Of Truth and Beasts

by Barb Hendee

  Chane did not voice any of this to Wynn. Instead, he rose, peered down the dark tunnel ahead, and sighed in resignation. He knew they would simply move on.

  Sau’ilahk drifted to the open portal of a hall filled with immense basalt statues like coffins. This chamber appeared to be a dead end, except for the gaping breaches in the end walls, but Wynn was nowhere in sight.

  He went to look into the wide left-end breach and found a shaft going up and down. Carefully approaching the hall’s other end, he found that this taller, narrower breach led into a tunnel. A good ways down it to the right, he spotted the faintest flicker of light.

  About to slip in, he paused and looked back. Chuillyon and his companions would come soon enough. No doubt Shâodh was tracking Wynn’s group. Sau’ilahk did not want to openly engage all three elves, but neither would he tolerate their interference. It was time to do something about Chuillyon.

  But when Sau’ilahk looked down the tunnel, the faint light bobbed and winked. Wynn was moving again. There was no time to feed on Chuillyon here and now. What a disappointment, but perhaps something less personal but still deadly was required.

  A simple servitor of Air would not be enough. Fire, in the form of Light, would also be required. It needed to be encased in Earth drawn from Stone, as well. A servitor of multiple Elements, in three conjuries, would cost him dearly. Then a fourth conjury had to intertwine with the others to give his creation the necessary spark of sentience.

  He began to conjure Air. When its quivering ball manifested, he caged it with his incorporeal fingers and embedded it with Fire in the form of Light. A yellow-orange glow radiated from within his grip. Forcing his hand to become corporeal, he slammed the servitor down into the hall’s floor stones.

  Sau’ilahk’s black form wavered as exhaustion threatened to overtake him. He was only half-finished, and the final two conjuries must be done simultaneously.

  Around his flattened hand, a square of glowing umber lines for Earth rose on the hall’s floor stones. Within that, a circle of blue-white appeared as he summoned in Spirit and inserted a fragment of his consciousness. In the spaces between the shapes, iridescent glyphs and sigils of white appeared like dew-dampened web strands at the break of dawn.

  Sau’ilahk called on his reserves, imbuing his creation with greater essence.

  His hand began to waver before him. He exerted his will to remain present and straightened, lifting his hand from the floor. All glowing marks on the stone vanished.

  Awaken! he whispered in his thoughts.

  Another glow rose beneath the floor’s surface. It shifted erratically, as if swimming inside the stones. He raised his hand above it, fingers closing like a street puppeteer toying with strings, and the glow halted.

  Stones bulged over it, and that light began to emerge. It rose out of the floor like a worm as thick as his wrist. Gray as the stone that birthed it, it wriggled away across the floor. Sau’ilahk had created such a servitor once before, with a gaping maw at one end, its body a vessel for poisonous gas.

  Stop, he commanded. As it halted, he focused on its spark of sentience, and he drove it through the tall breach and into the tunnel beyond.

  Hide in the wall facing the opening. When a life passes through, expel what you hold.

  It would obey these simple instructions, drilled into its limited consciousness. Even if the two younger elves survived, without Chuillyon, they would turn back. Shâodh would insist.

  Sau’ilahk drifted into the breach, weakened but satisfied, and he turned right down the tunnel to trail Wynn.

  Wynn’s thoughts turned over and over as she followed Ore-Locks. She wasn’t as dismissive of Chane’s concerns as she pretended, but her concerns differed from his. Clearly, he suspected that something had happened here after the seatt’s fall, though just what, neither of them could say.

  “What is that?” he asked from behind her.

  She saw black on the walls and floor again, but it wasn’t the same as before. Her crystal’s light caused it to shimmer.

  “Chlaks-álêg,” Ore-Locks answered. “‘Burning stone’ . . . a vein of raw coal.”

  It crosscut their path where the tunnel floor dipped slightly in a circular hollow, as if a good deal of the coal had been dug out and removed from the floor and both side walls.

  Chane slipped past Wynn into the left-side hollow. “And again here, look.”

