Actually, it was a faster way to go, but the map showed that the cave opened to a thousand span cliff with a hundred spans separating it from the other side.  That ravine was in the base of a valley that connected to one that was along his chosen route.  He pondered that for a moment.  He'd have to use magic to get them across the ravine, a calculated risk, but the day or so of being underground and the sudden change of position would make it hard for the Demons to find him if indeed that one did manage to send word of their positions back to the others.
	And it would cut two days off their trip through the mountains.
	Tarrin checked the book.  They had thirty-thirty-six days left before Gods' Day.  He estimated that it would take them ten to twelve days to cross the mountains, and the seven to nine days he'd given to get to the mountains actually only took five.  He'd have to stop to find a way to keep the Demons from finding them, which may take a few days...perhaps doing that up in that cave would kill two problems with one arrow.  They'd be out of sight, away from the Demons, and if he did find a way to hide them from the Demons, it would keep them out of their hair the rest of the way across.  He did not want to have to duck behind a rock every time he thought he saw a shadow in the sky.  If he had to do that, they'd be slowed to a crawl in a place where being in the wrong place at the right time could strand them until spring.
	As if to reinforce that, snow began to fall on them, dropping flakes on his book of charts, causing him to quickly sweep them off with a muttered curse and put the book safely away.
	That cave seemed to be the best option.  It would be a grueling path--he'd explored a few caves back home, and they involved a great deal of climbing up and down--but the gain they'd make by taking that route and the safety that it would offer to them would more than make up for the arduous nature of the journey through it.
	Tarrin crept up to the edge of the wood carefully and knelt in the snow beside Jesmind, who was looking up into the sky carefully.  "Anything?" he whispered.
	"Nothing yet," she answered.  "What was that thing?"
	"They're called vrocks," he answered.  "We're lucky we killed it so fast.  They're usually very nasty."
	"Just about any Demon is very nasty, love," she grinned.  "At least we know these magical claws you gave me work on them.  They went into its back easier than a pole through water."
	"Sorry if I scared you, but I have experience fighting these things," he told her.  "They've got powerful magic, but they're also very smart and most of them are seasoned fighters.   You have to attack them unconventionally, because they'll expect just about everything else."
	"Just warn me next time!" she huffed.  "I nearly had a heart attack when it went by you!  I thought it cut you in half!"
	"I did what I had to do to kill it and kill it quickly," he told her.  "You don't get easy kills against Demons most of the time.  Even without their magic, they're very formidable."
	"They didn't seem so formidable on the grounds," she scoffed.  "From what I heard, the humans and Wikuni had their way with them."
	"They were dealing with some of the best fighters in the world, Jesmind, and they were heavily outnumbered," he said bluntly.  "Once their magic and their invulnerability was taken away from them, they found themselves in a serious bind because they were facing humans and Wikuni that were just as formidable as they were, and facing a lot of them.  The humans and Wikuni there were crack veterans, and the only Demons that could really fight back were the cambisi.  And they killed nearly three times their number before they went down," he reminded her.  "And if it hadn't have been for the Legions, they would have lost alot more," he added.  "They're experts in large formation fighting, and they served as an anchor for everyone else."
	"I'll take your word for it," she said in a low tone.  "How long do we wait?"
	"We'll be here until dark," he told her.  "The map shows that there's a cave not far from here that leads under one of the mountains and lets out on the other side.  It'll save us some time if we take it, and we'll be alot harder to find if we use it.  We're going to pause there a while so I can figure out some way to keep the Demons from finding us, then we'll be on our way again."
	"I don't think I'm going to argue about that," she nodded.  "If we have to crawl through the snow the whole way, we'll get to the other side sometime next year."
	"A little time invested now is going to save us a whole lot later," he affirmed.
	They retreated into the grove, and spent the rest of the day fearfully scanning the skies as the snow piled up around them.  The dark clouds dumped nearly two spans of snow on the ground as they waited for dark, and the storm seemed to intensify as the day went on, the winds becoming stronger, the air colder, and the snow heavier as sunset approached.  By the time the dark clouds above did start dimming with the setting sun, they were in the teeth of a full-blown blizzard, with howling winds that bent the trees and driving snow that reduced the visibility to almost nothing.
