Marsheila Rockwell - The Shard Axe

She watched as the duhrs tried the same tactic on Mountainheart. The ground roiled beneath him but, forewarned, he was able to leap away whenever the fist started to form, and if his feet were not in contact with the earth, it seemed the grasping hand could not clutch him.

Too late, Sabira saw that the stone fist was just a distraction. One of the duhrs was hoisting up a boulder easily its own size. She called out a warning as the duhr heaved the huge rock at Mountainheart. The dwarf looked up, saw it, and nimbly danced out of its path.

If it had been just an ordinary rock, Mountainheart would have avoided it easily. But as it flew over his head, a stone leg shot out and kicked him square in the jaw, sending him sailing backward.

Right into the other pool of boiling mud.

Sabira could only watch helplessly as the dwarf’s back hit the far rim of the mudpot and the full length of both legs splashed down into the thick liquid, sending up globs of scalding mud to splatter his chest and arms.

Mountainheart’s scream was the most horrible thing Sabira had ever heard, a guttural sound of pure, primal pain wrenched uncontrollably from the depths of his lungs and expelled outward by the sheer magnitude of his agony. It echoed throughout the cavern, the fungi-covered walls sending it reverberating back to them for long moments after Mountainheart was too far gone in torment to hear it.

Sabira, heedless of her own safety, sprinted around the edge of the small hot spring to where Mountainheart lay, his hands beating weakly against the cavern floor as he tried to pull his legs out of the boiling mud with muscles that had already been burned away.

Dropping her shard axe, Sabira grabbed the dwarf under his arms and yanked him away from the pool. The sudden movement was too much for Mountainheart, and he lost consciousness, his head lolling against her chest as she struggled to pull him clear. As his legs came free with a wet squelch and Sabira got a good look at the ruin, it was all she could do not to vomit bile mixed with Onatar’s Blood all over him.

His clothes had been almost completely burned away from the waist down, and small flames licked the edges of what was left of his shirt before Sabira swatted them out. The exposed skin of his torso was a livid red, and covered in huge, oozing blisters. His thighs were a morass of melted flesh, muscle, and bone, and there was nothing left of his legs past the knee joint.

Sabira was amazed he was even still breathing, though those breaths came in shallow, panting gasps. And if she didn’t get him out of here soon, he wouldn’t be doing even that much.

She looked briefly at the rings he wore, but didn’t know which one would send him back to the Tankard, or how to activate its magic even if she could identify the right ring. And without her there with him to get help, all teleporting him would do is change the location of his final resting place.

Sabira grabbed the gold ring on the middle finger of her left hand and twisted it three times, clockwise.

“Aggar! Aggar Tordannon! I need you!”

Aggar appeared beside her, shirtless and just finishing lacing up his breeches. He looked up, startled.

“What the …?” he began, almost reflexively, but he took in the situation in an instant—his nephew dying at his feet, Sabira’s shard axe the only thing standing between them and a dozen galeb duhrs advancing on them in stony silence. With a curse, he twisted one of the gold rings on his fingers and said, “Wind!”

The sound of a thousand rushing whispers filled the cavern, and Sabira felt her hair and clothing pulled toward the duhrs with invisible, greedy fingers as gale-force winds streamed by on their way to encircling the walking boulders. In moments, a small tornado had formed around the duhrs, tearing them from the cavern floor and sending them spinning through the air in madcap cartwheels. At Aggar’s direction, the improbable cyclone skipped across the ground, picking up stray duhrs, then wound its way back to the largest of the bubbling mudpots.

As the whirlwind crossed the surface of the spring, multicolored mud and steam were sucked into its vortex, creating a conical rainbow wall and obscuring the airborne duhrs from view. When the wall had climbed halfway to the ceiling of the cavern, draining the deep basin almost to its bottom, Aggar released the wind.

The entire cone of mud, steam, and duhrs collapsed back into the basin with the same hissing whoosh the lightning rail made when it passed through a tunnel. Mud splashed high across the cavern floor, some small globs traveling far enough to hit her and Aggar, causing several small burns on his bare chest and one on her cheek. If any of the globs hit Mountainheart, Sabira couldn’t tell; he was already so covered in burns that one or two more would hardly be noticeable.

When the cavern was once more filled with only the sounds of popping bubbles and whistling steam, Aggar knelt beside his nephew, touching his forehead lightly, then placing a gentle hand on Mountainheart’s chest, trying to detect even the slightest rise and fall there, the smallest breath.

There was nothing.

When Aggar looked up at Sabira, his green eyes sparkled with a grief she knew all too well.

“I came too late,” he said in a small voice.

“It was already too late when I called you,” she said softly, her own voice catching with unanticipated sadness. While she’d found the envoy annoying at times—well, most of the time—he’d still been a decent partner. She imagined he would have made an even better friend. But she would never know now.

“So what do you want to do?” she asked Aggar after a few moments of respectful silence. She expected he’d want to take Mountainheart— Orin , she owed him that much—back to Krona Peak.

“This is my fault,” the dwarf said brokenly, looking away. “He would never have been down here if it weren’t for me.”

Aggar’s words rang with an unexpected resonance, sending chills down Sabira’s spine—they were the same accusing words she’d thrown at him after the cave-in, when the walls were coming down around them and he’d forced her to leave. Forced her to live.

“He was here because he wanted to be,” Sabira replied. “Because he cared about you and wanted to help you.” Though she was suddenly unsure if she was talking about Orin or Leoned.

“Don’t cheapen his devotion—his sacrifice—by saying he had no choice in the matter, because he did.” Sabira saw Ned, dangling from that chain, urging her to make her own right choice with earnest, accepting eyes.

“Don’t take that away from him, Agg. Honor it.”

After a moment, Aggar nodded.

“You’re right,” he said, with no trace of rancor or irony. Which Sabira had half-expected, considering Aggar had given her a similar speech right before she’d stormed out of Frostmantle, proclaiming her undying hatred for him and vowing never to return. He held out his hand to her. “May I have the ring back, please?”

Surprised, Sabira removed the ring and passed it over to him. Aggar removed his silver rings carefully from Orin’s hands, then placed Greddark’s golden one tenderly on Orin’s little finger. He pocketed the Silver Concordian rings, then reached up and gently closed his nephew’s sightless eyes.

“Go in peace,” he said simply, then twisted the gold ring three times counterclockwise around Orin’s finger. Orin’s body disappeared soundlessly and Aggar stood.

At her questioning look, he said, “I sent him back to the Peak. They’ll take care of him there, and inform Gunnett and Meridella.”

“What about the Council and Torlan?”

“To Khyber with them,” Aggar spat, toying with another of his rings. A rune-inscribed greataxe appeared in his hand and he hefted it appreciatively. Then he gave her a fierce, feral grin.