Teller of Fate
Fifth Movement: The Power Under Glyph
Chapter Forty-Seven
* * *
On waking Brad had told Dævara that the crew were assembling early near one of the entrances to the cellars.
They had to hurry, so after a quickie, a shower, and some food gobbled from last night’s feast, they dressed for the mission.
Brad wore his usual leathers and plate-and-chain. To his axe, slung across his back, the adventurer added a short sword sheathed at his waist and a buckler strapped to his left arm. The adventurer used a strip of braided leather to hold his hair back from his eyes.
Dæv outfitted herself in black, snug fitting leather. Her hair was capped with her faceted steel mesh and her queue cocooned in its black leather sheath. Thus bound, it was threaded through a larger sheath sewn down the back of the cuirass between her shoulder blades. This drastically reduced the chance of it being grabbed in a fight.
Her only weapon was the red metal staff she’d had since first leaving Ælfen, its runes sparkling in the yellow light of this day. The Syrat she tucked away in its magick hidey-hole.
She felt for her Conjunx, snugged away under her leathers between her breasts. Brad had his secreted somewhere on him.
The magick communicator was more than just a thoughtful gift. Her lover knew how much time she’d spent looking for him, and how much their separation had hurt her. He was never going to be more than a thought away now. Dæv had wept last night when he’d given it to her. She got misty just thinking about it now.
Brad noticed her expression. A glance confirmed he knew it was her Conjunx she was fingering. He smiled for her. “Come on, you. Let’s get going.”
They travelled down without speaking, holding hands. After Dæv and Brad reunited in Glyph, the latter had initially resisted any public displays of affection. He had his pride, after all. Now most times, it was he who first held out his hand when they went out together.
After reaching the main floor, Dæv led Brad toward the rear left corner of the sprawling complex of buildings. There were three wings in that direction that housed mostly adventurers from hi-tech worlds as well as the kitchens. Brad had never been near it before.
Bradwold spotted Gregarrt, beckoning to them in front of three sets of double doors. Two people with full plates of food exited different swinging doors just as the pair arrived. Delectable smells followed them down two different halls.
“You guys are late,” Gregarrt said.
“Is everyone else here?” asked Brad.
Greg nodded. “Come on. Follow me.” He pushed through the nearest door. The trio passed out of the hall.
For a place of such obvious industry, there was surprisingly little noise in the room beyond.
The kitchens of the Blue Griffin could serve over two thousand meals every six hours, supplying staples and delicacies for the palates and nutritional requirements of dozens of races.
Despite appearances, many of the races visiting Glyph had dietary requirements that were so divergent that what was essential for health for one might cause fatal toxicity in another. Brad had learned some time ago that Greg had more people employed in inventory and quality control than he did cooks.
They threaded their way through steam and hurrying people in stained whites and odours both mouth- and eye-watering.
A row of ovens and another of grills, each big enough cook for an army, lined two walls of the kitchen they were passing through. The sizzle of most of the grilling food was enticing. Overshadowing the flame spitting meats were vents sucking heated gases out of the rooms.
Lining the other two walls, neatly sorted on metal racks, were pots, pans, plates, cups, and utensils. Some were for the guests; the rest were the sundry arcana of the chefs’ alchemy.
The center of the room held rows of scrubbed wooden tables on which dishes in every stage of completion were operated on with surgical precision by skilled hands.
Through two of these monstrous food factories, Greg led his charges, neither of whom received so much as a glance from the staff. At the far end of the last one, an arched entranceway loomed out of the steamy aromatic air.
The three took wide thickly ridged steps down past another two floors of workhouse intense labour to yet a fourth. The brief views of the other kitchens displayed the same beehive atmosphere.
Down past that last level and they were in the storage spaces for the kitchens. The corridors were narrow, dividing rooms for dry and cold storage. There were several cooling rooms holding baked goods, two of which seemed devoted entirely to cooling bread.
Down one hall and around a corner to the end of a second Greg, Brad, and Dævara finally met up with the others.
Elian was in his usual garb, his mace held loosely in one hand against his shoulder. That weapon was so deadly looking, Brad had once mentioned it should have been classed as a crime against sentient life.
Quolamin was in a blue robe today, belted in iron. A necklace of sheathed daggers completed the ensemble. She leaned casually on her staff.