	"How are we going to find our way in this?" Jesmind demanded as they ventured out to the edge of the grove as the light around them became very murky.
	Tarrin took hold of his amulet and chanted one of the spells that Camara Tal had taught him, a priest spell that would lock in on a certain location and guide him to it unerringly.  He felt that strange surge of power rush through the Weave and into him, then release through him into the real world.  Immediately, he knew that the cave entrance was seven longspans away, a thousand spans higher than his current position, and it was almost due east of them.  The spell also showed him the easiest way to get there, telling him that he would have to go northeast around a peak and approach the cave entrance from the north.
	"I can find it now," he told her. "Come on, let's get there before we're buried."
	The going was very difficult.  The snow was deep, and the wind caused deep drifts to form.  He could barely see five spans in front of him, and he often had to plow through the snow to give his shorter mate a path to follow.  The fierce wind was like a knife cutting into them, so cold that even he could feel it, and he paused to Conjure heavy fur coats for them to wear, tying them tightly at the waist to keep the wind from tearing them off of their backs.  The coats got the wind off of them, but its force made them exert their inhuman strength to keep from being blown off course by it as Tarrin led them around the peak and towards the mouth of the cave.  The wind was an ally to him, however, and he knew it.  The stiff wind would even keep a Demon from flying, keeping the skies clear of them while they made their dash to the safety of the cave.
	That seven direct longspans of distance turned out to be nearly fifteen lonspans of travel, and it was such slow going that it took them most of the night.  The cold was getting to Jesmind, and she staggered along behind him, her teeth chattering as her effort was exhausting her regenerative ability.  They stopped frequently to rest behind anything that served as shelter from the wind, but things improved greatly when they finally got around the peak, and the peaks mass served as a partial break to the wind.  It still swirled and howled around them, but it was a wind that had been forced to turn up the small box-end valley in which the cave mouth was located, so it didn't have half of the raging force that it had had in the main valley.  Once they reached the box canyon, they moved with more speed and confidence, and though the snow was even deeper, coming up to Tarrin's waist in some places, he had little trouble bulling a path through it in which his mate could follow.
	Just before sunrise, as the main force of the savage snowstorm seemed to be abating, they finally reached the cave mouth...at least horizontally.  The cave mouth was set thirty spans up a sheer rock face, a hole in the red rock wall of the mountainside, and it was a small hole.  In a way, it reminded him of the hole that Sarraya had made for him in the side of the Cloud Spire, the hole that let him get into the lava tube that led up to the top and into the city.  This one was considerably larger than that one, but it was still going to be quite an acrobatic display of flexibility to climb up there and squeeze in while hanging thirty spans off the ground.
	"That's it?" Jesmind demanded as she pulled down the hood of the fur coat he'd Conjured.  "I'm going to lose all my clothes and half my fur trying to get in that!"
	"It's bigger than it looks," he told her as he pulled off his coat and handed it to her.  "We'll have to take off the coats and throw them in in front of us, but we should make it."  He put his claws in the stone and started up.  "I'll go first.  Let me get in, then come up.  Make sure you take your coat off first and throw them in to me when you get there."
	"Why not leave them here?" she asked.  "We won't need them in the caves."
	"Because I don't want to leave anything behind they can use to find us," he said calmly as he scrabbled  up the icy stone.
	The opening truly was bigger than it looked, and to his delight, it immediately opened into a rather large irregular chamber whose ceiling was populated by quite a few hibernating bats.  The interior was murky, even to his eyes, as the minimal light that got through the clouds above only had one small hole to filter into the chamber.  Tarrin wriggled in quite easily and dropped down to the floor of the chamber, layered rather unpleasantly with bat droppings that felt were disgustingly squishy under his feet.  He waited under the opening until the two coats flew into the chamber, him catching them before they fell into that unpleasant mess on the floor, and Jesmind slithered in effortlessly head first and dropped down to the floor.
	"Ewwww!" she complained, picking up a foot and putting it back down.  "Tell me that I'm not standing in what I think I'm standing in!"
