Of Truth and Beasts

by Barb Hendee

  But a small part of her pitied him. Was this truly why he had come all this way—to somehow change the truth of the past?

  “We are finished here,” he said coldly. “We move on.”

  “To where?”

  “You wished to go lower.” He strode past her, ignoring Chane and Shade.

  Chane kept glancing about as they walked. When Ore-Locks neared where they’d entered, Chane slowed. Wynn stopped, wondering what was wrong.

  “Feather-Tongue would find this tomb a tragedy,” Chane said.

  Wynn shook her head, uncertain what he meant.

  “These thänæ are forgotten,” he went on. “The tales that brought them here are forgotten. They will not continue in the memories of their people. These here are now truly dead, forever.”

  She hadn’t considered that. First, Ore-Locks had tried to clear his genocidal ancestor’s name in a place where the dead were forgotten, and now Chane waxed philosophical like a shirvêsh of Bedzâ’kenge. The world felt upside down.

  “We have to go,” she said.

  He nodded and followed her as they hurried.

  Ore-Locks was waiting by the portal. This time Wynn, Chane, and Shade all stepped out, and he closed the doors from the inside before passing through the iron to join them. They wouldn’t need to enter that place again.

  Ore-Locks still looked pale and sickened. He took the lead, and when they reached the narrow, sloping passage, he turned downward again.

  A small part of Wynn wished to offer him some word of comfort; the wiser part knew that was foolish—and wrong.

  Ghassan lingered near the entrance to the hall of the Eternals, noting the great gash in its far right end, but he did not step inside just yet. The wraith must be somewhere ahead of him. He did not wish to risk exposing his presence to it or to Wynn.

  Footsteps and voices carried down the engraved entry passage behind him.

  Ghassan looked back. Who else could possibly be down here? He could not make out the words, but he heard the lilt and guttural turn in those voices. Elves?

  He hurried inside the hall. Quietly rushing down its length, he looked for a vantage point where he could still remain hidden. Then he froze midway.

  The wraith lingered at an archway beyond the last great statue along the hall’s far wall. Its back was turned to him.

  Ghassan knew he had only moments before it might turn around or the elves would enter this place. He formed sigils and shapes in his mind, focusing on the wraith. He did not know if he could hide his presence from its unnatural awareness, but it was all he had left to try.

  On pure hope, he ran between the statues on the hall’s other side, ducking behind the shoulder-high base of the effigy of a dwarven warrior.

  The wraith turned. It floated farther out into the hall, but did not look his way.

  Ghassan stifled an exhale of relief. He remained rigid, listening to the footsteps approaching the hall.

  Sau’ilahk thought he heard something and turned quickly. He saw nothing, but he was not given to hearing things that did not exist. He drifted to the hall’s center and then heard something else.

  Footfalls and voices carried from the hall’s entrance.

  It could only be Chuillyon and his companions. An overwhelming hunger flooded Sau’ilahk. Feeding upon Wynn was the only greater pleasure he could imagine than draining the old elf’s life. But he could not lose Wynn now.

  Sau’ilahk rushed back to the portal archway and saw her light far down the passage.

  Ghassan peered out from hiding. Once again, he could almost not believe his eyes. Three elves in travel attire stepped through the hall’s broken doors. The oldest of them led the way, followed by a tall, younger male and a beautiful female.

  Ghassan fixed on the leader. He had seen that one many times whenever Duchess Reine of the royal house of Malourné had come visiting at the guild branch of Calm Seatt. He had heard the old one’s name mentioned once or twice, and he tried to remember.

  Chuillyon? What was an advisor to the royals doing in Bäalâle Seatt? It was certainly no coincidence.

  “Look at their size,” the woman breathed, gazing up at the massive statues. Beautiful as she was, she looked thin and exhausted, nothing like the hardened traveler Wynn had become.

  Ghassan spoke Elvish well enough, and hoped he might learn more than expressed awe over the work of ancient dwarven artisans.

