Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Chuillyon? What was an advisor to the royals doing in Bäalâle Seatt? It was certainly no coincidence.

“Look at their size,” the woman breathed, gazing up at the massive statues. Beautiful as she was, she looked thin and exhausted, nothing like the hardened traveler Wynn had become.

Ghassan spoke Elvish well enough, and hoped he might learn more than expressed awe over the work of ancient dwarven artisans.

“This way,” the younger male said, heading for the open portal.

Chuillyon slowed, glancing back at the hall’s right end. He finally nodded and continued on with the others. The trio passed through the portal.

Ghassan exhaled in frustration. He now had more than one interloper between himself and Wynn.

Chane kept close as Wynn followed Ore-Locks. He gauged that they had gone down another two levels before the passage stopped at another sealed portal. There had been no further side passages along the way. Chane had a strange feeling that they had reached the end of their long descent, though he could not fathom why.

Perhaps it was the look of finality on Ore-Locks’s face as the dwarf hesitated before that portal.

“What’s wrong?” Wynn asked.

“Nothing,” Ore-Locks answered.

The dwarf passed through the iron and, within seconds, the familiar grinding sound began.

Chane had not expressed his suspicions aloud, like Wynn, but he had become increasingly wary. Ore-Locks seemed to know exactly where to go and the correct sequences to open all portals. It was too easy, too convenient.

As the last of the triple iron panels slid into the arch’s frame, Chane pushed past Wynn, stepping inside another great hall. But he instantly spotted its difference.

In place of the stone effigies there were huge basalt likenesses of coffins sealed with carved representations of iron bands. Chane knew where Ore-Locks had brought them, for he had been in a similar chamber below Dhredze Seatt.

This was another chamber of the Lhärgnæ ... the Fallen Ones.

Chane hung back, blocking Wynn’s entry, until Ore-Locks moved off. When he glanced back, Wynn was peeking around him. She paled at the sight of those basalt coffins.

He finally stepped forward, noticing that this chamber was in even worse shape than the hall of the Bäynæ. The left and right end walls each bore the same strange breach he had seen above—except the one on the left was wide, and the one on the right was taller and slightly narrower.

Though the stone coffin effigies were at least three times the size of those in Dhredze Seatt, two showed multiple fractures, and a third was half-shattered into chunks that lay across the floor. Again, there were fewer of them than in Dhredze Seatt.

Chane walked farther in, looking for any passage to another chamber or hall where one more effigy might have been set apart. There were no openings. They had truly reached a dead end. He turned to find Wynn examining the engraved, oblong panel on a basalt coffin. Her brow crinkled as if in deep concentration or thought.

Chane could guess at her concern.

She had followed Ore-Locks into the bowels of this dead seatt, and not a single clue or hint to the orb’s whereabouts had been uncovered. Instead, they stood in this last hall, in the Chamber of the Fallen, with nowhere left to go.

“The symbols are worn, old, and hard to comprehend,” she whispered. “But I’ve made out their titles, at least.”

“Is Avarice here?” he asked.

Avarice was one of the Fallen Ones who she had learned of at Dhredze Seatt in tales of Feather-Tongue’s exploits.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He must have come later.”

Ore-Locks had not bothered even glancing at the coffins. He stood before the wider breach in the hall’s left end, looking into it. Then he walked the hall’s length, as if to do the same at the other end. Wynn watched his every step.

Her eyes turned so bleak, Chane could barely stand to look at them.

“It’s not here,” Wynn said, her voice breaking with sudden catches. “The orb isn’t here ... and there’s no place left to go. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere above, or worse, in the upper levels, buried where I cannot find it.” She closed her eyes, leaking tears. “I’ve lost.”

Chane pulled her toward him, not knowing what else to do. She dropped her forehead against his upper arm, gripping his cloak, his arm, and burying her face.

He hurt for her pain, but he was not sorry she had failed.

He was not sorry at all.

Suddenly embarrassed, Wynn released Chane’s arm and pulled away, completely uncertain of what to do next. The thought of leaving empty-handed was too much after all this. She couldn’t even look up at Chane, though she felt him watching her expectantly. She knew exactly what he wanted to do—just leave.

She turned her head and spotted Ore-Locks still standing by the taller, right-end breach. Why had he brought them down here after his futile attempt to find Deep-Root in the caves of the honored dead? He hadn’t even looked at the basalt coffins of the Fallen Ones. Perhaps he knew what she would find: Deep-Root wasn’t here either. Ore-Locks’s ancestor had fallen for the atrocity committed here.

She stepped away from Chane, but he reached after her.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “This is over.”

Evading his grasp, she went to the left-end wall and looked into its wide breach. Inside, another dark, raw shaft ran both up and down. She shuffled down the chamber, all the way to Ore-Locks.

The previous pale anguish on his face had been replaced by confusion. Obviously, he hadn’t expected to find a dead end. Something final, perhaps, some last discovery, but not this.

“Not here,” he whispered. “How could they not be here?”

Those words sharpened Wynn’s awareness.

Ore-Locks was too focused in his task and far too knowledgeable for someone who’d never been inside this seatt. But someone else had been here—Ore-Locks’s ancestor, that spirit who had supposedly called him to serve among the Stonewalkers.

Did that treacherous mass murderer guide Ore-Locks’s steps?

Wynn’s fear and revulsion of him magnified. In the face of her own failure, she lashed out at him.

“What are you looking for?” she demanded. “Deep-Root wasn’t among the honored dead—he couldn’t ... never will be! So, what are you after now?”

Ore-Locks’s red hair was dirty and wild, even bound back as it was. The beginning of a beard showed on his jaw. Confusion vanished from his face, and he turned on her in equal anger.

“His bones! Why else would I endure your ignorant judgments ... endure traveling with that ?” He pointed at Chane. “I found no truth here, but at the least I could have put him to rest. Now I cannot even do that.”

Wynn stared at him, not knowing what to think. Everything Ore-Locks said sounded almost honorable, as if Chane had been right back in Dhredze Seatt. When Ore-Locks had come at her that night she’d found the coffin effigy of Thallûhearag, he had denied that his ancestor was that monster. If only he didn’t wish to honor one who’d murdered thousands, tens of thousands. But if his ancestral spirit called to him now, deceived and used him even unwittingly, Ore-Locks still couldn’t be trusted.

“It cannot end like this,” he whispered.

No , she thought, it cannot .

Holding her crystal high, Wynn stepped to the tall breach, leaning in, and her heart jumped. This one wasn’t a shaft.

“Did you look inside here?” she asked.

For an instant, Ore-Locks didn’t appear to understand. All breaches so far had exposed raw, vertical shafts. Blinking, he gripped one side of the opening, pushing in beside Wynn. They both peered into a rough tunnel running off left and right from the opening.