Blue skies greeted the quartet and their horses when they left the cave the next morning. Tiep complained of a headache and tired easily, but was otherwise on the mend. They put him up on Hopper and covered more ground in the morning alone than they'd covered since they'd crossed the Dawn Pass Trail.
In the afternoon, a trio of red dragons flew freely overhead-a mother and her young, by the look of them. The first time they spiraled between the peaks, Sheemzher had led a pell-mell charge from the stone ledges to the bogs where they'd cowered, dreading an attack that didn't come. The second time the dragons swooped, they held their ground and watched an aerial dance of fire and grace. By the third and fourth times, they had better things to think about and just kept walking.
The ground was rising. There was more stone, less boggy forest. Sheemzher said they could push on with torches and reach Dekanter after dark, or camp above the last bog and arrive mid-morning at their destination. Dru thought of who and what they might find among Ghistpok goblins and decided he rather wait until daylight.
No one spoke out against Dru's caution.
The night was quiet with the clouds rolling back after midnight. There was no dawn, just a gradual brightening of the gray sky. Rozt'a said she'd seen something that might have been one of the misshapen goblins shortly before she'd awakened Dru.
'Makes sense,' he said, rubbing his eyes. 'They're goblins, after all. They don't like the sun. Yesterday would have been misery for them. They'd have spent the day hiding from the light.'
Rozt'a nodded, 'Then today they're hungry and hunting. Let's get out of here fast.'
They did, but not before filling all their skins with water, all the horse nets with grass and shoots, and gathering fresh rushes and green wood poles for making torches. Dru could cast a durable light spell. It would last the better part of a day or night and he could control its brightness with a thought, but only complete fools would venture underground without torches and the natural means to light them.
After they'd gathered all their gear, Sheemzher proposed that they march straight into Ghistpok's colony.
'People good. Ghistpok good! Remember Sheemzher. Welcome Sheemzher. Welcome all.'
Dru and Rozt'a harmonized on the word 'No!' and the goblin assured them that they could get into the mines without introducing themselves to Ghistpok. There were ancient air shafts opening onto something he called the High Trail. All was going according to plan along the High Trail until they stumbled against a rockslide at an inconvenient narrows. There wasn't space to turn the horses around. The animals had to be coaxed backward to a wide spot. The goblin apologized continuously for his mistake.
Six years was a long time. Even ordinary mountains changed in that time, and Druhallen remembered what Amarandaris had told him about the futility of maps in Dekanter. Druhallen supposed the goblin had made an innocent error, but the rockslide had reignited Tiep's suspicion of all things goblin.
At least the youth was behaving like his usual self again.
Sheemzher found another path. The humans judged it prudent to send him and Rozt'a ahead to check for rock slides. They were back sooner than Druhallen expected.
Rozt'a was nearly breathless. 'You're not going to believe this, Dru,' she said.
'Another rockslide?'
'No-the mines, the ruins-I was expecting a hole in the ground, but nothing like this. There's a hollow mountain up here. You could fit Scornubel inside the ruins and have room left for a village or two.'
But the path she and Sheemzher had followed was too steep and rocky for the horses. Tiep said he'd stay behind.
'Who's interested in a hole where goblins live?'
Druhallen didn't try to explain. He scrambled ahead of Rozt'a and was breathing hard when he emerged from another rockslide ridge. The ruined mines took his breath away. All the conflict, loss, hardship, and deception that had brought him to this moment faded to insignificance-though he wished Galimer were beside him to share the sight.
Like Rozt'a, he'd expected ruins-true ruins: heaps of rubble left by miners and magicians alike, and dark doorways to the underground standing empty like so many blind eyes. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He'd forgotten that the dwarves had quarried stone from Dekanter as well as metal ore. In rough shape, Dekanter was an amphitheater; in size, the theater had been built for giants. Five receding tiers-each at least twenty feet high and twenty feet wide-rose from an irregular plain Dru judged to be a half-mile wide and slightly longer. Zig-zag patterns etched the tiers. Dru looked closer and realized they were ordinary stairways.
