“Opal Room. You have until just before the third morning bell to find it and get what you need from it. I can’t protect you once the Tombs reopen.” What he really meant, of course, was that he couldn’t protect himself, but Sabira had no intention of staying that long in any case.
“Many thanks, Most Honored—”
“Just go.”
Sabira inclined her head to the Caretaker and then turned expectantly to Rockfist.
“It’s on the Soldorak level—that’s where all the writings pertaining to the Fist are, since it’s in Soldorakhold. I’ve never been to that particular room, but I know where it is. Follow me.”
“No,” the Caretaker said firmly. “Just her. One fool traipsing about my halls is more than enough.”
Rockfist opened his mouth to argue, took a good look at the hard set of the Caretaker’s wrinkled face, and thought better of it.
“Fine. I’ll just walk her to the stairs, then.” To Sabira, he repeated, “Follow me.”
Sabira did as she was bade, trailing behind the dwarf as he walked to the staircase on the right. As they neared the balcony, she couldn’t help but sneak a glance through the carved marble railing. The balcony opened onto a wide stairwell that plunged thirteen levels, with identical balconies on each landing. The twin staircases curved along their respective walls and then came in again toward the center, hanging in the air with no visible means of support. Fortunately, the stairs had high balustrades to keep those who used them from stepping off into the open stairwell and reaching their destination quite a bit more quickly than intended. From where she stood, she couldn’t see all the way to the bottom, but even the look she did get was enough to trigger a brief spell of vertigo. She hoped the Soldorak floor was toward the top.
“The Soldorak level is the tenth one down,” Rockfist offered, as if reading her mind. “Go to your right once you reach the bottom of the stairs. The Opal Room should be the third one on the left. If you hit Obsidian, you’ve gone too far.”
“What if someone else comes in while I’m down there?”
“I can’t see that happening—the Tombs are officially closed right now. But if it does … hmm.” Rockfist frowned, casting about for an answer. Then his eyes found the dangling chain beside the entrance to the vestibule. “If someone comes in, I’ll find a way to ring the Fire Bell. You’ll be able to hear it on every level, in every room. Unfortunately, so will the Fire Teams. It will take them some time to organize, but once you hear the bells, you’d better drop what you’re doing and get back up the stairs as fast as you can. Take the left staircase; anyone coming down will use the right one, since it’s closer to the Opal Room. If we can’t get out before they arrive, we’ll have to hide out in the Caretaker’s rooms until the Fire Teams clear the building.”
“Oh, he’s going to love that.”
“No doubt. Now you’d better get going. It’s a long walk.”
Sabira hurried down the worn marble treads as they curved along the wall, staying toward the inside as they swung out over empty space. Somebody really should talk the Caretaker into investing in a few soarsleds. Somebody besides her or Rockfist, that was.
As she passed each landing, she noticed the eponymous clan crest carved into the same wall where the vestibule was on the first level. Mroranon, not surprisingly, was first, followed by Doldarun and Droranath. Sabira couldn’t help but wonder what sort of tomes would fill that floor—the Droranath could not be considered scholars by anyone’s measure. Though it didn’t seem that the books and documents housed on a particular floor necessarily had much to do with the clan for which that level had been named. The family perspective written by Baron Deepspring was a good example—it was shelved on the Soldorak floor, but none of the families mentioned were affiliated with that clan.
The Kundarak floor was fifth, and showed the old clan crest, not the newer one they’d adopted as House Kundarak. Noldrun was ninth, and again Sabira wondered what volumes might be housed in its rooms. Would she find treatises on Korran’s Maw, the ancient Noldrun clan mine, there? Could the tale of Nightshard’s death—and Ned’s—in the depths of that mine be sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere in the Agate Room, or the Bloodstone Room? A part of her wished she had more time to explore and satisfy her morbid curiosity, but a larger part was glad that she did not. That was a book better left unopened.
