Since neither of them was familiar with Maintenance, it took them some time to find one of what the locals called “rat tunnels”—passages made by various entities in various ways over the years that led from the city’s lowest inhabited level to the natural caverns beneath Frostmantle. Whenever the watch found such openings, they would board them over or collapse them, but new ones were always cropping up. The caverns were too valuable a hiding spot for thieves and thugs, not to mention being a handy escape route for pampered nobles fleeing the rules and responsibilities of their parents. Sabira had no doubt that if Aggar were here, he could lead them blindfolded to half a dozen of his own favorite bolt holes.
Dodging the watch, they finally located a tunnel behind a guardhouse that had apparently been crushed when one of the large-diameter pipes above exploded. From the looks of it, whatever disaster had caused the accident had happened long ago, for the piping above the small building had been replaced and was once again showing signs of wear. Sabira hoped the Maintenance crews had figured out the cause of the explosion and fixed the problem when they fixed the pipe. It was all too easy to imagine a section of the heavy metal slamming down on them from above as they climbed over the rusted remains of its predecessor.
The tunnel was lit with fluorescent fungi that lived off minerals in the rock. The walls were only wide enough for them to proceed single file, so Sabira pulled back her hood, unharnessed her shard axe, and took the lead.
They followed the tunnel for a short distance before it opened up into a small cavern. Like the tunnel, the cavern was lit by patches of the glowing fungi, giving everything a nacreous hue. By the pale green light, they could see what their ears had already told them: no hot springs. Not that Sabira had expected their quest to end that quickly or easily. She was actually glad there was no telltale hint of sulfur in the air. They might still have time to thwart Hrun’s plan.
The cavern had two exits, not including the one through which they’d entered. When Sabira hesitated, Mountainheart stepped around her and took the lead.
“This way,” he said, heading for the closer of the two new tunnels. At Sabira’s quizzical look, he added, “The Fist is south of here, so if we head in that direction, we should eventually find the caverns with the hot springs in them.”
“But how do you know that’s south?” Sabira normally had a good sense of direction, but not when there were several hundred feet of solid rock between her and the sun.
Mountainheart looked at her like she’d sprouted purple fangs, a bushy tail, and a third eye.
“That’s like asking a ranger how he can tell which way west is when he’s staring at the setting sun. I’m a dwarf, underground. I just know.”
Fair enough.
“Lead on, then,” she replied, following him through four more caverns, each one bearing in the same general direction—south, Sabira presumed—and trending downward. As they were about to enter the fifth, Sabira caught a hint of rotten eggs on the air. She reached out to grab Mountainheart’s shoulder.
“We’re getting close,” she whispered. “Be ready.”
Mountainheart nodded, holding the tip of his rapier up higher. They entered the fifth cavern and were immediately engulfed in clouds of sulfurous steam. Sabira shifted her urgrosh to one hand and used the other to pull a fold of Kiruk’s cloak up over her nose, blocking out the worst of the odor, though her eyes still burned. Mountainheart refused to be so hampered, soldiering on through the hot stench, his face red from his effort to breathe in as little of the rank steam as possible.
As they made their way across the stalagmite-ridden cavern floor toward the cluster of sulfuric springs, Sabira couldn’t help but admire their alien beauty. Far from being basins of clear blue water, as she had expected, the pools were instead filled to their multicolored rims with bubbling mud in a dizzying array of colors—aquamarine, vermillion, ochre, and a blindingly bright yellow. Several small algae-covered boulders hunched near the edges of the mudpots, adding their own rich hues of green and brown. Sabira wondered idly if Haddrin’s body had been found by some daring painter who’d braved the rat tunnels for the chance to commit such a rare and vibrant mix to canvas.
Mountainheart paused a few feet away from the nearest spring, one of a group of five large mudpots surrounded by several smaller outliers. Sabira stepped up to join him.
“There’s no one here, and no sign anyone’s been here recently. So what’s our next move?” the dwarf asked, keeping his voice low despite his assertion that they were alone. Or perhaps it was merely the caustic fumes adding the deep rasp to his words.
“Well, assuming these are the springs Goldglove was talking about, he said the fissure was four hundred feet or so away,” Sabira replied, looking around. She couldn’t see that far through the wafting curtain of steam, but she pointed the way they’d been headed. “If we’re in the right place, the fissure should be over there somewhere. That’s probably where we want to start our hunt.”
Mountainheart nodded, but didn’t speak. Sabira doubted he really wanted to open his mouth and risk swallowing more of the pungent air. He wiped water from his eyes with the back of his free hand and started off in the direction Sabira had indicated.
As they moved away from the larger pools of boiling mud and toward the smaller ones, it got a little cooler and a little easier to breathe. Sabira dropped the edge of her cloak and resumed her two-handed grip on the shard axe as she scanned the ground in front of them. She was fairly certain they’d gone at least four hundred feet, but she knew from experience how being underground could confound perspective: Everything seemed alternately smaller and more closed in, and then too vast to be comprehended. She tried to shake the feeling off, knowing it for what it was—a haunted remnant of her time in the Maw, when she’d searched for, and found, Leoned.
Refocusing, Sabira peered ahead, searching in vain for Goldglove’s fissure. But she didn’t see anything on the cavern floor other than two bathtub-sized mudpots, one on either side of them, the ubiquitous stalagmites, and more of the brown boulders. Certainly nothing that looked like a channel—artificial or otherwise—diverting magma from the Fist of Onatar.
Were they in the wrong cavern? Were these new springs that had erupted in the time since Goldglove made his journal entry?
Sabira was about to tell Mountainheart they needed to move farther south and deeper into the network of caves when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. A rock the size of her head was sailing across the cavern from the direction of the larger mudpots, and it was about to hit Mountainheart square in the back.
“Orin! Left knee, hard!”
The dwarf didn’t miss a beat, falling to one knee as the stone missile flew harmlessly over his head.
Sabira whirled to face this new enemy, shard axe at the ready.
There was nothing behind them but stone and steam. Unless their foe was invisible—a dangerous proposition here, where even the slightest movement would leave a trail of super-heated mist—or was small enough to fit behind one of the boulders, she and Mountainheart were alone.
Another movement, on the edges of her vision.
There, on the other side of the small spring to her left. Had that boulder been there before?