The Road to Death

51

An inhuman scream of frustration echoed throughout the Great Hall, and Kandler nearly dropped his sword to clutch his hands to his ears. A howl of monstrous determination chased straight after it.

“Is it trying to shake down the mountain with its roars?” Kandler shouted over the din.

Duro shook his head. “The dragon has not tested the wards we put in place around its lair for over a century. Our finest artificers laid these while the great beast slept.”

“Now that it found them, it’s furious,” Sallah said. “Will they hold?”

Duro shrugged. “It is impossible to tell. As I said, they’ve never been tested this way before.”

A large chunk of rubble crashed to the stone floor next to Kandler’s feet. “We need to put a stop to this now,” he said.

“The only way to do that is to slay the dragon.” Duro’s eyes grew wide as another blow shook the chamber, and he stared up into the darkness, looking for another piece of the ceiling to fall loose.

“Funny,” the justicar said, hefting his blade, “that’s just what I had in mind.”

With a gentle shove from Kandler, the dwarf leader regained his composure and bounded off across the Great Hall. When he reached a portal, he waved the others down the stairways beyond. The other dwarves led the way, with Kandler, Sallah, and Burch bringing up the rear.

“It’s not too far from here,” Duro said, following after Burch. “It’s mostly straight down, then it opens up into a large room. We should be there shortly.”

In the narrow passageway, the dwarves proved far faster than their visitors and raced ahead of them. It was all Kandler could do to keep the last of them in sight without banging his head on the ceiling.

The noise only got worse as they worked their way lower. They switched their way back and forth through a number of intertwined passages in a bewildering route. Kandler thought that even Burch would have had a hard time following anyone through this place, and he was glad—for the moment, at least—that they’d decided to talk with the dwarves instead of fighting their way through them.

As Kandler turned a corner, rubble cascaded down from the low ceiling and fell across his shoulders. Sallah dragged him back from the collapse, and he watched as a few hundred pounds of stone landed where he’d been standing. Before the dust even cleared, though, he stumbled his way over the rocks and through the danger zone. He reached back to help Sallah through and then continued on his way after the dwarves, confident that Burch would find his way through with Duro’s help.

“Prideful fools!” a horrible voice roared from below in words so loud that Kandler could barely make them out. “You dare to try to cage me? I will bring this mountain down around your stunted ears!”

The stench assaulted Kandler then. It smelled like they had stumbled across the repository of the dwarves’ sewer system. The rot in the air was so thick he thought he might choke on it. He paused only a second, though, before charging down the last tunnel.

“Ready, Drakyager!” a dwarf called out from somewhere ahead. A chorus of voices joined in a wordless cry of approval.

“No!” Duro shouted from behind. “Hold back! Wait, damn you! Wait!”

Kandler heard something wet gush forth and splash out below, and acrid fumes chased up past him, stinging his eyes. He heard a strange sizzling noise and then a dozen screams.

Some of them lasted longer than others. A few gurgled into silence right away. Others wailed on for long seconds until Kandler reached the death chamber.

In the entryway, the justicar paused and peered into the room beyond. It was large, carved out of the living rock of the mountain, but barely worked, other than a floor that sat covered under inches of water bubbling and releasing a greenish mist. A door-sized hole appeared in a rust-colored wall opposite him. It looked like much of the rust had been removed recently, perhaps by the thunderous force of the dragon’s rage, and Kandler could see ancient dwarven runes carved into the wall’s iron surface.

Dwarf skeletons lay scattered about the room, some obviously decades or more old, their bones long since picked clean by whatever creatures prowled these darkened depths. Others, though, bunched closer to the portal in the iron wall, were fresh. The flesh had been melted off the front of them. The backs of their heads still bore skin and hair, although these boiled away from their skulls in a greenish paste as Kandler watched.

“Acid!” Duro shouted as he tried to push his way past the others. “The dragon spits acid!”

Kandler stepped into the room and felt the heat in the water as it combined with the acid, bubbling away into the acrid steam that burned at his skin and eyes. He coughed once, and a glowing orange ball appeared at the doorway, seemingly floating there in the darkness beyond. It bore a slit that ran straight up and down on its surface, and the slit contracted as Sallah pushed into the room as well, her blade blazing with light.

“They send knights to foil me now, do they?” a voice outside the doorway rumbled. “Knights? As if I were some hatchling to be dispatched with a magic blade? The world above has lived too long without my presence! They have forgotten how to fear me. It is a lesson I shall relish teaching again!”

With that, the globe in the portal disappeared, only to be replaced by a humongous scale-covered snout. A wet black tongue flickered from between rows of swordlike teeth framed in the rust-coated rectangle.

“Prepare to join your precious Flame,” the dragon said. Its noxious breath almost made Kandler gag, but he was able to choke out a few words as he shoved Sallah and the others back the way they’d come.

“Move it!” he said. “Get back! Now!”

The others turned and fled before him, and Kandler followed right behind them. As he reached the dry part of the stairs leading down into the room, he heard the dragon inhale a breath so ferocious, it seemed to suck all of the air from the room.

“Go! Go! Go!” he shouted.

The blast of acid sprayed into the room behind him, but Kandler didn’t dare look back. He felt tiny drops of the stuff fall on to the back of his arms and legs, burning their way through his clothes and skin. They stung like a cloud of red-hot embers, but he ignored the pain and kept running until they managed to turn a corner at the top of a long flight of stairs.

“How in the Host’s hallowed names are we supposed to fight that?” Duro asked. The shaken dwarf stood shivering in the corner of the niche at the end of the stairs.

“Got a point, boss,” Burch said, his own eyes wider than Kandler had ever seen them. “That’s one angry dragon in there.”

“You’re not afraid of it, are you?” Kandler tried to keep the fear from his own voice and hoped his sharp-eared friend didn’t notice.

Burch shook his head, denying his emotions, even to himself. “It’s not fear to know we can’t take that critter toe to toe.”

Kandler grimaced. “We need an edge, something to balance the scales in our favor.” He glanced at Sallah’s sword.

“I’m ready to give my life to rescue Esprë,” the lady knight said, no trace of irony in her voice. “I pledge this sword and my arm to that cause, but …”

“But?”

“It won’t be enough.”

“What about that?” Burch said, pointing at the rune-covered bolt in Duro’s crossbow. “What’s that do?”

The dwarf’s hands shook so hard that he had trouble prying the bolt from his weapon. Once he managed it, he handed it to Burch. “It’s a shockbolt,” he said. “Release it at something, and it blows up. The dwarves of Clan Drakyager have made them for centuries. My whole patrol here had only five. Up until today, I’d never seen one fired.”

Duro reached into a case of bolts slung under his shoulder and pulled out two more of the rune-crusted bolts. He handed them to Burch. “These are all that’s left.”

“What happened to the others?” Kandler asked.

“We used them on the Karrnathi airship.”

“Knight!” the dragon’s voice bellowed from below. “Have you run off with your tail between your legs? Have you realized the extent of your folly?”

Burch slotted the shockbolt into his own crossbow.

“I will charge into his maw and cut him open from within,” Sallah said, raising her flaming sword and preparing for a charge down the stairs, “or die trying.”

Kandler put a hand on her shoulder, holding her back. “We’re not quite ready for that,” he said. He looked into his old friend’s eyes. “You ready?”

The shifter blew out a long breath as he sighted down the length of his crossbow. “Never more.”

When Burch looked up, Kandler saw that he had put his fear behind him. All business now, he pulled back the winch on his crossbow and started down the stairs.