“There’s more at stake now,” she told Mavarin, trying to focus on the objectives. “There’s a darkness below Thelgrim. Something foul, and it is growing stronger. We have to stop it.”
“I know,” Mavarin said quietly. Astarra frowned, feeling surprised.
“What do you mean you know?”
“I’ve seen it in their eyes,” he said, looking down at his feet. “Black, like the void.”
There was a clatter as his manacles came undone. Maelwich pulled him from Astarra’s grasp and marched him to the door.
“This is the one who commands the burrower?” she demanded of Shiver.
“It is,” he said.
“Then he’s all we need.”
“What about Raythen?” Astarra demanded as the elves left the cell. She followed them out, her anger spiking. She’d come this far intending to free the thief, and that wasn’t a part of the plan she intended to abandon. He couldn’t be far. “We can’t just leave him.”
“If Raythen is not here, he can’t be rescued,” Shiver pointed out.
“Can’t you sense him?” Astarra asked stubbornly. “He must be close, surely?”
“There are more Dunwarr souls entering this place every second,” Shiver said. “It’s becoming impossible to distinguish them, especially a being as used to hiding himself as Raythen. For all we know, he’s not even here anymore. Perhaps he talked his way out. Or maybe he’s escaped.”
“Given how much his father seems to hate him, I doubt either of those things,” Astarra said.
“True,” Shiver admitted. “Regardless of his nature, we both owe him our lives. If I find any trace of him while we are here, I will make sure he leaves with us. I swear it.”
Astarra took a second to compose herself. She supposed she couldn’t hope for any better. There was no evidence of where the Dunwarr – or, specifically, the king’s advisors – might have taken him. More than ever, she envied Shiver’s ability to enter the Empyrean and sense the souls of those nearby.
The daggerband had assembled, one crouching over the single elf to have fallen in the brief, vicious clash in the undercroft.
“Leave him,” Maelwich said. “Ilara leth. We will mourn later.”
“Where are you taking me?” Mavarin asked. He was now flanked by two members of the daggerband. He looked terrified. Astarra wondered just what had happened to him after he’d been taken. What had he seen? Whose eyes had he been talking about?
“We’re getting you out of here,” she told him, hoping she sounded reassuring. “We need your invention. The burrower. Is it still beneath your workshop?”
“N- no,” Mavarin managed. “They took it. Said they could use it to finish the work. The Deeprun, the upper walls. They asked me to pilot it, but I refused.”
“Who did?” Astarra said, trying to make sense of the inventor’s rambling.
“The twins,” he whispered.
Astarra remembered Mavarin’s mention of eyes dark as the void, twinned with the darkness that had seemed so absolute in the tunnels. It sent a chill through her. If the king’s advisors were really in league with the Ynfernael, the situation was even more perilous than any of them had imagined.
“We can discuss this later,” Maelwich said sharply. “We need to move.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Maelwich led them back to the stairwell. They’d just entered it when the sound of the Dunwol Kenn Karnin’s horn rang out again, vibrating the stone underfoot. At first Astarra thought it was just another blast summoning the Warriors’ Guild to the citadel, before realizing that the notes were different – shorter and sharper, more urgent.
“I doubt that’s a good sign,” Maelwich called out as their echoes faded.
They reached the floor where the kitchen was, and immediately encountered resistance beyond the stairway’s door. A patrol of a dozen Dunwarr had emerged before them. Bellowed war cries went up, and Astarra found herself facing their charge.
This time, she reacted first. She brought her staff up, speaking the words of power. The Ignis roared in response, its flames bursting from the volcanic shard and surging into a conflagration. It created a curtain of fire along the entrance to the stairwell, a surge of heat that cooked the stonework and sent the Dunwarr reeling back.
“Go,” she managed through gritted teeth, glancing back at Shiver. He waved the rest of the daggerband past, further down the stairs. When the last was gone he put a hand on her shoulder.
