Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Sau’ilahk’s black form wavered as exhaustion threatened to overtake him. He was only half-finished, and the final two conjuries must be done simultaneously.

Around his flattened hand, a square of glowing umber lines for Earth rose on the hall’s floor stones. Within that, a circle of blue-white appeared as he summoned in Spirit and inserted a fragment of his consciousness. In the spaces between the shapes, iridescent glyphs and sigils of white appeared like dew-dampened web strands at the break of dawn.

Sau’ilahk called on his reserves, imbuing his creation with greater essence.

His hand began to waver before him. He exerted his will to remain present and straightened, lifting his hand from the floor. All glowing marks on the stone vanished.

Awaken! he whispered in his thoughts.

Another glow rose beneath the floor’s surface. It shifted erratically, as if swimming inside the stones. He raised his hand above it, fingers closing like a street puppeteer toying with strings, and the glow halted.

Stones bulged over it, and that light began to emerge. It rose out of the floor like a worm as thick as his wrist. Gray as the stone that birthed it, it wriggled away across the floor. Sau’ilahk had created such a servitor once before, with a gaping maw at one end, its body a vessel for poisonous gas.

Stop , he commanded. As it halted, he focused on its spark of sentience, and he drove it through the tall breach and into the tunnel beyond.

Hide in the wall facing the opening. When a life passes through, expel what you hold.

It would obey these simple instructions, drilled into its limited consciousness. Even if the two younger elves survived, without Chuillyon, they would turn back. Shâodh would insist.

Sau’ilahk drifted into the breach, weakened but satisfied, and he turned right down the tunnel to trail Wynn.

Wynn’s thoughts turned over and over as she followed Ore-Locks. She wasn’t as dismissive of Chane’s concerns as she pretended, but her concerns differed from his. Clearly, he suspected that something had happened here after the seatt’s fall, though just what , neither of them could say.

“What is that?” he asked from behind her.

She saw black on the walls and floor again, but it wasn’t the same as before. Her crystal’s light caused it to shimmer.

“ Chlaks-álêg ,” Ore-Locks answered. “‘Burning stone’ ... a vein of raw coal.”

It crosscut their path where the tunnel floor dipped slightly in a circular hollow, as if a good deal of the coal had been dug out and removed from the floor and both side walls.

Chane slipped past Wynn into the left-side hollow. “And again here, look.”

Both Ore-Locks and Wynn watched Chane trace his widely spread fingers along deep, long gouges in the black wall. This time there were four parallel grooves.

Wynn spotted places in the coal vein where it looked like chunks bigger than her head, or even Ore-Locks’s head, had been gouged out.

“Ore-Locks, do your people use ...” Chane began. “Do they use ... beasts of any kind in mining?”

Wynn blinked at such a notion. What was he suggesting?

“No,” Ore-Locks answered hesitantly. “Not that I have ever heard of.”

Wynn didn’t like where Chane was going with this. She glanced up the tunnel, thinking of those broken skulls. Did Chane believe something had survived the seatt’s fall, something large enough to kill anything that remained or arrived later? Even so, any creature among the enemy’s forces couldn’t have survived all these centuries with so little to feed it. Unless ...

Wynn began to worry. What if whatever it had been had taken away the orb for its master? Was the orb already long gone, as far back as the war? Her thoughts turned back to the few scant lines she’d read in the volume by Volyno.

... of Earth ... beneath the chair of a lord’s song ... meant to prevail but all ended ... halfway eaten beneath.

Something else came to her. Before leaving the guild at Calm Seatt, she’d stumbled on a forgotten dwarven ballad with one obscure word—gí’uyllæ, the “all-eaters” or “all-consumers.” Even so, whatever had been here was either long dead or long gone.

“ A’ye! ” Ore-Locks said breathily.

Wynn swung around at his exclamation. His large hand was pressed into another depression in the coal. That hollow was so large that his hand looked small as he drew it along the depression’s inner surface. Wynn slipped in, trying to see into the hollow as Ore-Locks withdrew his hand.

Under her crystal’s close light, the hollow’s back was smoothly cut in parallel grooves. These marks weren’t like the ones Chane implied were made with claws. These were smoother, closer together, like ... like teeth had bitten through the black coal.

She shook her head, reminding herself that whatever had been down here couldn’t still be here. Then she heard a low, rumbling whine.

Shade stood off behind Wynn, not drawing near. The dog’s jowls quivered as she flattened her ears, looking at that huge hollow under the crystal’s light.

Wynn decided not to move on just yet. Whatever happened here warranted further investigation.

Chuillyon walked right through an open portal into a chamber similar to that of the Fallen Ones back in Dhredze Seatt. But this one was huge.

It still surprised him that Ore-Locks was leaving these portals wide-open. Such negligence would shock Cinder-Shard, though Chuillyon certainly could not complain. He could not have opened them himself, but how had Ore-Locks done so? How could even an errant stonewalker know the combinations for locks used a thousand years ago?

“What is this place?” Hannâschi asked, looking around with clear worry on her smudged face. “These effigies are ... different from the last ones.”

Shâodh examined pieces of a broken effigy lying on the floor. “What do the carved bands represent?”

This was the first openly curious question he had asked in a long while. Chuillyon had no time to explain dwarven vices or the place of the Fallen Ones in their beliefs.

He saw no other ways out of here except for two jagged breaches in the walls. The wider breach to the left of the entrance was just another vertical shaft, as in the hall of the Eternals. He doubted Wynn or the others had the equipment or skills to climb down.

He looked at Shâodh and asked, “Which way?”

The glance Shâodh cast back seemed almost hostile. The young man closed his eyes with a thrumming chant. When his eyes opened, he looked to the taller, narrower breach.

Chuillyon scowled in frustration. Perhaps he had again underestimated Wynn. As he approached, he held his crystal through the opening. It did not open into a shaft, and instead, he found a rough and raw tunnel running in both directions.

Hannâschi came up beside him and leaned in to see around the opening’s sides.

“Well, onward again,” Chuillyon told her tiredly.

A shudder shook the hall’s floor, and he turned.

Shâodh still stood among the basalt debris, but his eyes widened as he looked toward the wide breach at the hall’s other end.

Ghassan reached an open portal and carefully peeked around its edge. There was another massive hall waiting beyond, but this one was filled with near-black faceless and formless effigies. Representations of bands were carved in the stone all around each one, but they did not keep Ghassan’s attention long.

Chuillyon’s young male companion stood at the hall’s center, while the old elf and the female looked into a tall breach in the right wall.

With no one looking Ghassan’s way, he slipped in behind the nearest tall, black effigy. From his hiding place, he tried to hear what the others said, but they were all quiet. In frustration, he thought of dipping into Chuillyon’s surface thoughts, hoping the old elf would not feel his presence.