Unbearable Read Online Free Page B

animals and symbols that once meant something to the Celts who ventured here.
    “They figure these are from the second or third century,” Mairead murmured. Her voice ran whispering back into the caves around us, the sibilants hissing eerily. “No one likes to go far beyond this main chamber. It’s not well known at all farther on.”
    “I’ll remember the way back,” Nick said firmly.
    “Me, too,” I added.
    Mairead nodded and kept going. We stayed bunched together and I kept my sword up just as Tally and Nick were doing. My heart was stirring unhappily and because I didn’t know why, I kept my guard up. My own gut instinct usually serves me well.
    Mairead came to a halt, playing the beam of light over the area ahead. She was frowning heavily. “I don’t remember this section being like this at all.”
    “How well do you remember it?” Nick asked. It was a pertinent question. Humans had notoriously faulty memories and often had to be tricked into recalling facts properly.
    “Well enough,” she said. “That section over there is as it should be, but not this slope, here.” She picked out the sharp incline with her flashlight. The slope was thick with rocks and rubble.
    “It looks very loose,” Tally said slowly.
    “Like a section has collapsed?” I suggested.
    “Or been pulled down?” Nick finished. He headed for the slope, where the rock floor turned into a field of pebbles and dirt. He edged around the lose stuff, heading deeper, beyond the fall.
    We followed.
    “Be careful!” Mairead whispered and the air picked it up and repeated it. “No one has been here before. You don’t know what you might find.”
    Nick was standing just ahead of us, moving the beam of his flashlight around. “Oh, I think there have been people here before,” he said as we reached him.
    The area we were standing in had a flat, dusty floor and walls that ran vertically.
    “Man-made,” Tally breathed, looking around.
    “A passage,” Nick confirmed.
    “It must have been blocked off, ages and ages ago,” Mairead murmured. “Maybe centuries ago.”
    I thought of the ancient symbols on the wall in the main chamber. Likely, her guess was right.
    “Why block it off?” Tally asked.
    “Let’s find out,” Nick said and moved ahead, down the wide passage.
    “Is that…? It looks like daylight ahead,” Mairead said. She was at the end of the file, now.
    Nick lowered his light and we looked ahead. It was dim light, certainly, yet it wasn’t the glow of artificial light. Daylight, then. I already knew the sun had not set. Some of the ancient instincts still remain with us. Sensing sunrise and sunset was one of them.
    We moved forward more quickly, heading for the light. There was a room built off the end of the tunnel and we stepped into the light, which seemed almost dazzling after the darkness of the caverns behind us.
    Nick backed up almost instantly, cannoning into Tally. Both of them pushed up against me. I looked over Tally’s shoulder.
    Valdeg sat hunched on the floor of the roughly-carved room. He was a motionless rock, still held by his stone-sleep. The hewn roof above was punctured by a hole that clearly drilled through the crag to the air above, for that was the source of the daylight.
    “God almighty, Mary Blessed Virgin….” Mairead breathed.
    “We don’t have any sledgehammers,” Tally pointed out. “We’ll have to wait for sunset and take him as he changes.”
    “That will be soon,” I estimated.
    Mairead moved closer to the gargoyle. “He’s a teeny one, isn’t he?” she said. “This be the one they call Valdeg? The sport with the deformity that lets him talk.”
    “They all talk,” I pointed out. “They just use a language that can be spoken by them alone. They can’t speak human languages, most of them, because their jaws and tongues are too rigid.”
    “Valdeg can speak English,” Tally said softly, staring at him. The pulse at the base of her throat was throbbing frantically.