Jeff Crook: Dark Thane

Tarn Bellowgranite hurried along the tunnel, surrounded by his personal guard of twelve dwarf warriors in jangling plate armor. A stiff, wet wind shrilled in his face, whipping his straw-colored beard over his shoulder like a scarf. Miles behind him now, King Gilthas led the last of the refugee elves away from their homeland of Qualinesti. Against the advice of his own Council of Thanes, Tarn and his dwarves had dug escape tunnels to help the elves avoid detection as they fled the green dragon Beryl. Somewhere ahead, Tarn’s army of dwarves was battling Beryl and her legions of goblins, draconians, and human Knights of Neraka. Somewhere behind, the elves they had come to save were fleeing to safety.

For a moment, the thirteen dwarves slowed their steps as they listened to the wind blowing up the tunnel. Dwarves could tell by the sighing of an underground breeze what kinds of stone it had blown through, or so it was said. It was also said that a dwarf could hear a copper coin rattle in the shoe of a troll standing in a cesspit. What Tarn heard, though, were screams. Terror, pain, anger, and the rending of stone, the scream of the very earth as it succumbed to some great force.

The floor of the tunnel suddenly dropped from beneath their feet, sending the dwarves plunging down a slope of loose gravel and soil that had not been there moments before. The thirteen heavily armored dwarves crashed in a heap on a level twenty feet below, sounding as if a tinker’s cart full of pots had been thrown down a well.

“What in the name of the Abyss!” Tarn swore as he rose, groaning and knuckling his back. The other dwarves climbed to their feet, battered and bruised, covered in dust and gravel, grumbling like the dead crawling out of their graves.

A wild-eyed dwarf with an unkempt beard jutting furiously from his mail coif leaned against the damp stone wall as though caressing it. “The very rock groans,” he hissed after a few moments.

“I can feel the strain of the earth through the soles of my boots,” Tarn said. “What I want to know is why?”

“The dragon,” one of the other dwarves cryptically pronounced. The others nodded while dusting off their beards.

“Where are we now?” Tarn asked. The collapsed tunnel had dumped them into a deeper passage, one that crossed beneath their tunnel at right angles. All around them, they smelled the soft, peaty loam excreted by the monstrous Urkhan worms the dwarves had used to delve these tunnels.

“Urkhan holding pen,” the first dwarf said. “If we follow this passage, it should lead us back to a main tunnel.”

“You know these passages better than I, Captain Mog. Lead the way,” Tarn said.

The other dwarves fell into protective positions around Tarn as they trotted off together. Mog ranged ahead a dozen yards to scout the way. The round passage led them along a meandering course through more worm pens and past the abandoned quarters of the worm wranglers. Several worm harnesses still hung from the wall of a chamber chewed from the earth by the worms’ passage. All the pens in this area were empty, as the Urkhan worms had been moved into the tunnels beneath the city in preparation for the dragon’s attack. Eventually, the tunnel led them into a wider passage.

“This is not the same passage as before,” Tarn said as he examined their surroundings. “There’s no wind here, and these walls are shored with timbers.”

“This tunnel’s not so deep as the previous one, m’lord Thane,” Captain Mog said.

“Just so long as it takes us to Qualinost,” Tarn grunted. “Lead on.”

They hurried along the passageway, their iron-shod boots tramping the soft earthen floor. Soon, they passed several wooden support beams that had fallen across the tunnel, partially blocking the way, and these they had to scramble over or under as best they could. Each damaged section of the tunnel filled Tarn with a deepening sense of unease. The air stank of the forest just a few yards above their heads, and the tunnel felt close and dank. There was an unnatural silence, as though of the grave.

Tarn and his companions traveled without benefit of light from torches or lanterns. The long dark of the tunnel was no hindrance to them, for they were blessed with darkvision. Not all dwarves possessed the ability to see in the dark—Tarn had it by his mother, Garimeth Bellowsmoke, a Daergar. His personal guard was made up of warriors from the Klar clan, who like the Daergar and Theiwar also had the gift. Tarn considered himself lucky to have been born with his mother’s eyes. She gave him little else. He might have inherited his Hylar father’s blindness to the dark, forcing him to travel in the deep places of the earth with torch or lantern light. Darkvision was a distinct advantage to those who dwelt underground.

The bends and turns gnawed through the earth by the Urkhan worms thus appeared to Tarn’s eyes as though lit by bright moonlight. His companions were outlined in warm red, especially wherever their flesh was exposed to the open air. They wore iron-shod boots to hide their footprints from other creatures of the deep earth, who could track the residual heat left in stone by a person’s tread. The Klar also painted their faces and caked their beards with white clay before battle, because white was the color of hiding among those with darkvision. To Tarn, their faces were blank masks in the dark, visible only by the heat of their open eyes; to their enemies, such faceless visages were terrifying.

Tarn guessed that they were nearing the city of Qualinost. He urged his guards to greater speed. They began to splash through muddy puddles where before there had been dry stone or moist earth.

“Are we near the tunnel entrance?” Tarn huffed as they jogged along.

“Not yet,” Captain Mog answered from the front of the party. “This tunnel will slope down to join the main passage before entering the city. But we’re close.”

Tarn grunted in acknowledgment, hiding his anxiety under his customary gruff exterior of command. He feared the worst. The evacuation of the elves had been going as planned, with the last refugees escaping into the tunnels before Beryl’s expected daylight attack. He and King Gilthas had been rounding up stragglers when a great blast of chill, wet air roared up behind them, from the direction of the city. The young elf king had wanted to return, but Tarn had urged him to lead the refugees to safety while he took his personal guard and investigated. Gilthas had reluctantly assented, marching off with his elves while Tarn turned back, the damp wind in his face speaking volumes that only a dwarf could read.

He dared not speculate as to the cause of the wind or the tunnel collapse that had dumped them into the Urkhan pen, but as he had said, he could feel the tension of the earth through his feet as he ran. The ground almost seemed to vibrate with the strain, the floor to hum like a harp string pulled to the breaking point.

They stopped at another partial collapse of the tunnel. Fallen beams crisscrossed the passage like the web of a spider, and sections of the roof had fallen, blocking the way. Captain Mog led the digging, clearing a path through the rubble for their king to follow. Tarn impatiently slapped the pommel of his sword while he watched them excavate. The Klar were not careful miners, but they were quick, strong-backed, and stubborn. They heaved beams aside or hacked through those too tightly wedged against the tunnel walls to budge. They clove through mounds of rubble with their hands, pushing, clawing, snarling, and cursing at the work. Earth, dust, and small pebbles sifted down from the unstable roof, threatening to bury them all, yet they pushed onward, needing little encouragement.