“That doesn’t mean you don’t need me for something in the future,” Astarra pointed out.
“Then trust me for now,” Shiver said. “Down here, we only have each other.”
Astarra said nothing, closing her eyes. Shiver felt a pang of sorrow as he looked away from her. He caught himself. He was seeking acceptance, he realized. Forgiveness. It was a trap he fell into so often. The desire to atone, even to those who knew nothing about him, knew nothing of his struggle.
There could be no forgiveness for him, no kindness from fellow travelers, not until his memories were complete and the last of his foul deeds had been atoned for in blood and ice.
Astarra was soon fast asleep, the light of her staff reduced to a dull glow.
Shiver sat beside her for a while, battling his own exhaustion. In truth, he needed to sleep as well, but he knew that to do so now would be unwise. There was always a chance the Dunwarr might still happen upon them, and the presence of groups of Aethyn clan deep elves still lingered on the edge of his senses. Besides, there were more dangerous things than elves and dwarfs in the Dunwarr Deeps. Of that he was becoming increasingly sure.
He roused himself a little way and walked to the edge of the cutting, looking down the rough timber stairs of the slope shaft. Nothing stirred below. He paced softly back to Astarra, whose lingering light was like a small firefly in the vast swathes of the night. He found himself strangely apprehensive about leaving the warm glow, weak though it was.
The thought was almost comical. Like all deep elves, he had grown up in the absolute darkness beneath the mountains. True enough, the shadows here were different to those he had known as a child, below the southern peaks of the Lorin’s Gate Mountains, but the essential essence should be the same. Gloomy caverns and close, rocky tunnels held no fear for his kind.
Then why was he afraid? It was the first time he had acknowledged it since leaving Frostgate. A fear had been growing in him all the time, and now it was made manifest. Something was down here, something festering and hungry. Something that shouldn’t be.
The fact that he was so certain of it was in itself a worry. He had reached out – tentatively – into the Aenlong, the land of dreams, seeking out what might be causing the sense of foreboding that had crept over him. The emotions of Thelgrim and its surroundings were busy and turbulent. The theft of the Hydra Shard had thrown the whole city into discord. That did not explain the shadow that had fallen across the Dunwarrs though. It did not explain darkness that refused to withdraw before the light.
“Not all darkness fears the light, Shiver,” she said, that honeyed voice worming in his ear, making him twitch. “You of all people should know that.”
“I won’t open another one for you,” he mumbled, starting to shake. “I will die before I do.”
She sighed, crouching in front of him. He kept his eyes down, seeing only her hand as it reached out to grasp the key tied to his waist. It was ridged with dark green scales, glittering in the torchlight, the nails long, black talons.
“You say that every time, my delicious little puppet,” she said reproachfully. “Now look at me and take the key.”
“No,” he moaned, feeling the power being dragged from him to the surface of his consciousness, the Aenlong churning and soaring around him. “Please! Please, not again!”
The power surged. Energies ignited around his manacles, locking tight. There was a scream, ringing through the tunnels, the terrible wail of the utterly damned. His scream, he knew. Much as he tried, he couldn’t stop it.
A blow struck him, sending him reeling. He reached out, elven reflexes responding, and felt something smack into his palm, held fast in his grip.
He realized he was holding Astarra’s staff, stopping it from striking his head a second time. Upon contact, the energies of the runestone she was using roared through him, hot as a furnace, searing his soul and bringing him back to the moment. He let go, his palm singed, the icy magics he drew from the Turning cringing back with an audible hiss.
Astarra lowered the staff rather than strike him again. Her eyes were wide with fear.
“I- I’m sorry,” he managed to say, voice trembling. His whole body was shaking. The power that had bound him moments before had snapped from existence, the ether-chains dissipated. He slumped back against the tunnel wall.
“Was that another memory?” Astarra asked quietly, staff held tight. “A new one?”
“Yes,” Shiver said, his voice hoarse. Astarra was silent for a moment before speaking again.
“You said you needed the locks to access them. That, or you had to be somewhere of personal significance.”
“Yes,” Shiver said again, head still bowed.
“You’ve been here before,” Astarra said. “Now you’ve seen it, you remember this place.”
Shiver didn’t answer. He reached down to the key at his waist and, after hesitating, grasped it and raised it before his eyes. It gleamed dully in the runelight. It was hot to the touch.
“We should go,” he said, looking past it at Astarra. There was concern in her eyes, he realized. Not just fear. “Others will have heard that, or sensed it.”
•••
“You owe me an explanation,” Astarra said, voice as hot as her runestone’s flames as she strode after Shiver. They were descending along the slope shaft, going ever deeper into the mountain’s roots.
He ignored her, but she carried on, her voice ringing after him.
“What did you do here? What did you see?”
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to keep a tight grip on the anger and confusion that threatened to overwhelm him. He hadn’t anticipated this, not fully. He needed time to think, to collect himself, but that never seemed to be possible with Astarra.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “Where are we even going right now? We’re just wandering in the dark beneath the mountain. We have to find the Hydra!”
“There’s something down here,” Shiver said, his patience at an end. “Something other than the Shard. It’s connected to me, to my memories. I have to find out what it is and, if need be, I have to banish it.”
