by D. D. Miers
"This is not just any random surfacer," Gwydion interrupted, sounding deeply annoyed. "Have you no ability to sense magic at all? This is the heir of Prince Tzarnavaras, a Queen in her own right, Godchild of Death."
There was a moment of silence from across the desk, then a clawed hand shot out to grab mine where it rested on the desk. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to startle me. I could feel something against my magic, roving like curious hands. I brought the Candle's flame forward quickly, concentrating on it so hard that for a moment its light radiated through my skin and cast a blue glow on the Dwarf's shocked face.
"Oh, oh my goodness!" the Dwarf said, startled. "I did not realize you were visiting royalty! I was told you were refugees."
"No one asked," I said primly, playing along as I yanked my hand away. "My consorts and I have been treated like mere immigrants since we arrived. As though you did not believe anyone but a Dwarf could be important!"
"That's not— we never meant to imply—" the Dwarf babbled.
"I'm certain you didn't," Gwydion cut them off sharply. "But perhaps you should allow the Queen her royal visit before you cause an international incident."
He followed this with some sleight of hand shenanigans, showing the Dwarf some 'royal documents,' which I was fairly certain were coupons we'd received in our orientation packet for "Digger Dan's Exotic Surfacer Buffet, most authentic surfacer cuisine in the Fort-ring!"
And then, finally, we were standing before the doors of the throne room. I assumed they were large and impressive. I could only see them a tiny corner at a time by the dim light of Gwydion's orb.
"Anyone else feel like maybe this is a bad idea?" Ethan whispered. I was inclined to agree, but it was too late to turn back now. The doors opened, and we stepped inside to meet the king.
The throne room was large and pitch black. The darkness seemed close and almost solid, thick as soil. The light of Gwydion's orb penetrated only a few inches around us. We stood huddled in the tiny circle of light, feeling decidedly un-royal as a Dwarf announced us as "Her Majesty the Night Queen of old Constantinople of the Ancient Line of Tzarnavaras, and Consorts."
"Your Majesty," the Dwarf said, turning back to us, the shine of their fur barely visible in the light. "May I present the Root of the Mountain, Stone-born, Whose Teeth Carved the First Caverns, Who Bled the First Iron Veins, Architect of the Undercity and Foreman of Foremen, the Father-Dwarf of all our kind and King of all that dwells beneath."
I noticed there was no proper name among all those titles. But the Dwarf retreated, and the door closed behind us, leaving us alone in the dark. If the king was there with us at all, we sensed no sign of him.
"Hello?" I called experimentally, my voice echoing in the vast room.
"Can you make that any brighter?" Cole asked, poking Gwydion's orb. Gwydion glanced at me, and when I nodded, he shrugged and the light grew brighter, pushing back the darkness around us. We saw it illuminate the delicate beautiful carvings in the floor, the elaborate subtle intricacies of the walls, things that could only be appreciated by touch, not sight. And at the end of the room, we saw a mound of dark earth that reached all the way to the ceiling, as though the back wall had simply collapsed.
And then, as Gwydion's light touched it, the mound began to move.
There were... no words to describe the Architect. In one moment, by one angle of the light, the earth seemed to draw into him, a construct like those we'd seen working all over the city. By another angle, I saw the glistening white flesh of a massive worm. By another, the fur and claws of a mole. By another, a man, or the corpse of a man, half buried, watching us with pit-like eyes.
"Out," he spoke, his voice the grinding of tectonic plates and the shuffle of soil. "Out, thou damn'ed light, and be still."
Gwydion snuffed the orb at once, saving us from the terrible ever-changing image of the Architect.
"That Sun, like a weed in my garden, I has't pried up and swallowed and alloweth its burning to suffocate in the vastness of Myself. Yet even now, shards of its hateful radiance assault me. What tender shoots push their shallow roots into my presence, still warm with bitter light?"
I couldn't see my companions to know if they were afraid or planning something. I fumbled in the darkness and caught two hands, squeezing them for reassurance. One was noticeably cool and almost definitely Gwydion's. The other, calloused and holding me loosely, on the edge of pulling away, was probably Cole.
