The Gates of Thelgrim

by Robbie MacNiven

  The ice flurry Shiver had called up surged in the magical gale, forming a gleaming, jagged ramp up the side of the outcrop.

  He didn’t need to say anything. Side by side, the human and the elf ran at the frozen bridge. Astarra’s footing slipped almost immediately, but Shiver grabbed her wrist and hauled her on, the ice reforming under his feet to better support him. More crossbow quarrels slashed past, cracking off the ice or sticking in it, leaving it crazed and cracked.

  They reached the top of the jutting pillar of natural rock. The stone was rough and uneven, but was easier going for Astarra than the ice slope had been. Shiver let go of her as they scrambled atop the promontory.

  “Keep going,” he urged her, before looking back the way they had come. The canyon below was crowded with Dunwarr warriors now, with the nearest trying to mount the ice ramp after the duo. There was a clatter of armor as boots scraped and slipped and stout, heavy bodies went tumbling.

  Shiver extended his arms and brought his palms smacking together. The ramp of ice exploded into a million shards, the cracking report echoing back like thunder from the nearby wall of the cavern. The Dunwarr were thrown from the base of the outcrop, battered by the hail of splintered shards, rebounding off armor and tinkling to the cavern floor sounding like a sudden deluge of hailstones.

  Shiver turned and followed Astarra.

  The outcrop didn’t get them far, but the important thing was being momentarily out of sight of the Dunwarr beneath them. Astarra had already reached the far edge, where she’d come up short. There was another, lower rock stack ahead, but it was on the far side of the canyon-alley below. The gap was too great to jump, and Dunwarr warriors, aware they were now above them, had already started appearing beneath.

  “Don’t suppose you know any flying incantations,” Astarra said to him as he joined her on the edge.

  “No, but I can narrow the gap,” he said, smiling for her benefit and immediately regretting it when a flash of alarm crossed her face. She was scared, he could tell, but trying to mask it with the confidence she so often led with. He empathized with that as best he could, though right now it was difficult – as was so often the case in matters of life and death, he found his thoughts cold and detached.

  He knelt and planted his hands on the edge of the outcrop. His body was going numb, the shaking almost uncontrollable now. He was being drawn too far into the Empyrean, too deep, but he couldn’t stop, not yet. His manacles were heavy with ice.

  He dragged in a breath to steady himself and again summoned up the chill from the depths of his soul. Ice sprang up from beneath his fingers and spread, forming a jagged buttress that extended beyond the outcrop’s edge, gleaming coldly in the cavern’s light.

  “Now we jump,” he said, grimacing as he wrenched his hands free.

  To her credit, Astarra didn’t hesitate. She took a few steps back and lunged for the spur, flinging herself from its edge before she had the chance to slip. For a second it looked as though she wasn’t going to make it, but Shiver felt the power of her runestone surge, his own robes billowing as the forest wind returned. She slammed down on the other side of the narrow canyon, rolling with the impact.

  He followed her, almost vaulting over her. He hadn’t needed the ice spur to make the jump, but he knew he couldn’t have left her. Being the king’s son, Shiver suspected Raythen could talk his way out of the worst of the punishment that was waiting for them. He very much doubted King Ragnarson could be convinced to show similar leniency to an outsider.

  He landed lithely and helped Astarra to her feet.

  “You’re shaking,” she said, as she took his frigid hand.

  “All power comes at a price,” he said. “We must keep going.”

  The Dunwarr below were out of sight again, but Shiver could still hear their angry voices ringing up from the canyons around them, barking in their own language. To his ears their words sounded like hammers clashing against anvils, full of anger and force. He led Astarra to the edge of their new outcrop.

  “One more, and we can reach the cavern wall,” he said. Thelgrim’s western flank soared before them, a mighty cliff face of craggy stone that arched gradually towards the cavern roof overhead.

  “What happens when we reach it?” Astarra asked, panting.

