‘We have our answer,’ said Wulfthram. ‘Derkss, Haelward, kill that fellow lurking over there with the torch; I will take the tall one. They cannot leave here alive. If you
cannot kill them, remove their amulets and let these guardians do their work. Show no mercy. They are fanatics and would think nothing of seeing you and your families dead if it furthers their
cause.’
At this Luto nodded at the other man, who was standing by one of the barrels holding a torch he had removed from its bracket on the wall. Straight away he lowered the torch, putting it to a
length of rope fixed to the barrel. He started to run, and before the two men could get to him, he had moved to the next barrel, and the next, lighting them each in turn. Luto laughed.
‘Did I not say we would collect the stone whether it was here or buried under tons of rock. You have decided – it is the latter course for us! We can all join our gods
together.’
Wulfthram looked at the flames licking up to the barrels, back at Luto’s serene face, at Dureke standing motionless before him, then back at the barrels. He remembered stories of his
childhood, of the exotic warriors of the south and of the blasting powder they used to demolish the walls of the cities that opposed them – technology now known only to a few. Without knowing
for certain that he was doing the right thing, he called out at the top of his lungs.
‘Into the tunnel, everyone! Now!’
Ceriana saw the grave look in his eyes and repeated the call. The two of them hurtled straight towards the tunnel, Wulfthram propelling his wife by the shoulder. Haelward and Derkss abandoned
their pursuit of the black priest and followed closely after them. Back in the chamber, Luto and his companion shut their eyes and slowly removed the amulets from their necks. Luto flung out his
arms in a cruciform shape embracing the guardians as they finally saw him and came towards him eager to punish the one who had violated the sanctity of the chamber. Within seconds all that remained
of the two men were two tall white columns of bitter frost, with a steaming mist swirling around them. The chamber was now clear of all living creatures.
All except one. Ulian had made to follow the others as they fled, but, once they were in the tunnel, he turned and walked back to Dureke.
‘Do the ritual,’ he said, choking slightly but with a firm resolve in his eyes.
‘I am the one you should use. I have few enough years left as it is.’
‘Come forward then,’ the armoured figure replied. ‘It will be as you wish.’
Ulian approached the throne. Dureke placed one steel hand on the stone and waited for Ulian to come closer. When he was close enough Dureke placed another hand on Ulian’s forehead. The
shock of the spirit’s icy fingers caused him to convulse but he stood his ground.
Dureke started to chant, a deep slow sonorous chant that rumbled through the dust and stone of the floor. And all the time the rope fuses burned.
The stone started to flare, a brilliant scarlet red reflecting off the white steel of Dureke’s armour. The guardians surrounded the two figures and started their own whispering, a hundred
hissing sepulchral voices, their sound reflecting off the walls and rising towards the chamber’s high roof. The brighter the stone flared, the paler Ulian grew; he seemed fixed to
Dureke’s hand and shuddered and convulsed at the spirit’s touch. Then Dureke himself started to glow and, as he did so, the light of the stone started to recede, to diminish.
Dureke’s chant grew louder, as did his followers’, and now he blazed like a flaming torch, the light casting high shadows in this darkest of places. The torches on the wall gave off no
illumination now. Dureke was the sun and the chamber his universe, the guardians his satellites, beholden to him for their long existence. Then the light of the stone snapped off completely; it
became dark, dark as obsidian, a blacker eye in a sea of blackness. It seemed to absorb what little light surround it, to devour it, to feed on it. And Dureke, even as he shone like the brightest
star in the cosmos, was plunged black into darkness. The flame he had drawn into himself was released from his spectral form and instead flew upwards to the chamber’s roof, where it blazed
brightly for less than a second and was gone.
Back on the floor, next to the throne, Dureke finally released Ulian from his grip and the scholar, who loved his desk and his books and his lectures and who hated travel so much, slumped to the
ground. It was as if all of his blood had evaporated, such was the paleness of his skin, whiter than candle wax or the virgin snow in a winter’s field, even the irises of his now-sightless
eyes seemed devoid of colour. A man whose sacrifice would be known by so few people but mean so much to thousands of others, though they knew it not.
