wouldn't it be easier to sink a new shaft from outside?' 'You'll see, Nephew. The Fifth Deep doesn't obey all the rules you're accustomed to.' 'What?' Sevaera merely smirked.
She was too smug by half. The long descent ended. A wide tunnel through the naked rock beckoned. They moved forward and, almost immediately, the nature of the tunnel changed. The lift shaft and all the tunnels above shared traits of recently excavated stone, with sharp edges, exposed facets, scratches, and blast marks. But the tunnel they now traversed was smooth, as if worn by extreme age or perhaps the passage of water. Stalactites reached down from above, white with calcite, and the left wall was thick with delicate boxwork, something normally found only in unworked caves. 'You've found a natural cavity!' exclaimed Warian. 'True, as far as it goes,' replied Sevaera. The passage opened into a wide, domed cavern. 'What's this?
Is that a building?' asked Warian. Ancient structures, half excavated, stood revealed in the light of brilliant mining torches. The ruins were so ancient, they nearly seemed natural formations of the cavern.
Worn and skewed by unknown ages, half walls emerged from the grasp of the stone. The visible structures were composed of purple stones, but they reached up from the detritus of millennia, tracing a broken, unknowable floor plan below the earth. The recent excavation ranged over the entire cavern, but even to Warian's inexpert eye, it was clear that more still lay buried than had been pried free by the work of pickaxe and rock knife. Several natural passages meandered off the wide cavern, some lit, others dark. 'We think this was an old Imaskaran compound,' said Sevaera, 'hidden here for thousands of years.' Warian nodded, studying the cavern. He could see small outcrops of the very crystal from which his arm was fashioned, and from which all the plangents drew their greater-than-human abilities.
The bits of raw crystal he could see from where he stood had to be worth a fortune. 'Seems kind of wasteful to let all this crystal lie about, unless…' Sevaera nodded. 'Yes, we've found a much purer, concentrated source. Shaddon says we no longer need to sift through the dirt and blast through rock-we have access to as much pure crystal as we'll ever need. This pure vein was what allowed the plangent project to move forward.' 'Hmm.' Warian cocked his head sharply toward one of the darkened tunnels. Had that been a scream? His aunt hadn't reacted-but the porter also looked curiously at the dark tunnel entrance. 'Aunt, did you hear that?' 'Nothing for you to worry about-we're late, and Shaddon is waiting.' So saying, the woman moved purposefully toward another tunnel. Warian shrugged and followed. The porter brought up the rear, still hauling the baggage. They passed a few dozen side passages, heard a few more worrying noises, and once passed through a mass of air so putrid that Warian had to pull his shirt up across his nose and mouth to filter it. Eventually, they reached another chamber. Unlike the previous excavation, this one was divided into two areas. One section had been extended by miners, or his grandfather's magic. The newly carved space was expansive and contained numerous wooden workbenches. About half the benches were neatly arrayed with tools of various types that resembled jeweler's and sculptor's adzes, hammers, and carving tools. The other benches contained the same, plus chunks of crystal mounted in vises, each partly carved to resemble some portion of human anatomy. Warian saw a preponderance of hands, arms, and legs, but also strangely sinuous crystal sculptures. These seemed uncomfortably organic, like something one might confine inside a human body. Looking at them made him feel faintly sick, because he knew that they were probably meant to replace natural organs. It struck him as insanely dangerous now that he saw these raw, unfinished prostheses. A doorway stood open at the far end of the work area. Warian turned to look at his aunt. How many of these internal implants did Sevaera carry? How much living tissue had she sacrificed to become a plangent? His aunt, watching him, misinterpreted his stare and said, 'Soon you'll be updated, Warian, and become fully plangent, like me.' Her smile was absolutely predatory. He swung around and looked at the natural portion of the cavern. It was bare but for a ring of ancient standing stones. Each menhir rose between ten and fifteen feet in height. A gap of perhaps five to ten feet between stones allowed access to the interior, which was empty. But… Dimness inhabited the ring's center, despite several brightly burning torches mounted just beyond its periphery. It was as if the light were having trouble reaching past the stones to illuminate the center. 'Is that some sort of ongoing spell?' Warian asked. Several steel carts with wide metal wheels stood lined up along one wall. Ruts in the floor revealed that the carts had entered and exited the ring many times. But there was just enough room for one cart inside the ring. Most of the carts were coated with crystalline dust. Sevaera said, 'I suppose it's a spell of a sort. It's a permanent source of magic that opens a door to somewhere else! The portal is a trade secret of Datharathi Minerals. We're mining extraplanar material, crafting it into prostheses of various types, and selling it in Vaelan to rich nobles and merchants. We're making a fortune, and we've only just started.' 'Where does it lead?' asked Warian. 'Where do you think?' snorted Sevaera. 'Somewhere strange, somewhere odd-someplace no one else has access to. We've cornered the market on the crystal.' Warian squinted at the stone circle, trying to catch some hint of the realm beyond it. 'Not now,' said his aunt.