  “This way,” the younger male said, heading for the open portal.

  Chuillyon slowed, glancing back at the hall’s right end. He finally nodded and continued on with the others. The trio passed through the portal.

  Ghassan exhaled in frustration. He now had more than one interloper between himself and Wynn.

  Chane kept close as Wynn followed Ore-Locks. He gauged that they had gone down another two levels before the passage stopped at another sealed portal. There had been no further side passages along the way. Chane had a strange feeling that they had reached the end of their long descent, though he could not fathom why.

  Perhaps it was the look of finality on Ore-Locks’s face as the dwarf hesitated before that portal.

  “What’s wrong?” Wynn asked.

  “Nothing,” Ore-Locks answered.

  The dwarf passed through the iron and, within seconds, the familiar grinding sound began.

  Chane had not expressed his suspicions aloud, like Wynn, but he had become increasingly wary. Ore-Locks seemed to know exactly where to go and the correct sequences to open all portals. It was too easy, too convenient.

  As the last of the triple iron panels slid into the arch’s frame, Chane pushed past Wynn, stepping inside another great hall. But he instantly spotted its difference.

  In place of the stone effigies there were huge basalt likenesses of coffins sealed with carved representations of iron bands. Chane knew where Ore-Locks had brought them, for he had been in a similar chamber below Dhredze Seatt.

  This was another chamber of the Lhärgnæ . . . the Fallen Ones.

  Chane hung back, blocking Wynn’s entry, until Ore-Locks moved off. When he glanced back, Wynn was peeking around him. She paled at the sight of those basalt coffins.

  He finally stepped forward, noticing that this chamber was in even worse shape than the hall of the Bäynæ. The left and right end walls each bore the same strange breach he had seen above—except the one on the left was wide, and the one on the right was taller and slightly narrower.

  Though the stone coffin effigies were at least three times the size of those in Dhredze Seatt, two showed multiple fractures, and a third was half-shattered into chunks that lay across the floor. Again, there were fewer of them than in Dhredze Seatt.

  Chane walked farther in, looking for any passage to another chamber or hall where one more effigy might have been set apart. There were no openings. They had truly reached a dead end. He turned to find Wynn examining the engraved, oblong panel on a basalt coffin. Her brow crinkled as if in deep concentration or thought.

  Chane could guess at her concern.

  She had followed Ore-Locks into the bowels of this dead seatt, and not a single clue or hint to the orb’s whereabouts had been uncovered. Instead, they stood in this last hall, in the Chamber of the Fallen, with nowhere left to go.

  “The symbols are worn, old, and hard to comprehend,” she whispered. “But I’ve made out their titles, at least.”

  “Is Avarice here?” he asked.

  Avarice was one of the Fallen Ones who she had learned of at Dhredze Seatt in tales of Feather-Tongue’s exploits.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He must have come later.”

  Ore-Locks had not bothered even glancing at the coffins. He stood before the wider breach in the hall’s left end, looking into it. Then he walked the hall’s length, as if to do the same at the other end. Wynn watched his every step.

  Her eyes turned so bleak, Chane could barely stand to look at them.

  “It’s not here,” Wynn said, her voice breaking with su
dden catches. “The orb isn’t here . . . and there’s no place left to go. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere above, or worse, in the upper levels, buried where I cannot find it.” She closed her eyes, leaking tears. “I’ve lost.”

  Chane pulled her toward him, not knowing what else to do. She dropped her forehead against his upper arm, gripping his cloak, his arm, and burying her face.

  He hurt for her pain, but he was not sorry she had failed.

  He was not sorry at all.

  Suddenly embarrassed, Wynn released Chane’s arm and pulled away, completely uncertain of what to do next. The thought of leaving empty-handed was too much after all this. She couldn’t even look up at Chane, though she felt him watching her expectantly. She knew exactly what he wanted to do—just leave.

