Winterheim it-3

by Douglas Niles

  “That is what I intend to find out. I shall go to the temple again in the morning. There I will pray to the Willful One and hope that he favors me with illumination. My lord husband, I am convinced that this is a real opportunity. Trust me, the axe is nearby!”

  “I trust you,” he said, lying. “Let me know as soon as you learn anything else.”

  “Certainly, Sire, I will,” she replied, bowing her head meekly.

  “Very well. Now, I intend to retire early tonight,” he said, pushing back his chair, rising to make his escape. It was only then that he remembered the subject raised by Captain Verra, a matter that could benefit from his wife’s unique skills. “One more thing, my queen?”

  “Yes, Lord King?” Stariz waited expectantly.

  “Have your contacts reported any rumblings about unrest among the slaves-more than the usual, I mean? Do you have any indications of a possible uprising?”

  “I cannot say that any such reports have come to my attention, not in the immediate past,” she replied. “Of course, there were those treacherous smiths I discovered in the foundry last fall, but we put them to death at the Sturmfrost feast, you recall. Why do you ask this? Have you heard a rumor?”

  “Just something from one of the grenadiers-a good officer. He said that there was some unusual activity in the Nobles’ Marketplace, and he wondered about some of the slaves there.”

  “Interesting. It is a place where the humans mingle with little supervision,” Stariz said. “I agree, it’s a potentially dangerous situation. I will look into the matter at once.”

  “I knew you would,” said the king, content that the issue was in capable hands. He exited the dining room with a bounce in his step, ready to get a good night’s rest.

  After the way Thraid had been working him, Gonnas knew, he needed it.

  Strongwind waited until everyone in the apartment was asleep. Brinda, the last to retire, had blown out her lamp a half hour earlier, and he could hear the measured breathing coming from behind the curtain where she and her husband shared a pallet. Slowly, quietly, the Highlander rose to his feet and padded out of the slave quarters into the great room. He pulled the outer curtain closed over the slaves’ alcove, and ignited a small oil lamp.

  Next he pressed his ear to Thraid’s door, satisfied to hear the sonorous snores that meant his mistress was drowsing deeply. He was relieved that she had demanded a drink after her bath and that he had had the foresight to make it very strong. He hoped she was sleeping very soundly.

  Finally, he looked around, wondering where to start his search for the secret door. He ruled out the walls of the kitchen, since they fronted the courtyard. Likewise Thraid’s bed chamber-one wall of which abutted the street outside.

  One possibility was the great room, another was a wall of the social parlor, and a third was the storeroom. All of these abutted the bedrock of the mountainside and could provide cover for a hidden passage.

  He started in the great room, holding the light close to the wall, grateful that the furnishings were still spare and that nearly the whole stone surface was bare. He spent a long time going back and forth, probing with his fingers, studying each irregularity, looking for some evidence of a crack, a breach, any kind of opening. After a half hour he was forced to conclude that the surface was solid stone.

  Next he moved into the storeroom, pulling the door shut behind him, then turning the lamp wick up to its full height. He repeated the inspection on the two walls of the chamber that allowed possible connection to the city’s mountainous bedrock and once again failed to find any indication of a concealed passage. After refilling his lamp from the barrel in this chamber, he turned to the small parlor.

  The parlor had three walls joining other rooms of the apartment but one surface adjacent to the mountain. Once again he pulled the door shut behind him and turned up the lamp to full brightness. The room was unfurnished and-in his estimate-hardly ever used. His attention was immediately drawn to the bearskin hanging on the wall, the only decoration of any kind in here.

  As soon as he pulled the pelt aside, he knew he had found his secret panel. The outline of a door was faint, but he could clearly see a deep crack.

  The portal seemed securely set in its frame, but he knew there had to be a way to open it. He turned his attention to the small alcoves set in the wall, perches for the lamps that were a feature of every house and every room in this subterranean city. There were two of them here, each with an iron bracket mounted in place. He reached into the alcove closest to the door, took hold of the bracket, and gave it a twist.