	Tarrin pointed up, and Jesmind followed his eyes.  Then she glowered at the eerie carpet of brown furry bats coating the ceiling.  "I don't think I'm ever going to groom my feet again!" she said with a queasy look.
	"Then they'll be crusty and smelly," he said absently, reaching within, through the Cat, and touching his Druidic power.  A small ball of faint glowing light appeared over his outstretched paw, and he held it up and surveyed the room.  "There's the opening that leads down into the mountain," he said, pointing at a small, roughly triangular opening on the far side of the chamber, which was only about two spans high.
	"It's pretty narrow in there," she frowned, bending down and looking across the chamber.  "I hope we don't have to crawl the whole way."
	"Have you ever explored a cave?"
	"Not really, why?"
	"Because we just might have to crawl the whole way," he said.  "Cave tunnels can be any size or shape."
	"You're making this trip better and better," she said acidly as she padded over towards the opening.  "First you freeze my tail off, now you want me to be an earthworm."
	"Hold on, we have to deal with the light situation," he called.
	"Why not use that?"
	"Because I have to work to keep it going," he said.  "I have a better idea."
	His idea was two little balls of light that were created by Sorcery, not Druidic magic.  He wove the very simple spells, some of the very first spells that Initiates learned, and set them in a way so that they couldn't unravel when he stopped concentrating on them.  The flows would pull against each other in a delicate knot of sorts, and that would keep the spells going for quite a while after he stopped maintaining them.  Since they were such simple spells, he figured that they would last for six or seven hours before the flows of Fire and Air finally worked themselves free of one another and disrupted the spell.  It was the trick that the Sha'Kar had taught him, a trick that he'd been very hard on himself for not figuring out on his own.  Tarrin cleverly set one over each of their heads, hovering just over and between the tips of their ears, so its light didn't shine right in their eyes, and they would also serve a vital purpose in warning them when their heads were getting too close to the ceiling.  The lights would go up into the ceiling and wink out when they were very close to it, and the sudden darkness was a warning they were about to bang their heads.
	"Cute," Jesmind said, trying to look up to see the ball of light, which only dipped back with her head as she moved it.  It would stay firmly where it was set in relation to her body, just over and between her two white-furred ears, illuminating everything around her without a part of her body getting in its way.  It did create two dim spots to each side of her head, shadows from her ears, but the ball of light was so close to them that it diffused light into those shadows well before it reached the walls.  The white fur of her ears served to reflect the light as well, much better than his black ones, which made the area of light surrounding Jesmind much brighter than the one surrounding him.
	"Now that we have that fixed," he said, rolling the fur coat into a bundle and tying it onto his back, a possible cushion should he rise up and into a ceiling, "let's go find a clean place to rest a while, then we'll set out."
	They moved just beyond the constricting tunnel and found something suitable.  It was a slightly wider section of tunnel that was straight and with a rather flat floor, but still with a ceiling only about four spans off the floor.  They spread the fur coats on the hard stone and rested for a short time, then started out.
	The passage through the caves was much warmer than travelling the mountains above, but that lack of cold was countered by the sheer effort of travelling like that.  True to his observation about caves, the tunnel they followed was almost whimsical in its dimensions.  Sometimes it would be dozens of spans wide and high, almost like chambers, sometimes it was so narrow and small they would have had to literally wriggle through bending zig-zags on their bellies had they not had the advantage of being able to shapeshift into a much smaller form.  In fact, in no less than four places they encountered that first morning, they were forced to shift into cat form to wriggle through tiny holes, which would have stopped any other spelunker that hadn't brought a pick and a shovel with him.  The floor was rarely even, with shelves or fissures in it, higher on one side of the passage than the other, making footing a serious business for both of them.  They occasionally had to climb up or down sheer rock faces, cliffs underground, vertical shafts that sometimes twisted and turned like the deranged machinations of some insane Wikuni plumber's most feverish fantasies.  Tarrin could swear that one particular strange loop in the tunnel was almost like a thread inside the stone of the mountain tying itself into a knot.  It went up, then down, then up, then down, and slid from side to side as it did so, giving it the illusion that it turned back on itself, like the floor of the passage actually rested right on the other side of the ceiling over their heads.  Though the tunnel rose and fell in turns, the down parts were longer than the up, and Tarrin realized that they were descending deeper and deeper into the mountain's core.  Stalagtites and stalagmites were everywhere, posing a very real hazard to their heads, and the caves were surprisingly wet, with water dripping from the ceilings or oozing from the walls.  There were patches of actual mud in some places, and there was part of the tunnel where they were forced to swim along a narrow channel, a flooded part of the passage.  It was a swim through water as cold as ice, and left both of them soggy and with chattering teeth when they got to the dry tunnel on the other side of the fifty spans of submerged passage.
