The Dreaming Hunt (13 page)

Laboriously, he pushed up to his hands and knees. The mechanical joint stuck but then gave way without warning. He caught himself clumsily, cursing himself for being foolish enough to use an ancient wonder without understanding its inner workings. He'd found the false leg tucked in a dusty corner of a sundry shop not long after he'd lost his own limb in a mining accident. Folks told him to let the Heart regrow him a new leg, but he didn't trust the Heart, not one bit. Lackeys of the cursed Empire, one and all, them healers.

He lit one of his small hand torches by feel, using the flint and striking stone from his pouch. Raising the guttering light high, he studied a ribbon of darkness winding away from him into the heart of the mountain. He'd been prospecting this pile of rock fifty years and more, and he'd never heard of a natural passage into the mountain. No map marked it nor dwarven lore spoke of it.

He pulled his cloak closer about him. By the blade of Battle Brand, the weather'd turned foul of a sudden. Caught him out on the mountain like some rank amateur, it had. No choice but to hunker down and wait it out. A cold and hungry night stretched before him. And not a single gem to show for his misery.

The wind shifted, driving sheets of rain into the angled opening as if to force him deeper into the crevasse. Might as well have a look farther in. He had nothing better to do until the storm passed. This called for a prospecting torch, which cast light bright enough to discern even the smallest vein of mineral within stone. No respectable miner was ever without one.

As soon as a spark caught greased cotton and the big torch flickered to life, he recognized worked stone around him. He lifted the light higher to inspect the walls. They were old, for sure. Errock work, if he had to guess. The deep dwarves were known for their use of broad-headed picks like the ones that had created this space. His kin, the kelnor, favored narrow-headed picks like the one slung over his shoulder. But errock were not known for working so high up inside a mountain. These realms were left by tradition and treaty to his kind—the hill dwarves.

The errock had a secret mine in kelnor territory, did they? It would not be secret for much longer if he had anything to say about it. Cautious now, he eased deeper into the passage. It opened out soon enough into what turned out to be quite a large space. A mine.

A thick layer of powdered grit covered every surface, and the air tasted stale. Hadn't been worked in a while, then. Was it played out? Had the errock taken all the treasure and gotten away without discovery? The kelnor council was going to have something to say about this, all right. Growling into his beard, he inspected the space more closely.

He spied tailings on the floor and picked up a few shards to take a closer look. Iron ore. Surely the errock didn't climb the treacherous cliff outside, hide the entrance to this place, and risk infuriating the kelnor who claimed this region of Waelan just to mine common iron.

Intrigued despite his ire, he continued exploring.
Ahh, Druumedar. It's greed twisting your gut, and there's the way of it
. Wary of letting it get the best of him, he moved on cautiously.

He came to an intersection of tunnels leading deeper into the mountain and stopped, shocked. What was this? A full mining complex? Soundings taken by striking the bedrock with singing hammers had never indicated any tunnels in Hauksgrafir. Only the most accomplished of master miners could create tunnels that soundings did not detect. Someone had gone to great lengths to disguise the presence of this place. But who? The errock made their homes deep underground. They would not have operated this far above the surface unless they had found something truly extraordinary.

The main tunnel branched, and he chose to follow the one with the most smoothly worn floor. Marking the wall of the tunnel that would lead him back to the cliffside cave with a piece of chalk, he lifted his torch and headed deeper into the mountain.

Before long, this tunnel widened into what looked for all the world like a miner's village. Small alcoves opened off the main chamber, and stone outcroppings carved into rough benches rose out of the floor in a circle around a shallow pit still blackened by ancient fires. His sharp prospector's eye spotted bits of pottery, a rusted nail here and there. Someone had definitely lived here or at least worked here.

Scowling, he stumped around the space looking for clues as to who'd carved out this mine and what they'd been doing here. The local elders were emphatically not going to be happy to hear about this place.

