Of Truth and Beasts

Chapter 23

Chuillyon led the way through the decaying, empty tram station and into a tunnel. He saw an archway ahead but was unprepared for the sight beyond it—a domed cavern as large as a small town.

“Oh, my,” Hannâschi breathed.

Chuillyon stared up at the remnants of walkways that had once stretched between remaining columns as thick as some old trees of his people’s forests. Column fragments and the ruins of huge stairways lay piled and scattered everywhere.

Even malnourished and exhausted, Hannâschi’s awe and wonder were plain to see. Shâodh, however, appeared singularly unimpressed. He stepped through the rubble, glancing once at a skeleton still wearing a thôrhk.

“Fewer bodies here,” he noted dispassionately.

Chuillyon almost winced, thinking of the grim fate of these lost dwarven ancestors.

“Did Wynn come through here?” he asked.

Shâodh paused, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. His exhale thrummed briefly in his throat, and Hannâschi crouched beside a set of broken bones.

“So much death,” she said quietly. “What happened here?”

“No one knows ... as yet,” Chuillyon answered.

She looked up, but her long hair and cowl covered half her face.

“This is the greatest archaeological find of our time,” she went on. “Bäalâle is no myth. If there is evidence here—amid all of this—then we will have proof the war did take place ... that it was not, is not, some overblown legend.”

Shâodh’s eyes opened, and he looked down at her with the barest frown.

In truth, Chuillyon had so single-mindedly followed Wynn that he had forgotten this possibility. But Hannâschi was only half-right.

“Such information must be kept from the public,” Shâodh stated before Chuillyon could express the same notion.

Hannâschi rose and turned to Shâodh with her mouth set tightly. Clearly, she did not need his reminder, and seemed about to tell him so. This was not the time for a spat—although one might come later. Chuillyon decided not to mention it yet, but, in truth, even few of his peers at the guild could be told of this place until he understood more himself.

“Did she come through here?” he asked again.

Shâodh nodded once. “But we have another problem. I sense three distinct lives. The journeyor’s protector cannot be one of them, and the majay-hì’s presence is different. That leaves her and the dwarf.”

“And so?” Chuillyon asked.

“Someone else is here, either with her or near her.”

This was all Chuillyon needed: one more unknown variable. “Which way?” he asked.

Shâodh pointed south. “Do we follow?”

Chuillyon fought an urge to snap at him for that same tiresome question. Did Shâodh think they were going home to announce their great find and bathe in glory? They were here to learn what Wynn was after.

When Chuillyon did not answer, Shâodh held out his hand, helping Hannâschi over a pile of loose rubble. He kept hold of her hand as he led the way across the cavern. Chuillyon never missed these small familiarities between them. Neither had he ever commented on them. But that might have to change.

They passed more crumbling stairways and fragmented columns ... and more remains of the long dead. After a good distance, Shâodh slowed, but he did not sink into meditation again. He gestured toward an archway at the cavern’s south wall.

Just inside of it lay a small pile of blankets and canvas bags.

Chuillyon hurried over to see inside the tunnel.

Chane stepped through the portal last, finding himself in a narrow passage. Ore-Locks walked to an open recess near the door that held the grid of metal rods exposed by a sliding metal panel.

“No,” Chane said quickly. “Do not close the portal.”

Ore-Locks eyed him in surprise. “It will bar any pursuit if we are still followed.”

“It will also lock us in. If we are forced to flee, we may not have time to stop and open it. Leave it open.”

The dwarf did not appear convinced, but Chane had no intention of allowing him near those rods. Should Ore-Locks close the panel, he could leave them entombed and trapped.

Wynn held up her cold lamp crystal, illuminating the passage. “Chane’s right. There’s been no sign of followers since the vibrations on the tram tracks. Ore-Locks, what if you get hurt ... or worse? The rest of us will be trapped with no means to get ourselves ... or you out.”

Her argument was rational and logical, and far less accusatory than what Chane was thinking. Ore-Locks finally nodded. It must go against his training and nature to pass through a portal without closing it. With the decision made, the strange, dark focus returned to his face, and he headed down the passage at a quick pace.

Shade rumbled low in discontent, watching him, and Chane shared her concern over the dwarf’s shifting moods. He was obviously looking for something.

Wynn trotted after Ore-Locks. “Come on.”

Within a few paces, Chane detected the floor’s slight slant. They were going deeper again, and he tried to gauge their descent. When he reckoned they were about two levels lower, Ore-Locks stopped before a side passage. He turned his head, cocking it, as if listening.

Ore-Locks suddenly turned into the side passage, as did Wynn. She seemed to be just blindly following the dwarf.

