by Troy Denning
A noisy rustling filled the cramped darkness as the front riders scurried to obey. Brianna placed her lips over Kaedlaw’s nose and mouth and blew a slow, gentle breath into his lungs. When he did not cry out, she pressed lightly on his abdomen to push the air back out, then repeated the process. As she worked, she heard the sharp crack of someone breaking a lance, then the shrill rip of cloth. A cork popped as it was pulled from a flask, then the pungent reek of torch oil filled the passage. Brianna silently begged her son to breathe, but he did not cry out or gasp.
A front rider scratched a flint across a striking steel, filling the tunnel outside with brief sparkles of white light. Forgetting about her own wound, the queen used both hands to raise her son’s chest to her ear. She heard a single, feeble thump, then nothing. “I need that light!”
The queen cradled her son in the crook of her elbow, then blew another gentle breath into his lungs. A tiny orange light flickered at the end of the passage. It gradually grew bright enough to reveal the form of a man squatting in the tunnel outside, blowing gently on a small pile of burning tinder. It took only a moment for the flame to grow steady enough for a second man to light the head of a makeshift torch. He passed the brand into the cockeyed drift, handing it to the front rider at Brianna’s feet.
As the torchlight fell over her son, the queen cried out in alarm. Kaedlaw’s handsome face was gone. In its place was an ugly round visage with brown eyes, a pug nose, and puffy cheeks. The infant’s lips had suddenly become meaty and bluish. He had a mouthful of snaggleteeth and a rolling double chin, and he looked as cold as a statue.
“What is it, Majesty?” asked Gryffitt. “He isn’t dead?” “I don’t know yet.”
The queen looked up and realized that she was the only one who could see her son’s new face. Gryffitt was standing on the low ground behind her, and the man at her feet had to reach across his chest to hold the torch for her. He could not look in her direction without staring directly into the flame.
Brianna placed her thumbs over her son’s sternum and began to press down in the rhythm of her own heart. Kaedlaw opened his mouth, unleashing a belch as deep and foul as an ogre’s growl. A blue sparkle appeared in his brown eyes, his meaty lips pursed out to suck a lungful of air, then, all at once, his heavy jowls disappeared, his teeth straightened, his nose lengthened, and once more he was her handsome young son.
The change puzzled Brianna only briefly, for she quickly decided what she had seen was an illusion. Those who lost too much blood often became disoriented and confused. The transformation had been no more than a hallucination of her blood-starved brain. The queen was sure of that.
“Majesty, what of the child?” Gryffitt asked. “Is he well?”
“He’s going to be fine,” Brianna answered.
All the front riders sighed in relief.
“Then perhaps we should see to you, Majesty,” Gryffitt suggested. “Unless we finish Avner’s work, I fear …”
The front rider let his sentence trail off, apparently thinking better of what he had almost said.
“It’s okay, Gryffitt. I’m no more anxious to make an orphan of Kaedlaw than you are. Take me into the tunnel.” Brianna clutched her son more tightly to her breast, then added, “And Hiatea have mercy on the firbolg that makes me cover my son’s mouth again.”
* * * * *
Tavis stood at the tunnel wall, peering into the black throat of a crooked, craggy-sided chimney that yawned overhead like the serpentine gullet of a famished wyvern. Mountain Crusher’s recurved tip pointed up the gloomy shaft at a slight angle. Only the high scout’s firm grip kept the weapon, still glowing with magical blue light, from flying up the hole of its own accord. Brianna was up there somewhere, at least if the bow’s seeking rune was to be trusted.
Unfortunately, that knowledge did not mean Tavis could actually reach his wife. The rune merely pointed in her direction, without indicating whether the route was passable. The chimney, which the miners called a raise, might end a dozen yards overhead. It might wander within a foot of the queen, only to turn in the opposite direction and leave the high scout farther from her than before. Or, it might lead straight to Brianna. The only way to find out was to climb.