'We're late for a meeting.' She turned to the right and walked past the workbenches and the prostheses, toward an open door. Warian wondered where all the miners had gone, as well as all the artisans that must have been diligently carving the crystal displayed on the workbenches. Perhaps the mine was between shifts. Through the doorway was a small corridor that emptied into a decorated chamber.
Book-filled cases, leather stools, warm magical lamps, and wall hangings concealed the fact that the room was far below the earth. But a thick coating of webs covered most of the ceiling and the corners of the room. This feature seemed ominously out of place to Warian. A high-backed leather chair commanded the room's center, facing away from the door but toward a great, multifaceted orb. The orb was carved of crystal, and it hung suspended on an iron chain. Warian gasped when he saw that each facet glowed with a separate image, as if from a different viewpoint. It was a riot of moving pictures, impossible for him to look at for long. 'What is that?' he asked. The chair turned from the orb, and a figure rose from where it had been seated. It was his grandfather, Shaddon Datharathi, of course. But a much-altered Shaddon since Warian had seen him last. Warian gaped at the changes, unable to take his eyes from the glittering crystal facets of his uncle's new flesh. 'Welcome, Warian,' said Shaddon. 'You and I have much to discuss.'
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thormud was sick, but wouldn't admit it. He could be such a witless, obstinate knob, reflected Kiril. Sometimes he acted just like a… a dwarf! She shook her head and spat. Kiril didn't share an automatic dislike of the only other populous, long-lived mortal race of Faerun, as did some elves she could name, but sometimes you had to call it like you saw it. The bitter taste of whisky from her last mouthful sustained her, but it didn't wipe away the darkening flush on her employer's face, or dry the perspiration from his brow. The jouncing stride of their mineral destrier added to the dwarf's discomfort. They ascended a winding, narrow pass between the Giant's Belt mountains on their right and the Dustwall on their left. But worse than the summoned destrier's gait was the unrelenting sun. Kiril mopped the dwarf's brow again and adjusted the impromptu shade she'd erected over his seat. Thormud was sweating so much, she could hardly keep him from dying of thirst. 'Tell me again why you've decided we should travel by day instead of night as you were previously so fond of?' she asked the dwarf. 'Prince Monolith thinks it best,' was all the dwarf had the strength to say. 'Stuff Monolith,' she muttered, but acquiesced without further argument, as she had on the previous two instances when she'd brought up the same point. Because of the shadowy, voidlike power of whatever lay beyond or through the crystals, Prince Monolith thought it better to travel by day, when that influence might be weaker. Prince Monolith stalked ahead of the destrier, following the narrow rut that served as the trail over the pass. They had not yet met another traveler. Given the steepness of the trail and the sheer drops to either side of the switchbacks they zigzagged up, Kiril wasn't surprised. The rut traced a crevice between a wooded slope on their left and an open drop to their right. The drop fell away into a vast gorge-far at the bottom, a river snaked and foamed in its bed. Beyond the river valley, another mountainous rampart rose, equaling and exceeding their current height. The jagged range taunted time itself, and the slow, eroding winds and water plied their work upon it. Straight ahead, across the river valley, rose the slopes of an even taller, broader peak. Its base was hidden in forested foothills, but most of the mountain rose skyward, free of any covering of greenery. Instead, the highest portions of the peak were clothed in the white of eternal ice. The sun on the snow dazzled Kiril's eyes, and she dropped her gaze away from the miles of towering rock. She'd see it a lot closer soon enough. Despite their pledge of daylight travel, clouds blew in from the west and caught them at the highest point on the pass the next day, just as they moved beyond the last of the scattered, skeletal trunks bearing needles on only one side that hardly qualified as trees. Whiteness enveloped their vision-the belly of
