“What have you learned?” Nistur asked her.
“They’re on the lowest level, but that’s just because they were some of the first brought in. The sweep started in the old harbor. The cells down there are small, and they’re shaped sort of like beehives: round, with ceilings that slope in like a cone and a circular door in the top. The prisoners are sent down a ladder, and the ladder’s drawn up. No need for a door and a lock that way.”
“It sounds grim,” Nistur said, shaking his head.
“It’s that, all right,” she affirmed. “It’s cold and cramped and dark. But I think it may give us an opportunity to get them out.”
“It sounds just the opposite to me,” Nistur said.
“Aye,” said Ironwood. “If they’re that far down, nothing short of the lord’s pardon or Kyaga taking the city will get them out.”
“I never would’ve thought you two would give up so easily,” she said.
“Perhaps we lack your resources,” Nistur said. “What is your plan?”
“Can the two of you follow my lead for a change?” she asked.
“I’d like to see the old man out of there,” Ironwood said, “but we’ve precious little time to find our killer.”
“And you were getting close?” she said sarcastically.
“I admit we were not,” Nistur said.
“Well, when they were dragging Stunbog off, he told me to find you and tell you that he’d figured out what that sigil was.”
“Let’s do as she says,” Ironwood advised. “We’re accomplishing nothing on our own.”
“Very well,” Nistur agreed, doffing his hat and dusting snow from its brim. “Where are we going?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to show you some of my part of the city, the places even the lord and all his spies don’t know about.”
* * * * *
The Lord of Tarsis was too preoccupied with unfolding events to think about what his investigators might be up to. The captain of the East Gate had sent word to the palace: Kyaga Strongbow was before the gate, demanding to see the lord at once.
Cursing and administering kicks and slaps as inducements to his servants, the lord was dressed in his finest ceremonial armor, a suit of cunningly jointed plate lavishly overlaid with gold and silver, with jewels set along the edges of the plates and rare feathers bepluming the helmet. An immense cloak of silk trimmed with ermine was fastened to the shoulder plates, and the lord was boosted into the saddle of his finest parade horse.
Runners both preceded and trooped alongside the mounted lord, keeping the common rabble well away from him and holding the long cloak clear of the filthy street. At the gate the lord dismounted and climbed the steps. Despite the precious metals, his parade armor was far lighter than his field harness, but ascending the stair was still hard going. Behind him the grooms managed his cape, which he was beginning to regret having worn. It added to his majesty, yet under these circumstances, it was faintly ridiculous.
When he stood at last above the gate and saw Kyaga below, he decided he should have adopted a more warlike appearance. The leader of the nomads was this day dressed all in black, down to his gloved fingertips. Over his tunic he wore a shirt of black chain mail, and his horse wore a plain harness of black leather supporting its master’s weapons. Kyaga looked like a chieftain preparing to lead his army to war.
“I have come at your request, rude as it was,” the lord began. “What would you have of me?”
Kyaga pointed an accusing finger. “I have every cause to demand your head, Lord of Tarsis!”
“But you would have to take my city to get it,” the lord replied.
“And I shall, if you do not satisfy me immediately. Another of my chiefs has been murdered in Tarsis! I want his murderer surrendered to me!”
The lord sighed quietly. He’d had no real hope that word of Guklak’s death could be withheld from Kyaga. “And how did your chieftain happen to be within the walls of Tarsis, Kyaga Strongbow? Did I come out to your camp, through your sentries, and abduct him? Or did he perhaps enter Tarsis by stealth to treat with someone here, perhaps someone who has neither your interests, nor mine, at heart?”
“It is that question alone that restrains me from ordering an immediate attack on your city! But I will tell you this: my patience has worn thin. Deliver to me the killers of Yalmuk and Guklak by sunrise tomorrow! You, Lord of Tarsis, must bring them personally to my tent and surrender them to me, for I will accept no lackey of yours!”
“You must take me for an imbecile, Kyaga Strongbow,” the lord answered. “This is clearly a ruse to trick me into your camp, where you may kill me or seize me for ransom. Many a general has been thus deceived, and I will not follow their example.”
“I come before you personally to make this demand, riding within easy shot of your walls, for this is the nomad way! I swear by the spirits of my ancestors that you will not be harmed or detained if you come before me to hand over the killers. No warrior of this host will ever follow me again should I break this oath.”
The Lord of Tarsis paused, suspecting a more subtle trap.
“It is true, my lord,” said Captain Karst, who stood nearby. “No nomad will tolerate the breaking of such an oath. If made by a chief, it would dishonor the whole people.”
“Very well,” said the lord. “Tomorrow, upon the rising of the sun, you will have the killers.”
“See to it,” said Kyaga. “I will have the killers, or I will have war!” He whirled his mount and galloped back toward his tent. His army raised a ferocious shout at his passing.
“I hope you can satisfy him, my lord,” said Captain Karst. “The preparations are far from complete. We need another ten days at least to get the walls in proper order. A month would be far better. Your amateur defenders are in dire need of drilling.”
