“I think it might be wide enough for you to fit,” he suggested to his wife. “It needs a few more inches before my shoulders are passing.”
“I’ll see what I can find, then,” Darann agreed nervously. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge that this could easily prove to be a short, dark, dead end.
She leaned sideways and slid, head first, through the widened crack. Quickly she stood up and touched off a pinch of flamestone.
“The floor’s good-fairly smooth,” she said. “A lot of stalactites overhead and some water, still flowing.” Her voice and the light grew softer as she moved farther away. Karkald heard her shout, and listened to a volley of echoes returning. Then, for long moments, there was no sound. The dwarf’s heart was pounding anxiously by the time she came back, explaining that her flamestone had expired. He had to still the shaking in his hands as he pulled her back through the opening.
“Wh-what did you see?” he demanded.
“It goes for a long way. The water seems to be coming from pretty high overhead. There are some rocks in the way, and I couldn’t get over them with one hand holding the light. Still, I could see that the cavern went on far after that, and when I shouted, the echoes lasted a long time.”
More hopeful than he had been in a long time, Karkald set to his chiseling with renewed vigor. In another two cycles he had a gap wide enough for even his broad frame. He passed through and found that there was plenty of room beyond the crack. Holding hands, hearts pounding, they departed the ledge that had served as their lofty camp. It was with a sense of impending adventure that Darann used a little flamestone to give them a picture of the route before them, while Karkald checked his tools.
“Hammer, chisel, hatchet, file. Knife, pick, rope, spear. I’m all set,” he declared, and they started into the cave.
T he great mountain of rubble completely blocked their path. Echoes sounded from high and wide, marking the barrier as almost incomprehensibly vast. Zystyl sensed, through the location of his many scouts, that the Delver army would not be advancing any closer toward Axial. Either the city had been buried by the quake, crushed beneath a mass of stone, or it was masked by this new and apparently impenetrable barrier.
As was so much of his own realm. The Delver commander had recently received word from Nightrock, his own homeland. Many of the food warrens had been destroyed by the temblor. He knew that if he had taken his army home, there would have been a critical shortage of provisions. It was not in his interests to have Delvers eating other Delvers, and so he had continued on with the campaign, striving to find a way to strike at their hated enemies.
But where could they go from here?
My master. The words came into his mind, the message from Kerriastyn, the army’s other arcane. Though she was second in command of this mighty horde, he was pleased that she knew to show proper respect to her leader.
What is it? Where are you?
I am here, high on the mountain. I have made a discovery that might prove promising.
Wait. I will reach you shortly.
Zystyl began to climb, following the rope lines that his scouts had laid earlier. He made his way steadily upward, knowing that Kerriastyn would not have reached out to him if she did not have something truly interesting to report. She was a capable leader in her own right, and would have handled any minor discovery by herself.
It was fully an hour later that the first sensations told him that he was drawing close to her. From a hundred paces away he could smell fresh blood, Delver blood. But the spoor was tainted with another stench, an animal-like odor that seemed to seep from the very rocks themselves. He heard Kerriastyn hiss, the sound a beacon drawing him through the darkness.
When he was within ten paces of Kerriastyn he could sense her excitement in his own mind, and then he could hear the rapid pounding of her heart, the giddiness of her breathing. She was standing between the corpses of two Delvers. From the probing of his mind Zystyl could see that both had been killed violently, and one was partially devoured.
“That smell… it is wyslet, is it not?” he asked, finally recognizing the animal stench.
“Yes, master,” Kerriastyn replied. “They slayed one of these Delvers and were eating him. They killed the second when he came upon the first, then fled when more of your warriors arrived on the scene.” She waited expectantly. His first reaction was to demand further explanation, but his intuition told him that he should know why this was important.
And then he did.
“Which way did the wyslets go?” Zystyl started to see the possibility.
“They ran up the hill, and vanished.”
“Indeed.” They had disappeared upward. Wyslets couldn’t fly, he knew… so they must have had a path of escape, a route into the ceiling of the First Circle.
Where could that have taken them? Wyslets needed food, and they probably had a route into and through the swath of midrock. Could those caverns take them all the way to the Fourth Circle, to a new world awaiting the cold kiss of Delver steel?
Zystyl remembered another thing that had happened in the last few cycles. He had heard hammering, steel against stone, coming from high up in the world. His best guess had placed that sound near the top of the pillar of the nearest watch station, the place he had been when the quake had rocked the world.
And he remembered the sweet taste of Seer tears, the allure of a woman he had touched, smelled, tasted, and heard. That memory still burned within him, rising into a compulsion, a need that he desperately wanted to slake. Could it be that she had escaped, that she had found a way into the vast canopy overlying their world?
It was enough to fuel his decision.
“Gather to me!” he shouted, a command that would carry for more than a mile through the vast Underworld. He would collect his army, and he would follow the path of the wyslets, knowing that there would be new routes before him, new opportunities for plunder, violence, and war.
N ow their progress was encouraging, and Karkald and Darann even felt a few moments of excitement as they were able to stride along, climbing only gradually, making their way through what proved to be an extensive network of rock-walled caverns. After some hours they found a comfortable grotto in which to sleep, and even enjoyed the luxury of a bed of dry sand.
They awakened refreshed, and continued their trek with renewed hope, finding the route steadily advancing before them. Unfortunately, by late the next cycle they had found no sign of animal nor even fungus, and they began to wonder how long they could survive here.
Abruptly they halted, both of them groping for the memory of a sound that had just barked through the darkness, barely rising in volume above the scuffing of their feet.
“What was that?” Darann whispered.
“It sounded like a shout, didn’t it?” Karkald’s reply was as soft. For a time both dwarves remained immobile and silent, straining to hear. Soon the noise was repeated, a distant cry or howl that bespoke of frustration, despair, and anger. There was something exceptionally plaintive in the sound, a sense of longing that contrasted oddly with the piercing nature of the vocalization.
“Do you think it heard us?” Darann asked.
“It must have,” Karkald replied. “We weren’t trying to be quiet.” Not that they could do much to silence their march, he groused to himself, when they were forced to pick their way over loose rubble, feeling their way.
He was startled out of his private griping by the sound of his mate’s shout.
“Hey… where are you? Who are you?”
“Are you craz-!” He hissed in outrage, but was startled into silence by the sound of a reply.
“Help! I caught! Help! Help!”
The voice echoed through the cavern, but they could discern a direction. Immediately Darann started out, until Karkald stopped her long enough to get her to touch off a light. She held the coolfyre high over her head and followed along while Karkald took his spear in hand and pointed the weapon aggressively before him.
He quickly realized that they were walking down a smooth, natural pathway. Barely two or three paces wide, it was a seamless surface of rock that twisted through serpentine curves along the floor of a large, natural cavern. Suddenly he came to a stop, as the light revealed a dark hole gaping in the floor before him.
