*
Block was a strange dwarf and he knew it. The absence of a beard alone would have made another of his kind stare in surprise, but that was only the most obvious difference between himself and what might be expected. Somewhat less obvious was the fact that he positively loathed being underground. When he was still a young dwarf of only fifty years and change, Block had left the great halls of Garak-Tor for the world of Men, and he had never gone back. That had been more than three and a half centuries ago.
There had been no banishment and no exile, nothing comparable to the drama that had attended the departure of the le po ka han, John Deskata, from his home in Miilark. Block had simply taken a job guarding a trade caravan bound for a human settlement, an above-ground town younger than the boots he had worn. It had turned out to be a place with an energy and newness Block had never felt in the stodgy old dwarf-hewn halls of Garak-Tor where the patrician faces of ancestors stared down from every wall. When his caravan left Block had stayed behind with a dwarven merchant setting up shop. He had meant to stay only one year until the caravan came back, and to see what it was to have the seasons change around him before he went home. The seasons had been changing around Block ever since and he had not grown tired of them yet.
He no longer thought about the underground world of his youth for now his was the larger world of sun and sky, the moon and the heavens bejeweled with stars. The humans had long since proven good company, though Block had kept everyone at a certain distance after watching the first generation of friends he had made above ground grow old and die. After decades had grown to centuries the dwarf had even found a place he considered home, in the sultry Islands of Miilark. When he grew into an age when he began to consider where he would leave his bones to lie, the halls of Garak-Tor never entered Block’s mind. He would dwell among the Miilarkians even in death, as he had chosen to do in life.
Now that Block found himself on what the gnome Fitzyear flippantly called the Underway, in a stonily silent world of a kind he had not known in centuries, the old dwarf’s thoughts were not troubled by nostalgia. They were troubled by thoughts of death. It was hardly surprising given what Block still knew from his youth about the place where he now was, and of what it had once been.
Fitzyear had told Matilda that he believed the dwarf tunnels here, the city of Yagnarok, had been abandoned some seven-hundred years ago when the ore veins played out. Block had no idea where the gnome had come by that theory, but it was correct only in its timeframe. In the year 702 NC, Yagnarok had been destroyed, and the Baltazarian clans massacred almost to the last man, woman, and child. Only a handful of survivors escaped to bring word back to Garak-Tor, where it was generally agreed that they’d had it coming.
The dwarves knew this, though in seven centuries they had never spoken a word of the story to outsiders. No people would be keen to spread the knowledge that others of their own lineage, no matter how far separated, had participated in the murder of a Great Dragon. Not even after those responsible had paid the price.
On the second night on the Underway after Tilda, Dugan, Fitz and his men had all been soundly sleeping in the safe room for hours, Block sat up among his bedding and looked in the dark toward the locked door. He sat for a time before slowly rising, moving his old joints and bones slowly, quiet as any Miilarkian born or Guilder trained. He padded to the door in thick wool socks, undid the lock, and slipped out to the room at the top of the long stairway, carved all around in extraordinarily detailed images done long ago by hands very much like his own.
With the door to the safe room silently closed behind him the last starlight from the windows within disappeared, leaving Block in profound and total darkness. He stood still with his eyes wide open until able to faintly discern what he had noticed passing through the room earlier. There was a faint blue glow from the arched hallway leaving the chamber.
Block moved in that direction between the tall bas-relief images of dwarves kitted out for war that lined both walls. The hall ended in a T-intersection but Block halted directly before the opposite wall where a final stone portrait of a wizened, bearded face far larger than life-size stared back at him. The faint glow, which human eyes surely would fail to notice, came from a square line all around the image. As he had done at the dwarf door leading to the stairs, Block put his fingertips in the vertical crack on the right side and moved them slowly down until it felt right to stop. He pushed with his left hand and the carved panel pivoted sideways. Soft blue light spilled in from another landing giving to yet another stone staircase. This one was straight rather than spiral and it led back down, though Block hoped it was nowhere near as long.
He did not expect it to be, for even three-and-a-half centuries after leaving Garak-Tor he still remembered the architecture of his first home. He knew that the fire pits Fitz and the others had used in both safe rooms were intended not for cooking, but for the burning of offerings. The shafts above streams were not lavatories, but rather the means to give the burnt ashes of the offerings to the spirits deep beneath the mountains. Anything else was sacrilege, but Block had felt no need to say so to the gnome and his men. Not in this place, not in Yagnarok, where surely nothing could add to what was already accursed.
As he had expected the straight stair led down only half a hundred steps. Block paused halfway down after hearing a single drop of water from ahead, and frowned. The light at the base of the stairs was brighter, illuminating a great chamber with smooth, unadorned walls and a ceiling that formed a perfect hemisphere high above the flat floor. As he entered Block saw cracks in many places with crumbling, damp stone around most of them. Pools of water stood on the no longer perfect floor, most of them under a line of stalactites that stretched above the only thing in the room that was not stone gray in color. In the center of the space stood a ten-foot high, four-sided pyramid of white marble, from which the glow seemed to emanate.