  Immediately he heard a rumble of grinding stone, and with a touch to the bearskin he felt the wall behind the pelt sliding away from him. After a few seconds the sound, which was too faint-he hoped-to rouse any of the sleepers, ceased. Pulling the skin to the side again, he observed a narrow hallway revealed, extending only a couple of steps before it became a steep, narrow stairway leading up.

  Quickly Strongwind adjusted the bearskin then turned the bracket to slide the door closed again. He was certain the route led all the way to the top of Winterheim, to the Royal Level, possibly the king’s own apartments. He didn’t know yet how he would take advantage of his discovery, but he doused his lamp and went to bed on his own pallet feeling that he had learned something very important, something that would prove to be quite useful indeed.

  14

  Paths of Stone and Shadow

  Kerrick limped past a row of dead humans, the bodies arranged by the survivors with as much dignity as they could manage. The elf was sore, badly bruised in many places on his body, but he could not ask Dinekki for help. Her precious store of healing magic was expended on those with broken bones or ghastly wounds, and in this way she saved the lives of a score of valiant warriors before she collapsed from utter exhaustion.

  “How many more are hurt badly?” asked Kerrick, looking first to Moreen, who shook her head, still trembling from the aftereffects of the fight. Next he turned to Bruni, who was carefully re-wrapping the Axe of Gonnas, handling the artifact with great, even reverent, respect.

  “A few bruises,” the big woman said, moving her left arm through a stiff circle. “Nothing’s broken, though.”

  Other warriors were moving around, bandaging wounds, collecting scattered arrows. The humans had quickly realized that those who had fallen into the chasm were utterly lost, the bodies beyond retrieval.

  The survivors of the war party had all filed into the cavern. All of the ogres had been slain and their bodies dumped into the crevasse, but the cost of victory was dire. Some thirty-five humans had lost their lives in the frantic fight. Three more were terribly wounded, unable to walk, and though it broke their hearts the others knew they could only leave them behind to die. Each of the three had declined the shaman’s healing magic, knowing that it would be better used to restore some wounded fighter to health than to merely allay the suffering of those who were inevitably doomed.

  The elf knelt beside Barq One-Tooth, who still lay flat on his back beside the crevasse. The Highlander thane was breathing, but his eyes were closed, and his face and beard were sticky with blood. Kerrick took a bit of water from his canteen and sprinkled it on the man’s face, eliciting a grunt of awareness. Carefully the elf tried to rinse away some of the blood.

  “I think his nose might be broken,” he noted. “He took quite a punch to the face.”

  He did his best to pull the thane a little farther away from the drop-off. A few minutes later Barq was sitting up, mopping his bloody beard with a rag, shaking his head groggily.

  Kerrick grimaced at the sight of the burly Highlander’s face. The thane’s nose was smashed nearly flat, while bruises had extended to black circles around both of his eyes. His lips were puffy and swollen, like two ragged sausages plastered across the gateway to his mouth.

  He snorted in reaction to Kerrick’s expression. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone who lost a fight before?” growled Barq.

  “We won-and that was
a brave charge you made,” the elf remarked.

  “Never took a hit like that before,” Barq grunted. Only then did he look around curiously, finally standing up and hobbling to the edge of the precipice, staring down into the shadowy depths. “The big one-he’s down there?”

  Kerrick nodded.

  “How did you do that?” wondered the thane.

  “I needed to use the Axe of Gonnas,” Bruni said. “The flames startled him as much as anything, and he lost his balance.”

  “Did you notice the way he stared at it?” Kerrick asked. “It was entrancing to him-as if he loved that axe!”

  “Not for long, he didn’t,” Moreen remarked wryly.

  Barq nodded again, soaking in the information. “Nice work,” he acknowledged, finally, “all of you.”

  “You, too,” Moreen said. “We make a good team.”

  Barq didn’t seem to be listening. His eyes widened as he probed his gums with his tongue then reached up to feel inside his mouth with his broad, blunt fingers. He exclaimed something that sounded like “Ai oof!”

