The Dreaming Hunt (66 page)

Sasha had also sent along with them an ogre-kin who'd said gruffly to call him Olivar. Gabrielle had never been around anyone of his race before and learned in a matter of minutes that his burly appearance was deceiving. Behind the thick jaw, heavy brow, and yellow-hued, leathery skin lay a quick mind and dry wit. An avarian traveled with Olivar, who referred to the bird changeling as his apprentice. At what craft, Gabrielle had no idea.

The last member of their party was a taciturn lizardman. As the journey was long and the need to find that which they sought urgent, Sasha had arranged for the lizardman guide to speed their journey along.

To that end, they boarded a long, low barge poled along a sluggish river by a pair of lizardmen who worked for their guide. At first, the river was wide, bordered by marshes and reeds. But as they progressed, its banks narrowed and grew tall and rocky until the barge flew along in a deep canyon the sun barely penetrated. And then the banks closed in overhead, and they were completely underground.

“What is this?” Gabrielle asked the lizardman.

“An underwae we sail. Faster by far it is than walking, and less conspicuous.”

That it was. She could not tell how long they let the fast-moving river carry them along, but it was at least a full day and a night if the number of meals they ate and the number of times the lizardmen at the tiller took turns steering the vessel were any indication.

When the river finally emerged above ground once more, it was night out, chilly and damp. Late night, then. They traversed another deep canyon, and nothing but shadowed rock walls were visible on either side of them. She huddled deeper in her cloak on her makeshift sleeping pallet and went back to sleep.

When she woke again, it was to bright sunlight. They were just emerging from the canyon into a green valley nestled between surprisingly tall mountains. They must have reached the beginning of Groenn's Rest, the tallest, youngest, steepest mountain range in all of Koth.

They sailed perhaps another half hour to the end of the valley, and then the river ended at a crystalline lake filled with shockingly cold water. They clambered ashore onto a beach made entirely of rounded slate stones no larger than her fist. It made for difficult walking, and she stumbled up the shore to grassier ground.

For the first time since she'd met him, Gunther smiled. “Ahh, it is good to be home. I've missed proper dwarven ale,” he declared, patting his belly and grinning.

“Is it wise for us to be seen in villages and pubs given the nature of what we seek?” Gabrielle asked in concern.

He laughed. “Every dwarven steading in Groenn's Rest will have a few barrels of ale in the cellar. We drink it like humans drink water. It is the elixir of life to us.”

My. He was in an expansively grand mood. She replied, “If that is the case, perhaps we should make a start on our journey toward where you found that bracer. We can stop for ale later after we've walked awhile.”

She thanked the lizardman boatman and his crew and pressed a few extra coins into their hands by way of thanks. And then she turned to face the mountains. “The peaks are certainly high. Is there a way between them?” she asked Gunther.

He chuckled. “These here be baby hills. You've yet to see the real mountains. Once we top that pass ahead, then you'll see the heart of Groenn's Rest.”

He turned out to be exactly correct. Later that afternoon when, huffing and puffing, she stepped over the summit of the pass he'd led the party through, she paused to gasp at the wonder of the massive, snowcapped peaks towering before them, nature's sentinels in all their wild glory.

“Please tell me I don't have to climb one of those,” she panted.

Gunther grinned. “Not all the way to the top of one, at any rate. Just to where the tree line meets the snow line. That's where I was attacked by that filth—” He broke off. “Where that yeren jumped me.”

Mina opened her mouth as if to speak but then thought better of it. Gunther had been throwing sidelong glares at Kuango all week, and Gabrielle suspected he was a lost cause when it came to learning to love yeren as friends and not food.

They stopped for the night at a prosperous-looking farm run by a human family. It turned out their eldest daughter had married recently and moved away, so they had a spare room they were willing to rent out for the night. Gunther and the others bedded down in the barn while she and Mina took the tiny room under the eaves of the rambling home.

