“Crack? What crack?” he asked through lips suddenly gone numb.
“I can’t say, my lord. Someone found him beside the crack, his skin scalded nearly from his bones but still alive. Of the other engineers, there was no sign.”
“Wait, my lord!” Ghash shouted as Tarn bolted through the door.
28
Though nearly complete, Tarn’s new Council Hall still had a good two years of work ahead before it would be ready to hold its first meeting of the Council of Thanes. Its architect, Gaul Quarrystone, had chosen the location to take advantage of a natural bowl-shaped cavern uncovered by silver miners a few years after the Chaos War. The cavern lay a hundred feet beneath the lowest level of Norbardin at the end of a broad sloping passage that wound snakelike into the heart of the mountain, following a thin vein of silver that could still be seen sparkling in the tunnel’s walls. For the better part of ten years, two hundred of Thorbardin’s most skilled stonemasons had chiseled and chipped and cut and polished until the cavern had become a thing of unmatched beauty. In their diggings, they had uncovered deposits of golden-hued quartz crystal, which they cut into panes to form the lamps that would one day fill the Council Hall with warm golden light. But for the most part, the dwarves sought to reshape the caverns as little as possible, and what they did alter, they used all their skill to make it look natural.
Were it not for the scaffolding rising to the ceiling a hundred feet overhead, the piles of stone dust waiting to be carted away, and the discarded tools of the workers littering the floor, one might have mistaken the chamber for a natural amphitheater. Only the stairs were too regular, the seats too evenly shaped, and the dais at its center was too perfectly rounded to be an accident of nature. The dwarves sought to improve upon the perfection of nature whenever they could. This philosophy had been the inspiration behind the wondrous Life Tree of the Hylar, their great city built within a single huge stalactite hanging over the Urkhan Sea. With Tarn’s enthusiastic support, Gaul Quarrystone had envisioned re-creating just a little of that former majesty here in the new Council Hall.
Tarn had no doubt that the brilliant young architect would succeed in his aspirations. Though the Council Hall followed the traditional design, this was a place unlike any the dwarves of old had ever imagined. Natural rock blended perfectly with shaped stone to form a fluid whole of surpassing beauty.
But there was one flaw in Gaul Quarrystone’s design—apparently, the Council Hall rested over a significant fault in the bedrock. The groundquake had opened it, neatly splitting the central dais almost through its center. Tarn and Ghash now stood at the edge of the gaping black hole, peering down into a seemingly bottomless chasm from which wisps of steam steadily rose.
Even more ominous, dried bloodstains and tatters of burned clothing lay around the crack. Bloody palm prints and streaks on the inside edge of the hole told of the surviving engineer’s desperate attempt to escape. The fire from below was intense, and dwarves feared fire more than any other hazard of the deep earth. But whether the engineers had accidentally stumbled upon a pocket of methane gas, igniting it with their lamps, or whether they had encountered molten rock pushing up into the mountain, neither ›Tarn nor Ghash could tell. Either way, this was a great danger.
“Ghash, I want you to go and fetch more engineers. Bring Gaul Quarrystone here at once,” Tarn said, adding when he saw the captain begin to protest, “Now, do as I say. Time is of the essence, and we must know what happened here.”
“All the more reason that you should come with me, m’lord. It is too dangerous for you to remain here. If the Hylar thane’s soldiers were to discover you… ”
“They won’t find me,” Tarn snapped. “I’ll be safer here than on the streets. Bring a squadron of my personal guard with you when you return. There is no telling when Jungor might… .” His voice trailed off as a faint sound rose from the crack in the floor. At first he thought it nothing more than the hissing of steam. But then a voice, distant yet clear, cried, “Someone help me! Please!”
“There’s someone still alive!” Ghash exclaimed as he knelt at the side of the hole.
“Hello down there!” Tarn shouted. His voice was amplified by the empty chamber.
A faint, inarticulate cry answered. Without even considering the danger, Tarn sat at the edge of the hole and swung his legs over the side. The shattered rock provided plenty of handholds and ledges to place his feet, so that he had little difficulty negotiating his descent. Grumbling into his beard about the risk, Ghash followed even more nimbly than his king. The younger Klar was an accomplished mountaineer and soon was able to pass his king.
After about forty feet, the air became sweltering, the stone under their hands grew uncomfortably warm. “If it gets any worse, we’ll have to turn back,” Ghash said. Tarn said nothing, continuing his swift descent. But they had not gone much deeper before the rocks grew too hot to touch for very long. Both dwarves felt the pads of their fingers slowly being seared, their faces and chests baked by the heat. Even worse, the air scalded their lungs with each breath. Steam mixed with noxious vapors seeped from the stone around them, even as the crack narrowed and grew more steep.
“We have to go back,” Ghash said in a strangled voice.
“There’s someone alive down there,” Tarn said. “If he can survive this long, we can stand it long enough to try to rescue him.”
“And what if he is trapped? What is he can’t escape? If we join him, we’ll be trapped, too.”
“Then we’ll be trapped!” Tarn shouted angrily as he continued downward. After a dozen more feet, he felt the close air open around him and knew that they had entered a larger cavern. The smoke and mist prevented him from seeing much with his darkvision. He felt truly blind in the dark. The slope leveled off and soon he found himself standing at the bottom of the chasm. Ghash joined him, coughing and retching from the poisonous fumes.
By feeling their way along the wall, they discovered that they had entered a tunnel, roughly circular, with smooth walls that seared their fingers. Both knew immediately that no dwarf had delved this tunnel. Some more elemental force must have burned its way through the rock. Guessing that the tunnel was not very wide, Tarn pushed off from the wall and moved blindly ahead. Almost immediately, he stumbled over something on the floor. The sickly sweet odor of cooked flesh assaulted his nostrils.
He and Ghash found six more dwarf bodies lying in the immediate area. They didn’t need to see to know that all of them were horribly burned. But the last body that they found stirred when Tarn touched it. “Here he is!” Tarn cried to Ghash.
“I can’t see!” the injured dwarf moaned. “My eyes! My eyes are gone!”
“Lie still and quiet,” Tarn said as soothingly as he could. “We’ve come to rescue you.”
He and Ghash each took the injured dwarf by one arm and tried to lift the poor fellow to his feet, but as they stood, his skin slipped loose from the flesh of his arms and he toppled to the floor again, groaning pitifully.
“This is hopeless!” Ghash cried in horror as he shook the loose folds of skin from his fingers. “He’s as good as dead already We must leave, my king.”
“King!” the dying dwarf shouted deliriously. “Must warn… !”
“Warn of what?” Tarn demanded. “What happened to you down here?”
A gurgling sigh was his only answer.
“He’s dead, m’lord. We must go now,” Ghash insisted. He began to pull at Tarn’s arm, dragging him away from the bodies.
Tarn lashed out and struck the Klar’s hands aside. “We’ll go when I say,” he shouted angrily. But almost as soon as he said it, Tarn regretted having not listened to his captain.