Marsheila Rockwell - The Shard Axe

“Let’s finish this.”

As they continued slowly across the cavern, Sabira still scanning the ground for signs of the elusive magmatic fissure, she began to fill Aggar in on everything she and Orin had learned from Goldglove’s logbook. By the time she’d finished, they’d left the springs behind and had reached the center of the cavern, where they could see the far wall and the two tunnels it boasted, both leading south.

When she was done, Aggar reached out a hand to stop her from moving on. When she turned to look at him questioningly, his expression was grim.

“Saba, it’s not Hrun Noldrun.”

“What?” She frowned, not quite sure she’d heard him correctly. “What do you mean, it’s not him? It has to be.”

“No, Saba. He’s dead. They found his body not far from the Tombs the day after you left for Frostmantle. He’d been beheaded, but his eyes were still intact. He was wearing a tattered gray cloak, so they assumed he was the one who breached security there the night before, since they’d found a scrap of similar material at the scene.” She must have looked at him uncomprehendingly, because he stopped and repeated, very slowly, “Sabira. He’s dead. ”

She felt suddenly like she was in one of those cheap tavern shows where the so-called mage would come around trying to earn coin by pulling the tablecloth out from under all the place settings without disturbing them. Only it never really worked that way, and all the glasses and dishes would go tumbling to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, while the charlatan slipped off into the shadows, unnoticed.

“But … the motto? The attack in the Tombs? If not him, then who?” And, hard on the heels of that, “Did I bring Orin down here to die for nothing?”

“No. You didn’t,” Aggar answered, cocking his head to the side. Then he went down on one knee and placed his hand on the cavern floor, much as he had done with Orin earlier. He bent forward and placed his ear to the ground.

“What are you doing?” Sabira asked, nonplussed. Her eyes darted from stalagmite to stalagmite and she wondered what fresh horror the cavern had in store for them.

“Listening,” the dwarf replied shortly, holding up a hand to keep her from speaking when she would have continued. “And feeling.”

After several long moments, he lifted his head up, brushed dirt out of his beard, and stood.

“Your fissure. It’s here, you just can’t see it. Maybe thirty feet below us, judging from the sound and the heat of the ground here.”

“How can you—” Sabira began, but stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s a dwarf thing, I know. So can you tell how far it extends?”

“No, but—”

Aggar was interrupted by a sudden deep rumbling. The cavern shook and the ground rocked beneath them.

“Earthquake?” Sabira asked as she widened her stance and tried to keep her feet. “More duhrs?”

Aggar shook his head, his own legs planted shoulder-width apart.

“Worse,” he said as the shaking subsided into an ominous quiet. He grabbed the haft of his greataxe in a two-handed grip and turned to face the northeast. “It’s what’s controlling them.”

“What?” Sabira asked, looking in the direction he was facing, but not seeing what he was talking about.

And then the ground exploded, not a hundred feet from where they stood, showering them with rocks and dirt. A huge, vaguely humanoid creature formed out of the earth itself stood there, its cave-like maw open in a great roar like the sound of an avalanche bearing inexorably down on them.

“That.”

That was an earth elemental, one of the largest Sabira had ever seen, let alone fought. It left a gaping hole as it strode toward them on massive legs, and Sabira could just glimpse the flickering orange glow of molten rock behind it.

The elemental was the one channeling magma from the Fist of Onatar, no doubt at the command of Nightshard’s accomplice—whoever he was. Why else would the creature be carving out a conduit for molten rock hot enough to destroy it?

“Use your ring!” she said urgently to Aggar, knowing that even her adamantine urgrosh would be no match for the towering elemental. But it wouldn’t matter if Aggar could summon his whirlwind to bear the creature back and drop it into the fissure it had created.

“I can’t!” he replied, her own fear mirrored on his face. “The magic has to recharge. I’ve got nothing that would be of any help against this thing.”

As if that weren’t bad enough, the cavern floor over the fissure was collapsing in both directions with every lumbering step the creature took. And they were about to be on the wrong side of the forming chasm.

“We need to—” she began, but too late. The ground shuddered and started to sink, and she and Aggar had to backpedal furiously to keep clear of the fissure’s crumbling edge. When they finally regained relatively solid footing, they were on the far side of a deep gorge that spanned the width of the cavern.

They were trapped.

And the elemental was still advancing.

Chunks of ore shone throughout its body, along with hairy roots, bits of fossilized bone, and what looked like half of a giant centipede, torn asunder when the elemental was formed out of the side of some mountain—presumably, the Fist itself. As it neared, Sabira could see the two golden gems that served as its eyes blazing with inhuman fury.

And just above and between them, a pulsing, blue-black Khyber shard.

“We can’t beat it while it’s in contact with the ground, and we can’t use your ring to lift it, so how are we going to get it into the air?” she wondered aloud as she and Aggar slowly backed away from the approaching elemental. She hadn’t really been talking to the dwarf, so she was surprised when he ventured a response.

“Trip it?”

Sabira stopped and looked at him, agog. Trip an earth elemental? Was he serious?

But then she turned back to watch the elemental’s approach. Earth elementals could glide through the earth like a fish through water, but this one was walking, lifting up one ponderous leg at a time and taking slow, plodding steps. Why?

The answer lay in the channel it had been creating. If it traveled as it normally would, leaving no tunnel or hole and displacing no material as it moved beneath the ground, it would be unable to form the conduit the magma needed. So, just as it was being commanded to bore out a path for the molten rock, it was also being directed to suppress its innate abilities in order to carry out that task.

Which did, in fact, leave it vulnerable to something as simple as being tripped.

She saw no effective way of snagging the elemental’s foot as it passed, but she thought with the aid of her urgrosh’s enchantment, she might just be able to act as an effective stumbling block for the creature. But that was going to require getting the thing to move faster than a glacier, and she could think of only one way to do that.

“You want me to do what? ” Aggar asked incredulously after she’d briefly sketched out her plan.

“Let it hit you. Then—”

“Let it hit me,” he repeated, interrupting her. “Has it, perhaps, escaped your notice that I’m not wearing any armor?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to hit you hard —just enough to whet its appetite for more, and get it moving. Then it will follow you, and you can lead it close to the edge, allowing me to sneak up and get in front of one of its feet without it noticing. Then with any luck, it will trip over me, topple over into the fissure, and we’ll be out of this mess, at least.”