Block looked around at the water and the cracks. He had been in the tombs of great dwarfs far older than this one back in Garak-Tor, but he had never before seen the least sign of wear or damage. Those places of course had been meticulously maintained by the descendents of those buried there. There were no living Baltazarians of Yagnarok, and this tomb was going to come down in time. Block judged it would not be coming down tonight, and so he entered.
He walked slowly around the pools, so shallow and still that they seemed but a film on the hexagonal flagstones. He approached the central pyramid upon which three lines of writing in the old dwarven script were cut deeply, plain characters carved with great care. The first, at the top, was a name. Baltazar II. The two at the bottom were a linked couplet which Block had read before, long ago, in similar places.
As I was once, so now are thee.
As I am now, so shall thee be.
Baltazar II was the son of Yagnarok’s founder, and the father of the monster who had brought the Yellow Mountain to its tragic end. Block stared at the name and something very old and deep and dwarven gave him an urge to spit on it. Before he had decided one way or another, a woman’s voice behind him shouted “Move!” in Miilarkian.
Block did so, not as spryly as he would have a century before, but just enough. He threw himself sideways to the hard floor and rolled through a puddle that tasted dirty and bitter. Before the taste had even registered a stalactite sharp as a spear and almost as tall as Block crashed to the floor on the spot he had just vacated.
“Captain!” Tilda yelped, bounding down the last few stairs and running into the chamber with her hair loose and the long gun in her hands. The crash of the stalactite echoed off the walls and almost seemed to hum from the smooth ceiling. Still prone, Block stared at the stalactite lying on its side and with the point broken.
“That thing almost spitted you like a…”
Tilda slid to a halt in her socks and her eyes, which were already huge, widened further as two thick, fat tentacles with a texture like rotted fruit emerged from the fat end of the fallen stalactite. Til
da swore and raised her gun to a shoulder, but the tentacles moved slowly and did not extend very far. They touched the floor with a sucking sound then bunched up as they dragged the stalactite away, maybe an inch at each pull.
“Don’t bother with that one,” Block said. “Aim up.”
Tilda snapped her eyes and gun to the ceiling above, where another score or so of stalactites hung, motionless and silent. Block rose with a grunt and moved out from beneath them while keeping his eyes riveted on them, but seeing no sign they were anything but natural.
The one on the ground moved another inch, scraping loudly. Tilda swung the gun toward it, then back to the ceiling, then back to the one on the ground. Back to the ceiling. Her loose hair swung across her face and she shook it back.
“What in the Names of the Nine Gods is that?” she asked in a voice that only sounded slightly hysterical.
“Piercer,” Block said, backing away for the stairs while keeping his eyes high. “Sort of a cross between a slug and a hermit crab. They burrow into rocks on high ledges, or stalactites, as their spit dissolves stone. Reckon you can tell how they hunt. And probably figure out how they feed.”
Tilda fell into stride with Block, and both backed to the stairs through the puddles, leaving wet footprints and dampening their socks though that bothered neither of them at the present moment. The piercer on the ground went on making its laborious way back toward the wall. At the base of the stairs beneath an empty ceiling, Block turned to Tilda.
“You followed me?”
Tilda still kept the gun on her shoulder pointing back into the room, and only glanced for a moment down at her Captain. He saw a not wholly unfamiliar flash in her dark eyes.
“Follow you? No, of course not. I wandered off alone into the dark, beasty-filled, godless ruins. Off the path where I was specifically warned not to go, because I am addled. Because I am soft in the brain. Captain.”
Dugan’s voice calling both their names boomed from the room above them, echoing down the stairs. Tilda jerked and nearly cracked off a shot. The crash had plainly woken everyone above and Block cupped his hands to his mouth to shout back.
“Stay where you are! We are returning!”
“Piercers,” Tilda muttered over her gun. “Stirges. I hate this stupid continent.”
“Matilda,” Block said quietly and put a hand on her elbow. His scant avoidance of impalement had almost been enough to make him crack a smile, but his customary frown and scowl returned as Tilda met his eyes uncertainly. He spoke rapidly, close to a whisper.
“This situation with Dugan is intolerable. He could have been gutted by the knight Procost rather than the other way around. Any one of us could die at any instant. If it were him to go, then you and I would be left with no idea of where to seek John Deskata.”
Tilda’s eyes kept flicking back to the crawling piercer, until Block finished.
“When we are out of this place and the three of us are next alone, you watch me for a signal.”
“A signal?”
“A signal.”
With that, Block turned and mounted the stairs. It was a moment before Tilda followed, then both hurried back to the safe room with their cold and wet feet slapping against the ancient stones.
Chapter Eleven
The Sable City Page 19