  Both Ore-Locks and Wynn watched Chane trace his widely spread fingers along deep, long gouges in the black wall. This time there were four parallel grooves.

  Wynn spotted places in the coal vein where it looked like chunks bigger than her head, or even Ore-Locks’s head, had been gouged out.

  “Ore-Locks, do your people use . . .” Chane began. “Do they use . . . beasts of any kind in mining?”

  Wynn blinked at such a notion. What was he suggesting?

  “No,” Ore-Locks answered hesitantly. “Not that I have ever heard of.”

  Wynn didn’t like where Chane was going with this. She glanced up the tunnel, thinking of those broken skulls. Did Chane believe something had survived the seatt’s fall, something large enough to kill anything that remained or arrived later? Even so, any creature among the enemy’s forces couldn’t have survived all these centuries with so little to feed it. Unless . . .

  Wynn began to worry. What if whatever it had been had taken away the orb for its master? Was the orb already long gone, as far back as the war? Her thoughts turned back to the few scant lines she’d read in the volume by Volyno.

  . . . of Earth . . . beneath the chair of a lord’s song . . . meant to prevail but all ended . . . halfway eaten beneath.

  Something else came to her. Before leaving the guild at Calm Seatt, she’d stumbled on a forgotten dwarven ballad with one obscure word—gí’uyllæ, the “all-eaters” or “all-consumers.” Even so, whatever had been here was either long dead or long gone.

  “A’ye!” Ore-Locks said breathily.

  Wynn swung around at his exclamation. His large hand was pressed into another depression in the coal. That hollow was so large that his hand looked small as he drew it along the depression’s inner surface. Wynn slipped in, trying to see into the hollow as Ore-Locks withdrew his hand.

  Under her crystal’s close light, the hollow’s back was smoothly cut in parallel grooves. These marks weren’t like the ones Chane implied were made with claws. These were smoother, closer together, like . . . like teeth had bitten through the black coal.

  She shook her head, reminding herself that whatever had been down here couldn’t still be here. Then she heard a low, rumbling whine.

  Shade stood off behind Wynn, not drawing near. The dog’s jowls quivered as she flattened her ears, looking at that huge hollow under the crystal’s light.

  Wynn decided not to move on just yet. Whatever happened here warranted further investigation.

  Chuillyon walked right through an open portal into a chamber similar to that of the Fallen Ones back in Dhredze Seatt. But this one was huge.

  It still surprised him that Ore-Locks was leaving these portals wide-open. Such negligence would shock Cinder-Shard, though Chuillyon certainly could not complain. He could not have opened them himself, but how had Ore-Locks done so? How could even an errant stonewalker know the combinations for locks used a thousand years ago?

  “What is this place?” Hannâschi asked, looking around with clear worry on her smudged face. “These effigies are . . . different from the last ones.”

  Shâodh examined pieces of a broken effigy lying on the floor. “What do the carved bands represent?”

  This was the first openly curious question he had asked in a long while. Chuillyon had no time to explain dwarven vices or the place of the Fallen Ones in their beliefs.

  He saw no other ways out of here except for two jagged breaches in the walls. The wider breach to the left of the entrance was just another vertical shaft, as in the hall of the Eternals. He doubted Wynn or the others had the equipment or skil
ls to climb down.

  He looked at Shâodh and asked, “Which way?”

  The glance Shâodh cast back seemed almost hostile. The young man closed his eyes with a thrumming chant. When his eyes opened, he looked to the taller, narrower breach.

  Chuillyon scowled in frustration. Perhaps he had again underestimated Wynn. As he approached, he held his crystal through the opening. It did not open into a shaft, and instead, he found a rough and raw tunnel running in both directions.

  Hannâschi came up beside him and leaned in to see around the opening’s sides.

  “Well, onward again,” Chuillyon told her tiredly.

  A shudder shook the hall’s floor, and he turned.

  Shâodh still stood among the basalt debris, but his eyes widened as he looked toward the wide breach at the hall’s other end.

  Ghassan reached an open portal and carefully peeked around its edge. There was another massive hall waiting beyond, but this one was filled with near-black faceless and formless effigies. Representations of bands were carved in the stone all around each one, but they did not keep Ghassan’s attention long.

