It was, indeed, a doorstep, and not a lovely one. They stood in a smelting cave, high-sided and long deserted. At one end rose a shaft, and from this light poured down as once, a long time ago, ore had, shoved from the open pits above. Great iron vats, gone to rust and ruin now, lined the sides. A pungent odor clung to the stone walls, strong enough to make Elansa’s eyes water. Far across the cavern a tall, broad opening gaped, like a mouth opened to scream. From there cold air drifted, carrying a fresher scent, the perfume of air that had never lived below ground, that only knew sunlight and starlight and the sweet breath of the seasons.
Elansa looked behind her, back the way they’d come. All those tunnels, all those dark ways, had been known to the dwarves who'd made Pax Tharkas and delved the open pits of the Tharkadan Iron Mines, that army of stonemasons and sculptors and smiths who had made real what kings had dreamed. Some of the tunnels they must have discovered and used, perhaps they even dwelt there for a time, for the making of Pax Tharkas had not been accomplished quickly. Perhaps they had delved some of those tunnels, though Elansa doubted they would have wasted much time at that. Through these tunnels the dwarves had traveled, roads beneath the surface of Krynn, unknown to any but them. One of those dwarves, she knew, had gone back and forth to Qualinost, perhaps by those underground ways for as far as they would take him, then overland. He'd seen the marks of the Lily of the Night, a king's lovely mistress. Perhaps the dwarf had crafted those lilies himself, small works of beauty to relieve an artistic hand that spent most of its time hacking a martial fastness out of the mountains.
Elansa’s skin prickled with chill, and her breath caught in her throat. She stood in the least lovely part of the great fastness whose name meant Peace of Friendship, yet she could not help but feel awed. She had heard many tales of Pax Tharkas, and she had never thought to see the place.
She took a long breath. It hurt to do that, and yet the breath strengthened her. She breathed in a place known to her oldest kin, and it seemed to her that some of their strength yet lingered here for their distant daughter to borrow. She moved away from Brand, standing on her own. He let her go, and the look he bent on her was that same complicated look he'd given her on the night he'd shown her the sapphire phoenix.
Now, as then, she couldn't interpret it.
Turning, he shouted, "Hey! Char, where’d you bring us?"
He asked, knowing the answer. He asked so others could hear the dwarf’s reply and acknowledge the feat he had performed.
"We are in a fastness of kings," Char said, his voice gone formal. The heavy gray sullenness fell from him, and his face lighted as Elansa had never seen it, graced by wonder and pride.
"What fastness is that?" Arawn asked, his voice thin with disbelief. "Ain't no king in the mountain, Char. Ain't no dwarf king. Ain't no elf king." Some of the others muttered agreement, Bruin and Loris. Ballu shifted a glance at Pragol, then away. Arawn’s lips twisted in a sneer as he glanced at Brand. "Ain't no king at all."
Ley stopped pacing. His hand rested on the grip of his sheathed sword, then he looked at Brand and let his hand fall.
As though Arawn hadn't spoken, Char swept his arm wide, taking in all around. "We're in the ancient smelting cavern of Pax Tharkas." He pointed to the shaft rising high at the far end. "There is where the ore from the famous Tharkadan Mines was dumped into here. See the vats-" He sniffed deeply. "You can still smell the ore melting."
Char grinned, and he walked across the stony floor, not looking at his companions as they stepped aside for him, never looking at Arawn who stood in sulking silence apart from the others. The dwarf stood before Brand, his friend, and he winked his one good eye. Then he slid a glance at Elansa and nodded.
"There's a prettier place to rest than here, though, ain't there, missy?"
She stood there, a moment silent, and Char nodded, just once to say he didn't mock.
"Yes," she said. "There is a better place to rest than smelting caves." She lifted her head and stood as tall as aching bones and groaning muscles would allow. It had been a long time, a long time since she'd stood in elven precincts, a long and sorry season. "Make ready to enter Pax Tharkas," she said, as though granting permission.
Brand quirked a smile, but Char didn't. The dwarf nodded again, for he knew that none here had a better right to grant that permission than a princess of the Qualinesti House Royal, she whose ancient kinsman-by-marriage had caused this place to be built, Kith-Kanan who slept the long sleep in one of the deepest chambers of Pax Tharkas.
In a dark chamber of Pax Tharkas, a high hall and many-columned, in a place now long unlit and home to creatures no dwarf or elf or human who lived in the time of the Peace of Friendship had ever dreamed existed, two things stirred.
One was a gully dwarf, one of that lice ridden, flea-infested tribe of dwarves known as the Aghar. People down the ages knew about these pests, beings regarded by most of Krynn as no more than vermin, held in contempt by all clans of dwarves as disgusting two-legged rats.
This gully dwarf’s name was Ygtha, and she was part of the plague of gully dwarves-"colony" she might have said had she known the word-who inhabited the ancient fortress. She'd been separated from her fellows, and in the space of moments utterly forgotten that she had, in fact, had companions at all. She'd come into this dark hall through a crack in the walls, momentarily thought she'd stumbled into a forest of stone whose trees either grew up from the floor or down from the roof. Then she saw the columns made a long aisle from one end of the vaulted hall to the other. A mile of an aisle, she thought, though she had no way of measuring that. The words just sounded good, and in her head they ran more like "aisle-mile," the rhyme jogging in and out of her mind.
Then she forgot the rhyme or the distance, for she became aware of high, wide doors on either side of the aisle. She pattered through the dust on ‘the floor, and then forgot the doors, for the dust bore the marks of small creatures-the little dark piles of rat dung and the tracks of the rats themselves. Ygtha decided she'd come into a treasure hall, for what greater treasure could there be than food, and she saw sign of that-fat delicious rat!-all around her. Alas, she saw only sign, no matter how hard she looked, and a few little skeletons from which the flesh had long ago fallen.
She picked up a bone and sat down on the floor, soothing her disappointment by sucking the brittle bones for marrow. Though she sat in near darkness, she wasn't unhappy about that or disturbed. Ygtha had learned that sooner or later light comes back again, either because it comes to you, or you wander out to it. One or the other thing would surely happen again, the coming or the wandering, and so she settled into the darkness of the mile of aisle, with all the doors around her, and sucked on rat bones.
When she heard the second thing stirring, she didn't give it consideration. She was eating, and if Aghar society had any commandment-that is, of course, assuming such a thing as Aghar society could exist at all-it would be that no one stops eating, no matter what.
And so the second thing that stirred, one of the doors along the far wall creaking, inching open, didn't trouble the gully dwarf’s feast. She didn't hear the click or scrape of brittle feet on the marble floor. She didn't hear the tall thing sigh through very lean jaws, or notice its breath, cold though that was and filling the hall with winter's breath.