Fitz and his men chatted amiably around the fire as they heated the food and ate, plainly familiar and comfortable with the strange accommodations. Tilda, Block, and Dugan ate in silence, then retired to their bedrolls. Tilda merely followed the Captain’s lead for Block still scowled deeply and scarcely acknowledged anyone around him. She had known the dwarf to overindulge in alcohol a time or two before on this journey, though the resulting hangover had never lasted this long. Either the full day of marching was not conducive to recovery or else, as Tilda suspected, the old Captain was silently furious with Dugan. The renegade had not spoken a word all day either, and likewise remained silent all evening.
Fitzyear did not post any of his men as guards overnight in the locked room, and though it bothered Tilda faintly she slept the sound sleep of exhaustion. If she dreamed she did not remember them when Fitz woke her for breakfast before the march was resumed, out through the second door of the room.
The new door marked a turning point, for beyond it the natural caverns and caves were left behind. While some of the tunnels that the group followed still had rough walls, the floors were all of leveled and polished stone. Most often the passages were bricked, if that was the right architectural word, with large stone blocks that fit together perfectly with no sign of mortar. When they met other passageways Fitz would stop and listen carefully down the crossways before leading the party ahead on what seemed to be a more-or-less straight course. Tilda supposed they moved ever south, though she had no real feel for direction underground.
Some time around mid day the party took a longer pause and bolted a cold meal. Tilda remained standing as it had taken most of the morning for the stiffness to work out of her legs, but at least her headache had not returned. After noon the tunnels changed again as the narrow corridor hit a much wider passage that the gnome took to the right, and as much of her surroundings as Tilda could see in the lantern light thereafter were astonishing.
She was on an underground highway, Tilda quickly realized, a subterranean street that surely had been heavily trafficked in the distant past. The passage was as wide as a boulevard in the Miilarkian capital and lined with round columns under a high, arched ceiling even taller than the route was wide. Ancient plaster on the walls had long since decayed, exposing rough stone and leaving inches of powder on the floor which came up in little clouds as the group passed. Fitz distributed scarves to tie around mouths and noses and the group pressed on, and Tilda noticed that the soldiers now moved more warily and with their weapons in hand. The men with the lanterns often narrowed the beams to shine around columns, or played the light over the dusty ground whenever tracks were seen. Most of the tracks were left by small animals, maybe lizards or rats, but some were much larger. Tilda did not recognize those by the quick glances she took in passing.
Their boulevard met several others along the way. Each intersection was wide and round, with circular stone stairways ascending into the ceiling through open shafts. At the base of some of the shafts rotted timber squares were still connected to massive chains that lay broken now, but had once hung from huge winches strong enough to hoist whole wagons up to the level above. Tilda could only guess as to what had been up there, for each of the stairways was choked with rubble below the level of the ceiling. There were piles of shattered stones and broken bricks, many blackened all over as if they had been through a great conflagration. Tilda was curious enough that she would have asked Fitz about it whether Captain Block liked it or not, but like his men the gnome was wary and careful on this part of the journey. His big amber eyes scanned the darkness all around above the scarf bound over his bulbous nose, and he carried a hand-axe balanced for hurling at his side. Tilda left Fitzyear alone, and carried her gun in the crook of an arm rather than on her shoulder.
After hours and miles on the boulevard Tilda knew from her sore calves that the way had been gradually ascending all along. It turned even more sharply up as the group seemed to reach an end point, becoming a long ramp. The party had moved mostly down the middle of the underground road but Fitz now moved toward the right side of the passage where there was a narrow space between the edge of the ascending ramp and the wall. The stone dust was even thicker here, gray and black as it was mixed with ash, and as the group moved single file next to the ramp the soldier immediately behind Tilda must have noticed her peering ahead toward the top. He narrowed the shutter of his lantern to make a beam shine in that direction.
Tilda did not gasp, but she did stop walking for a moment. Far up the ramp where it passed through a gap in the ceiling the way was again choked with rubble, but some of it was largely intact. Plainly visible lying on its side was a fallen, square tower of smoke-stained white marble veined with black stone. Though cracked and broken the tower was in a sense still holding together, and Tilda could discern at least seven stories’ worth of narrow, arched windows. The tower must have been at least that tall when it stood. Tilda exchanged a wide-eyed glance with the soldier behind her, who nodded soberly.
As the road rose the space beside it became a narrow stone canyon between ramp and wall that came to a dead end several hundred yards in. At the head of the group Fitz patted his hands all along the wall while another of his men held his lantern aloft so the gnome could see, but nothing seemed to be happening.
