“The Soldorak level is the tenth one down,” Rockfist offered, as if reading her mind. “Go to your right once you reach the bottom of the stairs. The Opal Room should be the third one on the left. If you hit Obsidian, you’ve gone too far.”
“What if someone else comes in while I’m down there?”
“I can’t see that happening—the Tombs are officially closed right now. But if it does … hmm.” Rockfist frowned, casting about for an answer. Then his eyes found the dangling chain beside the entrance to the vestibule. “If someone comes in, I’ll find a way to ring the Fire Bell. You’ll be able to hear it on every level, in every room. Unfortunately, so will the Fire Teams. It will take them some time to organize, but once you hear the bells, you’d better drop what you’re doing and get back up the stairs as fast as you can. Take the left staircase; anyone coming down will use the right one, since it’s closer to the Opal Room. If we can’t get out before they arrive, we’ll have to hide out in the Caretaker’s rooms until the Fire Teams clear the building.”
“Oh, he’s going to love that.”
“No doubt. Now you’d better get going. It’s a long walk.”
Sabira hurried down the worn marble treads as they curved along the wall, staying toward the inside as they swung out over empty space. Somebody really should talk the Caretaker into investing in a few soarsleds. Somebody besides her or Rockfist, that was.
As she passed each landing, she noticed the eponymous clan crest carved into the same wall where the vestibule was on the first level. Mroranon, not surprisingly, was first, followed by Doldarun and Droranath. Sabira couldn’t help but wonder what sort of tomes would fill that floor—the Droranath could not be considered scholars by anyone’s measure. Though it didn’t seem that the books and documents housed on a particular floor necessarily had much to do with the clan for which that level had been named. The family perspective written by Baron Deepspring was a good example—it was shelved on the Soldorak floor, but none of the families mentioned were affiliated with that clan.
The Kundarak floor was fifth, and showed the old clan crest, not the newer one they’d adopted as House Kundarak. Noldrun was ninth, and again Sabira wondered what volumes might be housed in its rooms. Would she find treatises on Korran’s Maw, the ancient Noldrun clan mine, there? Could the tale of Nightshard’s death—and Ned’s—in the depths of that mine be sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere in the Agate Room, or the Bloodstone Room? A part of her wished she had more time to explore and satisfy her morbid curiosity, but a larger part was glad that she did not. That was a book better left unopened.
At last she reached the Soldorak level. As Rockfist had directed, she turned right and walked down the wide corridor, counting off archways as she did so. To the left of each arch was a small placard printed with the room’s name and either a corresponding gemstone or nugget of ore. She passed the Silver and Amber Rooms on the right and the Turquoise and Iron Rooms on the left before reaching Opal.
As she entered the room, the first thing she noticed was the floor. In the light of the hovering everbright lanterns, the tiles sparkled with a rainbow of iridescent colors, almost bright enough to make her eyes hurt. On closer inspection, she saw that what she had thought were tiles were actually thousands of inlaid opals, each one perfectly round and breathtakingly flawless. Sabira estimated that the floor in this room alone was worth several hundred thousand platinum dragons. If each of the other rooms had floors inlaid with their respective gemstone or metal, the Tombs was easily one of the richest treasures in all of Khorvaire, and that was before taking into account the wealth of knowledge contained in its many books and documents. She could see now why the Caretaker—and, by extension, the whole dwarven nation—guarded it so jealously.
Once she got past the marvel of the opal floor, she saw that the walls of the room were covered floor to ceiling in shelves that had been hollowed out of stone. Rolling ladders were spaced evenly throughout to allow access to the upper shelves. Several freestanding shelves jutted up from the floor, forming a loose octagon around three stone tables that browsers could use to read through their selected documents. Rockfist had informed her that nothing could be removed from the Tombs, so any information she found would have to be copied down or remembered. Luckily, he’d also provided her with a stylus and one of his many notebooks, so Aggar’s case wouldn’t wind up hinging on her own memory, which might prove a bit unreliable, especially with as much effort as she’d put into suppressing it over the years.
From the barrister’s earlier comments, Sabira had expected to find the filing system to be arcane and incomprehensible, so she was pleasantly surprised to discover that the books were arranged in alphabetical order. She quickly located the D’s and easily found Darkore’s report, a thin booklet bound in white leather. Since she couldn’t be certain which “D” book Goldglove had been referring to in his log, she browsed a bit further in the section until she found Deepspring’s book, as well. Then she took both documents to one of the stone tables, moved a stack of much heavier unshelved books to an adjacent table to free up space, and sat down to read.
Darkore’s work was full of jargon that was no doubt quite informative to other students of volcanoes but was utterly incomprehensible to Sabira. Her eyes glazed over before she’d read through the first page. Then she recalled that Goldglove’s journal entry had mentioned a map, and so she confined her search to the illustrations. Though the back of the report consisted of several pages of maps, Sabira located the one Goldglove had referenced with relative ease, considering it looked like he had drawn on it. It was probably a good thing he was already dead; Sabira couldn’t imagine the Caretaker letting a transgression like that go unpunished.
The original map showed the Fist of Onatar, located near the western border of Soldorakhold. Jagged red lines—what the map legend informed her indicated the titular magmatic fissures—radiated out from the Fist to the east and south. Small black x’s showed the locations of hot springs along those fissures.
Goldglove had added a fissure to the map, this one a perfectly straight line leading from the volcano and crossing both Soldorakhold and Noldrunhold before ending at Frostmantle, in Tordannonhold. Red tick marks divided the line, but not uniformly, and each mark had a number written beside it in parentheses. 993, 995, 997, 998 … after a moment, Sabira realized they must be dates. As with the others, small x’s had been added to show where hot springs had appeared along the route of the new fissure.
Without seeing Goldglove’s journal—another reason to travel to Frostmantle, since Rockfist hadn’t been able to acquire a copy of it—Sabira couldn’t be completely sure what the map was showing, but even her uneducated eye could tell that the fissure leading to the Tordannon capitol could not be natural.
Was this why the researcher had been murdered? Rockfist’s offhand comment from the Iron Council’s audience chamber came back to her then with the force of prophecy.