“It is beautiful,” Tilda said, turning quickly back to the view before it was lost to the expiring daylight. The rapidly changing shadows were fascinating, but when Fitz stepped away Tilda noticed that several of his men were waiting their own turns, though certainly they had seen this view before. She doubted that even repeated viewings would spoil the effect and she too stepped aside, smiling briefly at the nearest soldier who took her place.
Only Dugan was not looking, having settled to a seat on a chest. He was rubbing at his sandaled feet as Tilda stopped in front of him. They had not exchanged a word since before he had gutted Sir Procost, and banged Tilda’s forehead off the back of a cottage. Dugan looked up at her and narrowed his eyes in the fading light of dusk.
“How is your head?” he asked, his voice rough after two days of not speaking a solitary word.
“As it looks,” Tilda said. She leaned toward him.
“You did not have to kill the knight,“ she whispered. “We could have incapacitated him.”
Dugan looked at her evenly. “You think he was trying to incapacitate me?“
Tilda turned away, knowing that this was neither the time nor the place for a discussion of how civilized people behaved.
Fitzyear was across the room tapping the sides of several large clay jugs big as amphora, for there was no access to a running stream this high up. The containers had certainly not been brought up the stairs, which made Tilda hope that the party was not going to have to climb back down through the dark in the morning. The gnome’s men were still gathered at the windows, and after looking around for a moment Tilda saw Captain Block standing back in one shadowy corner, all but invisible in his black Guild cloak. The dwarf was glaring pure murder at Dugan.
Despite her exhaustion, Tilda did not sleep well that night.
*
Block was a strange dwarf and he knew it. The absence of a beard alone would have made another of his kind stare in surprise, but that was only the most obvious difference between himself and what might be expected. Somewhat less obvious was the fact that he positively loathed being underground. When he was still a young dwarf of only fifty years and change, Block had left the great halls of Garak-Tor for the world of Men, and he had never gone back. That had been more than three and a half centuries ago.
There had been no banishment and no exile, nothing comparable to the drama that had attended the departure of the le po ka han, John Deskata, from his home in Miilark. Block had simply taken a job guarding a trade caravan bound for a human settlement, an above-ground town younger than the boots he had worn. It had turned out to be a place with an energy and newness Block had never felt in the stodgy old dwarf-hewn halls of Garak-Tor where the patrician faces of ancestors stared down from every wall. When his caravan left Block had stayed behind with a dwarven merchant setting up shop. He had meant to stay only one year until the caravan came back, and to see what it was to have the seasons change around him before he went home. The seasons had been changing around Block ever since and he had not grown tired of them yet.
He no longer thought about the underground world of his youth for now his was the larger world of sun and sky, the moon and the heavens bejeweled with stars. The humans had long since proven good company, though Block had kept everyone at a certain distance after watching the first generation of friends he had made above ground grow old and die. After decades had grown to centuries the dwarf had even found a place he considered home, in the sultry Islands of Miilark. When he grew into an age when he began to consider where he would leave his bones to lie, the halls of Garak-Tor never entered Block’s mind. He would dwell among the Miilarkians even in death, as he had chosen to do in life.
Now that Block found himself on what the gnome Fitzyear flippantly called the Underway, in a stonily silent world of a kind he had not known in centuries, the old dwarf’s thoughts were not troubled by nostalgia. They were troubled by thoughts of death. It was hardly surprising given what Block still knew from his youth about the place where he now was, and of what it had once been.
Fitzyear had told Matilda that he believed the dwarf tunnels here, the city of Yagnarok, had been abandoned some seven-hundred years ago when the ore veins played out. Block had no idea where the gnome had come by that theory, but it was correct only in its timeframe. In the year 702 NC, Yagnarok had been destroyed, and the Baltazarian clans massacred almost to the last man, woman, and child. Only a handful of survivors escaped to bring word back to Garak-Tor, where it was generally agreed that they’d had it coming.
The dwarves knew this, though in seven centuries they had never spoken a word of the story to outsiders. No people would be keen to spread the knowledge that others of their own lineage, no matter how far separated, had participated in the murder of a Great Dragon. Not even after those responsible had paid the price.
On the second night on the Underway after Tilda, Dugan, Fitz and his men had all been soundly sleeping in the safe room for hours, Block sat up among his bedding and looked in the dark toward the locked door. He sat for a time before slowly rising, moving his old joints and bones slowly, quiet as any Miilarkian born or Guilder trained. He padded to the door in thick wool socks, undid the lock, and slipped out to the room at the top of the long stairway, carved all around in extraordinarily detailed images done long ago by hands very much like his own.
With the door to the safe room silently closed behind him the last starlight from the windows within disappeared, leaving Block in profound and total darkness. He stood still with his eyes wide open until able to faintly discern what he had noticed passing through the room earlier. There was a faint blue glow from the arched hallway leaving the chamber.
Block moved in that direction between the tall bas-relief images of dwarves kitted out for war that lined both walls. The hall ended in a T-intersection but Block halted directly before the opposite wall where a final stone portrait of a wizened, bearded face far larger than life-size stared back at him. The faint glow, which human eyes surely would fail to notice, came from a square line all around the image. As he had done at the dwarf door leading to the stairs, Block put his fingertips in the vertical crack on the right side and moved them slowly down until it felt right to stop. He pushed with his left hand and the carved panel pivoted sideways. Soft blue light spilled in from another landing giving to yet another stone staircase. This one was straight rather than spiral and it led back down, though Block hoped it was nowhere near as long.
He did not expect it to be, for even three-and-a-half centuries after leaving Garak-Tor he still remembered the architecture of his first home. He knew that the fire pits Fitz and the others had used in both safe rooms were intended not for cooking, but for the burning of offerings. The shafts above streams were not lavatories, but rather the means to give the burnt ashes of the offerings to the spirits deep beneath the mountains. Anything else was sacrilege, but Block had felt no need to say so to the gnome and his men. Not in this place, not in Yagnarok, where surely nothing could add to what was already accursed.
As he had expected the straight stair led down only half a hundred steps. Block paused halfway down after hearing a single drop of water from ahead, and frowned. The light at the base of the stairs was brighter, illuminating a great chamber with smooth, unadorned walls and a ceiling that formed a perfect hemisphere high above the flat floor. As he entered Block saw cracks in many places with crumbling, damp stone around most of them. Pools of water stood on the no longer perfect floor, most of them under a line of stalactites that stretched above the only thing in the room that was not stone gray in color. In the center of the space stood a ten-foot high, four-sided pyramid of white marble, from which the glow seemed to emanate.