  “Looking for this?” The chiefwoman leaned down and picked up a golden chip that was lying on the stone floor, holding it. Barq One-Tooth groaned as he saw it, holding it up close to his face and examining it glumly.

  “We’ll have to call you Barq No-Tooth for the time being,” Kerrick observed, drawing an angry glower from the hulking Highlander.

  Apparently he lacked the spirit to argue, however, for he simply placed the loose gold tooth in a small belt pouch and went about collecting his backpack, which he had cast aside early in the fight.

  “Here-spread this across your nose and your cheeks.” Moreen gave him a small jar of the healing ointment Dinekki had brought. They had a small supply of the stuff remaining, which was useful mainly for minor wounds.

  The fighters were exhausted from their long climb and the intensity of the brief battle, but they loaded up their gear, re-ignited their torches, and started to follow the cavern that curved and twisted away from Icewall Pass. Bruni led the way, followed by Kerrick and Moreen, with the limping and bruised Highlander joining the rest of the warriors in the shuffling column. Barq cast frequent glances behind them, sharing Kerrick’s irrational dread that perhaps the monstrous ogre guardian might not be dead.

  It was a weary and dispirited group that made its way farther into the cavern. Dinekki was carried by Bruni, who supported the elder shaman like a baby, cradled against her chest in both of her brawny arms.

  For an hour they made their way deeper into the Icewall cavern, following a fairly wide passageway with a smooth floor that was, thankfully, free of any further obstacles. Finally exhaustion compelled a halt, and at a wide spot in the corridor the weary warriors stretched their bedrolls on the floor and tried to find space to rest. However, many of the men and women sat staring, eyes fixed upon remembered images. Sleep proved to be a very elusive comfort.

  The torches sputtered and failed until only a few of the brands still flickered. Kerrick found himself restless and uneasy, and as he had on the faraway hill before the Tusker Escarpment, he pushed himself to his feet and wandered along the periphery of the war party.

  He heard an annoyed shout and turned to see a big Highlander holding the gully dwarf, Slyce, by his neck.

  “Little bugger just stole the last of me warqat!” growled the man. “I oughta punch him clear back to the White Bear Sea-knock the lights out of him!”

  “Looks like he’s already pulled the shades,” the elf remarked, seeing the little fellow’s eyelids close droopily.

  “Hmmph,” snorted the warrior, his rage apparently dissipating in weariness, or despair. “Stone drunk-wish I could join him there.”

  He cast the gully dwarf against the wall, where Slyce collapsed and started snoring noisily. The Highlander ended up stretching out next to the pudgy little fellow, and using his chest as a pillow, he was soon snoring his own accompaniment.

  Here, in the underground passage, Kerrick probed ahead of the group, allowing his elven eyes to penetrate regions of pure shadow, places that would have been utterly dark to the humans. It was a relief to get away from the torches, which sizzled and flared in his vision annoyingly.

  The elf wandered on, looking for something, anything, to distract him along this twisting passageway. He saw signs of serious excavation and knew that the ogres-or more likely their slaves-had labored hard to create this route through the mountain. Steps had been carved into the floor to ease the passageway in places where it descended or rose. Narrow corridors had been widened, the walls showing the marks of countless chisels and picks, so that even at its most constricted point the corridor would allow the passage of four or five ogres walking abreast.

  Before he knew it the elf had wandered a good distance away from the rest of the group. Behind him the torchlight was invisible, the faint sounds of sleep swallowed by the twists and turns of the circuitous route.

  “Nice fight,” said Coraltop Netfisher, who was leaning against one of the cavern walls, a dozen paces in front of the elf. “You really know how to use that sword.”

  Kerrick snorted bitterly. “Now you show up? It would have been too much trouble to help out, I suppose.”

  If the kender took offense, he didn’t show it. Instead, he ambled forward then reached up to rummage through Kerrick’s belt pouch. “No warqat left, huh?” he said, disappointed.

  The elf blinked in surprise. “No … but that was a good tip, to carry strong drink up the Tusker Escarpment. How did you know to tell me that?”

  Coraltop shrugged. “Know to tell you what? I thought you’d drink the stuff-never thought it would go to waste inside of a polar worm!”