"Forgive our disturbance, Architect," Gwydion spoke to my left. "We come in search of a criminal. My brother stole something of mine and brought it here. We seek only your guidance in his capture and your patience as we pursue him across your realm."
There was a low, rumbling sound like an earthquake, which might have been laughter.
"How foolishness cometh in threes," the Architect said. "So dost the wheel turn as it ever hath and bringeth ere me the same faces again. So do the seasons change, but a stranger season than hath yet been seen rises like a star wither all anticipated the sun. What wainright welded this new spoke in place of that two-faced axel which wast once the fulcrum of all our ceaseless cycles? Better questions, little sprouts."
I hoped Gwydion understood some of that, because I sure didn't. I'd always been more interested in Poe than Shakespeare.
"Forgive me, Your Majesty," Gwydion pushed. "But did my shadow, my brother, come here? Did he bring you something? Do you know where he went?"
"Mine is a Court of shadows, weed," the Architect spoke, the humor gone from his voice. "I am King of that primeval deep, which no light wilt ever touch. Thine candle-flicker shades art as grains of sand on the ocean's endless plane."
"My apologies, Your Majesty," Gwydion said quickly.
"Yo, did he come here or not?" Cole shouted impatiently, squeezing my hand. "I've seen your primeval deep, and to my shitty surfacer eyes, it's not any darker than this room. I'm not that impressed."
There was a long silence in which I waited for the worst. But finally, that low earthquake laugh filled the room again.
"The little green and growing things," the Architect spoke almost wistfully. "In what centuries didst I wind about their roots and brave the light to eat their softness? That time is long passed, and as those deep roots bound and broke the stones, so is my crown caught in their bramble grasp. That shadow came, thou helpless seeds, thou dandelion wisps. And brought with him a precious splinter of our old strength. But the vein split. The deep rivers seized him in their current. He is washed on the shores of shallower men, false kings and petty scribblers who drive nails into my masterwork and call it their own. These blighted begotten mistake Night for Darkness and seek to outlive all suns, by any unholy means."
"What does that mean?" Ethan asked.
"It means he's not here," Cole summarized.
"But he was," Gwydion added. "He went to the Parliament. Or was taken there."
"Son of a bitch," I muttered. "They kept telling us—"
"Another matter," the king rumbled, and the room shook. Was he moving? "The gates of the city art thrown wide, and much is forgotten. But the old law still standeth. Thy brother is a thief among thieves. Debt is owed, weed."
Gwydion's hand tightened around mine.
"It was not stolen," he said quickly. "The Glass was acquired lawfully. The Wizard Marchion purchased it from the Dwarves at the price of ten thousand slaves and the three gems of Nimüe—"
"There was no purchase," the Architect spoke, inexorable as a landslide. "The Dwarves doth not recognize such a concept. All things Dwarven-made art the property of Dwarves, until the end of all. I was there, weed! I saw it placed in those deceitful hands! Borrowed, ere the duration of her line, which died out not a hundred years after. But what was ours was not returned as it should have been. Twas stolen, hidden! Traded back and forth among thieves until it landed in thy greedy hands. And still the debt might have been forgiven if thee, who knew what ye held, had returned what was stolen. But thou hast kept it amongst your hoard, t
hou petty dragon, thou pretender-wyrm. And seek ye even now to reclaim what was never yours!"
Gwydion was shaking. I could feel the tremors in his hand, distinct from the tremors in the earth as something unimaginably massive moved at the other end of the room.
"Debt is owed. And by the law, I will accept only the blood price, the flesh price, a pound for every year twas withheld. Tell me, weed, how much dost thee weigh?"
I'd heard enough. I grabbed the orb from Gwydion's other hand and poured my power into it. It blazed to life with blue fire light. The Architect loomed over us like a wave about to crash, a dragon and an insect and a hundred-armed giant, ancient beyond all time and as inescapable as the earth all around us.
But he recoiled from the light, howling as though it burned him.
"Out!" he bellowed. "Damn'ed light! I will have it! I will smother every light within me! I will swallow every sun and every candle flame 'til I am given darkness!"