He realized Astarra had stopped behind him. He looked back up the stairs at her.
“I didn’t sign up to this,” she said, the flames of her runestone making her look fierce and untamable. “I left Frostgate intending to retrieve a runestone. I agreed to carry on because the Hydra Shard is a greater prize than anything I had anticipated. But this… this offers me nothing. Nothing but death.”
“You came here intending to steal the very runestone you were asked to retrieve,” Shiver said. It was an accusation, not a question. “Why else would you have agreed to journey all this way, other than to further your addiction to power? Now you wish to take the Hydra Shard instead. That even greater prize is what is keeping you here.”
Astarra glared down at him before answering. “We are all here for our own reasons. I doubt very much that yours are any more just.”
“My reasons are necessary ones,” Shiver said. “I have been led here for a purpose. Justice is not a consideration.”
“And what are your reasons then?” Astarra asked. “To claim the Hydra for yourself? Use it to subjugate the elves of these mountains?”
“No. You know not of what you speak.”
“And I will take no lectures in morality from a daewyl,” Astarra snapped.
Shiver reacted. He didn’t mean to, but before he’d realized what was happening his hand was raised and icy crystals were surging towards Astarra. For a moment all he knew was anger, and the desire to strike.
She responded just as fast. Fire flared, lighting up the tunnel. The magical energies collided and dissolved, searing each other from existence with a loud, threatening hiss.
Shiver paused, his hand quivering.
“You do not call me that,” he said,
voice hoarse.
“That’s what you are though, isn’t it?” Astarra demanded, fire kindling in her eyes as well as atop her staff. “A fallen elf. A worshiper of demons. A servant of the Ynfernael.”
Shiver felt suddenly weak. He leant against the sloping tunnel wall, his magics slipping through his fingers.
“I was,” he said slowly, no longer looking at the runewitch. “A long time ago.”
“Is it possible to stop being one?” Astarra asked. Her own fires had dimmed, though they still flickered dangerously.
“That’s what I’m attempting to discover,” he admitted. It hurt to say it aloud, but it was a truth he realized he could no longer deny. He didn’t know if he could ever find repentance. Sometimes, even trying felt futile.
“And how does that fit into all this?” she went on. “You took this task for the locks. They bring back your memories. But why keep going when you discovered Mavarin doesn’t have any?”
Shiver bit back an immediate answer. How much more could he tell her about the darkness he could sense, even now, all around them?
“I told you already, there’s a shadow under Thelgrim,” he said. “And I mean to banish it.”
“How very noble,” Astarra said. “So, you want me to believe that while myself and Raythen are here trying to steal a Star of Timmoran for ourselves, you’re looking to battle the forces of darkness?”
“Perhaps those roles aren’t as mutually exclusive as you seem to think,” Shiver pointed out. “And perhaps you should ask yourself why Mavarin would hire someone like you or me to retrieve the Shard?”
“We have the required skills,” she said, almost indignantly. “Raythen is a Dunwarr and a thief, you are a deep elf, and I am a master of runemagic.”
“Adventurers and sellswords of every sort delve mountain depths and dungeons all the time,” Shiver said, in no mood to indulge the human’s shortsightedness any longer. The situation had grown far too serious for that. “Yet you think he needed we three in particular?”
“What are you trying to say?” Astarra asked.
“That there is more at work here than just a quest for a stolen Star,” Shiver said. “I expect the threat I sense and the Shard are connected. How, I do not yet know.”
“I should never have come down here with you,” Astarra said. “I’m going back, and I’m doing whatever I can to leave these cursed mountains.”
“I wouldn’t advise that in the short term,” Shiver said, as she began to climb up the shaft.
“Why?” she snapped without pausing. She only halted when she felt the temperature in the tunnel start to plummet, the telltale signature that went hand-in-hand with Shiver’s magics.
“Because there’s a deep elf daggerband currently on its way down to greet you.”
“This is a trap,” Astarra said.
“Not yet it isn’t,” Shiver replied. “But it will be if we don’t hurry.”
He urged her down the stairway. He could sense more Aethyn closing in, from both above and below. If they couldn’t make it to the next level of the mine and its adjoining tunnels, they’d be cut off.
He could feel Astarra’s hesitation. He’d lost his temper with her, and had damaged the fragile trust they’d been developing. There was no time to regret that – he had to steer them both clear.
He’d rarely heard of such aggressive encroachments by a deep elf clan into dwarven territory. Both peoples knew the high price that conflict between them brought. It was yet another part of the mystery that had enveloped the Dunwarrs, the one that Shiver felt as though he was being hauled inexorably towards.
“Hurry,” he urged Astarra. He feared they weren’t going to make it. The Aethyn were closing like a vice. He had no doubt they were aware of them. He slid into the Aenlong as they went, drawing up its power, made icy by the natural attuning of his soul. He was already tired, but he had to dig deep, perhaps now more than ever. He hoped he wouldn’t need it, but the memory of the Hearth Road was still strong. Steel, striking for his throat, and an instinctive choice between life and death.