She broke contact with some difficulty, the intensity of the blaze making a swift exit more challenging. Her hands were scorched, but she left the fire raging. She followed Shiver down, almost tripping on the steep, spiral stairs. Shouts of fury and alarm rang after them. The element of surprise was long gone.
The leading elves had reached the next level, but that was packed with oncoming Dunwarr too. Maelwich slammed the door to the stairwell in their faces and used one of the long blades proffered by one of her kin to lock it shut. It shivered in its frame, pounded by repeated blows from the other side.
“If the next floor is blocked, we fight our way through,” she said fiercely. “We can’t keep going down.”
They carried on, Shiver taking the lead this time. Another corridor lay beyond the next door. At first Astarra thought it was empty, before realizing there was a Dunwarr guard right in front of Shiver.
Maelwich was past him in a flash, daggers darting for the warrior’s throat and gut.
“No!” Shiver shouted. Astarra gasped as she felt his magics abruptly surge, seeming to drag every ounce of heat from the corridor. At the sweep of a hand a thin screen of ice materialized between Maelwich and the dwarf. Her daggers jarred off it, shattering it but checking her blows. The dwarf, though equipped with a shield and axe, raised neither.
“Oh, thank Fortuna,” he said gruffly.
It was Raythen. He hauled his helmet off, his one eye darting from Shiver to Astarra. She felt an outpouring of relief, so great she almost had to clutch harder onto her staff for support. Quickly, she tried to mask it from him, embarrassed by her instinctive response to seeing him.
“Took you long enough,” Raythen said, offering her a grin.
“Are you… trying to escape dressed as a Dunwarr warrior?” she asked incredulously, still trying to disguise her relief. With the thief at their side, she suddenly felt a lot more confident about making it out of the fortress.
“Just thought I’d test out a terrible idea someone once suggested to me,” he replied. His eye went to Mavarin, who was still being manhandled between two of the daggerband.
“I’d leave that one behind,” he growled. “He’s the one who stole the Hydra in the first place.”
“We need him to pilot the burrower,” Astarra said, unwilling to spend time taking in the concept of Mavarin being the one who’d taken the Hydra Shard. If that was the case, there would be a reckoning, but it didn’t change their current circumstances. She had to keep them all on course, or the plan would still unravel.
“And there was me thinking you’d come to repay the debt you owed me,” Raythen said. Astarra shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant.
“Enough of this,” Maelwich snapped, shoving past Raythen and heading down the corridor.
“I wouldn’t go that way,” the dwarf called out after her. “There’s nothing down there but the Dunwol Keg.”
“There are two doors,” Maelwich pointed out. Raythen frowned and followed her.
“I’ve no idea where that leads,” he admitted, looking at an archway set into the corridor wall. Darkness lay beyond it, seemingly impenetrable. “I’ve… never seen it before.”
Astarra looked at Shiver, seeking an indication of what lay beyond. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, before taking a deep breath and nodding.
“Go,” he said. “There is no other way.”
“That do
esn’t sound very encouraging,” Raythen said.
Maelwich took a second to count off the daggerband and then, as the crash of a splintering door echoed down towards them from the stairwell, she led them into the darkness.
•••
The Ynfernael was here. Shiver could sense it on every surface, in every breath, inside every thought. Its evil made him want to retch and cry. Every instinct screamed at him to go back.
But he didn’t. He went on, down, following Maelwich, trying not to think about how the darkness coiled and writhed around the lonely flame of Astarra’s runestone, like a living thing, leering and insatiable.
He was not surprised that Raythen wasn’t familiar with the tunnel. A glamor lay upon it, one that had been disrupted either by the presence of his magics and Astarra’s, or by some other, deliberate design. Unlike the mines around Thelgrim or the corridors of the Dunwol Kenn Karnin, the passage didn’t seem old or well-established. After the initial archway and a flight of stone stairs, it was all hacked rock and bare dirt. Loose stones cascaded from the ceiling at their passing. There was no obvious sign of just who, or what, had carved it. That in itself disturbed Shiver. He didn’t dare run his hand along the walls to try and find out.
