The Rising Stones (Ihale Book 1)

of stairs. She would get the siblings and drag them up there; no sense in wading through the muck twice. That decided, she turned back the way she had come, the bubble coming back to meet her, and the shadows moved strangely in the corner of her eye. She whipped back around, but the tunnel was just as empty as before.
It took a moment for her heart to stop pounding. Once it had she began trekking back to where she'd left Bel and Heln, trying to ignore the mud sucking at the bottom of her boots.
It didn't take long to get back to what counted as solid ground and she began scraping her boots uselessly against the moss. They were Trainee regulation and made to withstand a lot more than a little mud, but she'd kept them nice for so long.
"Stupid Bel," she muttered, dragging her foot and probably actually making the mud worse. "Stupid shortcut. Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots."
There was no way the two siblings could hear her from here but that didn't matter. She nearly fell over with how vehemently she moved her foot and saw what she had missed the first time she had gone down the tunnel. The muddier parts of the tunnel had been perforated with deep dents that dwarfed her own footprints.
When she looked closer she realized what they were. Tracks, large ones, spaced nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. It hadn't been visible in the round chamber because of the moss, but something clearly was living down there, something wide and low enough to the ground that it had disturbed the stream banks very recently.
She ran back to camp. She had gone a lot farther down the tunnel than she had thought. What kind of Guard was she? Bel and Heln were civilians and she shouldn't have left them, not even for a moment. Especially since she had seen no evidence of animal life in the tunnels despite all of the plant life. That had been one of the first things she learned — if the little things aren't there it's usually because something bigger was living off of them.
The room was exactly the same as she had left it and she felt relief burst like a balloon inside of her. Bel and Heln were still asleep when she charged into the barrier, nearly stepping on their faces.
"Get up." She hissed, loudly. "We have to go. Now."
"What happened to sleeping?" Bel opened one eye and glared at her. When she sat up she looked almost put together and Rhyss had to wonder if she had slept at all, because Heln's short red hair was standing on end when he sat up and blinked owlishly at her
"You slept. Let's go." Rhyss was glad she had packed her own satchel, swinging it over her shoulder and shoving Bel's belongings into her own, throwing it at her. She made a noise of protest but Rhyss didn't bother to see if she'd hit her, concentrating on Heln. "Do you sense anything?"
"The barrier script is sort of like… that cottony feeling you get with a cold." Heln was at least moving and gave a nudge to Bel, who was groaning piteously about how Rhyss had murdered her. Somehow Rhyss got her standing without too much fuss. "Why? Is something out there?"
"I don't know, but I really don't want to find out," Rhyss admitted. Ice was in her veins and it made her numb to anything but fear. "Leave the barrier up, just in case."
"Fine." Bel seemed to be taking things seriously enough. At the very least she didn't sound completely like a petulant child. "May I ask in case of what? More constructs?"
Heln shook his head. "No. There's nothing here that I can sense."
That didn't make Rhyss feel better, somehow. She drew her dagger, pressing her thumb against the script in the hilt and activating the magic in the blade before she stepped across the barrier line.
Heln crossed it last and nothing disastrous happened. "I still don't sense any of those things, before you ask."
"Fantastic." Bel smiled, but she must have seen something in her expression. "So… are we heading back or…?"
She barely heard the noise over Bel talking, but it was there, like the soft hiss of a breath. She shoved Bel backwards just as something dropped heavily from the ceiling right where they had been standing.
It was big, that was her first impression. Then it lifted its head, nearly lost in the darkness of the cave, and she realized that big didn't quite cover it. It looked like a massive black snake with a bird's beak. The pale plating over its head looked like a skull and large, white spines jutted out of the back in a thick row. Vin had always told her to look for the eyes and go for the soft tissue in the joints, especially when something had scales, but she didn't see either one at first. A moment of panic hit her, the thing was shaking its head and making the spines rattle like dead tree branches in the wind. It lunged at her and she saw the legs, small, but definitely there, the claws scoring the ground.
Rhyss dove out of the way, rolling into a crouch. The beak scraped a long, dark line in the moss. The head swiveled towards her again. This time, when its head snapped forward with frightening speed, she was ready and slashed at it with her knife.
It bounced harmlessly off of the creature with a spray of sparks and magic, startling it enough that it jerked away from her, knocking her onto the ground.
If she lived through this, she was going to shake Heln until his teeth rattled.
"Follow the stream!" There were no other options. The thing was blocking the only other exit; every time she tried to sidestep it weaved into her way even though she still hadn't figured out where its eyes were. If she had any luck at all the stairs