It took them more than two hours to wend their way down through the lower levels of Frostmantle until they reached Maintenance. This level housed great pumps and a labyrinthine system of pipes that delivered clean water to every home in the mountain and took the soiled water away again to be purified. Trash and debris were likewise delivered to this level via an intricate system of chutes, where it was separated for either composting or burning. If an item could be melted down or somehow reused, it was; otherwise, it went into a vast central furnace that provided heat for much of the city. The operation was not without disadvantages, however: While most of the smoke was vented away, the lingering odor rivaled that of Stormreach’s sewers.
Since neither of them was familiar with Maintenance, it took them some time to find one of what the locals called “rat tunnels”—passages made by various entities in various ways over the years that led from the city’s lowest inhabited level to the natural caverns beneath Frostmantle. Whenever the watch found such openings, they would board them over or collapse them, but new ones were always cropping up. The caverns were too valuable a hiding spot for thieves and thugs, not to mention being a handy escape route for pampered nobles fleeing the rules and responsibilities of their parents. Sabira had no doubt that if Aggar were here, he could lead them blindfolded to half a dozen of his own favorite bolt holes.
Dodging the watch, they finally located a tunnel behind a guardhouse that had apparently been crushed when one of the large-diameter pipes above exploded. From the looks of it, whatever disaster had caused the accident had happened long ago, for the piping above the small building had been replaced and was once again showing signs of wear. Sabira hoped the Maintenance crews had figured out the cause of the explosion and fixed the problem when they fixed the pipe. It was all too easy to imagine a section of the heavy metal slamming down on them from above as they climbed over the rusted remains of its predecessor.
The tunnel was lit with fluorescent fungi that lived off minerals in the rock. The walls were only wide enough for them to proceed single file, so Sabira pulled back her hood, unharnessed her shard axe, and took the lead.
They followed the tunnel for a short distance before it opened up into a small cavern. Like the tunnel, the cavern was lit by patches of the glowing fungi, giving everything a nacreous hue. By the pale green light, they could see what their ears had already told them: no hot springs. Not that Sabira had expected their quest to end that quickly or easily. She was actually glad there was no telltale hint of sulfur in the air. They might still have time to thwart Hrun’s plan.
The cavern had two exits, not including the one through which they’d entered. When Sabira hesitated, Mountainheart stepped around her and took the lead.
“This way,” he said, heading for the closer of the two new tunnels. At Sabira’s quizzical look, he added, “The Fist is south of here, so if we head in that direction, we should eventually find the caverns with the hot springs in them.”
“But how do you know that’s south?” Sabira normally had a good sense of direction, but not when there were several hundred feet of solid rock between her and the sun.
Mountainheart looked at her like she’d sprouted purple fangs, a bushy tail, and a third eye.
“That’s like asking a ranger how he can tell which way west is when he’s staring at the setting sun. I’m a dwarf, underground. I just know.”
Fair enough.
“Lead on, then,” she replied, following him through four more caverns, each one bearing in the same general direction—south, Sabira presumed—and trending downward. As they were about to enter the fifth, Sabira caught a hint of rotten eggs on the air. She reached out to grab Mountainheart’s shoulder.
“We’re getting close,” she whispered. “Be ready.”
Mountainheart nodded, holding the tip of his rapier up higher. They entered the fifth cavern and were immediately engulfed in clouds of sulfurous steam. Sabira shifted her urgrosh to one hand and used the other to pull a fold of Kiruk’s cloak up over her nose, blocking out the worst of the odor, though her eyes still burned. Mountainheart refused to be so hampered, soldiering on through the hot stench, his face red from his effort to breathe in as little of the rank steam as possible.
