Chapter 359 - Aioa part 7

The cave was narrow and winding, like the warren of a burrowing animal. The walls were composed of slick blue ice and the patter of dripping water sounded constantly through the labyrinth. The air was just a degree or two above freezing and smelled of the hot springs my people used to bathe in when I was a mortal man. I could feel it flowing through the cavern like the breath of a living creature, as if the glacier itself was gently respiring.

"Do you think it is safe in here?" Eris asked, eyeing the ceiling of the cavern nervously. "What if the cave collapses on top of us?"

"I think it's safe enough," Rayna said. "So long as we tread lightly."

I felt that I should reassure them, but in all honesty I was probably more anxious than everyone else. I had once thrown myself into a glacial crevasse. This was several thousands years ago, when encroaching glaciers had forced my people from our ancestral lands and I went a little mad from loneliness and despair. The crevasse had collapsed upon me, crushing me flat. I had meant to destroy myself, but the glacier had merely enveloped me, preserving my insensate form for the next seven thousand years until the most recent interglacial thaw freed me from my icy tomb. The interior of this ice cavern was much too similar for comfort. Any moment I expected the roof to collapse down upon us, and how long would it take for this massive ice sheet to melt? A thousand years? A million? Never perhaps, and then we would all lie frozen in the belly of this great beast forever, like insects trapped in amber. I could barely force my feet to carry me onwards, though the restoration of my true body was nearly at hand. It took all of my courage to shuffle forward one step at a time.

"This way," Aioa said when the passage branched out, and led us to the right. A little further on we went right again, and then curved around to the left. With each turn the light from the surface fell away so that we quickly found ourselves marching through near absolute darkness. Fortunately our vampire eyes are adapted for darkness, so we had little difficulty navigating the ice cavern without torches.

"It's here," Aioa said, "just a little further on. I can feel it getting closer."

We proceeded through the darkness, a warm wet respiring darkness that hummed like the inside of a conch shell. It was a desolate sound, that humming, punctuated only by the splashing of our movements. That and the incessant twittering of the old man.

The floor pitched down at a precipitous angle and it was all we could do to maintain our footing on the slippery slope. Several times the shaft widened into a larger chamber and we had to wend our way through fang-like stalagmites. Chaumas had to be encouraged through those hollows for the ice formations confused his echolocation.

I did not like them either.

If those glistening spikes should happen to break loose…!

Each time we came to one of those larger cavities, I swallowed my fear and made my way through the dripping chamber as circumspectly as possible, even as Sunni and the others coaxed the old man forward. The blind old blood drinker was much more of a hindrance than a help… except once.

I do not know how far beneath the surface we were by then. It was certainly deep. It was utterly lightless, and I could feel the weight of all that ice suspended over our heads as if it were the hammer of some cosmic being, ready to crash down thunderously upon us. It was difficult to see, even with my vampire eyes, and I was proceeding through a narrow section of the shaft mostly by feel. Aioa was ahead of me, the rest of our group behind. I could tell that the cave had opened up ahead, that we were approaching another of those hollow chambers. It was mostly the tone of the constant humming sound that filled the cavern. It had dropped to a lower, deeper octave. In fact, the nearby cavity sounded as if it were vast, the largest chamber we had encountered so far.

Suddenly, Chaumas shouted: "Stop!"

We all froze, so startled were we by his cry. A moment later, the old man pressed by me. He stopped a few steps ahead, just to the left of Aioa, and emitted a series of piercing whistles. "No ground," he said. "No ground ahead. We all fall down. Hee hee!"

I pulled Aioa back, positioning her behind me, then lowered myself to my hands and knees and shuffled forward past Chaumas.

"You fall," the old man said warningly.

A few steps past the old man, I felt an eddy of warm air moving upwards past my face, one that smelled of dissolved minerals, and then my left hand slid out over empty space. I lurched forward for an instant before I caught myself, my heart leaping up into my throat, and then spent the next few minutes carefully exploring the margin of the drop-off. I could tell there was a deep chasm in our path. Its ledge spanned from one side of the passage to the other. It was too dark to see how wide or deep the crevasse was, or whether the cavern continued on the far side of it, but I could sense the open space as a sort of thrumming in my ears.

Far below: the hiss and gurgle of escaping gases. So this is where the hot air came from. How many eons had it taken for those warm gases to carve such a large and intricate network of tunnels? I cannot say, but I was kneeling at its wellspring, and again I was reminded with a throttling sense of nostalgia of the hot springs my people had bathed in when I was a mortal man. Bubbling Waters, we called it. Strange how smells can evoke such powerful emotions!

"What is it? What are you doing?" the others questioned me. "What has happened?"

"It is a crevasse," I answered. "Directly in our path. It is too dark to see how deep it is, or what is on the other side of it. We need a torch."

Chaumas was fumbling at the back of my head, tugging at my hair. I batted his hand away. "Follow this one!" Chaumas insisted. "I see it! I see without eyes!"

