• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Emilo shrugged. “Do you want me to go first?” He reached for the rusty remnant of a railing, only to be slapped away by the suspicious dwarf.

“Don’t you try it!” Cantor seized the railing and stepped onto the top step, which was a small web of iron bars anchored solidly into the bedrock of the fortress.

Immediately the bars creaked, and there was a distant clatter of some scrap tumbling downward, clanging off the jutting wreckage of the stairway. The Theiwar yelped and clung to the railing with both hands as the frail support leaned outward, the vast gulf yawning like an unquenchable, eternally hungry mouth. As Cantor clung to his precariously dangling perch, more bits of metal broke away, the sharp sounds fading into the depths, banging, jangling, continuing to fall for a very long time.

“Here,” said Emilo, extending a hand. He, too, stepped onto the bending bars of the platform, casually swinging into space with a grasp of the railing, then hopping to rest on the next intact stretch of stairs several feet below. “Just do it like that.”

“I’ll do it my own way!” snorted Cantor, gingerly inching along the railing, grunting as his feet swung free. He clumped to a rest beside the kender, and this time he didn’t slap away the supporting hands that wrapped around his waist and helped pull him to safety.

“Come on,” Emilo said cheerfully, scampering farther along the rapidly descending framework.

“Wait!” The Theiwar followed as quickly as he could, his temper growing more foul with each swinging traverse, each heart-stopping leap through the darkness. Quickly the hole in the floor disappeared overhead as they continued to descend steadily down the inside of the cylinder of stone. And always the kender proceeded jauntily, spanning long gaps with the same lack of concern with which he stepped over easy, solid footholds.

Abruptly the dwarf halted, seized by a new suspicion. Cantor clasped a shaft of metal and glowered at the kender, who was quite a few feet below him. “How come you’re not scared going down here? Don’t you know you could break your neck with one little slip?”

“Oh, we kender don’t worry about much of anything.” Emilo made a breezy gesture with one hand, ignoring the darkness yawning below. “The way I look at it, if it’s going to get me, it will. Doesn’t make much difference if I waste my time being afraid.”

“That’s crazy!” With renewed muttering, the dwarf started after the kender, trying to conjure up those images of treasures that had once flitted so seductively through his mind. But another, deeper thought intruded.

“What was that you were talking about, that thing that had you worried?” He remembered Emilo’s nervousness, even fear, when they had first talked of the gem. “I thought you said you kender didn’t get afraid of stuff?”

“What do-oh.” Emilo’s voice fell. “You mean down by the jewel?”

Cantor nodded silently.

“Well, there-there was a skull on the floor right beside the jewel. It kind of gave me the creeps. Just when I was thinking of taking that pretty stone along, I got the feeling that the skull was watching me with those shadowy eyes. I decided I would leave the gem and get out of there.”

The Theiwar snorted in quiet contempt. Here was a person who didn’t have the sense to worry about a bone-crushing fall into a yawning abyss, yet he let himself get alarmed by a mere piece of skeleton!

With a renewed sense of smugness, the dwarf struggled to follow along. He still cursed at frequent intervals, and his fury at the kender’s seeming ease of movement grew into a cold determination, fueled by his instinctive antipathy for one who was not Theiwar, was not even mountain dwarf. His resolve was clear: As soon as Emilo showed him where the jewel was, the kender would die.

Finally a lower platform emerged from the darkness, and Cantor sighed, relieved that the interminable descent was almost over. Yet he soon saw that there remained one more challenging section to traverse, for the tangled wreckage of the