Darmorel had chosen padded leather, her long sword sheathed at her waist. Her shield was slung on her back.
“Pardon,” said Gregarrt to Elian, stepping by the dwarf to a small stone door. It was the same colour as the rest of the wall and so was hard to see. The tall man spoke civilly to the dwarf, but there was a coolness there that none missed.
Gregarrt pushed the door in two different places, and it swung in silently, leaving a space three feet wide and not quite tall enough for Bradwold to pass through without ducking. “There’s light down there, as I told Dævara. Once you get down the stairs, follow the hallway till it ends and then go left. Take the second right and follow it to the end. The first of the storerooms affected is there. Good luck.”
They decided to go in usual party order: Bradwold the Above-the-Hipbone Disemboweller on point, Quolamin the Well-Manicured, almost as tall as he and handy with a nasty area effect spell, was second. Next went Elian Kneecapper, then Darmorel the Well-spoken. After a brief discussion, Dævara Tatharsdottir, Teller of Fate was placed behind Elian where she could use her own special magicks to defend the party from attacks from the rear.
They went single file down a narrow, straight stair. Darm pulled the stone door shut as she passed it. It seemed to Bradwold that they descended about twenty steps before they got to the ground.
No light. “Dæv?” Brad said. “Could you get the lights on?”
Dævara leaned to her right until she felt the wall. Sliding her hand along it, she found a switch and pushed it up. Light, flickering at first, sprang up away from them. It defined a ceiling nine feet up. In a couple of seconds, the whole of a long hallway was brightly lit.
They began their march.
Nothing untoward did they see. There were a few doors, spaced along the hall, each tightly shut. Brad pushed one open and examined the space beyond. “Full. No one’s been here, at least,” he said as he reclosed the door. He peeked into another two. Same story.
The crew came to the end of the hall. It T-jointed another. Following Gregarrt’s directions, Brad led them left. The second right was another door. This one was open. Brad led them in.
This corridor led to another open door right at its end. The blank wall beyond seemed to be part of yet another corridor. Brad led them to a door on the left branch, the first of a series that lined both sides of the hall.
According to Gregarrt, the room beyond was the first one disturbed. Dævara again got a light on. In a couple of seconds, the room was brilliantly lit.
The illumination was decidedly unilluminating. The room was empty.
The crew filed in and spread out a little, so each had a view.
“It’s not supposed to be empty, is it,” Brad said. It wasn’t a question.
“Thomehow, I doubt it.”
Dæv said, “I was down here a few years ago. Greg first showed me how the light works, then. It was full of boxes and barrels, it was.”
“Shouldn’t it be full of rubble, now?” asked Brad.
“Only if there actually was a dig,” Elian replied.
“I don’t doubt Greg’s word on this, Elian. That doesn’t mean the Underdwellers had anything to do with it, though,” Brad conceded.
“There should be something of what he said would be here,” said Quol.
“Yeah! Why would it be gone now?” Sometimes Darmorel sounded just like everyone else.
Brad said, “This was the first storeroom hit. Greg said there were others. Let’s look at them.”
The team split into two groups. Bradwold, Elian, and Dævara went left down the hall; Darmorel and Quolamin the right.
The first two rooms Brad saw were like the first: completely empty. Not so the third room. When the lights flickered on, they reflected off facets of stone. Or rather, something that looked like stone. Moving as one, Brad, Dæv, and Elian walked over to the first pile of rubble and crouched down to give it a closer look.
Crystalline chunks of…something, none bigger than a clenched fist, littered the floor. They were flat-surfaced, sharp-edged, and translucent. Red and blue filaments wriggled through them. Dæv reached out and touched one. It was warm and gave slightly. When she withdrew her hand, she left two depressions. The tiny whorls of her fingerprints were clearly visible in the glare.
“I don’t wish to alarm anyone but, if I remember my early studies at the Mages Guild, these are chunks of the Spire,” Elian rumbled.
Bradwold turned to the dwarf. “You studied at the Mages Guild?”
Elian nodded. “That’s where I got my training as a healer.”
“Do you smell that?” Dæv asked. It was subtle and slightly acrid. “And look.” She pointed to the crystal she touched. The fingerprints were no longer visible. One could barely make out the imprints at all, in fact.
“They’re melting,” Brad said.