On the opposite side of Dekanter-across the narrows to the eastern side of the quarry-a gorge had been cut through all five layers of dark gray granite. The gorge curved and disappeared. Dru guessed it led to the Dawn Pass Trail, though in days past, surely it had been the western end of a road that wound into Netheril's heart.
Dekanter's great tiers weren't perfect. Here and there the rain, frost and snows of countless winters had shattered the quarry's deliberate structure. Streams of paler rock spread onto the lower levels. The untouched debris looked as if it could have fallen yesterday. With a shake of his head Druhallen dismissed his eyes' conclusion. Dekanter was ancient; even the scars of its abandonment were ancient.
Yet Dekanter wasn't abandoned. Ghistpok's goblins-Sheemzher's relatives-dwelt on the rubble-strewn plain at the bottom of the quarry. Their colony was a black-and-green smear across a small portion of the granite plain. Gardens, Dru thought-marveling for a moment that goblins would have the sense or skill to grow vegetables. Then common sense reclaimed his mind. The green patches weren't gardens-at least not deliberately planted crops. Ghistpok's goblins weren't farmers, they were merely living atop their garbage. What he'd taken for gardens were weeds erupting from the trash.
Dru rough-counted forty huts on the midden and one larger, stone-built structure. From their vantage, in the crease between the rectangular tiers and naturally irregular stone of the untouched mountains, the goblins were little more than dots between the huts. The stone building was as crude and ugly as any of the huts, but had the squat solidity of Zhentarim construction. He'd bet it was where the Network's minions lived while the slave trade flourished; and he almost pitied them for the stench and filth they'd surely endured.
There were more dots around the stone building than anywhere else. If power and status had run true to form, the goblin chief, Ghistpok, had moved in once the Zhentarim left. Sheemzher might blame Takers for goblin slavery, but there'd never been a slave-trade that didn't rely on the cooperation of some element within the enslaved population.
There were two other landmarks on the plain. One, slightly north of the goblin colony, was a water pool so perfectly circular that it couldn't have been natural-and couldn't have been carved out of the stone by the goblins either. The second area lay some distance south of the colony. At first glance, it resembled a wizard's conjure circle painted white on the stone, but conjury required a measure of intelligence Dru would not grant any goblin, even Sheemzher standing silently at his side.
A black spire-stone jutted out of the white circle. The Greypeaks were, as their name implied, a study in shades of gray, without a trace of pure black or white. Both the stone and its circle were out of place, ominously out of place.
'What is that?' Dru asked the goblin.
Sheemzher had been staring at his own feet and raised his head slowly. His eyes were red and watering. He didn't like sunlight, even on an overcast day, and had suffered since losing his hat, which left Dru wondering about how many goblins the nearly shadeless colony contained. Surely more than he could see among the huts.
Cupping his hands around his eyes, Sheemzher peered out across the plain.
'Beast Lord, good sir.'
Just when he thought he was getting a measure of goblin intelligence, Sheemzher would utter something unbelievable. 'The Beast Lord is a black stone?'
'Sheemzher never see Beast Lord, good sir. Ghistpok say drink wine. Ghistpok say dance. Ghistpok say sing. Ghistpok say Beast Lord come. Ghistpok say not-look, never-look. Sheemzher look once. Elva go away. Sheemzher not-see Beast Lord. Sheemzher see black stone. Sheemzher see Takers.'
Was the stone a teleportation focus? Dru asked himself and asked Sheemzher, 'Did the Takers come out of the stone? Did your wife vanish in a flash of bright light?'
'No,' Sheemzher answered, a touch of exasperation in his voice. He calmed himself. 'No, good sir. Takers under Dekanter. Takers walk. Elva walk into darkness, walk into mountain.' The goblin tapped his foot on the stone. 'Sheemzher tell already. Good sir forget, no? Sheemzher follow Elva. Here. Below. Into mountain. Sheemzher follow.
