lengths. A dagger’s length.
Darkness appeared. Chetiin seized a loose rock and shoved it into the gap. Geth drew back the pry bar and thrust it into the darkness before the stone could crack. The heavy steel squealed as it took the weight of the door. Geth drew a breath and shifted, letting the ancient heritage of his blood give new energy to his muscles before he stepped around, worked his fingers into the thin gap and pulled. Tenquis moved with him, hands resting steady on the stone, whispers rising.
The gap grew. Geth could have slipped through sideways. “Enough!” he gasped at Tenquis.
“All the way or it will swing closed on us,” said the artificer, and even those few words interrupting his whispers brought new creaking from the unseen pivots. Geth groaned again and kept pulling. Step by step, back until the mouth of the tomb gaped wide. He waited for a shout from Daavn or one of his men as they caught a glimpse of what was happening and realized they’d been tricked. None came.
“Almost there!” said Tenquis-and pulled his hands away from the door, getting out from behind it. There was a crunch and a grinding sound as the magic that had held the shattered pivots together faltered. For an instant, Geth felt the unbearable weight of the door against his arms. He pulled with all his strength, trying to hold in the straining cry that threatened to escape him.
The door shifted one last time, then ground to a stop, striking the side of the tomb with a gentle tap. Geth’s arms and shoulders felt heavy and numb. His legs trembled, but he limped around to the front of the tomb and the doorway.
Chetiin was already standing in the shadows, poised at the top of a dark staircase. Tenquis pulled a stone that glimmered pale as moonlight from his pocket. Geth drew Wrath. He could feel the presence of the Rod of Kings pulsing in the sword.
They stepped down into Haruuc’s tomb together, moving away from sun and into shadow. The cold stench of cave damp and slow decay rose to meet them. Tenquis’s moonstone-shedding just enough light for shifter or dar or tiefling eyes to see-revealed walls that changed from worked stone to rough, natural rock as they descended. The stairs became rougher, too, hacked out of the floor of a steep passage wide enough for two broad-shouldered men to walk side by side. The words that the hobgoblin priests had spoken at Haruuc’s funeral came back to Geth.
Traditions tell that the People were born in caverns and lived there before we emerged to fight beneath the sun and the sky. When we pass through the gates of death, we return to caverns, the womb and the grave.
The steep passage grew taller. Glints of light shone ahead, reflections of the moonstone, and they emerged into a cave perhaps twice as big as Geth’s quarters in Khaar Mbar’ost and far taller, heaped with gold and treasures.
Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat’kor sat on his throne in the midst of this tribute, both eye sockets empty now as they stared at the stone sky.
Geth stopped at the bottom of the passage and looked on the remains of the father of Darguun, haste brushed aside by a curious sense of awe. He’d watched the corpse being carried down into the tomb, had walked with it through Rhukaan Draal. Haruuc was as dead now as he’d been then, yet somehow there was a particular solemn majesty about him. It wasn’t so much the wealth that surrounded him as it was the unnatural stillness of something dead, alone in the unchanging solitude of one of Eberron’s small secret places. Geth felt like an intruder. He lowered Wrath and bent his head in a nod of respect.
Tenquis must have felt it too. He bowed low, a flourishing gesture that was distinctly tiefling. Chetiin, however, didn’t move at all for a long, long moment and it took all that time for Geth to realize that this would be the first chance he’d had to see Haruuc up close since Midian had attacked him.
When the goblin finally moved, he walked directly up to Haruuc’s seated corpse, knelt down, and opened a small chest that rested by Haruuc’s feet. From inside it, he took the ugly, crystal-set dagger named Witness-the dagger that had been stolen from him, the dagger that had killed Haruuc. He pressed the flat of the blade to his heart as he looked up at the lhesh and Geth heard him murmur, “You will be avenged, my friend.” He slid the dagger into an empty sheath on his right forearm, then turned back to Geth and Tenquis. “Find the rod,” he said.
Geth raised Wrath again and swung it around the cave. Awareness of the Rod of Kings prickled across his senses. To the left and across the cavern-the sword pointed directly at a pile of rolled carpets. Geth had to admit that it was a good hiding place. If by chance the tomb was pilfered while the rod was within, the fine but bulky carpets would almost certainly be ignored in favor of gold and gems. “There!” said Geth. He stepped toward the carpets.
Something flickered in the very corner of his vision, high up among the shadows of one wall of the cavern. Something pale, quickly obscured by the movement of something dark that gave a soft snap.
He threw himself back with a curse at the same moment a crossbow bolt hissed through the space where he’d been. It sank deep into the wood of a treasure chest. Shadows leaped across the cavern wall as Tenquis raised the moonstone. Its pale light revealed Midian, perched in the mouth of narrow crack, already sighting along the stock of a small hand crossbow once more. The gnome gave a crooked grin and winked at Geth before he squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
3 Aryth
The rocks of the ridge made a challenging hunting ground. Makka’s initial charge carried him to the arm of the ridge behind which Ekhaas, Ashi, and Geth had sought shelter, but his quarry had already vanished into the rough gray folds. At the point where a shallow gully broke the slope he paused and tested the air with flaring nostrils. They hadn’t lingered-they were moving higher. He crouched. “Get off, Pradoor,” he said. “Wait here.”
“And do what?” The old goblin woman clung tight to his shoulder. “Admire the sounds of battle? My place is with you. The age turns.”
Makka bared his teeth for all the good that it did. Her blind eyes didn’t see him. “I can’t fight with you on my back.”
“The age turns around both of us.” Pradoor’s fingers dug into him. “We serve-”
“-the Six,” Makka said through his teeth. “But the Fury puts my revenge before me.”
“Then why do you hesitate to follow her path?” asked Pradoor. “The Six reward those who serve.”
Makka snarled and rose to his feet just as rocks clattered along the arm of the ridge behind him. He whirled to find two of Daavn’s bugbear workers clambering over the crest of the slope. The other bugbears, iron hammer and pry bar in hand, paused at the sight of him. Makka tensed his ears, thrust out his chest, and growled.
The other bugbears hunched back. Their ears flattened and they ducked their heads, offering submission in the ancient manner. When Makka turned again and continued on up the ridge, they fell into line behind him. On his shoulder, Pradoor chuckled.
He felt like the leader of a tribe again. But better. Stronger. The favor of the Fury was on him.
The age turned around him.
Somewhere behind him, Daavn was shouting his name. He ignored it.
The peak of the ridge broke into a jumble of pits and crevices and more gullies, some shallow, some twice his height in depth, all of them offering hiding places. A scattering of stunted trees and bushes on the backside gave even more cover. The only figures visible were Daavn’s other workers. They saw him and the pair of bugbears that followed him and, one by one, they offered their silent submission. Makka gestured to them all with crisp movements, ordering them to spread out among the broken places of the ridge. His gut told him that his enemies wouldn’t have gone far-they would stay near the tomb.
Daavn and his hobgoblins came trotting up behind him with a clatter of armor. The warlord’s ears were back and his sword was out. “Maabet, I knew we should have killed them in the dungeon.”
Makka swung around to glare at him. “Their deaths are mine,” he said. “The Fury gives them to me.”
The guards with Daavn had the sense to flinch back, but Daavn just leaned into Makka’s anger. “If I find them first, I will kill them, gift of the Fury or not. They’re not going to stop Tariic from taking what’s-”
A weird, fluting battlecry and the sudden clash of weapons interrupted him. Makka knew the cry-it belonged to Ashi of Deneith. Shouts in Goblin answered it as bugbears converged on the crevice where the dust of battle