“Evanescing, I think. No liquid, but there’s a smell, there is,” Dævara pointed out. She stood. The other followed her example. “These rooms were only to store these pieces of the Spire for a while.”
Elian said, “We still don’t know why, though.”
“To sell?” asked Brad.
“No that can’t be it. No market for it.”
“Besides,” said the elf, “It’s disappearing so fast, there’d be nothing left of the stone before a buyer could be found, there’d not.”
Digging into the spire…that it was possible was far more alarming than who did it or why.
Elian, “The Spire is solidified magick energy. This state change means this energy is floating around loose.”
That stopped them all as they considered the implication of unchanneled magick slowly filling the air of the city.
Someone had done something dangerous to the Spire that had resulted in its energy being released. The question was, to what end? No one could think of a good reason. Could the apparent ineptitude of the Garda be a result?
“Let’s get the others. We must go to the Underdwellers now,” Brad said. Elian started to object. “Elian, if they aren’t doing this, they may well know who is.”
The dwarf nodded reluctantly. He’d have to lead them.
The others had found the same thing and had come to the same conclusion. The later the theft, the more rubble remained in the rooms. Still no hint of where the original stores had gone, though no one really cared about that anymore.
They reformed, Elian now taking point with Brad just behind Quolamin. The dwarf led them back a little way down the corridor. He stopped at a spot on the right that looked no different than any other. He turned to them. “The Underdwellers are leery of surface dwellers and mistrustful of non-dwarves. You will be unmolested only so long as it remains clear that you are with me. Don’t stray from the group for any reason. By leading you to their places, I am vouching for you. If they decide that you are a threat, all our lives will be forfeit. I know from experience that the Garda permit them to administer their own justice—down here, anyway.” The dwarf’s face fell.
Elian knelt, holding both hands flat against the stone. He began a plainchant in one of the dwarven tongues. The depth of his voice’s pitch made Brad’s chest vibrate. It echoed along the hall sounding like a voice that could sing the Multiverse into being.
When the dwarf was done, a large section of the wall simply wasn’t there anymore. Without a word the fighter-healer stood and strode into the opening. The others followed.
They entered a cave so large there shouldn’t have been space for it. Anywhere but Glyph, this would have surprised Bradwold. The others seemed to take it in stride as well. He looked back when they’d all taken a few steps and found no sign of the entrance Elian had just opened. He turned his attention to the front.
It was a mostly a natural the cavern they’d entered. A rough arched ceiling, jagged and angular, gave the space a cathedral-like air. Square openings cut into it allowed a greyish light to cascade to the ground. The room’s dimensions were unshaped as well. The floor was mostly virgin, but wide pathways had been smoothed in it. Just discernable at the farthest end was a large round pool.
There was no sign of dwarves or any other living thing.
“There should be someone here,” Elian said. He seemed troubled.
“Where should we go?” Quol said.
“We should leave. Without escort none of us, not even I, are permitted to enter the Underdwellers’ halls.”
“Well, we can leave or jutht chanthe it and go anyway. If there’th thomething wrong, the Underdwellerth might thank uth for helping.”
Elian turned to Darmorel and just looked at her for a moment. He nodded. “Let’s do it. Something is definitely wrong.”
They reformed and followed the dwarf, their steps echoing and re-echoing from the high ceiling.
The paths were paved with triangular flagstone that had been laid over the planed down surface of the native rock. The rock itself appeared grey from a distance. Close to, it was multi-coloured in subtle shades of everything. Dæv had never seen stone like it. A sudden epiphany—“Are we still under Glyph?” she asked.
Over his shoulder as he walked, Elian explained, “In a sense, no. This space—” he indicated, with a sweep of his arms—“was part of the largest city on a world that died with its sun many thousands of years ago. Legend has it that the Hermetists offered to move it to a safe place. The offer was accepted and as many of my people as could fit crowded it. When they emerged, they found they were in the underground of Glyph.”
‘Hermetists,’ thought Bradwold. ‘I wonder what their take on all this would be.’
Quol asked, “Did all dwarves come from that world?”
“Not at all. It was a colony of the dwarven home world. Today, my people number in the billions scattered over almost two dozen worlds.”
The crew walked the curving path while the conversation continued, past crossing paths that led, some to the pool and some to arched openings in the wall. Brad could see that they were headed for another such opening.
