody is actively keeping the goblins and such out of here.”
“Locals downstream?” Allia asked.
“Starting about fifteen miles downstream, it becomes mortal territory. Remember how Sidis told us about the tribe that the Berado conquered, that cut her tribe off from Aleria? I’m pretty sure it’s their territory.”
“So Berado controlled land starts up that close to us?” she wondered, concerned.
“Probably,” I nodded. “But we’re going in, anyway.”
She blinked. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve got a lead on Princess Amelia’s location. She’s there.”
I think at least six people retorted something along the lines of “You found her?!” simultaneously. It was too jumbled together to parse out the individual speakers and responses.
“Sort of,” I said, then pulled out the pouch with Lucy’s stone in it. “This spirit and I finally managed to communicate last night.”
I roughly described how I followed the wind spirit, how the spirits were networking to find Amelia, and where I ended up, in the middle of farmland, as the closest I could get to her. And explained how she was somewhere far below.
“She’s… underground?” Allia’s brows knitted. Yeah, I know that feeling, My Lady.
I looked at Talene. “Your Wisdom, have you ever heard of the great open spaces beneath these mountains?”
“Well, yes, since they broke into such a thing in the Lisrau Mine. Are you claiming there is another one in the territory to our west? That would be quite a coincidence.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Is there anything in the lore you have studied that mentions a vast underground land? Not just a big cavern, but a great archipelago of them, extending great distances, interconnected by a network of tunnels?”
She looked over at Arken. “There are Elven legends of underground lands, and underground cities, I believe?”
He nodded. “In the legendary times, and earlier, in the times of myth, there were supposedly cities. Some believe that the Svartalfar city still existed five thousand years ago, when it caved in. There is a lake that supposedly formed as a result of the collapse.”
Talene pursed her lips and then shook her head, “But the consensus among scholars is that those are strictly fictional. Just as a strength of materials problem, a cavern large enough to contain an entire city is impossible. Perhaps there were subterranean dwellings that grew in memory as they passed into legend, but a cavern that could contain an entire kingdom, like in the Elven legends…”
She trailed off while shaking her head again, but I finished her sentence with the word, “Existed.”
I understood what she meant by a ‘strength of materials problem’. I had read about how the ‘geofront’ in Evangelion and similar colossal structures in other sci fi stories were effectively impossible, because no material strong enough to hold up such a cavern roof could exist.
In reply to her frown, I continued, “I do not know how much has survived the millennia since it was inhabited, but a network of such caverns once ran from Hamagaar all the way to Relador, underlying the whole of the Dragonsbacks. In Ancient Fairy, the Dragonsbacks are called the Land of Ilim, and that network of caverns and interconnecting tunnels stretching beneath it was known as Ilim Ras. Ilim Below.”
Talene’s reaction had started from a frown, then became a scowl, followed by a third, firm shake of the head. She might have had a different reaction if she had actually seen the space the miners found, rather than simply hearing about it. That sight would have erased the supposed ‘strength of materials problem’ that she was hung up on. The cavern that stretched not only below Lisrau, but continued all the way past the very spot where we were sitting, was larger than the great space we had visited near Cara Ita.
After observing Talene’s reaction, which was undermining my claim, Allia asked me, “How do you know?”
