The Delving

by Aaron Bunce

  Thorben stepped off the final step, moving into a wide, dark hollow. Gor and the others filed in behind and around him, Iona’s labored breathing a wheezy, painful sound. He turned to find the small man hunched over in Jez’s arms. He lifted his head, caught Thorben’s gaze, and stood a little taller.

  Thorben looked left, and then to his right, the torchlight revealing paths on either side of them, the third continuing straight ahead. Each of the three tunnels extended into darkness.

  “A bleedin’ maze? I thought the tomb would be small? Iona, you said it would be small?” Hun groused from the back, the guildsman’s body framing the opening of the long stair, blocking their path to freedom.

  “It is not a maze,” Thorben answered, and took a quick step to his left. A small, shadowy pocket appeared in the wall on the side of the passage, the space expertly carved out of the gray stone. A tightly wrapped, skeletal figure lay inside, a delicate shroud pulled over its face. The light revealed something shiny under the wrappings.

  “I thought they buried their dead in stone boxes? Uh, what did you call them…caskets?” Gor whispered, leaning over his shoulder, “Let’s check this one for jewelry and other precious things.” The mule muscled by and reached for the parchment-thin linen covering the body, but Thorben reached out and held him back.

  “Wait, no! Don’t touch them! We don’t touch the dead,” he said, immediately letting go of the large man and jumping back.

  Gor flinched, his hands going up as if he’d touched something hot. He turned and looked to Thorben, his eyes wide, and not with anger, but alarm. Thorben thought quickly, knowing the big man’s shock would quickly turn to anger, and possibly violence. He flashed a look at his hands, ever watchful for his copper coin.

  “You’re in the realm of the dead now. You mustn’t disturb those that rest, lest you anger the lingering spirits. Please…let them stay as they lay.”

  “Spirits?” Gor stammered, the dark, rotten stumps of his missing teeth making him look like a fall festivus pumpkin in the light.

  Thorben nodded animatedly and whispered, “If you are very quiet, sometimes you can hear them, moving, moaning, or calling out for those they left behind. Listen.” He pressed a finger to his lips. The big man sucked in a breath and held it, his head swiveling from side to side. Thorben’s eyes instinctively dropped to the spear in his hand, and then to the shiny relic stuffed in his belt. He yearned to touch the hammer again. But why? To hold it and feel the lively spark again, or strike Gor down?

  Both.

  The cavern fell to silence…a stillness unlike any other. The air felt heavy and old, with no hint of the sweet aromas he’d noted above. He could think of no other way to describe it than…dead.

  The torches flickered, the dancing flames popping and hissing – gentle, lively sounds that died quickly in the still air. A water droplet suddenly released from above, landing with a soft plink against the ground.

  Gor’s face contorted, the skin around his eyes tightening as he concentrated. Thorben knew what the big man was feeling only too well. When surrounded by the dark, every noise became something significant, no matter how small or far away. Sometimes a person would hear sounds when none existed…driven by imagination and fear. Some delvers never made it more than a dozen paces from the light, while others descended boldly into the darkness, only to be driven slowly mad by the silence. Thorben had seen both enough times to know. The living weren’t meant to spend so much time in the company of the dead.

  Gor blinked, looked down to Thorben, and opened his mouth to speak just as a strange noise echoed in the distance. The sound bounced off walls, reverberating down the tunnel before them, seemingly seeping out of each and every skeletal corpse. The big man’s eyes went wide, his mouth hanging open. Hun leaned closer to one of the walls, turning an ear towards one of the shelves.

  It could have been a bat, or a gust of wind from one of the many underground vents. Fortunately for Thorben, Gor didn’t know that, and in the cavernous dark, it sounded oddly like muffled whispers. To those uninitiated by the dark, it was the voices of the dead.

  “You see? You must leave them as they lay…for all of our wellbeing. You don’t want to anger the dead while trespassing on hallowed ground, for once you gain their attention…” Thorben drifted off, letting the tension and doubt build.