  “We go beyond,” Shiver said, kneeling and summoning forth another ice spur. He couldn’t feel his hands or his forearms now, and the shaking in his legs was making standing difficult. Still, the ice responded. This time he barely made the jump – it was Astarra’s hand which snatched out to steady him.

  “Down,” he managed to say, the words slurred on numb, blue lips.

  “We can jump,” Astarra assured him, pulling him to the edge of the last outcrop. It sloped slightly, and its top lay closer to the cavern floor than the ones they’d been traversing. Privately, he felt a surge of relief – he didn’t think he could reach into the frigid ether anymore, not without his soul becoming permanently frozen.

  They leapt down together, perhaps a dozen feet, both falling but managing to rise. Shiver cracked the ice from his fingers, looking up at the cavern wall that now lay directly before them. It was riddled with staired doorways and mining entrances, haulage rails and scaffolded walkways that formed a vertical network hundreds of meters up the rugged flank of the cavern. The immediate interior of the city’s western edge, the area they had traveled beneath in Mavarin’s burrower, was a honeycomb of tunnels and passageways, delved out, enlarged and connected over the centuries by the industrious Dunwarr.

  “Mavarin said we have to reach the Plummets,” Astarra said. “Which way are they?”

  “I have no idea,” Shiver said, taking in the array of entrances and shaft chutes that seemed to glare down at them. “I think we simply have to pick one.”

  They set off again, Astarra leading the way. Shiver could hear the Dunwarr in the narrow rock alleyways behind them. They were still in pursuit.

  The runewitch appeared to pick one of the tunnel openings at random, leading them over a rail track and up a sloping boardwalk. Shiver assumed that the cavern edge would usually have been a hive of activity, but had been abandoned with the city’s inhabitants curfewed until the Hydra was recovered. The entrance loomed ahead of them, an archway of hungry, impenetrable blackness.

  Shiver drove off the sudden spike of dread. There was nothing in there, nothing but the same darkness he had known since birth.

  He made it a few meters inside before he found himself on his knees. He tried to rise, but found he could not – strength had deserted his limbs. The shaking was wholly uncontrollable now.

  Astarra came back for him. He looked up, feeling an unexpected pang of shame.

  “The Empyrean… has drained me,” he managed to admit between the trembling. “You should go on. I cannot.”

  Astarra knelt before him.

  “Take hold of my staff,” she said, the length of carved tusker bone planted in the ground between them. Shiver hesitated for a moment, wondering just why the runewitch was helping him.

  “We don’t have time for elven arrogance,” she said, mistaking his reasoning. “Or I really will leave you. Trust my runestone and hold the staff.”

  With difficulty, Shiver reached out and locked his shaking fingers around the bone. The effect was instant. A vision of vast trees, dappled in sunlight and swaying heavily in a cool breeze, flooded his mind. He could smell honeyseed and fresh pine needles, and feel the warmth on his skin.

  The aching chill of the ether retreated, little by little. He could feel his body again, his fingers, the life energies of the runestone surging through them. The shaking receded, and he found he could stand.

  “You have my thanks,” he told Astarra. “You could have left me. I believed you would.”

  “Like it or not, I could use a deep elf’s senses just now,” she said. “If I go in there alone, I’m not comi
ng back out.”

  Shiver considered her words and nodded. He looked back out of the tunnel entrance. Dunwarr were advancing from the canyons at the edge of the city, closing the ground up to the canyon wall.

  “It seems there is no going back,” he said, trying not to think about the darkness ahead. “So let us go forward.”

  •••

  Astarra did her best to map out the route they were taking in her head. After the sixth or seventh turn in the third new section of tunnels, she finally admitted to herself that she’d lost track.

