Her eyes turned so bleak, Chane could barely stand to look at them.
“It’s not here,” Wynn said, her voice breaking with sudden catches. “The orb isn’t here ... and there’s no place left to go. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere above, or worse, in the upper levels, buried where I cannot find it.” She closed her eyes, leaking tears. “I’ve lost.”
Chane pulled her toward him, not knowing what else to do. She dropped her forehead against his upper arm, gripping his cloak, his arm, and burying her face.
He hurt for her pain, but he was not sorry she had failed.
He was not sorry at all.
Suddenly embarrassed, Wynn released Chane’s arm and pulled away, completely uncertain of what to do next. The thought of leaving empty-handed was too much after all this. She couldn’t even look up at Chane, though she felt him watching her expectantly. She knew exactly what he wanted to do—just leave.
She turned her head and spotted Ore-Locks still standing by the taller, right-end breach. Why had he brought them down here after his futile attempt to find Deep-Root in the caves of the honored dead? He hadn’t even looked at the basalt coffins of the Fallen Ones. Perhaps he knew what she would find: Deep-Root wasn’t here either. Ore-Locks’s ancestor had fallen for the atrocity committed here.
She stepped away from Chane, but he reached after her.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “This is over.”
Evading his grasp, she went to the left-end wall and looked into its wide breach. Inside, another dark, raw shaft ran both up and down. She shuffled down the chamber, all the way to Ore-Locks.
The previous pale anguish on his face had been replaced by confusion. Obviously, he hadn’t expected to find a dead end. Something final, perhaps, some last discovery, but not this.
“Not here,” he whispered. “How could they not be here?”
Those words sharpened Wynn’s awareness.
Ore-Locks was too focused in his task and far too knowledgeable for someone who’d never been inside this seatt. But someone else had been here—Ore-Locks’s ancestor, that spirit who had supposedly called him to serve among the Stonewalkers.
Did that treacherous mass murderer guide Ore-Locks’s steps?
Wynn’s fear and revulsion of him magnified. In the face of her own failure, she lashed out at him.
“What are you looking for?” she demanded. “Deep-Root wasn’t among the honored dead—he couldn’t ... never will be! So, what are you after now?”
Ore-Locks’s red hair was dirty and wild, even bound back as it was. The beginning of a beard showed on his jaw. Confusion vanished from his face, and he turned on her in equal anger.
“His bones! Why else would I endure your ignorant judgments ... endure traveling with that?” He pointed at Chane. “I found no truth here, but at the least I could have put him to rest. Now I cannot even do that.”
Wynn stared at him, not knowing what to think. Everything Ore-Locks said sounded almost honorable, as if Chane had been right back in Dhredze Seatt. When Ore-Locks had come at her that night she’d found the coffin effigy of Thallûhearag, he had denied that his ancestor was that monster. If only he didn’t wish to honor one who’d murdered thousands, tens of thousands. But if his ancestral spirit called to him now, deceived and used him even unwittingly, Ore-Locks still couldn’t be trusted.
“It cannot end like this,” he whispered.
No, she thought, it cannot.
Holding her crystal high, Wynn stepped to the tall breach, leaning in, and her heart jumped. This one wasn’t a shaft.
“Did you look inside here?” she asked.
For an instant, Ore-Locks didn’t appear to understand. All breaches so far had exposed raw, vertical shafts. Blinking, he gripped one side of the opening, pushing in beside Wynn. They both peered into a rough tunnel running off left and right from the opening.
Wynn’s light only showed perhaps forty or fifty paces either way. The wall had certainly been broken by pressure when the mountain fell. She stepped into the raw tunnel, its floor as rough as the walls, and looked back as Ore-Locks followed.
Shade stood beyond the opening with her ears flattened and jowls twitching, and Chane glowered, his eyes narrow.
“Are you coming?” Wynn asked.
Chapter 24
To Chane’s dismay, the tunnel behind the breach went on and on, deeper into the mountain. Each time he thought Wynn’s perilous mission was finished, it began all over again. Worse, this tunnel was nothing like the ones above.
Roughly hewn, it had been gouged out in a rush, rather than skillfully excavated. Had someone been left alive after the seatt’s fall? If so, why dig here, farther into the mountain’s depths? Even more puzzling, the tunnel was surprisingly wide and without any supports, but the ceiling appeared sound. Chane could have driven a horse and wagon down this passage.
Ore-Locks still led them. Although his manic drive had resurfaced, he appeared less certain of his way, advancing more slowly. Wynn stayed right behind him, her breaths coming too quickly. When she looked back, her lips were parched.
“Drink,” Chane said, pulling the water skin off his shoulder.
She took a long swallow and tapped Ore-Locks’s shoulder. When he turned, she handed him the water skin. Once he’d finished, she dropped to her knees, set down her staff, and poured water into her hand.
“Here, Shade.”
As the dog lapped, Chane noticed even deeper gouges in the wall. He took a few steps past Ore-Locks.
“Look here,” he said.
Wynn joined him, holding out her crystal near the tunnel’s wall. In some places, three gouges ran parallel, each one so deep they made no sense. Multiple strikes along the same lines would have been necessary to cut paths so deep, but to what purpose? He remembered the blackened wall in one tunnel far above, and the human corpses.
“I do not like this,” he said.
“I know,” Wynn whispered.
He knew nothing would stop her but another end to this new route. When she retrieved her staff, Ore-Locks moved on. Within twenty paces, the floor became cluttered with debris, and their progress slowed.
Chane looked ahead over Ore-Locks, trying to see how far the tunnel stretched, and then Wynn gave a small cry. She fell forward on the tunnel floor, and Chane moved quickly to help her, but Shade dodged around him, trying to get to her first.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I just tripped.”
She pushed up onto her knees and reached back, pulling something long and dark out from under her ankle. Dropping it instantly, she scrambled up.
Chane leaned over with his crystal for a closer look. It was a bone, big enough to wield as a club, and so aged that it had blended with the debris.
“Not from a dwarf,” he said. “Thick enough, but far too long.”
Ore-Locks waited ahead, but for the first time since Wynn had entered this rough-hewn passage, her eyes glowed with that old, familiar excitement.
“It’s not human, either,” she said quietly. “When I had access to the ancient texts, I found a mention in one of Volyno’s writings that the enemy’s forces may have tried to come in from beneath the seatt.”
The knot in Chane’s stomach returned. “What mention?”
“It was difficult to make out, and he also wrote ‘of Earth ... beneath the chair of a lord’s song ... meant to prevail but all ended ... halfway eaten beneath.’ ”
“Eaten?”
“Ore-Locks, wait,” Wynn called out. “Shade, come help me.”
Chane was lost for a way to stop her as she dug through the rubble. Shade whined once and sniffed the debris, then huffed, scratching for Wynn to come look.