It seemed to twist and turn one way then another, occasionally contracting, then widening again, like some vast, intestinal tract. Shiver tried to banish the idea as they went ever deeper.
He could no longer sense any hint of a pursuit from the fortress above. There was nothing, nothing beyond the cloying darkness.
“I do not like this,” Talarin murmured. “This place is overrun with evil. I don’t think we want to go any further.”
“That is the very reason we have come this far,” Maelwich said, shooting him a harsh glance. “We go on.”
They came to an intersection in the tunnels, a circular space wide enough for the daggerband to gather and pause. Astarra had fed more light into the Ignis Shard, its flames illuminating no less than ten tunnels branching off from the junction and, strangest of all, a spherical hole in its bottom and another directly above, in the ceiling. For a moment, he thought he could hear a distant wail ringing through the winding dirt passages, though from which one it was coming he had no idea.
“We’re not in the Dunwarr fortress anymore, are we?” Maelwich said softly. Mavarin let out a little, fearful groan.
“The shadow is here,” Shiver replied, forcing himself to speak despite the fear gnawing at him, wondering all the while whether he was the only one who could truly sense its pervasive shadow. “This is where it will strike from.”
“What shadow?” Raythen demanded gruffly.
“Something is rotting underneath Thelgrim,” Astarra said. “We discovered it after we were separated from you. A shadow of the Ynfernael. The deep elves have been hunting it, while it hunts them.”
“I didn’t come here to chase literal shadows,” Raythen said. “What does any of this have to do with the Hydra Shard?”
“The twins are the shadow,” Mavarin interrupted abruptly. Everyone looked at him. He was shaking, but he carried on, eyes fierce.
“The k- king’s advisors. They summoned the darkness. They h- helped me steal the Hydra too. They ensured the wardens in the Hall of the Ancestors were occupied and told me about the chamber where I could hide it and claim I’d discovered it later on.”
“You knew about this all along?” Astarra demanded dangerously.
“Not about the Ynfernael!” Mavarin insisted. “But it’s clear now. There was a… a horror to the twins when they last visited my cell. They had taken the Garak Gaz, and they wanted me to pilot it. I tried to refuse. Their e- eyes… their eyes were like darkness. Pure, utter darkness.”
The words brought back flitting memories of Shiver’s mistress, unbidden, to his mind. She had possessed the same fathomless eyes, a terrible quality that had taken over whenever the power of the Ynfernael had gripped her. Just the thought made him want to quail. The idea that the king’s advisors were the ones bearing the taint only made the current situation more perilous. The darkness had worked its way to the very core of Thelgrim.
He forced the fresh fear that surged within him back, focusing on the sound of Raythen’s voice.
“What did they want with the burrower?” the dwarf was asking.
“They said they were digging at the Deeprun, where it branches out to the gates.”
“The valley defenses,” Raythen murmured, looking at Astarra and Shiver. “Fortuna’s dice, they’re going to collapse them. The Deeprun, it doesn’t just feed the aqueduct. If the mountain is besieged, it can be rerouted to the crevasses I led you in through. It can flood the valley beyond the gates. If Korri and Zorri are opening a new tunnel there, they’ll burst the dam mechanism and unleash it without Ragnarson’s orders.”
Shiver remembered the smooth rock of the narrow passageways Raythen had first taken them through, stone worn down by the passage of a vast flood. It suddenly all made sense. His vision, the refugees, Tiabette and Sarra. The rush of water, the crushing horror of it, plunging from the valley sides. A defense mechanism for Thelgrim, unleashed by treachery and deceit.
“They’re trying to drown the refugees,” he said. “The ones encamped in the valley. There must be thousands there by now. It would be… a vast sacrificial offering.”
The closing of the gates made even more sense now. The twins had doubtless advised Ragnarson to do it in order to trap the Hydra’s thief in Thelgrim, while their true purpose was to leave thousands of innocents at their mercy. He had known sacrifices before, far too many, and he feared even more remained hidden in thoughts that had been stolen from him. The idea of the valley being flooded sickened him.
