It was easy enough, at first, to tell which way he needed to go: down. There was still something about the flow of mana – it was too streamlined to be very near the source; closer to, it would have been more likely to spread and billow out, so to speak.

Which did mean that the times he took a wrong turn, he felt it before getting more than a minute or so away.

Farther down, he doubted he’d have that cue. The stone here had been worked, and inlaid with spell-forms, to channel mana to the surface, rather than letting it go straight through the rock where it might spread out prematurely; with this much power, though, it would come to a point where those spell-forms weren’t enough to contain it entirely.

Unless the spell-forms got a great deal stronger – which might not be worth the effort – the whole area around the font would be washed out. And mage-sight would be essentially useless. It was hardly much good to him even now.

He took no chances; he walked in the shadows now. He had to assume that the others knew about it – after all, Liri had.

The thought made his gut wrench. If he had to fight her…

The less he needed to fight any of his companions, the better. Even if they knew he could copy a Nightkin, they still wouldn’t be able to see him. So long as the corridor remained clear, he should be all right.

Except that they could still move faster than him – and not just the Vhark; there were still some others moving through the tunnels. More than once he had to duck into a side passage or flatten against a wall as a group went through. He had to creep, to avoid making noise, not knowing where someone might be lying in wait; they could move at a dead run.

He made progress, and went for a while without coming any closer to being spotted, but it couldn’t last – and it didn’t.

The grinding rumble of stone on stone was not only audible, it was a palpable force; in fact, it came up through his toes more than it did into his ears. The mechanism seemed to be much like any other mana font the Vhark had; magma heated water in a sealed vessel, boiled it into steam, and that steam forced the paddles of a turbine to move in its bid for freedom, before a small portion of the magic that the font gathered was used to chill the steam.

In cities, though, what couldn’t be reclaimed of the steam was channelled to the surface in its own chimney. Here, it evidently was allowed to pass into a portion of the cave system – one which presumably opened to the surface via a vent or sinkhole of some kind, but ambled for quite some distance before doing so. A number of galleries billowed with moisture, the air hot, muggy, and almost opaque.

This section didn’t seem much used, probably for that reason, but his gut told him it was a more direct route. Portions of it were too sheer to cross quickly; sometimes, one chamber broke into the next some twenty feet or more above the floor. Bits of rubble from the initial attempts to dig through had been left strewn all over, and more had been dumped in from here and there.

It made the footing treacherous, and the whirling clouds of fog largely defeated invisibility for those who knew what to watch for. He let his concentration lapse, instead focusing it on the very mundane matter of watching his step.

So intent was he on that, that in spite of telling himself he’d be seen, he almost missed the telltale swirl of fog himself.

It was at the far side of the chamber – the steam divided and flowed together around an obstruction his eyes didn’t see. He lurched back, into the corridor he’d just left, and pressed against the wall, inching along it.

It had to be a Nightkin – probably Srin, unless their nameless opponent had drawn more than the one Vhark to his banner, which was a possibility he forced himself to consider. Even if he slipped away from one, there might be more. The slip in his vigilance could have killed him; he’d been lucky to catch himself before getting any farther.

Pebbles clacked together, just past the cavern mouth.

He’d definitely been seen; his pursuer had been intent enough on him to miss a step – and probably realized that total stealth wasn’t an option anymore.

Mulin slid into the next chamber and surveyed the exits. One was high up on the wall, quickly rounding a corner; the other was farther away, on the same level.

He ducked down, coiled himself, and leapt, claws scrabbling at the stone. He pulled himself up, enough to catch sight of a few loose rocks.

And in a quick moment of focus, he gave the rocks a firm nudge toward the lip, slid into the shadows again – and dropped, coiling up as he landed, the noise of it largely obscured by the clatter of tumbling rock.

He crawled on all fours toward the farther exit, keeping himself below the level of the steam, wings spread slightly to the sides so as not to jut above his shoulders. This could go very badly indeed…

But it didn’t. Claws tapped on stone, ascending; he risked a glance and saw a vague shape disappear into the higher passage.

He couldn’t gamble on that working for long; he picked himself up, shifted his grip on the crysknife, and tiptoed across the rubble-strewn floor as quickly as he dared.