At last she reached the Soldorak level. As Rockfist had directed, she turned right and walked down the wide corridor, counting off archways as she did so. To the left of each arch was a small placard printed with the room’s name and either a corresponding gemstone or nugget of ore. She passed the Silver and Amber Rooms on the right and the Turquoise and Iron Rooms on the left before reaching Opal.
As she entered the room, the first thing she noticed was the floor. In the light of the hovering everbright lanterns, the tiles sparkled with a rainbow of iridescent colors, almost bright enough to make her eyes hurt. On closer inspection, she saw that what she had thought were tiles were actually thousands of inlaid opals, each one perfectly round and breathtakingly flawless. Sabira estimated that the floor in this room alone was worth several hundred thousand platinum dragons. If each of the other rooms had floors inlaid with their respective gemstone or metal, the Tombs was easily one of the richest treasures in all of Khorvaire, and that was before taking into account the wealth of knowledge contained in its many books and documents. She could see now why the Caretaker—and, by extension, the whole dwarven nation—guarded it so jealously.
Once she got past the marvel of the opal floor, she saw that the walls of the room were covered floor to ceiling in shelves that had been hollowed out of stone. Rolling ladders were spaced evenly throughout to allow access to the upper shelves. Several freestanding shelves jutted up from the floor, forming a loose octagon around three stone tables that browsers could use to read through their selected documents. Rockfist had informed her that nothing could be removed from the Tombs, so any information she found would have to be copied down or remembered. Luckily, he’d also provided her with a stylus and one of his many notebooks, so Aggar’s case wouldn’t wind up hinging on her own memory, which might prove a bit unreliable, especially with as much effort as she’d put into suppressing it over the years.
From the barrister’s earlier comments, Sabira had expected to find the filing system to be arcane and incomprehensible, so she was pleasantly surprised to discover that the books were arranged in alphabetical order. She quickly located the D’s and easily found Darkore’s report, a thin booklet bound in white leather. Since she couldn’t be certain which “D” book Goldglove had been referring to in his log, she browsed a bit further in the section until she found Deepspring’s book, as well. Then she took both documents to one of the stone tables, moved a stack of much heavier unshelved books to an adjacent table to free up space, and sat down to read.
Darkore’s work was full of jargon that was no doubt quite informative to other students of volcanoes but was utterly incomprehensible to Sabira. Her eyes glazed over before she’d read through the first page. Then she recalled that Goldglove’s journal entry had mentioned a map, and so she confined her search to the illustrations. Though the back of the report consisted of several pages of maps, Sabira located the one Goldglove had referenced with relative ease, considering it looked like he had drawn on it. It was probably a good thing he was already dead; Sabira couldn’t imagine the Caretaker letting a transgression like that go unpunished.
The original map showed the Fist of Onatar, located near the western border of Soldorakhold. Jagged red lines—what the map legend informed her indicated the titular magmatic fissures—radiated out from the Fist to the east and south. Small black x’s showed the locations of hot springs along those fissures.
Goldglove had added a fissure to the map, this one a perfectly straight line leading from the volcano and crossing both Soldorakhold and Noldrunhold before ending at Frostmantle, in Tordannonhold. Red tick marks divided the line, but not uniform
ly, and each mark had a number written beside it in parentheses. 993, 995, 997, 998 … after a moment, Sabira realized they must be dates. As with the others, small x’s had been added to show where hot springs had appeared along the route of the new fissure.
Without seeing Goldglove’s journal—another reason to travel to Frostmantle, since Rockfist hadn’t been able to acquire a copy of it—Sabira couldn’t be completely sure what the map was showing, but even her uneducated eye could tell that the fissure leading to the Tordannon capitol could not be natural.
Was this why the researcher had been murdered? Rockfist’s offhand comment from the Iron Council’s audience chamber came back to her then with the force of prophecy.
“… unless you’re suggesting he was killed to cover up this business with the hot springs, and every murder since then has simply been an effort to divert attention from it?”