If only their hosts knew the Queen of Haraland slept in their house, the ruckus it would cause. As it was, she enjoyed traveling incognito like this. Regalo would have heart failure if he knew she traveled abroad with so little protection and in such primitive conditions. But it was an adventure and a blessed relief from the strictures of royal life, particularly at court.

The next morning, they headed out and began the long climb up a mountain Gunther called the Hauksgrafir. A narrow forester's path crisscrossed back and forth across the face of the ever-steeper slope. Her thighs burned, and her lungs felt near exploding. But if a one-legged dwarf past his prime could make the climb, by the stars, so could she.

In midafternoon, Gunther stopped to survey their position. “I found the bracer in a cave well down that cliff over yonder. But I'd not like to make the climb down to it again. Nearly died, the first time I did. Sheer dumb luck that I fetched up on the last ledge before I would have plunged to my death. A woman like you, a city dweller, could never make the climb and live.”

As much as she would like to disagree with him, she couldn't.

“Way I figure it, there must've been another entrance to the mine I found. Place that big couldn't have carried out all its production through the tiny tunnel and hidden entrance I used.”

He stared at the mountain, thinking hard, and she did not interrupt him.

“I'm guessing the main entrance is nearly straight above us, maybe another three, four hundred feet up the mountain. In yon yeren-infested forest.”

She gazed up. That would put them just shy of the snow line. Which was a blessing. She had not packed boots for tromping around in the cold and wet of a snowpack.

Gunther moved out, stumping to the front of the party on his odd mechanical leg. He led the way up a narrow forester's path. “Keep a sharp eye peeled, lads and ladies, for any cave entrances. Holler if you spot one.”

It took them the better part of an hour to climb the three hundred feet higher. Not only did the path twist and turn, but the air was thin, and at times, the underbrush was almost too thick to pass through. No forester had been this way in a while, that was certain.

Gunther stopped. “Way I figure it, right around here somewhere; there must be a cave or a tunnel into the mountain.”

They fanned out and found it in a little while. As it was getting late, though, they decided to camp in the large cave Gunther had found, its opening cleverly masked by overlapping stones that still left an opening a team of oxen could drive through.

Through the night, Mina and Kuango sat in the cave entrance. Three times, Gabrielle wakened to rumbling sounds outside that just tickled the edge of human speech. Were those yeren? She was too afraid to get up and find out.

First thing the next morning, they dressed warmly and prepared a brace of torches before heading deeper into the cave. Gabrielle was impressed by how Gunther never seemed to get disoriented or turned around while navigating his way forward.

For a while, they traversed a natural cave complex. But then the walls changed and became worked stone. They passed through large chambers that Gunther said were played-out mines. And then he stopped abruptly at an intersection of two crossing tunnels in the thick darkness.

“My sign!” he exclaimed, pointing at some chalk markings on a wall. Now that he mentioned it, the signs did look recent. He studied the markings for a moment, nodded to himself, and moved off down one of the side tunnels.

Before long, they emerged into another chamber, but this one held benches and sleeping coves and what looked like the remains of a forge of some kind. Olivar and his apprentice rushed forward to the forge and began muttering excitedly to each other.

“What is it?” Gunther demanded of the ogre-kin.

“Storm forge.”

“You know how it works?” the dwarf asked eagerly.

“I may be a stormcaller, but that does not mean I know all there is to know about storm forges. What I do know is they're made to channel lightning through those copper conduits coming out of the ceiling right there.”

Gabrielle and Mina waited patiently while the men oohed and aahed over the likely engineering of the full forge that had once stood here. But eventually, Gunther got around to commenting, “Over there, under that pile of rock fall is where I found my armor.”

The party moved over to the small mountain of fallen stone and lifted their torches high. Kuango gestured urgently at Mina, who translated. “He says there's a big place behind it that smells different from the other places down here.”

Gunther eyed the pile doubtfully. “It would take a mining crew a week to move that pile.”

“Ahh, but we've got a yeren,” Mina replied confidently. “If you will show me what stones to have Kuango move without causing the entire pile to come down on us, we'll be past that pile in no time.”