He flailed, terrible coils smashing the walls and showering us with dirt. I grabbed Ethan and ran, Cole and Gwydion close behind me.
We barreled into a Dwarf on our way out, who set up a shrill, piercing screech. It echoed all through the palace and beyond it, a chorus of screams that I knew meant nothing good for us.
I poured more light into the orb and ran down the nearest open passage. I took turns at random, barreling in any direction that seemed to be opposite the sound of the terrible screaming.
"You'll never outrun them here," Gwydion said as we ran. "They can feel every step we take. They know this place better than you know your childhood home."
"Then what do we do?" I asked. "We'll never make it back up to the surface without their help!"
Gwydion didn't seem to have an answer.
In the flicker of the wildly swinging light, Ethan shifted into his wolf shape.
"Climb on," he said, his clothes gripped in his jaws. "They can feel our steps, right? So maybe this will throw them off."
"It's worth a shot," Gwydion agreed, and I yelped as he scooped me up into his arms. Cole, looking very unsure, climbed onto Ethan's back. "Silence now. They can hear our voices just as well as our footsteps."
So, in total silence, we ran deeper into the endless dark warren of the Dwarven mines. We ran without plan or direction. When we encountered Dwarves or Constructs, all we could do was run in the other direction. I'd never felt so lost and helpless. I hadn't been this afraid of the dark since I was a kid.
Eventually, we went deep enough that the Dwarves pursuing us dwindled and disappeared. We ran on out of fear of them catching up and in the desperate hope that, somewhere in the endless tunnels of the Undercity, we'd find some way back to the surface.
Chapter 15
The tunnels around us grew rougher as we went. Gone were the benches and fountains, then the bricks, then even the columns and braces. We ran down unrefined winding tunnels that grew and shrank like natural caverns, as though they'd only recently been hewn out of the rock and dirt. Sometimes we tripped over metal tracks and heard the distant rumbling of carts. One whipped past us, unmanned and the size of a minivan, loaded with stone and ore and heading back in the direction we'd come from. When another, mostly empty and heading the other way, zipped past, I barely needed to exchange a glance with the others before we caught it and climbed aboard. It carried us deeper in, its magnetic power unslowed by the additional weight of three humans and a bear-sized wolf. Ethan shifted back among the stone bricks piled in the bottom of the cart and struggled to dress himself again, biting off complaints as the stone scraped and jabbed his bare skin.
Well, we weren't making any steps now. If anything would throw them off our trail, I hoped this would.
By the light of the orb, Gwydion squinted at the map from our orientation packets. He was the only one of us who'd managed to hold on to his, tucked into his jacket's seemingly bottomless pockets.
"We are very deep down," he whispered. "Deeper than I think any non-Dwarf has ever gone. These are new tunnels. I believe we left the last of the development documented on this map some time ago."
"So, there's probably not much chance of finding an exit down here, is there?" I asked grimly.
"An air vent maybe," Gwydion considered, rubbing his chin as he stared at the map. "But... No, it would be several days vertical climb. We'd never make it. We could find one of these carts heading back towards the Fort-ring."
"But then we'd have to deal with the Dwarves again," I pointed out. Gwydion pressed his lips together and fell silent, staring hard at the map as though if he simply looked long enough the solution would reveal itself. I exchanged looks with Cole. We were both dirty and tired. Ethan, always exhausted by shifting, looked close to dozing off.
"I know some... people," Cole offered in a low voice. "People I could call."
"No," Gwydion said firmly and immediately. "Even if you could get the rituals to work in this place, to bring something like that here would be to doom us and everyone else in this hateful pit."
"I can handle them," Cole said defensively. "I've been handling them for years."
"Or so they've let you think," Gwydion snapped. "However insidious the Fae may be, however cruel, our motivations are rarely more than selfishness and boredom. The things of which you speak are infinitely patient and infinitely malicious. They do not want. They cannot be persuaded. They have only one goal, and one intelligence solely focused on achieving it. The only way to win against such things is not to play, to never them in, and to pray they never notice you. I can promise you, whatever you have already suffered for your association with them, you will suffer worse before the end."