  “You’ve…you’ve seen them? The spirits?” Gor asked, Hun and Renlo crowding in on either side. The big man worked his fingers over and over, the large, copper coin rolling between his knuckles. Thorben felt a little bit of leverage slide his way.

  He nodded slowly. “And I pray that you never have to. I’ve seen delvers scared mute, while others wither away, fading like the dead they disturbed. Do you see how they wrapped the bodies?” Thorben asked, passing his torch closer to the skeletal remains.

  Gor nodded and leaned in, his mouth falling open.

  “They wrap them in special anointed cloth to ensure the spirits can’t settle back into the body…for if they do, they can become trapped and vengeful. Best not to linger, do not call out to the dead here, and like I said, never disturb them,” he said, adding to his story before rubbing the goose bumps popping up on his cold arms. Gor crowded in a little closer behind him, his dark eyes flitting more eagerly between shadows.

  Thorben turned and led the group back to the hub, his confidence growing with each passing moment. He turned to take the middle of the three paths, Gor not only staying close behind him, but also walking on his tiptoes. He’d effectively put some fear into the man, and silently thanked his luck, and more realistically, the late nights spent around their fireplace telling scary tales. It had been a tradition for him and his boys since their early thaws, even though in more recent seasons, Dennah had proven to possess the most devilish imagination of the group. In truth, he borrowed very heavily from her most recent story about a spirit that lived in a tree and lured travelers from the nearby road to their doom. He would have to borrow more from his children’s stories if he wanted to keep Gor and his mates from getting too confident.

  I only need to plant the seed and let the dark do the rest, he thought.

  The center passage was lined with carved-out hollows three high, each space filled with a carefully wrapped body. He’d never seen the dalan treat bodies so, but didn’t want to admit as much to the others. Then again, in all of his delves, he’d rarely actually seen remains, just stone sarcophaguses, metal urns, and the occasional open-air burial.

  Thorben paused for a moment, his eye catching on one of the burial hollows to his right. The wrapping had broken open, the thin fabric now clinging to the dark, damp stone. He stopped and took it in, one fact registering above all others. The figure was short, a child’s height from head to toe. The realization struck him hard.

  “These aren’t dalan. I think these are dwarves?” he snorted, stepping closer. The torch hovered in, the light revealing the shrunken, skeletal body in greater detail. It was covered in finely tailored linen, the fabric shining with what looked like metal thread. Armor hung over the figure’s ribcage, the enameled metal glimmering red and black. A helm sat atop the small skeleton’s head, a crease in the bone extending from above the left eye diagonally across its face, ultimately splitting the jaw in two. A deep gouge appeared in the bones of the figure’s chest beneath.

  Thorben shivered as he imagined the weapon and violence needed to rend bone in such a manner. It was undoubtedly the wound that killed the warrior, and had surely been a bloody, horrible sight to see.

  “Dwarves? I thought this was a dalan crypt?” Gor asked, his eyes dropping to the body. They went wide suddenly, and he jumped back. ”Wait! The…wrappings…does that mean?” The large man gestured towards the body with his torch as if he expected it to start moving at any moment.

  “Don’t get too close. Best not to take any chances,” Thorben said, and gestured to the group to move back and continue along the path.

  “If we cannot disturb the bones, how do we find relics?�
�� Renlo asked, falling in step next to him. Thorben considered the question, his gaze sweeping back and forth to both sides of the passage. The stone angled down with each step, the space growing in size and height. The shelves carved into the walls grew in frequency – where there once were three, there were four, and five, until they lay a dozen high. The torchlight continued to reveal more.

  “I have…I’ve,” he murmured, trying to respond, but ultimately failing. It wasn’t a complicated affair. He would break into the tomb, look around, and took what looked interesting. But this…this didn’t feel like a tomb. Not like any he’d seen before. There were hundreds – no thousands of bodies. No. This was a mass grave. He was standing in the largest grave he’d ever seen, and couldn’t stop wondering if he would join them.

  “I need to know,” Thorben whispered as his torch sputtered and started to go out. He leaned into Renlo and pulled a fresh fire stick from the guildsman’s pack, lighting it from the old one. “How do I live through this? How do I make it home to my wife and children?”

