“Buy a nice house somewhere?” Maldred posed, a gleam in his eye. “Settle down and forget the adventuring life? Raise a big family and plant your roots deep? Riki’d like that just fine.” The last he said with a touch of sarcasm, which was lost on the busy Varek. Dhamon stepped back and resumed examining the building, though his mind was on the half-elf now, of her settling down to a mundane and safe life with a young man Dhamon didn’t care for—too young, too impetuous. Am I jealous? he wondered.
He admitted that it had bothered him every night seeing Varek sleeping with his arm protectively around Riki. Dhamon tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter, that he didn’t love the half-elf, that he’d only kept company with her because she was pretty—and convenient at the time. I don’t love her, he thought. I never did. But did the half-elf love the boy? Riki didn’t smother the young man with affection, didn’t hang on him the way she used to cling to Dhamon. She looked different, too, than when she’d been with Dhamon. She no longer painted her face and didn’t dress in garish, tight clothes. She cursed less frequently and often seemed softly feminine.
“I’m better off without love,” he whispered. “I don’t want it, don’t need it. I’m better off alone.” He tried prying at a different piece of slate and discovered that like the one Varek still worked on, it had been fused to the window—perhaps some act from the Cataclysm or perhaps a sorcerer’s spell, the latter something Maldred might be capable of.
“I don’t need love,” he repeated.
He turned and gestured to Maldred. “Over here. I want to get a look inside this building. Could be some treasure vault the way it’s all sealed up. I think we’re going to need your magic to get inside.”
* * * * *
“What are you lookin’ at, Ragh?”
Rikali eased herself down at the sivak’s side and leaned close to get a look at what was in his palm.
“It’s only sand and silt,” the draconian told her. His words themselves sounded like sand blowing across stone, raspy and soft from his scarred throat. “And ash, I think.”
“Ash?”
“From a volcano.” Ragh pointed a claw toward a spot high on the wall and moved the lantern.
“See?”
“All I see is rock.”
“Different kinds of rock,” he said, his grating voice slow and even, as a teacher might speak when lecturing. “They’ve been melted together—chert and granite and sand, shells, some fossils probably. A solid piece. The floor we sit on. Beneath this…” The sivak brushed aside some sand. “It’s indurated, soil and rock all fused together.”
She raised an eyebrow. “How could that happen?”
“Time could do it, enough pressure on the ground. So could a volcano, the heat melting everything together. It would explain the ash and maybe explain the tunnels and this chamber. They might have been formed by a lava flow.”
The half-elf shivered. “I’ve been through an earthquake. Pigs, when Mal an’ Dhamon an’ me were in the Vale of Chaos…. The vale, it’s a…”
“I know what and where it is.”
The half-elf traced a design in a patch of sand.
“I am old, Rikali. I have seen much of Krynn.”
“Smart, too,” she said. “You seem to know a lot. Smarts don’t come with age.”
The sivak let out a long breath, which sounded like a strained whistle. “I learned a lot about Krynn out of necessity. A spy for Takhisis, then for Sable, I would slay men and take their places for as long as I could hold their forms—explorers, politicians, ambassadors, dwarves. From the dwarves I learned a lot about caverns and stone.”
Rikali shivered at the thought. “How many did you kill?”
“More than I can remember.” Ragh tipped his head back to study the ceiling. “But all of that ended when Sable gave me to Nura Bint-Drax.”
“Like them thieves sold me and other folks to her.” Rikali shivered again. “I could’ve been turned into a spawn.”
“An abomination,” Ragh corrected her, a clawed finger drifting up to touch the scars on his chest where he had been bled to create the creatures.
“I hope they won’t be too much longer,” she said as a way of changing the subject. “Ain’t comfortable to sit here.”
* * * * *
“Magic,” Maldred said. “It fused the slate on the windows and sealed the door. I’d say the resident was a wizard who thought barricading himself inside might save him from the Cataclysm.”
Varek continued to struggle at a window. “Then maybe he might have saved all his magical trinkets.” He huffed and tugged a moment more, then shook his head. His chest heaved from the effort he’d put into it. In frustration, he kicked at the door. “Can you get us in there?”
Maldred grinned and splayed his fingers wide, chest high on the door. “Shouldn’t be too difficult, I’d wager.” He started humming a tune Dhamon had not heard before. Interspersed in the melody were Ogrish words, a monotonous chant.
Varek glanced around the cavern. “Maybe there are some more chambers. That old map showed the river going farther south, another pirate port maybe.”
“Don’t you think we’re rich enough?” Dhamon asked. He knew that if he had not wanted to find the healer, he’d be exploring farther. It was his greed that sent him down the crevice to this place anyway. In the back of his mind he was considering a return trip. Maldred could seal the hole that brought them underground, and he could come back after he’d been cured of the spreading scales.
“What’s rich enough?” Varek rubbed the ball of his foot against the stone floor. “I want to buy Riki a real nice house. Buy her anything she needs.”
“Almost have it!” Maldred’s shoulders were straining the seams of his tunic, and the outline of his muscles shown through the fabric. He was using more than just his magic to get through the door.
“Though if this place weren’t so old… and if the door was set in here any better…. There! Hmmm, what’s this?”
Strips of green wax fell away as he began to push the door inward. The big man put his shoulder to it and pushed harder, grinning when the door moved a few more inches. “Some help, here, Dhamon.”
Dhamon was quick to join him, the hair prickling on the back of his neck when the door moved a few more inches and part of the rocky ceiling came down. A fist-size chunk of stone hit him on the arm, and he muttered a curse.
“It’s nothing,” Maldred said. “It seems you heal easy enough anymore. Come.”
One more push, and the door swung wide, Maldred jumped away from it and grabbed up the lantern. He was back and through the opening before Dhamon had moved. The air felt dead, still, cold, and heavy with the scent of decay, and Dhamon fought to keep from gagging. Maldred was affected too, but his senses were not as keen. He plunged ahead.
“You stay out of here, Varek!” he warned.
The young man shook his head and followed. “You’re not cutting Riki and I out of anything.”
“Doesn’t look like any sorcerer’s house,” Dhamon stated. “Varek, why don’t you wait outside?”
There were eight large chests spaced evenly in the center of a rough-hewn square room—four on each side, separated by wooden pillars that looked as if they might collapse at any moment. Varek brushed by Dhamon and Maldred and moved to the first chest, noting more of the green wax around the edges.
Dhamon felt the air chill.
“Varek, I don’t think this has anything to do with pirates or sorcerers.”
Varek tried to lift the lid. “Some pirate who didn’t trust his fellows in the port put his wealth in here.”
“Let me give you a hand with that.” Maldred thrust his fingers under the lid and pulled up.