User Unfriendly by Vivian Vande Velde Page B

a big bump.
    "It looks like a burial mound," I said.
    Everyone glared in my direction.
    Disconcertingly near, a wolf howled.
    Wolstan nearly jumped out of his skin.
    Cornelius said something that sounded like "
Turgid hostage FORTRAN,
" and a little ball of light appeared in his cupped hand.
    "Ah! Tinkerbell!" I said.
    With a condescending smile, Cornelius motioned for me to take the lead, since it was still my turn.
    I took a deep breath and stepped into the darkness. Behind me, muffled by the stone walls, once again came the eerie cry of the wolf.
    Cornelius and his horse crowded in behind me. The light he held let us see about as far ahead as you might at night with a car's high-beam headlights, except it was a circle of light, not a beam, so we could see the sides and behind too.
    The cave dipped sharply downward and widened. Cornelius moved in next to me, and we started walking right away, leading our horses behind us to make room for the rest of the group. Above the clatter the horses' hooves made on the stone floor, I called back to Wolstan, "Who carved this out? Ores?" for the passage obviously hadn't been chipped out by nature.
    "Dwarfs," he answered. "Mining for copper. Some of the smaller tunnels interconnect, some are dead ends, some are filled with water. Once the dwarfs moved out, the orcsmoved in."
    It was a natural orc habitat: dark, damp, smelling of mildew and worms. They'd love the mazelike construction of the place, too, which would make it impossible ever to ferret them out.
    We passed countless offshoots, smaller tunnels that branched away into darkness. The main tunnel dipped, curved, climbed repeatedly. Sometimes it would open up into a huge cavern, though mostly the ceiling was too low for us to ride horseback. Once we skirted an underground pool. Its black surface reflected back Cornelius's light, showing nothing of what was underneath. Ripples gently lapped the stone basin, though there was no breeze. When we spoke, our voices echoed back in sinister whispers. Our road was smooth, constructed that way by dwarfs with wheelbarrows full of copper, or worn by the feet of countless travelers.
    And all the while we watched and listened, alert for ores.
    I was used to a game moving faster. "You have entered the Shadow Caves," a dungeon master might say. "After walking for two hours, you come to a door." Or, "Several furlongs later, you hear the rattle of loose pebbles from a corridor off to your right." Instead, I was in a constant state of expectancy, the surging of my own adrenaline wearing me out, the tense waiting dulling my warrior's edge. Already I knew that if orcsattacked
now,
I wouldn't be able to fight them off as well as I could have an hour ago. But the alternative was to give in to boredom, to deaden the instinct to strain my senses outward, to depend on the others to catch any telltale clue that we were being followed or were approaching danger.
    Something skittered in the tunnel behind us. We all whirled around, flashing swords, daggers, bows: ready to battle for our survival.
    It was only a red-eyed rat, its sharp claws clicking on the stone path before it disappeared into a crack in the wall.
    Cornelius released a breath. "How about we break for supper?" he suggested.
    I didn't point out that his timing was disgusting. Instead I said, "Sounds good to me." I stretched, trying to work the beginnings of stiffness from my muscles.
    Cornelius went to unload Phoenix, while Robin watched the rear. It was Thea's turn to be up front; and as for Mom, she just sat down where she was, looking exhausted.
    "How about you, Wolstan?" I asked. Nobody was talking to the poor guy. That was a situation I would have hated, but I was never good at small talk. "You hungry?"
    He shook his head. He had a way of always avoiding people's eyes. "My brothers and I, we'd just eaten. You know. Before."
    There I went, trying to be helpful, dragging up painful memories. I sniffed at an unpleasant odor. "Lucky," I told him.