“Oh, I think I can satisfy him at dawn,” said the lord. “After that, it will be back to negotiation. I can easily buy us another month that way. And perhaps it will not come to war at all.”
Karst bowed. “As my lord says.” He frowned after the silk- and ermine-clad back as his employer walked toward the stairs. Karst knew all too well what the lord meant: barring the appearance of a better suspect, tomorrow he would turn over Councilor Melkar to Kyaga’s tender ministrations. And Melkar was the only member of the Inner Council who had both the authority and the experience to coordinate the defense of the city.
Karst found he had much to ponder. He had always served his paymaster loyally, but there was a limit to the folly that a sensible soldier should put up with. He decided to consult with his fellow officers. It might be a good time to contemplate a retreat from this ill-starred city.
* * * * *
“I trust you are not taking us to meet another of Granny Toadflower’s ilk,” Nistur muttered.
The three were back in the Old City, in an area of tottering buildings that leaned alarmingly toward one another across narrow streets.
“Not exactly,” she said. At a crossroads, she halted. At its center was one of the storm drains with the customary grated cover. She knelt by it and examined the grate. Then she thrust a fine-boned hand through one of the square holes and felt around. There was a clank as she pulled on something, then withdrew her hand. “Grab it on this side,” she instructed, “and pull up on it. I can’t do it by myself.”
Mystified, the other two crouched and laid their hands to the cold metal. With a muscle-straining heave, they raised the grate on a pair of heavy internal hinges until it was in an upright position.
“How fascinating,” Nistur mused, peering into the darkness below. “Another part of this city we have not yet explored, a part perhaps even more repellent than that with which we are already acquainted.”
“It doesn’t have to be pretty,” Ironwood retorted, “as long as it gets us someplace. Shellring, I take it you have some sort of plan.”
“I do. Just follow me.” Nimbly, she dropped into the hole, and they followed. “There’s a ladd
er here,” she said as she disappeared. “The last one down close the grate. Just give it a tug and let it fall. It’ll close slowly.”
Ironwood was next down, followed closely by Nistur. As instructed, he tugged at the grate, then ducked his head down lest the weighty thing fall precipitately. But, as Shellring had predicted, it dropped slowly and settled into place, making very little noise. He continued down the ladder, which seemed to be inordinately long. The darkness was profound.
“You should have mentioned that we would need torches or lanterns,” he chided, his voice echoing as if in a long tunnel.
“We won’t need them,” she said, her voice sounding as if it came from the bottom of a well. The descent continued until Nistur’s arms and legs ached; then he found himself hanging from the bottom rung.
“Just drop,” Shellring advised him.
“That calls for an act of faith,” Nistur said. Someone yanked his belt, and he yelped as he fell. The drop was no more than six inches.
“If you were a little taller you wouldn’t have had such a fright,” Ironwood said.
“I was not frightened,” he said with offended dignity. “It is just that altitude is not a thing I like to accept on faith in conditions of utter darkness.”
“It’s not quite dark,” Ironwood told him.
Nistur looked around and realized he could just make out the forms of his companions, although he could as yet make out little detail of his surroundings.
“Your eyes will get used to it in a little while. And there’s more light where we’re going,” Shellring assured him.
“What is the source of the light?” Nistur asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Some of it’s from mushrooms that glow in the dark. I think there’s glowing rock, too.”
Carefully, Nistur stepped to a nearby wall and scrutinized it from a few inches away. Embedded in it were flecks that glowed a dull blue-green. He scratched at it, but his nails found only hard surface. “Yes, this is a luminous mineral. How intriguing.”
“Let’s go,” Shellring urged. “You can see well enough now not to stumble.”
She led them along a low, circular tunnel that angled slightly downward. The air was damp but not stale, and they could feel a constant, slight motion to it, as if the air were being circulated by some means. Though cool, it was noticeably warmer than at street level.
They came into a large room where the light was brighter. From the ceiling sprouted a profusion of mushrooms that glowed in various shades of blue and green. The light was still dim, but it seemed bright after what they had come through. A number of side tunnels met at the room, and above each tunnel mouth was a niche containing a statue. The light was not sufficient to reveal the appearance of the statues, save that they were squat and primitive-looking.
“Let’s see,” Shellring said, “which one was it?”
“Surely you haven’t brought us all the way down here without a clear notion of where we are going!” Nistur snapped, slightly unnerved by their spooky surroundings.
“It’s been a while,” she said. “Just be patient. I think it’s that one.” She pointed at a square-sided tunnel and set off along it. Lacking any credible recourse, the others followed.
The tunnel branched more than once, but Shellring now seemed positive in her sense of direction. After a few minutes of travel, she stopped at a spot that seemed to be like every other place in the tunnel. “This is it,” she announced.
“This is what?” Ironwood asked, looking all around him. The faint, diffuse glow was unremarkable, except for a patch on one side from which no glow came. Shellring reached into this patch, and there came the unmistakable sound of knuckles rapping on wood.