More determined now than ever to get to Frostmantle, Sabira hurriedly sketched the basics of the map out in her borrowed notebook. She glanced quickly at the other maps in Darkore’s report to see if Goldglove had embellished any more of them, but didn’t find anything. So she set the booklet aside and picked up the thicker volume written by Deepspring.
Again, Goldglove left his trail for her to follow, this time dog-earing the page he’d been interested in. Sabira opened to it quickly.
It was a map of Noldrunhold and the holds bordering it, showing the boundaries of various mining claims and the owners of each. The names of the Mountainheart and Deepspring families were written in bold black print, while the Stoneblood name was a faded gray, as were the other, smaller family names inside Noldrunhold itself and most of those along the border in the surrounding holds, as well. A note at the bottom of the map revealed that the black print was for families with active mines, while the gray print was for those whose mines had either been tapped out or were no longer in service.
Glancing at her sketch, Sabira judged that the straight line Goldglove had drawn went through both the Mountainheart and Deepspring claims. Were their continuing mining operations somehow connected to the unnatural fissure?
Sabira jotted down a few notes and was about to close the book when a diagram on the facing page caught her eye.
It was an abbreviated genealogy for the Stoneblood family, used to trace the pedigree of their mining claim. It showed that Gunnett—the last of the Stoneblood line—currently held the rights to the claim, which had come to her from her mother and from her grandmother before that. There were also two symbols not defined in the text, a circle circumscribing an x beside Gunnett’s mother’s name and two unequal circles separated by a vertical line next to Gunnett’s.
Sabira was about to sketch out the family tree when she heard a soft noise behind her, like a slippered footfall on plush carpet or the whisper of a cloak hem against a table. On her guard instantly, Sabira reached for her shard axe and turned.
Just in time to see a gray-cloaked figure bringing a massive book down on her head. As the book slammed into her temple and the room exploded into a shower of stars, Sabira got the briefest look at the top half of her attacker’s hooded face. Black eyes glared out at her malevolently from a pale face as the room spun around her. She had time to wonder fuzzily what Hrun Noldrun was doing in the Tombs, and then the opal-encrusted floor was rushing up at her and she knew no more.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Zol, Nymm 17, 998 YK
Krona Peak, Mror Holds.
Sabira awoke moments later to the awful sound of bells reverberating through the vast stone halls. Her attacker was nowhere to be seen. Neither were the documents she’d been examining nor the notebook she’d been writing in.
Before she had time to wonder what the Caretaker was going to have to say about that, another sound echoed through the room, louder and more sinister than that of the bells.
Stone grinding against stone.
Sabira looked toward the entrance to see a granite slab descending to fill the archway.
Of course. If there really was a fire, they’d want to seal off all the rooms to keep it from spreading. And they’d want to extinguish it as quickly as possible, in a way that would preserve the documents from harm. And that meant …
There. Beneath the strident bells and the teeth-jarring scrape of stone. A faint hissing coming from the ceiling, where Sabira could just make out several small vents.
The air was being sucked from the room.
If she didn’t get out now, she’d be trapped here, and she would suffocate long before the Fire Teams made it down to this level and found her.
Shaking the vestiges of stars from her eyes, Sabira jumped up and raced toward the entryway, her booted feet pounding heedlessly across a fortune’s worth of opals.
Though the slab had at first seemed to be dropping slowly, either she had misjudged or it was moving faster the farther down it slid, for it already filled three quarters of the archway before she cleared the final bookshelf. Lengthening her stride, Sabira hurtled forward, throwing herself to the floor at the last moment and rolling underneath the heavy slab just before it crashed into place with a thunderous echo, magnified a hundredfold throughout every level of the Tombs.
She lay there panting for half a heartbeat, then sat up, only to realize that the hem of her cloak—of Kiruk’s cloak—was caught beneath the massive stone.
