by Ellis Knox
“I don’t like this one,” I said.
“It is merely another gateway,” Henrik said, with no attempt at reassurance. “Let us pass through and be on our way.”
“The opening is large,” Cosmas said.
“Good point,” Nik said. “This time, let’s all step through together.”
“That’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Henrik said. He arched an eyebrow at his nephew.
“This portal’s different, we’re agreed. If something different is going to happen, I’d rather it happen to all of us.”
“I agree with Nik,” I said. “I don’t want to be left standing here, wondering why the rest of you didn’t come back.”
“And that’s even more dramatic,” Henrik said, “but I take your point. Let us proceed as one.”
We lined up in front of the portal. As before, the blackness gave forth neither heat nor cold, sound nor smell. It was a rectangle of nonexistence. The light from our lanterns fell into it like water over a cliff.
“One, two, three,” Nik said.
We stepped through.
The portal was indeed larger but evidently was also somehow deeper or longer, for we did not at once emerge out the other side. I lurched forward like I’d missed a stair step. My stomach fell toward my feet, which seemed somehow to be above my head, as my heart tried to claw its way backward. I was suspended in the void. My mouth opened to cry out, then my other foot struck ground and I stumbled out and into a street.
The others stumbled as well; we all missed a step. Professor Queller pitched forward and was saved from a fall by Cosmas, who managed to turn his own stumble into a rescue more gracefully than I would have credited. Nik stumbled and swore. I think Bessarion may have come through evenly. Once recovered, we looked around ourselves.
The portal now stood behind us, imperturbably blank. We stood upon smooth stone. On either side rose stone buildings, gray and featureless, with empty doors and windows.
“It’s a city,” I said.
“A town, at least,” Henrik said. “We shall have to look farther to guess at its size.”
Guess is all we could do, for the light of our lanterns faded away into darkness above as well as ahead. The place was markedly different from the earlier settlements. These buildings rose several stories tall, their height lost in shadow. The roadway was paved, perfectly level. It stretched away to the limit of our light and was deep as a canyon. The doorless openings yawned blankly on either side, like tributaries feeding into a river.
Nik went into one opening, more or less at random, and we followed. Our lights threw shadows that flitted and stretched up the walls, like ghosts in a mansion. The uneven light revealed a warren of rooms, most about the size of a parlor room or a peasant hut. They were nearly uniform in shape and appointment, rectangles with a solid stone shelf on one side and low tables on the other. Room after room of this, with larger versions here and there. A flight of stairs brought us to a second story much the same as the ground level. There were more levels, but Nik took us back to the street, for which I was glad. The interior was too forlorn, an abandoned mausoleum or a house that was no longer anyone’s home.
“Beso, what do you make of all this?” Nik asked as we continued along the paved road.
The dwarf, once again in the lead, stumped on without reply or acknowledgment. His head hung down, shoulders hunched up; he looked neither left nor right.
“Bessarion,” Henrik called out, “we ask what you think of this place.”
Still no reply.
“Let him be,” Nik said. When the professor began to object, Nik cut him off. “What do you think, Uncle? I’m sure you have an opinion.”
Henrik cleared his throat, a sure sign of a lecture to follow. I was certain his students had likely managed to imitate that selfsame ahem to each other’s delight.
“We are at a central place, without doubt. A hub. The rooms we saw are warehouses where supplies were kept prior to shipping farther up the Long Dig. I had expected to find some such place as this. A matter of logistics, you see.”
“Is this a halfway point, then?” I asked, hoping we were more than halfway.
“As to that, we have insufficient information to construct a meaningful answer.”
“Crossroads.”
Bessarion stopped, held his lantern high, and pointed.
Our architectural canyon ended some several yards ahead, opening indistinctly onto a plaza. The smoothed stone gave way to flagstones, but otherwise the plaza was as featureless as a desert. Buildings rose at the edges, vague as distant mountains. Narrow streets radiated to left and right, but the boulevard appeared to go on from the other side of the plaza. Our light barely reached it.
“Most peculiar,” Henrik said.
“Impressive,” Nik said, “but it’s so empty.”
“Which way?” Cosmas asked.
“Every way,” Henrik replied. “We can make a camp here, then explore in each direction.”
Nik swept his arm in a wide arc. “Here in the open? How about we set up inside one of the buildings? That way, we only have to keep watch in one direction instead of every point of the compass.”
“No need to get sarcastic, nephew,” Henrik said.
“No need to get careless, either.”
Henrik sniffed audibly.
“Beso, come help us set camp,” I said, trying to insert something conciliatory. “We’re all tired and could use a rest.”
This wasn’t strictly true, as the day was not far gone, and tiredness had become a more or less permanent condition for all of us. But the tension needed a break, even if our bodies didn’t.
I had Beso choose the building. It was a smaller structure, only three levels tall, overshadowed by its neighbors. In a human town I’d have called it a shop, with a front room and a back, living quarters and storage upstairs, or so I thought they might be. But this was not a human structure, and the benches, stools, and tables were too oddly placed for me to be sure of their purpose.
