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
