"I know where we are," Brond said, looking about. "That way"—he pointed up the smooth-floored track—"is a thermal vent that jets steam at regular intervals. It is caught in a copper hood and piped down to the mine works"—now he pointed downslope to where the trail disappeared around a protuberance of porous gray tufa—"where it is fed through a network of tubes beneath the floor of the administration offices and the workers' baths and accommodations. The pipe runs beneath the track."
"Impressive engineering," said Raimeau.
"Let us follow the path down to the mine," said the Noble Head. "We need to warn my people there about the orc threat."
They followed the trail to a place where the slope steepened and the smooth rock floor became a series of descending steps, curving around the girth of the mountain, with the hot-water pipe running beside it. Now Brond led the way, and the nearer he came to the place where dwarven skill and energy had laid an economic base for the Regulate, the more upright his posture became. At the end, he was almost skipping down the steps with a lightfootedness as unusual in a dwarf as his hairless head.
There turned out to be no need to warn the miners and their guards about the orcs. They came upon the first bodies before they had even reached the bottom of the steps: a pair of engineers, their bodies hacked and eviscerated. A few dozen steps farther down—Brond was not skipping now—and they rounded a last curve and had a clear view of the mine adit. And of the death that had come to roost there.
Raimeau had read military history; he could tell what had happened from the arrangement of the bodies. The mine guards had not been taken by surprise. The last stretch of road leading up to the mine head had to traverse a slope too steep for oxcarts, so the dwarven road builders had cut a series of switchbacks back and forth up the incline. The orcs had come up it in a stream, but not fast enough to take the mine guards by surprise.
Fifty spear-dwarves had formed a shield wall where the road reached the broad apron of flat stone carved out of the mountain in front of the main tunnel. They should have been enough to handle twenty times their number. But again, the orcs had not come on in the same old way, flinging themselves against the spearpoints, piling up a wall of their own dead from atop which the dwarves' long spears would continue to methodically skewer them.
Instead, the orcs had cut down a big pine, below the tree line, far, far down the mountain. They had trimmed it, leaving stubs of branches sticking out as handholds, sharpening the wider end to a crude point. Then they had carried the log all the way up the switchbacks, forming up as a column with its pointed end at their front.
"You can see, there," the gray-haired man said, "where they drove through the wall. The rear rank of the guards threw their spears over the heads of the other three ranks. They did fearsome damage, but it was not enough. Other orcs seized the handholds and bore the ram forward.
"The shield wall broke. The guards tried to reform into two platoons, with the orcs squeezed between them. But the orcs did not give them the opportunity. Before the two bodies could get their shields and spears in place, the enemy raced through the breach and attacked the ends of the broken lines. The dwarves fought well, but they were overwhelmed."
The orcs had killed them all, the guards and a few miners who had not made it into the tunnel before the great doors had closed. But it would not have made any difference if the stragglers had gotten inside—the invaders had immediately picked up their ram and thrown themselves against the portal, which had been designed to keep out weather, not blood-fired orcs. The doors hung askew from their torn-out hinges; behind them, the proofs of slaughter continued. The miners had fought with their iron tools and had even hurled chunks of shattered overburden. Pools of orc blood, shreds of orc flesh, fragments of orc bone, and even severed orc limbs lay among the scattered bodies of the dwarves.
"They took their dead away," Raimeau said, shaking his head as they stepped among the carnage. "When have orcs done that?"
Brond moved quietly among the fallen, his hairless face ashen. Here and there, he stopped and softly spoke a name, or bent and rearranged an ungainly sprawled limb or closed a pair of sightless eyes.
Skanderbrog had gone beyond the densest part of the killing zone, his nostrils distended to catch the scent that came from farther down the tunnel. Here the place was illuminated by sunlight; deeper into the downward-sloping shaft, globes of light should have lit the way. But the tunnel was steeped in darkness. A set of wooden rails, laid into the stone floor, disappeared into the gloom.
"They went down there," the troll said, gesturing with his chin at the closed-in blackness. He sniffed again. "But I don't think they carried them. I think they walked."