Tavis tied his quiver to his hip and slipped Mountain Crusher over his chest. The tip of the bow swung around so that it pointed up the shaft. The weapon would have floated free if the string had not caught in the high scout’s armpit. Tavis gulped down a lungful of the tunnel’s sulfur-reeking air, then reached into the chimney and hauled himself up.
He barely fit. Though the raise was more than eight feet wide, it was not much thicker than Tavis’s torso. To pull himself into the cramped space, he had to wedge his back against one wall and press his palms against the other, keeping his elbows tucked tight at his sides. It was strenuous work, and the high scout still felt weak and dizzy from his injuries. By the time he had pulled himself up far enough to use his knees and feet, his muscles were burning with fatigue. The sulfur stench from the tunnel below made matters worse, filling his lungs and throat with such a scorching stink that he could hardly breathe.
Tavis forced himself to gulp down more air, then clenched his teeth and pushed himself up another few inches. It would be slow going, but he had few alternatives. Shortly after leaving Galgadayle, a group of firbolgs had seen his glowing bow and started rolling boulders down the slope at him. The high scout had been forced to duck into this tunnel, trusting Mountain Crusher’s magic to help him find his wife before her pursuers.
Nor were the Meadowhome warriors Tavis’s greatest worry. He had yet to spy any verbeegs or fomorians, but the high scout knew better than to doubt Galgadayle’s word.
Both groups were formidable foes.
The verbeegs were as organized as they were cunning. They would move quickly to seal every exit from the mountain, then begin a search of the entire warren—no doubt aided by the magic of their shamans and ingenious runecasters. If they captured Brianna before the virtuous firbolgs, they would not content themselves with killing her child. Almost certainly, they would also demand an impossible ransom for her release.
The fomorians posed an even greater danger. Although they were the largest and least intelligent of the giant-kin races, they were born to darkness. They could squeeze their peculiar, deformed bodies through holes half their size, and they walked through pitch blackness in utter silence, with the patient, slow movements of spiders on the stalk. When their hunt was successful, nothing delighted them quite so much as twisting their live prey into grotesque parodies of their own malformed bodies.
Brianna had to be at the end of this raise; Tavis could not bear to think of what might happen if she was not. Unfortunately, the farther he climbed, the more Mountain Crusher pointed at the wall instead of straight up. He began to fear that soon the tip would be leveled at an impassable wall of solid granite.
Tavis came to a rocky choke point too narrow for his thick torso. He blew out his breath and tried to pull past, but succeeded only in lodging himself between two craggy ridges of granite. He tried to push back down, thinking he could traverse sideways and climb through at another angle. He could not descend.
Tavis attempted to break free through sheer force, trying to move up, down, sideways, and all directions between. He succeeded only in exhausting his battered body. His weary muscles began to shake uncontrollably, and the granite grew damp and slick beneath his palms. His boots trembled free of their nubby footholds, leaving him suspended in the crevice like a thief stuck in the palace chimney. For each breath, he had to struggle against a crushing glove of stone.
Tavis’s own odor, as musky and bitter as minkwort, overpowered the sulfurous stench from below. The firbolg could see nothing but the stone before his eyes, glowing eerily blue in his bow’s magic light. The darkness around him grew heavy and smothering, as though the immense weight of the mountain itself had poured into the absolute blackness of the raise. Nothing existed below his feet save the impenetrable murk,
and nothing above him, nor around him, but more of the same. The high scout had a vision of himself: a tiny, buglike creature trapped in a minor crevice lost deep within the mountain’s immense, cloying gloom.
Tavis’s pulse sounded in his ears. With each beat, he felt the cold stone grating against his ribs, sending sharp pangs of agony through his battered torso. He tried to squirm sideways. The pain only worsened, and he grew more convinced that he had lodged himself forever. He heard his own voice groaning and snarling, as though someone might actually hear him through all those immeasurable tons of granite.
The high scout forced himself to stop struggling, to close his eyes and mouth and simply feel his situation. He was caught beneath his chest. Somehow, he managed to push the largest part of his body—his breast and shoulders—past the choke point. After a moment’s reflection, he realized he had been trying to pull himself through the constriction, which meant his arms had been raised above his head.