They came abreast of the pool, a perfect circle about fifty feet across, neatly edged with the native stone. The lip was barely a foot above the level of water. The latter was black and still, a dark mirror.
Brad asked, “What is the pool for?”
“It’s part of a lock system. That—” Elian stopped and swore, an especially potent sounding phrase in his native tongue.
Without another word, the dwarf left the path and sprinted toward the far side of the pool. The coarse surface didn’t seem to give him any trouble. Brad seemed to hesitate for a moment, then beckoned them all and followed. They did so more slowly.
All but Dæv got slightly bruised from the occasional fall as the four of them straggled, panting, to the far side of the pool where Elian was crouched over the body of a dwarf.
This one was dressed in tunic and trousers of dark green. They had sandals on.
The hair and beard of this one was blonde and plaited in cornrows. That and a suspicious swelling under the tunic identified the dead dwarf as female. There was a dark stain on the dwarf’s abdomen. “Shot,” said Elian the Healer.
Brad asked, “By whom?”
Elian looked up at him over the body. “Almost certainly another dwarf. Unless—” he looked around—“someone else got here before we did.”
“What the fuck is going on down here?” from Brad.
That echoed the general sentiment. The was Spire leaking potent magick, there were unauthorized intrusions in the Underdwellers’ supposedly impregnable realm, and now murder. No Garda involvement in any of it was the worst.
“We should go back and report this,” said Quolamin.
“Who to?” countered Dæv. “We’ve never had a crime in Glyph, we’ve not. The Garda stop them before they can happen. They can’t’ve allowed this…” Dævara voiced the thought they all had. “Maybe something’s happened to them?”
“The leaking Spire magick might be to blame,” Quolamin.
“How?” Darmorel.
“Just a hunch. It would be a significant change to the atmosphere. The Garda are nonmaterial. It might have a negative effect on them.”
Bradwold listened, again worrying about the motive of whomever had changed the Spire. He hoped Quol was wrong even though that might mean the Garda had simply decided to abandon their charge over Glyph. The City of Portals would become a war zone if it became known that the Garda no longer kept the peace. Half the armies in the Thirty Aions would want control of the city and its Portals. “Elian, could this have been an execution?”
The dwarf blinked and turned to stare at him, brows descended toward his nose, finally shaking his head. “It wouldn’t have been done this way. Even a fleeing fugitive would have been treated better.” He lifted the body and spotted another, smaller wound in her back, an entrance wound. “Shot in the back. This was murder. We go on.” Elian’s tone and his thunderous expression brooked no argument.
No one now considered any other course of action. If murder had been done, this place held the best chance of getting some real answers to what or who plagued the City That is a World. Brad thought of how much might depend on what they could do in the next few hours and shuddered. “Where would we find most of the Underdwellers?” he asked.
“Further down. The locks would be the quickest way, but the platform isn’t here.” The dwarf pointed to the pool.
“Where would it be?”
“Below. The last person to use it could have tied it in place so it couldn’t rise with the water level—”
“Because he’d just committed murder,” Brad.
Elian’s head snapped around to stare at the party leader. “Or was fleeing someone who had.”
“Is there any way to get the platform back up?”
“No, there isn’t. We could go down without it, but only if everyone can swim.”
Quolamin spoke. “Would a levitation spell be of any help?”
Everyone turned to face her. She had one eyebrow raised and a teeny smile on. Dæv replied, “It might do. What d’ya think, Short Stuff?”
The corpse at his feet had momentarily robbed him of all sense of irony. “It takes a good fifteen minutes to get to the next lock. Can you carry all of us for that long?”
“Don’t think so, but I shouldn’t have to. Send the water level down first and I’ll lower us all down the empty shaft.”
Twenty minutes later they were on the wayward platform and going further down the lock system.
The levitation had felt strange to Bradwold. The spell grabbed him somewhere in the middle of his abdomen. The rest of his body was dead weight hanging from that one spot. It was uncomfortably like balancing on a narrow pole jammed through his middle, absent the pain.
The shaft of the lock system was cylindrical and of polished native stone. Water clung to the sides. The light they carried awakened a vivid life in the colours of the rock. It was jewel-like in its intensity.
Dæv asked Elian what the stone was called.
“Orichalc,” the dwarf replied, his voice echoed up the shaft. “It was native to only the world that died. All that’s left of it is here.”