As they made their way across the stalagmite-ridden cavern floor toward the cluster of sulfuric springs, Sabira couldn’t help but admire their alien beauty. Far from being basins of clear blue water, as she had expected, the pools were instead filled to their multicolored rims with bubbling mud in a dizzying array of colors—aquamarine, vermillion, ochre, and a blindingly bright yellow. Several small algae-covered boulders hunched near the edges of the mudpots, adding their own rich hues of green and brown. Sabira wondered idly if Haddrin’s body had been found by some daring painter who’d braved the rat tunnels for the chance to commit such a rare and vibrant mix to canvas.
Mountainheart paused a few feet away from the nearest spring, one of a group of five large mudpots surrounded by several smaller outliers. Sabira stepped up to join him.
“There’s no one here, and no sign anyone’s been here recently. So what’s our next move?” the dwarf asked, keeping his voice low despite his assertion that they were alone. Or perhaps it was merely the caustic fumes adding the deep rasp to his words.
“Well, assuming these are the springs Goldglove was talking about, he said the fissure was four hundred feet or so away,” Sabira replied, looking around. She couldn’t see that far through the wafting curtain of steam, but she pointed the way they’d been headed. “If we’re in the right place, the fissure should be over there somewhere. That’s probably where we want to start our hunt.”
Mountainheart nodded, but didn’t speak. Sabira doubted he really wanted to open his mouth and risk swallowing more of the pungent air. He wiped water from his eyes with the back of his free hand and started off in the direction Sabira had indicated.
As they moved away from the larger pools of boiling mud and toward the smaller ones, it got a little cooler and a little easier to breathe. Sabira dropped the edge of her cloak and resumed her two-handed grip on the shard axe as she scanned the ground in front of them. She was fairly certain they’d gone at least four hundred feet, but she knew from experience how being underground could confound perspective: Everything seemed alternately smaller and more closed in, and then too vast to be comprehended. She tried to shake the feeling off, knowing it for what it was—a haunted remnant of her time in the Maw, when she’d searched for, and found, Leoned.
Refocusing, Sabira peered ahead, searching in vain for Goldglove’s fissure. But she didn’t see anything on the cavern floor other than two bathtub-sized mudpots, one on either side of them, the ubiquitous stalagmites, and more of the brown boulders. Certainly nothing that looked like a channel—artificial or otherwise—diverting magma from the Fist of Onatar.
Were they in the wrong cavern? Were these new springs that had erupted in the time since Goldglove made his journal entry?
Sabira was about to tell Mountainheart they needed to move farther south and deeper into the network of caves when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. A rock the size of her head was sailing across the cavern from the direction of the larger mudpots, and it was about to hit Mountainheart square in the back.
“Orin! Left knee, hard!”
The dwarf didn’t miss a beat, falling to one knee as the stone missile flew harmlessly over his head.
Sabira whirled to face this new enemy, shard axe at the ready.
There was nothing behind them but stone and steam. Unless their foe was invisible—a dangerous proposition here, where even the slightest movement would leave a trail of super-heated mist—or was small enough to fit behind one of the boulders, she and Mountainheart were alone.
Another movement, on the edges of her vision.
There, on the other side of the small spring to her left. Had that boulder been there before?
Mountainheart had regained his feet and moved up to stand on her
right, a step or two in front of her.
“Where?” he asked simply, eyes scanning the cavern behind them, hands white on his weapons.
“Left,” Sabira said, but then she saw more movement on the other side of him. “And right!” she called as their enemies finally showed themselves.
Their opponents were the boulders themselves, unfurling from fetal positions to reveal blocky stone bodies and stubby appendages that served as rocky arms and legs.
Mountainheart swore. “Duhr!”
“What are you talking about?” Sabira asked as she dodged one flying rock and swatted another away with the cheek of her shard axe.
“Galeb duhr disguise themselves as boulders. But boulders are surface features, formed by water and wind erosion. You hardly ever see them underground, except for in the beds of large subterranean rivers.” He shook his head in disgust. “I should have suspected when I saw them grouped around the hot springs, but I was too focused on finding Goldglove’s fissure.”
As he spoke, he ducked to avoid one rock and took another, smaller one in his left thigh.
