Chapter 36: An Argument in Stone¶
Prologue: Dravyn, Pentarch of Rune¶
A fortress is an argument written in stone. Every wall is a premise. Every door is a conclusion the builders meant to force upon whoever came after them.
The dwarves who cut this place understood that. Their halls are square. Their angles are honest. They set their prayers where a man must walk past them to go deeper, so that no one might descend into their work without first being reminded who had taught him to cut stone at all. That is not ornament. That is proof.
The trolls who squat in it now understand nothing. They have collapsed the stairs they could not guard. They have fouled the rooms they could not clean. They keep their kennels beside their beds because they cannot tell the difference between the two. They were handed a proof, and they have scribbled over it.
My master taught me that wrath is a hammer, and he died believing it. Xin wrote otherwise. Wrath is a rule laid against a crooked line. It does not shatter. It corrects. There is a difference between those two things, and the difference is the whole of my work, and I have spent a great many years learning to feel it in my hands rather than merely recite it.
So. We went back up the path in the rain. We opened the doors that had been left to us. And where we found sleeping things grown fat on the people of Athanor, we did not debate.
The anger whispered, as it always does.
I answered it with geometry.
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I. The Ledge Regained¶
4th of Desnus (May), 4711 AR
An hour was all the ledge would give them. They had gone down the path after the barbican fell, out of the wind and out of sight, and there beneath the shoulder of the cliff they had bound what needed binding and let their hands stop shaking. Rust held the line of retreat below with Dog at his knee, watching the wet trees for anything that might come up behind them. Then the light went the colour of slate, and there was no further reason to wait.
They climbed back. The path was a bare five feet across in places, slick as a fishmonger’s bench, and below it the forest floor lay seventy or eighty feet down — far enough that the drop stopped being a fact about the landscape and became a fact about them. The rain came sideways off the rock face and found the gaps in their collars.
The foyer received them as they had left it: crumbling stone, filth trodden into it, and one hobgoblin lying where he had fallen with the rain now reaching far enough in to pool against his ribs. Beyond the eastern door a dog was barking, and it was not the sound a dog makes at a stranger. It was the sound a dog makes at a meal. No alarm had been raised — the whole of their advantage, good for perhaps another quarter of an hour.
Elroy wanted the flanks before the throat. The hobgoblins who had run from the gate had run somewhere, and he had no intention of putting his back to a door he had not opened. Perry weighed the great arch north against the side passages, and agreed. They turned south.
The ruin deepened as they went. Perry turned his lamp along a broken riser of the second fallen stairway and found what he had half expected: the bright bite of pickaxes still on the stone, the flat scoring of a stoneworker’s tools, no weathering on any of it. The upper ways had not fallen. They had been brought down, deliberately and recently, by somebody who wanted every foot that entered this building funnelled onto one floor and one staircase — by a mind that had never once considered anyone would come this far.
Dravyn had gone still by the southern wall, two fingers set against the stone, and the stone answered him — the low patient sense of mass and weight that had been in his blood since before he had words for it. He signalled Elroy without speaking. Two creatures, large, immediately south. Something small moving overhead that he could feel and could not resolve.
Elroy put his nose to the nearer door and drew back from it. Old hide, unwashed flesh, the ammoniac reek of a bed nobody had ever changed — and through the wood, unmistakable, snoring. Two mouths, deep and wet and entirely untroubled.
The other door was worse. Flies came off it in a haze even through the gap beneath. Behind it lay the mouldering sweetness of a charnel pit, and beneath that, bones being worked between jaws: the crack and the snap and the crack again, unhurried, the noise of something that had all night.
Perry turned that over, thinking about what a harpy keeps for company. Harpies keep to their own kind. They will eat nearly anything that walks but find goblinoid flesh foul — precisely the arrangement that lets hobgoblins and harpies strike their sour little bargains. When harpies keep companions at all, the companions have feathers. Whatever was chewing behind that door was not a harpy’s pet. It was not anything’s pet.
One room slept; one was awake and hungry. They would take the sleepers first, and quietly — the noise was coming either way, and they would rather choose the hour of it.
