After what felt like ages, they reached another doorway. Like so many they had passed, stone and mortar blocked it. But the vibration was so strong here, Aric was surprised the others couldn’t hear it. His whole body tingled, all his fine hairs standing on end. “Behind here.”
“It’s sealed,” Damaric pointed out.
“We need to unseal it.”
“How?”
Ruhm pushed past the others, taking Aric’s agafari-wood sword from him. “Like this,” he said. He started jamming the hard wooden blade into the mortar, chipping it away little by little. The others joined in, using whatever slender implements they had, attacking the mortar rather than the solid stones. Soon, Ruhm had chipped away enough mortar from one of the upper stones that he was able to shove his fingers through and get a grip on the stone. “Back away,” he said.
The others complied, and he pulled on the stone, putting all his considerable weight into it. Mortar crumbled beneath it, and then the stone gave way, breaking loose several around it at the same time. They all reached into this larger hole and tugged together.
Soon they could step through the doorway. On the other side they found a gargantuan cavern. The walls of the cavern must have been where the stone for the corridor came from, as they glowed with the same gentle luminosity.
They were on a level slightly more than halfway to the cavern’s roof. A narrow stone staircase wound down, close beside a cave wall. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, stalagmites at the bottom reaching up to join them. In some places they met, forming columns. All of it was suffused with that soft glow. On each step, a different rune had been etched.
All over the floor and on every rock shelf and outcropping were bones. Thousands must have been slaughtered here. Animals, monsters, people—there was no way to know what the bones had come from. They were everywhere.
And the steel … the steel sang.
From this height, it was a shapeless, formless mass, sitting on the cavern floor. But Aric knew what it was. More metal than he had ever imagined in one place, mined and smelted and shaped.
“It’s here,” he said, his heart racing. “It’s really here, just as Nibenay said it would be.”
Damaric pointed down at the hulking shapes. “That’s all metal?”
“It is.”
“Incredible.”
Aric started down the stairs, almost at a run. “I know!”
Excitement built in him with every step down, until he thought he would surely burst. The singing in his head was louder than ever, like a choir of a million voices.
Then, on the way down, he spotted an almost whole skeleton, lying on a shelf of rock just off the staircase. He couldn’t make out what type of creature it had been—not quite human or elf, but something not too different, he believed. It was covered in cobwebs, and some of the brown bones had, over time, separated from the others. It, like everything else he had seen in this city, seemed impossibly ancient.
Jutting from the skeleton’s bony ribs was a steel broadsword.
Aric put down his wooden sword and leaned off the staircase as far as he dared. The tips of his fingers could just brush the sword’s hilt. But he couldn’t close them, couldn’t get a grip on it.
The sword wasn’t new—it was as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—but it looked intact. The workmanship, as far as he could see in the faint glow of the rocks, was spectacular. He longed to hold it in his hand.
Clutching his coin medallion in his left hand, he reached out again with his right and the sword hilt shifted, just enough to fall into his outstretched palm.
He closed his hand around the sword, and the singing in his head ceased so abruptly he wondered if he had gone deaf.
“Aric?”
It was Ruhm. Aric could hear—and besides, he reminded himself, it wasn’t my ears hearing that anyway.
“I’m fine,” Aric said.
“Good. Had me worried.”
“But look.” Aric drew the heavy sword from the skeleton, supporting his grip with his left hand to hold it steady. Its blade was long, gleaming in the rocks’ glow, and appeared to be in very good condition: old, with nicks and scratches, but still sharp and sturdy. “A steel sword, as fine as any I’ve …” His words trailed off, as the staircase seemed to turn inside out around him. The glow faded from the walls, and once again, Aric plunged into absolute blackness.
XII
Glimpses in the Dark
Aric saw an Athas that surely had never been: a lush, forested world, where a gentle breeze could set a million leaves quivering. Birds flew over the forests in great flocks, and animals left the shelter of huge trees to drink at the shores of rushing rivers. Wildflowers of every color carpeted the valleys and the wild meadows beyond vast cultivated fields. Glorious cities gleamed in vivid, golden sunlight.
But as he watched—a tiny part of him protesting, aware that he was not truly present in those scenes, but viewing them as if from the back of a high-flying Athasian roc—the peaceful world before him was riven by strife. He could not determine the source of the unrest, but in its wake forests burned and rivers dried up. People in those cities stared toward the skies in horror, and then the cities crumbled. Finally, as deserts spread across the beautiful, serene world he had glimpsed so briefly, that brilliant yellow sun dulled, then turned to the dark red color so much more familiar to him.
And as if suddenly transported into Akrankhot itself, he saw a powerful, sun-bronzed man wielding a broadsword—I’m holding that sword, he thought, before the idea flitted away like a dried blade of grass in a heavy wind—battling what seemed to be an army of foul, depraved creatures. He slayed many but killed himself in the process.
Aric felt the loss as personally as if the big man had been a close friend, and tears dampened his eyes even as the visions continued. In place of the mighty-thewed warrior, he saw the citizens of Akrankhot, trembling in fear of the powerful forces sweeping their planet, terror of a conflict between beings for greater than themselves. And there was something else, something dark and horrible, with too many limbs and tentacles and teeth, and on its twin tongues Aric could taste the blood of innocents, and—
“Ungh …” Aric moaned and thrashed and blinked. Faces loomed around him, causing panic to well up in his chest. He tried to scrabble away, then saw that it was only Amoni and Ruhm, the closest things to friends he had.
He was in the cavern beneath Akrankhot, on the staircase landing, a heavy broadsword weighing upon his chest.
And something else was there, too; its psionic tendrils probing at Aric’s mind.
Aric jerked into a sitting position. “Are you hurt, Aric?” Amoni asked. “You fell, and then you were … dreaming, perhaps …”
Aric closed his eyes, gripping the broadsword with both hands to draw as much strength from the steel as he could. He sensed all the other metal nearby, on the cavern floor—rods and posts and columns and bars of it, gold, lead, iron, steel, silver, copper, bronze—and he reached out with his psionic abilities and touched that, and for an instant the vision of a bygone time almost returned, but he fought it off. He needed to concentrate, to focus on summoning what energy he could from the steel and on blocking the unknown incursion into his mind. The cold, solid bulk of steel comforted him, made him strong.
He turned his attention inward, where it seemed he could see several slimy tentacles oozing through cracks in his mental defenses. He took each in turn, pinching it off until the tentacle itself retreated, then disposed of the segments in an infinitely deep pit he imagined.