  Chuillyon’s young male companion stood at the hall’s center, while the old elf and the female looked into a tall breach in the right wall.

  With no one looking Ghassan’s way, he slipped in behind the nearest tall, black effigy. From his hiding place, he tried to hear what the others said, but they were all quiet. In frustration, he thought of dipping into Chuillyon’s surface thoughts, hoping the old elf would not feel his presence.

  But then Ghassan heard the sound of falling rock. Dust billowed from the wide breach in the hall’s end just behind him. The floor shook and vibrated as he heard more debris tumbling down the shaft.

  Ghassan froze, ready to bolt from the hall.

  “What was that?” Shâodh said.

  A cloud of dust billowed from the wide breach in the hall’s end nearest its entrance.

  “We should move on, as this place is not stable,” Chuillyon said, and turned as Hannâschi stepped through the taller breach.

  A ripple in the tunnel’s inner wall caught Chuillyon’s eyes. He instinctively lurched back, trying to grab for Hannâschi.

  A loud hiss came as a cloud of umber vapors filled the tunnel inside the breach.

  Chuillyon covered his face with a sleeve, as the cloud enveloped Hannâschi. She wheezed and choked as he snatched the back of her cloak and jerked. Then he caught sight of a wriggling form protruding from the tunnel’s inner wall.

  Only instinct kept him clutching Hannâschi’s cloak as he threw himself back and fell. Muddy orange vapors spilled out of the opening, rising over the breach’s top lip and drifting upward. Before Chuillyon could roll off his back, Shâodh knocked his grip free and pulled Hannâschi farther out on the hall’s floor. He dropped to his knees, and she collapsed in his arms, her head lolling to one side.

  “No . . . no!” Shâodh stammered, all composure gone from his horrified face.

  Sau’ilahk saw Wynn’s glowing light ahead and even heard her voice. From what he could tell, she stood at some dark crosscut in the tunnel.

  “Keep searching,” she said, her voice barely reaching him.

  Sau’ilahk’s excitement grew. He longed to drift closer, but he was too close even now. Yet he could not bring himself to withdraw. What had she found?

  Wynn suddenly appeared to drop out of sight, as if she sank lower than the tunnel floor. By the glow of a crystal’s light, Chane and Ore-Locks appeared to be on the crosscut’s far side, and a fair distance away from Wynn.

  “What are we looking for?” Ore-Locks called.

  “Any more of the same,” she called back. “Or anything unusual.”

  Sau’ilahk’s urgency heightened. What did they search for?

  A rumble carried down the tunnel from behind him, and he could not help turning to look.

  Light spilled into the tunnel from the breach where he had planted his servitor. The elves must have come, but his stone worm could not have made that rumbling sound. He hung there, watching, until a crack like thunder echoed through the breach and down the tunnel.

  Chuillyon regained his feet, prepared to repel whatever had assaulted Hannâschi. He drew his sleeve over his nose and mouth and looked through the breach, but he saw only the rough stone of the tunnel’s inner wall through the thinning vapors.

  A crack of breaking stone filled the hall.

  Chuillyon whirled as the sound pierced his ears. More stones crashed down the chute inside the wide breach at the hall’s other end. A billow of dark dust bulged out of the opening, and a charred stench filled the hall’s air.

  It was not dust, but smoke.

  Flame bellowed out of that breach, reaching toward the hall’s midpoint. Shâodh shouted something, but the fire’s roar drowned him out.

  Before the flames had begun to die, a monstrous form crawled out of the wide breach on all fours, its bulk spreading the cloud of smoke.

  As the flames erupted, Ghassan tried running for the entrance, but he stumbled as he was assailed by searing heat. Something charged right through the fire, and he ran back behind the first effigy, rushing to its far side to see what was happening. All he saw amid the flames was something huge and four-legged, with a massive head on a long neck. It charged straight toward Chuillyon and his people.

  Wynn tensed at the thunderous echo rolling down the raw tunnel. A soft, red light filled the passage’s distant end back where the narrow breach led into the Chamber of the Fallen. But she froze before calling to the others.