“’Tis pretty, it is!”
Elian nodded, the lines in his face smoothing as anger momentarily loosened its hold. “It had many uses as well. At one point, its value was above any other stone. Now what’s unmined here stays in memory of the world that was.”
After a pause filled with morose speculation on many types of death, Darmorel asked, “How much further down?”
“We’re headed for the main dwellings. Someone there will have answers.”
Brad heard the unspoken fear. They hadn’t seen a living dwarf yet.
In total, they descended two vertical miles and seven more locks, before reaching the bottom of the colony.
A carved door rose slowly to one side of the shaft as the party ended their descent. The platform settled into its berth.
The sound of water continued, its level still dropping.
The water’s retreat quickly revealed a dock of sorts, slick with run-off, connecting their stationary ferry to their exit.
Despite the layer of water still covering the causeway, Bradwold found the footing firm and fast.
Once the crew got within arms’ reach of the door, the latter quietly withdrew into the left wall. The scene revealed shocked them all.
Darmorel caught her breath. Dæv swore in Gaelic. Elian was surprisingly silent and unmoving. Brad felt his heart slam into his ribcage three times and then it might as well have stopped altogether. He felt himself leaning heavily on the doorframe as a wave of dizziness advanced and retreated slowly.
A large open area dominated by an elaborate flowing fountain was carpeted with the corpses of dwarves.
The smell hit them: spoiled meat and shite.
Brad’s breakfast came up. When the fit passed, he noted that Dæv and Elian were the only ones who didn’t vomit.
As soon as Quolamin’s spasms subsided, she fired a spell into the room that killed the stench.
The sound of the cantrip echoed in a space utterly silent.
No flies; no carrion birds.
Dwarves kept no animals except for food. There wouldn’t be any near their homes.
At Brad’s direction, Elian and Darmorel joined him in advancing into the room, feet taking small dragging steps. Quolamin and Dævara stayed in the shadow of the doorway.
Pain for the murdered advanced in waves like a tide, getting higher and higher, threatening to drown Bradwold. He forced it down, made himself see.
Flesh, where it was visible beneath crusted blood and torn clothing, was grey and swollen. Cuts on the bodies; severed limbs and heads; chests and guts ripped open. Intestines had spilled out of opened bellies, hence the stench of excrement. “This didn’t happen recently.”
“Two weeks ago, at least,” said Elian, the healer.
“Thothe woundth don’t have the look of swordth or axtheth.”
“There’s almost no blood,” Brad noted.
“They were dead before they were butchered.” Elian said.
“Who by?” Darm asked. She didn’t expect an answer.
They reached a fountain. The basin was free of any sign of carnage. The water was clear. When Brad took off a steel-backed gauntlet and dipped his hand into it, his fingers burned and began to ache in seconds—it was icy cold. He bent his head and scooped out a bit, smelling then slurping water before it drained between his fingers. Cold and delicious it was.
Darmorel, and after a moment’s thought Elian, drank as well. It didn’t erase the horror of the situation, but it did make it more bearable somehow.
“The bodieth,” Darm said. “Notithe anything thtrange about them?”
After a moment, Brad saw it. “Too, neat. There should be some piled on top of others. Limbs and heads are near to their own corpses. It’s as if they lay down before being butchered.”
Elian said, “We need to check the homes.” Stepping over bodies, the dwarf moved as quickly as he could toward one of the gates in the iron fence that surrounded the square.
From his tone, Brad thought the dwarf already had a good idea what precipitated this slaughter.
Bradwold looked around. The light was everywhere. It was a pleasant yellow, without any source that he could identify. The surrounding cavern was of the ubiquitous rock.
The ceiling was rough-hewn, as had been the chamber they’d entered from. In glimpses, as he picked his way over the dead, he saw the village that surrounded the square. He’d expected rooms tunnelled into the rock and was surprised to find proper homes instead.
True, they were low and regular in outline, but they had windows and doors that wouldn’t have been out of place in the city above.
The three of them passed through the gate and into the town proper. Brad looked up to find Dæv and Quol, following the outer edge of the fence, most of the way to them. Elian halted and waited for the pair.
Upon entering the village proper, the first thing they noticed was the absence of the dead. The streets were clean and silent.