	"T-This was a b-b-bloody b-b-bad id-d-d-dea," Jesmind said, her teeth clicking as she hugged her arms to her sides.
	"That wasn't very pleasant," he agreed with a shiver, then he used Sorcery to strip the water off of them, then warmed them with a gentle weave of Fire and Air, warming the air around them.  "But at least we didn't have to go totally under the water."
	"Oh, that's a relief," she snapped shortly, then she sighed as the warmth of his spell started seeping into her cold skin.  "You're a handy fellow to have around," she smiled as she closed her eyes and enjoyed the warmth.
	"Thank you.  Someday I aspire to be more than your slave."
	"Don't count on it," she winked.
	Though the effort was exhausting, neither of them wanted to stop.  They both seemed not willing to stop until they got so deeply into the mountain that neither the Demons nor the blizzard could find any way to reach them.  They continued on, steadily descending deeper and deeper, and Tarrin noticed that the properties of the tunnel were changing.  The narrow areas were becoming further and further apart, and the tunnel grew noticably wider and the grade of the passage less severe as they got deeper inside the mountain.  Almost like the caves in the heart of the mountain were older, and had more time for the water to dissolve away the rock and make them bigger.  That made the going much easier and faster, almost like they were walking through a carved passage than a natural tunnel.
	It was about then that he noticed the peculiarities of a deep underground passage.  It was pitch black, which was normal for such a place, but the air and the rock almost seemed to swallow the light.  The little dim lights he made only illuminated a very small area around them, but their night-sighted eyes let them penetrate deeply into the gloom beyond that light, but even that wasn't a tremendous distance.  Tarrin found the idea of having the range of his vision impaired extremely irritating, and not a little unsettling.  He was a creature heavily grounded in his senses, and a limitation on one of those senses made him jumpy and nervous.  The air, though fresh, still had a strange stagnant quality to it.  It did move and it was fresh, but it moved in and out of caves that all had the same musty smell, making the air heavy with dull scents that were hard to make out, since the same scents had been drifting around down here for years.  Smells of rock and dust and dirt, and also strange plant-like smells like mold, lichen, and fungus.  Rare, strange plants that could survive in a world without light.  And sound was very curious.  They moved quietly, as was only their habit, but ever whisper of sound they made echoed and re-echoed up and down the passage, and the sound of dripping water carried down the passages for longspans.  A loud noise would carry for a long way and echo for a long time, and if there was anything down there with them, it wouldn't take it long to find them if they made alot of noise.  The sound was trapped, bouncing endlessly off the walls, and he realized that a sound could linger down here in these tunnels for days after the maker of the sound was long gone.  Since there was no light, he figured that anything that lived down here that was carnivorous hunted by sound.  That was another good reason to be as quiet as possible, though the simple fact that every sound they made lingered around them so long it made both of them unsettled was reason enough.
	They travelled for quite a while, and Tarrin realized that being under the ground was going to make it hard for him to track time.  He was never very good at keeping time, because of the nature of the Cat, and being robbed of the stars and moons and sun to serve as reference points, he would quickly lose count of the days.  And knowing how many days he had to go was very important.  When he thought that it was pretty close to sunset, he pulled up when they entered a huge chamber that had the sound of running water in it, like a bubbling brook, though wherever the water was, it was beyond the illumating range of the little balls of light.  "We should camp a while," he told her lowly, looking at the cave that he could see.  It was a large chamber, with an irregular dome-like roof that was about thirty spans off the floor, the chamber roughly circular in shape.  The water turned out to be a small underground river that flowed from north to south through the chamber, with their passage extending on towards the northeast, a decline hiding the passage and letting them see nothing but its ceiling almost as soon as it left the chamber.