“Great, so how do we fight them?” Sabira asked as more of the duhr advanced. She counted half a dozen standing now, and nearly the same number still rolling toward them from their former places around the larger springs.
“Our weapons,” Mountainheart replied with a shrug. “Unless you’ve got a fireball up your sleeve.”
“You’re the one with the magic rings,” Sabira reminded him, casting a quick look over her shoulder to the south to make sure they weren’t being flanked. If there were any duhr on that side of the cavern, they were keeping themselves hidden.
She briefly considered retreating in that direction, but quickly dismissed the idea. Without knowing what was over there, they were safer where they were. There could be more duhr. Or the fissure might actually be there, farther away than Goldglove had calculated, and Sabira didn’t particularly relish the idea of stumbling into it while fighting off animated boulders. At least here, between two of the smaller mudpots, the approaches from the east and west were cut off, leaving the duhr only one avenue of attack. Well, Sabira amended as a rock the size of her fist bounced off the knuckles of her right hand, make that two avenues.
“I guess I could teleport back to Aggar’s rooms at the Tankard, track down some scrolls or WANDS, and come back, but I’m not sure how well you’d fare in the meantime,” Mountainheart replied, reaching up to snatch one of the rocks whizzing past. As he hurled it back at one of the closer galeb duhr, he added, “Because other than that, I don’t know what these rings do, if anything.”
Sabira didn’t bother to reply. She was too busy trying to keep her footing as the ground began to heave and she came perilously close to being dumped headfirst into the mudpot on her left.
Then she realized the floor of the cavern wasn’t just rolling beneath her feet, it was growing up around them!
“Orin!” she shouted as the ground rose up to engulf her legs in a ghastly parody of a hand.
“I see it!” he called back, dancing from foot to foot to keep from being caught in the same trap. “Keep your arms up, out of the way!”
Sabira did as Mountainheart instructed, keeping her shard axe clear. The fist of stone reached her waist but came no higher.
And then it began to squeeze.
She didn’t need the dwarf to tell her what to do next. As the crushing grip inexorably tightened, Sabira swung her adamantine urgrosh down at the stone “wrist.” Again and again she slammed the axe-blade into the rock, and with every blow it sank deeper, until she’d created a deep, bloodless gash that cut halfway through the false appendage. Meanwhile, a muted crack and a burning pain in her side signaled a broken rib, if not a punctured lung. If she didn’t get out of this now, her pelvis would be next, but it wouldn’t just snap—it would shatter, and she’d be as good as dead.
Fighting against the earthen grasp, she threw all of her weight back and forth, again and again. Finally, her painful struggles were rewarded by another crack, this one sharp and reverberating. Next she was falling to the right as the force of her oscillation broke the rock hand from its weakened wrist. As she toppled, the stone encasing her fell apart, and by the time she hit the ground, she was free.
She quickly clambered to her feet and then kept moving, dancing from side to side, making sure neither foot stayed in the same place too long. If she had to be a target, she would at least be a moving one, for the duhrs and the ground both.
She watched as the duhrs tried the same tactic on Mountainheart. The ground roiled beneath him but, forewarned, he was able to leap away whenever the fist started to form, and if his feet were not in contact with the earth, it seemed the grasping hand could not clutch him.
Too late, Sabira saw that the stone fist was just a distraction. One of the duhrs was hoisting up a boulder easily its own size. She called out a warning as the duhr heaved the huge rock at Mountainheart. The dwarf looked up, saw it, and nimbly danced out of its path.
If it had been just an ordinary rock, Mountainheart would have avoided it easily. But as it flew over his head, a stone leg shot out and kicked him square in the jaw, sending him sailing backward.
Right into the other pool of boiling mud.
Sabira could only watch helplessly as the dwarf’s back hit the far rim of the mudpot and the full length of both legs splashed down into the thick liquid, sending up globs of scalding mud to splatter his chest and arms.