Elian approached the nearest building. The windows held no glass. Something that might have been a shutter prevented a look inside. The dwarf approached the front door, took a breath, and pulled it open.
He stepped in at once. The others followed.
The room looked to be a combination kitchen and living area. Most of the furniture had been carved in place from native stone. The whole dwelling was one giant carving, in fact.
A low table with six chairs around it, all rigidly fixed to the floor, was on their left. On the other side, a carved soot-blackened declivity, obviously a fire pit, was surrounded by low, flat mounds.
Dæv looked up and found the strangest feature of the home. Its twelve-foot walls didn’t support a ceiling of any sort. Everyone but Elian seemed to notice it at the same time.
There were four windows the room. Each was tightly shuttered from the inside. The table was clear. Shelves along the far wall held kitchenware on the left and books on the right.
Bradwold went deeper into the home. An open archway led to a narrow hall with two doors on the left and one on the right. Sleeping chambers were to either side and the last was a water closet. All absent any sign of dwarves. All neat and tidy.
“No one,” he said in response to their looks.
There was no sign of the occupants anywhere in the dwelling. Likely, they were dead in the square.
Elian said, “Let’s spread out and check a few of the other houses.”
* * *
In all, the crew, apart from Elian, spent an hour checking other buildings for signs of life or more corpses. The dwarf walked the perimeter of the square outside the fence, moving slowly, head down. Bradwold wondered why.
Elian told them when he returned. “There’s no sign that anyone left the square once the butchery began. Anything in the houses?”
“Empty,” said Bradwold.
“Elian, what’th going on?”
Elian stared at Darmorel for a moment. Then, “It looks like this was suicide.”
“What, all of them?” asked Quol. “How? Why?”
“Under certain circumstances, death is the only alternative for a dwarf.” Elian shook his head. “I can’t imagine what, but something in their life here made extinction the least objectionable option.
“The ‘how’ is simple enough. First, one dwarf is chosen to kill the others. Next a poison to render them senseless. Then the chosen dwarf butchers the others and takes a fatal dose of the poison. We will likely find him somewhere in the square without visible wounds.”
“Would the other settlements in the Under have done the same?” asked Quolamin.
Elian nodded deeply.
“You don’t believe it was suicide, though, do you?” Dævara.
Elian shook his head. “It was made to look it, but my intuition tells me there was at least some coercion.”
“Why? Under what circumstances would a dwarf commit suicide?”
“They’d only kill themselves if they knew they were going to die anyway; and die in some way dishonourably.”
They all stood in silence for a few moments, looking from one to the other.
“Maybe they knew something we don’t,” said Brad.
* * *
Brad’s words landed in the fertile soil of the Dævara’s sudden worries. No one spoke for a time as each considered what course of action to take.
Elian broke the silence. “Ugly as it may be, we must consider that this is exactly what it seems. If it is, then their deaths were inevitable and certain.”
“That must mean that something is coming that threatens Glyph as well, doesn’t it?” asked Quolamin.
Elian nodded. “We must assume that. Whatever they discovered; it had to be here, in the Under.”
“Let’s go look for it then,” Brad said.
Something had disturbed the equilibrium of the simple lives of the dwarves of the Under. Their investigation of it had led them to the conclusion that their lives were forfeit.
They could not escape death by fighting, nor they could escape it by fleeing. The latter was what bothered Dævara the most.
Leaving Glyph, even if it meant abandoning a home of millennia, had to have been a possibility. Their suicide had to mean that the dwarves had concluded leaving the Nonspace City would not save them. How far reaching was the disaster they foresaw?
“Elian, where would they’ve made the decision to die?” Dæv asked.
“The Gathering Hall, most certainly,” he replied. “It’s the best place to start, if we’re going to find out what happened.” Without another word, he led them to it.
Dæv had a fair understanding of dwarf culture. Another race might have used the village square as the place of gathering, but dwarves were a careful, methodical people. They tended not to multipurpose anything, especially places, most especially important places.
The Gathering Hall was the effective seat of government for the dwarves of the Under, every dwarf a parliamentarian. All important decisions affecting the lives of the colony would be made there.
It would be big enough to hold every dwarf from every town and village in the Under. That would mean almost two hundred thousand seats.
The whole of the society would have to be present for important decisions. Illness, except of an incapacitating nature, would not have excused an absence. Even the children of the dwarves would be present, and their voices heard. The Gathering Hall would be the most protected place in the colony.