“A door?” said Nistur. He was answered moments later when a shuffling sound announced the arrival of someone on the other side. With a creak, a round patch of light replaced the blank spot on the tunnel wall. From beyond came a light no brighter than that cast by two or three candles, but after the gloom they had come through, it seemed bright. In the light stood a dwarf with pure white hair and beard.
“Who is it?” the dwarf inquired. “Oh, Shellring. But who are these two?”
Nistur doffed his hat. “I believe we met briefly a few evenings ago in Stunbog’s ship. I am Nistur, and this is my companion Ironwood, who was indisposed that night.”
“Delver, Stunbog is in trouble,” Shellring said. “I think you and your people can help him.”
The dwarf peered at them not so much in suspicion as in puzzlement, as if he were not accustomed to intrusions into his placid life.
“Well, come in, then. If Stunbog needs help, we want to do what we can for him. Half the children would have died these last two years, had it not been for him.”
The others passed within. Ironwood and Nistur had to stoop slightly, and they stood close together of necessity, for the room was dwarf-scaled.
Quickly, Shellring related an abbreviated version of recent events, culminating with the arrest and incarceration of Stunbog, Myrsa, and Badar. The dwarf listened attentively, nodding from time to time.
“We’ve heard of some of this,” he said. “We get around, you know, but we try to stay out of doings aboveground. They’ve all but forgotten us up there, and that’s the way we like it. But to help Stunbog, I think we can do something.”
“Wonderful!” Shellring said. “How do we do it?”
“Well, for starters, it won’t be easy or simple.”
“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “I thought we could just go up there and bust them out.”
“Not in that part of the city. Some of the old tunnels are blocked up. It will call for some digging. And there’s … Well, let’s go consult with the gathering, and we’ll learn what the situation is. There’s a danger, you see, and it might make things difficult, even impossible.”
“A danger?” Nistur said. “What might it be?”
“The behir,” Delver answered. “But, no sense borrowing trouble beforetime. There are folk who know the situation in that part of town better than I do. Come along.” The dwarf crossed the little room into another, and they followed. Part of his dwelling seemed to be a stonecutter’s workshop, with tools neatly racked and a number of apparent works in progress standing about on pedestals.
From the dwelling they passed into a corridor far larger than the ones they had traversed earlier. This one had a vaulted ceiling from which were suspended iron baskets full of luminous fungi, casting a light at least equal to that within the dwelling. At one point Delver stopped and opened a small door. It gave admittance into a closet that was just large enough for the dwarf to squeeze inside alone. From its ceiling hung a length of chain terminating in a handle. Delver grasped the handle and pulled it downward three times. As he left the closet and closed the door, a deep, booming gong sounded through the corridor. Then came a second boom, then a third. The reverberations continued long afterward.
“That’s the summons to the gathering,” Delver told them. “It can be heard through the whole underground. Come on.”
They set off after him and came to an immense room. The light was too dim to illuminate its extremities, but the floor was littered with stones that had fallen from its ceiling. From this room they took a broad stairway that led down; then there was another corridor and more rooms.
Nistur’s mind whirled, thinking of the incredible amount of labor it had taken to hew these corridors and chambers out of solid rock, then to decorate and adorn the lot. At last they came to a room not quite as vast as the others, where they found some forty or fifty dwarves gathered on banked stone benches that had been designed to accommodate a far larger number.
“What is this about, Delver?” said an elderly dwarf whose eyebrows drooped to the sides of his face like a long mustache. “That signal came from your part of the underground.”
“And who are these strangers?” demanded a woman almost as old.
“They are friends of Stunbog, here with news of something that con
cerns all of us,” Delver said. “There’s trouble above.”
The old dwarf snorted. “What do we care about that? The nomads can sack and burn the city if they want to. It will never affect us. They won’t dare come down here.”
“It’s not the nomads, Hotforge,” Delver said. “Listen to Shellring.”
The thief came forward and delivered her story once more. The audience listened with somber expressions.
“We can’t let Stunbog rot in the dungeon,” said a woman who looked young, for a dwarf. “He saved my child when I had given her up for dead.”
“Aye, we owe him too much,” said the one called Hotforge.
“Just get him and the other two free,” Shellring said. “We won’t cause any trouble for you. We’ll be on our way as soon as they’re out.”
The old dwarf turned to face the assembly. “Are we agreed?” Everyone nodded, grunted, or otherwise signaled assent. “All right, then. Who knows that area best?” A bald, middle-aged dwarf raised a hand. “Then tell us about it, Pickbreaker.”
The bald one stood to his full, four-foot stature. “When the foundations of the Hall of Justice were dug, our ancestors left in place many of the access tunnels, as was their custom with the greater buildings of the city. These tunnels were seriously weakened in the Cataclysm, and they were filled up lest the building settle.”
“How long will it take to dig through the fill to the cell where they are keeping Stunbog?” Delver asked him.
“I’ll have to go to the archive and get the plans, but I am sure it will take several hours at least. And then there is the behir.”
“I’m already certain that I will not like the answer,” said Nistur, “yet I must ask. Just what is the behir?”
“You do not know what a behir is?” Delver said wonderingly.
“They must be rare elsewhere,” Nistur answered.
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