	"This is as good a place as any," she said in a quiet tone, almost a whisper.  "At least we have water."
	He had no idea how long they stayed there, because he couldn't easily tell time down in the cave.  He Conjured wood for a fire and a roasted goose off some hapless inn's serving table, and then both of them immediately went to sleep.  They were both very tired, and though he'd been a bit worried about not posting a guard, he realized that there really wasn't anything down there that could hurt them.  He did raise a Ward that kept out everything but air before he went to sleep.  He was confident that there was nothing down here, but he wasn't going to take any chances.
	He had no idea how long they slept, but when both of them were awake, they ate breakfast without conversation and then set out again.  The going was easier and easier as the passage continued to enlarge and become easier to travel as it descended, almost like a grand gallery with a ceiling higher than they could see and a flat floor that almost seemed like a road.  It rose and fell, but he could tell that it still predominately went down.
	They travelled some time before a strange sound reached both of them.  It was extremely faint, barely audible, but the nature of the tunnels carried the sound to them.  After pausing to filter out the echoes in his mind, he realized that it was a faint hissing sound, like what he remembered the volcano on Sha'Kari sounded like in the cauldera.  But it was a slightly different sound, and he could distinctly hear moving water as well.  And bubbling, like a kettle of boiling water, or maybe an area of very gentle rapids in a small stream.
	"Sounds like water," Jesmind whispered, peering into the gloom ahead.  She could only see about a hundred spans ahead, just as he could, but the reflex to try was automatic.
	"I think it is," he answered in the manner of the Cat, a means of communication that was completely silent, and would not interfere with his ability to hear.  "Let's go see where it is."
	"Let's be careful," she said.  "I think I've caught whiffs of some kind of animal in the air.  This air is too damn thick and laden with other smells for me to be too sure, though."
	He nodded, bringing his staff out of the elsewhere.  The passage was more than large enough for him to wield it.
	They padded along carefully for a surprisingly long distance, as he realized that the tunnel was funnelling the sound to them from a great distance away.  The air began to move, to blow very gently in their faces, and it carried the smell of water with it, along with the tang of minerals, and the air seemed both humid and strangely warm.  Curious now, both of them picked up their pace just a little bit, confident that the air blowing in their faces would bring the scent of an enemy to them before the enemy knew they were there.  The air kept getting warmer and warmer, until it was almost unpleasantly so, and it grew veritably sticky with humidity, so much so that Jesmind took off the fur-lined shirt he'd Conjured for her.  The passage descended again, but now there was a very faint, ruddy light at its end.
	Tarrin stopped, remembering the last time he'd seen a ruddy red light at the base of a descending passage.  "What's the matter?" Jesmind asked in the manner of the Cat.
	"That might be an underground volcano," he told her.  "Something has to be making that light.  It might be lava."
	"Well, let's keep going," she said.  "If it gets too hot for me, I'll stop, alright?"
	"Alright," he nodded, and they started down again, more cautiously this time.
	They padded down to the end of the descent, as the air got hot, but not dangerously so.  Tarrin did smell some sulfur and other minerals that he remembered smelling in the volcano, but it wasn't nearly strong enough to be dangerous.  They reached a bend in the passage and peeked around it, and Jesmind laughed audibly when they saw what was on the other side.
	It was an absolutely massive opening, a great chamber of empty space at the very heart of the mountain itself.  The light wasn't from lava, it was from some kind of strange luminescent fungus or growth that was literally covering all the ceiling and walls, but not the floor.  It was a huge circular chamber with an arching domed roof, the top of it more than two hundred longspans from the floor, cast in the strange red light of the luminescent material covering its walls and ceiling.  The floor of the chamber was surprisingly flat, but there were multiple rimmed pits in it that were filled with water or dark, thick mud, and both water and mud laid in thin pools in depressions on the wide floor, all of which had tendrils of thin steam rising up from them.  The air was hot, sticky, and he realized that the mineral smells were coming from the water itself.  The hissing and moving sounds they'd heard were coming from the water, from the hissing of the water and mud that boiled to the sounds of the bubbling water churning in its stone pools, like large kettles on a stove.