To get to it Elian led them out, past the houses opposite their point of entry.
There was a wide clear space beyond the last row of houses. It puzzled Dæv that it would be here.
Elian explained that it was a cross between tradition and defense. Mostly, it was space left over in the cave and it just never got used. The village had more houses than it currently needed—had needed, he corrected himself—even to accommodate population increases. There just wasn’t a use for the space.
A large semi-circular opening in the far wall was their destination.
It was dark in the passage, but Elian would permit no light. Ahead was a dim glow that guided their steps without illuminating them.
They came into a hemispherical room about twenty yards across lit by no visible source. Of the three other exits, Elian took the rectangular one opposite.
Once again, they travelled in the dark. This time the walk was longer.
Since the slaughter in the village, Dævara had been anticipating something. She wasn’t sure what, only that it would be another disturbing blow. The noise coming from up the hall confirmed her fear.
Distorted by distance and echo, they all clearly heard chanting.
How he could tell was a mystery, but Elian was the first to break the crew’s silence by declaring that the voice was not a dwarf’s.
They approached the sound cautiously.
The chanting became clearer to the Teller’s ear. It was Kazhi, the language of the Incunabulum and of the Syrat. Dævara gripped her red staff tightly and held it across her chest.
The light got steadily better. “We’re almost at the Gathering Hall,” Elian said in a low voice. “No sound from here on.”
The others readied weapons. Dævara heard Quolamin mutter the syllables of an incantation, readying a spell for use. The elf gathered protective power from the Syrat, hoping that the change to Reality being engineered by the chanter in the Gathering Hall wouldn’t negate such an effort.
At ten yards from the bright square of light ahead, Elian turned and motioned everyone down. They continued forward in crouches.
The dwarf signalled a halt and moved the last two yards on his stomach. Dæv waited with the others, eyes locked on Elian as he poked his head out just enough to see into the room. He remained unmoving for a while.
Something was wrong. By all accounts, Elian was a talented scout and should have been able to assess the situation quickly.
After a time, the dwarf beckoned. Something about his expression said that things weren’t right. The others crawled slowly forward.
Evidently, the corridor had been designed to accommodate the whole of the dwarven village at a go; all five of them fit easily along the floor.
The room was shaped like a huge shallow cone, lined with stone benches. They were crouched at an entrance most of the way down.
Below a figure was standing upon a stage.
Detail was difficult for Dævara to make out as the person was obscured by a bright light shining behind it. There was enough to determine that it was male, nude, and likely human. He was also holding a soft covered book in both hands. It was open.
It could have been any book, Dæv knew that. But it wasn’t. The chanting had confirmed the worst. It was the Incunabulum.
Things had got ahead of her and there was still no sign of her father. Dævara wondered if the time had come to tell the others in the group about her arrangement, made so long ago. Not yet, she decided.
At the far end of the line, Brad and Elian had heads together, likely working out a strategy. Brad said something to Quol. There followed the muffled zing of a spell going off. Nothing else seemed to happen, but the mage looked pleased with the result.
A whisper passed down the line. “Move down on three,” whispered Quolamin. Dævara passed it on to Darmorel, the last on the left.
Elian held up a fist. Index finger raised…then middle…finally ring finger.
She was up and moving with the others. The elf just had time to see two other strangers approaching from the opposite side when with a sizzling crack, the lights went out.
Raging blue fire roared all around. The noise was deafening. Dæv knew what was happening. “Everyone, snug close to me!” she shouted above the noise.
Soon she was the middle of an elf-wrap.
“What’s this?!” Brad had to shout as well.
“My Syrat is keeping the spell from me, it is! If you stay close enough, it’ll save you!”
After what seemed a long time, the spell began to break up. The roaring stuttered. The room began to appear in strips. With a small thunderclap, the flame evaporated.
The benches being too low to hide behind, they abandoned all notions of stealth and began to move down. Quol began to ready another spell but stopped once she saw the stage.
Dæv hadn’t had time to do more than register the presence of the other two before the spell had engulfed them. Now she saw that they were both women, one of them a Miu, a species she’d never seen before.
The man that had started all the trouble was lying prone on the stage. The cat-woman was sitting on him. The other, human by her look, was just reaching the stage.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
