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The grotesque figure canarled, it did not have skin as humans had skin, nor was it scaled like the lizards and snakes that crawl along the ground Its skin glittered the way granite did when caught in sunlight; leprous growths more like crystalline rocks or salt cones than a scabrous disease encrusted that skin The pale bulges that seemed to be its eyes clouded and cleared as if narled, it wore an assort softly as the spherical lamp swayed back and forth at the end of its chain

She found her voice "We have come from my sister, known to me as Horn" She extended her arait back into the tunnel

"So much unknown to ht receded, they followed down this smoothly surfaced tunnel road Adica had never seen a path so straight and so easy The creature leading the tie bordered by a railing that brought the in her life or experience, not even that one sight she had had years before of the great city built by the Cursed Ones, had prepared her for the vista that opened before her now The skrolin lived not in dank and dark caves in the ground but in a city so vast and coardens built by the Cursed Ones look like crude naw aup the very heart of the cheese as they nibbled outward, so the skrolin had fashioned their city into and out of the rock itself, that ered a series of bu open to reveal a stairway carved into the cliff Down these steps they descended into a labyrinth of pillars and archways clothed in jewels Caverns spun one off the next as though an ancient hand had woven thread into stone No surface was unpolished, and sowall that she thought it uide kept a hand in contact with these surfaces, its fingers rubbing and tapping in a complicated code

They did not walk far before their guide steered theiant shell scoured clean and fitted out with pearlescent benches It took all three of thes, and they clah side with unexpected grace to take its place at the steht up off the ground Laoina yelped in surprise Alain gasped out loud as he steadied his Adica bit her lip rather than uide to think that she, a holy woic

But she was: stunned and even terrified as they floated through the cavernous city It seeths of dark tunnel that opened at intervals into caverns born out of a thousand prickling lights or streaked with veins of gold and copper This was mystery and power displayed on a scale so vast she could not coht the Cursed Ones powerful? They were as children, couide’s eyes--if they were eyes--remained turned away from them Even their awe did not interest it Yet Adica did not feel unwatched The many adornold that flashed and winked when any light diffused over theic hoarded within the A few of the skrolin they passed halted to regard theht a curiosity, butany utted fish, wove baskets, built pots, or chipped obsidian into tools She saw nothing rese as they wrought sorcery into copper and tin She saw no fields, nor flocks, but when they came at last to a vast river whose banks were chiseled out of the rock itself, she saw a thing she could finally recognize, built on such a vast scale that it took her breath away

"Truly," Laoinaher hand until her knuckles whitened, "there is more to this world than I ever dreamed"

Adica knew a e was the reat festivals, three tier for days or even weeks at the Festival of the Sun as people gained time free from their fields and flocks to trade One time, when Adica had been a child, the Horse people had coons had e a vast fair unlike any other she had seen, exotic and colorful, and folk had lingered there long past the usual seven days of , but soon afterward the first of the raids made by the Cursed Ones had coain Adica had also seen the lively market of Shu-Sha’s city before it was burned by the Cursed Ones, and she had seen, froreat slave ht human slaves