  A dark silhouette stood in the tunnel between her and that pulse of orange-yellow light.

  Shade spun and lunged two paces past Wynn. The dog’s growl began to twist into something akin to a cat’s angry mewl, and her hackles rose in the light of Wynn’s crystal.

  Wynn’s mind went numb. She knew Shade’s sounds, but she couldn’t accept what it meant, and kept whispering, “It cannot be. It cannot be.”

  Wynn couldn’t take her eyes off the black figure framed by the orange glow farther up the tunnel. Then a crack of stone erupted behind her, followed by the sound of falling rocks.

  Wynn twisted about as billowing dust and dirt rolled toward her.

  “Chane!”

  Chane was farther down the tunnel with Ore-Locks when three sounds stunned him in rapid succession. Shade let out a loud mewl of warning, and Chane shoved the cold lamp crystal into his pocket, reaching for his swords. Before he could draw them, he heard rocks falling overhead, and then Wynn cried out, “Chane!”

  A cloud of dust and loosened earth filled the coal pocket between him and her, nearly blocking out her crystal’s light.

  Chane heard rocks crashing down within that cloud, and still he lunged forward. He felt Ore-Locks grab his cloak and jerk him to a halt.

  “Let go,” he snarled.

  He turned in a frenzy, but faltered at the dwarf’s gaping mouth and wide eyes staring upward.

  Ore-Locks shouted, “It is coming from—”

  The rest was drowned in a thunder of crashing rock. Dust filled the air around both of them. Chane grew wild to reach Wynn as he looked back for her, but that choking cloud obscured everything.

  Something lashed at him out of the dust.

  He caught only a glimpse of a great, snaking tail with a barbed end, and he tried to duck. Its bulk caught him across the chest like a swinging tree trunk and slammed him against the tunnel wall. As the world darkened for an instant, he heard a metallic clang, and then Ore-Locks cried out.

  Chane crumpled to the floor as the snaking tail whipped away. He clawed at the tunnel wall, trying to get off his knees, but a sudden pain made him fear he had been broken inside. Dust began settling over fallen stones in the crosscut, and he struggled up, looking for whatever had attacked them. At first he could not see Wynn at all, for something blocked his line of sight.

  He barely made out the huge tail as its barbed end scraped the stone floor. Though the creature faced away fr
om him, he could see it was taller and broader than a draft horse. Its back nearly reached the ceiling. Wynn’s light from beyond it exposed something else shifting on its back.

  Folded leathery wings covered its upper body.

  Chane saw the glint of scales all over it, down across its flexing haunches to its taloned rear feet. But the light around it was the wrong color, orange instead of the white from a sage’s crystal.

  The creature shifted suddenly, stepping away up the tunnel with a scrape of claws.

  Chane’s panic sharpened as he finally spotted Wynn and Shade beyond the creature. But he also saw that the flickering orange glow came from far beyond them.

  “Run!” he tried to shout, but his maimed voice was drowned out by an echo of falling stones. As he drew both swords, for an instant he thought he imagined . . .

  Someone stood in the tunnel’s darkness between Wynn and the distant orange light.

  That light suddenly died, leaving only Wynn’s glowing crystal, and all that mattered to him was reaching her.

  Wynn saw a monstrous head snake out of the dust cloud, and the whole creature followed with a grinding scrape of claws upon stone.

  Shade lunged back around her, barking and snapping.

  The reptile opened its long mouth, and an acrid stench stung Wynn’s nostrils. It hissed as clear fluid spilled out of its maw. A shower of spittle sprayed out as its large, sooty rows of teeth clacked together . . . and sparked.

  “Shade!” Wynn screamed, grabbing the dog and throwing them both toward the tunnel’s far wall.

  Spittle ignited, and flame burned along the wall where they’d been standing.

  Wynn hit the far wall, toppling over Shade. She tried to keep Shade down as her staff clattered away across the floor. A curtain of fire spread along the far wall and the ceiling above from whatever the creature had spit at them. Wynn felt her forearm begin to sear.