“We have to stop them,” Astarra was saying. “We need to destroy the burrower!”
“If it’s drilling where I think it is, it’ll take us over a day to journey to the Upper East levels of the cavern wall,” Raythen said. “Assuming we can get out of this demon-cursed burrow anytime soon.”
“There’s no time to go up,” Maelwich said. “The shadow is already too powerful. We need to uproot it at its source. We have to go down.”
“I’m not part of your daggerband,” Raythen said gruffly, squaring up to her. “You cannot command me as you please. I do not even know your name, elf.”
“I am Maelwich,” she replied, meeting the dwarf’s glare and returning it with interest. “And down here my daggerband and I are your best hope of getting out of this place alive.”
“She’s right,” Shiver said. He didn’t want to admit it. Just now, he wanted nothing more than to get as far away as possible from the twisting, unnatural tunnels and the cloying evil that ran through them like rot. But this was what they had been seeking, a direct passage to the source of the darkness. They couldn’t go back now, not after coming so close. Not with so many lives now clearly at stake.
As though in response to his thoughts, the shadows around them seemed to solidify slightly, encroaching a little further into the light thrown by the Ignis.
“It’s trying to repel us,” Maelwich hissed, looking at the surrounding tunnels. “It knows we seek it.”
“I didn’t come here to go hunting the Ynfernael in some accursed pit,” Raythen said. “If I’d known that was on the cards, I’d have turned this whole venture down without a second thought.”
“I would not ask any of you to go further,” Shiver said. “Maelwich and the Aethyn will give their lives to stop this evil, as will I. Some part of it was my doing, I fear. But the three of you don’t belong down here. You should go, before the darkness closes in completely.”
“Why were we hired, Mavarin?” Astarra asked. “Did the twins pick us specifically?”
“No,” Mavarin said hastily. “N- no, that was my decision. What I said during the trial was true, Raythen. I didn’t dare venture after the Hydra without help, and i
t needed to come from the outside. I didn’t trust the twins. I needed insurance.”
“A fine three you picked,” Raythen scoffed. “A thief, a university dropout, and a cursed elf. We’re not exactly the saviors of Terrinoth reincarnate.”
“But we’re the three who are here,” Astarra said. “How many of those who’ve triumphed over the Ynfernael down the centuries have thought themselves fit for the task? In the stories, it’s never just a perfect band of heroes.”
“I don’t seek to be a hero,” Shiver said. “I only wish to do my penance. And there will be a great deal of penance here.”
“And the Hydra Shard, probably,” Mavarin added. “If your deep elf friends didn’t h- happen across where I hid it, the twins probably removed it before we got to it.”
“So Korri and Zorri probably have the Shard as well,” Raythen said. “Even better! A Star of Timmoran and the Ynfernael, working as one!”
“That’s exactly why we have to stop them,” Astarra exclaimed. “There are thousands of lives at stake now. Not just the refugees in the valley, but the whole of Thelgrim. If this darkness rises it will swallow the city whole!”
“Good!” Raythen barked. “That hidebound, oafish place deserves nothing less! I wouldn’t lift a single finger nor spend a single penny, to save a single one of those braying fools in the Guild Council. They all wanted to see me crushed to death.”
“Don’t be such a coward,” Mavarin said suddenly. “This is why your father disowned you! You shamed him before, and you’re doing it again.”
“You know nothing of my father,” Raythen snarled, rounding on his fellow Dunwarr.
“The Ynfernael is doing this,” Shiver said quietly. “I have seen it enough times before. It bends the will of those it touches to its purpose.”
“I will waste no more time on arguments,” Maelwich said tersely. “The Aethyn will strike down this evil, with or without your help.”
“We’re with you,” Astarra said, before placing her hand on Raythen’s shoulder and looking him in the eye.
The Gates of Thelgrim Page 25