Freeing the cloak would take time she just didn’t have, but if she left it, not only would it confirm that there had been an intruder but it could very well lead the authorities right to Aggar’s door. Or worse, to his father’s. That was all she needed: two Tordannons to defend.
With an impatient sigh, she used the sharp edge of her urgrosh’s axe to saw away at the fabric, wincing at having to utilize such a fine blade for such a pedestrian task. She cut as close to the slab as she could; with any luck, the scrap of gray would go unnoticed by anyone investigating the commotion. At the very least, the small bit of wool should be harder to analyze than the entire cloak would be, and might make the process of identifying its owner take longer.
Whether it would be long enough remained to be seen, and she couldn’t worry about it now. She had to get out of here.
Freed from the grasp of the slab, Sabira leaped to her feet. Then she was on the run, headed for the leftmost staircase as fast as she could go.
She didn’t worry about stealth at this point; her rhythmic footsteps would not be heard over the sound of the bells. But once she got to the landing between staircases, she hugged the crest-adorned wall, worried she might be seen by someone leaning over the balcony on one of the higher levels. Once she’d cleared the landing, she took the stairs two at a time until she reached the part of the spiral that hung, open, over the stairwell. There, she paused. She would have no cover here. Anyone looking down from above would be able to see her.
She peered upward, trying vainly to determine if there was any activity at the topmost balcony, but the distance was simply too great. She could see nothing.
Well, she thought, when in doubt, do it quick and hope you don’t get caught.
She dashed up the stairs to the Noldrun landing and back into the covered portion of the staircase. As she reached the next open segment of stairway, she paused again, scanning the higher balconies, which remained blessedly deserted.
She repeated this process six more times, and then, in between the Droranath and Doldarun levels, she finally saw movement at the ground floor balcony. A lone figure stood peering down. It took her a moment to realize it was Rockfist.
She stepped out of hiding and waved up at him cautiously.
“Hurry!” the barrister called down once he’d spotted her. “They’ll be here any moment!”
Now that she no longer had to worry about being observed, Sabira covered the distance in half the time, though she was perspiring lightly and breathing hard when she reached Rockfist’s side.
“What happened? How did you set off the alarms?”
“I didn’t,” Sabira said, brist
ling at the barrister’s accusing tone. She pointed to the bruise already forming on the side of her face. “The guy who gave me this did. I think it might have been … Hrun Noldrun?”
Though she was hardly certain of that. It could have been anyone; all she’d actually seen had been black eyes, a gray cloak, and a really heavy book. Host, she thought to herself. Now I sound just like Kiruk.
“Noldrun?” Rockfist exclaimed, surprised. “He’s no mage. How did he get in without setting off the alarms, let alone back out again? Never mind, we’ll sort that out later. We’ve got to get to the Caretaker’s rooms, and quickly! He says there’s an exit there we can use to get past the guards.”
So the old dwarf had a secret bolt hole. Well, not so secret, now. No doubt he was furious at having to reveal its existence, especially to them. But Rockfist’s words had confirmed what she’d already guessed when she’d first heard the bells: It wasn’t just the Fire Teams responding, because Rockfist hadn’t set off the alarm. Her attacker had, when he’d teleported out of the Tombs, taking two of its sacrosanct documents with him. Accordingly, once the Fire Teams cleared the building, the guards would swarm in, looking in every crack and crevice to find the intruder, not knowing that he was already long gone.
The old dwarf, leaning heavily on a carved ebony walking stick, ushered them through a door behind his desk and into his small suite of rooms. They passed through a cozy sitting area and into the Caretaker’s bedroom. A darkwood wardrobe stood against one wall, and Sabira headed for it, assuming that’s where the entrance to the tunnel would be.
“In here,” the Caretaker snapped, motioning for her and Rockfist to follow him into the tiny bathroom, which boasted a clawfoot tub and a privy. He tapped one of the claws with the end of his stick and the entire bath swung silently outward to reveal a set of steps leading down into darkness.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel (Dungeons & Dragons) Page 22