  She had swapped out the Viridis Seed for the Ignis. She hadn’t wanted to so soon – hairline splits still marked her staff, and the tip where the volcanic shard slotted home was charred. She could feel the same charring on her soul, not yet fully healed by the powers of the Seed. Each of the shards demanded its own price – the Deeprune left her feeling numb after a while, and the Viridis sharpened her senses until they were achingly taut. The Ignis was the hungriest, the most aggressive. She had no choice but to call upon its light though. She couldn’t have traversed the dark tunnels at Shiver’s side without it, even if she’d wanted to.

  Initially the runefire illuminated broad, wide work tunnels, their flanks still stacked high with barrels and sacking, the walkways on either side of the rail lines worn by generations of scuffing Dunwarr boots. It only took a few turns, however, for the spaces to grow rapidly lower, narrower, and less permanent-looking.

  Astarra followed a step behind Shiver, not questioning the directions he chose while, at the same time, wondering if that was what she should be doing. The fact that she wouldn’t have made it out of the city without him wasn’t lost on her. He could easily have abandoned her. She was taking a risk and trusting him, just as she assumed Raythen had been taking a risk when he had called out for her to find the Hydra. The dwarf thief was the last person Astarra could imagine making a selfless stand to buy her and Shiver time to escape, so there had to be something more to it. He was gambling with odds that weren’t yet clear to her. She had to try and figure out her own chances, but right now, it seemed as though staying with Shiver, and trusting him, was her best bet.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked Shiver eventually, as they took a tunnel that passed a series of plunging, vertical mineshafts. The silence had become too much.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. She frowned.

  “Do you make a conscious effort to be cryptic, or are you just unaware of how to interact with people?”

  “A small amount of both,” the elf replied without looking back at her. They walked a little further in silence before he spoke again.

  “I’m trying to lose any pursuit. The Dunwarr know these mines intimately. They will be able to track us. Our only hope of evasion is if we reach less frequently excavated sections of the works. That means going deeper.”

  “I thought we were pretty deep already,” Astarra said, trying to imagine a reality in which they could delve even further down than Thelgrim’s shining, buried cavern.

  “Oh, this is nothing,” Shiver said, snatching a glance at her. If his smile was supposed to be reassuring, it didn’t feel like it.

  The elf took her along a sloping rail tunnel, then through a series of ever-smaller auxiliary excavation slips. The subterranean structures grew less and less permanent looking, the dirt walls supported by bare wooded struts and the low ceilings by uneven beam wedges. The air became staler. She found herself yearning for the soul-cleansing rush of the winds of Aymhelin, summoned up by the Viridis.

  Shiver stopped abruptly. She halted behind him, looking back along the tunnel they’d taken. Nothing stirred beyond the flickering light of her staff.

  “What is it?” she hissed.

  “Nothing,” Shiver said quietly. He began to walk again, more sharply than before. Astarra hurried to catch up.

  “You sensed something,” she pressed. “What?”

  “My kin,” the deep elf said.

  Fear clenched up tightly in Astarra’s stomach. Even during the chaos of the past few days, her mind had returned often to the initial ambush on the Hearth Road, to the sudden, desperate fury of the elven assault. She could have been dead before she had even realized it. A moment’s hesitation, a misplaced incantation, a second’s weakness, and they would all have ended with their throats slit, dragged off into the darkness or left for Bradha and her patrol to find.

  Or perhaps not quite all of them. She’d seen the body at Shiver’s feet. He’d killed one of them, but how much did that really count for? Had it even really been a corpse, or just frozen, dormant? Was it all part of a trick? Some wider plan?

  But if so, why would Shiver be leading her on? He could probably have still escaped Thelgrim without her help. Perhaps the deep elves wished to claim her runestones, but if so, she couldn’t fathom why. Their magic was wholly separate and, in truth, more potent than her runemagics.

  That wouldn’t be the case if she could claim the Hydra Shard. That was Shiver’s ultimate aim, she’d decided. He wanted to capture a Star of Timmoran and its Dunwarr device before his fellow deep elves, perhaps to attain dominance among them. Astarra could at least understand that drive for power, the need for recognition.

  “How far away are they?” she asked him.