  She turned her head and spotted Ore-Locks still standing by the taller, right-end breach. Why had he brought them down here after his futile attempt to find Deep-Root in the caves of the honored dead? He hadn’t even looked at the basalt coffins of the Fallen Ones. Perhaps he knew what she would find: Deep-Root wasn’t here either. Ore-Locks’s ancestor had fallen for the atrocity committed here.

  She stepped away from Chane, but he reached after her.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “This is over.”

  Evading his grasp, she went to the left-end wall and looked into its wide breach. Inside, another dark, raw shaft ran both up and down. She shuffled down the chamber, all the way to Ore-Locks.

  The previous pale anguish on his face had been replaced by confusion. Obviously, he hadn’t expected to find a dead end. Something final, perhaps, some last discovery, but not this.

  “Not here,” he whispered. “How could they not be here?”

  Those words sharpened Wynn’s awareness.

  Ore-Locks was too focused in his task and far too knowledgeable for someone who’d never been inside this seatt. But someone else had been here—Ore-Locks’s ancestor, that spirit who had supposedly called him to serve among the Stonewalkers.

  Did that treacherous mass murderer guide Ore-Locks’s steps?

  Wynn’s fear and revulsion of him magnified. In the face of her own failure, she lashed out at him.

  “What are you looking for?” she demanded. “Deep-Root wasn’t among the honored dead—he couldn’t . . . never will be! So, what are you after now?”

  Ore-Locks’s red hair was dirty and wild, even bound back as it was. The beginning of a beard showed on his jaw. Confusion vanished from his face, and he turned on her in equal anger.

  “His bones! Why else would I endure your ignorant judgments . . . endure traveling with that?” He pointed at Chane. “I found no truth here, but at the least I could have put him to rest. Now I cannot even do that.”

  Wynn stared at him, not knowing what to think. Everything Ore-Locks said sounded almost honorable, as if Chane had been right back in Dhredze Seatt. When Ore-Locks had come at her that night she’d found the coffin effigy of Thallûhearag, he had denied that his ancestor was that monster. If only he didn’t wish to honor one who’d murdered thousands, tens of thousands. But if his ancestral spirit called to him now, deceived and used him even unwittingly, Ore-Locks still couldn’t be trusted.

  “It cannot end like this,” he whispered.

  No, she thought, it cannot.

  Holding her crystal high, Wynn stepped to the tall breach, leaning in, and her heart jumped. This one wasn’t a shaft.

  “Did you look inside here?” she asked.

  For an instant, Ore-Locks didn’t appear to understand. All breaches so far had exposed raw, vertical shafts. Blinking, he gripped one side of the opening, pushing in beside Wynn. They both peered into a rough tunnel running off left and right from the opening.

  Wynn’s light only showed perhaps forty or fifty paces either way. The wall had certainly been broken by pressure when the mountain fell. She stepped into the raw tunnel, its floor as rough as the walls, and looked back as Ore-Locks followed.

  Shade stood beyond the opening with her ears flattened and jowls twitching, and Chane glowered, his eyes narrow.

  “Are you coming?” Wynn asked.

  CHAPTER 24

  To Chane’s dismay, the tunnel behind the breach went on and on, deeper into the mountain. Each time he thought Wynn’s perilous mission was finished, it began all over again. Worse, this tunnel was nothing like the ones above.

  Roughly hewn, it had been gouged out in a rush, rather than skillfully excavated. Had someone been left alive after the seatt’s fall? If so, why dig here, farther into the mountain’s depths? Even more puzzling, the tunnel was surprisingly wide and without any supports, but the ceiling appeared sound. Chane could have driven a horse and wagon down this passage.

  Ore-Locks still led them. Although his manic drive had resurfaced, he appeared less certain of his way, advancing more slowly. Wynn stayed right behind him, her breaths coming too quickly. When she looked back, her lips were parched.

  “Drink,” Chane said, pulling the water skin off his shoulder.

  She took a long swallow and tapped Ore-Locks’s shoulder. When he turned, she handed him the water skin. Once he’d finished, she dropped to her knees, set down her staff, and poured water into her hand.