And, as the power finally left the stone of the dragon, the flames that had been creeping slowly along their fuses finally found their mark.
Ceriana and her companions had almost cleared the tunnel when the barrels finally did their work. The creature on the roof did not move as they passed it; it was now a sickly luminous green with
a dark, nearly black polyp forming at its centre. They tried not to think about Strogar; it was their own survival that was imperative now. Wulfthram had snatched a torch as they fled the chamber
and this was their only source of illumination as they ran.
Until the explosion.
The first Ceriana knew of it was the noise, a dull muffled rumble that made her ears pop. Then came the red fire, briefly lighting up the tunnel as though they were running from Keth’s
infernal furnace itself. She choked and spat out a mouthful of black dust. And then came the sound of avalanche, of tons upon tons of rock and earth pouring into the void, she turned her head
quickly and saw a great spume of coal black dust roiling along the tunnel, heading for them at such a velocity there was no way to escape it. Behind this noxious cloud was a lick of crimson fire,
swiftly extinguished as the tunnel began to collapse in on itself.
‘Run, everybody!’ She could barely get the words out through the choking fog. She felt the dust fill her lungs, her hair; she felt it stinging her eyes and blocking her nose. But she
did not stop running. She did not dare. And suddenly there it was, a cold air hitting her full on the face, a sense of space to her left and right. She suddenly remembered there was a precipice
close at hand and stopped her running, flinging herself to her left as the tunnel behind her collapsed, shooting forth a midnight cloud of debris, a jet of filth and spoil that covered all of them
in such a thick film of grit and residue that she felt a swim in the Western Ocean, so close to them, would not even remove it all.
As the cavernous echo of the collapsing rock behind them began to recede, Wulfthram was the first to get up. His torch was still lit, though it was sputtering alarmingly.
‘Here, the land bridge over this gorge – it is here. Hurry, we do not know if the earth above us has ceased collapsing.’
‘Where is Ulian?’ asked Haelward. It was the first chance they had to take stock of their surroundings. In the chaos no one had seen what he had done. Except Ceriana. She had sensed
it, felt it when he made his sacrifice.
‘He is gone,’ she said, ‘and the stone is drained. I don’t know what else to say.’
It took a second for the words to sink in. Haelward, his face looking unearthly in the light from the torch, was about to speak again when there was an ominous rumble from almost directly above
their heads.
‘Later,’ said Wulfthram. ‘For now, we move.’
He led the way along the narrow stone bridge as it wound its way over the abyss to their left and right. Despite the precariousness of the traverse it seemed to Ceriana that they crossed it in
no time at all. Behind her she could hear the hollow sound of dust and light earth falling into nothingness as the ground above them continued to settle itself.
‘Which way now?’ asked Wulfthram. ‘Does anybody remember?’
‘I do,’ said Haelward. ‘Follow me.’
‘I am glad one of us has a sense of direction.’
‘Oh, I don’t really,’ replied the smiling soldier, ‘but I do have a strong sense of self-preservation, especially after all we have seen down here.’
They followed him through the tunnels. As they went Derkss piped up.
‘What by all the Gods caused that collapse? Did the priests summon Keth’s demons?’
‘Nothing as dramatic,’ Haelward replied, ‘though no less effective. I should have realised what they were doing, but I have only witnessed such things at first hand myself
twice. Those barrels they ignited, they contained a powder that just explodes in a ball of fire once a naked flame is put to it. When I was in the marines some Kudreyan pirates got hold of some;
they started hurling these small metal globes on to our ship. They had a lighted wick, like the barrels we saw. Well, we were all laughing at them as though they had lost their senses; people were
calling over to their ship asking if Uba, god of fools, was steering their vessel. Well, suddenly the cursed things just went up – a gout of flame and a wave of force that could knock a man
over. Closest I came to death in that war it was; I was a fool to have forgotten about it. It is to the right here, my Lord.’
Ceriana followed them, feeling a sense of familiarity as they entered tunnels where the rock was damp and moist. One more turning and in front of them was a passage ending with a low roof beyond
which was a steep step illuminated by a small well of light, projected through the earth by the late autumn sun, an object Ceriana had all but forgotten about.
