Mortal Consequences (5 page)

“Sorry is nothing,” pronounced the dwarf, obviously an old mountain adage. Then surprised him with, “I owe you, Sunbright Steelshanks. I, Drigor, son of Yasur, owe you a favor.” He tipped the warhammer, then left the stone room.

Sunbright sat on the shelf and stared at the empty doorway, wondering what next? A quiet stir made him turn.

“A dwarf owes you a favor. Better than money in the bank.”

Sunbright looked into Knucklebones’s single eye and asked, “How long have you been awake?”

“Long enough. As a child, I learned to wake silently. You make powerful and lasting friends, country mouse.”

“I meet a lot of people, true, though some I must kill. How’s your head?”

“It hurts. What are you looking at?” she murmured, almost against his chin as he loomed above her.

“It’s a shame you’ve only the one, because it’s a pretty eye,” he whispered, then he planted a big juicy kiss on her eyelid.

“Yick! That’s not where they go!”

He kissed her small, firm mouth.

“Better?”

“Much better,” she murmured.

Sunbright and Knucklebones spent the night huddled under two blankets and the glowing iron pipe. The stone was hard, but the warmth wonderful. In dry clothing and with breakfast (their own rations) under their belts, they felt better, if sore.

Drigor walked into the room shouting, “Are you better?”

Noise made Sunbright’s head throb, but he answered civilly, “Yes, we’re better, thank you. This is my friend, Knucklebones, by the way.”

The dwarf only puffed a wisp of ring-braided mustache from his mouth. “It’s well you can travel,” he said, “for you must leave.”

“Leave?” The word was jerked from Sunbright.

By the glow of luminous paint the dwarf’s face looked like old parchment. He nodded glumly, brooking no argument, and said, “We have nothing to offer you, and you nothing to offer us. Your mission is accomplished and you may go. We conserve food and fighters because of yak-men. What you saw yesterday was another scout party. The yak-men covet our mountains. They push in from the east, and we are busy killing them. This takes food, and we have barely enough to feed ourselves.”

“More folk on the move …” Sunbright pondered aloud. “Tell me, do you find the animals fewer, and sickly, even plants not thriving?”

Drigor frowned, and said, “Yes, perhaps. The elk and goats did not climb as high this autumn, and even the high-dwelling chamois have moved to lower meadows to scratch moss. Scouts tell us the lichen and gorse is thin on the highest peaks, and not recovering from their graze. Why ask?”

“The high mountains are another harsh territory, but fragile, like my tundra. I sought my people in traditional lands for months and never found them. They’ve moved into new territories, unless they’re all dead, which I don’t believe. Now you tell me yak-men press in from the east, outside the empire. I wonder if they too find their land can’t support them.”

“I care not.” Drigor waved a craggy hand as he said, “These mountains can’t support them either, and we kill all they send. But our best fighters are away soldiering, and the yak-men are many. Sometimes I think …”

The pause arrested Sunbright and Knucklebones, but the dwarf never finished, only changed tack. “Never mind. You must go. Gird yourselves. A guide will lead you out.” He spun on his heels and stamped away.

“The rotten bastards!” Knucklebones snapped. “The lousy cheapskates! Pitched out into the storm without so much as a by-your-leave! Why not just hurl us off the mountain, for Shar’s sake?”

“Or charge us for the room and hot water,” Sunbright sighed. “It would be kind to give us some of the yak-men’s rations. They had food satchels.”

“I’d like one of those carved staves.” Knucklebones groused. She rammed clothes into her ox hide pack, yanked the straps tight, and slammed her blanket roll atop. “They’re probably worth a fortune! And we earned them, for we engaged the enemy first.”

“We would have died if the dwarves hadn’t attacked,” Sunbright reminded her.

“They still stink, the penny-pinching shrimps. I hope their mountain collapses around their ears.”

She shut up as a dwarven woman, the same who’d led them here, clomped through the doorway. Crossing her arms, the dwarf waited impatiently for them to strap on their tackle. Silently, the humans complied. Without a word, they followed her through corridors black or illuminated, searing hot or just warm. Knucklebones craned her head around, for she’d seen nothing when carried in. They heard bursts of coarse laughter, smelled cookfires and food, glimpsed rooms where dwarves repaired gear or stoked charcoal fires for forging. Once she heard a snatch of lonesome song like a coyote’s cry. Deliberately she dragged her feet to slow them.