"Fine, Jesus," Cole threw his hands up to stop Gwydion's lecture. "It was just a suggestion. Better than dying down here or getting ripped into pieces by the king."
"No," Gwydion said, his eyes dark with terrible gravity. "Trust me. Any death the Dwarves could devise would be vastly preferable."
The cart jumped, hitting some bump in the track, and suddenly, there was light above us, so bright after the endless darkness that my eyes hurt, though it was still relatively dim. Confused, I stood to peer over the edge of the cart.
The track had entered a massive cavern, large as a stadium. The light I'd seen came from glowing channels of magma that ran through the cavern in canals carved for the purpose. Heavy and slow, it oozed down towards a central structure, some kind of furnace made of massive black stones, each alone probably the size of a doublewide trailer. All around the base of the furnace on a black platform, massive Constructs, each at least eight feet tall and made of a patchwork of stone, mud, and metal, stood working. The furnace smelted ore fed into it by carts like the one we were in, and the Constructs drew it from taps and shaped it with the hands with flawless precision, hammering it with their massive fists on anvils the size of cars.
Smaller Constructs filled the rest of the cavern, tending the magma flow, loading and unloading carts, expanding the cave with picks and shovels, and carrying the pieces the larger Constructs finished towards something behind the furnace. As the track, which ran near the top of the cavern, curved around the edge of the vast room, what they were building came into view.
It was, from I could tell, a massive wheel. Or maybe a hoop. A circle of steel and stone that would have put most Ferris wheels to shame. It seemed mostly complete, save for a keystone near the top. Constructs below swapped carved steel panels along the ring's circumference, while others on scaffolding at the peak fit in the keystone, waited for a moment, and then removed it and readied another from a long line, while below the panels were shuffled again. A single real Dwarf directed them while hunched over a massive book whose pages appeared to be thin, carved stone.
It was blisteringly hot, even from as far up as we were. I worried for a moment that we were heading for the furnace, but the track was angling down and away. It led to the floor where Constructs were finishing unloading supplies from another cart. The cart ahead of that was being loaded with scrap stone and
ore from the constant expansion, to be sent back up and around to a track parallel to the one that had carried us here, which would presumably return to whoever was supplying this venture.
"What is that thing?" Ethan asked, staring at the massive ring and wiping sweat from his brow.
"I'm not sure," Gwydion replied with a frown, also peering over the edge. "Whatever it is, it's hellaciously complicated. Look at the enchantments."
I hadn't looked that close before, but now that I trained my magic sight on it, I could see it was crawling with the most complex magic I'd ever seen. I didn't think anything I'd seen in Gwydion's collection could compare to the sheer scale of it. It was as though someone had constructed the Empire State Building out of individual sesame seeds. Every square centimeter was filled with a spell of immense power. If you removed the physical matter of the wheel, the magic that composed it would still have been too dense to see through. I was amazed, almost elated. I'd never seen anything so incredible. I wanted to touch it so badly I could taste it, to dig into those spells, take them apart and put them back together until I understood them. It was as glorious to me as seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time or walking into the Sistine Chapel. What a phenomenal piece of work, what titanic forces, the vast scope of effort and planning and labor... Feeling slightly dizzy, I sat down again.
"Have you ever seen anything like that?" I asked Gwydion, dazed.
"Once, maybe twice in all my life," Gwydion replied, and I could see he was similarly dazzled. "But to compare such masterworks would be an insult to all of them. This is art."
"But what's it for?" Cole asked impatiently. Gwydion and I hit him with the same dirty look.
"Philistine," Gwydion muttered.
"Uh, guys, I think we're going to stop soon?" Ethan warned us.
"Shit," I muttered, and scrambled for one of the bricks, ready to defend myself. The other three tensed as well, as the cart ground to a stop at last.
A Construct with the face of a cracked geode leaned over the edge of the cart. I shrieked, pulling back to hit it with the brick, but it only plucked the brick out of my hand and moved away. Other Constructs reached past us into the cart as well, lifting out bricks as though they didn't even see us. Or, more precisely, like we simply didn't matter.