It actually took what Gabrielle estimated to be an hour before a dark opening beckoned at the top of the rock pile. One by one they squeezed through it. She was amazed that Kuango passed through an opening that was barely large enough for her.

They slid down the far side of the rock fall and lifted their torches high.

And gasped.

A room as large and ornate as any receiving chamber at the Imperial Court yawned in the darkness. Benches and decorative pillars, frescoes, and bas-relief hunting scenes were all exquisitely carved from the mountain's granite core. As they strode the length of the vast hall, their torches only lit a portion of the cavernous space at one time.

Which was why they'd nearly reached the far end before Gabrielle spied something that made her stop and gasp again. A statue stood on a raised dais beside a throne-like chair of massive proportions. But unlike everything else in the room, the statue did not look carved of granite. Rather it was fashioned from something darker, and gleaming dully. Metal, perhaps.

They reached the statue and examined it closely. The detail and perfection of the carving were hard to fathom. Each whisker, each pore, each individual eyelash managed to be portrayed with stunning accuracy.

Olivar reached out reverently to touch the suit of armor the statue had been carved wearing. “Storm copper,” he murmured in awe.

“The suit of armor is made of this storm copper, or the whole statue is?” she asked, confused.

The ogre-kin tilted his head quizzically, staring at the face of the carved dwarven warrior. “I wonder…”

“Wonder what?” she prompted when he did not continue. She had a feeling she already knew what he would say, but the message from the Eight sending her and Sasha on this quest had made it clear that the true nature of the statue they sought must not be revealed to any outsiders.

“If the stories could be true, after all—”

“What stories?” she prodded him.

“Of living creatures being turned into storm copper statutes, eternally frozen in metal until the day when they should be released again into the world by reversal of the—”

The room around them erupted into movement and filled with horrible screeching so piercingly loud she could hardly stop herself from clapping her hands over her ears and collapsing to the floor. From tunnels and other openings unseen to her, creatures poured into the hall around them.

Some were small and winged, no larger than dragonflies. Others bounded forward on four legs, dog-sized. But the largest ones made her cringe back toward the statue in horror. They were snakelike in shape and movement, with no legs, upright like humans but undulating forward like a sidewinder might proceed across sand. A haunting pink glow, visible just at the edge of her vision, came from them all.

The piercing noise they made was nigh unbearable. Olivar shouted something, but she could not hear it. The little flying ones were easy enough to bat away, and the medium ones, although annoying, were easily dispatched by Gunther's axe or Olivar and his apprentice's swords.

But the big ones were more problematic. It turned out they could move with blinding speed and dodge when edged weapons were swung at them. More frightening, though, was the way one latched onto the back of Olivar's head with its mouth in some sort of twisted parody of a kiss. His eyes went blank, and his sword tip wavered and dropped.

Gabrielle did not have cause to use magic often—there were servants aplenty who could cast whatever spells she required—but summoning the energy to her hand came back easily to her. She flung a ball of force magic at the creature attached to the back of Olivar's head, and it screamed, breaking away from him.

A swarm of the insectoid bugs was bedeviling Gunther, and at least eight of them had attached themselves to his head, as well. She threw a magical shield at the dwarf, and as the magic raced across his skin, the little creatures detached themselves from him. Once they were airborne, she chucked fire magic into the mass of creatures, singing them and sending a shower of the creatures to the floor.

“Step on them!” she yelled at Gunther. He shook himself from whatever trance the creatures had lured him into and began dancing around awkwardly, stomping on the bugs with his mechanical leg.

She whirled as she felt something latch onto her leg. One of the middling-sized creatures was sucking on the back of her leg. Irritated, she shook it off and cast a ball of force damage down at it from a range of about one foot.

But then something large wrapped around her like a constrictor on its prey, and she felt something moist and cold on the back of her neck. She slapped her hand directly onto the creature's torso wrapped around her waist and cast a bolt of damaging magic into it. With a painfully loud squeal, the creature let her go.