“So what do you want to do?” she asked Aggar after a few moments of respectful silence. She expected he’d want to take Mountainheart—Orin, she owed him that much—back to Krona Peak.
“This is my fault,” the dwarf said brokenly, looking away. “He would never have been down here if it weren’t for me.”
Aggar’s words rang with an unexpected resonance, sending chills down Sabira’s spine—they were the same accusing words she’d thrown at him after the cave-in, when the walls were coming down around them and he’d forced her to leave. Forced her to live.
“He was here because he wanted to be,” Sabira replied. “Because he cared about you and wanted to help you.” Though she was suddenly unsure if she was talking about Orin or Leoned.
“Don’t cheapen his devotion—his sacrifice—by saying he had no choice in the matter, because he did.” Sabira saw Ned, dangling from that chain, urging her to make her own right choice with earnest, accepting eyes.
“Don’t take that away from him, Agg. Honor it.”
After a moment, Aggar nodded.
“You’re right,” he said, with no trace of rancor or irony. Which Sabira had half-expected, considering Aggar had given her a similar speech right before she’d stormed out of Frostmantle, proclaiming her undying hatred for him and vowing never to return. He held out his hand to her. “May I have the ring back, please?”
Surprised, Sabira removed the ring and passed it over to him. Aggar removed his silver rings carefully from Orin’s hands, then placed Greddark’s golden one tenderly on Orin’s little finger. He pocketed the Silver Concordian rings, then reached up and gently closed his nephew’s sightless eyes.
“Go in peace,” he said simply, then twisted the gold ring three times counterclockwise around Orin’s finger. Orin’s body disappeared soundlessly and Aggar stood.
At her questioning look, he said, “I sent him back to the Peak. They’ll take care of him there, and inform Gunnett and Meridella.”
“What about the Council and Torlan?”
“To Khyber with them,” Aggar spat, toying with another of his rings. A rune-inscribed greataxe appeared in his hand and he hefted it appreciatively. Then he gave her a fierce, feral grin.
“Let’s finish this.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Far, Nymm 20, 998 YK
Somewhere beneath Frostmantle, Mror Holds.
As they continued slowly across the cavern, Sabira still scanning the ground for signs of the elusive magmatic fissure, she began to fill Aggar in on everything she and Orin had learned from Goldglove’s logbook. By the time she’d finished, they’d left the springs behind and had reached the center of the cavern, where they could see the far wall and the two tunnels it boasted, both leading south.
When she was done, Aggar reached out a hand to stop her from moving on. When she turned to look at him questioningly, his expression was grim.
“Saba, it’s not Hrun Noldrun.”
“What?” She frowned, not quite sure she’d heard him correctly. “What do you mean, it’s not him? It has to be.”
“No, Saba. He’s dead. They found his body not far from the Tombs the day after you left for Frostmantle. He’d been beheaded, but his eyes were still intact. He was wearing a tattered gray cloak, so they assumed he was the one who breached security there the night before, since they’d found a scrap of similar material at the scene.” She must have looked at him uncomprehendingly, because he stopped and repeated, very slowly, “Sabira. He’s dead.”
She felt suddenly like she was in one of those cheap tavern shows where the so-called mage would come around trying to earn coin by pulling the tablecloth out from under all the place settings without disturbing them. Only it never really worked that way, and all the glasses and dishes would go tumbling to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, while the charlatan slipped off into the shadows, unnoticed.
“But … the motto? The attack in the Tombs? If not him, then who?” And, hard on the heels of that, “Did I bring Orin down here to die for nothing?”
“No. You didn’t,” Aggar answered, cocking his head to the side. Then he went down on one knee and placed his hand on the cavern floor, much as he had done with Orin earlier. He bent forward and placed his ear to the ground.
“What are you doing?” Sabira asked, nonplussed. Her eyes darted from stalagmite to stalagmite and she wondered what fresh horror the cavern had in store for them.
“Listening,” the dwarf replied shortly, holding up a hand to keep her from speaking when she would have continued. “And feeling.”
After several long moments, he lifted his head up, brushed dirt out of his beard, and stood.
“Your fissure. It’s here, you just can’t see it. Maybe thirty feet below us, judging from the sound and the heat of the ground here.”
“How can you—” Sabira began, but stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s a dwarf thing, I know. So can you tell how far it extends?”
“No, but—”
Aggar was interrupted by a sudden deep rumbling. The cavern shook and the ground rocked beneath them.
“Earthquake?” Sabira asked as she widened her stance and tried to keep her feet. “More duhrs?”
Aggar shook his head, his own legs planted shoulder-width apart.
“Worse,” he said as the shaking subsided into an ominous quiet. He grabbed the haft of his greataxe in a two-handed grip and turned to face the northeast. “It’s what’s controlling them.”
“What?” Sabira asked, looking in the direction he was facing, but not seeing what he was talking about.
And then the ground exploded, not a hundred feet from where they stood, showering them with rocks and dirt. A huge, vaguely humanoid creature formed out of the earth itself stood there, its cave-like maw open in a great roar like the sound of an avalanche bearing inexorably down on them.
“That.”
