Murder in Tarsis (23 page)

“It’s been a while,” she said. “Just be patient. I think it’s that one.” She pointed at a square-sided tunnel and set off along it. Lacking any credible recourse, the others followed.

The tunnel branched more than once, but Shellring now seemed positive in her sense of direction. After a

few minutes of travel, she stopped at a spot that seemed to be like every other place in the tunnel. “This is it,” she announced.

“This is what?” Ironwood asked, looking all around him. The faint, diffuse glow was unremarkable, except for a patch on one side from which no glow came. Shellring reached into this patch, and there came the unmistakable sound of knuckles rapping on wood.

“A door?” said Nistur. He was answered moments later when a shuffling sound announced the arrival of someone on the other side. With a creak, a round patch of light replaced the blank spot on the tunnel wall. From beyond came a light no brighter than that cast by two or three candles, but after the gloom they had come through, it seemed bright. In the light stood a dwarf with pure white hair and beard.

“Who is it?” the dwarf inquired. “Oh, Shellring. But who are these two?”

Nistur doffed his hat. “I believe we met briefly a few evenings ago in Stunbog’s ship. I am Nistur, and this is my companion Ironwood, who was indisposed that night.”

“Delver, Stunbog is in trouble,” Shellring said. “I think you and your people can help him.”

The dwarf peered at them not so much in suspicion as in puzzlement, as if he were not accustomed to intrusions into his placid life.

“Well, come in, then. If Stunbog needs help, we want to do what we can for him. Half the children would have died these last two years, had it not been for him.”

The others passed within. Ironwood and Nistur had to stoop slightly, and they stood close together of necessity, for the room was dwarf-scaled.

Quickly, Shellring related an abbreviated version of recent events, culminating with the arrest and incarceration of Stunbog, Myrsa, and Badar. The dwarf listened

attentively, nodding from time to time.

“We’ve heard of some of this,” he said. “We get around, you know, but we try to stay out of doings aboveground. They’ve all but forgotten us up there, and that’s the way we like it. But to help Stunbog, I think we can do something.”

“Wonderful!” Shellring said. “How do we do it?”

“Well, for starters, it won’t be easy or simple.”

“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “I thought we could just go up there and bust them out.”

“Not in that part of the city. Some of the old tunnels are blocked up. It will call for some digging. And there’s … Well, let’s go consult with the gathering, and we’ll learn what the situation is. There’s a danger, you see, and it might make things difficult, even impossible.”

“A danger?” Nistur said. “What might it be?”

“The behir,” Delver answered. “But, no sense borrowing trouble beforetime. There are folk who know the situation in that part of town better than I do. Come along.” The dwarf crossed the little room into another, and they followed. Part of his dwelling seemed to be a stonecutter’s workshop, with tools neatly racked and a number of apparent works in progress standing about on pedestals.

From the dwelling they passed into a corridor far larger than the ones they had traversed earlier. This one had a vaulted ceiling from which were suspended iron baskets full of luminous fungi, casting a light at least equal to that within the dwelling. At one point Delver stopped and opened a small door. It gave admittance into a closet that was just large enough for the dwarf to squeeze inside alone. From its ceiling hung a length of chain terminating in a handle. Delver grasped the handle and pulled it downward three times. As he left the closet and closed the door, a deep, booming gong

sounded through the corridor. Then came a second boom, then a third. The reverberations continued long afterward.

“That’s the summons to the gathering,” Delver told them. “It can be heard through the whole underground. Come on.”

They set off after him and came to an immense room. The light was too dim to illuminate its extremities, but the floor was littered with stones that had fallen from its ceiling. From this room they took a broad stairway that led down; then there was another corridor and more rooms.

Nistur’s mind whirled, thinking of the incredible amount of labor it had taken to hew these corridors and chambers out of solid rock, then to decorate and adorn the lot. At last they came to a room not quite as vast as the others, where they found some forty or fifty dwarves gathered on banked stone benches that had been designed to accommodate a far larger number.

“What is this about, Delver?” said an elderly dwarf whose eyebrows drooped to the sides of his face like a long mustache. “That signal came from your part of the underground.”

