... of Earth ... beneath the chair of a lord’s song ... meant to prevail but all ended ... halfway eaten beneath.
Something else came to her. Before leaving the guild at Calm Seatt, she’d stumbled on a forgotten dwarven ballad with one obscure word—gí’uyllæ, the “all-eaters” or “all-consumers.” Even so, whatever had been here was either long dead or long gone.
“A’ye!” Ore-Locks said breathily.
Wynn swung around at his exclamation. His large hand was pressed into another depression in the coal. That hollow was so large that his hand looked small as he drew it along the depression’s inner surface. Wynn slipped in, trying to see into the hollow as Ore-Locks withdrew his hand.
Under her crystal’s close light, the hollow’s back was smoothly cut in parallel grooves. These marks weren’t like the ones Chane implied were made with claws. These were smoother, closer together, like ... like teeth had bitten through the black coal.
She shook her head, reminding herself that whatever had been down here couldn’t still be here. Then she heard a low, rumbling whine.
Shade stood off behind Wynn, not drawing near. The dog’s jowls quivered as she flattened her ears, looking at that huge hollow under the crystal’s light.
Wynn decided not to move on just yet. Whatever happened here warranted further investigation.
Chuillyon walked right through an open portal into a chamber similar to that of the Fallen Ones back in Dhredze Seatt. But this one was huge.
It still surprised him that Ore-Locks was leaving these portals wide-open. Such negligence would shock Cinder-Shard, though Chuillyon certainly could not complain. He could not have opened them himself, but how had Ore-Locks done so? How could even an errant stonewalker know the combinations for locks used a thousand years ago?
“What is this place?” Hannâschi asked, looking around with clear worry on her smudged face. “These effigies are ... different from the last ones.”
Shâodh examined pieces of a broken effigy lying on the floor. “What do the carved bands represent?”
This was the first openly curious question he had asked in a long while. Chuillyon had no time to explain dwarven vices or the place of the Fallen Ones in their beliefs.
He saw no other ways out of here except for two jagged breaches in the walls. The wider breach to the left of the entrance was just another vertical shaft, as in the hall of the Eternals. He doubted Wynn or the others had the equipment or skills to climb down.
He looked at Shâodh and asked, “Which way?”
The glance Shâodh cast back seemed almost hostile. The young man closed his eyes with a thrumming chant. When his eyes opened, he looked to the taller, narrower breach.
Chuillyon scowled in frustration. Perhaps he had again underestimated Wynn. As he approached, he held his crystal through the opening. It did not open into a shaft, and instead, he found a rough and raw tunnel running in both directions.
Hannâschi came up beside him and leaned in to see around the opening’s sides.
“Well, onward again,” Chuillyon told her tiredly.
A shudder shook the hall’s floor, and he turned.
Shâodh still stood among the basalt debris, but his eyes widened as he looked toward the wide breach at the hall’s other end.
Ghassan reached an open portal and carefully peeked around its edge. There was another massive hall waiting beyond, but this one was filled with near-black faceless and formless effigies. Representations of bands were carved in the stone all around each one, but they did not keep Ghassan’s attention long.
Chuillyon’s young male companion stood at the hall’s center, while the old elf and the female looked into a tall breach in the right wall.
With no one looking Ghassan’s way, he slipped in behind the nearest tall, black effigy. From his hiding place, he tried to hear what the others said, but they were all quiet. In frustration, he thought of dipping into Chuillyon’s surface thoughts, hoping the old elf would not feel his presence.
But then Ghassan heard the sound of falling rock. Dust billowed from the wide breach in the hall’s end just behind him. The floor shook and vibrated as he heard more debris tumbling down the shaft.
Ghassan froze, ready to bolt from the hall.
“What was that?” Shâodh said.
A cloud of dust billowed from the wide breach in the hall’s end nearest its entrance.
“We should move on, as this place is not stable,” Chuillyon said, and turned as Hannâschi stepped through the taller breach.
A ripple in the tunnel’s inner wall caught Chuillyon’s eyes. He instinctively lurched back, trying to grab for Hannâschi.
A loud hiss came as a cloud of umber vapors filled the tunnel inside the breach.
Chuillyon covered his face with a sleeve, as the cloud enveloped Hannâschi. She wheezed and choked as he snatched the back of her cloak and jerked. Then he caught sight of a wriggling form protruding from the tunnel’s inner wall.
Only instinct kept him clutching Hannâschi’s cloak as he threw himself back and fell. Muddy orange vapors spilled out of the opening, rising over the breach’s top lip and drifting upward. Before Chuillyon could roll off his back, Shâodh knocked his grip free and pulled Hannâschi farther out on the hall’s floor. He dropped to his knees, and she collapsed in his arms, her head lolling to one side.
“No ... no!” Shâodh stammered, all composure gone from his horrified face.
Sau’ilahk saw Wynn’s glowing light ahead and even heard her voice. From what he could tell, she stood at some dark crosscut in the tunnel.
“Keep searching,” she said, her voice barely reaching him.
Sau’ilahk’s excitement grew. He longed to drift closer, but he was too close even now. Yet he could not bring himself to withdraw. What had she found?
Wynn suddenly appeared to drop out of sight, as if she sank lower than the tunnel floor. By the glow of a crystal’s light, Chane and Ore-Locks appeared to be on the crosscut’s far side, and a fair distance away from Wynn.
“What are we looking for?” Ore-Locks called.
“Any more of the same,” she called back. “Or anything unusual.”
Sau’ilahk’s urgency heightened. What did they search for?
A rumble carried down the tunnel from behind him, and he could not help turning to look.
Light spilled into the tunnel from the breach where he had planted his servitor. The elves must have come, but his stone worm could not have made that rumbling sound. He hung there, watching, until a crack like thunder echoed through the breach and down the tunnel.
Chuillyon regained his feet, prepared to repel whatever had assaulted Hannâschi. He drew his sleeve over his nose and mouth and looked through the breach, but he saw only the rough stone of the tunnel’s inner wall through the thinning vapors.
A crack of breaking stone filled the hall.
Chuillyon whirled as the sound pierced his ears. More stones crashed down the chute inside the wide breach at the hall’s other end. A billow of dark dust bulged out of the opening, and a charred stench filled the hall’s air.
It was not dust, but smoke.
Flame bellowed out of that breach, reaching toward the hall’s midpoint. Shâodh shouted something, but the fire’s roar drowned him out.
Before the flames had begun to die, a monstrous form crawled out of the wide breach on all fours, its bulk spreading the cloud of smoke.
As the flames erupted, Ghassan tried running for the entrance, but he stumbled as he was assailed by searing heat. Something charged right through the fire, and he ran back behind the first effigy, rushing to its far side to see what was happening. All he saw amid the flames was something huge and four-legged, with a massive head on a long neck. It charged straight toward Chuillyon and his people.