Tavis unfastened the ties on his scout’s cloak, then blew out his breath and raised his arms. The pressure on his ribs abated, and he slid down a few inches. He let his body go slack and fell out of his coat. Mountain Crusher slipped over his shoulder and started to float up the raise, and the high scout fell into the darkness below.
Tavis thrust his feet and hands against the chimney wall, bringing himself to a quick halt—then almost lost his hold as his heavy scout’s cloak landed on his head. He pulled the coat off, then realized that the raise was still illuminated by Mountain Crusher’s blue light. He looked up and saw his glowing bow a dozen feet above the choke point, where the raise gradually bent over and became a narrow corridor with cockeyed walls. The weapon was scraping along the ceiling, slowly floating into the drift.
Tavis folded his cloak over his quiver and climbed back to the choke point. This time, he slipped through with only a minimum of grunting and cursing. He scrambled up the raise and caught his bow a few steps inside the drift. The cockeyed passage sloped upward at a gradually decreasing angle for about fifty paces. There, dancing on the wall of a junction with another corridor, he saw the orange glow of torch light.
Tavis felt he would find Brianna near the torch, but he had no idea who would be with her. He wrapped Mountain Crusher inside his cloak, then crept up the drift as silently as a fox on the stalk. His heart was pounding so hard that he did not hear the strange, gurgling growl until he had almost reached the junction. He stopped and quietly eased his sword from its scabbard.
A woman hissed, then groaned in pain—Brianna!
With visions of cruel, malformed fomorians dancing through his head, Tavis threw his cloak into the passage to distract his wife’s captors. He followed with his sword raised, then heard several voices cry out in surprise. He found himself stooped over in a small tunnel, staring down at his wife’s fur-swaddled form. One man was holding a torch over her, while another knelt on the floor, hunched over her bare midsection. There were no giant-kin—fomorians or otherwise—anywhere near the queen.
Tavis lowered his guard.
Someone behind him hissed, “Firbolg!”
“Wait, it’s me!”
Tavis was spinning even as he spoke, bringing his sword around to deflect the misguided assault. A sharp crack rang off the tunnel walls as his blade sliced through a well-aimed lance, but even the lord high scout of Hartsvale was not fast enough to counter the thrust of the second front rider. The point of a lance sliced across his flank, opening a long gash above his hip.
Tavis grabbed the lance and jerked it from the man’s hands. “Is this the proper way to greet me?”
“Lord High Scout!” The men uttered the exclamation together, then one continued, “But you—Avner said you fell to the fire giants!”
“I did.” Tavis returned the lance he had taken, then pressed his hand over his bleeding wound. “But—”
“But Tavis Burdun always honors his duty,” interrupted Brianna. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Even if he must cheat death to do it.”
“Firbolgs can’t cheat, milady,” he replied. “You know that.”
Tavis sheathed his sword and faced his wife. She had a pearly grin upon her lips and a violet sparkle in her eyes, but her joy could not hide how hard the last hours had been for her. She looked haggard and weak. Her golden hair was sweat-plastered to her head, and her complexion was more pale than alabaster. Her pain showed in the lines etched into her brow and around her mouth, and her cheeks were as sunken and hollow as a corpse’s. Although her belly was no longer swollen in pregnancy, Front Rider Gryffitt was carefully sewing shut a long incision that someone had cut across the lower part of her abdomen.
Tavis could hardly bring himself to look away from the wound. If he had not seen the joy in her eyes, he would have assumed that one of their enemies had cut the child from her womb.
Tavis knelt at his wife’s side. “What happened?” he asked. “How badly are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Brianna’s voice was as serene as moonlit snow. “And Tavis—I have something to show you.”
The queen opened her cloak. There, suckling at her breast, was the most hideous infant Tavis had ever seen. The baby was the size of a two-year-old, with stubby limbs and pudgy red fingers that pinched at its mother’s flesh like talons. It had dull brown eyes as ravenous as they were vacant, a short pug nose, bloated cheeks, and blood-red lips. Sparse tufts of wiry black hair covered its fat, round head, and the thing resembled a goblin more than a child.