Grotdor asked for the latch and got it, kneeling with his scarred hands flat on the wood the way a man listens to a wall. The iron handle was greasy with rendered fat, worked into the hinges by years of careless hands, and the whole assembly turned in his grip without so much as a sigh. Beyond lay a barracks of sorts: half a dozen pallets of branches and uncured hides, and on two of them a pair of trolls sprawled with their bellies distended from a recent and generous meal, dead asleep with their mouths open.
Grotdor mentioned poison. Elroy dismissed it before the word had finished leaving him.
“We brought you for your fire.”
— Elroy Jenkins
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II. The Sleepers¶
Grotdor stepped through the doorway first and squared his stance like a furnace door swinging open.
What came out of him was not a flame so much as a tide. It rolled thirty feet down the length of the barracks in one unbroken sheet, took the pallets and the hides and the branches, and turned a room that had smelled of sleep into a room that smelled of burning hair. The first troll was picked up and set down again, flat on its back among the embers of its own bed. The second came awake already screaming.
It is the particular horror of a troll that almost nothing the world does to it can finish it. Flesh knits; bone reseats; a wound that would end a man is, to a troll, a delay. Fire is the exception. Fire tells the flesh to stop, and the flesh listens, and everything after that is arithmetic — which was why the Pentarchs had come into this house with a kineticist at the head of the line.
Both trolls tried to mend as they rose. Both were told no.
The first came up snarling and swung for Grotdor, and it was Elroy who took the blow instead — a step and a shoulder and the whole mass of him interposed, the jaws closing on plate and shield-rim rather than on the man who had lit the room. Elroy grunted, adjusted his footing, and did not otherwise appear to have noticed.
Dravyn came past him with the glaive and opened the creature along the flank in one long clean line, then let a thin fork of lightning crawl between the pair of them, testing. It hurt them. It did not appreciably impress them. He filed the result away with the satisfaction of a man whose experiment has eliminated a variable: no weakness to lightning here, and none to acid. Fire alone — and then whatever they could put through the hole fire made.
Then Elroy went to work. The longsword he carried had been sworn to giant-kind, and it knew what stood in front of it. He came in low and rising, on a line he had been waiting the whole climb to find, and the blade went through the troll’s shoulder and out again in a single glittering arc, and the arm it had been holding came away entire. The troll had time to look at the place where its arm had been. It had time for nothing else — Elroy was already coming back the other way, and the second stroke took the other arm off at the elbow. The thing folded into the burning bedding, and this time nothing in it tried to get up.
Perry had not moved from the doorway. He rarely did. He raised the repeating crossbow and put a fire-touched bolt through the surviving troll’s chest at a spot he had chosen seconds before it became available. The bolt punched in and stayed in; flame took hold around the shaft, and blood came out around it in a steady, unhurried flow the creature had no way to stop. He read the animal the way another man reads a ledger, and shared what he found: its body was iron and its mind was straw.
Elroy raised his shield and offered the survivor a greeting it did not live long enough to answer. It clawed once at the shield and found the shield where the shield had promised to be, then twice more at a man no longer standing where it had aimed. Then it began to burn in earnest, and Dravyn stepped in and took it twice with the glaive — once across the ribs, once through them.
It dropped like a sack of burning hammers.
From the opening of the door to the second body hitting the floor, not twenty seconds had passed, and nobody had been meaningfully touched. Perry went through the pallets afterward, briskly and without hope, and found exactly what a troll’s bed contains: stinking hide, filth, and no evidence that any of them had cared who slept where.
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III. The Voice in the Larder¶
The two rooms connected. Of course they did.
With the sleepers dealt with, the party turned on the other door — the one with the flies, the one that had been awake the whole time. Elroy knew what was behind it before any of them. They had met a leucrotta once. It had wheedled and begged and traded, and they had let it live, and it had repaid them by sending them toward a cliff-cave full of harpies without one word of warning. He said as much, at volume, and put his shoulder to the door.
The chamber beyond was a slaughter-yard. Carcasses lay open-ribbed across the floor with their meat gone grey; horses, and things that had not been horses, picked over and abandoned where they lay. Iron chains trailed from rings in the wall where the hounds were sometimes tied. And in the middle of it, up to its knees in the wreckage of a week’s eating, a leucrotta turned toward the doorway and smiled — an almost human expression on a face that had never been anything of the kind.