  “Well, it was good advice, anyway,” Kerrick noted, “but we’ve lost nearly half our men, and we haven’t even made it into Winterheim yet. Now what do we do?”

  “How should I know?” asked the kender, with maddening indifference. He brightened, though, even smiled. “I guess it’s going to start getting interesting now!”

  Kerrick awoke with a start, sitting up on the cavern floor, his hand instinctively going for the sword that slid soundlessly from its sheath to gleam coldly in the lightless space. He was alone in a wide stretch of the underground passage connecting from the Icewall Gate, and he had somehow dozed off while sitting against the wall.

  “By Zivilyn!” he gasped in a breathless whisper. “I can’t believe I fell asleep like that!”

  He had. Anything or anyone that had come along could have killed him, and he would have been utterly defenseless.

  “Coraltop?” he asked, remembering that he had been talking to the kender in his last moments of wakefulness.

  He was not surprised to receive no answer, but when he placed his hand on the stones where his seafaring companion had been sitting, he was startled to feel that the bedrock was still warm. Perhaps he hadn’t been as defenseless as he first thought.

  “Thanks, old friend,” he said quietly.

  He was stiff and uncomfortable when he rose to his feet and felt like an old man as he hobbled back to the war party, only gradually working the kinks out of his joints and limbs. The battle with the monstrous ogre had taken a toll on him that he would feel for days, he felt certain.

  He found the group of warriors stirring, though most of them, too, seemed to be suffering the aftereffects of the fight-all except Slyce, who moaned under the influence of an obviously thudding hangover.

  “That’ll teach you to steal good warqat!” snapped the Highlander.

  “Never no more,” agreed the gully dwarf lugubriously.

  “Ah,” the warrior said, his tone softening. “It’ll wear off with a few good miles under your boots.”

  “We go on the same way?” Barq asked, squinting into the dark passage Kerrick had scouted.

  “No other choice,” Moreen said. She addressed Kerrick. “Will you lead the way?”

  “Sure,” he agreed as Bruni fired up a torch. All along the file other brands flared,
until the war party looked as if it were escorted by a legion of huge, smoky fireflies.

  With his back to the blazes, Kerrick found he could see pretty well. The walking was easy here. The passage was obviously a natural cavern, with stalactites on the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the floor in many places. Here and there the walls showed signs of chisels and hammers, where the ogres-or their slaves-had widened the route to allow for easier traversing. The floor was for the most part level, though not infrequently there were periods of steep descent. These were invariably carved with steps that, even if they were a little tall for a human’s stride, made for relatively easy descent.

  Nowhere did the cavern narrow to the constricted route that had marked the entrance. Kerrick speculated that the mouth of the gate had been left thus to make it easier to defend, while the interior had been widened and made smooth to allow for easy marching, possibly by a large contingent of ogres. The air throughout was warm and moist, much like the air in the caverns below Brackenrock. They knew this was the result of subterranean heat sources that would-also like Brackenrock-ensure that Winterheim maintained a comfortable and constant interior temperature even during the worst ravages of the Sturmfrost and the sunless winter.

  For hours the party trudged along, mostly in silence, though there were occasional hushed observations from some of the humans, awed by the vast sweep of a chamber ceiling or an exotic column of stone that seemed to have been formed from solidified mud. They came to the longest stairway of the route, a series of thirty steps that carried them steadily downward, with a broad landing after each ten tiers. At the bottom they entered a very large chamber, and Bruni and the others held their torches high. The light barely reached the walls but reflected back from enough slick surfaces to reveal a cavern that was nearly the size of Brackenrock’s great hall.

  The air was slightly cooler in here, and it felt moist against Kerrick’s skin. He looked around in a moment of silent awe and heard the gentle trickling of water. Crossing the room he found a small pool, with a stream flowing into it from a gap in the opposite wall and a little channel leading away, eventually passing through a hole in the far side of the cavern where it undoubtedly continued its descent toward the sea. Beside the pool was a wide, flat expanse of fine-grained sand. Here they decided to take an extended rest.