Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [76]
Regardless, the hook had been set. She couldn't open the Causeway, but she would not give up entering Stardeep. So what would she do? What could she?
It was obvious.
She would attempt the "long way around," a path open only to natives of Sildeyuir. She would attempt to slip in through the underdungeon!
Telarian hurried past the doors open to the dining room, ignoring the fabulous smells emanating from within. When was his last real meal? Later. He turned onto the marble dressed stairs and took them two at a time down to the thick iron doors that opened onto the Outer Bastion.
He'd promoted someone to the position of Knight Commander with Brathtar's… departure. Dharvanum. Of course, he'd had to kill Dharvanum moments later. After that, he'd walked down to the War Room and promoted the first Knight he'd seen. An elf named Thindhul? No matter. Telarian smiled. He had a task for the new Knight Commander. A force of Knights must be prepared to enter the subterranean dungeon tunnels in which lesser criminals were housed. Those tunnels were widely known to connect, in their meandering, dangerous fashion, directly onto Sildeyuir.
And it must be an overwhelming force of Knights! Not because Angul represented a thteat-the blade had already shown himself uninterested in turning his energies against pledged Cerulean Knights.
No, the force must be overwhelming because nothing less would survive that which stalked those long-abandoned passages and crawlways beneath ancient Stardeep.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aglarond, Yuirwood Forest
Raidon Kane followed the elf Kiril Duskmourn as she stalked through shallow snow drifts. She was of the same fey race to which he was kin, if he could believe her claims. She was a harsh woman, a lodestone of reluctant authority, a comet trailing foul language, threats of bodily harm, and the smell of strong drink. Nothing like his memory of his mother-were they truly of the same race?
Yet during theif walk, she had relented and spoken more of the strange realm Sildeyuir. She told Raidon and Adrik the star elves had created the hidden land as a refuge, a place to which they could retreat from the cruel and ambitious human empites of old. More than a thousand years before the raising of the Standing Stone in the Dales, the human kingdoms of Narfell and Raumauthar, as well as Unther and Mulhorand, had fought furiously for dominion in the region. In western Faerun many elves had retreated to Evermeet to avoid human ambitions, but the star elves had decided to move their entire realm rather than abandon it. All Sildeyuir was a construction of high magic, an echo of the Yuirwood itself spun into starshine and dusk through mighty craft of old.
Since the creation of Sildeyuir, the star elves had slowly slipped farther and farther from Faerun, leaving the daylight world to its own devices. Some still traveled through the old elfgates and roamed Aglarond or the Inner Sea, but they passed themselves off as elves of other regions, and did not speak of their homeland to strangers. And of the star elves that remained in Sildeyuir, only a fraction cared enough for the Cerulean Sign to take up its practice. Had his mother been one?
The monk considered the moment, tendays past, when he'd fought Chun, a member of the Nine Golden Swords, in the Shou Town streets. His mental discipline allowed him to perfectly picture the moment he'd retrieved the daito from Chun's limp grasp. He'd clutched his grandfather's blade, raising it in a salute. On that day the honor of his family had been restored. And on that day he quit his old life, lest Nine Golden Swords vengeance find him.
If he hadn't retrieved the daito but instead turned his back on family honor, as would have been the far easier road, Shou Town would yet be his home. Perhaps he would even now be called master by fledgling students in Xiang Temple, and by old Shou merchants in the colonnaded bazaar he