Marsheila Rockwell - The Shard Axe

Sabira, unfamiliar with the term, looked at Mountainheart, who shrugged and shook his head. A response he was getting a little too much practice making of late.

“The fortunate twin?” she prompted Tysane.

“Yes. It refers to an old custom no longer considered acceptable by civilized dwarves. Twin births are generally more difficult than singletons, and one or both children are often born with abnormalities. In older, darker days, the ‘imperfect’ twin was usually cast out.” Tysane’s wrinkled face creased into a grimace. “Can’t say as I’m sorry the custom’s been abandoned, seeing as I was a twin myself, and my life hasn’t turned out half bad.”

Sabira resisted the urge to give Mountainheart a pointed glare at that, thinking of another blind child that never got the chance to find out what his life would have been like.

“So, if the mother was barren, and the daughter was a fortunate twin …?”

“Then the normal daughter was adopted via the Ceremony of Blood, Steel, and Stone, while her twisted twin was most likely left to die in the depths of the Ironroots,” Tysane finished. “If that’s the case, the size of the circles can also indicate the age at which the adoption took place.”

Sabira thought back.

“The smaller circle was about the same size as the one indicating barrenness, and the larger was probably twice that.”

“Not an infant, then. Anywhere from five to ten years old, I’d guess. Old enough to remember it, poor child.” But whether Tysane was referring to the fortunate twin or the cast-off, Sabira couldn’t tell.

“Why are you wasting time asking about this?” Mountainheart demanded with an impatient frown. “What does the barbaric practice of some obscure family have to do with finding Hrun or helping my uncle? Who are you even talking about?”

Sabira looked at him for a moment, considering. He didn’t have any of the usual tells of someone who was bluffing; he must honestly not know that Gunnett had not been born a Stoneblood.

“It’s not important,” she said at last. She wasn’t sure what to make of this new information, but she did know telling Mountainheart about it now was only going to distract him from the task at hand, and she had a feeling she was going to need him at his sharpest. Their foe was turning out to be far cleverer than she’d imagined.

“Something from an old case,” she added when the dwarf didn’t seem convinced. “Remind me to tell you about it later, after this one is closed. For now, we need to get down to the lowest levels of the city as soon as possible. From what I read in Haddrin’s journal, the fissure had almost reached Frostmantle. It must be even closer now, maybe even beneath the city already, so whatever Hrun has planned, it’s going to happen soon. And we need to be there to stop it.”

It took them more than two hours to wend their way down through the lower levels of Frostmantle until they reached Maintenance. This level housed great pumps and a labyrinthine system of pipes that delivered clean water to every home in the mountain and took the soiled water away again to be purified. Trash and debris were likewise delivered to this level via an intricate system of chutes, where it was separated for either composting or burning. If an item could be melted down or somehow reused, it was; otherwise, it went into a vast central furnace that provided heat for much of the city. The operation was not without disadvantages, however: While most of the smoke was vented away, the lingering odor rivaled that of Stormreach’s sewers.

Since neither of them was familiar with Maintenance, it took them some time to find one of what the locals called “rat tunnels”—passages made by various entities in various ways over the years that led from the city’s lowest inhabited level to the natural caverns beneath Frostmantle. Whenever the watch found such openings, they would board them over or collapse them, but new ones were always cropping up. The caverns were too valuable a hiding spot for thieves and thugs, not to mention being a handy escape route for pampered nobles fleeing the rules and responsibilities of their parents. Sabira had no doubt that if Aggar were here, he could lead them blindfolded to half a dozen of his own favorite bolt holes.

Dodging the watch, they finally located a tunnel behind a guardhouse that had apparently been crushed when one of the large-diameter pipes above exploded. From the looks of it, whatever disaster had caused the accident had happened long ago, for the piping above the small building had been replaced and was once again showing signs of wear. Sabira hoped the Maintenance crews had figured out the cause of the explosion and fixed the problem when they fixed the pipe. It was all too easy to imagine a section of the heavy metal slamming down on them from above as they climbed over the rusted remains of its predecessor.

The tunnel was lit with fluorescent fungi that lived off minerals in the rock. The walls were only wide enough for them to proceed single file, so Sabira pulled back her hood, unharnessed her shard axe, and took the lead.

They followed the tunnel for a short distance before it opened up into a small cavern. Like the tunnel, the cavern was lit by patches of the glowing fungi, giving everything a nacreous hue. By the pale green light, they could see what their ears had already told them: no hot springs. Not that Sabira had expected their quest to end that quickly or easily. She was actually glad there was no telltale hint of sulfur in the air. They might still have time to thwart Hrun’s plan.

The cavern had two exits, not including the one through which they’d entered. When Sabira hesitated, Mountainheart stepped around her and took the lead.

“This way,” he said, heading for the closer of the two new tunnels. At Sabira’s quizzical look, he added, “The Fist is south of here, so if we head in that direction, we should eventually find the caverns with the hot springs in them.”

“But how do you know that’s south?” Sabira normally had a good sense of direction, but not when there were several hundred feet of solid rock between her and the sun.

Mountainheart looked at her like she’d sprouted purple fangs, a bushy tail, and a third eye.

“That’s like asking a ranger how he can tell which way west is when he’s staring at the setting sun. I’m a dwarf, underground. I just know.”

Fair enough.

“Lead on, then,” she replied, following him through four more caverns, each one bearing in the same general direction—south, Sabira presumed—and trending downward. As they were about to enter the fifth, Sabira caught a hint of rotten eggs on the air. She reached out to grab Mountainheart’s shoulder.

“We’re getting close,” she whispered. “Be ready.”

Mountainheart nodded, holding the tip of his rapier up higher. They entered the fifth cavern and were immediately engulfed in clouds of sulfurous steam. Sabira shifted her urgrosh to one hand and used the other to pull a fold of Kiruk’s cloak up over her nose, blocking out the worst of the odor, though her eyes still burned. Mountainheart refused to be so hampered, soldiering on through the hot stench, his face red from his effort to breathe in as little of the rank steam as possible.

As they made their way across the stalagmite-ridden cavern floor toward the cluster of sulfuric springs, Sabira couldn’t help but admire their alien beauty. Far from being basins of clear blue water, as she had expected, the pools were instead filled to their multicolored rims with bubbling mud in a dizzying array of colors—aquamarine, vermillion, ochre, and a blindingly bright yellow. Several small algae-covered boulders hunched near the edges of the mudpots, adding their own rich hues of green and brown. Sabira wondered idly if Haddrin’s body had been found by some daring painter who’d braved the rat tunnels for the chance to commit such a rare and vibrant mix to canvas.