“This will serve,” Nik declared after a search of the upper levels.
“It’s so dead,” I said. “Not even an insect.”
“Yes,” Henrik agreed, “I find that decidedly odd.”
We looked at Beso, hoping he might have something to say, but he was as silent as the stone. The corners of his mouth pointed nearly straight down.
“Let’s eat,” Nik said.
Mealtime had become a dull, grim business. Our portion of way bread was supplemented by half a cup of water, a shared last dried apricot, and a single swallow of brandy. I had grown to loathe the taste of that liquor, but Henrik insisted it had fortifying properties. To me it tasted like chewing on a caramel fished out of a dustbin. It tasted like ashes.
I swallowed it anyway.
After we had eaten, it was time to plan next steps.
“There are three directions to explore,” Nik said, “and five of us. That means two go one way, three the other.”
“Or, two, two, and one,” Henrik said. “That way, we cover all directions in one tour.”
“No. We don’t travel alone. This place looks empty, but people have died in empty places before.” Nik looked pointedly at his uncle. “We do not travel alone.”
“Very well.”
“I’ll go with Beso and Uncle forward, on down the boulevard. Cosmas, you take Gabi to the right.”
I opened my mouth to object to being the one “taken” like baggage, but Cosmas spoke first.
“I go with Herr Doktor Professor Henrik Queller,” the ogre intoned.
“No, it’s better you…,” Nik began, then caught Cosmas’s eye. There was no arguing with that misshapen scowl.
“Oh, all right. A contract is blood, eh?”
The ogre nodded once.
“Then I’ll go with Gabi.”
“Why?” I tried to look as forbidding as Cosmas. “Do you think I need protecting?”
“Gabi,” he said, “I’m running low on patience here.�
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“So am I,” I said. “We all could use protection. Cosmas won’t be separated from Henrik, and you should accompany your uncle. Beso and I will be fine; we’ll take care of each other.”
Nik opened his mouth, then closed it again. He sighed mightily, as if he were running out of energy as well as patience.
“We should get going.” Nik put his hands on his knees and stood, making a show of the effort.
Outside, Nik gave further instructions.
“Go straight as you go. Don’t take any side streets. If you find something interesting, note it down, and we can explore it all together. If you start taking side streets and get lost, we risk never finding each other again. Straight out, straight back.”
“How far?”
“Until you get to the end. My guess is that we’ll run out of city before we run out of time. You’ll probably just encounter solid stone.”
“So long as we don’t encounter anything else!”
I had angled for Bessarion, thinking I’d have better luck getting the dwarf to talk if it was just the two of us. Something had been weighing on him for days, and it had only got heavier since coming through that last portal. I had a pretty good idea what it was and thought if he could unburden himself he might walk easier.
“It must be hard to see the city so dead,” I said.
We had been walking for some minutes, seeing nothing of interest. The buildings rose stepwise into shadow. All were gray, unmarked, free even of chiseled symbols, empty of furnishings, very nearly empty of meaning. The street itself was scarcely wider than an alley. While there was no doubt this was built by dwarves, it all felt very un-dwarven, somehow.
“You see?” Beso said. “It is only this.”
“This is what you were seeking, isn’t it?” I said. “The First Dwarves?”
He frowned at me in a distracted way, then took hold of my arm and led me to the nearest building. He pointed at the doorway.
“Here,” he said, “examine this unusual doorway.”
He had me look at the sides and the top. I said I saw nothing unusual about it.
“Exactly!” he cried. I could not understand his agitation, but I tried to look sympathetic. He went into the room and cast himself to the ground like an actor in a bad opera.
“This is not the work of the First Dwarves. This is work anyone in any clan in any canton could do. My cousins could to this.”
It would have been comical had not the pain been so evident in his voice. Something was coming apart for him, something too important to mock.
“It cannot be the True Ancestors,” he said hopelessly. “They’d never make something so ordinary.”
I searched for something comforting to say, but came up empty. I heartily wished the professor or Nik would find us and extricate me from the scene.
“What are you trying to say, Beso?”
“I’m not trying, I am saying. The Long Dig is real, but it is not the work of the First Dwarves!”
He stared in my direction, but not at me. His eyes were bright as with a fever. He panted like a runner.
“Are we on the wrong path?” I asked, but he did not answer that. He was wrapped up in his own loss.
“Where are the Ancestors? Where are the First Dwarves of our true legends?”
His eyes locked onto mine, a wild look in them, as if I might have hidden his ancestors behind my back. I heard the unstated question clearly. If the Long Dig had not been built by the First Dwarves, then perhaps the legends were not true. Perhaps he had put is faith in false gods.
“Beso,” I said, as gently as I could, “we still have a long way to go. You’ve been right so far. As much as you know about the First Dwarves, there may be just as much you do not yet know. We can discover it together. Be confident. Be patient.”
This calmed him somewhat. He got himself back on his feet.
“I’ve been patient. I will be patient. But, this is all wrong,” he said, continuing the conversation from before. “The Wisdom speaks of bright cities spread wide across open lands, of rich farmlands and . . . I suppose you’d call them livestock. Animals. Here we see only what has been carved from the flesh of the earth.”