“And who are these strangers?” demanded a woman almost as old.

“They are friends of Stunbog, here with news of something that concerns all of us,” Delver said. “There’s trouble above.”

The old dwarf snorted. “What do we care about that? The nomads can sack and burn the city if they want to. It will never affect us. They won’t dare come down here.”

“It’s not the nomads, Hotforge,” Delver said. “Listen to Shellring.”

The thief came forward and delivered her story once more. The audience listened with somber expressions.

“We can’t let Stunbog rot in the dungeon,” said a woman who looked young, for a dwarf. “He saved my child when I had given her up for dead.”

“Aye, we owe him too much,” said the one called Hotforge.

“Just get him and the other two free,” Shellring said. “We won’t cause any trouble for you. We’ll be on our way as soon as they’re out.”

The old dwarf turned to face the assembly. “Are we agreed?” Everyone nodded, grunted, or otherwise signaled assent. “All right, then. Who knows that area best?” A bald, middle-aged dwarf raised a hand. “Then tell us about it, Pickbreaker.”

The bald one stood to his full, four-foot stature. “When the foundations of the Hall of Justice were dug, our ancestors left in place many of the access tunnels, as was their custom with the greater buildings of the city. These tunnels were seriously weakened in the Cataclysm, and they were filled up lest the building settle.”

“How long will it take to dig through the fill to the cell where they are keeping Stunbog?” Delver asked him.

“I’ll have to go to the archive and get the plans, but I am sure it will take several hours at least. And then there is the behir.”

“I’m already certain that I will not like the answer,” said Nistur, “yet I must ask. Just what is the behir?”

“You do not know what a behir is?” Delver said wonderingly.

“They must be rare elsewhere,” Nistur answered.

“It is a great worm,” said Hotforge. “A vicious reptile twenty paces long. It eats anything it can catch.”

“A dragon?” Ironwood asked.

Hotforge shook his head. “No, the behir has no wings, it does not speak, and it does not have fiery or poisonous breath.”

“That’s a relief,” Shellring said shakily. “Instead, it shoots lightning bolts from its mouth,” said Hotforge.

“Ah, is that all?” Nistur said. “Well, have no fear. My companion, Ironwood”—he clapped a hand on the mercenary’s armored shoulder—”is a renowned dragon-slayer. You see? He wears the skin of a black dragon he slew some years ago. Such a champion will have no difficulty dispatching a mere behir.” He glanced up and was shocked to see that Ironwood’s face had gone deathly pale, a truly ghastly sight in the fungus light.

“Let’s get to work, then,” said Hotforge. “Pickbreaker, go find those plans. The rest of you, fetch tools and gather at the old banqueting hall below the palace.”

The assembly split up, and the little crowd made their way out through numerous exits. There was an air of high-spirited excitement, as if these folk had little to break the gloomy monotony of their lives and they looked forward to this unusual task.

“This should be enjoyable,” Delver told them, flexing the long fingers of his gnarled hands. “I haven’t done any decent digging in many years.”

“How far do your excavations extend?” Nistur asked as they followed him into yet another of the endless tunnels.

“Wherever you see city above, there is underground beneath. My ancestors dug the foundations of Tarsis, and when that work was done they extended the diggings for their own use. There are tunnels that go out under the walls. Once, there were small dwarven villages and towns out there, and the people who farmed the land above them never even knew they were there.” The dwarf sighed. “That was long ago. We are a dying people now. All the villages are deserted, and so is most of the underground, just a few score of us left out of many thousands in the old days.”

“That is sad,” Nistur commiserated. He fell back a little and said to Ironwood, in a low voice, “What ails you? Is your illness returning so soon?”

“No, it’s just that—” He hesitated. “Well, news of this dragon-thing caught me by surprise.”

“But it isn’t a real dragon, they say, just sort of a dragon.”

“It doesn’t have to be very close! Who cares if it doesn’t have wings? They’d do it no good down here anyway. It’s why the Tarsians put those heavy grates over the street drains.”

“Well, the dwarves have coped with the creature for centuries, so let us not allow it to dismay us. I have proclaimed your fame as a dragon-slayer, so act like one!”