“Help me. I’m drowning.”
— The elder leucrotta
Then a laugh, wet and sick and delighted with itself. It asked them to save its baby. It said the baby was drowning too. There were two of them, and both had learned from the last time.
Elroy shifted on the threshold. There was no ceremony in it — the curse he had carried out of the Narlmarches came up through him like heat through a grate, shoulders first and jaw last, and by the time his foot came down on the far side of the doorway there was a great deal more wolf in it than there had been. He had stopped fighting the thing a long while ago. Now he simply used it, the way he used the shield, and for the same reasons.
He hit the elder before it finished laughing.
It answered in his own voice — took the words Elroy had just spoken and gave them back, warped and stretched and repeating, until the room seemed full of a man saying the same threat over and over with his mouth in the wrong place. Then it opened that mouth wider and let out something that was not language at all.
The sound went through the chamber like a hand through water. Dravyn felt his grip on the glaive go pleasantly, disastrously loose; the thing in front of him was suddenly a marvel, a small and interesting fellow he was very glad to have met, and the swings he took at it went nowhere he intended. Grotdor caught it too and kept moving by habit. Elroy felt it grasp for him and shook it off.
Perry heard the seam. Somewhere under the call was a joint that did not fit — a fractional wrongness in a voice assembled rather than spoken — and once he had it, the illusion came apart in his hands. That was not Elroy calling him. It never had been. He put a bolt through the elder while the rest of them were still admiring it, and this one carried fire, and it stayed lit.
The second leucrotta came in on Elroy from the flank and got the shield for its trouble; the wood split under the bite and stayed between the teeth and the man. It kicked, missed, and fell back on the trick that had served its kind a thousand years — it stole Dravyn’s voice and threw his own oath back down the darkening hall in his own cadence.
The elder was dying by then and knew it. Perry hit it again, this time with acid, until Elroy allowed as how the creature was bleeding out of five places at once. It made one last plea for mercy in a voice it had taken from a man it meant to kill, then ran for the dark of the deeper hall, and nobody had anything left to stop it with.
Elroy caught it three strides in. The thing that had begged at the barbican died in the middle of a stolen sentence, the false voice cutting out mid-word, and the sudden absence of it was louder than the sound had been.
Somewhere deeper in the fortress, something large answered the noise. Dravyn felt it through the floor — a mass in motion, heavy and unhurried, coming or waiting or circling, he could not tell which. Nothing came through the archway. Whatever it was never arrived and never went away, and from that moment it sat at the back of the evening like a name left off a ledger.
Elroy spat the elder’s torn-out throat onto the flagstones in the direction of the dark and observed that his own language might not travel, but that this particular remark generally did.
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IV. The Pack¶
They had perhaps four seconds of quiet. Then the hounds came — four at once, low and fast and nipping at each other in their eagerness, all sinew and hanging jowl and the same maddening capacity to close a wound faster than a man could open one. They were the reason the kennel had chains in it. They had not been in the kennel. They had been loose in the fortress the whole time, and now they had found the noise.
Dravyn met them with fire, set in the middle of the pack rather than at the front of it — a hard bright bloom that lifted two clear off their feet. The nearest came out of it burning and half its size. The rest came out angry. Elroy was in among them before the light faded, and Elroy did not raise his shield.
That was deliberate. Every jaw aimed at him was a jaw not aimed at the halfling behind him or the kineticist rebuilding his heat. He took the smallest hound apart where it stood. Something bit him hard enough to matter, and a fever came with the bite, some old sickness the creatures carried in their teeth; he burned it off in a breath and kept moving. Something else swept his legs, and he came up off the floor swearing cheerfully and observing that he had not given anyone permission for belly rubs.
The second leucrotta was leaving by then, in the incremental way of a cunning animal: a step, a feint, a hit-and-run kick at Grotdor’s ribs, then three more paces toward the ledge — drifting always toward the open air and the seventy-foot drop, trying to draw them out onto stone that would do its work for it. It called for help in Dravyn’s voice as it went. It was bleeding from four wounds and still, in its way, negotiating.
