Mortal Consequences (9 page)

They scurried into wet darkness that echoed like wide-open chambers. “What’s a ferret?” Sunbright finally asked.

“A crawler. A squealer. A spy in the pay of the guards.” Her panting voice led him on. “I saw the door wasn’t locked because he was pulling it shut. You could see the muscles in his arm work, and the handle couldn’t be glyphed, or his fingers would have been singed. He must have thought us stupid gulls!”

“Quick of you to spot that in a second.” Sunbright’s voice was warm with admiration.

Her voice floated back, “It’s nothing.” But he imagined she smiled.

“Where are we bound?” he asked. The dark made Sunbright’s neck ache, for he feared bashing his skull.

“Wherever this leads. We’ve lost everyone else. They went up at the fork, but I suspect a mousetrap awaits there. South by west will get us out, I hope.”

Sunbright had known they jogged alone. Now cold light glowed as Knucklebones striped her vest. Underfoot ran dirt and gravel and creases dappled with water that reflected silver. The passage opened overhead, and he heard bats squeak, a comforting sound because it promised an exit. Abruptly the trail slanted, and Sunbright had to hold Knucklebones’s shoulder to keep from overrunning her. She trotted as confidently as a cat until her foot crunched something hollow.

“Whoa!”

“What is it?” he said. “That sounded like—”

He squinted at more light. Knucklebones stroked a round rock aglow, but it bore eye sockets, an underslung jaw, and yellow fangs. “Skull of an orc,” she said.

“Orcs,” he corrected. “Look.”

What looked like yellow sand around them was actually bones. Knucklebones lobbed the luminous skull, and they saw that the boneyard extended farther than the glow could reach. Thousands, perhaps millions of bones littered the cavern.

“I don’t… understand …” murmured the shaman.

“Sure you do,” Knucklebones hissed. “Remember? In my time, the cities warred, and prophecies came true? The Rain of Skulls.

“An explosion hit Ioulaum’s underside, and bones spilled out in the millions. The legends recalled Ioulaum was sheared from one of the Unholy Mounts, Redsnow or Bloody Hill, where an orcish army was wiped out. This is that cavern.”

“Yes …” Sunbright squinted upward. “I keep forgetting the natural caves lie upside-down so we walk on ancient ceilings. But all this death. There should be—” He swallowed the word “ghosts” before it escaped. No sense in conjuring the spirits of thousands of slain orcs.

“Come. Quickly,” she said. Even steadfast Knucklebones was spooked, and led him by the hand. They couldn’t walk without stepping on bones, so they closed their ears to the crunching and grinding. They made for the far end of the cave.

A quarter-mile on, dawn light sparkled on cave walls. They reached a grate where the thief pronounced, “Wisht!” to pop the rivets. Rattling it aside, they crawled into a culvert and up to the street. Merchants called to their friends and neighbors, clucked to ponies, and lugged their wares to the marketplace.

Sunbright was bewildered by the abrupt transition from death to life, but the city-born Knucklebones was already towing him into the crowd, saying, “Come on.”

“Where?”

“East side. Street of the Faithful Protector. Bly’s. To have her scry what you’ve sought so long.”

“It’s no good, Cholena. It’s foolish to fight the yak-men.”

“Oh, so, Drigor? Ayaz died for nothing? And Ridon and Nodin, their deaths were meaningless? Best their ghosts haunt your nights until all turns black before your rheumy eyes.”

“Berate if you will, woman. I only speak from three hundred years’ experience. That counts for nothing, I suppose.”

Deep in the Iron Mountains, Drigor and Cholena, his sometimes wife, worked at a stone bench littered with crude axe heads and blades. The weapons had been puddled in antique molds. By candlelight reflected from copper and brass holders, the dwarven artisans worked with craggy hands to etch the old designs deeper: entwined dragons, bold kings, noble steeds, and fierce sailing vessels. They polished or darkened the swirls and whorls, and brought a glittering luster to all. They argued as they talked, an argument years old.

“We must defend our homeland,” Cholena chided. “The Sons of Baltar have inhabited these mountains for centuries. It’s—”

“Aye, centuries,” Drigor interrupted, “but not forever, not since the first dwarf sprang from a glacier by the breath of Igashum. I’ve lived here all my life, three centuries, but my father, Yasur, came from the Rampant Mountains, which tall men call Gods’ Legion. If my father could leave his homeland—”

A scream cut him off. Not a scream of pain, as someone scalded by molten metal at the forges, but a scream of terror, pure fright. Drigor and Cholena grabbed a mattock and stabbing spear, clumped in tarry boots, and thundered down a wide tunnel toward the foundry.