“Wynn,” Chane rasped, but she had already stopped.

Another iron portal blocked the passage’s end. Ore-Locks did not even pause, but walked straight through the iron and vanished.

“No!” Wynn cried, rushing to the closed portal.

The smallest hope flickered inside Chane. Perhaps this time, Ore-Locks truly had left them. Without his obsession feeding Wynn’s drive to go deeper, Chane might yet convince her to turn back. To his surprise, Wynn closed her fist around her crystal and pounded on the portal.

“Ore-Locks!” she shouted. “Open these doors now! Do you hear me?”

The words echoed loudly along the narrow passage, but Wynn only pounded harder.

Chane stood waiting, hoping, for her to finally halt in exhaustion.

Sau’ilahk drifted from the hall of the Eternals and through the open portal into a smaller passage. From a distance, he saw light down its gradual slope. The light suddenly dimmed by half and then spilled out of what might be a side passage. When the illumination faded from the passage’s mouth, he followed carefully.

The sound of Wynn shouting and pounding rolled out of the side passage and toward him in echoes. He stopped and slipped close to the main passage’s wall, prepared to sink into it. He had not caught her words—something to do with the dwarf—but she sounded more distressed than angry.

Something had gone wrong.

Sau’ilahk fled back to the open portal into the hall of the Eternals. He feared being sensed by the dog, and he could not move until certain of which way Wynn might go next.

A grinding sound rose in the narrow passage, rumbling all around Wynn, and she stopped pounding. When the last of the iron triple doors rolled away, Ore-Locks stood in the opening, but this time he looked angry.

“Do not disturb the peace of the honored dead,” he ordered, and then looked to the crystal in her hand. “Close that in your fingers, and allow only enough light for sure steps.”

With that, he turned away, heading inward beyond the portal.

Wynn glanced back at Chane and Shade, and then hurried after, entering a natural cave beyond a shorter passage. It all looked alarmingly familiar.

She walked a wide, cleared path between calcified, shadowy forms. A hulking stalagmite rose from the cavern floor, thick and fat all the way up to head height. Others were joined at the upper end by descending stalactites, forming natural, lumpy columns that glistened with mineral-laden moisture. But in the dim phosphorescence of the walls, some forms looked too big and bulky to have been made only by calcified buildup. To an unknowing observer, they might have been boulders at one time, now buried beneath decades of crust.

Wynn knew exactly what those protrusions were. She stood in the chambers of the honored dead, as she once had in Dhredze Seatt. This was where dead thänæ were entombed in stone, to be tended in eternal rest by the Stonewalkers of this lost seatt.

Ore-Locks glanced at only a few of the lone stone protrusions in this first cave. He moved to a nearby opening and stepped off the open path and into the next shadowed forest of such formations. Wynn followed, watching as he examined each one with a kind of mania before rushing for the next.

“What is he doing?” Chane asked. “Has he gone mad?”

“Shhhh,” Wynn said. “Those aren’t just mounds of calcified stone.”

She didn’t know why the Stonewalkers wouldn’t allow bright light in these caves. They seemed to think it would disturb the dead they cared for. Wynn spread her fingers, letting just a little of her crystal’s light seep out.

“Look,” she told Chane, and he leaned in.

The top of one glistening stone protrusion narrowed over rounded “shoulders” to a bulk like a “head.” This one had melded to the tip of a long, descending stalactite. The hints of features, like the face of a sculpture roughly formed and left unfinished, were barely visible in the light of Wynn’s crystal.

The long-dead thänæ’s eyes seemed closed, but there was no way to be certain.

Wynn couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Its clothing was nothing more than the barest ripples in the glittering layers of minerals. The buildup had turned its hands into lumps. She glanced at other dark shapes about the cave’s silent stillness.

“Honored thänæ, taken into stone,” she whispered. “We are standing among the dead of a forgotten time.”

No coffins or crypts. The Stonewalkers—the Hassäg’kreigi—entombed their most honored in stone itself. Left here for a thousand years or more, they became one with the earth their people cherished.

Chane backed up, looking all around without blinking.

Wynn knew he didn’t fear the dead. He too had stood in those caves in Dhredze Seatt.

Chane’s eyes suddenly widened. “One has been shattered!”

He rushed off the path.

When Wynn caught up, he was crouched over fragments at the base of one form. She froze at the sight of this desecration. From the size of the pieces lying all around, the dwarf had been large—tall—and the broken bits had been there long enough to bond to the cave floors.

She shook her head in sadness. Who would do such a thing, and why? There was no way to know, and she gripped her crystal tighter, peering about for Ore-Locks.