‘Praise Artorus and the Gods for daylight!’ sighed Derkss. ‘We may abandon them, but they never abandon us.’
Allowing herself a brief moment of blasphemy to wonder what Strogar would think of such a statement, Ceriana braced herself for the steep but welcome climb, and so it was that shortly afterwards
they emerged, blinking, filthy and as black as coal miners, into the fine mid-morning sunlight. Their surroundings looked so much more benign without the mist and the night surrounding them. If she
wasn’t so choked and emotional, she would have loved to have taken her time to wonder at the people who had created this city of ruins. According to Dureke, she had some of their own blood in
her. She knew for certain that there were many gaps in her family tree; it could be traced back over a thousand years after all. Who could say who had filled them, especially in the early days of
the invasion of the land that would become Tanaren. As they walked slowly back towards Oxhagen, they noticed a spiral of dust less than a mile away, a plume reaching for the thin white clouds above
from behind a stand of trees to their east.
‘I imagine there is a fair old crater there now,’ mused Wulfthram as he stopped to clear his throat and lungs of the tar-like substance clogging them.
‘Yes,’ said Haelward. ‘After all that has happened I can content myself with the thought of those damned priests scrabbling through the earth for months on end only to find
their precious stone is no use to them.’
‘No,’ said Ceriana sadly, ‘they will know it no longer has power. Ulian has ended the threat they posed to the west and north, at least for now.’
‘The university needs to know,’ said Wulfthram. ‘Both of his loss and the reason for it.’
‘There is something else,’ Ceriana said while wiping her face with her hand, trying and failing to make a clean patch ‘That priest Luto said they had raised a dragon in the
east. It may be that they are all too aware of it already, but if not, they should be warned. My brother is out there; perhaps I should write to him.’
‘It sounds like,’ said Haelward, staring wistfully at the sea through a gap in the collapsed city wall, ‘it is time for me to travel again. I can escort Willem and Alys back to
Tanaren City and carry on back to the east. I can take your letter, though a professional travelling through the coaching inns would probably be swifter.’
‘Yes,’ said Wulfthram, ‘it is time for the two youngsters to go home. The next port Eltlo is some ten miles down the coast; we can take you there. I don’t know if you can
find a ship that can take you all the way to Tanaren, but there should be one that takes you most of the way at least.’
They were starting to go downhill and Oxhagen lay huddled around the bay before them. Their ship lay at the harbour and the sun glinted off the flecks of white foam that dappled in the grey-blue
sea to the west. It was an idyllic scene, as far removed from the circumstances of their arrival as it was possible to be.
A horseman was riding up the path from the town; he appeared to be purposefully heading towards them. The bedraggled group stopped and waited for him to get to them.
‘Hail, Baron Wulfthram!’ the man saluted them. ‘The men of your ship told us where you were. I see the landslip caught you in its midst. Anyhow, Baron Farnerun waits in Oxhagen
for you with the rest of his men. He is at the manor house where you can bathe and hopefully accept his hospitality.’
‘I would be delighted,’ Wulfthram replied, ‘but is there any news of the people of the town? When we travelled through it earlier only the dead remained.’
‘Indeed, my Lord, most of the people fled to Eltlo and to other nearby villages. It was their calls to the Baron and your letter that prompted him to journey here. He is not allowing them
to return until the strange threat to them has been dealt with.’
‘Then he can recall them. The danger has passed here.’
‘That is joyous news indeed. Please, my Lord and Lady, remain here while I go and sort out horses for the four of you; it will be but a few minutes before my return.’ With that he
turned and headed back down the path.
Ceriana sat on the wet grass, her head spinning with the night’s events. At long last tiredness was beginning to stretch its fingers over her and she nodded, resting her head against her
husband’s shoulder. Much had changed for her, and also little, but she was too tired to take stock now. Instead, she gazed blearily at the sea, the sea that had brought the stone to her in
the first place and she wished she had never decided all that time ago to head for that picnic on the beach.