Dust seemed to crawl into every orifice of his body. Sweat poured out just as eagerly, coating him with a layer of mud over the layer of grease. Stones gouged every part of his body, including some that made him wonder about his future with women. The sides of the hole quivered and occasionally dropped loose stones on him or down into the shadows.
As he widened the passage, however, he ceased to be alone. Someone lowered a lantern, which drove back the shadows. Another lowered a bottle of water, which kept the dust from clogging his throat. A third lowered a bundle of scrap lumber. This was handier for shoring up passages weakened by removing ill-placed stones, and he moved downward more swiftly after that.
It took him the best part of an hour to descend from one floor to another, a distance that on a flight of stairs he could have climbed while holding his breath. By the time he reached bottom, only his gloves kept his hands from being red ruins, and he had no doubt that Grimsoar was alive.
He could see the man, sprawled on his back, one arm apparently trapped under a tilted slab of stone overlain with some ancient mosaic. Ancient? Pirvan thought it might have been laid by beings who came before men, when Paladine and Takhisis had still been mates. The thought of such lost eons chilled him, even without the Dark Queen’s name.
Grimsoar’s scalp was oozing blood, and his chest was rising and falling. It appeared that once he regained his senses and the use of his arm, it would not be hard to extract him.
Oh, and once the passage is a trifle wider-say, two or three times wider, thought Pirvan.
He crept as close to his friend as he could, soaked one of the bandages in the healing potion, and started patting the blood off the man’s scalp. This revealed a long but shallow gash, the sort that sheds ugly amounts of blood without doing great harm.
This healing also woke Grimsoar.
“Takhisis fly away with you!” Grimsoar said, halfway between a moan and a curse. Then he moved his head, his eyes widened, and he cursed plainly.
“Pirvan?” he said at last.
“Under the dust, the very same. And don’t mention names. We’re down among haunted stones, or I’m a cleric.”
Grimsoar nodded, winced, and swallowed. “Any water?”
Pirvan’s bottle was empty, but there was healing potion to spare. Grimsoar said that it tasted no better than it felt, but some life returned to his voice and eyes after it went down.
Meanwhile, up above they’d heard the call for more water, and two bottles came down. By the time they did, Pirvan would rather have had more grease. The stone slab had stopped its tilt short of injuring Grimsoar’s arm, but not short of holding it tightly. A little grease might give the big man’s largely intact strength a chance.
“As long as you hold that slab off my arm while I wriggle,” Grimsoar said. “I know this is giving my proper work to you and yours to me, but we can sort it all out some better time and place. Want to try?”
“If you’re ready-”
“I’ve been ready to be out of this place since I hit bottom, even if I didn’t know it,” Grimsoar said. “And you’ll need me with two good arms to get us back out of here. I doubt not that the hole’s cleaned out to your size, not mine.”
“It would fit you like a child’s loinguard on a minotaur.”
“I thought as much.”
“Your head-”
“-hurts like I’ve been drinking cheap dwarf spirits, but won’t hurt less if I lie around here until another rock falls on it!”
* * * * *
It took only five minutes and two or three lesser miracles to free Grimsoar’s now well-greased arm and pull him out from behind the slab. The open space was barely large enough for the two men unless they huddled close, and there was no room for Grimsoar to lift the smaller man on his shoulders as they had done in several bits of night work.
The only way out was to enlarge the hole until Grimsoar could pass outward, with as much help from above (the floor above, not necessarily the gods) as could be contrived. Pirvan called for some more shoring timbers and water, and they shared the water as Pirvan counted and judged the strength of the timbers.
After this night’s work, I’ll be able to take up mining in the dwarven kingdoms, if the thieving ever runs dry, Pirvan thought.
Without the help of gods or magic, getting out was going to take almost as much time as getting in. There would be two pairs of hands at work, as Grimsoar appeared remarkably fit for a man about to be rescued from burial. There would also be much more room needed, which Pirvan was making one rock at a time.
The problem was that every other rock he removed had to be replaced by a piece of timber. This could exhaust their supply of wood before the hole was safe, Pirvan realized. They might have to raid the timberyard across the alley from the Willow Wand, and though Pirvan had lost his sense of time, the night could no longer be young. It went against custom and pride among the night workers to pay for something, but these would not weigh heavily against the life of a brother.
What would weigh heavily on both men in the hole (besides a cave-in) was the matter of space. Every piece of shoring not only shrank the timber supply, it took up some of the space freed by the removal of stones. It was a question of more than philosophical interest: Could men save and doom themselves at the same time? Much more than philosophical interest, if you were one of the men.
“How are you coming down there?” Silgor sounded impatient.
Grimsoar grunted like a boar having a diseased tusk removed. “If we’d as much space down here as you’ve between your ears, we’d be long out and fondling Yanitzia on our knees.”
That drew something between a gasp and a giggle from the woman. Otherwise there was silence, except for what Pirvan would have sworn was Silgor grinding his teeth.
“Truly, what do you need?” Silgor asked.
“More wood,” Grimsoar replied.
“We’ll have to start tearing out-”
“Do so,” Pirvan said, in a commanding tone, which he realized might be unwise only after he’d spoken. “Is this hidey-hole going to be of any further use anyway?”
“Probably less than you and Grimsoar, I admit,” Silgor said. “And not just to the ladies, either.” They heard him ordering out another wood-gathering party. By the time they’d left, Pirvan had an idea.
“Silgor,” he called. “I think that one of these big slabs is holding everything else in place. If you braced it on the top while we braced it on the bottom, we could probably clear out the rest of the passage.”
“Which slab?” Silgor called. “This one?”
Pirvan heard the sound of a boot striking stone. He also heard the rubble groaning and grating as it shifted and timbers cracking from new strains. Dust filled the hole again, and a fistful of gravel rattled down and bounced off Pirvan’s nose and forehead. He sneezed and thought rude things about Silgor.
Grimsoar said them aloud. He described Silgor’s parents, habits, brains, and likely fate in some detail and at considerable length.
When the big man fell silent, a repentant-sounding Silgor called down, “I think we can wait for the others to come back. The more hands, the better!”
“Assuming you want us out of here alive, yes,” Pirvan said. He wondered briefly if the witnesses had decided that the best way of solving the Pirvan problem was to “accidentally” bury him, even if they had to bury Grimsoar along with him.
If they do that, I will have their blood, if I have to come back from the Abyss to do it, Pirvan thought.
By the time the timber-gathering party returned, Pirvan was certain that he and Grimsoar had been down in the hole for a week. The next accident would be an underground stream breaking through into this hole, and if he and Grimsoar didn’t float to the surface on the timbers, they would drown.…
“Many hands speed work,” at least if they know how to do it. From the curses, coughs, and groans (echoed by groans from shifting rubble), Pirvan had to wonder. At least nothing serious fell.