He still wove between the lumpy columns, studying every calcified thänæ he could find.

“What are you doing?” Wynn called to him.

Instead of answering, he broke into a jog and ran into the cave’s wall.

Wynn stiffened, and then heard his heavy footfalls echoing through the caves. Shade took off toward another opening.

“Ore-Locks!” Wynn cried, following Shade’s lead.

The next cave held only a few calcified forms. Ore-Locks was already running for another wall, his face twisted in urgency. Wynn started after him, but Shade barked.

Still moving, Wynn glanced back in frustration. “What?”

“Perhaps she has dipped into his memories,” Chane said.

Wynn stopped cold, though Chane went on to peek into the next cave.

Shade padded closer, and Wynn dropped to one knee. She touched Shade’s face, feeling bad for having snapped at the dog. In her own mania to catch Ore-Locks, she’d forgotten Shade’s ways.

“Sorry,” she said softly, closing her eyes.

An image of darkness filled her mind instantly. One of her own memories began to return....

She held a cold lamp crystal out before a figure of stone, carved almost like an upright coffin, but with an engraving inside a raised, oblong panel about chest level. She traced the engraved markings with her finger.

... outcast of stone ... deceiver of honored dead ... ender of heritage ... the seatt killer ...

She reached the bottom—a final vubrí.

Thallûhearag—the Lord of Slaughter.

Shade had taken her back to the Chamber of the Fallen at Dhredze Seatt, those counterparts to the dwarven Eternals. Reviled for their rejection of dwarven virtues, their faceless effigies, chiseled in the form of iron-banded coffins, were locked away in the deepest place. One was worse than all others, and secreted in a small chamber of its own.

Inside the memory, Shade began to snarl.

In her crystal’s light, a shadow of that lone effigy appeared to move upon the wall behind it. A baritone voice rose as if from the black basalt form.

“His true name was Byûnduní ... Deep-Root.”

Ore-Locks stepped from the shadows, his hand stroking down the effigy. He raised his eyes to where the head would be, as if seeing more than the mute form’s representation. He placed both hands flat on the oval plate of its engraving, as if trying to blot out the epitaph.

“He does not belong here,” Ore-Locks whispered.

The memory ended as abruptly as it began.

Wynn opened her eyes, still holding Shade’s face, and realized what Shade was trying to tell her.

“Deep-Root?” she breathed.

Did Ore-Locks actually hope to find his traitorous ancestor among the honored dead of Bäalâle?

“What did she show you?” Chane asked.

“I know what Ore-Locks is looking for, and he will not find it here.”

Rising, she ran into the next cave, and then the next. The farther in she went, the more the entombed forms became indistinguishable from the cave’s glistening stone. She found Ore-Locks inside the fifth and last cave. He looked pale and stricken, down on his knees. When he saw her watching him, he stood up, his expression hardening.

She had no idea what to say. Her feelings were as mixed and blended as the remains of the dead and the cave’s stone. She was angry with him for leading them astray. After the carnage they had seen above in the seatt, how could he ever have thought to find his genocidal ancestor here? Even if any stonewalkers had survived the seatt’s fall, why would they ever place a monster among the honored dead? Or did Ore-Locks merely wish it so, as proof that the little-known tale of his treacherous ancestor was a lie?

But a small part of her pitied him. Was this truly why he had come all this way—to somehow change the truth of the past?

“We are finished here,” he said coldly. “We move on.”

“To where?”

“You wished to go lower.” He strode past her, ignoring Chane and Shade.

Chane kept glancing about as they walked. When Ore-Locks neared where they’d entered, Chane slowed. Wynn stopped, wondering what was wrong.

“Feather-Tongue would find this tomb a tragedy,” Chane said.

Wynn shook her head, uncertain what he meant.

“These thänæ are forgotten,” he went on. “The tales that brought them here are forgotten. They will not continue in the memories of their people. These here are now truly dead, forever.”

She hadn’t considered that. First, Ore-Locks had tried to clear his genocidal ancestor’s name in a place where the dead were forgotten, and now Chane waxed philosophical like a shirvêsh of Bedzâ’kenge. The world felt upside down.

“We have to go,” she said.

He nodded and followed her as they hurried.

Ore-Locks was waiting by the portal. This time Wynn, Chane, and Shade all stepped out, and he closed the doors from the inside before passing through the iron to join them. They wouldn’t need to enter that place again.

Ore-Locks still looked pale and sickened. He took the lead, and when they reached the narrow, sloping passage, he turned downward again.

A small part of Wynn wished to offer him some word of comfort; the wiser part knew that was foolish—and wrong.

