By my reckoning it takes more than twenty hours before the leftwards track emerges into the main mineshaft. I’m panting and hungry, legs aching, yet all those discomforts are forgotten the moment I step forth from the tunnel.
This mine is vast.
For most of my eight years as a miner I was hollowing out Broderick’s forging hall; only a couple of times was I put in an ore extraction team. Those times, I’d thought the mines I found myself in were huge, with shafts many hundreds of paces wide filled with clanking, screaming, sparking machinery.
Yet this place is another scale altogether. It is hard to believe something so vast resides beneath the city.
It looks to be an entire mile in diameter. Rust-red water has pooled in the bottom and formed a lake glittering from the glow of buzzing flies that hover above and are occasionally snatched down to oblivion by a lurking frog. Up the walls run lines of dark entrances to side-tunnels. Iron juts from them, the last stubs of long decayed bridges.
In the dim light I can just make out a spire in the center of the red lake. I point to it.
“What's that?”
“Remains of the central lift,” Hayhek tells me. “They used to load the ore on it. Was a very great piece of rune-work, I’m told.”
“How old is all this?” I say in awe.
“A thousand years, give or take. Was hollowed out long before Thanerzak’s time. Originally the ore was transported eastwards to another city. Then, after the conquest, Thanerzak had new shafts dug from his city to see what was left. Wasn’t much apparently.”
“What job were you on when you came down, then?”
“Just guarding some engineers. They wanted to figure out how the ore lift worked. Spent a good few days up to my knees in that red water while they poked around. Toenails looked like I’d stubbed them raw for a good six months afterwards.”
“Let’s hope we don’t spend quite that long in the water. I suppose it’s not so deep, then?”
“About ankle deep on the whole, but there’s a few deeper channels we need to be careful of. We should wade through slowly.”
“You lead the way.”
“Gladly.”
He steps down from our high ledge into the lake and the water runs up nearly to his waist. Blood red ripples spread from him. He begins to wade forward leaving pinkish froth in his wake. Glow-flies buzz around him.
“You coming?” he calls back. “It’s deeper around the edge, should shallow out soon.”
“All right.”
I step down with a splash. Immediately I feel water run into my armor—there’s no fire in it for my runes to repel. Forward I go, feeling mist through my vision slit cooling my face.
The cruel heat I sensed before is gone now. I tell myself it was probably just my imagination, yet I can’t quite shake my unease.
The red water sloshes and plashes as we advance. Long waves wriggle away from us—how long has it been since this water was disturbed so much? Depends on what the biggest creature lurking here is, I suppose. I hold Heartseeker at combat readiness.
My foot hits a rusted length of iron. Bubbles erupt and frogs leap from the water; I jump back in fright then shake my head as they bound away on wide feet. Continuing, I notice that Hayhek is leading me in a curve.
"Where are we heading anyway?" I ask.
"Just around the opposite side. There's a tunnel spiraling upwards there. That’s going to be our way out."
"All right."
I listen to our voices echo, the sound bouncing around the great hollow mineshaft and, I do not doubt, into the many tunnels branching from it. And we weren't even speaking that loudly.
"Maybe we should stick to whispers," I whisper. "Very quiet ones."
"Good idea."
We slow our pace to reduce our splashing also. The ripples spreading from us diminish slightly. The lake feels awfully quiet all of a sudden.
Then I spot it—the wake of something arrowing toward us just beneath the surface. It looks to be twice as long as me, and there’s a hint of black about it.
“Amphidon!” I hiss.
It’s already leaping out the water, jaws open. I stab into it, but in my haste jab too hard: Heartseeker pierces through it to the other side too fast to redirect itself from the guts to the heart. The amphidon lands on me and clamps its jaws around my head. It squeezes and my helmet groans, but does not give or bend.
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Hayhek’s axe separates its neck. The jaws remain clamped for a short second before detaching and splashing loudly down into the water.
“Bloody hell!” I hiss as I tear Heartseeker out the gore. “You might have warned me there were amphidons lurking down here.”
“We never ran into any!” he whispers. “Maybe there were too many of us. They seem like the kind of beasts that go after animals that get separated from the herd.”
I make an unsuccessful attempt to wash the blood off my armor with the blood-red water. “Let’s hurry up a bit,” I suggest. “In case all that splashing woke up more.”
We wade on and curve around the mass of fused rust in the middle. A hundred black windows formed of the spaces between the girders stare at me. I think I hear a creak inside it, and I make my path around wider, but nothing emerges. I force myself to take some deep breaths and relax slightly. Judging from the last amphidons we ran into, they’d rather go for the corpse of their fellow than risk hunting us.
I just hope nothing massive and tentacled lives down here.