  “Far enough, for now,” he said. “I don’t believe they are yet aware of our presence.”

  “They’re a different tribe from your own?” Astarra went on, wondering how much she could get out of him. “You’ve already claimed that you’ve never been to the Dunwarrs before. Where are you from originally?”

  “Further south,” he said.

  “That makes two of us,” Astarra said, thinking once more of the green pastures and the ripe apple trees of her home. It sat on the south-western borders of Forthyn, yet still it felt like a totally separate plane of existence from the dark, turgid, cramped world she now found herself in.

  “Trast, upon the border of what you know as Lorimor,” Shiver went on, to her surprise. “My people are the Aelthwael. I was born to the clan’s high priestess. That was long ago now.”

  “You remember your childhood?” Astarra asked. “I thought your memories had been stolen from you.”

  “Some I have regained,” he said. “My recollection of the times before these were put on are easier to recall.” He raised an arm as they walked, the robe slipping back to reveal the heavy manacle around his wrist.

  “And just why were those put on?” Astarra asked. She was wary of pressing the elven sorcerer, especially when he currently had her at his mercy, leading her blindly through the mountain’s depths. She’d been turning his existence over in his mind constantly though, since the day they’d first met. She had been certain that her initial instincts, that he was sullied by a cruel and wicked darkness, were correct, but she had yet to see him act out on the shroud of evil that hung so heavy on him. His actions, both towards her and others, had been nothing but selfless thus far. She tried to remind herself that he had surely committed all manner of foul deeds in the past – he had barely denied as much – but she was finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile that concept with the person she had been interacting with now for weeks.

  “The manacles were placed on me because I was a fool,” Shiver said. “I sold everything. My birth right, my talents, my abilities, my hopes, my future. They remain on me because I am still buying it all back. One memory at a time.”

  “And the key, that’s what unlocks your lost memories,” Astarra surmised, once again finding the elf’s dark description of himself at odds with how she had seen him act. She had wondered often about the key that hung around Shiver’s waist. Even for elven magic, it was strange to her. She had wondered just what else it could unlock.

  “Something like that,” Shiver said. “We should be silent now. The Aethyn may hear us.”

  Astarra doubted very much that was
the reason Shiver wished for silence, but she knew better than to keep up the questions. She was surprised he’d responded at all.

  They carried on without speaking. At one point, Astarra thought she heard a slight scuffling noise behind them. She turned and found nothing, though it seemed like, for the briefest second, the shadows that shrouded the length of the tunnel refused to retreat before the light of her staff.

  Frowning, she hastened after Shiver.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They stopped to rest in an old crosscut branching off the stepped tunnel of an incline shaft. The effects of the Viridis Seed had started to wear off on Shiver. He felt hollow, drained. His concentration was at the point of wavering, and that was the last thing he wanted.

  There was a small ventilation shaft intersecting with the tunnel. Shiver had left Astarra sitting beside it. He wasn’t sure if the slightly clearer air was the help the human needed to stave off her exhaustion, but right then it was all he could offer. Neither of them had any food, and while Shiver, like most deep elves, could go days before feeling the ill effects from lack of sustenance, Astarra clearly did not possess a similar constitution. Though trying to hide it, she had clearly started to flag as they progressed deeper and deeper into the Dunwarr labyrinth.

  “Sleep, if you can,” he advised her as she settled with her back to a support beam, her staff propped against the dirt wall next to it, still lit. He saw doubt flash across her face. It was still there, the fear and distrust he had first seen in Frostgate. Then it had been so potent she had almost lashed out at him instinctively. Exposure seemed to have taken the edge off her loathing, but the wariness remained.

  “Your kind need more sleep than mine,” Shiver said, crouching in front of her, trying to be reassuring but fearing he was sounding condescending. He tried to change tack, aiming for something she might better understand.

  “It makes no sense for me to betray you now,” he said. “If I’d wanted to leave you behind, I could have.”