“Grubs,” Stanach said. “Well, larvae. Hold steady. You drop it, you’ll likely kill it.”
Jai held the lantern at arm’s length, watching the fat, eyeless larva pulse, its glowing body casting as much light as an oil lamp would.
Stanach picked up his axe and slid the haft into his belt. He settled the broad belt round his waist, checking to see that all was there: knife, fat leather water-bottle, and a coil of rope. When he took the lantern back, Jai had a good look at him. He was a dwarf in his middle age, not more than two hundred years, likely a decade or so less. He stood as high as Jai’s chest. His beard was black, his hair silvering at the temples and long enough to fall over the collar of his shirt. Thick in the neck, thick in the shoulders, he looked like one who knew his way around a hammer and anvil.
“You’re a forgeman,” Jai said.
“Used to be.”
Even as he said so, Jai realized that Stanach had done everything with his left hand, holding the axe, lifting the lantern, hauling Jai himself to his feet. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers twisted and withered. The dwarf stood braced, as though waiting for the inevitable, for Jai to mumble an apology for noticing. When Jai said nothing, he relaxed.
“All right, elf,” he said, “we have some traveling to do, and it’s going to be a hard old walk. You up to it?”
“Walking to where?”
“We’ll catch up with the work detail. That’s a good two miles out. They can send a runner back along the tunnel to Thorbardin and let your mam-” He cocked his head, and offered a lean smile-”your mother and father, know all’s well with you.”
“Thorbardin. How far are we from there?”
“Farther than I like to be. We’re standing about halfway between there and Qualinost. There’s a crossway up ahead. Once we get there it’s north to Qualinost, or as near to Qualinost as we get till we hit stone. From there, it’s clear south to Thorbardin. You came in-or tried to come in-about a mile north of where we are now, near Mianost. We’ll pass it on the way, but you won’t see much. We hide those ways in and out pretty well.
“Come on, now. We’ll make the camp, and then you can rest.”
Bleak dwarf, rough as stone. His strange eyes seemed to see only winterscapes, only lifelessness and ending. But there are endings, and there are beginnings, Jai thought. Out from winter, spring. He didn’t know where he’d find his beginning, that spring again. With all the world seeming to want to end around him, he couldn’t imagine. He did know, though, that he would not find it in Thorbardin. His heart told him that.
No, he decided. He wasn’t going to Thorbardin. He was going back to Qualinost, and the first thing he could do about that was get rid of the dwarf.
It was, as Stanach had said, a hard old walk through the tunnel. Once they turned south the going became rougher, rising and falling in ways a man able to stride out and not worry about his footing wouldn’t notice. Jai felt every rise and dip, every rock on the underground road. He had a sense of walls rising high, curving to a rough ceiling, but he didn’t look around much. He couldn’t take his eyes from the ground. Stanach kept the light near, for the farther they went the rougher the road became.
“They haven’t made the second pass yet. It’s going to be hard going. Hold on to me if you want, elf.”
Jai didn’t, and didn’t even thank him for the offer. He concentrated on the way ahead, lurching along unassisted. He was looking for something, an opportunity.
They went that way for a time. Jai looked at the walls when they stopped to rest. Stanach called them the ribs of the runnel, and he said the ceiling was the spine, the floor the belly. Like we’ve been swallowed by some horrible beast, Jai thought. At these ribs, spine, and belly he looked, trying to find some sign of the Mianost entrance. He saw nothing but stone. All the while the earth vibrated beneath them, the rumbling growing stronger the farther they went. The vibrations rattled Jai’s knee, sending fiery lightning lances shooting through the joint.
“That can’t be worms,” he said, his words coming through gritted teeth as he leaned up against a damp wall, again forced to rest.
“If you say so.”
Lanterns hung at intervals on the walls, settled snugly in iron brackets. By their glowing light Jai saw the tunnel here was strewn with debris, boulders half as high as Jai stood, many looking like they’d been flung to the ground by some giant hand and shattered.
To balance, he put his hand on one of the piles. His fingers closed round a stone the size of his fist. His belly clenched suddenly. That might be one way to get rid of the dwarf.
“Larvae?” Jai said, speaking of the lanterns, getting a good grip on the stone.
“Lots. We’re almost there.” Stanach untied the leather water bottle from his belt and held it out. Jai let go the stone and took what he offered. “It’s not water. Go easy.”
Jai would have known what the bottle held the moment he unstopped the mouth. The pungent odor of dwarf spirits stung his nose. He took a sip, the liquor burning past his lips and down his throat, finally sitting like fire in his belly. Standing there, the spirits afire inside him, he imagined he felt pain ease. He took a step, his knee wobbled beneath him, but for the moment it didn’t hurt.
“Just the lying spirits,” Stanach said. In the light and the shadow, he looked like he knew those lies and maybe had believed them for a while. He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned the leather bottle to his belt. “Rest. It isn’t far to the work camp now-just beyond the bend. There’ll probably be a healer there to slap some poultice or something on your knee. It won’t help the pain, but if anything’s inflamed, it might help that.”
Again, Jai felt the stone beneath his hand. Again, he closed his fingers around the roughness of it. “You don’t sound like you have a lot of faith in healers.”
Stanach grunted. “Magic was better, but gods come and gods go, and this latest going of theirs isn’t the first. I had the bad luck to get my fingers broken the time before, during the War of the Lance, while the crowd of them was shuffling around on the doorstep, trying to decide whether to stop by again. Friends tried to help…” Again, he shrugged. “Healer-craft is good for cuts and boils and colds, but you probably notice it doesn’t do much for the big things.”
The ground beneath their feet shook again. Stanach braced with his feet planted wide. Jai caught his balance against the wall. From behind came voices, several shouting in Dwarvish. A great rumbling filled the tunnel, sounding like thunder. With gestures and words Jai couldn’t hear, Stanach made him understand that he should get right up against the wall.
“Second pass!” he shouted, his words sounding small and distant. He pointed back the way they had come, and Jai’s blood ran cold. He gripped the stone now.
Something huge lumbered through the tunnel from the direction he and Stanach had just come, something nearly six feet thick through the middle, and so long Jai couldn’t see the end of it. It came hungry, eating all the stone and rubble in its path, chewing boulders with the same placidity as a cow chewing grass in her green pasture.
“Worm!” Stanach shouted.
His heart pounding, Jai thought the last thing you could name that creature was worm. And yet it did look like an out-sized worm, its hide glistening with slime in the light of lanterns, advancing as worms do, slithering in a gigantic sort of way. It had horns, and atop its back a basket sat, maybe where the neck was if, indeed, it had a neck. In that basket a dwarf stood, thick leather reins in his hands.
“Attached to the horns!” Stanach roared as the worm came nearer and the sound of the earth rumbling beneath it grew even louder. “See!”