confidence, in order to have any chance at survival. Despite the agony that ripped his back, that burned in his legs, he could not yield to his weakness.
Even with the departure of so many invaders, Zystyl had left several dozen of his warriors on the island of the watch station, including many waiting on the portico or hiding in the nooks and crannies nearby. Clearly, whatever part of the den hadn’t been destroyed remained unattainable to the two Seers.
Again Karkald found himself looking at the departing Delvers, amazed that so many of them had survived such rampant destruction. Several of the Blind Ones bore long, golden trumpets, and periodically raised them to broadcast a blast of sound through the First Circle. This time, a few seconds after they brayed another call, an answering blast rang through from the distant darkness. Moments later still another sounded, making it clear that the Delvers were all around them.
“Is there something strange about the water?” Darann asked softly. She had turned her attention to the Darksea below them. “Should it be so far away?”
Karkald was about to answer that the island’s shoreline had expanded, but when he looked again he saw that she was right-the water level was very low. It seemed that a patch of the surface farther out spiraled like a whirlpool. He limped up to realign the beacon, and there was the proof, clear in the light of coolfyre.
“The Darksea,” he whispered, awe and caution combining to mute his voice. “It’s draining away!”
Over the next half hour more and more of the sea bottom came into view. He passed the beam back and forth, and though the light reflected from many pools and lakes, it was obvious that most of what had once been the Darksea was now dry land. Even more alarming, his beacon had picked up numerous companies of Delvers, all using the trumpets to coordinate a gathering on a low rise a few miles away.
“It’s an army,” he breathed softly. “This was the start of a full-scale invasion!”
“What are we going to do?” Darann asked. The dwarfwoman’s voice was calm, but he supposed that she was still numb from the shock. At least she remembered to speak in a whisper, since many Delvers remained only a hundred feet below them.
“We can’t go down there.” Karkald stated the obvious.
“Then we go up, right?” she replied.
He nodded. It was, of course, the only option, but at the same time it made for a daunting prospect.
“We’ll have to climb for a mile or more,” he warned. “But with luck, we’ll find some caves overhead, some means of getting”-he realized with a stab of grief that he didn’t even know where they were going-“away from here,” he concluded, knowing from the pain in her eyes that Darann had experienced the same realization.
“How far?” she asked, her voice even more hushed than her usual whisper.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, panicked at this failure of knowledge. He tried to think quickly. “The beacons have a range of a few miles, and when they’re tilted upward they can illuminate the ceiling… That puts it two miles away, perhaps.”
“Can you climb that high?”
“It’s been done before,” Karkald replied, knowing that he was avoiding her question.
“And then what?” Darann asked, her bright eyes shining in the nearly pitch darkness.
He felt rising exasperation and worked hard to stay calm. “There are lots of caves up there, cracks in the ceiling leading up, into the midrock. There’ll be fungus there, and bats… maybe even pools of fish!” Karkald’s mind veered away from the dangers, the savage wyslets that prowled in the darkness and preyed on isolated dwarves, the vast stretches of bare rock with no food or water. Or the most horrible prospect of all: that they would be blocked by a thousand feet of bare, seamless rock. Such a barrier would end their hopes as certainly as any Delver blade or wyslet fang.
“The midrock.” Darann blinked, whispering slowly. “How thick is it?”
Karkald almost snorted his irritation. “How should I know?”
By the sight of her eyes he knew she was shaking her head. “You don’t understand… to Nayve. How far is it to the Fourth Circle?”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever measured it,” he replied, amazed at the audacity implied by her question. “Dwarves have made it that far in the past-though not, perhaps, since we got the coolfyre.”
“Well, maybe it’s time some dwarves tried to go there again!”
“All the way to Nayve? What makes you think we could do it?”
“What choice do we have?” Darann spat back at him. “Stay here, and starve? Go down there, and get killed by Delvers?”
“We-we won’t starve, at least not right away,” Karkald said, even as his mind, unwillingly, started to grapple with her suggestion. He gestured along a narrow ledge leading away from their perch, a path toward a barely visible crack in the rocky face. “I stored some supplies in there a half dozen intervals ago, in case I got involved in a project up on the cliff and had to spend a few cycles up here.”
“Supplies?” His wife looked hopeful. “Like what?”
In a few minutes he had retrieved the cache, a small backpack that he dropped to the ground between them. “Spare boots-they should fit you,” he announced, remembering Darann’s bare feet. “A few sacks filled with water, an empty pouch or two. Not much.” Karkald felt apologetic as he looked at the meager stash.
“That’s good!” The dwarfwoman was already pulling on the boots. “At least enough for us to get started. I can carry this, and you can carry your tools.” She stood, lifting the backpack, nodding in satisfaction as she tested the feel of the supple boots.
Karkald, meanwhile, had stopped thinking of objections. He was heartened by his wife’s enthusiasm, determined to do what he could to maintain her rising spirits. “Let’s go to Nayve, then,” he declared. “Are you ready to climb?”
With a resolute motion, she nodded, cinched the straps of the backpack, and looked up the steep cliff overhead. “Can you brighten the first stretch for a minute, so that we can see the best way to go?” she wondered.
“Yes… and we can take some flamestone along with us, enough to light our immediate surroundings for a few intervals.”
“Good. Then let’s go.”
Karkald too looked up, running his hands over his tools out of long-trained instinct. “Hammer, chisel… I don’t have a hatchet!” He almost raised his voice when he encountered the empty loop on his belt.
“It’s planted in a Delver’s forehead, remember?” Darann said wryly. She pulled something from her own waistline, and he saw that she had one of the cleavers from the kitchen. “Will this do instead?”
“I… I guess it will have to,” he replied. The cooking implement was neither as heavy nor as well-balanced as his own hatchet, but it had a similar shape and, in the back of his mind, he admitted that it would perform many of the same functions.
“Hammer, chisel, hatchet, file.” These were now in order, arrayed in leather loops around his belt. “Knife, pick, rope, spear.” And his final tools were also in place, knife and pick in chest pouches, rope around his shoulders, and spear in its tube on his back.
“One more thing,” Karkald said, as he led Darann up the ladder beside the beacon. He scooped up some of the flamestone in his hands, then trickled as much of it as he could into the loose pouches of his tunic. His wife held out a watertight sack, and he filled that as well. Then he turned the gauge on the feeder down to its tightest setting. The beacon faded to to a pale spark, barely brighter than a candle flame.
“It will last for years at this setting,” Karkald informed her. “It might let some other Seers know, sometime, that we were here.”
She nodded mutely, and he knew she was remembering her family. Could they be alive? Given the utter extinction of Axial’s lights, he knew there was very little hope.
But then Darann put her hand on his arm. “Shouldn’t we leave a message… some kind of note, to let people know what happened-to us, and with the Delvers?”
“You’re right,” he agreed immediately. “I know where to write it.”
He reached into the door of the feeder and pulled out the upper hatch, which was a thin sheet of pure gold. Removing his file, he poised it over the surface. “What should I say?”
“Give the date.”
“Year six hundred and seventy of the Tenth Millennium, interval three, cycle thirty-two, right?”
She nodded-Darann had always been better than Karkald at keeping track of dates.