The good news was it appeared very old. Long deserted. He found a series of narrow post holes augured into the floor. Some sort of forge must have stood next to the blackened fire pit. A narrow, blackened shaft that looked suspiciously chimney-like disappeared up into the ceiling above it. Why on Urth would anyone build a forge inside a place like this? The effort required to haul in the forge itself, let alone bring in enough charred coal to properly fuel it, boggled the mind. Were the errock mad?

He moved farther into the big cavern, and his torchlight glinted off something shiny. A sluggish trickle of water seeped down a wall and into a knee-high basin. The water filling it was black and still. Curious, he plunged his pickaxe into the pool, and it was deep, sinking well below the level of the floor without touching the bottom. A quenching pool. This had definitely been a forge at one time. But for what? And why?

He moved back to where the forge must have stood and raised his torch high. That was when he spotted the circular array of blue glints overhead. Turquoise. And where there was turquoise, there was copper. A dozen veins of the stuff seemed to run together exactly over the spot where the ancient forge must have stood. Odd.

Copper was no rarer or special than common iron. What, then, was the secret treasure of this mountain?

Frustrated, he moved away from the center of the cavern and commenced methodically searching the side alcoves. He found more evidence of dwarven occupation—a beard bead or two, a broken cup on a roughly hewn shelf over what must have once been a sleeping platform.

At the far end of the huge chamber, there had been a cave-in. As a prospector, cave-ins were particularly interesting to him because they quickly revealed large, previously unseen layers of rock and ore that would otherwise have remained buried.

He poked around the rockfall. The collapsed rubble pile was not tall—it had fallen outward more like a wall collapsing than rock sheering off in an avalanche pile. Still, he could not see the exposed face behind the rocks, curse it. Awkwardly, he picked his way around, over, and through the debris. A faint flash of green caught his eye.
'Ey? What's that?

He clambered on top of a boulder and spied a smooth curve of stone that looked worked. In fact, it looked finely carved. He took a step toward it, and his artificial leg chose that moment to lock up. He pitched forward, falling clumsily and landing heavily on his side.

He shouted hoarsely as a green eye glinted back at him. He scrabbled backward, feeling about frantically for the torch, which had rolled away from him and was guttering badly, threatening to go out.

He righted the torch and got it burning properly again, and then he thrust it forward at the creature peering out at him from under the stone.

Nothing moved.

Cautiously, he leaned down to peer into the shadows. It was an eye, all right. But this time he saw it was carved of some precious stone. Now that he looked closely, all the stone fragments around him appeared to be carved and smoothed into a statue-like finish. That looked like a leg over there. And an arm …

Huh. With a bracer buckled to the stone forearm. Except the bracer was not part of the carving. It looked to be made of metal of some kind. He gave an experimental tug at the bracer, and it lifted away from the shockingly realistic arm beneath, complete with bulging muscles and corded tendons in the elbow and wrist.

At first glance, the bracer was little more than a bent piece of metal. Copper if the green patina covering it was any indication. A finger-long gash marred it right across the middle, though. He shoved it into his pouch and reached for a big, curved piece of rock to push it aside. A metallic ringing announced that another piece of metal lay under it. He rolled over what turned out to be the statue's incredibly realistic stone torso and spied a larger metal piece. This time a breastplate in the same copper as the bracer.

Now who would make a copper suit of armor? Any apprentice armorsmith knew that copper was far too soft a metal to stand up to the rigors of combat or even a good swing from a tempered steel blade.

He poked around a bit more, and some distance away, he spied a round stone. It turned out not to be stone at all, but a head still wearing a copper helm. And both were shockingly intact. The face was so lifelike down to the last little detail that he fancied he could feel stubble on the carving's cheek above where its beard began to grow. Each hair in the intricately woven and beaded beard had been meticulously carved. He'd never seen or heard of chisels that could texture stone so finely. The mouth had tiny flakes where the statue's lips had been chapped—whether by wind or lack of water, he could not tell. Even a few hairs inside the nostrils were faithfully rendered.

The model for this piece had definitely been a dwarf. But the features weren't errock nor kelnor. And although he'd met but a few of the reclusive terrakin dwarves in his day, the face staring up at him didn't look entirely terrakin, either. Bah. He was no art critic. It was a dwarf, and he'd leave it at that.

