Authors: R.A. Salvatore
They seemed to be going generally in the right direction, south, as far as their instincts could tell, but more troubling, they were going down more than up. And the air grew warmer and more stifling with each passing hour.
The next change came so gradually that it took them all many, many steps to even notice.
Juraviel stopped, and the other two glanced at him and were held by the curious expression on his face. “The tunnels are not natural,” he explained. “They have been worked.”
Both Cazzira and Brynn moved to the side of the tunnel, holding aloft their respective lights to study both wall and flooring. Sure enough, they found crafted supports along walls and ceiling, and worked blocks flooring the somewhat even slope beneath their feet.
Brynn and Juraviel inevitably turned to Cazzira for some explanation, but the Doc’alfar had none to offer. “There are no cities down here, no settlements at all, that the Tylwyn Doc know of,” she explained. “Unless these are goblin tunnels.”
Juraviel was shaking his head before she ever finished that last, ominous thought. “No goblins made these,” he said with some confidence. “Goblins tear down, they do not create.”
“The world is a wide place, Belli’mar Juraviel,” Cazzira reminded. “By your own words, not all humans are alike—the men of the kingdom north of the mountains are not so closely akin to the To-gai-ru. Perhaps the same can be said of goblins.”
Juraviel considered the words briefly, but shook his head again. Not goblins.
“We should know soon enough,” Brynn put in, and she started away, the other two falling into step beside her.
The worked tunnel went on for more than a hour of walking, opening finally into a wide chamber sectioned by walls of mortared stone, each running out from a wall, left and right, and with a narrow doorway set in the middle. Gingerly, ready for fight or flight, the trio moved up to the door, to find that it was not fully closed, and was swinging unevenly on its old and rusty hinges.
Juraviel took the lead, gently pushing it open, studying the stonework immediately beyond, then rushing ahead, glancing left and then spinning around to the right, looking past the door.
Then he looked back to his companions and shrugged.
The trio went left, moving along a corridor of stonework walls, six to seven feet high, all the way to the wall, and finding only a dead end, with no other doors or openings apparent.
Juraviel looked at his companions, shrugged again, then hopped, beating his wings to lift him to the top of the wall. Then he leaped higher, a short flight that gave him an overview of the wide chamber for as far as his light source would illuminate. Knowing that he would make quite a fine target up there, the elf came down almost immediately.
“A maze of walls,” he explained. “There seem to be openings, but at opposite ends of each successive corridor.”
“A defensive design,” Cazzira noted. “To force enemies to battle along hundreds of feet of narrow corridors merely to cross this one chamber.”
“Then let us hope it is not now defended,” said Juraviel, and he started along the corridor the other way, all the way to the far wall, where they found an opening that turned back into the second corridor. All the way back to the other end, they found the entrance to the third.
Entering that third corridor, Brynn jumped up, caught the top of the wall, and pulled herself into a sitting position atop it. “My feet ache from the walking,” she explained, reaching back toward Cazzira. The Doc’alfar took her hand, and Brynn easily pulled her over the wall, while Juraviel fluttered up and over to join them.
And so they crossed, wall by wall, gradually working their way back toward the center of the room, and finally they came over the last of the thirty barriers, to find
a series of carved steps leading between four fabulously decorated columns, and with a great iron door set in the chamber’s back wall.
The carvings on those columns told them much.
“Powries,” Juraviel said breathlessly as he inspected the worn reliefs. He looked to Cazzira, who seemed not to understand. “Bloody caps. Dwarves.”
The Doc’alfar shrugged and shook her head, even after moving beside Juraviel to see the fairly accurate depiction of one of the fierce powries sculpted into the column. Fittingly, that relief showed the powrie in a threatening pose, hooked sword at the ready and in full battle gear.
“If we go through that door to find a city of powries awaiting us, then we are surely doomed,” Juraviel remarked.
Cazzira looked up at him, a knowing grin on her face. “Yet you wish to open it as much as I do.”