Lights sputtered like sparks from a forge. Above the screams of the mortally wounded the dwarves heard a screech like a dragon’s.

“Where is the bright-haired one? Where is my enemy? I smell his tracks! He must die! You will die for sheltering my foes!”

Drigor and Cholena burst into a scene from hell. The cavernous foundry, lit by red and yellow fires from iron slotted doors and smoldering heaps of charcoal, was crammed with a writhing mass of black tentacles. A dozen dwarves were snared in hundreds of slimy arms that grew before their bulging eyes. The slither and rustle of these thousand arms was deafening, like the crash of surf in a storm or the roar of an avalanche. Kicking dwarves hung ten, twenty, even thirty feet in the air. Tentacles coiled around them, sliding into their clothing, wrapping arms and legs, circling their necks, as if the plantlike assassin had a mind and a will.

Centermost in the room, in a hollow the roots avoided, a tall scarecrow of stone shook misshapen fists and screamed. “I’ll destroy you all! I’ll rip the flesh from your bones, then crack them and suck the marrow! I’ll rend your children before your eyes unless you tell me where lies my enemy!”

Drigor went for roots, Cholena for the monster.

A dozen feet high, Cappi and Pullor hung upside down. They kicked and writhed, yanked at the vines around their necks with powerful, work-worn hands, but couldn’t squeeze even a finger under the tendrils. Only the solid muscle of necks and chests kept them from being suffocated, and Drigor saw they couldn’t hold their breath forever. Slinging his keen-edged mattock over his head, he scraped the blade within a hair’s breadth of a stone wall, and sheared through a dozen dark roots. The devilish web sagged, and Cappi’s boot thumped Drigor’s shoulder. Savagely the old dwarf yanked his comrade down, towing a snarl of roots along.

Deft slashes of a worn knife freed Cappi from the thickest vines. The young dwarf sucked air like a bellows, and retched from a raw throat. Turning to the wall, Drigor leaped, chopped, tore magic vines, and tugged Pullor free. The dwarf’s face was white, and Cappi had to bang on his chest to get him breathing. By then Drigor had waded deeper, hacking at the jungle growth toward Oredola trapped farther on. The stink was terrible, for the slimy vines reeked like something dead and rotten raked from a river bottom. Drigor gagged on the stench, spat, but kept cutting.

By reddish hell-light he saw scuttling movement and cursed freely. The black roots he’d sheared curled in the air. Not alive, but not dead, they clung again to the wall, and spawned new vines from bare rock. Cappi yelled as vines twisted around his boot, and he had to stomp them loose while dragging Pullor clear.

They’d never defeat this spell, Drigor could see, but he cleaved valiantly, and called, “Hang on, Oredola! I’m coming!”

All the time, the monster screeched madness. “Where is my enemy? I’ll punish you all! I want the bright-blond barbarian! These caves will be your boneyard!”

Cholena didn’t know what this flinty monster was—golem or crypt servant or wight or troll—but few creatures could stand a thrust of dwarven steel. Charging head on, stifling a war cry rather than warn the fiend, Cholena bunched her arms to stab straight and hard. The fiend turned from its ranting too late, and the hand-forged blade jarred its spine just above the cockeyed hips.

Yet the monster must have been true stone, for the hollow-ground blade only knocked loose a shale chip. Red blood flowed from a jot no bigger than a dwarf’s hand. Cholena was shocked at the toughness of the hide, and how easily the blade had skipped off. Frantic, Cholena stamped to set her feet, slashed upward with her stabbing spear to strike again at the small wound. Only by prying it open could she hope to kill the fiend.

But the flint monster whirled with clawed hands, fire flickering in its blue, staring eyes. “You dare? You would harm me, who crawled alone from the depths of hell to gain vengeance? You would halt my quest?”

The last thing Cholena saw was twin tornadoes issue from the unmatched hands of the fiend. Then she was blinded by the hundred-mile-an-hour winds that erupted before her. Blistering, killing winds roared over the dwarf, tearing away her eyes, ripping loose her hair, then the scalp from her skull. Hissing zephyrs like a basket of knives stripped the unfortunate dwarf to shreds in seconds, until hair and flesh and bones and then chips of bone were scoured to splinters and blown in a gory trail across the floor of the foundry. The spear was flung away to clatter in a corner.