	It was a hot spring!  A hot spring in the middle of the mountain's heart!
	"Incredible!" Jesmind said in wonder, looking around.  "It's a hot spring!"
	"Let's be careful," he said.  "Sometimes hot springs erupt into geysers.  It won't hurt me, but I think you may not like having boiling water sprayed all over you."
	They waited where they were for a while, then carefully circumnavigated the chamber around the walls, wary of any trembling in the floor or rushing sound that would herald an eruption.  But none happened.  They reached the far side of the chamber, where a wide tunnel led up, and somehow Tarrin sensed that this hot spring was at the bottom of the cave system, that it would be up now instead of down.
	"I kind of like it here," Jesmind said.  "I've never seen a place so exotic."
	"It may be dangerous."
	"Well, do your magic thing and find out if it is or not," she said.  "I'm tired and I'd like to rest a while, and this place looks pretty good."
	Glancing at her irritably, Tarrin knelt and put a paw on the floor, then sent flows of Earth down into the stone.  He didn't like using magic as they got close to Val, but what he was doing was very gentle, very passive, and required very little energy.  He sent his weave deep into the ground, seeking out the source of the hot spring, and once he found it, he inspected what he found there.  The stream that they'd seen before dropped down close to a pocket of magma, which heated it and caused it to rise up here.  It was very steady and consistent, and he sensed no erratic motion of water or steam that would cause a geyser.  The springs here were very stable.
	He told her so, which made her almost squeal in delight.  "Let's find one that won't boil the meat off me!" she announced, rushing back into the chamber like a little girl with a new doll.
	"What?"
	"I want to take a bath!" she called after him.
	Take a bath?  Then he realized what she meant.  A hot bath always was relaxing but a bath where the water would never cool off was a rather attractive concept.
	Tarrin looked around.  The place was a bit warm and a little muggy, but it had its own light, plenty of water, and it was in the absolute center of the mountain.  He couldn't get any safer than this.  This would be a perfect place to stop so he could figure out how to keep the Demons off of them...and he had to admit, the idea of bathing in one of those hot springs was rather attractive.
	By the time he'd made that choice, Jesmind had already shrugged out of her shirt, and was in the process of shedding her trousers.  He was about to warn her not to do that, but she got them off, tossed them aside negligently, then stepped down into one of the pools of water.  Tarrin rushed over to where she was in concern, afraid that she'd just stepped into a boiling cauldron that would boil the meat off her bones, and saw with some relief that she had chosen a wide pool of water that was so clear that it did not in any way hinder his view under its surface.  It didn't bubble, meaning it wasn't boiling, and the water seeped up from several small cracks in the bottom of the pool.  It was also rather shallow, and when Jesmind seated herself in it with a look of dreamy contentment on her face, her head just crested the salt-crusted rim of the pool.  The steam that wafted up from the pool shifted when she blew out her breath, then she opened her eyes and gave him a warm, inviting smile.
	"Now this is my idea of resting after getting down here," she said languidly, stretching in the water.  "Please tell me that this is a good place for us to stop so you can do whatever it is you wanted to do to hide us from the Demons."
	"It crossed my mind," he said, squatting down beside her, wrapping his tail around his ankles.
	"I could spend half of forever in here," she sighed in utter contentment, then she reached up and grabbed the end of his tail.  She tugged on it lightly, grinning at him.  "You need a bath, my mate," she told him, tugging a little more firmly.
	"Let me put up Wards at the entrances, and I'll be happy to join you, Jesmind," he told her. "Let's make sure we're safe before we drop our guard, alright?"
	"Well, alright," she acceded thoughtfully.  "Just don't take too long."
	"I'll do my best," he said, standing up.  "Jesmind."
	"Sorry," she said, letting go of his tail.
	Tarrin moved off to raise the Wards, silently thankful that Jesmind had found something with which to distract herself.  She wasn't as hostile as she'd been before, but he was thankful for anything that distracted his mate from Jasana's abduction, even if it was for a little while.  After all the heavy travelling they'd done, taking a few days off here to give him time to devise a means for them to return to the surface with