A strange feeling washed over Brynn as she watched the two elves exchange smiles, a sudden intuition that some deeper connection was forming between them. She didn’t say anything about it, just followed, her bow in hand and ready, as Juraviel and Cazzira walked up to the large iron door, studied it for a few moments, then pushed it open, its rusted hinges creaking.
A thin, glowing fog awaited them.
“Fazl pods,” Cazzira noted, moving forward. Just inside the doors was a landing, a balcony overlooking a wide chamber with a series of plateaus stepping down into the bowels of the mountains. Hundreds of structures, houses and larger communal buildings, sat on those various plateaus, connected level to level by stone-worked stairways, all of it illuminated in dull white. They saw the pockets of fazl pod colonies, dozens and dozens of great living lamps and each containing pods numbering in the millions, by Cazzira’s guess. So many were there, that few corners of the various plateaus were hidden in shadows, and this city spreading beneath them was surely huge, level upon level upon level.
But, they learned as they descended the stairway from the balcony to the nearest plateau, it was a city long in decay. Upon closer inspection, the trio noted that the stones of the various buildings were crumbling, their mortar gone. What few items they found in the many houses, pots and clay vessels, utensils and stone furniture, were broken and dusty, with no sign of any continuing society.
They moved along, down another stairway, then across a narrow stone bridge to a small section of what seemed to be more lavish houses.
“Back!” Cazzira warned as soon as they had stepped off the bridge, and the other two froze in place.
Following her gaze, they saw the threat, first one gigantic subterranean lizard and then another, slithering across an area of tumbled stones. The creatures went on their way, bodies swaying in a fluid, mesmerizing manner, forked tongues flicking out before them.
“The new inhabitants,” Cazzira whispered.
“But what happened to the old ones?” Brynn asked; and intending to find out
exactly that, the three went down again to another level, then down from there, and down again.
On what seemed to be the bottommost section of the city, in a chamber similar to the first they had crossed, full of defensible walls, and even with the rotted wooden remains of what seemed to be a ballista, they found their answers.
The room was full of skeletons, piled at every portal.
“Short and thick,” Juraviel remarked, holding up one broken femur. “Powrie bones.” He shook his head in disbelief as he searched on, for the bones were devastated, smashed and clawed. “What could have done this to a colony of hardy powries?” he asked, and the other two, having no experience with the powerful dwarves, didn’t truly understand the weight of that statement.
They made their way from pile to pile, coming to a wide-open anteroom, where they found many more bones, but with wounds very different.
Brynn bent low and picked one up, holding it for the other two to see. It was charred on one side, as if some intense heat had blasted across it with tremendous force. Likewise, one wall of the room was blackened and blasted.
“What war engine could have done this?” Juraviel asked.
“A dread wurm,” came a quiet answer from Cazzira a few moments later, and when both Juraviel and Brynn looked at her directly, she added, “Dragon.”
“Dragon?” Brynn echoed, and she looked to Juraviel, her expression full of doubt.
But Juraviel’s look dispelled those doubts, for he was nodding in agreement.
“Perhaps they dug too deep,” Cazzira remarked. “Perhaps they uncovered that which should have been left undisturbed.”
“Do you notice that something is missing?” Juraviel asked, and the other two looked at him curiously.
“Their weapons,” he explained. “Their armor. All of their treasures. The entire city, as far as we have seen, has been picked clean.”
“By centuries of pillagers,” Cazzira reasoned, and they left it at that and went back to their searching.
By the tunnel opening of the anteroom, Brynn found the next surprise. “This was no powrie,” she said, holding up a longer and narrower femur, charred on one side. Several other larger bones, human bones, they seemed, were about it, some crushed, others just burned.
“Humans and powries did battle in here?” Cazzira asked.
“Why would they leave only one set of human bones, then?” Brynn asked. “A traitor, perhaps, who betrayed his clan to the dwarves?”
“You assume too much,” said Cazzira, but her scolding was cut short by a cry of surprise from Juraviel, who had exited the anteroom to inspect the beginning of the tunnel beyond. He emerged from that shadowy place holding a piece of wood as long as his arm.
“What is it?” asked Cazzira.
“Darkfern,” Brynn answered as she inspected the piece, to see the silverel lines
encircling it. “That was part of a bow, a Touel’alfar bow!”