I was unable to find even empty words of comfort. We went back into the street.
Not much farther, we came to the end of the city. The street simply arrived at a stone wall, where the dwarves had stopped building. We looked at each other and turned around. Our way back was quicker, for we did not stop to peer into buildings or hold our lanterns up to illuminate the side streets. It was all of a piece, monochromatic, desolate, and silent.
The others were already back at the central plaza when we arrived. Nik waved urgently when he saw us.
“He must have found something,” I said. Beso’s lack of response told me he was still sunk deep in his own melancholy.
They had indeed found something. Death.
“Not far up that street,” Nik said, then he stopped, staring in that direction.
“What?” I said. “What did you find?”
“A camp, or the remains of one.”
My throat tightened. “Fournier?”
“Uncle thinks so,” Nik said with a grimace.
“It could be no one else,” Henrik said. “For a thousand years the Long Dig of the dwarves has been regarded as mere legend. How likely is it, do you suppose, that in the space of a single year not one or two but three expeditions should chance to find it?” He snorted to show what he thought.
“Only the Gaul has Temur,” Bessarion said quietly.
“There, you see? The learned dwarf agrees with me.” Henrik was triumphant. Evidently anyone who agreed with Professor Queller was thereby proved learned.
“Whoever camped there is dead,” Nik said.
“What?” I saw by his face he was not making some sort of dark joke.
“Not necessarily,” Henrik said. “Beso, wait!”
The dwarf had uttered a low growl, then darted away, to the extent any dwarf can be said to dart. His shadow leaped backward and forward as he swung his lantern.
“Let him go, Uncle. Maybe he’ll notice something we missed.”
“Piffle.”
“Henrik,” I said, “do you think Monsieur Fournier might still be alive?”
“I do. Thank you, Cosmas,” Henrik said.
“Why?”
“For one thing, we ourselves are still alive.”
“There’s dried blood,” Nik said. “Some scorch marks, some chips out of the stone. They were camped in one of the buildings.”
As we had been, I thought. I took a bite of bread to suppress a shudder.
“I’ll thank you not to interrupt, nephew.”
“She should know the facts, Uncle.”
“The facts are one thing; it’s the conclusions that one makes from them that matters here.”
Nik waved one hand to signal he was done with the conversation.
“Signs of a fight, then?” I prompted.
“Yes,” Henrik said. “Niki and I agree on that much, at least. It is possible, of course, that the whole expedition perished on the spot, but I find that unlikely.”
“Why?”
“They were attacked, by a force either intelligent or unintelligent, by beings or beasts. If the latter, where are the bodies?”
“Dragged off to the beasts’ den,” I said, indulging in a bit of gruesomeness, hoping he’d disprove it.
“There are no trails of blood.”
I confess my imagination, already overheated, went from that to vampires, but I did not speak this aloud.
Henrik nodded, assuming he’d won his first point.
“The attackers must therefore have been intelligent.”
“The First Dwarves!” I cried.
“Unlikely,” Henrik said, “but the identity of the folk isn’t important at this point.”
“There are people down here,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Unfriendly people,” Nik sai
d, unable to stay out of it.
“I never hypothesized friendliness, only existence,” Henrik said. “You keep bringing up secondary matters.”
“You won’t think it secondary when someone runs a sword between your ribs.”
The anger, more than the words themselves, shocked me. I thought Nik, too, might be seeing his uncle as a little delusional.
“They might still be out there,” I said.
Henrik rolled his eyes. “You two could stage a melodrama.”
“Where is Bessarion?” Cosmas asked.
Nik stood. He peered down the boulevard, as did we all.
“I do not see his light,” the ogre added.
“Damn that dwarf,” Nik said. “Come on, we’d best stick together now.”
We advanced at a rapid pace. I wanted to go faster, to outrun the morbid images my mind was conjuring. Each doorway we passed yawned at me like an open grave. There was only one possibility for Bessarion in that moment, or so I thought: a bloody death and a vanished corpse.
“Here.” Nik stopped at a building and stepped inside. He called out. “Beso!”
His shout echoed against the bare stone.
“Not here. Damn dwarf.”
“Bessarion! Reply!” Henrik called, but his words rang without reply.
“He’s gone on, for some reason,” Nik said, exasperated.
“Maybe he found something,” I said. To myself I added, or something found him. Maybe the professor had a point about melodrama. “Or food,” I added hopefully.
“Come on,” Nik said. “We’ll go forward. I doubt he went off on a side street.”
“Why presume that?” Henrik said.
Nik gave his uncle a hard look. “We can’t look everywhere,” he said, “so we shall start by looking somewhere.”
As the others went onward, I took a moment to peer through the doorway. I took only a moment, the space of a few breaths, but that was more than enough. Dark stains on the floor, and a few on one wall. Gouges in the stone. I fled.
The nature of the boulevard changed a little farther on. The buildings that had lined both sides of the street lost their doors and windows. Now, sheer walls rose high, their tops lost in to light. Running the length of both, at a height of four or five feet, was a parade.