“Well, Tavis?” Brianna asked. “Don’t you think he looks like you?”
7
The Drainage Tunnel
The muggy underground air suddenly felt cool and crisp, a sure sign that Tavis and his companions were finally nearing an exit. They were deep down in the mine system, wading through the turbid orange waters of a drainage tunnel as long as it was straight. The walls babbled with the constant echo of dripping water, and the ceiling was so lofty that even the high scout could stand upright. Dozens of side tunnels opened off the main passage, all filled with streams of cloudy, auric water that stank of iron and copper and a dozen other minerals too obscure to name. But it was the heavy smell of brimstone—sharp and acrid and fresh—that concerned Tavis. The queen’s party could not be far from where the fire giants had broken into the mine warrens.
“Thatcher, hold up a minute.” Tavis was carrying the queen and her child in his arms, for the tunnel waters were so deep that only he could keep them dry. “Do you feel that cold air?”
The front rider stopped and nodded. “It’s coming from there.” He gestured forward with Tavis’s glowing bow, which had become the party’s only light source when their torch guttered out. “We must be near an exit.”
“Thanks be to Stronmaus,” whispered Gryffitt. “I was beginning to think we’d never get out of this labyrinth.”
“We haven’t yet,” Tavis cautioned. “Our enemies are sure to be watching the portals.”
“Then let us hope they missed one,” Brianna said. “If we keep stumbling around in the dark, sooner or later we’ll run into Raeyadfourne’s warriors—or something worse.”
The queen was looking much healthier now. After Gryffitt had finished sewing her up, she had used her healing magic to mend both her own wounds and some of those Tavis had suffered. Unfortunately, she had been unable to do anything about her fatigue. She was still so weak she could hardly stand.
Tavis nodded to Thatcher. “Lead on,” he said. “But keep a watchful eye, and you other men hold your weapons ready.”
The other front riders arranged themselves on Thatcher’s flanks, two carrying hand axes and two bearing lances cut short for use inside the mine. The party continued down the tunnel. The foul waters grew deeper, the interval between support timbers shorter. Twice as they passed side passages, Tavis heard the distant rumble of firbolg voices.
The air became cooler. They passed a drift in which the waters sat stagnant, with no sign of any current flowing from the other end. Deep withi
n the passage echoed the sucking sounds of draining water, and Tavis smelled the mordant reek of brimstone hanging heavily about the entrance.
A dozen steps later, the main tunnel intersected another flooded corridor. The two passages joined and angled off together. The cold breeze became a frigid wind. The water was up to Tavis’s navel now, and he could feel the current pressing against the front of his thighs—the opposite direction he had expected.
Thatcher stopped in the intersection. “The wind’s coming from up there.”
He was not pointing down the joined passages, but up the opposite arm of the intersection. This tunnel was even more heavily braced than the one in which the queen’s party stood. It looked as though it had been driven through wood instead of granite.
“And down the main tunnel?” Tavis asked.
Thatcher waded around the angle. He came back a few moments later. “I think it’s the tunnel you blew up with your runearrow,” he reported. “The passage is filled with rocks, and the support timbers have burned away. I saw a boot sticking out of the rubble. It had to be as large as my chest.”
The report did not please Tavis. The main body of the firbolg troop had been hiding just up the canyon from the site of the fire giants’ ambush.
“What are we waiting for?” Brianna asked. “The choice is obvious enough. Let’s walk into the wind.”
Tavis shook his head. “Not without scouting ahead.” He pointed at Thatcher and one other front rider. “You two take a look.”
Thatcher and his companion waded up the opposite fork of the mine, holding Tavis’s bow and their own weapons above the swirling orange currents. Mountain Crusher’s blue glow reflected off the water and danced across the timber-lined ceiling, filling the tunnel with a half-moon halo that steadily dwindled away. The darkness grew as smothering as a cave-in, and Kaedlaw began to growl.
“Maybe I should cast my light spell,” Brianna suggested.
“I’d rather you saved it,” Tavis replied.