"There is a way across?"

The old man nodded, laughing merrily at my question. I couldn't see him nodding, just sensed it.

"There is a way across," he said. "But narrow. I go first. Show you. Then you follow."

Before I could object, the old man leapt. Too slow, I reached out to catch him back, and waited to hear his plummeting cry. Crazy old man! Any second I expected to hear his body strike the bottom of the chasm with a thud. Instead, I heard him land lightly just a short distance away. Maybe the length of two grown men. I heard laughter, and the rustle of his movement. And then he slapped the palm of his hand on a moist flat surface. "Bridge," he crooned. "But you must jump over! Hee hee!"

"I cannot see it," I said, opening my eyes as wide as possible. Even vampires cannot see in utter darkness. There must be some light, no matter how faint. A single candle. A flickering star.

"Listen," the old man said, and he slapped his palm against the ice bridge again.

I closed my eyes then and tried to see as he saw the world, with my ears rather than my eyes. I listened to the echoes in the humming chamber, how they bounced against the walls, and the subtle differences in the time it took the sounds to travel back and forth. I realized the old man was patting his hands around the edges of the ice bridge, defining its dimensions, trying to draw a picture of it in my mind with the sounds. Slowly I was getting a sense of the shape of the room, the walls and the ice bridge and several overhanging ledges.

"Yes, keep going," I said, and then to the others, who were whispering behind me in nervous confusion: "Quiet!"

"You see?" Chaumas said, slapping the edge of the ice bridge.

"Yes," I said, and before I could second-guess myself, I leapt.

I landed just where I intended. The ice bridge was actually wider than I expected, about four feet across, though its edges were treacherously uneven, narrower in some places, wider in others. I crossed to the far side of the chamber on my hands and knees while Chaumas sauntered in front of me, whistling and chortling quietly to himself.

The cave system continued at the end of it, a shaft plunging into the wall. I thought perhaps there was a bit of light up there as well, though it was so faint I was not sure if it was real or simply my imagination.

"Wait here," I said to the old man, and then I turned around and crawled back to the end of the ice bridge. Billows of steam, smelling strongly of salts and sulfur compounds, swirled around my body like ghostly trailing fingers.

"Grandfather?" Aioa called.

"There is a way across," I said. "A bridge twice the width of a man's shoulders. If you listen to the patting of my hands you will know where to leap. Just take your time, listen, and do not jump too high or too far. It is no lower than the floor of the shaft you are standing on. I will catch you and help you across, but try not to collide with me. You'll knock us both off."

Such a fall could not kill us, of course. It probably wouldn't even injure us to any significant degree, not even Aioa, who was perhaps the most vulnerable of our group. But it would take time to climb out of the pit. There would be confusion.

I patted the bridge as Chaumas had done. Aioa leapt. She landed precisely where I had indicated but her booted feet slipped on the slick surface of the conduit and she went skidding over the side. She let out a surprised squawk. I snatched at her body as she fell past me and managed to snag ahold of her tunic. Her momentum very nearly pulled me off behind her but I grabbed onto the ledge on the opposite side of the bridge and managed to hang on.

"Easy," I said as I hauled her back up. "Get on your hands and knees. Once you've recovered your bearings, we'll crawl to the end and I'll go back for the others."

"Yes, grandfather," she said shakily. "Thank you."

It was in that manner that the rest of our group, one by one, crossed the dark chasm.

Together we started up the shaft on the other side. The tunnels here were not so winding, and we noted that we were moving upwards rather than descending. And there was definitely some source of light ahead. I was not sure previously if I had imagined it or not, but it was real. The light grew steadily stronger as we ascended until at last it was so bright we were certain we were about to breach the surface of the ice sheet. I thought perhaps we had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the darkness and were coming out the far side of the cave system, but Aioa assured me we had not.

"It is very close now," she said. But she frowned as she said it as if she were uncertain. Maybe she had led us wrong. She looked back over her shoulder, eyes narrowed, then set her chin determinedly. "No, we haven't gone the wrong way," she said. "Follow me."

We passed through a large, kidney shaped cavity, crossed one last short and narrow passage and stepped into a vast and brilliantly illumined chamber.

It was easily three or four hundred meters across, somewhat round and had a high domed ceiling. There were several openings in the roof of the chamber. That was where the sun found ingress. The light lanced down in blinding shafts, glaring on the snow and frost and winking brilliantly off the denser, blue tinted ice. All around the perimeter of the pit were shelves of ice at various heights, and the floor of the chamber, while broad, was broken into sections by a series of zigzagging cracks so that to cross the chamber one must skip from one jagged platform to the next. The fissures were narrow but very deep, and all throughout the cave were heaps of broken ice, like mountain rubble, where great chunks of the wall and roof had collapsed.

I blinked in the sudden glaring light, trying to clear my vision. Cold blood tears dripped down my cheeks.

"There it is!" Aioa exclaimed. "Grandfather! On the far side of the cavern!"