Krunzle could catch the sour odor—stronger now—and under it, it seemed, something else—something sharp and rank that went straight through his nose to the oldest part of his brain, to stir up nameless animal fears from the times before a human ever opened his eyes on a Golarion night. "Dead orcs don't walk," he said
"These did," Raimeau said. "Look at this track." He indicated a splotch of congealed blood on the tunnel floor. "The orc who made that was missing half his foot. Yet he was walking on the stump. And he wasn't the only one. Look there." Smears of blood could be seen on the stone floor and the rails, as well as on the walls.
The troll sniffed again. "There it is again," he said, "snake magic. Strong." He summoned up phlegm and spat, then looked back toward the shattered doors and the sunlight beyond. "I don't think I'll be getting a steel sword today."
Gyllana's face was as bloodless as Brond's. She said, "What about Berbackian? Can you smell him?"
The troll's educated nose drew in more air from the darkness. "He went down there," he said.
"And has he come out?"
"No."
"I have to find him," she said, looking at Krunzle, "and so do you."
There was no point asking Chirk. The thief could feel the snake stirring around in his mind. Somehow the sensation was sharper now, as if the strange being were finally coming into focus.
"I have to go, too," said Brond.
"And I will go," said Raimeau. "Whatever I am meant to do, I sense that I am meant to do it here."
They all turned to Skanderbrog. The troll shook his head. "I would still like the sword. I would fight orcs for it. But what is down there is more than orcs, worse than orcs. I will heed my mother's advice and let it lie."
Brond ran his hairless hand over his browless, whiskerless face. He had aged a great deal since the fight by the river. "We cannot fight the orcs alone," he said, "and I must go to see what has called them and made them ...strange. I could not live, not knowing."
"You might die, finding out," said the troll.
Brond's mouth moved, almost like a tic. "Let me offer you this: come with us and fight the orcs and I will give you a finer set of steel weapons and armor than any troll has ever owned. But if we find something that your mother would not have approved of, you may leave us and I will still honor the agreement."
"How, if you are dead?" said Skanderbrog, then with a shudder, "Or worse?"
Brond went to the mine office, found pen and paper, and drew up an order to the chief of the Grimsburrow smithy. "Present this and it will be honored," he said.
The troll looked at the paper then showed it to Raimeau. "Does it say what it should?"
"It does," said the thin man.
The troll rolled up the document into a scroll and tied it into his hair. "I will come," he said.
∗ ∗ ∗
The tunnel bent as it went down into the bowels of the mountain. The dwarven engineers had scried the locations of lava tubes in which the blue diamonds would be found, and had directed their tunneling appropriately. The curve meant that soon they had left behind the sunlit entrance, but Brond had found oil lamps hanging from chains in the mine offices, and they hung these from the ends of lathes of wood and lit them. Thus they proceeded constantly into a gold glow, leaving darkness behind them.
&nb
sp; Along the floor of the tunnel were laid two parallel tracks of hard wood, their upper surfaces polished by the traffic of grooved wooden wheels. A little way into the darkness, they came upon a cart. Krunzle climbed onto its yoke and held his lamp to illuminate the interior. He was hoping for a glint of blue light, but the cart was empty. Still, they pushed it ahead of them, Brond having reasoned that it would serve as a defensive barrier should a rush of orcs suddenly come out of the dark.
The tunnel was more than tall enough for dwarves, just comfortable for a man as tall as Raimeau, and tricky for a troll—Skanderbrog had to crouch, his knees bent and his head constantly in danger of banging against the ceiling. After a timeless time, they reached the first lava tube. It was a wide vertical shaft, almost cylindrical, that had formerly been filled with porous tufa. The dwarves had hollowed it out, above and below, extracting the gems they found lodged in the soft volcanic rock. They had also erected a wooden trestle from one side of the excavated tube to the other to support the wooden rails that crossed it to where the tunnel recommenced on the other side. Beside the tracks ran a walkway, again wide enough for dwarves and men, but difficult footing for a troll. Skanderbrog solved the problem by straddling the tracks and walking with one foot on each side. At least here he could stand straight.