He had to say, the armor pieces felt pretty solid. He put his full strength into trying to warp the breastplate and didn't achieve the slightest flexion. And when he whacked the helm with the flat side of his pickaxe, he didn't leave a mark on it, let alone a dent.

Using the edge of his cloak, he rubbed away the worst of the dust and grit covering the pieces, but he still could make out no details. Harrumphing, he limped back to the quenching pool. His stump hurt where the false leg attached. The tumble down the cliff, and now this latest fall, had wrenched it violently.

He should toss out the mechanical leg and use a traditional wooden one. Except a gnome had offered this one to him. Not only had he been intrigued by the encounter with a member of the nearly extinct race, but he'd been intrigued by all the intricate moving parts that seemed to serve some secret purpose.

The gnome had stubbornly refused to tell him what any of the extra gears and levers and boxes did. And he never could turn his back on a good mystery. He'd been tinkering with the leg, trying to ascertain what the extra bits did, to little avail. He had learned how to throw a clever lever that engaged a gear in the knee joint, allowing him to lift a man's worth of extra weight beyond what his good leg would do.

And speaking of curiosity, he dipped the bracer into the water and scrubbed it vigorously to remove the worst of the grime. It had clearly been fashioned to protect the back of a warrior's hand and forearm. Slits on each edge of the piece would have been where leather buckles had attached it to a mailed glove most likely.

What he'd initially thought were bits of dirt clinging to the thing turned out to be incredibly intricate decorative details covered in dust. As he cleaned the green piece thin, twisted ropes of copper emerged, along with tiny beads of copper that formed a complex geometric pattern across its surface.

He gave the breastplate and helm the same scrubbing, and beautifully inlaid patterns began to appear. If he was not mistaken, the inlay was also copper, but of a distinctly different color and composition from the base piece. All three pieces were light and well shaped, and despite their damaged state, incredibly strong. The quality of the craftsmanship was extraordinary, even to his jaundiced eye.

Huh. No errock had made such a thing. They were stonemasons and gem cutters first and foremost, not metal artists, and definitely not armorsmiths of this caliber. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that no kelnor smith he knew of could replicate a piece this magnificent, either.

Hmm. Mayhap this piece, this place, were better brought to the attention of the
other
dwarven council. Not the local miner's consortium that answered to the Imperial Miner's Guild but the immensely more secretive and cautious group the Empire knew nothing about. Now that he thought on it, this hidden and entirely unmapped place could prove highly useful to the resistance. And in the meantime, it was a fine place to wait out the storm on the mountain and that cursed yeren.

He eyed a small pile of ancient coal in its stone cradle by the fire pit. Mayhap it would still burn. He built a pyramid of the stuff near one of the sleeping platforms ringing the chamber, primed it with a smear of grease and a handful of crystalized pine resin, and thrust his torch into the whole. Good dwarven charcoal, that. It lit up as if it had been made yesterday and was not older than the hills.

As the fire cast light at the ceiling of the main cave, metallic flashes caught his eye. A circle of metallic posts was clearly visible in the gray rock of the ceiling among the strange veins of turquoise. Too regularly spaced to have been nature-made, the posts were sunk almost entirely into the granite with only a handspan length of each protruding. Now what purpose did those serve? For surely the makers of this cave would not have gone to such trouble to install them way up in that cavernous ceiling just for decoration.

He trimmed a timekeeper candle for eight hours and carefully extinguished his torch. Finding his way out of this warren of alcoves and tunnels would be nigh impossible if he lost all his light sources. He stretched out on the sleeping platform and watched his little fire's smoke curl upward toward the ceiling. Who put a forge deep underground, anyway? Never mind the difficulty of hauling fuel down here to feed its fires. Where did the smoke go once it entered that narrow chimney?

Irritated at the complete lack of answers, he rolled himself in his cloak. His final thought before he fell asleep was to wonder on the last dwarf who had slept in this exact spot and what had caused the fellow to depart, leaving no known trace of this place behind.