Perry shot it with cold. Grotdor finished the argument. What the kineticist did to the creature at the ledge was not fire at all; it was the absence of it, every scrap of heat drawn out of the thing at once as though through a flue. The leucrotta went rigid mid-stride, crystals blooming across its hide, and toppled sideways with all four legs still locked in the position of running.
Dravyn cut the second hound in half where it stood, the glaive passing through at the precise point where ribs stop being ribs. He stilled a third’s heart mid-lunge with a thread of lightning. The last Elroy took by the flank and did not let go of. Then the Pentarchs went around the room with acid and with fire and burned every corpse until it stopped being able to consider getting up. It was ugly work, and nobody suggested skipping it.
There was nothing to take — chains, dead horses, and the remains of people the trolls had already stripped of anything worth stripping before throwing the leavings to their dogs. Perry looked once, at length, and declined to look twice.
Dravyn laid his hands on Elroy where the worst of the bite was and let the light of his god do what the glaive could not. After that they simply stopped. No one in the company could mend a body quickly — that seat had been empty in the field for some time — so they did it the slow way: the better part of an hour of poultice and bandage in a room full of dead things. Elroy’s shield had a bite out of it a competent artisan could have hammered flat in ten minutes. He declined, on principle, and carried it as it was.
And Dravyn, palm flat against the northern wall, reported what the stone was telling him. More trolls. More hounds. A much larger chamber, and a great many feet standing on the floor of it.
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V. The Allfather’s Water¶
They did not go north. Not yet.
There was a hallway in the north wing that Perry did not like the look of, for the specific reason that he liked the look of it very much. It was clean. In a building where every surface bore the greasy record of everything that had touched it, this passage was swept nearly bare, and the air smelled of nothing but wet stone and rain. In a fortress full of trolls, that was not a comfort. That was a question.
The answer was on the other side of the door at the end of it.
The chamber beyond had been carved with love. Bas-reliefs ran the length of every wall — dwarves at the forge with the sparks rendered individually in the stone; dwarves in a shield-wall against giants twice their height; dwarves at the seam of a mine with gems coming out of the rock in their hands. Along the northern wall, water poured in a steady rope from the head of a graven warhammer to fill a font beneath. The hammer had never been meant to be lifted, and the water had been running out of it longer than Athanor had existed. Under the sound of it there were voices — whispered prayers, in Dwarven, still going, from no throat anyone could find.
Perry examined the font first, because Perry examines things. The water was cool and fresh and, so far as any test he could devise, nothing more sinister than water.
Elroy — human by blood, dwarf by adoption and by oath — went to the reliefs and read them the way another man reads a letter from home. This was a shrine to Torag: the Father of Creation, the Allfather, the god who taught the first smith which end of the hammer to hold. Which meant the fortress under their feet had been dwarven before it was anything else, and that everything the trolls had done to this place since had been done to somebody’s cathedral.
Perry, in a rare and frankly opportunistic flash of theology, suggested the General might get something out of that font the rest of them would not.
“Yeah, I’m gonna take a sip. Wash this troll out of my mouth.”
— Elroy Jenkins
He drank. Something in the room took his measure while he did — a weight of attention, patient and enormously old, the sensation of being looked over by someone with every right to look. It found him acceptable. Nothing struck him and nothing burned; the water was cold and tasted of iron, and the whispering went on undisturbed. What came back to him was a piece of understanding he had not asked for: that no path was worn through that hallway because the things living in this fortress could not stand in this room. They were not the Allfather’s, and they knew it.
It made the shrine, among other things, the safest ground in the building.
Dravyn had his palm to the wall again. Something large lay to the south, he said, and roughly ten feet up — which meant a floor they had not reached by a stair they had not found. Behind another door there were risers climbing. Nobody wanted to go up yet. The great chamber first.
Grotdor took that door the way he had taken the first, hands flat, hinges greased by a decade of filthy palms, and it opened without a whisper. The silence bought them nothing at all. The room’s occupants were already facing the right way.
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VI. The Great Hall¶
It was a cathedral of a room. Pillars marched down both sides holding up a vaulted ceiling lost in the dark, and off to one side, unmistakable even at that distance, the carved railings of a grand staircase climbing to the floor above. This was the throat of the fortress. Everything the collapsed stairways had been meant to funnel came through here.