And for once our luck holds: we make it to the opposite side with out further incident. I pull myself up onto the ledge, higher at this side, and out of the water. I shake some drops from my arms and hear them patter gently on the stone.
“Not so long back to the city from here, right?” I whisper hopefully.
“No.” He gestures to the dark mouth in the wall before us. It’s a fair bit wider than most tunnels: a thoroughfare if I ever saw one. “This tunnel spirals up around the shaft. All the side tunnels we can see link up to it. After the top, it’s a bit of a maze, but I think I’ll be able to lead us through no trouble.”
“Excellent.”
I can hear the relief in my voice. Of course, I know that the occupied city will have its own troubles. And there’s still the possibility that the dragon is dead, and all my effort in bringing back the key will have been for naught. But worrying about that is pointless. At the very least I’ll be able to scrounge some proper food again.
We enter the blackness.
“Shit!” Hayhek curses, only five minutes later.
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The black dragon pads after the echoes.
It picked up on them a few days back after an ugly encounter with a pair of abyssal salamanders drove it to down near the river. The way the water itched its wounds made it curse its luck, until it heard the distinctive cadence of dwarven footsteps.
They were very faint: almost completely drowned out by the ambient sounds of the caves—water dripping, magma hissing, bats chittering, salamanders hissing, and so on—yet dwarven footsteps have a particular rhythm that all dragons recognize instinctively. They are very ordered and regular, much more so than those of humans or elves, for dwarves are born to hammer to a regular beat and that habit slips into their tread. They also ring slightly, because who has ever heard of a dwarf not clad in metal from head to toe?
So the black dragon forced itself to ignore the stinging dampness and continued in the direction of the footsteps. At several points it misjudged the direction and they became faint—a couple times it lost the trail entirely. Yet, tunnel by tunnel and cave by cave it drew closer. The footsteps grew louder, and the black dragon began to pick up voices.
The first time that happened, what passes for a smile among dragonkind twisted its scarred lips. Fiery light shone through its gleaming teeth.
It recognized that voice.
And now it watches the voice’s owner as he splashes across the rust-dyed water and up into the tunnel beyond. The black dragon chuckles to itself. It has lived its whole life in caves and tunnels, and can read the flow of air passing over its black scales. Tunnels that link to the forest and by extension the surface world have a soft wind flowing from them.
It can sense no such wind from this one.
It unfolds its wings and, even injured as one is, they’re plenty well enough for a glide down to the tunnel’s entrance.
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“What is it?” I hiss.
“Blocked!”
“Blocked? What with?”
“What do you mean, what with? Rock, of course. It’s fallen in.”
“Fallen in?”
“Yes. Shit. Shit, this is bad luck.”
“How much rock is there? Maybe we can dig through.”
“We can try.”
We lay down our weapons and begin to pull stones out from the crumbled mass dividing us and the way up. Stones is probably too weak a word: each rock is a chunk at least as big as my head, sometimes bigger than my torso—we roll those ones together, straining and heaving to get them down. Yet for each rock we remove several more fall to take its place.
“This is hopeless,” I pant. Even with the strength of my armor, this is hard. More exhausting even than fighting. It’s mining without a pick.
“We have to keep trying,” Hayhek says stubbornly.
I pull up my visor, wipe off the sweat with one of our none-too-full supply sacks, and get back to work.
It really is hopeless. There seems to be no end to the rocks in the blockage. After more than two hours I step back, exhausted, and review our progress. We have advanced but a few feet, and who knows how many remain?
“We need to turn back and find another way,” I tell Hayhek.
His shoulders slump. “You’re right.”
“We’ll find a way eventually. At least, we’re closer to the city than we were when we set out.”
“Yes. But not that close. Not if we’re lost.”
“Still. We have to emerge eventually...”
I trail off. Do we? There are plenty of stories about dwarves who get lost down here and meet violent ends. Or just plain sad ends—starving and thirsting, falling down, and having their mummified corpses stumbled upon decades later.
“At any rate, we have to turn back.”
Hayhek turns and begins to march away, very quickly. I chase after.
“We should rest first though.”
He spins around. Through his vision slit I see his eyes are red with tears. “I was this close!” he hisses. “This close to seeing them again... Just a few days away...”
“We’ll make it up there!” I promise him.
“But when? And what’ll have happened while we were gone?”
He resumes his march—
And the darkness around the corner sprouts a terrible clawed hand which grabs him around the torso, pinning his arms to his sides, and it presses him down to the stone. He screams out.
Bright green eyes gaze upon me.
“You dwarves are such noisy creatures,” says the black dragon. “Now, I very much hope you have the key. For both of our sakes.”