Juraviel turned it over to reveal a tiny signature near the tapered end. “With the mark of Joycenevial, my father,” he explained. “This was the bow of a ranger—of that ranger,” he said, pointing to the human remains. He considered the piece of the bow and the mark and searched his distant memories.
“Emhem Dal,” he decided a few moments later. “Bow your head, Brynn Dharielle, for here before you is the final resting place of Emhem Dal, trained by the Touel’alfar to return to his home of To-gai more than three hundred years ago.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means that he never made it home,” said Cazzira.
“And that his sword, Flamedancer, was lost here,” Juraviel added. He looked at Brynn, his golden eyes narrowing with determination. “Are you ready to find and earn your ranger sword, Brynn Dharielle?”
The woman stared back at him hard, then nodded grimly.
“If the dread wurm has it, then you’ll not likely get it back,” Cazzira was quick to put in. “Behold the devastation of the beast.” She swung her arm about at the piles of charred and crushed bones as she spoke. “Behold the fate of the last ranger who stood before the dragon!”
“That was hundreds of years ago,” Brynn put in. “Can the dragon still be alive?”
“We shall see,” was all that Belli’mar Juraviel replied, his tone more grave and angrier than Brynn had ever heard it before. Clearly, the sight of the remains of Emhem Dal had unsettled him.
Cazzira suggested that they should return to the city to search for more clues, but Juraviel pushed on down the tunnel, his pace strong.
They followed their instincts, they followed the heat they could feel pulsing beneath their feet, then they followed the smoke, wafting through cracks in the floor on hot updrafts.
After three long marches, with only short rests in between, they came to a huge and broken chamber, with a shattered stone bridge that had once crossed a deep gorge. Far below, they saw the orange glow of fire, the heat radiating up to flush their faces.
“If the dragon remains, it is down there,” Juraviel said. “If Flamedancer remains, it is down there.”
“You cannot know that,” said Cazzira.
“I feel it,” was all the answer she was going to get.
Juraviel stood up straight, peering across the way. “We can work our way to the entrance of the tunnel.”
“Or we can go down there,” said Brynn. She spent a long time staring down into the gorge, then looked up at Juraviel, whose gaze led her to Cazzira.
The Doc’alfar chuckled under the intensity of those two looks. “What is life without adventure?” she asked at length.
And so they descended even farther, so far that they had to set their hundred foot rope several times. Sweat stung Brynn’s brown eyes as she hand-walked down
rope and stone, finally coming out on what seemed to be the floor of the place.
On they went, the air smoky about them. Soon the reflected light of flames was enough so that they did not need their torches, and rounding a bend in the corridor, they happened upon the source of the light and the heat, a wide and winding chamber full of what seemed to be water—except that the water was burning at various points.
“There is oil leeching onto the water,” Juraviel reasoned.
“But what ignited it?” came Cazzira’s response.
“Let us learn,” said Brynn, and she stepped out from the bank onto a stone, then hopped to another. She paused there and bent low, and gradually lowered her hand to the water, dipping it below the surface. “Warm, but it does not burn.”
“Take that as comfort if you fall in,” said Cazzira. “A pleasant thought before the dread wurm eats you.”
For many minutes, they made their way along the only trail open to them, a broken walk of small ledges and stepping-stones that wound through the fires and across the waters.
“Do we even believe that the dragon is still alive?” Brynn asked. “Three hundred years is a long time.”
“Only in the measurement of humans,” said Juraviel. “Not in the memory of the Tylwyn Tou or Tylwyn Doc, and certainly not in the memory of the great wurms, the longest living creatures of Corona.”
“What do you know of dragons?” Cazzira asked.
“Only what you do, I presume,” Juraviel answered. “Since our legends on the matter should be similar.”
Brynn started to join in, but she stopped abruptly—so abruptly that the other two turned to regard her.
She stood there on a stepping-stone, looking down at the orange-glowing water, and when her companions similarly looked to the base of her stone, they recognized the potential problem—for the water was lapping at the rock, as if something had disturbed its stillness.