For Knucklebones found this mountain enclave enticing. The winding dark tunnels with jots of light, so warm, reminded her of home, the sewers and tunnels of the floating enclave of Karsus. And too, the hustle and bustle and busyness reminded her of the thieves’ community with its quiet secrets and bold camaraderie. Visiting the dwarven warrens made the city-born orphan feel homesick, and yet at home.

But they were ejected. A wave of cold air gushed, and made Knucklebones draw her sheepskin coat close to her neck. Her breath fogged, misting the picture of the outdoors, though she knew it was sunny. By the time her one eye had squinted open, they stood alone at the mouth of the pass, the dwarven woman having turned back.

Sunbright huffed in the clear mountain air. After last night’s storm, fair weather brought blinding sun reflected from a million icicles and knobs and patches on gray, naked rocks. Far in the distance, beyond lesser peaks, lay some blue-gray and green land to the south.

Knucklebones sipped chilly air and waited for the barbarian to begin the trek down, but he stood stock-still. His lover realized he seethed inside, furious, the insult of being thrown out finally fanned to a white-hot rage. Yet he breathed deep, swallowed his anger, and finally summed up, “A hard life makes a hard people. But still, they could have … But never mind. Let’s go.” He tramped off, going too fast on the icy slope.

That was a contrast between them, Knucklebones thought. While her anger flared quickly, and quickly died, Sunbright took a long time to anger, smoldering low but hot, perhaps for days, then exploding.

Meekly, Knucklebones picked after him. She reflected that Sunbright too was hard, for the tundra had made him so. And being driven from his tribe, surviving on his own, had hardened him more, until he was tough as tempered steel. But even steel could shatter under tension, and the constant disappointments galled him, she knew. Seeing Dorlas die, losing Greenwillow, being dragged to the future against his will to be chased and abused, failing to find his tribe, being refused hospitality by dwarves he’d pledged to visit….

“Hard lands and hard people, yes,” she murmured, “just please don’t turn bitter on me, Sunbright. Don’t harden your heart….”

The casura hung in the air, dozens of mouths working; scores of eyes glaring; spidery hands threatening, pitching rocks, sticks, bones, and shafts and blades of broken weapons. The ghost argued with itself, for it was composed of many, many creatures thrown together by violent death, and they hated one another.

Yet the sound of scratching feet stilled it. The casura turned to the noise, for that meant life, and more than anything the collective ghost hated anything that lived.

Onto the littered floor of the cavern trod the flint monster. Its horny feet, sharp-edged as granite, crunched underfoot a hundred bones, hooves, horns, jawbones full of fangs, rib cages, segments of tails without flesh. That hundreds had died here meant nothing to the monster, for it was obsessed with its own goal.

“… This way out. Must be the way out. Must be. Need to get free, and kill my enemies …”

The monster glanced around, sniffed through nostrils that were mere slits in its stony face. With the stirring of the high ghost came a graveyard reek, dead flesh and turned earth. Too, the dark air of the cavern resounded with sinister rattling, knocking, scratchings, and skittery, uneven footsteps. Yet none of these warnings deterred the flint monster, for it sought only a way out of the endless, winding caves.

Suddenly, in the darkness, loomed a host of eyes, all sizes and shapes and colors, all flaming with hatred. Their baleful glare was so intense the cavern was bathed in yellow-white light that flickered along the broken walls like firefly glow. The casura was nothing but eyes and mouths and rootlike, spidery hands, the whole flung together like chopped grasshoppers caught in a threshing basket. The gathered ghost stretched thin in spots, held together as if by fish glue, while other parts were clumps of eyes and hands and mouths. The fiend was a sticky web dancing in the air, clinging to the walls, touching the floor in spots. An awful and impassible barrier.

The casura’s burning glare sparkled on the monster’s flinty hide, yet the monster’s round, staring eyes showed no fear. The flint monster hated with a deeper passion than even the ghost, for it hated all souls: living, dead, or in between. Without eyelids, the exposed eyeballs were a shocking blue in its dark carapace.

Yet there was recognition here. Ages ago, it seemed, the casura’s many dead creatures had been an unholy army: imps, ghouls, ghasts, blind giants, barbed fiends, things without names. Together they’d battled the enemies of Prinquis, archfiend of these pits. Until treachery brought down the balor of the Abyss, ancient, deadly enemies who’d descended with joy and crackling whips to slay everything moving in this vast throne room.

