“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Alec, walking farther in, light held aloft.

“Neither have I.” Seregil approached the nearest wall to examine the drawing of an elk. Beside it was a pair of lynxes with tufted ears and spots on their backs. They were walking side by side along the wall, one visible behind the other. The artist—or artists—had had a good eye and a deft hand, rendering the images with a minimum of strong, flowing lines and clever shading that made each animal look almost real. Seregil moved along the wall, wet boots forgotten, finding more and more beautifully drawn animals: deer, owls, otters, snakes, more cats, turtles, fish, eagles, hummingbirds, and gulls, even an octopus. Here and there were partial handprints, where the artist had perhaps rested a hand as he or she paused in the work. Farther on was a whole span of ocher handprints, thirty or forty at least, and all the same size. Each showed a missing ring finger; they’d all been made by the same person with his left hand. Seregil held his own hand over one of them. The print was larger and the uppermost ones were above Seregil’s reach. A tall man, this artist.

“Seregil, look at this.”

He turned to find Alec surrounded by the pale nimbus of his lightstone, fifty or so feet away, standing before a veritable forest of dripstone formations. Here was the source of the dripping water. Crenulated columns of wet, glistening limestone formations twice as tall as Alec reached up toward the long tapering fingers that hung from the ceiling. Color was hard to make out in the light, but they were striped light and dark with various minerals.

Seregil splashed across the cave to join him and their combined lights revealed more fantastical shapes—a lump on an outcropping of stone that looked like a dragon’s head; a wide, striped ribbon of stone hanging above them like a giant slice of bacon; others that looked like drapery; and tiny pale pipes like hollow wheat stalks. Many formations on the floor of the cave and up the walls had been recently broken, carried off no doubt by the workman who’d first found this place. The whole back wall of the cave was obscured by the formations, and a thin glaze of whitish stone had dripped like thin icing over the paintings on the wall there. There was also evidence of a small cave-in. Rubble still lay in a heap at the foot of the wall, though it appeared that a good amount had been removed.

“It’s beautiful!” Alec whispered. “The paintings, this. All of it.”