“There is one intact Dwarf Door, just here,” Fitz whispered, his voice carrying easily down the line off the echoing stone. “Thought I left it open a crack…”
Without a word Block pushed past Dugan and two of Fitz’s men to stand beside the gnome. The dwarf reached out a hand and Tilda could not see just what he did, but there was an audible scrape and a vertical line appeared on the wall in the lantern light.
“Right,” Fitz said. “There it is. My thanks, Cousin.”
A soldier pushed one side of the wall while the gnome scrabbled at the line, and with another sharp scrape a section of brick moved silently around a pivot. Fitz stepped through and waved the others ahead, then pushed the swinging stone until it again appeared as unbroken wall behind them.
They had entered a small room at the foot of a plain stone stairway, which Fitz wormed around the others to lead the way up, and up, and up. The lanterns were awkward and useless in the tight space and were rapidly extinguished. The group went on one at a time in the dark with their hands and feet on the stairs wrapping around a long shaft. The way was at least not dusty here, and everyone lowered the scarves from their faces as all were soon huffing their way upwards. The stairs spiraled on. Tilda started counting after a while, maybe halfway along, and it was another hundred-and-fourteen steps to the top.
The top was a landing with a square chamber around the circular shaft, and Tilda blinked in surprise upon reaching it for while the lanterns had not been relit there was natural light shining in through wide double doors Fitz had already opened. Before Tilda stepped through the doors to clear room on the landing, she saw that the walls of the chamber and an arched hallway leaving it were all alike covered by bas-relief carvings. She only got a glance at the bearded face of an old dwarf carved as large as a real dwarf would stand, cut into the hard stone with as fine detail as she had ever seen on a painting.
The room Tilda entered was much like that in which the group had spent the last night. Same size, same fire pit in the center, and again with writing in a band around the walls. In place of a second door in the opposite wall were three windows. They were narrow but they reached from the floor to the ceiling and they were lit by the first sunlight Tilda had seen in almost two days. She walked directly to them and this time she did gasp, for each was a perfect pane of clear glass without so much as a whorl or blemish within it. They gave Tilda one of the more remarkable views she had ever seen in her life.
All she could compare it to was the view of the Miilarkian capital from the top of the Ghost Mountain, which Tilda had climbed without equipment to culminate the second year of her Guild training. These windows gave a view at a similar elevation, but not of an urban
cityscape. Instead Tilda stared out at rugged mountainsides from deep among them, jagged crags throwing shadows from right-to-left as the sun set, giving the cloudless sky that was half the view a deep burgundy hue. Right in front of Tilda, just inches from her toes, the whole world seemed to fall away into a deep valley of darkening pine forest. Straight across the valley and looking as though it was close enough to touch was another great mountain with a white snow line almost at Tilda’s eye-level. Ancient glaciers nestled in purple shadow among the gleaming peaks.
“Almost worth the stairs, isn’t it?” Fitzyear said beside her. Tilda had not noticed the gnome step up to the window next to hers, and when she turned she saw Block was likewise standing at the third.
“It is beautiful,” Tilda said, turning quickly back to the view before it was lost to the expiring daylight. The rapidly changing shadows were fascinating, but when Fitz stepped away Tilda noticed that several of his men were waiting their own turns, though certainly they had seen this view before. She doubted that even repeated viewings would spoil the effect and she too stepped aside, smiling briefly at the nearest soldier who took her place.
Only Dugan was not looking, having settled to a seat on a chest. He was rubbing at his sandaled feet as Tilda stopped in front of him. They had not exchanged a word since before he had gutted Sir Procost, and banged Tilda’s forehead off the back of a cottage. Dugan looked up at her and narrowed his eyes in the fading light of dusk.
“How is your head?” he asked, his voice rough after two days of not speaking a solitary word.
“As it looks,” Tilda said. She leaned toward him.
“You did not have to kill the knight,“ she whispered. “We could have incapacitated him.”
Dugan looked at her evenly. “You think he was trying to incapacitate me?“
Tilda turned away, knowing that this was neither the time nor the place for a discussion of how civilized people behaved.
Fitzyear was across the room tapping the sides of several large clay jugs big as amphora, for there was no access to a running stream this high up. The containers had certainly not been brought up the stairs, which made Tilda hope that the party was not going to have to climb back down through the dark in the morning. The gnome’s men were still gathered at the windows, and after looking around for a moment Tilda saw Captain Block standing back in one shadowy corner, all but invisible in his black Guild cloak. The dwarf was glaring pure murder at Dugan.
Despite her exhaustion, Tilda did not sleep well that night.
*
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.
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