And the flint monster had been one of those enemies. And still was.

A howl echoed from the casura’s hundred gibbering mouths. Writhing hands snatched rocks, skulls, and broken blades, and flung the lethal lot at the flint monster. Yet nothing harmed it, not the missiles, nor the stench, nor the screaming noise, nor the rolling waves of hatred. The flint monster had lived with pain for so long, nothing outside could hurt it.

Raising two long, misshapen arms, curling fingers like shards of glass, the monster retaliated. From one hand exploded bolts of pure darkness, shafts blacker than moonless night, that stabbed amidst the spider-web ghost. Eyes popped into jots of gore, twisted hands were splintered to fragments, mouths had teeth smashed out and knocked to the four winds. From the monster’s other hand spun a whirlwind of blades sharper than steel. Propellers of dweomer sliced through ectoplasm like water, ricocheted from stone walls, and went on spinning. Phantom blades ripped through the undying spirits of fiends and imps and giants, who screeched in protest as they were killed yet again. They howled too because they knew they would heal again, slowly, in agony, never dying, never cured, again hanging in this chamber to die anew. For such was the nature of this pocket hell, that all the denizens suffered, died, and were resurrected to suffer forever.

Before long, darkbolts and whirlwinds of steel ripped the casura into shreds like a sundered cobweb. Ichor and blood and snot and ectoplasm dripped in a ghastly rain onto the antique bones and weapons of the dead below. Ghostly beings shriveled, died, retreated, shouted, hated one another and themselves, almost forgetting the flint monster in their midst.

For the monster passed on. Down another long tunnel it scuffled, searching. Its dark-bred senses were attuned to the air, the rock, the dust and decay, constantly seeking any sign of outside life.

And far down, where rocks had collapsed the tunnel to a hand’s height, the monster sniffed a trace. Rusty water, far off. The merest trickle, yet a hopeful sign, for nowhere in this corner of hell was there any standing water, for thirst was another form of suffering, and the archfiend who ruled here liked his subjects to suffer.

Any water, no matter how foul, came from outside.

“My enemy, she sealed us in. But not all. Sloppy work, sloppy. I shall be free, outside, at last. Free to wreak vengeance. To kill…”

Scrabbling with hands hard as diamonds, the flinty beast dug at crumbled rock.

“That’s it! Put up your fists!” bawled Delmar.

“If that suits you!” Sunbright shot back.

Both men swung while everyone else hollered.

Delmar was Sunbright’s height but broad as an ox across the shoulders. He had dark skin, dark, curly hair and a beard to his chest, a tight blue shirt hacked off at the shoulders, and woolen breeches above rawhide boots. His arms and fists were hard as oak stumps from a lifetime of hauling baggage and wrangling horses, and he knew how to brawl, which was more than Sunbright could boast.

But the barbarian was furious, having fumed for weeks at the jeers Delmar pitched his way. It was inevitable that tempers would explode into flame.

Dark Delmar stamped his heavy boots down near Sunbright’s toes to distract him, or else cripple him given the chance. The barbarian danced nimbly backward, but Delmar added a savage right hook at Sunbright’s ribs. Sunbright was rocked half off his feet by the tremendous blow.

Merchants, bodyguards, cooks, and others—including Knucklebones—circled to watch and cheer and slap down bets. The caravan came to an abrupt halt on the woodland road, a good fight livening up an overcast summer afternoon. The only one not thrilled was Knucklebones, who held one hand over her mouth and tried not to scream. At Sunbright.

Crooked to one side by aching ribs, Sunbright guarded his left and whirled to present his right. He learned fast, and as Delmar repeated his trick of stamping before punching, Sunbright beat him to it. A fast right smashed into Delmar’s brow and glanced off, dinging a swatch off the barbarian’s knuckle.

Delmar had flipped his head aside, missing most of the blow, but his bruised eyebrow and eyelid began to swell immediately, cutting off vision in that eye. “Lucky!” he sneered, and made to stamp again.

He changed tactics, so his off hand strove for his foe’s brisket. The wooden fist slammed into Sunbright’s belly, but that was hard as iron plate itself and did little damage. Rather, the barbarian hammered both fists onto Delmar’s neck and knocked the man into the dust.