Troy Denning - The Crimson Legion

Neeva raised an eyebrow, and Rikus bit his lips to keep from showing his own aversion. Muls and dwarves generally prided themselves on their clean skin and scalps. The idea of having their bodies covered by a matted growth of sweaty hair was considered repulsive by most members of both races.

Caelum walked into the next open area, a huge hallway running the perimeter of the keep. The floor was arranged in a pattern of polished black and white squares. At even spaces along the walls, tall white columns supported the vaulted ceiling above. Between each set of arches was a mural painted directly onto the wall.

Neeva stepped over to the nearest and inspected it closely. “You don’t exaggerate, do you Lyanius?” she asked. ‘When you said hair, I didn’t imagine anything like this!”

Rikus joined her. The painting before Neeva portrayed a dwarf dressed in a full suit of golden plate armor, a huge war-club cradled in his arms. From beneath his golden crown cascaded a huge mop of unruly hair that hung well past his shoulders. That was not the worst of it, either. His face was lost beneath a thick beard that started just below his eyes and tumbled in a tangled mass clear down to his belly.

“Come along!” ordered Lyanius. “I didn’t bring you here to gawk at my ancestors.”

He hustled them down the hall, Caelum following close behind. As they passed the other murals, the mul saw that they, too, portrayed grossly bearded dwarves. The painting usually depicted dwarves standing in the somber halls of dimly lit keeps or in the dark chambers of some vast cave.

When he reached the last mural in the line, Rikus stopped. He had no doubt that the picture depicted the guardian of the city, King Rkard. Like the figure that had met them at the city gate, the dwarf in the painting had golden-yellow eyes and wore black plate mail trimmed in silver and gold. His helm was crowned by a jewel-studded crown of strange white metal. In his hands, the picture king even held a battle-axe identical to the one carried by the gate-guardian. The weapon’s serrated blade was flecked by tiny sparkles of light.

As interesting as the king’s picture was, it was the background that fascinated the mul. Behind Rkard, the ground sloped down a gentle hill blanketed by the green stalks and red blossoms of some broad-leafed plant Rikus did not recognize. At the bottom of this slope, a wide ribbon of blue water meandered through a series of lush meadows. In those fields grew food crops of every imaginable color and shape. In the far background of the painting, the river finally disappeared into a forest of billowing trees ranging in color from amber to russet to maroon. Behind this timberland rose a mountain range, its peaks and high slopes covered strangely with white.

“Rkard is the king who led our ancestors into the world,” explained Lyanius.

“What world?” Rikus gasped, his eyes still fixed on the painting.

“This one, of course,” Caelum answered, also studying the painting. “Don’t let the mural mislead you. The artist must have been given to a certain amount of embellishment. Perhaps that green land is his idea of paradise-or maybe the after world.”

“Not so,” said Lyanius, his tone strangely morose. “Dwarven artists painted only what they saw.”

“What do you mean?” asked Neeva, wrinkling her brow at the mural. “Who has ever seen anything thing like this? It is even more magnificent than the halfling forest!”

Lyanius looked away. “Come on,” he grunted. “This is not what I brought you to see.”

The dwarf led the way around the corner and down the corridor until they reached a bronze-gilded door with the bas-relief head of a bearded dwarf. The sculpture’s blue eyes, made of painted glass, followed the movements of Lyanius and his guests as they approached.

Rikus and Neeva glanced at each other, uneasy at the sight of an animate sculpture.

Stopping in front of the door, Lyanius spoke to the head at length, using a strange language of short, clipped syllables. When he finished, the unblinking eyes studied Rikus and Neeva for several moments, looking them up and down. Finally the head’s metal lips began to move, and it replied to Lyanius’s query in the same staccato tongue. The door swung open.

As the door moved, Rikus heard the faintest scuffle in the hallway behind them. “Did anyone else hear that?” he asked.

Lyanius frowned. “I’m certain it was just the echo of the door opening.”

Nevertheless, the old dwarf passed his torch to Rikus. Motioning for the others to stay behind, Lyanius shuffled down the corridor into the murky blackness, where his dwarven vision would not be nullified by the light of the torches.

“Shouldn’t we go with him?” Rikus asked.

“Not if you value your life,” answered Caelum. “My father is quite touchy about taking care of himself.”

They waited for what seemed an eternity before Lyanius stepped silently out of the shadows. “There’s nothing there,” he said irritably. “Probably just a wrab.”

“Wrab?” asked Neeva.

“A tiny, flying serpent,” explained Caelum.

“Filthy blood drinkers,” added Lyanius, stepping through the door he had opened earlier. “Normally, they’re as quiet as death, but every now and then they bump into something.”

Frowning, Rikus peered back down the corridor. When he saw nothing to contradict what the old dwarf had said, he followed the others into a small room. It was lit by a flaxen glow of ambient light that issued from no apparent source, yet filled the chamber like a haze. In the center of the room, an open book hovered in midair, as though it were resting on a table that Rikus could not see.

“I wanted you to know that when you saved Kled, you saved more than a village,” said Lyanius, motioning at the book proudly.

Its binding was of gold-trimmed leather, and the long columns of angular characters on its parchment pages glowed with a green light of their own. In the margins, brightly painted pictures of horned beasts moved before Rikus’s eyes, grazing or leaping as though they still roamed the glens in which the artist had first seen them.

Despite the magical pictures in the book, Rikus was more interested in what he could not see. Passing his hand first under, then over the tome, he asked, “What holds it up?”

“What holds it up?” snapped Lyanius. “I show you the Book of the Kemalok Kings , and you ask the mechanics of a simple enchantent?”

“I’ve never had much interest in books,” the mul said, self-consciously shifting his attention back to the volume. “I can’t read.”

“Neither can I-at least not this book,” answered Lyanius, calming. “It was written in the language of our ancestors. I have learned to translate only a little of it, enough to know that this volume tells the history of Kemalok.”

“That’s-ah-interesting,” Rikus said, glancing at Neeva to see if she understood why Lyanius placed so much import on bringing them here.

“I think Rikus will find the Great Hall more to his interest, Urhnomus ,” Caelum said, noticing Rikus’s puzzled expression. “What matters is not that our friends understand the importance of what they did, but that they kept the Book of Kings out of Urikite hands.”

Caelum’s words calmed the old dwarf. “You’re very wise for someone yet under a hundred,” he said, nodding proudly.

After they left the little room, the bas-relief head spoke briefly to Lyanius, then the door closed of its own accord. The old dwarf led his friends farther down the corridor and turned another corner. This time, they stopped before a pair of massive wooden doors so infested with dry rot that Rikus was surprised they still hung on their hinges.

Despite the deterioration of the doors, the strange animals carved into each one remained handsome and distinct. The snarling beasts resembled bears, save that, instead of the articulated shells armoring the creatures Rikus had fought, these were covered with nothing more protective than a thick mat of long fur. The mul wondered if the carvings depicted some gentler breed that the ancient dwarves had kept as pets.