Drigor looked up at the first shrill of wind, and howled like the tornado himself as Cholena died. He’d dragged Oredola free of the deathdealing vines, was cutting his way to the next dwarves, so enwrapped he couldn’t tell their identity. Whirling winds filled the cavern with noise and destruction. Backlash from the tornadoes whipped around the monster so magic vines were wrenched from the walls. The flint creature became a center of snapping, flailing tentacles that spattered into slimy fragments or else wrapped around their creator like seaweed around a shipwreck.

Drigor howled in outrage, and champed on his beringed mustache over Cholena’s death. Yet even in grief the old dwarf analyzed the enemy, and saw that the monster had made a mistake.

The dark roots sprang from stone, and now they’d touched the monster’s frame. On the stone-like skin, they took root and grew anew. Vines sprouted across the monster’s back, on its bald head, on the backs of its knobby legs. Within minutes, the rampaging fiend was festooned with vines thick as hedgehog quills. It screamed and slashed at the onslaught of its own magic, gibbered as it raked the vines from its skin with obsidian claws.

Elsewhere the vines curled and writhed and thickened, but a large hole had been blown in the jungle growth, and several dwarves wriggled free. They hit the ground running, sprinting on stumpy legs past the weedy monster. Yet three still hung in vines, and kicked more feebly, or hung limp as rag dolls.

Drigor hacked at roots until even his famed strength began to fail. Freed dwarves and others came running to chop and flail. The vine-wrapped monster screeched, blathered nonsense, and sputtered like a rabid wildcat.

Finally, in an eye-smarting blaze, it scorched the air with a shifting spell and vanished. The only things remaining were a blackened patch of cave floor, the reek of charred vines, and a forest of slithering vines that fell still, then withered and died. By the time the dwarves had cut the last three dwarves free, the vines were dried stalks, no thicker than burned hay.

But the three victims were dead. Strangled, they lay in heaped stalks with bulging eyes in blue faces. Many dwarves, unused to showing emotion, broke down and wept at the loss to their tribe.

While someone stoked the coal forge, Drigor rested his mattock head on the ground and leaned on the shaft. Death coming to young ones made him feel uncommonly old. And the death of Cholena, who’d given him a son years ago, tore at his heart like iron fingers. Red firelight glistened on tears dripping from his pouchy face, like icicle melt from the crags of a mountain in spring.

Yet even his grief was interrupted, for one young dwarf blubbered, “This is the fault of those humans! The tall barbarian and the one-eyed part-elf! They brought death to our house!” Others agreed, anger and resentment growing to a muffled outrage.

Drigor cut them off. “The upperfolk could not know this monster pursued. We would have read their faces, heard fear catch in their throats. They are ignorant of this fiend’s quest for revenge, and I owe the big man a boon.”

“Owe?” Cappi’s voice rasped from near-strangulation. “You’d return a favor to a human? After your tribe has suffered?”

“I would,” stated Drigor. “For in times of crisis the trivial burns away and important matters lay bare, as grease burns off iron in the forge, as winter winds scour dirt to bedrock.” Images of wind brought pictures of Cholena ripped to flinders before his eyes. “This visitation is an omen.”

“Omen?” echoed a dozen.

“Just before the attack, I talked with Cholena about how these rooms have sheltered our tribe for centuries. Centuries, but not forever. She bade me stay. Then the gods sent us a test. I survived while Cholena was killed. An omen of blood is strongest of all.”

“I don’t understand,” squeaked Pullor. “You blame the gods for Cholena’s death? And you’d go where? For what purpose?”

Drigor just shook his head, and with aching arms shouldered his beslimed mattock. “I don’t presume to know the gods’ will, nor the heart of a woman, nor my own. I only know to go forth and seek what needs to be found. And to warn the barbarian, Sunbright Steelshanks of the Raven Clan of the Rengarth Barbarians, that a deathdealer comes calling.”

From a mile in the air, Sunbright and Knucklebones watched the dawn light flare on the horizon. Edged by the saw-toothed peaks of the Abbey Mountains, brilliant light filled the sky and washed the clouds golden, so the tundra-dweller and thief saw why the Netherese worshiped the sun, and paid a premium price to welcome it. With the caroling of choirs in temple belfries, the trill of birdsong in gardens, the cry of vendors of oysters and shoes and sharpening echoing from the walls, the wicker of horses and laughter of children at games, the empire could be seen as a glorious and happy place—providing the visitor could ignore memories of marching armies, oppressive taxes, wasteful practices, and the blind and stupid disregard and neglect of any non-Netherese “undermen.”