  “Here, Shade.”

  As the dog lapped, Chane noticed even deeper gouges in the wall. He took a few steps past Ore-Locks.

  “Look here,” he said.

  Wynn joined him, holding out her crystal near the tunnel’s wall. In some places, three gouges ran parallel, each one so deep they made no sense. Multiple strikes along the same lines would have been necessary to cut paths so deep, but to what purpose? He remembered the blackened wall in one tunnel far above, and the human corpses.

  “I do not like this,” he said.

  “I know,” Wynn whispered.

  He knew nothing would stop her but another end to this new route. When she retrieved her staff, Ore-Locks moved on. Within twenty paces, the floor became cluttered with debris, and their progress slowed.

  Chane looked ahead over Ore-Locks, trying to see how far the tunnel stretched, and then Wynn gave a small cry. She fell forward on the tunnel floor, and Chane moved quickly to help her, but Shade dodged around him, trying to get to her first.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I just tripped.”

  She pushed up onto her knees and reached back, pulling something long and dark out from under her ankle. Dropping it instantly, she scrambled up.

  Chane leaned over with his crystal for a closer look. It was a bone, big enough to wield as a club, and so aged that it had blended with the debris.

  “Not from a dwarf,” he said. “Thick enough, but far too long.”

  Ore-Locks waited ahead, but for the first time since Wynn had entered this rough-hewn passage, her eyes glowed with that old, familiar excitement.

  “It’s not human, either,” she said quietly. “When I had access to the ancient texts, I found a mention in one of Volyno’s writings that the enemy’s forces may have tried to come in from beneath the seatt.”

  The knot in Chane’s stomach returned. “What mention?”

  “It was difficult to make out, and he also wrote ‘of Earth . . . beneath the chair of a lord’s song . . . meant to prevail but all ended . . . halfway eaten beneath.’ ”

  “Eaten?”

  “Ore-Locks, wait,” Wynn called out. “Shade, come help me.”

  Chane was lost for a way to stop her as she dug through the rubble. Shade whined once and sniffed the debris, then huffed, scratching for Wynn to come look.

  Puzzled, Ore-Locks came back. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for . . . here!” Wynn exclaimed.

  She held up a large skull, having to use both hands. Chane took it from her.

  Its back half was gone, and it was heavier than expected. When whole, it might have been the size of a mule or horse’s head, but it was not shaped like any equine beast. Neither was it human or dwarven. Huge eye sockets were set wide to the skull’s
sides, and the long upper jaw was lined with a few remaining, needlelike teeth.

  Chane had never seen anything like it.

  “What was it?” Wynn asked.

  “I do not know,” Ore-Locks said.

  “It must have been part of the enemy’s forces.” Wynn’s excitement grew again. “That means it was down here for a reason.

  “But did it come before or after the seatt fell?” she ventured, as if talking to herself.

  Chane could see her mind working, and did not like it. “Either way, more important is how it died,” he countered.

  He looked to those three deep and long gouges in the wall. Shade huffed again, still digging in the debris, and this time Ore-Locks leaned over to grasp what the dog uncovered.

  “I know this one,” he said, holding up what was little more than the upper portion of a skull’s face. “Shlugga . . . what you call a goblin.”

  Even Chane knew of goblins, having encountered a pack on his journey across the world to find Wynn. She had told him that some sages believed the Ancient Enemy had used these two-legged beasts during the war.

  He kept his thoughts to himself. Unlike Wynn, he had never believed any war could have covered the world enough to blot out history. Before the Guild of Sagecraft, history would have always been a fragmented thing, subjected to “revisions” according to the desires of those who preserved it. But the scale of destruction and death here was beyond any territorial conflict exaggerated over ages to mythical proportions.

  Multitudes had died here over a short period of time, at a guess. He could not help wondering what had happened. And what of these foreign bones in this deep, raw tunnel? What had made those distinct, deep gouges in the wall, and why?