Marsheila Rockwell - The Shard Axe

Mountainheart paused a few feet away from the nearest spring, one of a group of five large mudpots surrounded by several smaller outliers. Sabira stepped up to join him.

“There’s no one here, and no sign anyone’s been here recently. So what’s our next move?” the dwarf asked, keeping his voice low despite his assertion that they were alone. Or perhaps it was merely the caustic fumes adding the deep rasp to his words.

“Well, assuming these are the springs Goldglove was talking about, he said the fissure was four hundred feet or so away,” Sabira replied, looking around. She couldn’t see that far through the wafting curtain of steam, but she pointed the way they’d been headed. “If we’re in the right place, the fissure should be over there somewhere. That’s probably where we want to start our hunt.”

Mountainheart nodded, but didn’t speak. Sabira doubted he really wanted to open his mouth and risk swallowing more of the pungent air. He wiped water from his eyes with the back of his free hand and started off in the direction Sabira had indicated.

As they moved away from the larger pools of boiling mud and toward the smaller ones, it got a little cooler and a little easier to breathe. Sabira dropped the edge of her cloak and resumed her two-handed grip on the shard axe as she scanned the ground in front of them. She was fairly certain they’d gone at least four hundred feet, but she knew from experience how being underground could confound perspective: Everything seemed alternately smaller and more closed in, and then too vast to be comprehended. She tried to shake the feeling off, knowing it for what it was—a haunted remnant of her time in the Maw, when she’d searched for, and found, Leoned.

Refocusing, Sabira peered ahead, searching in vain for Goldglove’s fissure. But she didn’t see anything on the cavern floor other than two bathtub-sized mudpots, one on either side of them, the ubiquitous stalagmites, and more of the brown boulders. Certainly nothing that looked like a channel—artificial or otherwise—diverting magma from the Fist of Onatar.

Were they in the wrong cavern? Were these new springs that had erupted in the time since Goldglove made his journal entry?

Sabira was about to tell Mountainheart they needed to move farther south and deeper into the network of caves when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. A rock the size of her head was sailing across the cavern from the direction of the larger mudpots, and it was about to hit Mountainheart square in the back.

“Orin! Left knee, hard!”

The dwarf didn’t miss a beat, falling to one knee as the stone missile flew harmlessly over his head.

Sabira whirled to face this new enemy, shard axe at the ready.

There was nothing behind them but stone and steam. Unless their foe was invisible—a dangerous proposition here, where even the slightest movement would leave a trail of super-heated mist—or was small enough to fit behind one of the boulders, she and Mountainheart were alone.

Another movement, on the edges of her vision.

There, on the other side of the small spring to her left. Had that boulder been there before?

Mountainheart had regained his feet and moved up to stand on her right, a step or two in front of her.

“Where?” he asked simply, eyes scanning the cavern behind them, hands white on his weapons.

“Left,” Sabira said, but then she saw more movement on the other side of him. “And right!” she called as their enemies finally showed themselves.

Their opponents were the boulders themselves, unfurling from fetal positions to reveal blocky stone bodies and stubby appendages that served as rocky arms and legs.

Mountainheart swore. “Duhr!”

“What are you talking about?” Sabira asked as she dodged one flying rock and swatted another away with the cheek of her shard axe.

“Galeb duhr disguise themselves as boulders. But boulders are surface features, formed by water and wind erosion. You hardly ever see them underground, except for in the beds of large subterranean rivers.” He shook his head in disgust. “I should have suspected when I saw them grouped around the hot springs, but I was too focused on finding Goldglove’s fissure.”

As he spoke, he ducked to avoid one rock and took another, smaller one in his left thigh.

“Great, so how do we fight them?” Sabira asked as more of the duhr advanced. She counted half a dozen standing now, and nearly the same number still rolling toward them from their former places around the larger springs.

“Our weapons,” Mountainheart replied with a shrug. “Unless you’ve got a fireball up your sleeve.”

“You’re the one with the magic rings,” Sabira reminded him, casting a quick look over her shoulder to the south to make sure they weren’t being flanked. If there were any duhr on that side of the cavern, they were keeping themselves hidden.

She briefly considered retreating in that direction, but quickly dismissed the idea. Without knowing what was over there, they were safer where they were. There could be more duhr. Or the fissure might actually be there, farther away than Goldglove had calculated, and Sabira didn’t particularly relish the idea of stumbling into it while fighting off animated boulders. At least here, between two of the smaller mudpots, the approaches from the east and west were cut off, leaving the duhr only one avenue of attack. Well, Sabira amended as a rock the size of her fist bounced off the knuckles of her right hand, make that two avenues.

“I guess I could teleport back to Aggar’s rooms at the Tankard, track down some scrolls or WANDS, and come back, but I’m not sure how well you’d fare in the meantime,” Mountainheart replied, reaching up to snatch one of the rocks whizzing past. As he hurled it back at one of the closer galeb duhr, he added, “Because other than that, I don’t know what these rings do, if anything.”

Sabira didn’t bother to reply. She was too busy trying to keep her footing as the ground began to heave and she came perilously close to being dumped headfirst into the mudpot on her left.

Then she realized the floor of the cavern wasn’t just rolling beneath her feet, it was growing up around them!

“Orin!” she shouted as the ground rose up to engulf her legs in a ghastly parody of a hand.

“I see it!” he called back, dancing from foot to foot to keep from being caught in the same trap. “Keep your arms up, out of the way!”

Sabira did as Mountainheart instructed, keeping her shard axe clear. The fist of stone reached her waist but came no higher.

And then it began to squeeze.

She didn’t need the dwarf to tell her what to do next. As the crushing grip inexorably tightened, Sabira swung her adamantine urgrosh down at the stone “wrist.” Again and again she slammed the axe-blade into the rock, and with every blow it sank deeper, until she’d created a deep, bloodless gash that cut halfway through the false appendage. Meanwhile, a muted crack and a burning pain in her side signaled a broken rib, if not a punctured lung. If she didn’t get out of this now, her pelvis would be next, but it wouldn’t just snap—it would shatter, and she’d be as good as dead.

Fighting against the earthen grasp, she threw all of her weight back and forth, again and again. Finally, her painful struggles were rewarded by another crack, this one sharp and reverberating. Next she was falling to the right as the force of her oscillation broke the rock hand from its weakened wrist. As she toppled, the stone encasing her fell apart, and by the time she hit the ground, she was free.

She quickly clambered to her feet and then kept moving, dancing from side to side, making sure neither foot stayed in the same place too long. If she had to be a target, she would at least be a moving one, for the duhrs and the ground both.