As they passed through the empty space, Krunzle again lifted his oil lamp, hoping for a glint of blue from the walls. But it seemed that the dwarves had taken every gem.
They passed through two more lava tubes, each as empty as the first, then came to a stretch of tunnel that angled steeply down. The walls were fitted with strong timbers and iron rings to which blocks and tackle could be attached, for here the grade was too sharp for an ore cart to be easily dwarf-handled upward.
The passageway was black as pitch. The glow from their oil lamps scarcely illuminated the track ahead of the cart. They had not had to push the vehicle since they had left the reach of sunlight; gravity had pulled it along before them, and now the job of keeping it from rolling away on the steeper incline was left to Skanderbrog, who held it back with one hand gripping its rear wall.
∗ ∗ ∗
"That's an orc," Raimeau said, holding his lamp aloft and peering with the others at the object the front wheels of the cart had bumped against, stopping the vehicle.
"It only has one arm and one leg," said Krunzle.
"And yet," said Brond, "we're supposed to believe it crawled all the way from the entrance." He looked around, moving his lamp to illuminate the area. "At least, I don't see any severed limbs. That makes no sense."
Another few hundred paces into the mine, they found a second orc, as dead as the first. This one had all its limbs, but its belly had been slit open by a razor-edged dwarven spear and its ropy entrails straggled behind along the track. It had finally expired with one hand outstretched, as if struggling to move one more span toward whatever had kept it moving.
Raimeau felt its arm: the gray flesh was cold. "It didn't die here," he said. "It's been dead for hours. Yet, dead, it staggered here until finally it no longer had enough of whatever had been enlivening it and keeping it going."
Brond's face twisted in disbelief. "Wounded orcs drag themselves away from things that might finish them off; they don't drag themselves toward anything. An orc, wounded or not, is a simple collection of appetites: it hungers, it lusts, it hates, it covets. A dead orc doesn't do anything."
"Somewhere," the gray-haired man said, "I've come across a mention of this kind of thing."
"Undead orcs, marching to ..." Apparently, Brond could not think of anything undead orcs might march to, and ended by waving away the notion with a brusque gesture.
"No," said Raimeau, his brow furrowed in an attempt to catch a wisp of memory. "Something that could reach into another being's mind and bend it to its will—and do so with such power that the master could keep the mindslave moving and doing despite injuries that ought to have been fatal."
"Perhaps your flower-headed snake?" said Krunzle. "The one that would choose the middle of a volcano as its preferred lurking spot?"
Raimeau frowned. "My memory is capricious," he said. "Too many nightmares, all those years in the iron mines. But it could have been a lily-head."
"Well," said the thief, "if we keep going down this tunnel, we're liable to find out, aren't we?" He sighed, hitched his sword belt so that the weapon's hilt was close to hand, lifted the lathe of wood from which his oil lamp hung, and set off. A few steps on he stumbled and cursed. "Another one," he called back over his shoulder.
Answer me one question, Chirk, he said in the quiet of his mind, will this end happily for me?
Define happiness, from your point of view, said the snake.
The thief's response was instant. A trove of blue diamonds.
Then, yes. Your happiness is assured. Think of the biggest blue diamond you could ever imagine.
Krunzle did so. Mmm, he said.
Then double it.
Mm-mm.
And even that's not big enough.
Krunzle smiled to himself. Then another question occurred. And the opportunity to sell it for a fortune? he said.
You asked me to answer one question. I did. Now keep moving.
Krunzle swore and stopped to let the others catch up.
∗ ∗ ∗
They found more orcs as they went on; many of them had lethal wounds. "Your guards gave a good account of themselves," said Raimeau. "And your miners."
"Dwarves do not die easily," said Brond.
Krunzle put a question to the gray-haired man. "Why do we see dead orcs, but not dead dwarves?"
Raimeau did not know, but said if he had to guess it would be that orcs were simpler-minded. "The clockwork of their minds would be easier to disrupt."
"But Berbackian must have had a subtle mind," the thief said, "to have put one over on the daughter of the Second Secretary to the First Commissariote of Kerse."
