But this time, the handprint pulled at me, dragging my gaze to the painted red print on Droko’s chest…directly over his heart.
Gorgul’s eyes fell to the paint, then lit on the matching handprint he’d laid across my cheek.He opened his mouth to speak—to challenge Droko’s vision, no doubt—and then opened his mouth wider.Wider.Impossibly wide, in a soundless, lopsided yawn, eyes huge…as his head slid apart in a diagonal slice from ear to jaw, as precise and sharp as the invisible seams in the walls around us.
Dreadforge hadn’t missed, after all.
The top half of Gorgul’s head hit the ground with a meaty thump, rocked in place a few times, and finally went still…just as his body collapsed.
23
DROKO
I’m told I had a vision.
To me, it felt more like a dream—like the chaotic nightmares that had plagued me since I first allowed myself to sleep in the geyser caves.But this time, I hadn’t exactly been sleeping.And I’d spoken aloud of what I saw.So if that’s what prognostication truly was, well then….
Visionwas as good a word as any.
I just hoped it didn’t happen again anytime soon.
I’d made an impression, that was for sure.My honor guard had been respectful before, but only as far as duty dictated.Now?They were terrified.
The only one who could even bring himself to look at me was Kof.Maybe, to his single eye, I was only half as frightening.And while he stank of fear as much as all the rest of them, at least he forced himself to do his job.
He genuflected low and said, “The chieftain has been summoned and the slaves are secure.”
Neither Crespash nor Archie would be happy about their confinement, but the guardsmen were all jumpy, and I couldn’t risk either of my slaves ending up on the wrong side of a blade.“Get up,” I told Kof.I needed another set of eyes—or at least a single intelligent one—to puzzle through what the dwarves had hidden all those years ago.
The amber walls glowed with eldritch light that shifted and danced.Something aboveground dappled the daylight streaming in through the small shafts—a cloud, perhaps, or maybe a branch.I kept my eyes firmly on the floor, worried that the dancing light would provoke another “vision.”A queer tingle in the back of my neck that preceded the prior episode was absent.But I didn’t want to take any chances.
The chamber was natural.The center had been a tree, once.A massive tree as wide as a hut.At some point deep in the past, its own sap had overtaken it and the core had rotted away, leaving this hollow.Maybe it then sunk into the cliffside, or maybe the rock had formed around it.Either way, it had been eons in the making—and then worked with dwarvish craftsmanship to house the bones of the shamans.
The work of dwarves is so cunning that the ignorant take it for sorcery.But the fact that I knew it for what it was—staggeringly complex and unerringly precise mechanics—didn’t tarnish my opinion of the crypt in the least.
The far side of the chamber had slid open to reveal the final resting place of the Red Hand Clan’s shamans—a single galley.Kof and I moved into the dark hall, him raising a lantern to try and see what we’d discovered.
A dozen biers flanked the long, narrow space, half of them empty, the other half home to dead shamans.The mummified remains had been undisturbed inside either of our lifetimes, and their elaborate ceremonial garb had fallen to rot.
Kof made a fist and blew into it like he was staving off cold—a ward against evil I recognized from my father’s superstitious kobold chambermaid—but he stuck by my side, which was what mattered most.
It wasn’t the bodies that held my attention…but the writing on the wall.
I’d always been criticized for my interest in words and letters.But the figures here were archaic and difficult to ken, even for me–at least until I got my bearings and was able to discern one word, then another…and their meaning unfolded.
A faithful server shall accompany the shaman into the afterlife,
Steadfast until the end,
May they be at peace in the halls of the ancestors,
And together shall they remain.
It was then I saw that the biers weren’t solid stone.Each platform was more like a table, with a narrow vault hollowed out beneath—just the right size for a second body.
Slotted in below every interred shaman was the corpse of a slave.Bound.Festooned with nonsense mystical charms.Likely buried alive.
With mounting panic, I realized that Taruut kept no slaves, save one.
Archie.
