Esprë balked outside the hole, but the skeleton in front of her gave a firm tug on her chains, and she followed it into the darkness beyond. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that she was inside a small, dry cave no larger than the main room in the house she’d shared with Kandler in Mardakine.
Ibrido uncapped an everburning torch and handed it to the skeleton standing between him and Esprë. The creature passed it back to the young elf, who held it up before her.
“The rest of us do not need the light,” Ibrido explained, “but I’d prefer that you didn’t slip into a bottomless shaft by some sick twist of fate.”
As an elf, Esprë’s eyes were better than Kandler’s in the dark, but the pitch black of an unlit cave would have blinded her as well. She nodded at the dragon-elf, not in thanks but for him to proceed.
They crept through the caves for some time, always working their way lower and lower. Most of the passages were natural, but some had been carved by skilled hands and reinforced to keep them from collapsing. Esprë had never been in such a place, but she recognized the handiwork of dwarves. Temmah, one of Kandler’s deputies back in Mardakine, had often spun tales of such glories for her, locked deep away in his ancestral home in the Mror Holds. These were no crude tunnels but clean passageways cut from the living rock by skilled hands.
Even so, the passages seemed long unused. Dust kicked up around Esprë’s feet as she walked, and a stale smell permeated the place. Underneath it lay a subtle stench of rot that grew as they worked their way deeper into the mountain.
At one point, the passage emerged into a large chamber, so expansive that the light from Esprë’s torch could not reach the ceiling or the opposite wall. Tall pillars of stone stabbed high into the vaulted darkness, each carved with intricate statuary that depicted ancient tales of the dwarf clans that Esprë hadn’t the time to study or comprehend. Graffiti marred some of these, scrawled in some sub-literate hand, pictograms that seemed to speak of violence, blood, and death. In other places, rubble from the carvings littered the floor where they’d been torn down or broken to pieces with hammers and axes.
Esprë gawked as she moved through the chamber, and several times the skeleton leading her had to yank on her chains to bring her along. As an elf, Esprë knew that she would—could, at least—live for many centuries. If the Undying Court somehow allowed her to ascend into its ranks, she might walk this world for millennia untold. As young as she was now, though, she had only the barest idea of what this entailed, and the thought of things as old and full of history as this chamber standing abandoned and unused filled her with sadness.
“This was once the Great Hall of Clan Drakyager,” Ibrido said. His voice echoed in the empty darkness, bouncing from distant walls at which Esprë could only guess. “They were a wealthy and powerful line in those bygone days, but they fell into decadence and could not stand against the Jhorash’tar orcs who overran this part of the mountains a hundred years ago.”
Esprë stopped and gaped at what little of the hall she could see at once. To her delight, Ibrido halted as well, and the skeleton leading her by her chains stopped next to him. The other skeletons that walked with them clustered about them for a moment, an earless audience of the dead.
“Who were those dwarves who attacked us as we approached then?” she asked.
The dragon-elf snorted. “The remnants of that once-proud clan. The Iron Council in Krona Peak granted them the right to attempt to return here in exchange for accepting a solemn duty, a responsibility with which none of the other clans cared to be charged.”
“What was that?” Esprë brought her torch closer to one of the pillars and saw a carving of a great dwarf king sitting atop a mound of gold and jewels. Its head was missing, and several empty spots stared back at her from the carving, possibly where real jewels had once rested before being pried out by trespassers and thieves.
“Guarding the home of my superior, of course.” Esprë could see Ibrido’s bared teeth glowing softly in the torchlight. “Come now,” he said. “Our host will be waiting.”
44
From the Great Hall, the procession turned left and down, even deeper into the mountain’s roots. The passages became rougher and rougher as they went, until the smoothness of the floor was the only sign that anyone had ever been here before.
The walls turned blacker here too. Esprë reached out with her hand and felt the wetness on them, as if they were soaked through with untold millennia of water that had run through them since shortly after the world had been born. The air became humid, nothing like the clean, dry stuff from the caverns’ upper reaches, and the stench of rot grew stronger, filling her nostrils until her lungs ached for a taste of the untainted sky.
After what seemed like an endless series of twists and turns, the procession came to a halt. Esprë followed her skeletal keeper into a large room filled with other skeletons. Some of these were of the Karrnathi variety, standing tall and dressed in various pieces of armor, waving about the swords that seemed to be forever grasped in their bony hands. Others lay scattered on the floor in pieces, bare of flesh but held together by rotted bits of clothing and the occasional mail shirt. Most of these were short—no taller than Esprë, she guessed—but broad. Others stood taller but even wider and had long, savage tusks spearing out of aggressive underbites.
The room bore carvings like those in the Grand Hall, but they seemed fresher and less polished, the fruit of less-skilled hands. Whereas the others had depicted legends of all sorts, these showed only images of war, pitched battles between the dwarves of Clan Drakyager—their shields bore an icon of a sparkling diamond, just as Esprë had seen on the statuary above—and their orc foes.
A slab of cast iron comprised the wall opposite of where Esprë and the others had come in. It had once been smooth and polished, the young elf guessed, but the constant exposure to the damp had rusted the surface a cracked and burnt red. Some of the pictographs she’d seen above appeared here too, splashed across the iron wall in some crude attempt at a mural that only served to horrify with both its subjects and its style.
Ibrido stood before the rusted iron wall. His boots disappeared into inches of black, unwholesome water that covered the floor. His hands rubbed at the center of the wall, removing flakes of rust as large as the leaves of the maples that Esprë had climbed in during her early childhood in Cyre.
The skeleton holding Esprë’s chains gave them a tug, and she followed him into the frigid water, which swallowed her shoes and soaked her up past her ankles. She splashed after him as close as she could, not wanting to stumble into the water and be dragged through it to where Ibrido waited.
The dragon-elf nodded at her as she came up. Then he took a hammer from one of the nearby skeletons—a dwarf that had probably died defending this chamber many years ago—and smashed it into the iron wall in the center of the spot at which he’d been peeling the rust away.
A dent appeared where the hammer struck. Ibrido grunted and swung the weapon again and again. After three blows, an outline appeared around the dents, a series of cracks that defined a square about a foot wide.