Ghassan lingered near the entrance to the hall of the Eternals, noting the great gash in its far right end, but he did not step inside just yet. The wraith must be somewhere ahead of him. He did not wish to risk exposing his presence to it or to Wynn.

Footsteps and voices carried down the engraved entry passage behind him.

Ghassan looked back. Who else could possibly be down here? He could not make out the words, but he heard the lilt and guttural turn in those voices. Elves?

He hurried inside the hall. Quietly rushing down its length, he looked for a vantage point where he could still remain hidden. Then he froze midway.

The wraith lingered at an archway beyond the last great statue along the hall’s far wall. Its back was turned to him.

Ghassan knew he had only moments before it might turn around or the elves would enter this place. He formed sigils and shapes in his mind, focusing on the wraith. He did not know if he could hide his presence from its unnatural awareness, but it was all he had left to try.

On pure hope, he ran between the statues on the hall’s other side, ducking behind the shoulder-high base of the effigy of a dwarven warrior.

The wraith turned. It floated farther out into the hall, but did not look his way.

Ghassan stifled an exhale of relief. He remained rigid, listening to the footsteps approaching the hall.

Sau’ilahk thought he heard something and turned quickly. He saw nothing, but he was not given to hearing things that did not exist. He drifted to the hall’s center and then heard something else.

Footfalls and voices carried from the hall’s entrance.

It could only be Chuillyon and his companions. An overwhelming hunger flooded Sau’ilahk. Feeding upon Wynn was the only greater pleasure he could imagine than draining the old elf’s life. But he could not lose Wynn now.

Sau’ilahk rushed back to the portal archway and saw her light far down the passage.

Ghassan peered out from hiding. Once again, he could almost not believe his eyes. Three elves in travel attire stepped through the hall’s broken doors. The oldest of them led the way, followed by a tall, younger male and a beautiful female.

Ghassan fixed on the leader. He had seen that one many times whenever Duchess Reine of the royal house of Malourné had come visiting at the guild branch of Calm Seatt. He had heard the old one’s name mentioned once or twice, and he tried to remember.

Chuillyon? What was an advisor to the royals doing in Bäalâle Seatt? It was certainly no coincidence.

“Look at their size,” the woman breathed, gazing up at the massive statues. Beautiful as she was, she looked thin and exhausted, nothing like the hardened traveler Wynn had become.

Ghassan spoke Elvish well enough, and hoped he might learn more than expressed awe over the work of ancient dwarven artisans.

“This way,” the younger male said, heading for the open portal.

Chuillyon slowed, glancing back at the hall’s right end. He finally nodded and continued on with the others. The trio passed through the portal.

Ghassan exhaled in frustration. He now had more than one interloper between himself and Wynn.

Chane kept close as Wynn followed Ore-Locks. He gauged that they had gone down another two levels before the passage stopped at another sealed portal. There had been no further side passages along the way. Chane had a strange feeling that they had reached the end of their long descent, though he could not fathom why.

Perhaps it was the look of finality on Ore-Locks’s face as the dwarf hesitated before that portal.

“What’s wrong?” Wynn asked.

“Nothing,” Ore-Locks answered.

The dwarf passed through the iron and, within seconds, the familiar grinding sound began.

Chane had not expressed his suspicions aloud, like Wynn, but he had become increasingly wary. Ore-Locks seemed to know exactly where to go and the correct sequences to open all portals. It was too easy, too convenient.

As the last of the triple iron panels slid into the arch’s frame, Chane pushed past Wynn, stepping inside another great hall. But he instantly spotted its difference.

In place of the stone effigies there were huge basalt likenesses of coffins sealed with carved representations of iron bands. Chane knew where Ore-Locks had brought them, for he had been in a similar chamber below Dhredze Seatt.

This was another chamber of the Lhärgnæ ... the Fallen Ones.

Chane hung back, blocking Wynn’s entry, until Ore-Locks moved off. When he glanced back, Wynn was peeking around him. She paled at the sight of those basalt coffins.

He finally stepped forward, noticing that this chamber was in even worse shape than the hall of the Bäynæ. The left and right end walls each bore the same strange breach he had seen above—except the one on the left was wide, and the one on the right was taller and slightly narrower.

Though the stone coffin effigies were at least three times the size of those in Dhredze Seatt, two showed multiple fractures, and a third was half-shattered into chunks that lay across the floor. Again, there were fewer of them than in Dhredze Seatt.

Chane walked farther in, looking for any passage to another chamber or hall where one more effigy might have been set apart. There were no openings. They had truly reached a dead end. He turned to find Wynn examining the engraved, oblong panel on a basalt coffin. Her brow crinkled as if in deep concentration or thought.

