The man who had been harboring the torches lit a spark and soon the flame was going. Erik found he had to squint, which surprised him, given how far back down the line the light was. He turned and saw de Loungville; the sergeant had his usual mask of determination in place. Erik decided he wouldn’t have noticed the sound of worry if he had been looking at the man.
Without saying anything, Erik reached out and quickly placed his hand on de Loungville’s arm, gave a quick squeeze, and released it, the only gesture he could make without saying something.
The sergeant looked at him, giving him only a brief nod of acknowledgment, before Erik moved down the tunnel. Greylock reached the junction of the tunnels, peered both ways, then motioned for the men to follow to the left. Erik reached the junction and as he started to turn the corner, he fought down the urge to look back to where de Loungville waited.
If only the Captain were here, he said to himself silently. Where could Calis be?
Calis held close to the wall as he stared in wide-eyed amazement. He and his father had spoken many times of what it would be like to confront their unusual heritage, a legacy of ancient magic, warped by the skill of Macros the Black, and used to bring to his human father the powers incarnate of the legendary Valheru.
Tomas had wooed and won the hand of Aglaranna, the Queen of the Elves, and had fathered Calis, impossible fruit of a union unique in history. Calis was young by the reckoning of the elven people, little more than a half century old. By human consideration, he was a man of middle years, and by any measure, he had more than a dozen lifetimes’ experience in watching the pain and madness of the creatures who lived on this world.
But nothing had prepared him to deal with the consequences of what he had chosen to investigate.
Elves possessed the ability to navigate by the dimmest light of the night, a single moon, or distant stars, but even dwarves were incapable of seeing in the utter blackness of underground tunnels. Yet they had other senses, and Calis, unlike his elven cousins, had traveled with dwarves enough in his youth to have learned some of their tricks: the sound of air moving, faint echoes upon the passage walls, counting turns and remembering distances. It was said that once upon a path, no dwarf could ever fail to retrace his steps. Calis possessed the same knack.
After leaving the company, he had moved back down to the vast gallery, the circular central hall of this city within a mountain. For that was what he was certain it had been, once in ancient days, a city beneath the mountains, as Roo had supposed. But the youth from Ravensburg had no idea what sort of city.
From what he had studied with Tathar and the other Spellweavers of Elvandar, Calis had suspected from the first that this was a city of elven construction rather than dwarven. But the elves who had built this place were as unlike Calis’s people as they were unlike any other mortal race. Those elves had existed as slaves to the Valheru, and only by command of their ancient masters could such a place have come to be built by elven hands.
Once he had reached the gallery, Calis was convinced the sound he had heard had been nothing more than a distant rockfall. There were no signs of pursuit; still, he moved downward to make sure, passing the strange split in the tunnels that had called to him so strangely.
He had moved deep within the well of darkness, and when at last he could hear only his own breath and the pounding of his heart in his ear, he turned back. But as he approached that odd junction where he had hesitated the first time he had passed, at the head of the company, he again paused, sensing something ancient and compelling deep within the tunnel that moved downward.
It was a foolish risk, yet it was impossible for Calis to resist. He knew he should ensure the others got free, but he had faith in the cunning of de Loungville and the skills of Nakor.
And now he knew what had called him. There was something ancient at the heart of this hall. And he looked upon it with fear and astonishment.
He had taken the tunnel moving downward, following it through another gallery, smaller than the grand gallery they had climbed, yet large enough to have served as a small town. High above, a faint light shone down, so far away that the noon sun was but a pinpoint, yet that entrance, at the summit of some high mountain, told him his instinct was correct.
This ancient place had once been home to a Valheru, much as the great cavern below the Mac Mordain Cadal, the ancient dwarven mines in the Grey Tower Mountains, had been home to Ashen-Shugar, the Ruler of the Eagles’ Reaches, the Valheru whose ancient spirit had come to possess his father and change his nature so profoundly.
Crossing a narrow stone bridge, he had come to a set of wooden doors large enough to admit a great dragon, and Calis knew that once they did, for the Dragon Lords kept their mighty mounts close at hand. In the door was a smaller portal, one used by servants in ages past.
He had moved a heavy iron handle, and to his surprise it opened a latch easily and without noise. The door had swung open on hinges recently well oiled, and Calis blinked his eyes as the sudden light threatened to blind him.
At the end of the long cavernous hall, a ledge overlooked a vast cavern ablaze with torchlight; and in the center of the cavern a village of mud huts, crude and without craft in their fashioning, was constructed around a series of cracks. Steam rose, heralding an underground source of heat, and at the center of the largest vent a heat shimmer danced in the air. As he had approached, Calis had been bewildered by the sudden rise in temperature. Where he had been feeling damp chill when he left the others, he was now sweating as much as he had been in the desert. The thermal vents showed that this Valheru hall was fashioned inside what had once been a volcano.
The air was pungent with the smell of decay and the stench of sulfur on the air. Calis felt his eyes burn at the sting of it as he looked down on the scene below.
Throughout the hall roamed serpent men, and at the center rear of the hall, on a high dais, a great throne rose against the wall. Upon that throne, where once sat a Dragon Lord, now sat one of their tribe, a creature of scales and claws, but its eyes were fixed upon space, for it was ages dead. The Pantathians nearest the motionless figure appeared to be priests, wearing vestments of green and black, and to the mummy of some ancient reptile king they paid homage.
Calis was no Spellweaver, but he felt the bite of magic in the air, and around the base of the throne he saw artifacts from eons past.
It was the presence of these items that caused him to suffer. He ached to march into the hall, brushing aside those creatures, and to mount those steps to the top of the dais, casting down this lesser creature, to take possession of the items of might that lay at its feet.
For Calis was certain these items were indeed relics of the Valheru. Never had his blood sung so, save once when his father had allowed him to hold the shield of white and gold he wore into battle.
Calis fought back such foolhardy urges and tried to make sense of the scene before him. It would be too easy to count this simply a Pantathian village, for there were too many strange things to account for; he wished Nakor was here – the little man’s ability to see things clearly would have been invaluable.
As it was. Calis attempted to memorize every detail before him, drinking in the conflicting images and trying to record them in his mind without passing judgment on their significance, so as not to neglect an important detail through an error in judgment.
After a half hour, several human prisoners were brought into the hall. Most had the vacant-eyed look of those in shock or under some sort of spell or the effect of drugs, but one woman struggled against her chains. The priests ranged themselves in a line across the lowest step on the dais, and the centermost spread his hands, holding in one an emerald-topped staff.
He spoke in a hissing language unlike anything Calis had heard in his travels, and motioned to guards to take the prisoners and move them to another place. Calis wished for his bow, that he might kill this priest; then he wondered where such a violent rage came from.
Then the priest motioned for the first prisoner to be brought before the throne, and two guards moved to carry out the command. A series of ritual passes of the staff