Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Shâodh pointed south. “Do we follow?”

Chuillyon fought an urge to snap at him for that same tiresome question. Did Shâodh think they were going home to announce their great find and bathe in glory? They were here to learn what Wynn was after.

When Chuillyon did not answer, Shâodh held out his hand, helping Hannâschi over a pile of loose rubble. He kept hold of her hand as he led the way across the cavern. Chuillyon never missed these small familiarities between them. Neither had he ever commented on them. But that might have to change.

They passed more crumbling stairways and fragmented columns ... and more remains of the long dead. After a good distance, Shâodh slowed, but he did not sink into meditation again. He gestured toward an archway at the cavern’s south wall.

Just inside of it lay a small pile of blankets and canvas bags.

Chuillyon hurried over to see inside the tunnel.

Chane stepped through the portal last, finding himself in a narrow passage. Ore-Locks walked to an open recess near the door that held the grid of metal rods exposed by a sliding metal panel.

“No,” Chane said quickly. “Do not close the portal.”

Ore-Locks eyed him in surprise. “It will bar any pursuit if we are still followed.”

“It will also lock us in. If we are forced to flee, we may not have time to stop and open it. Leave it open.”

The dwarf did not appear convinced, but Chane had no intention of allowing him near those rods. Should Ore-Locks close the panel, he could leave them entombed and trapped.

Wynn held up her cold lamp crystal, illuminating the passage. “Chane’s right. There’s been no sign of followers since the vibrations on the tram tracks. Ore-Locks, what if you get hurt ... or worse? The rest of us will be trapped with no means to get ourselves ... or you out.”

Her argument was rational and logical, and far less accusatory than what Chane was thinking. Ore-Locks finally nodded. It must go against his training and nature to pass through a portal without closing it. With the decision made, the strange, dark focus returned to his face, and he headed down the passage at a quick pace.

Shade rumbled low in discontent, watching him, and Chane shared her concern over the dwarf’s shifting moods. He was obviously looking for something.

Wynn trotted after Ore-Locks. “Come on.”

Within a few paces, Chane detected the floor’s slight slant. They were going deeper again, and he tried to gauge their descent. When he reckoned they were about two levels lower, Ore-Locks stopped before a side passage. He turned his head, cocking it, as if listening.

Ore-Locks suddenly turned into the side passage, as did Wynn. She seemed to be just blindly following the dwarf.

“Wynn,” Chane rasped, but she had already stopped.

Another iron portal blocked the passage’s end. Ore-Locks did not even pause, but walked straight through the iron and vanished.

“No!” Wynn cried, rushing to the closed portal.

The smallest hope flickered inside Chane. Perhaps this time, Ore-Locks truly had left them. Without his obsession feeding Wynn’s drive to go deeper, Chane might yet convince her to turn back. To his surprise, Wynn closed her fist around her crystal and pounded on the portal.

“Ore-Locks!” she shouted. “Open these doors now! Do you hear me?”

The words echoed loudly along the narrow passage, but Wynn only pounded harder.

Chane stood waiting, hoping, for her to finally halt in exhaustion.

Sau’ilahk drifted from the hall of the Eternals and through the open portal into a smaller passage. From a distance, he saw light down its gradual slope. The light suddenly dimmed by half and then spilled out of what might be a side passage. When the illumination faded from the passage’s mouth, he followed carefully.

The sound of Wynn shouting and pounding rolled out of the side passage and toward him in echoes. He stopped and slipped close to the main passage’s wall, prepared to sink into it. He had not caught her words—something to do with the dwarf—but she sounded more distressed than angry.

Something had gone wrong.

Sau’ilahk fled back to the open portal into the hall of the Eternals. He feared being sensed by the dog, and he could not move until certain of which way Wynn might go next.

A grinding sound rose in the narrow passage, rumbling all around Wynn, and she stopped pounding. When the last of the iron triple doors rolled away, Ore-Locks stood in the opening, but this time he looked angry.

“Do not disturb the peace of the honored dead,” he ordered, and then looked to the crystal in her hand. “Close that in your fingers, and allow only enough light for sure steps.”

With that, he turned away, heading inward beyond the portal.

Wynn glanced back at Chane and Shade, and then hurried after, entering a natural cave beyond a shorter passage. It all looked alarmingly familiar.

She walked a wide, cleared path between calcified, shadowy forms. A hulking stalagmite rose from the cavern floor, thick and fat all the way up to head height. Others were joined at the upper end by descending stalactites, forming natural, lumpy columns that glistened with mineral-laden moisture. But in the dim phosphorescence of the walls, some forms looked too big and bulky to have been made only by calcified buildup. To an unknowing observer, they might have been boulders at one time, now buried beneath decades of crust.

Wynn knew exactly what those protrusions were. She stood in the chambers of the honored dead, as she once had in Dhredze Seatt. This was where dead thänæ were entombed in stone, to be tended in eternal rest by the Stonewalkers of this lost seatt.

Ore-Locks glanced at only a few of the lone stone protrusions in this first cave. He moved to a nearby opening and stepped off the open path and into the next shadowed forest of such formations. Wynn followed, watching as he examined each one with a kind of mania before rushing for the next.

“What is he doing?” Chane asked. “Has he gone mad?”

“Shhhh,” Wynn said. “Those aren’t just mounds of calcified stone.”

She didn’t know why the Stonewalkers wouldn’t allow bright light in these caves. They seemed to think it would disturb the dead they cared for. Wynn spread her fingers, letting just a little of her crystal’s light seep out.

“Look,” she told Chane, and he leaned in.

The top of one glistening stone protrusion narrowed over rounded “shoulders” to a bulk like a “head.” This one had melded to the tip of a long, descending stalactite. The hints of features, like the face of a sculpture roughly formed and left unfinished, were barely visible in the light of Wynn’s crystal.

The long-dead thänæ’s eyes seemed closed, but there was no way to be certain.

Wynn couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Its clothing was nothing more than the barest ripples in the glittering layers of minerals. The buildup had turned its hands into lumps. She glanced at other dark shapes about the cave’s silent stillness.

“Honored thänæ, taken into stone,” she whispered. “We are standing among the dead of a forgotten time.”

No coffins or crypts. The Stonewalkers—the Hassäg’kreigi—entombed their most honored in stone itself. Left here for a thousand years or more, they became one with the earth their people cherished.

Chane backed up, looking all around without blinking.

Wynn knew he didn’t fear the dead. He too had stood in those caves in Dhredze Seatt.

Chane’s eyes suddenly widened. “One has been shattered!”

He rushed off the path.

When Wynn caught up, he was crouched over fragments at the base of one form. She froze at the sight of this desecration. From the size of the pieces lying all around, the dwarf had been large—tall—and the broken bits had been there long enough to bond to the cave floors.