Some coffins contained only ancient stains, scraps of clothing, and bits of broken bone, as if the bodies had been taken elsewhere.
When he reached the room that smelled of ashes, he found the ovens, big fireplaces, worktables, and scattered cooking vessels of a large communal kitchen. Peering up the wide chimneys showed no hint of light or open air at their tops. He stirred the ashes with his feet and uncovered charred bones among them. In one fireplace, a large covered cauldron remained where it had been placed untold decades or more likely centuries before. Kri lifted the lid and found exactly what he suspected he would.
A wide hall nearby might have been a common dining area, judging by the moldered remains of wooden tables and benches. A corridor of many doors was lined with small rooms, each containing the jumbled remains of what might have been a bed and perhaps a small table. The mix of large common spaces and tiny individual quarters told Kri what kind of place this had been. He’d dwelled in a few and visited many cloistered communities in his long life-though never one seemingly inhabited only by dwarves. Or one so completely cut off from the outer world.
Or one devoted to the Chained God.
The pinch of his empty stomach reminded him of how long it had been since his own contact with the outer world. He’d find nothing to sustain him in the ancient ruin. A hiss of bitter laughter escaped him. He knew a magical ritual that could conjure food to sustain him, but in the flight from Fallcrest that had saved his life, he had left all of his possessions and gear behind.
You have the key, Tharizdun had told him. One comes who will help you turn it.
But what if that one didn’t come quickly enough?
Kri pressed his lips together, stifling his doubt. Tharizdun had not succumbed to hopelessness in his place of imprisonment. Neither would he. The dwarves must have had some way to get their food, whether they traded for it or harvested it themselves. The cloister had been no short-lived community to judge by the number of dead in the sepulcher. There had to be some exit. And the logical place to find an exit from a dwarf community was up, toward the surface. Toward the vast statue chamber where he had first found himself. He retraced his mental map back to the stairs he had descended and began to climb them once more.
Where the stairs turned, he found the first runes. Unlike most dwarven inscriptions, they weren’t incised, but rather painted. His fingers, brushing the wall on the way down, had completely missed the subtle changes in texture on the stone surface.
Kri studied the runes, raising the lantern high so its dim light illuminated as much as possible. The runes ran the length of the stairs in long blocks, as if a long text had been copied onto the wall. In addition to being painted rather than carved, the runes weren’t in the common style of Davek, the dwarves’ script. Although angular at their heart, there was an unusual sinuousness to them, each character curving back on itself. In fact, entire passages seemed to follow the same twisted pattern. Kri had spent most of his life puzzling out writings that would have confounded a lesser mind, so the curious inscription proved little challenge. He had it figured out within two more turns of the stairs.
It was a prayer to the Chained God, mostly in his incarnation as the Elder Elemental Eye, but invoking all of his epithets: the Patient One, the Black Sun, Undoer, Ender, Anathema, Eater of Worlds. The prayer repeated itself over and over, twisting and regressing as did the characters that spelled it out. It was a meditation on Tharizdun’s message of freedom through the casting down of order-or more precisely, on the freedom brought by change. True change, not merely the superficial alterations enjoined by Avandra, the wanderer’s god installed in Tharizdun’s rightful place. The overthrow of order was only a way to bring the Chained God’s word to the overworked peasant or harassed apprentice who might dream of turning on his master. The truth was more universaclass="underline" there could be no growth without change and the enemy of change was order. Order, whatever form it took, must be challenged to permit change.
Kri smiled to himself and murmured the words as he continued to climb the stairs. The words echoed in the stairwell and whispers came back to him, a ghostly chorus reciting the prayer.
That such a doctrine, generally seen as a path to madness, served as the guiding tenet of a highly disciplined monastic community would have seemed impossible to many. They would have looked at the evidence Kri had found and concluded that the dwarves had courted disaster from the beginning-that they had delved too deeply within themselves and woken something dark.
Kri would have knocked such fools across the head and forced them to consider the possibility that the inhabitants of the cloister had found exactly what they were looking for. There were many paths to the enlightenment Tharizdun offered. Some followed those paths slowly. Others raced along them.
Some did not know they followed them at all.
“You know as well as I do,” said Moorin, “that divinations are useless where the Voidharrow is concerned. Arcane rituals reveal nothing. Prayers to the gods and their servants go unanswered.” The wizard spread empty hands. “Maybe we know all that can be known about it.”
Kri slammed his palm down on the tabletop, making the dishes and goblets around him rattle. “When did any member of the Order of Vigilance last try to make a serious investigation of the Voidharrow?”
Moorin’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a question we know the answer to, Kri,” he said soberly. “Tavit Nance opened one of the vials containing the Voidharrow and he died a demon along with three dozen innocents. The Order barely contained the plague he unleashed.”
The spirit of argument rose in Kri. “That was four generations ago,” he countered. “And before that the Order didn’t even know the name or true danger of what it guarded.”
The answer to his words came in the hiss of sharply drawn breaths. Around the sides of the table, the other members of the Order of Vigilance-a scant handful of aging men and women of varying races-glared at him. Kri knew immediately that he’d gone too far. He bent his head in acknowledgment. “What happened was a tragedy, but see what came of it. If we do not dare, we will not learn. We’ll sit upon the Voidharrow and tap our fingers until the end of time.”
“If it pleases Pelor,” said the deva Hania, “that is exactly what we will do and consider ourselves successful by it. You swore the same oath all of us did.”
“I’m not Tavit Nance. I have no intention of releasing the Voidharrow. I only want to study it.” Kri looked back to Moorin. “You keep the last vial. Let me visit you. Let me examine it.”
Moorin just shook his head. Kri ground his teeth and touched the symbol of the eye that hung around his neck. “I am a priest of Ioun, god of knowledge. It’s my calling to seek answers.”
Raven Shirai leaned forward and the shadows seemed to shift with her. “And what does the god of knowledge tell you concerning the Voidharrow?”
Kri opened his mouth… then closed it as if he could trap the truth. Except that he was a priest of Ioun and he couldn’t.
“Nothing,” he said at last. “She says nothing.”
The shock of the impact that broke him out of his reverie was as much mental as it was physical. Kri returned to his senses to find himself stretched on the stone stairs of Tharizdun’s cloister, gasping for the breath that a stumble had knocked from his chest. The shame and frustration of that moment many years ago when he’d first begun to doubt Ioun’s power was so fresh that he felt as if he’d stepped directly out of the past.
He pushed himself upright, feeling anew the ache of aging the nearly two decades that had passed. The dim light of the lantern made judging distance difficult, but he thought he had perhaps walked a turn and a half of the stairs during his vision.