• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 995 0

he had pulled a dagger out of his boot. A moment later, the kuo-toan was gone. He lurched forward on the trembling ground and tripped once more, falling flat and banging his large nose hard on sharp, broken rocks. The pain caused him to scream; his stinging eyes ran anew with tears. The dagger fell and was gone. Then Wykar took a deep whiff of something that filled his lungs like smoking magma. He hunched up on the ground, coughing and gasping as each breath stabbed his lungs with fire. A crystal-nosed dart on his armor had broken open when he had fallen, choking him with its gas.

Deep gnomes are a pragmatic people. That does not keep them from cursing the unfairness of death, and Wykar gasped out a string of curses himself as he waited for a crushing blow from a quake-loosened stone to strike the life from him in the bleak hell of the earthquake. He hoped death would be quick. The gas from the broken dart was the pits.

* * *

The short, violent shock rocked every floor, wall, and ceiling of Raurogh's Hall, as if the earth had come to life and breathed in for the first time. Ragged cracks burst open in walls facing the direction of the shock, then closed as the earth swayed back and split the opposite walls wide with deafening roars. Carved ceilings crumbled; walls of bas-relief broke. Rock fragments fell over all, and the air was a cloud of choking dust that clogged noses, mouths, and lungs.

The fisher dwarf slipped and fell on damp rock when the shock hit, dropping the gaff with which she had banged out the alert. Scrambling fingers seized the fishing net she had flung aside as she slid on her stomach toward the river; the net snagged itself on a foot-long iron bolt driven into the cave floor. This saved her life.

In the next instant, the River Raurogh sloshed over the fisher dwarf's head and carried her off with it, flooding the riverside tunnels as the shock flung it sideways out of its ancient bed. Clinging to the net, the dwarf collided painfully with a stone bench in the hall. Then, as the earth jerked in the opposite direction, she was washed back out again onto the stone bank of the river, and the water rushed back into its channel.

It was then that the fisher dwarf heard a monstrous roar tear through the river tunnel from the direction of the falls, a sound as great as if the cavern were the throat of a wild beast. She turned her head to look. It was the moment when the Eastern Shaar hunter far above lowered his bow, when the sorceress in her tower glared, when the old shepherd looked up from his knife and flute.

A magical lantern had been washed out into the river from the dwarves' hall, and in its light the fisher dwarf saw the entire ceiling of the silo break free, a monstrous plate of rock twenty yards thick. It dropped swiftly past the top of the falls and out of sight. The dwarf looked on in amazement. She remembered the legend of the foolish dwarf. Her lips moved. "One," she whispered. "Two-"

An enormous, screaming wind awoke around her. It hurled water, tools, buckets, lanterns, and nets toward the falls, everything it could seize in its shrieking teeth. The wind savaged the dwarf as she gripped the fishing net with gnarled fingers; she felt the net's worn strands give and break apart. Freezing rain whipped at her face. The river danced and shook in the fury. Four, she thought, head down, eyes shut. Five. Six.

The hurricane blast eased and faded as swiftly as it had come. The partial vacuum created by the ceiling collapse was filled. Chilled to the bone, the fisher dwarf shivered and clung to the ruined net, unable to pull herself up. The wind's last howls echoed in her ears, following the great rock plate down into the light-lost abyss of the Deepfall.

The fisher dwarf was oblivious to all but her numbers, waiting for the great stone to reach the end of its endless fall. She had been cautious every day of her life. She would not lose her place in the legends now.

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen…

The thunder dwindled slowly from every direction. Wykar heard himself shouting hysterical pleas and prayers