  Renlo met his gaze as the new torch fizzled and surged to life, the bright light revealing the glimmer of armor under more of the bodies around them. Thorben tried not to notice, tried not to look at all the death, but there were so many of them and they all started to look like him. The shadowy pockets of ancient remains came alive in his mind, moving and shifting, the bones crackling and popping.

  Stop it! They are dead. You are alive. Your family is alive. You will make it home to them! You will journey to Klydesborough and watch Paul takes his tests. You will see him become a river watchman.

  “You want to leave here alive?” Renlo asked, his dark eyes flitting to the dark walls and their skeletal inhabitants. “Give him his treasure. Give him what he wants. Fill his bags, but also build him up. He is strong and feared for good reason, but beneath it all, he believes in the fates. Things either have value or not, they are good or bad, they live or die. There is no in between. Prove to him that you have value and he will make sure you walk out of here.”

  “But what if there…” he started to ask, but bit off the words. Renlo’s head half-turned, waiting for him to finish the thought, but Thorben couldn’t spit it out. He knew, anyway. If he couldn’t find Gor his treasure, he wouldn’t have value.

  Laid to rest here with hundreds…no, thousands. Another fool joining an army of the dead.

  He continued forth quietly, the ceiling suddenly rising up as their path led them into a massive cavern. He cursed involuntarily and stumbled as someone ran into his back.

  “Mother’s milk,” Gor stammered.

  The path led ahead and down, the darkness broken only by a host of small shafts of light shining in from above. The darkness prevailed, but the permeating glow revealed a cavern spanning like a valley, stretching at least a league in every direction. Their path continued on, intersecting with dozens of others, creating a curving, branching maze of walls, each path seemingly hollowed and lined with the dead.

  “Impossible,” he breathed.

  “There’s so many,” someone whispered, and Thorben turned to find Iona standing beside him, Jez still wedged under one arm. “Have you ever…have you ever…?”

  Thorben shook his head, understanding the question even if Iona couldn’t voice it.

  “You’ve heard the stories of the Great War…?” Thorben asked, suddenly. Iona nodded, Gor murmuring quietly on his other side.

  “Bloody and grim – armor, flesh, and soil alike rent and aflame. The lands of dwarvish kings, their dalan allies aside them, tumbling into the abyss of war, to clash blade with blade against a dark and terrible foe…generations of soldier, artisan, and commoner ferried from life in the setting of a few, lonely suns. A land, oh a land, tainted by the spilled blood and magic of its people, left for the wild gods to heal. I do step foot in this place willingly, but aware of its loss…the cost of blood so long ago paid, but this home I must make for the path behind me is closed,” someone said behind him.

  Thorben turned to find Renlo standing alone in the passage, his eyes unfocused. A dying torch hung limply at his side.

  “Beautiful words. Are you a poet?” Jez asked.

  Renlo shook his head, his wide, stubbly face and close-set eyes giving him a brutish, wild look. He pulled a torch out of his bag, lit it, and dropped the sputtering one to the ground.

  “They aren’t me words…they are from an old tome me father owned. It was his treasure. The only thing he said ‘had any value in this world of lords and gold’. He read me that passage o’re and o’re every moonrise before bed. He’d say, ‘see me boy, there is a king a man can be proud of. One day we’ll have a leader like that again. That king will come, and they’ll fix this broken world of ours,” he said, and Thorben swore he saw a tear roll down his cheek.

  “So you’re saying all of these dwarves died in a war?” Gor cut in, pulling Thorben around by his shirtsleeve.

  “The story fits,” he replied, weighing his response. “They say it was a battle that covered this land from border to border in death, that the conflict watered the ground with the blood of an entire generation of dwarves. It is a tale told at fireside pubs in every corner of Denoril. They say it was the reason that the dalan left these lands.”