That was an earth elemental, one of the largest Sabira had ever seen, let alone fought. It left a gaping hole as it strode toward them on massive legs, and Sabira could just glimpse the flickering orange glow of molten rock behind it.
The elemental was the one channeling magma from the Fist of Onatar, no doubt at the command of Nightshard’s accomplice—whoever he was. Why else would the creature be carving out a conduit for molten rock hot enough to destroy it?
“Use your ring!” she said urgently to Aggar, knowing that even her adamantine urgrosh would be no match for the towering elemental. But it wouldn’t matter if Aggar could summon his whirlwind to bear the creature back and drop it into the fissure it had created.
“I can’t!” he replied, her own fear mirrored on his face. “The magic has to recharge. I’ve got nothing that would be of any help against this thing.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, the cavern floor over the fissure was collapsing in both directions with every lumbering step the creature took. And they were about to be on the wrong side of the forming chasm.
“We need to—” she began, but too late. The ground shuddered and started to sink, and she and Aggar had to backpedal furiously to keep clear of the fissure’s crumbling edge. When they finally regained relatively solid footing, they were on the far side of a deep gorge that spanned the width of the cavern.
They were trapped.
And the elemental was still advancing.
Chunks of ore shone throughout its body, along with hairy roots, bits of fossilized bone, and what looked like half of a giant centipede, torn asunder when the elemental was formed out of the side of some mountain—presumably, the Fist itself. As it neared, Sabira could see the two golden gems that served as its eyes blazing with inhuman fury.
And just above and between them, a pulsing, blue-black Khyber shard.
“We can’t beat it while it’s in contact with the ground, and we can’t use your ring to lift it, so how are we going to get it into the air?” she wondered aloud as she and Aggar slowly backed away from the approaching elemental. She hadn’t really been
talking to the dwarf, so she was surprised when he ventured a response.
“Trip it?”
Sabira stopped and looked at him, agog. Trip an earth elemental? Was he serious?
But then she turned back to watch the elemental’s approach. Earth elementals could glide through the earth like a fish through water, but this one was walking, lifting up one ponderous leg at a time and taking slow, plodding steps. Why?
The answer lay in the channel it had been creating. If it traveled as it normally would, leaving no tunnel or hole and displacing no material as it moved beneath the ground, it would be unable to form the conduit the magma needed. So, just as it was being commanded to bore out a path for the molten rock, it was also being directed to suppress its innate abilities in order to carry out that task.
Which did, in fact, leave it vulnerable to something as simple as being tripped.
She saw no effective way of snagging the elemental’s foot as it passed, but she thought with the aid of her urgrosh’s enchantment, she might just be able to act as an effective stumbling block for the creature. But that was going to require getting the thing to move faster than a glacier, and she could think of only one way to do that.
“You want me to do what?” Aggar asked incredulously after she’d briefly sketched out her plan.
“Let it hit you. Then—”
“Let it hit me,” he repeated, interrupting her. “Has it, perhaps, escaped your notice that I’m not wearing any armor?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to hit you hard—just enough to whet its appetite for more, and get it moving. Then it will follow you, and you can lead it close to the edge, allowing me to sneak up and get in front of one of its feet without it noticing. Then with any luck, it will trip over me, topple over into the fissure, and we’ll be out of this mess, at least.”
“With any luck,” Aggar parroted the words back to her sarcastically. “Says the woman not being used as a training dummy by a gigantic walking boulder.”
“If you’ve got a better idea …?”
Aggar gave her a sour look.
“That’s what I thought. Besides, are you honestly going to tell me that one of those rings of yours doesn’t have some spell to harden your skin? That used to be a favorite trick of yours during sparring sessions back at the safehouse.”
“Of course I have one that does that, but it’s meant for use against opponents who are roughly my same size—not ones that are ten times bigger. What good is it going to do against that?” he asked as the elemental, who’d moved closer while they argued, slammed a massive fist down on the cavern floor mere feet from where they stood, shaking the ground and leaving a crater big enough to swallow both of them whole.
“It’s better than nothing,” Sabira answered as they scrambled backward yet again. “Now, are we going to do this or not? We’re running out of chasm, here.”
“Well, if I’d known I was going to die today, I would have at least worn a shirt,” the dwarf muttered, mostly to himself. Then to Sabira he said, more loudly, “Let’s do it.”
He didn’t wait for her to reply. Instead, he touched one of his rings and said, “Stone.” Then he hefted his greataxe and ran nimbly back toward the elemental. When he was almost in range of the creature’s fists, he stopped, waving the weapon over his head and yelling.
“Over here, you gutless brute! You want to smash something? Smash this!”
Aggar darted forward and sliced at one of the elemental’s legs, his enruned greataxe leaving a bloodless gash where an ankle would normally be. Then he jumped back again before the cumbersome creature could bring its fists to bear. The earth elemental let out another thunderous roar like the echoes of a subterranean cataract and slammed a massive forearm down, nearly catching Aggar across the back. As the dwarf tumbled away and leaped to his feet again, Sabira dashed around the elemental, giving it a wide berth as Aggar continued to taunt the dim-witted monstrosity.