"Indeed," said Raimeau, "but perhaps his intellect was debased by overindulgence in certain appetites."
Now it was Krunzle's turn say, "Indeed?" An idea formed in his mind and he turned to the woman. "Was he a flayleaf addict? A devotee of pesh? Or perhaps the drug called shiver?"
"None of your business," said Gyllana.
Brond spoke. "I must differ. We are here because of a train of events your lover set in motion, whatever their end might be. Any knowledge about him may be germane to our situation, and thus we have a right to know."
For a moment, she faced them down, standing on the eminence of her social rank. Then her face crumpled. "Flayleaf," she said. "He introduced me to it ...but I take responsibility. I liked it. It made ..."—she took a breath, looked away, and continued—"it made certain pleasures more pleasurable."
Krunzle saw the shape of things. "He plied you with it, and while you lay inert and replete from his attentions, he stole the talisman from your father's strongroom."
"It wasn't in the strongroom," she said, as if the thief had proposed an obscenity. "I am a Kalistocrat's daughter; I would never have admitted one who was not of our blood to the inner sanctum of our house. The object was on a tabletop on my father's study, part of a collection of curious oddments he had picked up at a house sale. A minor wizard had misjudged the strength of a spell and blasted himself into oblivion, and his effects were auctioned. I told you that my father collected mystic curiosities from the East. He had bought a box full of such bric-a-brac at the sale. Thang-Sha was known to be an expert on such things; my father had taken objects to him before for valuing. He did so again."
"What did Thang-Sha say?"
"That the thing was obscure, probably of little value. He asked my father if he could keep it while he consulted his reference books." She shrugged. "My father is a Kalistocrat. It is foreign to his nature to part with so much as a stepped-on bean, even on loan. But he did invite the wizard to take up residence in the old wing. He could strengthen the mansion's defenses—free of charge, of course—while he studied t
he object to his heart's content."
She thought back, and spoke as if remembering a dream. "Then Berbackian was in the house for one of our trysts. He saw the whatever-it-is and asked if he could take it. I said no, of course." She shook her head gently, amazed at her own folly. "He said it was a test of my love, and for some reason I cannot explain, I did not laugh in his face and explain what love meant to a Kalistocrat's daughter.
"I remember thinking, ‘It's just an old thing from who knows where. No one knows what it's for.' It was like someone else's hand picked it up and handed it to him. Then came the morning after. Thang-Sha made a fuss. My father was outraged that one of his possessions had been taken." She made a sound that might have been laughter. "He wanted to send the Blackjackets after Wolsh."
"But he didn't," said Krunzle.
"No. Thang-Sha said we should avoid the scandal of anyone knowing that we had been robbed." She made a chagrined face. "It is a great shame to be taken."
"So they sent you," Krunzle said. "And you, once again, succumbed to Berbackian's manly charms."
Now she made a face that expressed no respect for the thief's opinion. Krunzle began to offer a detailed analysis of Gyllana Eponion, but Brond shut him off with a wave of his hand. "What happened?" the dwarf said.
She made a helpless gesture. "I went to Berbackian, asked for it back, this trifle, this nothing. He said he would give it to me—of course, he would give it to me; it was around there somewhere. But first, let us kindle the pipe one more time. We lay on his bed, smoking."
Krunzle could imagine the rest, and took pleasure in saying it. "When you awoke, you were on the barge upriver, then you hitched a ride to Ulm's Delve with a wagon string, and there he decided to sell you to Boss Ulm. You were lucky that I had already come by and dealt with the riverside welcoming committee, or your introduction to the Ulm's Delve way of life would have taken the form of three bandits and a half-orc."
She nodded, not looking at any of them. "Even by the time he carried me onto the barge, I had become completely inessential to his plans. But he did not want anyone to know where he was going. I would like to think that some vestige of affection kept him from just killing me, but probably it was sheer happenstance. We were never alone. His true nature became clear when we reached the gold camp. Ulm saw me and made an offer: me for Berbackian's freedom. It was accepted."
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