“It isn’t as though I have much choice,” Ironwood groused.

A few minutes later they were assembled in the banquet hall, a long, narrow room with stone tables down its center and open hearths at each end. At one end of a table, the dwarf named Pickbreaker had spread out a scroll and weighted its corners with bits of rock.

“These are the original plans as made by the master digger when the city was laid out. They’ve been amended over the centuries as new diggings were added and old ones closed off. The last additions were made just after the Cataclysm. That’s when these”—he pointed a stubby finger at some incomprehensible lines and squiggles— “were closed down.”

“What sort of task are we looking at?” Hotforge asked.

“There’s a plug of about fifty yards of solid masonry between the nearest access tunnel and the lowest dungeon, where they’re keeping Stunbog.”

“Fifty yards!” Nistur said, aghast. “Surely you must need many days to carve through so much stone!”

“If they’d used granite, it would take days, even for

us,” Pickbreaker agreed. “Even if they’d used coral stone from the harbor, it would be something of a task. Luckily, though, they used soft tufa from the nearby hills. It would be a hard dig for you, but we are dwarves. We dig as naturally as you breathe.”

“Make the tunnel large enough,” Shellring advised. “Stunbog is no lightweight, and Myrsa’s as big as Ironwood here.” She punched the mercenary lightly in the stomach, then winced and shook her hand in pain. As she did this a pair of young dwarves scurried into the banquet room.

“The behir’s in a lair two levels below the dungeon,” said one of them. “But it’s asleep.”

“I trust it sleeps deeply?” Nistur said.

“A behir can sleep for years,” said Hotforge, “but this one’s been restless of late. We’ve heard it moving about. It must be getting hungry.”

“Why haven’t you killed it?” Ironwood said, irritated. “If the thing sleeps like that, it should be easy.”

“Have you ever killed something that spits lightning?” Delver demanded.

“Plenty of them have been killed over the centuries,” said Hotforge. “But every time we think we’ve killed the last of them, another shows up. They hatch in the natural tunnels that are below even our own diggings. When a young one grows too big for the old volcano vents, it moves up here where it’s roomier.”

“Most unfortunate,” Nistur said. “Will your digging activities wake it?”

“That is what we’ll find out,” Hotforge said. He turned to the other dwarves. “We’ll work in two teams. While one digs at the plug, the other will carry the rubble to block up the behir’s access to us. Maybe that will slow it if it comes for us.”

“An excellent thought,” Nistur commended.

“We are as interested in staying alive as you are,” said Hotforge.

“How far is it to this blocked tunnel?” Ironwood asked. “Come along. I’ll show you.”

They followed the dwarf leader from the banqueting chamber to a wide, square door about eight feet high. It was not locked, but it was carved all over with dwarven writing. The most fit-looking of the dwarves were already assembled there with picks, sledgehammers, steel rods, and wedges. A team of older dwarves stood by with wheelbarrows to carry off the rubble.

“We are standing,” the old dwarf said, “just below the middle of the plaza before the Hall of Justice. Beyond this door was the old access tunnel, one of many used in working on the foundations of this part of the city.”

“Such tunnels must have been handy things to have,” Nistur observed. “They would give you certain advantages should the folk of the Upper City turn hostile toward your people.”

“Open it,” Hotforge commanded. With a great creaking of rusty hinges, the door swung back to reveal a solid wall of grayish rock. The stone had been precisely cut, and so compulsive was the dwarves’ sense of tidiness in masonry that the facing blocks had been buffed to a dull gloss. The central block bore a few lines of writing and below it a sigil. Hotforge’s finger traced the lines of script.

“This says which tunnel was blocked and why, along with the date of the task. This sigil below it is the master mason’s mark.” He turned to one of the workers standing by. “Remove this block carefully; see that it isn’t damaged. We’ll replace it when we restore the work. Well, get to it.”

Immediately, the dwarves set to their task with the intensity of termites boring into wood. As soon as the inscribed block was free, Hotforge personally pried loose

the block immediately below it and carried the cube of tufa to one of the banqueting tables.

“I’ll inscribe this one with the story of our task and the date and place my own mark on it.”

“You take your stonework seriously,” Nistur observed.