Mountainheart’s scream was the most horrible thing Sabira had ever heard, a guttural sound of pure, primal pain wrenched uncontrollably from the depths of his lungs and expelled outward by the sheer magnitude of his agony. It echoed throughout the cavern, the fungi-covered walls sending it reverberating back to them for long moments after Mountainheart was too far gone in torment to hear it.
Sabira, heedless of her own safety, sprinted around the edge of the small hot spring to where Mountainheart lay, his hands beating weakly against the cavern floor as he tried to pull his legs out of the boiling mud with muscles that had already been burned away.
Dropping her shard axe, Sabira grabbed the dwarf under his arms and yanked him away from the pool. The sudden movement was too much for Mountainheart, and he lost consciousness, his head lolling against her chest as she struggled to pull him clear. As his legs came free with a wet squelch and Sabira got a good look at the ruin, it was all she could do not to vomit bile mixed with Onatar’s Blood all over him.
His clothes had been almost completely burned away from the waist down, and small flames licked the edges of what was left of his shirt before Sabira swatted them out. The exposed skin of his torso was a livid red, and covered in huge, oozing blisters. His thighs were a morass of melted flesh, muscle, and bone, and there was nothing left of his legs past the knee joint.
Sabira was amazed he was even still breathing, though those breaths came in shallow, panting gasps. And if she didn’t get him out of here soon, he wouldn’t be doing even that much.
She looked briefly at the rings he wore, but didn’t know which one would send him back to the Tankard, or how to activate its magic even if she could identify the right ring. And without her there with him to get help, all teleporting him would do is change the location of his final resting place.
Sabira grabbed the gold ring on the middle finger of her left hand and twisted it three times, clockwise.
“Aggar! Aggar Tordannon! I need you!”
Aggar appeared beside her, shirtless and just finishing lacing up his breeches. He looked up, startled.
“What the …?” he began, almost reflexively, but he took in the situation in an instant—his nephew dying at his feet, Sabira’s shard axe the only thing standing between them and a dozen galeb duhrs advancing on them in stony silence. With a curse, he twisted one of the gold rings on his fingers and said, “Wind!”
The sound of a thousand rushing whispers filled the cavern, and Sabira felt her hair and clothing pulled toward the duhrs with invisi
ble, greedy fingers as gale-force winds streamed by on their way to encircling the walking boulders. In moments, a small tornado had formed around the duhrs, tearing them from the cavern floor and sending them spinning through the air in madcap cartwheels. At Aggar’s direction, the improbable cyclone skipped across the ground, picking up stray duhrs, then wound its way back to the largest of the bubbling mudpots.
As the whirlwind crossed the surface of the spring, multicolored mud and steam were sucked into its vortex, creating a conical rainbow wall and obscuring the airborne duhrs from view. When the wall had climbed halfway to the ceiling of the cavern, draining the deep basin almost to its bottom, Aggar released the wind.
The entire cone of mud, steam, and duhrs collapsed back into the basin with the same hissing whoosh the lightning rail made when it passed through a tunnel. Mud splashed high across the cavern floor, some small globs traveling far enough to hit her and Aggar, causing several small burns on his bare chest and one on her cheek. If any of the globs hit Mountainheart, Sabira couldn’t tell; he was already so covered in burns that one or two more would hardly be noticeable.
When the cavern was once more filled with only the sounds of popping bubbles and whistling steam, Aggar knelt beside his nephew, touching his forehead lightly, then placing a gentle hand on Mountainheart’s chest, trying to detect even the slightest rise and fall there, the smallest breath.
There was nothing.
When Aggar looked up at Sabira, his green eyes sparkled with a grief she knew all too well.
“I came too late,” he said in a small voice.
“It was already too late when I called you,” she said softly, her own voice catching with unanticipated sadness. While she’d found the envoy annoying at times—well, most of the time—he’d still been a decent partner. She imagined he would have made an even better friend. But she would never know now.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel (Dungeons & Dragons) Page 25