They reached the bottom of the slope shaft. It opened out into another level, the ceiling low and the walls narrow.
The deep elves were waiting for them. The darkness gleamed with black eyes and naked blades before the light of Astarra’s staff, following Shiver down, lit the tunnel.
There were six of them, two with raised blowpipes. Shiver felt a surge of heat – both physical and magical – prick his skin as Astarra’s fire surged the length of her staff.
“Talqa,” he shouted, interposing himself between the runewitch and the pale elves. “Wait!”
The daggerband had hesitated. They could have hit them both with darts, and while they were clustered around the foot of the slope shaft, none had lunged immediately into the attack the way they had on the Hearth Road.
Shiver had already paused once when confronted by the Aethyn and had almost paid with his life. He could only hope he didn’t regret the second chance. He could feel Astarra on the cusp of incinerating the elves, words of power straining at her lips. She hadn’t sensed the second party descending the stairs at their back, almost atop them.
For a brief moment in time, Shiver thought he was going to be impaled from one side and incinerated from the other. He knew a slew of spells that would have protected him, but he didn’t dare utter any of them for fear of eliciting a violent response.
The moment passed. An order was snapped, and the daggerband, slowly, lowered their weapons. Astarra’s heat on his neck remained constant.
“Telleth ahala,” Shiver said, and slowly brought his hand to his nose and mouth, making the greeting of the Aethyn clan.
None of the elves returned it. There was hatred in their eyes, and distrust, and something more – fear. They were expressions Shiver always told himself he’d grow used to, but knew he never would.
“Stand aside,” said one, speaking in the Aethyn dialect. It always sounded firmer and more definite to his ears than his own tongue, influenced as it was with hints of the neighboring language of the Dunwarrs. The deep elves parted for one near the rear. She advanced towards Shiver, stepping into the shadow he was casting in front of Astarra’s flames.
It was a woman, tall and raven-haired. Her face was like a bared knife, sharp-edged, dangerous and coldly beautiful. She looked at Shiver with something even worse than the fear and disgust being exhibited in her kindred’s eyes. Recognition.
“After all these years,” she said. “You dare come back?”
Chapter Sixteen
There was a scraping sound as the hatch in the door opened, followed by the crack of the dented metal bowl hitting the cell floor. Half of its contents, a thick, pale gruel made from mashed cavern mushrooms and deeproots, spattered across the stone slabs.
Raythen looked at the bowl for a moment, then stepped across the cell and stooped to pick it up. The chains binding him to the far wall pulled taut just as his fingers reached it. He edged it fully into his grasp, lifted it, and sniffed.
The temptation to eat all that remained in the bowl was there, a knot twisting tightly in his stomach. He took half a dozen mouthfuls, savoring its stodgy blandness, before moving so his chains were once more at their maximum extent. Straining, and trying not to make a sound, he scraped what remained from the bottom of the bowl and deposited it atop a small, congealed lump of gruel he’d been amassing in the grimy corner of the cell, to the right of the door. When it was scraped clean, he placed the bowl in front of the entrance and retreated to the far corner to the left of it.
Patience and misdirection, those were the only keys he needed.
They’d taken everything from him bar his boots, breeches, jerkin, eyepatch and cloak. He’d been thrown into the Dunwol Keg, the fortress pit, a single cell sunken at the bottom of a narrow shaft in the depths of the Dunwol Kenn Karnin. After the throne roo
m and several tombs in the Hall of the Ancestors, it was the most secure place in Thelgrim.
It wasn’t his first visit.
He settled down against the wall and waited. He’d been doing a lot of that. A lot of doubting too, though he tried to avoid it. He’d replayed the final moments in the Cragwarren over and over in his head. Should he have tried to follow Astarra and Shiver? Had they even made it into the deeps and, if they had, would they be able to find the Shard? If they did, would they come back for him?
He knew what would have happened if their roles had been reversed, and it wouldn’t have involved him triumphantly returning to Thelgrim with evidence of their innocence. But they didn’t think like him. Astarra was fueled by brashness and self-confidence, while Shiver seemed to be playing a game with very different rules and objectives from everyone else. As for Mavarin, he could only assume he’d been taken at the same time. He hadn’t seen or heard him since being thrown in the Dunwol Keg.
He’d been mulling over how best to use his association with the inventor. If Astarra and Shiver didn’t come through, then his options narrowed, but they didn’t disappear completely. Trying to lay the greater part of the blame for everything that had happened on Mavarin’s shoulders was a possibility, even more so considering that, really, all this was his fault in the first place. Raythen had scolded himself countless times over for the lack of due diligence before setting out from Frostgate. He’d expected better from Cayfern.
The other option was escape. Given the difficulties he’d encountered the last time he had attempted that, it was very much a last resort. It wasn’t impossible though, even in a place like this.
Time was difficult to track in the cell. The isolation in itself wasn’t wholly alien – he’d been confined alone for extended periods in prisons from Castle Artrast to Strangehaven. There were ways of coping, mind games, counting tricks, the compartmentalization of separate trains of thought. It was more difficult being here though. Things were always more difficult in Thelgrim. He bitterly regretted coming back.
The Gates of Thelgrim Page 16