When she was behind the elemental, she waved her own weapon high, her signal to Aggar to begin implementing his part of the plan.
“Khoot! Khoot!” he yelled, giving Sabira’s old Karrnathi battle cry to show he’d seen the motion. “Come on, you mass of mud! Impress me!”
As the elemental swung at him again, Aggar ducked and twisted out of the way, just enough to let the blow clip him on the shoulder. Even so, it sent him flying, almost to the edge of the precipice overlooking the river of magma.
The elemental closed in, intent on finishing its prey, and Sabira seized her chance. She darted in between its legs as it went after Aggar, waiting until its airborne foot had nearly descended and driving her shard axe in the ground in front of the foot that would be moving next. She hunched over, grasped the haft firmly with both hands, and braced herself for the impact.
The elemental’s other foot hit the ground and it raised the one she was planted in front of. But even with the urgrosh enhancing her stability, she just wasn’t big or heavy enough to stop it. Instead, the creature’s foot caught her mid-thigh and sent her and her shard axe arcing through the air to land several feet ahead of its advance.
Right in the path of that same foot, now plummeting toward her at an alarming rate.
Sabira rolled out of the way just in time, narrowly avoiding having her legs smashed by a toe nearly as large as she was.
She lay there for a moment, still stunned by the force of her landing. As she watched, the elemental’s foot slammed down again, this time on a thick stalagmite. The sharp formation was not crushed beneath the creature’s weight; it was too massive. Instead, it pierced the thing’s foot like a needle. And when the elemental went to take another step, its foot stuck on the stalagmite for just an instant before the thrusting formation broke off under the power of the creature’s stride.
The elemental slammed a fist down again, trying to squash Aggar, who was still hurling insults the creature could only dimly comprehend, like some persistent, buzzing gnat. She could see the dwarf leap to the side, but he was out of room. The elemental would be on him in just another step or two.
Well, if it worked for the stalagmite …
Sabira jumped up and ran for the elemental, dodging the deep hollows it left in its wake. She reached the creature just as it was about to take the final step that would bring Aggar into range of both fists, with nowhere for the dwarf to run.
She stationed herself in front of the thing’s earthbound foot and plunged the Siberys shard-tip of her urgrosh through it with all her might. She felt it lodge into something hard and firm. Bedrock.
As the elemental went to raise its foot, it caught on Sabira’s shard axe, just as it had on the stalagmite. But where the stalagmite had barely fazed the creature, the urgrosh, planted deep in unyielding stone, was not so easily dislodged.
With its weight already moving forward on that side, and no leg to support it, the elemental hitched and began to fall. Its heavy arms hit the edge of the chasm, and the ground crumbled beneath them. Aggar scrambled away in time, but Sabira, still pinned to the elemental’s foot with her shard axe, had no place to go.
She struggled to retract the urgrosh from the underlying stone, working it furiously back and forth, fearful for a moment that she might somehow break either the dragonshard tip or the leather-wrapped haft, but better either of those things than her. The shard axe came loose from the bedrock, but would not come free from the creature itself. Sabira had only moments to choose: give up the weapon or go to her death still vainly clinging to it.
Then Aggar was there, adding his strength to hers, and together they worked the tip free and jumped clear as the last of the elemental’s footing disappeared from under it, and it pitched headlong into the eager magma below, roaring wordlessly. Moments later, a resounding splash echoed through the cavern, and the ground rumbled in reply.
Aggar regained his feet first and went to the edge of the chasm, peering over to make sure their foe was really gone, swallowed whole by the river of molten rock below.
He watc
hed for a moment, frowning, then turned back to her.
“We’d better find what we’re looking for quickly. I think the magma’s starting to rise. I had the engineers in Maintenance working on something to stop it, just in case Goldglove’s fantasies proved real, but we’ll have to get to their main station on that level to activate it, and well before the magma gets there, or it won’t work.”
Sabira nodded and started to rise, but her ankle had been twisted beneath her during her fall, and it was slow going. Aggar moved back to help her, holding out his hand.
“Careful, I think I broke a rib. It’s a good thing my spell didn’t wear off until after that jump—”
His words were cut short by a gasp of mingled surprise and pain as the tip of a pulsing black blade burst from his stomach in a foul parody of birth, with what looked like a stunted third arm emerging instead of a child.
As Aggar fell forward, sliding off the short sword and barely missing her, Sabira saw the blade’s owner—a cloaked and hooded figure that had literally appeared out of nowhere.
“A good thing, indeed,” the figure said, drawing back his blade for another blow.
And that’s when Sabira saw the ring.
Gold, set with a large black stone with a glowing blue heart. A Khyber shard.
A nightshard.
Sabira had seen the twin of that ring once before.
On Nightshard’s bloody hand, protruding from a pile of rubble that had crushed both the assassin and Leoned.
Or so she had thought.
She’d taken that ring, and she knew the assassin would never have willingly given up the one remaining, even to an accomplice. Which could only mean one thing.
There was no accomplice. There never had been. Because, despite what everyone believed—what Sabira herself had believed all this time—the assassin had not died in the cave-in.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel (Dungeons & Dragons) Page 26