Book of Iron by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Promethean Age, Elizabeth Bear, Fantasy, Magic, Eternal Sky, Wizards
ISBN: 9781596064744
Amazon: 1596064749
Publisher: Subterranean
Published: 2013-09-29T05:00:00+00:00

Five

After the fire of the outside, the cavern with its echoing, plashing water was a cool relief. Kaulas convinced the horse-skeleton to stand rearguard, and they arrayed themselves and continued downward, along the shore of the underground lake.

Now they needed the torches—even the necromancers, once they passed around a curve or two and out of sight of the entrance’s reflected light. Bijou allowed the beam of hers to play out over the lake briefly, too entranced by curiosity to mind her own earlier cautions. The outer part of the cavern was raw and rough, wind-carved—but as they progressed backwards and it narrowed, they found themselves passing twisted filigrees of flowstone: stalactites, stalagmites, candelabras of stone that looked as if candles had melted and slumped down over them. The colors streaked and faded like the sandstone above, but this was something else—limestone, dissolved away and redeposited by millennia of water.

“We’re under a sea,” Bijou said suddenly, surprised. “A fossil sea. Limestone and sandstone.”

“Imagine,” said the prince. “This desert was water, once.”

The chime of Ambrosias’ zills halted abruptly. Bijou turned to track its jeweled gaze and saw something blunt-ended and swift coiling away among the twisted gardens of stone. Two bright spots in a light-banded black body caught the light of her torch before it vanished.

“Have a care,” she said. “I just saw an amphisbaena.” Then she realized that the guests might not have such things in their wet Northern lands. “A two-headed snake,” she explained. “Extremely poisonous.”

“And I,” announced Prince Salih, from further down the lakeshore, “just found Dr. Liebelos’s footprints. Or at least, the footprints of a woman with Northern boots, and not a ghul’s bare feet and claws.”

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