Read A Stone's Throw (The Gryphonpike Chronicles Book 3) for Free Online Page B

handful of long moments, I thought my idea had failed. But the debris cleared and the whipmaw’s angry lashing turned more to shudders and convulsions and its tentacles curled shut. Its roots buckled against the stone, peeling partway up with a teeth-aching grating sound.
    When the whipmaw was totally still, its branches lax against its trunk and no shiver of moment visible to my keen eyes, I risked stepping into the chamber. The whipmaw did not react. With a bravery I didn’t really feel, I inched forward and poked at one of the roots with Thorn. No reaction.
    “Killer killed the tree,” Drake said with a laugh that was more a release of tension than true humor.
    I wished I could join him, but I merely smiled.
    “Now, which passage?” He had removed the spectacles once we were inside the glimmer moss cavern, and his hazel eyes looked more green than brown or gold in the odd light. They unfocused for a moment, as though he were trying to recall the way.
    More vision-from-the-scabbard nonsense. Great Tree spare me .
    “Left passage.” Drake moved past me, giving the whipmaw a little kick as he went by, and headed for the opening on the left.
    The corridor wound deeper underground and at one point constricted enough that we had to kneel and crawl to get through. I picked up the metallic scent that millipedes and other crawly underground denizens give off and hoped the itching sensation I suddenly felt in my hair was just my imagination trying to conjure bugs where there weren’t any. I vowed that as soon as I was back on the surface, I would strip down and take a very thorough bath in the nearest body of clean water.
    Drake crawled ahead of me, leaving a trail of loose pebbles and swearwords in his wake. His curse vocabulary had clearly been expanded by Makha’s. Little passageways opened off this one, some curving upward, others veering sharply down and beyond where I could follow with my eyes. None of the openings were large enough for us to get into so I somewhat trusted that Drake was leading us toward somewhere. Or, I supposed, into a tight dead end.
    I heard water dripping ahead of us and at last we crawled free of the tunnel into a wider passage. The floor was thick with algae and standing water that trickled over my boots. The walls had sparse glimmer moss, enough to lend light to my vision but not nearly the overpowering green glow it was in the other caverns. Following the flow of water, I looked up and saw a chute going high into the rock and earth above from which trickled a metallic stream. Drake had already sloshed ahead, and I turned and followed him, adjusting my quiver back into position after having moved it to the side during our crawl.
    “Will you look at that?” he said as we stepped out of the corridor and into a wide cavern that rang with the sound of flowing water. “Cave bacon.”
    Sheets of striated stone hung down from the ceiling of the cavern like fancy drapery. The rust-red, yellow, and brown stripes made it looked a lot like thick slices of bacon crisped in an iron pan. Drake’s vision had come to pass, as silly as it had sounded before. Cave bacon .
    “Come on,” he said to me as he started forward again. “It isn’t far now.”
    The water was deeper here, coming up almost to the top of my knee-high boots, and more dripped down on us from the frilly edges of the drapes above, cooling my skin and tickling in my hair. Because that is water making my head itch. Not bugs. The cavern floor curved upward toward the end and an opening into another, larger cavern lay through a massive archway of the striated rock.
    The large cavern had a raised stone middle in a loosely circular shape with steps leading up to it that might have been carved by men, but more likely by time and water. The surface of the platform was stone, but had rings marring its top like a giant tree trunk had been cut and petrified. The whole place looked like a giant dome, the ceiling far above our heads covered in