Song of the Saurials - Kate Novak [51]
"What is it?" Olive called out with alarm.
Finder did not reply.
Olive froze in horror. "Finder?" she whispered. From the other side of the rubble, she heard the sound of rattling iron. Olive snatched up her torch and scrabbled to the hole. "Finder!" she shouted.
"No need to shout. Olive girl," Finder called back. "I can hear you."
"Why did you say 'damn?" she asked angrily, thrusting her torch into the hole.
"Someone's put an iron grate across the passage," the bard explained. "Nothing I can't handle, though."
As Olive crawled through the hole toward the light, she heard the sound of a wire jiggling in a lock. As she poked her head out of the hole, she saw the iron grate ten feet away. There was a door with a simple-looking lock set in it. The bard was bent over it, picking at it with a bit of wire. Why, Olive wondered, would anyone seal the passages with cave-ins and then put up an iron grate with a door in it? That is, unless they had some insidious reason to want someone to open the door… "Finder, wait!" the halfling cried urgently. "Let me have a look first!"
A distinct click echoed down the passageway. Finder pushed on the grate. It swung open on squeaky hinges. The bard turned around, grinning at Olive with amusement. "I told you I could handle it," he said.
Olive rolled her eyes. "You can never have too many people check a lock," she snapped. "Suppose it had been trapped?"
Finder shrugged. "It wasn't. No harm done," he said. "Let's get going."
Sometimes, Olive thought, he's just like a little boy. She slid down the pile of dirt and stone on the other side and picked up her torch.
"After you, my dear," Finder said, motioning for her to go through the doorway.
Olive eyed the passage cautiously. It was too dim to pick out any really well-hidden traps. "Age before beauty," she replied.
A rueful look flickered across the bard's face, but he turned and stepped across the threshold into the passage beyond.
Olive understood that look. Now that Finder was no longer living on the boundary of the plane of life, his body was feeling his great age more, and Finder had never liked anything that reminded him of his mortality. The younger halfling couldn't bring herself to tease him about it. She remembered all too well her mother's own groaning complaints when her body began to fail. No doubt, Olive realized, I'll be just as annoyed when I get old-providing I live long enough, she amended, though she suspected the odds of that decreased the longer she stayed with Finder.
She trotted after the bard anyway. "So, where's this workshop?" she asked when she caught up with him.
"Straight ahead, Olive," Finder said, pointing down the dim corridor.
Olive held her torch higher and peered into the darkness. Two dim torchlights shone somewhere farther down the passage. "Someone's coming," she hissed, halting in her tracks.
Finder chuckled. He moved his torch up and down, and one of the lights ahead of them rose and fell as if in reply. "It's just our reflection, Olive. The door is enchanted, made of polished steel. Keeps it from being disintegrated."
Olive paced behind Finder. Halfway down the passage, a strand of her hair blew across her face. Olive halted again and turned sideways. From a gap in the wall large enough for a human to pass through, warm air, stinking of garbage, blew into the corridor. The quarried stone that had covered the gap lay smashed in pieces about the passageway floor, crunching under their feet. Beyond the gap was a tunnel stretching farther than the torchlight could reveal.
"This must be where whatever it was that disintegrated those arches broke in"
Olive said.
Finder turned and walked back to inspect the gap. "Yes," he said slowly. "The hillside is riddled with natural caves and galleries. I had this gap sealed off to keep cave monsters out. I should have filled in the tunnel