Chane could guess at her concern.

She had followed Ore-Locks into the bowels of this dead seatt, and not a single clue or hint to the orb’s whereabouts had been uncovered. Instead, they stood in this last hall, in the Chamber of the Fallen, with nowhere left to go.

“The symbols are worn, old, and hard to comprehend,” she whispered. “But I’ve made out their titles, at least.”

“Is Avarice here?” he asked.

Avarice was one of the Fallen Ones who she had learned of at Dhredze Seatt in tales of Feather-Tongue’s exploits.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He must have come later.”

Ore-Locks had not bothered even glancing at the coffins. He stood before the wider breach in the hall’s left end, looking into it. Then he walked the hall’s length, as if to do the same at the other end. Wynn watched his every step.

Her eyes turned so bleak, Chane could barely stand to look at them.

“It’s not here,” Wynn said, her voice breaking with sudden catches. “The orb isn’t here ... and there’s no place left to go. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere above, or worse, in the upper levels, buried where I cannot find it.” She closed her eyes, leaking tears. “I’ve lost.”

Chane pulled her toward him, not knowing what else to do. She dropped her forehead against his upper arm, gripping his cloak, his arm, and burying her face.

He hurt for her pain, but he was not sorry she had failed.

He was not sorry at all.

Suddenly embarrassed, Wynn released Chane’s arm and pulled away, completely uncertain of what to do next. The thought of leaving empty-handed was too much after all this. She couldn’t even look up at Chane, though she felt him watching her expectantly. She knew exactly what he wanted to do—just leave.

She turned her head and spotted Ore-Locks still standing by the taller, right-end breach. Why had he brought them down here after his futile attempt to find Deep-Root in the caves of the honored dead? He hadn’t even looked at the basalt coffins of the Fallen Ones. Perhaps he knew what she would find: Deep-Root wasn’t here either. Ore-Locks’s ancestor had fallen for the atrocity committed here.

She stepped away from Chane, but he reached after her.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “This is over.”

Evading his grasp, she went to the left-end wall and looked into its wide breach. Inside, another dark, raw shaft ran both up and down. She shuffled down the chamber, all the way to Ore-Locks.

The previous pale anguish on his face had been replaced by confusion. Obviously, he hadn’t expected to find a dead end. Something final, perhaps, some last discovery, but not this.

“Not here,” he whispered. “How could they not be here?”

Those words sharpened Wynn’s awareness.

Ore-Locks was too focused in his task and far too knowledgeable for someone who’d never been inside this seatt. But someone else had been here—Ore-Locks’s ancestor, that spirit who had supposedly called him to serve among the Stonewalkers.

Did that treacherous mass murderer guide Ore-Locks’s steps?

Wynn’s fear and revulsion of him magnified. In the face of her own failure, she lashed out at him.

“What are you looking for?” she demanded. “Deep-Root wasn’t among the honored dead—he couldn’t ... never will be! So, what are you after now?”

Ore-Locks’s red hair was dirty and wild, even bound back as it was. The beginning of a beard showed on his jaw. Confusion vanished from his face, and he turned on her in equal anger.

“His bones! Why else would I endure your ignorant judgments ... endure traveling with that?” He pointed at Chane. “I found no truth here, but at the least I could have put him to rest. Now I cannot even do that.”

Wynn stared at him, not knowing what to think. Everything Ore-Locks said sounded almost honorable, as if Chane had been right back in Dhredze Seatt. When Ore-Locks had come at her that night she’d found the coffin effigy of Thallûhearag, he had denied that his ancestor was that monster. If only he didn’t wish to honor one who’d murdered thousands, tens of thousands. But if his ancestral spirit called to him now, deceived and used him even unwittingly, Ore-Locks still couldn’t be trusted.

“It cannot end like this,” he whispered.

No, she thought, it cannot.

Holding her crystal high, Wynn stepped to the tall breach, leaning in, and her heart jumped. This one wasn’t a shaft.

“Did you look inside here?” she asked.

For an instant, Ore-Locks didn’t appear to understand. All breaches so far had exposed raw, vertical shafts. Blinking, he gripped one side of the opening, pushing in beside Wynn. They both peered into a rough tunnel running off left and right from the opening.

Wynn’s light only showed perhaps forty or fifty paces either way. The wall had certainly been broken by pressure when the mountain fell. She stepped into the raw tunnel, its floor as rough as the walls, and looked back as Ore-Locks followed.

Shade stood beyond the opening with her ears flattened and jowls twitching, and Chane glowered, his eyes narrow.

“Are you coming?” Wynn asked.