  “Every tale has to start somewhere,” Gor rumbled, and turned to survey the valley below. He turned back, his torch hovering between them, the light catching his profound cheekbones and casting his eyes in dark shadow. “There is enough dwarven armor in here to outfit a thousand small men. But this many dwarves died…fighting alongside dalan. That means dalan died, too. That also means there are some of them buried here…somewhere, waiting for us to find them. Right?” The big man enveloped Thorben’s shoulder with a wide palm, his hand clamping down like a smith’s vise. It wasn’t a loving or even reassuring embrace. It was a reminder.

  “This place is unlike any crypt I have ever delved,” Thorben answered honestly, a stab of fear accompanying his words. “But if they are here, I think I can find them.”

  Gor nodded and slowly pushed him down the path. Thorben locked eyes with Renlo, the short man’s face expressionless and stoic once again. But then, ever so subtly, the mule nodded.

  Thorben turned and set off at a fast walk, the sea of dead spanning beneath him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Makers’ Shanty

  The path ran straight and true, curving steadily down into the valley. Thorben tried to keep a tally in the back of his mind, but there were simply too many dead, the walls now looming a dozen high with shelved remains. After a time, he gave up, wondering if there were enough people in all of the boroughs to fill the hollowed out walls. Hells, were there enough people in the whole of Denoril?

  Death and dust. They were all like me once – sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers.

  The further they traveled into the valley, the more it changed. The walls on either side went from smooth, featureless stone, to almost polished marble, curling, flowery carvings decorating the flat surfaces, while detailed beasts and winged figures appeared like effigies from the upper reaches. A break in the path appeared, the intersection of pathways affording them a view down another dark route. An immense statue sat in the middle of the intersection, forcing them to skirt around it.

  Thorben’s torchlight revealed a group of lifelike stone figures, huddled close to the ground, their armor and stature eerily similar to those laid to rest around them. A larger figure – a woman, sprawled above them, her flowing gown morphing into a pair of enormous, feathered wings. She sheltered the group of weary soldiers, her embrace almost motherly.

  Although she was more animal than woman, Thorben recognized something in the likeness. It took him a few moments to rationalize it, but then it fell into place. It was her face. The graceful but pronounced nose, the slight brow and large eyes. It was the same face he gazed upon every time he paid tribute to his goddess at the temple in Yarborough.

  “My Goddess, my light. Show me a good path,�
� he whispered and reached up to place a hand on the statue’s bird-like foot. His gaze dropped and caught on something hanging from a hook in the stone. “Look,” he said, gesturing towards the small satchel with his torch.

  “Offerings?” Gor asked, as Hun crowded around, the hunger for wealth and treasure gleaming in his eyes. Thorben reached in and tried to pry the small bag open, to glimpse inside, but the strap broke on contact. The satchel fell to the ground, crumbling to dust.

  “It appears…” he muttered and dropped down, gently pushing the ruined bits around. The bag’s contents materialized out of the dust. But it wasn’t the shine of coin or the sparkle of gems as he’d hoped, but small bones. He held his hand out above the scattered bones, the truth quickly and painfully evident. “They’re fingers.”

  “Mother’s milk. You’re telling me they cut off their fingers and left them as…offerings?” Gor asked, his face surprisingly bright. The big man moved quickly around him and scooped up the next closest satchel, and crushed it in his palm. The dust plumed and drifted to the ground, and when he opened his fingers again, the torchlight revealed the same, stubby bones.

  Iona dropped to the ground, his daughter immediately fussing over him. The broker pushed her away several times, their conversation urgent and hushed. Finally, the girl seemed to win out, and huddled over his wounded leg. Thorben wanted to help, but hovered nearby, unsure whether she would want or need his help. Gor made his way around the base of the statue, and when he reappeared on the other side his arms and pants were covered in dust.

  “They were all full of fingers! How ‘bout that? What would a god have need with a bunch of severed fingers?” the big man laughed, and clapped his hands together, the dust pluming.

  Thorben watched the big man, but glanced back to the ground, the bones scattered in a powdery mess on the stone. It sickened him that he’d broken open the offering, but that he’d also not stopped Gor from destroying the rest.