The Road to Death

44

From the Great Hall, the procession turned left and down, even deeper into the mountain’s roots. The passages became rougher and rougher as they went, until the smoothness of the floor was the only sign that anyone had ever been here before.

The walls turned blacker here too. Esprë reached out with her hand and felt the wetness on them, as if they were soaked through with untold millennia of water that had run through them since shortly after the world had been born. The air became humid, nothing like the clean, dry stuff from the caverns’ upper reaches, and the stench of rot grew stronger, filling her nostrils until her lungs ached for a taste of the untainted sky.

After what seemed like an endless series of twists and turns, the procession came to a halt. Esprë followed her skeletal keeper into a large room filled with other skeletons. Some of these were of the Karrnathi variety, standing tall and dressed in various pieces of armor, waving about the swords that seemed to be forever grasped in their bony hands. Others lay scattered on the floor in pieces, bare of flesh but held together by rotted bits of clothing and the occasional mail shirt. Most of these were short—no taller than Esprë, she guessed—but broad. Others stood taller but even wider and had long, savage tusks spearing out of aggressive underbites.

The room bore carvings like those in the Grand Hall, but they seemed fresher and less polished, the fruit of less-skilled hands. Whereas the others had depicted legends of all sorts, these showed only images of war, pitched battles between the dwarves of Clan Drakyager—their shields bore an icon of a sparkling diamond, just as Esprë had seen on the statuary above—and their orc foes.

A slab of cast iron comprised the wall opposite of where Esprë and the others had come in. It had once been smooth and polished, the young elf guessed, but the constant exposure to the damp had rusted the surface a cracked and burnt red. Some of the pictographs she’d seen above appeared here too, splashed across the iron wall in some crude attempt at a mural that only served to horrify with both its subjects and its style.

Ibrido stood before the rusted iron wall. His boots disappeared into inches of black, unwholesome water that covered the floor. His hands rubbed at the center of the wall, removing flakes of rust as large as the leaves of the maples that Esprë had climbed in during her early childhood in Cyre.

The skeleton holding Esprë’s chains gave them a tug, and she followed him into the frigid water, which swallowed her shoes and soaked her up past her ankles. She splashed after him as close as she could, not wanting to stumble into the water and be dragged through it to where Ibrido waited.

The dragon-elf nodded at her as she came up. Then he took a hammer from one of the nearby skeletons—a dwarf that had probably died defending this chamber many years ago—and smashed it into the iron wall in the center of the spot at which he’d been peeling the rust away.

A dent appeared where the hammer struck. Ibrido grunted and swung the weapon again and again. After three blows, an outline appeared around the dents, a series of cracks that defined a square about a foot wide.

Ibrido set to the square with a flurry of blows that echoed throughout the skeleton-packed chamber like rolling thunder. The sounds from beyond the iron slab came back a spilt-second later but no less loud.

The dragon-elf puffed with the effort, and the blows came less frequently and powerfully than before. Soon he gave up, his arms hanging like the branches of a willow at his sides, limp and useless. He cursed between panting breaths and dropped the hammer. It disappeared into the black waters around his feet.

The skeletons stood like statues throughout this, never twitching a single knucklebone. It seemed that they were part of the decorations here and that only Esprë bore witness to Ibrido’s efforts and his failure.

The young elf laughed. The first giggle escaped from her throat before she could stop it. When Ibrido’s yellow reptilian eyes narrowed at her, the giggle grew to a guffaw, and she soon found herself howling uncontrollably, tears flowing down her reddened face.

“Do not mock me!” Ibrido said, showing the first emotion Esprë had ever seen in the creature. He reached out with his taloned hand and wrapped it around her throat. With it, he lifted her inches off the ground and snarled in his face.

“Never mock me,” he hissed into her face.

For a moment, Esprë feared the dragon-elf would sink his vicious teeth into her face. She felt the dragonmark itching, begging for her to scratch it by letting it loose. Before she could act on that impulse, though, something on the inside of the iron slab banged back.

Ibrido hurled the young elf into the arms of the skeleton that held her chains and spun to glare at the door. The furious look of defeat on his face turned to one of triumph.

The banging sounded again and again, and Esprë noticed that a new set of cracks had formed in the rusted wall. These were set in a square at least twice as tall as her and just as wide, right in the middle of the slab.

“Back,” Ibrido ordered her and the skeletons. The creatures pressed against the walls to either side of the iron slab. The skeleton holding Esprë dragged her into the corner to the right of the slab and kept itself between her and the noise.

A horrifying roar sounded on the other side of the slab. Esprë had never heard anything like it, but it chilled her to the bone. Had she not been chained to the skeleton shoving her into the corner, she would have broken and run straight back up the twisting hallways that had led them here, until she reached the sun and fresh air again.

Then the cracked section of the iron slab smashed inward, blasting past Esprë, Ibrido, and the Karrnathi skeletons. Some of the other remains, the ones that were lying against the slab, shattered from the impact, smashing to tiny pieces. The sound of the section of the iron wall clanging against the opposite wall deafened the young elf for a moment, and she closed her eyes and ears, pleading for it to stop.

When she opened her eyes again, Esprë saw Ibrido beckoning her skeletal escort to bring her along after him through the new-made hole in the slab, which now seemed like a perfectly cut doorway. As the skeleton tugged at her chains, she pulled back against it and screamed.

A trio of skeletons broke off from the others and grabbed at her from all angles. Their sharp fingers, uncushioned by flesh, snatched at her and pulled her up off her feet. As she struggled, caught in their many grasps like a fly in a spider’s web, they hauled her over to the doorway and followed Ibrido through.

Once beyond the iron slab, Esprë fell silent. The air in the massive cavern felt oppressive, thick and cloying, stinking with the rot of the swamp, the grave. It filled her lungs and quieted her voice with a paralyzing sense of menace.

The young elf stopped struggling against the skeletons that carried her, and at a signal from Ibrido they set her back down on her feet. She landed in more of the frigid, pitch-black water, this time reaching up past her knees. She shivered, but not from the cold.

She realized she still clutched the everburning torch, and she held it up high in the air over her, peering out into the distance, looking for some sign of whatever it was that had made that terrifying roar.

The torch seemed small and insignificant against the darkness surrounding her. Esprë had never wanted her mother more in her life than at that moment. If she couldn’t have her—and she knew, in the deepest recesses of her heart, that it was impossible—then Kandler would do. Where was he? she wondered.

Te’oma had told her that they pursued her in the refurbished Phoenix, but could she trust a thing the changeling told her? For all she knew, Te’oma was still in league with Ibrido, off someplace else on another mission of evil, just using her telepathy to give the young elf enough hope that she wouldn’t take her own life in a brave attempt to put an end to all the horrible plots that swirled around her.

Something foul, like the stench of a latrine, assaulted Esprë’s nostrils. Staring out across the water to the limits of the torch’s light, she saw bubbles bursting on the black surface. She wrinkled her nose at the swamp gases that something below had stirred up.

Then the waters in front of her erupted, splashing forward and drenching her from head to toe. Standing there, shuddering in the icy waters, she looked up and saw a pair of orangish eyes glowing down at her from the darkness, each of them larger than a pumpkin. Then a set of teeth, each of which was half as long as Esprë and set in a monstrous, black-scaled snout, slipped forward from the gloom. From behind them, a low, loud laugh rumbled, and somewhere in the darkness she heard the flapping of wet, leathery wings.

The sounds shattered Esprë’s trance of fear. She threw back her head and screamed.