No one doubted that traveling the ancient tunnels was risky. Every so often, an enterprising Knight, eager to win a wager or make a name for herself among her squad, would venture into the enigmatic white-walled passages. Often enough, the foolish Knight was never seen again-for which reason the tunnels were forbidden. The restriction only heightened the allure among those already drawn to danger and derring-do. Expeditions of the foolish still launched into the tunnels every few years. Those lucky enough to return would tell tales more interesting than endless echoing tubes. These Knights would return bloodied and pale, babbling of haunting whispers echoing through smooth, endless galleries, great pyramids of living stone, and entities long dead when Sild?yuir was not yet conceived.
No one doubted that danger stalked the tunnels separating Sild?yuir from Stardeep. Great gates and a defender statue guarded Stardeep's flanks against intruders from the hoary past.
Against Angul, tunnel threats of the tunnels were likely to be less potent. Kiril might well decide to chance the passage, knowing few dangers could stand against her soul-forged steel.
Likewise, with Nis in hand, Telarian was confident he could win through to confront Kiril. Strictly speaking, he didn't need the entire mounted force of Empyrean Knights riding ahead of him. But that wasn't the only reason he'd commanded the Knights to accompany him.
You brought them in order to prevent Delphe from using them to hold Stardeep against you upon your return, should she learn of your hidden objectives, came Nis's emotionless voice directly into his mind.
True. It wouldn't do for the increasingly suspicious Delphe to sway credulous, virtuous Knights with her misunderstanding of Telarian's goals. This way, even if Delphe decided to thwart him, he commanded the stronger force. She'd have little chance to persuade their loyalties when they were already in the field. For all Cynosure's power, Delphe and the construct couldn't stand against the entire company of Empyrean Knights.
And if he gained Angul and Nis, even that wouldn't matter.
"Keeper!" spoke the Knight Commander, his tone terse.
A messenger afoot pressed along the line until she reached the side of the Knight Commander's horse.
The messenger was a Knight apprentice, a girl of no more than twenty, twenty-five years, he guessed. She said, "We've come upon a wide space ahead, filled with ruins. A sorcerous wall prevents the vanguard from advancing."
Telarian and the Knight Commander passed to the front of the column, a short journey in the narrow tunnel.
The Knight vanguard was arrayed before a flickering screen of green and gold, through which a wide cavern was visible. Past the distortion, Telarian glimpsed smooth-cut angles of black stone, broken arches, and the bases of columns whose heights were long crumbled.
From his saddle, he essayed a simple analytical spell. The screen was weak. And old. A wonder it still functioned. A barrier whose usefulness was concluded, except as a warning.
"Just push through," commanded Telarian. "It may feel unpleasant, but its ability to harm you is long spent."
When Telarian's turn came to breach the barrier, shrieking wind assaulted his ears. The lantern light flared, then settled to normal. The diviner stumbled over a ridge in the white floor-an exposed, fossilized spine of some larger-than-elf creature.
Beyond the exposed spine, the tunnel opened into a wide enclosure whose white walls showed compacted seams of eons-preserved bone, layer upon layer.
"Is this a graveyard?" he heard one of the Knights ask in wondering tones.
Near the cavern's center leaned a pile of broken stone. Telarian's eyes scanned the heap and then turned up to the cavern's ceiling. A dark hole, like a mouth agape in pain, punctured the otherwise smooth surface. The wind screamed through the aperture, howling and abrading the room and its contents with a haze of airborne grit.
The only other exit from the chamber was a tall set of double doors sheeted in hammered, coppery metal.
"Best ignore the ceiling breach-we'd never get the horses up there," yelled Telarian over the wind. He spurred his mount toward the doors. As he pulled up next to the exit, he was relieved to confirm they were sufficiently high and wide enough to permit two Knights to ride abreast. If he could open them. Rusty stains decorated the metallic surface of the doors where latches might have once protruded.
He reached out one hand and gave the left door an experimental push. Unyielding. He dismounted, grasped Nis with his offhand, and tried again.
Nis pulsed in his grip. Blade-sent geometries, dark and subtle, flared behind his eyes. A logic born of emotionless calculation bent his mind and suffused his body. Mere mortality was suppressed, and his musculature pulsed with certainty. He placed his hand again upon the door and stove it from its hinges. The other door fell as quickly.
Beyond was a natural bore through stone. The passage was basalt, but the walls were streaked with the same white stone as the previous tunnels. The same strata of ancient death lay compacted amid those pale veins.
Telarian surrendered his hold on the soul-forged blade, and the hint of recognition Nis felt toward the strata vanished. The knowledge of who might have been responsible for cutting these passages was again beyond his conjecture.
They made good time then, traveling straight and level, without any side passages to dilute their resolution to move forward. The wind's strength slackened as they moved farther from where it had first assaulted them, and finally failed altogether, so that only the sounds of clopping hooves rushed down the narrow corridor.
They camped once, strung out over several hundred horse spans, with Knight apprentices moving up and down the line with feed, food, and water for mounts and Knights alike.
When they rode next, they traversed not more than a few miles before they broke into an underground city.
Telarian found his steed traversing what had once been a street, its cobbles now buckled and misaligned. Squat tenements of white stone crowded along the road, mostly collapsed and shattered beneath the settling ceiling.
Flashing lantern beams picked out hundreds of bodies lying in the street, in positions of casual repose, as if they had settled for a midmorning nap from which none had ever risen again. The humanoid shapes were as hard and pale as the sedimentary rock in the tunnels. Telarian's first thought was that they were scattered, looted sculptures.
Telarian dismounted. He saw the forms were not posed in any way, like a statue might be. No, the remains were apparently people who fell to a disaster unrecorded. An image granted him earlier by Nis flashed before his eyes-a slender, white tower burning as it receded into the sky, leaving behind a plain of absolute black. The image dissolved. Telarian leaned in to get a closer look at one of the bodies.
Not elf, nor precisely human. Orc? The features were too gracile to be those of any modern orc. Some sages believed the farther one penetrated history, the more primitive one would find the inhabitants. Were these extinct people something related to goblins? Whatever they were, they hadn't survived into the current age in any realm or plane Telarian knew. Nor had he seen any such creatures in any of his visions of the future. Whatever civilization and achievements these humanoids may have once known, reality moved on without them.
Thindhul said, "Who knew Stardeep's underdungeon opened upon such"-the Knight Commander fluttered his hand at the scene-"such enigma."
"One that doesn't concern us," said Telarian, more to himself than Thindhul. Whatever the nature of the secrets and treasures hidden away in Stardeep's unexplored basements, they had no bearing on the reason they were there, or what he intended to accomplish.