Three trolls stood in the middle of it picking bones, and for one long ridiculous moment nobody on either side did anything at all. Then the growling started.
Perry shot first. He had loaded fire before the door opened, and the bolt went in under the nearest troll’s collarbone at an angle he had chosen from the doorway; the flame took at once and the bleeding began beneath it, and the creature spent its next seconds discovering that neither would stop. He read the thing while it staggered and passed what he found to the others in three words, and every one of them was a fraction surer of their next blow for having heard it.
Elroy moved Grotdor bodily out of the doorway and took the gap himself. Better arithmetic, he announced: one man in a five-foot arch, one shield, and every claw in that hall obliged to come at him singly rather than at four of them at once. A trollhound came around the pillar and snapped at him, got a shieldful of teeth for it, then went for his legs and found the General remarkably unwilling to fall over.
Behind him, Dravyn opened his hand and threw fire in three directions at once. The bolts left him in a fan, one to each troll, chosen and released in the same breath, and where they landed the effect was catastrophically out of proportion to the effort. The first took its ray full in the chest and nearly came apart. The third took one nearly as bad. Even the middling hit on the second went in like a coal into snow. Dravyn had brought a great deal of fire and had left his scruples at the barbican.
That was the moment the first troll stopped fighting. It looked at four figures in a doorway who had walked through its house killing everything in it, and at its own chest, which was burning, and made a decision no one could really argue with. It shouldered a side door open and bellowed into the dark beyond — a warning, a name, an alarm; whatever it was, it carried — then broke north and put a pillar between itself and the fire.
The rest were slower to reach the same conclusion. The second troll rushed Elroy, mistimed the whole affair, and landed heavily on its own backside. The third made three attempts to drag him down and finished face-first on the flagstones beside its companion, having achieved nothing except to make itself easier to hit. Grotdor stepped past Elroy’s shoulder and sent a running line of flame down the hall that touched all of them on its way through.
Perry, meanwhile, did the single most useful thing anyone did in that room. There were more hounds outside — he had counted them coming — and rather than fight them he crossed to the far door, put his shoulder to it, and shut it in their faces. The scrabbling started up at once on the other side of the wood. Elroy remarked, with enormous approval, that they were absolute villains.
Dravyn took a bead from the strand at his throat and asked Elroy, quite seriously, whether he minded. Elroy did not mind; he had spent the whole evening not being hit, he said, and could stand to take one. He waved it through, and the fire went off among the trolls and around him, and he came out of it with his eyebrows more or less intact and one troll behind him clinging to life by a thread. Perry noted, as calmly as a man reading out a total, that a company with no one to mend it should not make a habit of that.
The burning troll had by then had enough of watching its own body try and fail to repair itself. It looked left, looked right, saw a hall entirely full of flame, and ran for the grand staircase, taking the risers three at a time. It went up shouting.
Grotdor did not chase it. He moved Elroy aside with a hand and a word, stepped into the gap, and let go of everything he had been holding — the widest and hottest thing he had thrown all night, a wave that filled the near third of the hall and did not discriminate. The troll clinging to life stopped clinging; it burned where it stood and went down burning. The last troll came out the far side with most of its skin gone. Grotdor watched the wave die and pronounced it, with feeling, worth the cost.
And at the far end of the hall, one trollhound abandoned the fight entirely. It ran the length of the room to the smouldering ruin of the master it had followed in here, stood over him wagging its tail, and licked his burning face. The chronicle records this without further comment.
That is where the hour left them: the Pentarchy holding a doorway in a dwarf-cut hall the trolls had made a midden of, the floor scattered with bodies burning and burned, rain still falling outside in the dark. One troll and its hounds still on their feet across the room. One troll climbing toward the floor above, shouting all the way.
Thirteen months, near enough, since a charter had been sworn on the bank of the Thorn River by five people with no particular reason to believe they could hold anything at all. Hargulka had not shown himself. Neither had the great weight Dravyn kept feeling through the floor. But there was a staircase, and a troll on it, and whatever surprise the Reclaimers had carried since the barbican fell would end at the top of it.
They took a breath in the doorway, and started for the stairs.
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