“No.” the boy said. “I’ll go, too. It’s forbidden for any of us to go in without Satok’s say-so. Some who have disobeyed have never been heard from again. But if there’s any kind of proof in there that Satok’s not who he says he is, then my word will carry more weight than an outsider’s. I don’t think my folks would give up a second kid to that creep as easy as they let Luka go.”
“Will you be okay, Bunny?”
Dinah chose that moment to press her wet nose against Bunny’s ear and lick it.
“Yeah,” Bunny said slowly. “Maybe I could even go back in now that it wouldn’t take me so much by surprise.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Diego said, eyeing Bunny’s pale face and eyes staring wide with shock and grief. “Besides, somebody should stand guard. I wish we had a light, though
“Oh, there’s lamps in there,” Krisuk said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
Bunny heard their voices grow fainter as they penetrated farther into the cave. Her fingers folded Dinah’s fur and stroked her soft, pointed ears. Dinah whined and laid her head in Bunny’s lap. Bunny felt like whining herself.
The little lamp threw the boys’ shadows into grotesque skeleton dances around the smooth walls of the cave room. It was a large room, but it stopped abruptly about forty feet from the entrance. “Has it always been this small?” Diego asked.
“No. There was this accident, oh, a couple of days before Satok came. It was the first latchkay we’d had here since old McConachie died. People were goin’ back into the place like we’d always gone, when all of a sudden there was what sounded like an explosion, and showers of rock and dust came spewin’ out after us. We all ran, but the first few people, McConachie’s family, his apprentice, they were all killed. I remember my Da and the other men diggin’ for bodies. I was just a little kid then. I couldn’t understand where my friend Inny McConachie had gone. That was old Mac’s grandson, a good mate of mine.”
“That’s rough,” Diego said, feeling along the walls “I lost a friend not too long ago, too.”
“The woman in the song.?”
“Yeah. Wait a minute. What’s this?”
“What?”
Diego’s fingers dipped into a notch and a panel slid open; reaching out, his hands touched only empty space.
“How long did it take them to clean up the cave-in?”
“They didn’t. Nobody wanted to. When Satok came, he pretended to be real sympathetic and went in to look for bodies. He brought out a couple of pieces of clothing and insisted we all go back into the cave to give a proper memorial service. I don’t know why people went along with it. Guess everybody was kind of in shock. It’s got to be about the worst thing that ever happened here.”
“Not quite,” Diego muttered under his breath. “Bring the light over here.”
Krisuk did. The fumes from the mare’s-milk lamp stank, but the acrid odor was almost welcome in the sterility of the cave. As Krisuk raised the little lamp, it illuminated an area of clean stone floor and clean stone walls.
“There may’ve been a cave-in here,” Diego said with a snort, “but someone worked real hard to tidy it all away.”
“It can’t be!” Krisuk said. “The cave’s been blocked off for years. Nobody comes in here except with Satok. Everybody’s sort of afraid of the place.”
“That’s too bad,” Diego mumbled, the thought coming to him like a stray line of poetry. “It should be the other way around.”
“What?”
“Seems like the place had more reason to be afraid of the people”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I dunno. It just popped into my head.”
“Look, my people may be mistakenly following a sleaze bag but I still don’t like them being insulted by an outsider …”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean anything by it. Come on, let’s see the rest.”
“There’s more?” Krisuk held the light up head high, advanced a step inside the new opening, and emitted a low whistle. “There sure is.”
Even in the weak light of the lamp they could see that a good-sized tunnel had been cleared through the cave-in.