“What the …?” he began, almost reflexively, but he took in the situation in an instant—his nephew dying at his feet, Sabira’s shard axe the only thing standing between them and a dozen galeb duhrs advancing on them in stony silence. With a curse, he twisted one of the gold rings on his fingers and said, “Wind!”
The sound of a thousand rushing whispers filled the cavern, and Sabira felt her hair and clothing pulled toward the duhrs with invisible, greedy fingers as gale-force winds streamed by on their way to encircling the walking boulders. In moments, a small tornado had formed around the duhrs, tearing them from the cavern floor and sending them spinning through the air in madcap cartwheels. At Aggar’s direction, the improbable cyclone skipped across the ground, picking up stray duhrs, then wound its way back to the largest of the bubbling mudpots.
As the whirlwind crossed the surface of the spring, multicolored mud and steam were sucked into its vortex, creating a conical rainbow wall and obscuring the airborne duhrs from view. When the wall had climbed halfway to the ceiling of the cavern, draining the deep basin almost to its bottom, Aggar released the wind.
The entire cone of mud, steam, and duhrs collapsed back into the basin with the same hissing whoosh the lightning rail made when it passed through a tunnel. Mud splashed high across the cavern floor, some small globs traveling far enough to hit her and Aggar, causing several small burns on his bare chest and one on her cheek. If any of the globs hit Mountainheart, Sabira couldn’t tell; he was already so covered in burns that one or two more would hardly be noticeable.
When the cavern was once more filled with only the sounds of popping bubbles and whistling steam, Aggar knelt beside his nephew, touching his forehead lightly, then placing a gentle hand on Mountainheart’s chest, trying to detect even the slightest rise and fall there, the smallest breath.
There was nothing.
When Aggar looked up at Sabira, his green eyes sparkled with a grief she knew all too well.
“I came too late,” he said in a small voice.
“It was already too late when I called you,” she said softly, her own voice catching with unanticipated sadness. While she’d found the envoy annoying at times—well, most of the time—he’d still been a decent partner. She imagined he would have made an even better friend. But she would never know now.
“So what do you want to do?” she asked Aggar after a few moments of respectful silence. She expected he’d want to take Mountainheart—Orin, she owed him that much—back to Krona Peak.
“This is my fault,” the dwarf said brokenly, looking away. “He would never have been down here if it weren’t for me.”
Aggar’s words rang with an unexpected resonance, sending chills down Sabira’s spine—they were the same accusing words she’d thrown at him after the cave-in, when the walls were coming down around them and he’d forced her to leave. Forced her to live.
“He was here because he wanted to be,” Sabira replied. “Because he cared about you and wanted to help you.” Though she was suddenly unsure if she was talking about Orin or Leoned.
“Don’t cheapen his devotion—his sacrifice—by saying he had no choice in the matter, because he did.” Sabira saw Ned, dangling from that chain, urging her to make her own right choice with earnest, accepting eyes.
“Don’t take that away from him, Agg. Honor it.”
After a moment, Aggar nodded.
“You’re right,” he said, with no trace of rancor or irony. Which Sabira had half-expected, considering Aggar had given her a similar speech right before she’d stormed out of Frostmantle, proclaiming her undying hatred for him and vowing never to return. He held out his hand to her. “May I have the ring back, please?”
Surprised, Sabira removed the ring and passed it over to him. Aggar removed his silver rings carefully from Orin’s hands, then placed Greddark’s golden one tenderly on Orin’s little finger. He pocketed the Silver Concordian rings, then reached up and gently closed his nephew’s sightless eyes.
“Go in peace,” he said simply, then twisted the gold ring three times counterclockwise around Orin’s finger. Orin’s body disappeared soundlessly and Aggar stood.
At her questioning look, he said, “I sent him back to the Peak. They’ll take care of him there, and inform Gunnett and Meridella.”
“What about the Council and Torlan?”
“To Khyber with them,” Aggar spat, toying with another of his rings. A rune-inscribed greataxe appeared in his hand and he hefted it appreciatively. Then he gave her a fierce, feral grin.
“Let’s finish this.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As they continued slowly across the cavern, Sabira still scanning the ground for signs of the elusive magmatic fissure, she began to fill Aggar in on everything she and Orin had learned from Goldglove’s logbook. By the time she’d finished, they’d left the springs behind and had reached the center of the cavern, where they could see the far wall and the two tunnels it boasted, both leading south.
When she was done, Aggar reached out a hand to stop her from moving on. When she turned to look at him questioningly, his expression was grim.
“Saba, it’s not Hrun Noldrun.”
“What?” She frowned, not quite sure she’d heard him correctly. “What do you mean, it’s not him? It has to be.”
“No, Saba. He’s dead. They found his body not far from the Tombs the day after you left for Frostmantle. He’d been beheaded, but his eyes were still intact. He was wearing a tattered gray cloak, so they assumed he was the one who breached security there the night before, since they’d found a scrap of similar material at the scene.” She must have looked at him uncomprehendingly, because he stopped and repeated, very slowly, “Sabira. He’s dead.”
She felt suddenly like she was in one of those cheap tavern shows where the so-called mage would come around trying to earn coin by pulling the tablecloth out from under all the place settings without disturbing them. Only it never really worked that way, and all the glasses and dishes would go tumbling to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, while the charlatan slipped off into the shadows, unnoticed.
“But … the motto? The attack in the Tombs? If not him, then who?” And, hard on the heels of that, “Did I bring Orin down here to die for nothing?”
“No. You didn’t,” Aggar answered, cocking his head to the side. Then he went down on one knee and placed his hand on the cavern floor, much as he had done with Orin earlier. He bent forward and placed his ear to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Sabira asked, nonplussed. Her eyes darted from stalagmite to stalagmite and she wondered what fresh horror the cavern had in store for them.
“Listening,” the dwarf replied shortly, holding up a hand to keep her from speaking when she would have continued. “And feeling.”
After several long moments, he lifted his head up, brushed dirt out of his beard, and stood.
“Your fissure. It’s here, you just can’t see it. Maybe thirty feet below us, judging from the sound and the heat of the ground here.”
“How can you—” Sabira began, but stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s a dwarf thing, I know. So can you tell how far it extends?”
“No, but—”
Aggar was interrupted by a sudden deep rumbling. The cavern shook and the ground rocked beneath them.
“Earthquake?” Sabira asked as she widened her stance and tried to keep her feet. “More duhrs?”
Aggar shook his head, his own legs planted shoulder-width apart.