NOVEL FROG Cavern Exile: Bitter Grief
I slice a sliver of meat from one of the legs and put it into Hayhek’s hand. He drops it.
“Eat,” I say. “We have to get our strength back.”
“Where are we?”
“The bottom of the chasm. There’s a river, we’re on an island on it.”
“A what?”
“An island. Dry stone.”
He shuts his eyes and curls back up. I persist with my effort to get him to eat and drag him up to a sitting position.
“Eat!” I urge. “We need to get our strength back.”
Reluctantly he takes the slimy meat into his mouth and chews. His face screws up in disgust and he makes to spit it out. I clap my hand over his mouth.
“Eat!” I urge.
He swallows it and looks sick.
“Where are we?” he asks again.
“After the fight we fell. We’re in the chasm. On an island in a river that runs through the bottom of it.”
“Fight... Where’s my son?”
My heart twists in pain. “You don’t remember?” I say quietly.
“Remember...” He buries his face in his hands. “Oh, hell. Where the hell am I? What’s happened to me?”
“You can’t think like that,” I say. “You can’t dwell on the past.”
He looks up, eyes red with tears. “And who the hell are you to tell me that?”
“I lost my brother! I know how it feels. But you can’t dwell in depression—”
“Lost?” His voice catches in his throat for a second, then he spits his next words: “I didn't lose my son. He was robbed from me, by you.”
“I made some mistakes.”
His eyes flash. “You killed him!”
“I understand why you see it like that.”
“Really? Do you? Our life was going well, until he met you. You roped him into thievery, even, didn't you? How much lower could you have sunk?”
“He agreed. He made his own choices.”
“After you warped his mind.”
“Warped his mind?” I feel a tiny flame of anger rise out the coldness of my grief and regret. “That’s going too far. He always wanted to rise up above the rest. I just persuaded him to take the steps.”
“You shouldn’t have. We had a nice life. A family, enough money. Enough of everything.”
“Enough for you. He didn't feel the same way.”
“He was young, that’s why! Immature, just like we all are at first.”
“Wanting to move up in the world isn’t immature.”
“Isn’t it? Is risking everything you have on a one in ten thousand chance you’ll make it to the top a sensible decision? For anyone?”
“It was for me! I had nothing. You noticed, like everyone did. I never even had to tell anyone and you all saw it: I was a miner. I had nothing. I was the dregs of the dregs.”
“My family isn’t! Why would I risk throwing them down so I can rise up?”
“They would move up with you. And it’s not so great a risk if you do it properly.”
He shakes his head bitterly. “You have talent. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Yezakh had talent as well. You could have supported him.”
“Supported him to do what? Follow you? That got him killed. I made the right decision in trying to hold him back.”
“You would both be dead if it wasn’t for me. You were about to stride right into the battle.”
“Then we would have died together, and I wouldn’t have drawn any attention to my family. They would have hid, and when it all died down, maybe continued something of their lives. Now what do you think is going to happen to them?” He buries his face in his hands again. “Oh, hell...”
“They can hide. Your wife isn’t a fool, is she? And you must have some friends to help her. They’ll live.”
“You don’t know that!”
“If they do, they’ll still need you. Up there, alive and healthy.”
He laughs bitterly. “And you’re going to carry me up, are you? We have nothing.”
“We have food and water. There’s caves on the bank. We can get past the beasts—”
“Beasts? Is this meat from one of them?” He examines the slimy black skin of the leg and needle-like claws. “Amphidons. They’ll tear us apart!”
“They won’t. And after we get past them we can find somewhere to make our camp. Then find some magma, materials... start to forge.”
“Live and forge like the wild dwarves of old," he says sarcastically. "You make it sound so easy.”
“It won’t be easy. But we have to try. So you can see your family again.”
“My family will never be together again, thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me, you’re still alive!” Frustration finally wins out over guilt. “You’d be in a corpse pit with the rest of Thanerzak’s defense force if it wasn’t for me. I gave you a chance, and now another one! I even got the fucking water out your lungs!”
“I wish you hadn’t!”
I throw my hands up in exasperation. “Fine! You hate me, you wish you were dead. I feel the same way about myself, halfway. Just... We can fight about who’s in the right or wrong later. For now, we have to work together.”
He slumps back. “Fine. There’s nothing else to do, I suppose. It’s pointless. But fine.”
“It’s not pointless. There’s still some hope. We have to believe that.”
“I’ll believe it when I see my wife and daughters again.” His voice cracks. His eyes screw up and he speaks his next words through sobs: “Now leave me in peace for a while, would you?”
I nod silently, and walk up to the top of the ramp away from him, clutching the amphidon leg in my free hand. I don't feel like eating any more, though. Miserable old dwarf... I know I should be understanding. Should feel sorry for him silently sobbing down there, and I do. But we aren’t alike. He’s been content to sit at eighth degree his whole life. Decided this is as good as it will ever get, and been too afraid to take the risks necessary for a truly good life. Worse, he tried to hold back his son.
I sigh. Then again, what do I know? If I had my brother with me maybe I wouldn’t be so keen to risk losing him.
At any rate, I have lost him. The diamond key lies at the bottom of the watery abyss where there is no light to glitter on it. Yet...
Surely there is some kind of helmet I can forge with gills and a light. With enough time and the right materials I'm sure I could manage to create one, and with a repaired and improved Heartseeker fight past any underwater beast to retrieve the key. Only, first I would need a dictionary with the right runes, and caves are not generally known for their bookshelves.
I examine the circular engravings on the slope just above the bent figure of Hayhek. They’re immensely complex—I never knew something made up of the same shape repeating over and over could be so intricate in its detail. Loops loop around loops, and are cut through by further loops. It has to be a rune carved by long forgotten dwarves. Yet who knows if it was carved before the river came or after? And on what metal might its magic be workable?
No. I should give up on the key for now, and concentrate on making my way back up to the stalagmite forest... But that’s so far away.
First we must get past the amphidons.
Deep in the stalagmite forest, Guildmaster Wharoth is worrying. Not because of the black dragon—Vanerak is an expert dragon hunter and this one is little more than a whelp. They’re cornering it steadily, preventing it flapping down to vanish into the caves with timed and furious volleys of bolts. Its end is nigh.
No, he is worried by his axe.
Strange that a dwarf should be scared of his own weapon. There’s a children’s story about such a dwarf that his mother used to read to him. A dwarf who made something so powerful he hid it away, only for it to later prove his undoing...
The axe is not what Wharoth is hiding away. Indeed it is at his side always, a sharp titanium wedge that’s bitten the black dragon twice and hungers to do so again. It shines as he takes it out and lays it across his lap. In the dying light of the campfire around which his dwarves are already snoring, he reads the central rune around which its poem is formed. Or at least, he tries to.
Halat.
Yet it’s not halat. What is it? What word has Zathar stumbled across that Guildmaster Wharoth, a scholar of the deepest and most obscure runic languages, has never read? How is it meant to be pronounced, and what is its true meaning?
A chance error turned a common rune to something unknown. That’s what he wants to believe, what he fears to disbelieve. Yet that explanation is impossible. Runes are not discovered by accident, but by deep archaeology and only brought back to life by skill of the most precise order.
Could it be possible that the meaning of the strange rune glinting on the titanium is known not to dwarves long dead, but was formed deep in a young miner’s heart?
This is the theory he hides away; he shivers at its implications.