Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [19]
“Whaddaya mean?” argued the dark dwarf. He pointed across the chamber to a series of stone columns, now broken and splintered, cast casually along the far end of the large chamber. A deep crack, as jagged as a lightning bolt, scarred the wall all the way to the ceiling. “Surely you can see that. Right?”
“Well, of course,” Emilo agreed breezily. “But down below here, I found a whole bunch of tunnels. Even a place where there’s a jewel…”
The kender’s voice trailed away with a shiver.
“Jewel?” Cantor froze, his luminous eyes staring at the pensive kender.
“What? Oh, yes. It was kind of pretty. I might even have taken it, except-“
“Where?” The dwarf had no ears for the rest of Emilo’s story. His mind was alive again, sending a cascade of pictures through his imagination.
Vividly he expanded the vista of his desires, imagining mounds of glittering stones, gems of red and green and turquoise and every other color under the rainbow. His fatigue and despair were forgotten, swept away by a tide of avarice.
His next instinct was as natural as it was swift: This kender was a danger, a threat to the treasure that was rightfully Cantor’s! He must be killed!
Only after the dwarf had already begun to calculate the most expeditious means of accomplishing his companion’s demise did further reality again intrude. Faced once again with the inexorable truth that you couldn’t wring information from a lifeless witness, Cantor was forced to acknowledge that Emilo Haversack continued to be more useful to him alive than dead.
He forced his trembling voice to grow calm. “Where was this jewel?
Far from here?” He cleared his throat and spat to the side in an elaborate display of casual interest.
“Well, quite a bit below here, actually.” Once again Emilo displayed that strange sense of disquiet. “It wasn’t really much to look at, kind of scuffed up and all that. Besides, there was something else… something I didn’t like very much.”
Cantor didn’t want to hear about it. “Take me there!”
“Well, if you really want to. But don’t you really think we should rest for a-“
“Now!” snarled the Theiwar, instantly suspicious of the delay. “You’ll just wait for me to fall asleep so you can get the treasure for yourself!”
“What? No, I won’t! I don’t even want it-not anymore, at least. But all right, then, if you’re so worried about it, I’ll show you. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Muttering about bad manners and pushy people, the kender rose to his feet and plodded out of the chamber where he had discovered the pool of water. They passed through a maze of broken walls and tumbled ceilings, but the dwarf could clearly discern that this had once been a structure of large hallways and broad, sweeping stairways.
Now the shadows were thick through the corners, and a stairway was as likely to be lying on its side as standing upright. They picked their way through the ruins with care, Emilo apparently guessing which path to take at several junctures. Eventually the kender came to a large circular pit, a black hole with a depth extending beyond the limits of the dwarf’s darkness-piercing vision.
“This must have been a central shaft,” Emilo said. If he still begrudged the dwarf’s peremptory commands, his voice revealed no trace of the resentment. Instead, he was as chatty and conversational as ever. “You can see that it goes up through the ceiling as well as down.”
Indeed, Cantor observed a matching circle of blackness in the arched surface over his head. A spindly network of strands dangled through space, connecting the upper reach of the shaft to the pit on the floor level.
When he clumped over for a closer look, the Theiwar saw that these were the rusted remnants of a steel stairway that had once spiraled through the central atrium of the great tower of Zhaman.
And now those same stairs offered a route into the deep heart of Skullcap.
“That’s how I went down before,” Emilo said, joining the dwarf. “You have to hold on a little bit carefully, and in some places the metal sways back and forth. But it’s strong enough to get you down.”