Voices drifted after him. Echoes and distortions made them impossible to recognize for certain, much less decipher, but he did catch snippets of Vhark words.

Either someone had been following him, or the one hunting him here had somehow communicated sighting him, and summoned help.

His heart was hammering so hard, he was almost surprised the sound of it didn’t give him away. The next several minutes were full of close escapes – once, he was actually clinging to the side of a stalactite when Vhish and Srin went under it, their eyes too low to find him.

Too close. Too close by far. He had yet to find the way through; every time he thought he was getting close, searchers forced him to change course. They could keep him trapped here until fatigue made him sloppy – and he didn’t have the benefit of a full night’s sleep, at that. Enough hours had passed that some of them might well have done so, even without considering anyone outside of their group that might have been involved in the search.

He pressed his cheek against the warm stone and let out a breath. He needed a plan, and he needed it fast. He couldn’t cling to this rock forever – and if he did, anyone approaching it from the same side would probably notice him before they passed under it.

Sneaking by wasn’t the answer. Heat or cold wouldn’t help him. Anything he did to manipulate the air would only make him more noticeable.

But what about the rock?

He lowered his handhold, clambering down until he could almost reach around the taper of stone; he stretched out as much as he could and from there dropped to the cavern floor, with only a momentary wobble on his feet.

He crept on, toward what had to be the other end of this foggy gallery, the source of the steam.

He was partly vindicated when, peeking around a corner, he saw a pair of Sachi flanking the tunnel from which the fog billowed, and glimpsed worked stone beyond them. They held spears crossed over the tunnel mouth, though, and they were carefully watching the space around them, shifting their spears often enough to make slipping past them out of the question.

They also might have just seen him. They were too disciplined to leave their posts as he ducked back around the corner and into the nearest chamber on the same side of the passage. It was small, and looked like it had been intended to be a storage room of sorts before work on smoothing this section had stopped. It also had only one entrance.

With the Sachi guards on one end, and the searchers closing from the other, he didn’t have very many places to go. The guards could be patient; so long as they kept him from slipping by them, he was trapped.

Unless…

He hefted the crysknife in his grip, turned it around, and passed it to his right hand; not ideal, but it would give his left a bit of a chance to rest.

Shadow-stepping covered one’s possessions in its illusion. The reason the Stonekin were known more for making their hides tough was that their other gift didn’t work on anything carried, not even clothing.

But the crysknife was a thing of stone itself, and carefully crafted to channel magic, to be in tune with it.

He pressed his back against the stone, right hand splaying against it. Though he kept his eyes on the tunnel, watching for any glimmer of light that would mean an approaching searcher, he turned his thoughts behind him, to the flow of stone, the veins and irregularities that had resisted being hollowed out by the events that had made the caves in the first place.

The stone had been worked since then, but it wasn’t masonry, which would render this impossible. It was still one piece.

He was dimly aware of a crawling sensation on his hide. If there had been enough light to see it, he knew what he would see: grey skin, now thick, rough, pebbly.

Very carefully, he focused the feeling of stone in his left arm, in his curled fingers, in the spike of crystal that was, as far as anything magical was concerned, nearly an extension of his being. He held the knife with his thumb toward the pommel, and he lowered his arm, bringing point toward the rock, expecting any moment a clink that would risk giving him away.

It never came. The stone sank into the wall as it might into cold butter.

The shift in his perception was dizzying. He could feel that the stone was not thick, that there was a smooth, flat wall directly behind him, near enough that were the air and the stone reversed, he would not be able to spread his wings across the gap. But that was the tiniest part of it. The stone existed on a scale that was hard to comprehend; miles of it stretched all around, veins twisting amongst one another, interrupted by voids of air.

He couldn’t make very much sense of the layout of the caverns. But he did know he’d come closer than he’d dared hope. The steam vent must have been made near the magma flow – because he did feel a place where the stone had been shaped near the magma, and it was close.

All he had to do was get closer.

Voices were approaching, but that didn’t matter; let them search these foggy caves all they wished. He didn’t intend to be there to care.

He stepped backward, and he drifted through the stone.