For an hour they made their way deeper into the Icewall cavern, following a fairly wide passageway with a smooth floor that was, thankfully, free of any further obstacles. Finally exhaustion compelled a halt, and at a wide spot in the corridor the weary warriors stretched their bedrolls on the floor and tried to find space to rest. However, many of the men and women sat staring, eyes fixed upon remembered images. Sleep proved to be a very elusive comfort.
The torches sputtered and failed until only a few of the brands still flickered. Kerrick found himself restless and uneasy, and as he had on the faraway hill before the Tusker Escarpment, he pushed himself to his feet and wandered along the periphery of the war party.
He heard an annoyed shout and turned to see a big Highlander holding the gully dwarf, Slyce, by his neck.
“Little bugger just stole the last of me warqat!” growled the man. “I oughta punch him clear back to the White Bear Sea-knock the lights out of him!”
“Looks like he’s already pulled the shades,” the elf remarked, seeing the little fellow’s eyelids close droopily.
“Hmmph,” snorted the warrior, his rage apparently dissipating in weariness, or despair. “Stone drunk-wish I could join him there.”
He cast the gully dwarf against the wall, where Slyce collapsed and started snoring noisily. The Highlander ended up stretching out next to the pudgy little fellow, and using his chest as a pillow, he was soon snoring his own accompaniment.
Here, in the underground passage, Kerrick probed ahead of the group, allowing his elven eyes to penetrate regions of pure shadow, places that would have been utterly dark to the humans. It was a relief to get away from the torches, which sizzled and flared in his vision annoyingly.
The elf wandered on, looking for something, anything, to distract him along this twisting passageway. He saw signs of serious excavation and knew that the ogres-or more likely their slaves-had labored hard to create this route through the mountain. Steps had been carved into the floor to ease the passageway in places where it descended or rose. Narrow corridors had been widened, the walls showing the marks of countless chisels and picks, so that even at its most constricted point the corridor would allow the passage of four or five ogres walking abreast.
Before he knew it the elf had wandered a good distance away from the rest of the group. Behind him the torchlight was invisible, the faint sounds of sleep swallowed by the twists and turns of the circuitous route.
“Nice fight,” said Coraltop Netfisher, who was leaning against one of the cavern walls, a dozen paces in front of the elf. “You really know how to use that sword.”
Kerrick snorted bitterly. “Now you show up? It would have been too much trouble to help out, I suppose.”
If the kender took offense, he didn’t show it. Instead, he ambled forward then reached up to rummage through Kerrick’s belt pouch. “No warqat left, huh?” he said, disappointed.
The elf blinked in surprise. “No … but that was a good tip, to carry strong drink up the Tusker Escarpment. How did you know to tell me that?”
Coraltop shrugged. “Know to tell you what? I thought you’d drink the stuff-never thought it would go to waste inside of a polar worm!”
“Well, it was good advice, anyway,” Kerrick noted, “but we’ve lost nearly half our men, and we haven’t even made it into Winterheim yet. Now what do we do?”
“How should I know?” asked the kender, with maddening indifference. He brightened, though, even smiled. “I guess it’s going to start getting interesting now!”
Kerrick awoke with a start, sitting up on the cavern floor, his hand instinctively going for the sword that slid soundlessly from its sheath to gleam coldly in the lightless space. He was alone in a wide stretch of the underground passage connecting from the Icewall Gate, and he had somehow dozed off while sitting against the wall.
“By Zivilyn!” he gasped in a breathless whisper. “I can’t believe I fell asleep like that!”
He had. Anything or anyone that had come along could have killed him, and he would have been utterly defenseless.
“Coraltop?” he asked, remembering that he had been talking to the kender in his last moments of wakefulness.
He was not surprised to receive no answer, but when he placed his hand on the stones where his seafaring companion had been sitting, he was startled to feel that the bedrock was still warm. Perhaps he hadn’t been as defenseless as he first thought.
“Thanks, old friend,” he said quietly.
He was stiff and uncomfortable when he rose to his feet and felt like an old man as he hobbled back to the war party, only gradually working the kinks out of his joints and limbs. The battle with the monstrous ogre had taken a toll on him that he would feel for days, he felt certain.
He found the group of warriors stirring, though most of them, too, seemed to be suffering the aftereffects of the fight-all except Slyce, who moaned under the influence of an obviously thudding hangover.
“That’ll teach you to steal good warqat!” snapped the Highlander.
“Never no more,” agreed the gully dwarf lugubriously.
“Ah,” the warrior said, his tone softening. “It’ll wear off with a few good miles under your boots.”
“We go on the same way?” Barq asked, squinting into the dark passage Kerrick had scouted.
“No other choice,” Moreen said. She addressed Kerrick. “Will you lead the way?”
“Sure,” he agreed as Bruni fired up a torch. All along the file other brands flared, until the war party looked as if it were escorted by a legion of huge, smoky fireflies.
With his back to the blazes, Kerrick found he could see pretty well. The walking was easy here. The passage was obviously a natural cavern, with stalactites on the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the floor in many places. Here and there the walls showed signs of chisels and hammers, where the ogres-or their slaves-had widened the route to allow for easier traversing. The floor was for the most part level, though not infrequently there were periods of steep descent. These were invariably carved with steps that, even if they were a little tall for a human’s stride, made for relatively easy descent.
Nowhere did the cavern narrow to the constricted route that had marked the entrance. Kerrick speculated that the mouth of the gate had been left thus to make it easier to defend, while the interior had been widened and made smooth to allow for easy marching, possibly by a large contingent of ogres. The air throughout was warm and moist, much like the air in the caverns below Brackenrock. They knew this was the result of subterranean heat sources that would-also like Brackenrock-ensure that Winterheim maintained a comfortable and constant interior temperature even during the worst ravages of the Sturmfrost and the sunless winter.
For hours the party trudged along, mostly in silence, though there were occasional hushed observations from some of the humans, awed by the vast sweep of a chamber ceiling or an exotic column of stone that seemed to have been formed from solidified mud. They came to the longest stairway of the route, a series of thirty steps that carried them steadily downward, with a broad landing after each ten tiers. At the bottom they entered a very large chamber, and Bruni and the others held their torches high. The light barely reached the walls but reflected back from enough slick surfaces to reveal a cavern that was nearly the size of Brackenrock’s great hall.
The air was slightly cooler in here, and it felt moist against Kerrick’s skin. He looked around in a moment of silent awe and heard the gentle trickling of water. Crossing the room he found a small pool, with a stream flowing into it from a gap in the opposite wall and a little channel leading away, eventually passing through a hole in the far side of the cavern where it undoubtedly continued its descent toward the sea. Beside the pool was a wide, flat expanse of fine-grained sand. Here they decided to take an extended rest.