Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [92]
"Keeper!" spoke the Knight Commander, his tone terse.
A messenger afoot pressed along the line until she reached the side of the Knight Commander's horse.
The messenger was a Knight apprentice, a girl of no more than twenty, twenty-five years, he guessed. She said, "We've come upon a wide space ahead, filled with ruins. A sorcerous wall prevents the vanguard from advancing."
Telarian and the Knight Commander passed to the front of the column, a short journey in the narrow tunnel.
The Knight vanguard was arrayed before a flickering screen of green and gold, through which a wide cavern was visible. Past the distortion, Telarian glimpsed smooth-cut angles of black stone, broken arches, and the bases of columns whose heights were long crumbled.
From his saddle, he essayed a simple analytical spell. The screen was weak. And old. A wonder it still functioned. A barrier whose usefulness was concluded, except as a warning.
"Just push through," commanded Telarian. "It may feel unpleasant, but its ability to harm you is long spent."
When Telarian's turn came to breach the barrier, shrieking wind assaulted his eats. The lantern light flared, then settled to normal. The diviner stumbled over a ridge in the white floor-an exposed, fossilized spine of some larger-than-elf creature.
Beyond the exposed spine, the tunnel opened into a wide enclosure whose white walls showed compacted seams of eons-preserved bone, layer upon layer.
"Is this a graveyard?" he heard one of the Knights ask in wondering tones.
Near the cavern's centet leaned a pile of broken stone. Telarian's eyes scanned the heap and then turned up to the cavern's ceiling. A dark hole, like a mouth agape in pain, punctured the otherwise smooth surface. The wind screamed through the aperture, howling and abrading the room and its contents with a haze of airborne grit.
The only other exit from the chamber was a tall set of double doors sheeted in hammered, coppery metal.
"Best ignore the ceiling breach-we'd never get the horses up there," yelled Telarian over the wind. He spurred his mount toward the doots. As he pulled up next to the exit, he was relieved to confirm they were sufficiently high and wide enough to permit two Knights to ride abreast. If he could open them. Rusty stains decorated the metallic surface of the doors where latches might have once protruded.
He reached out one hand and gave the left door an experimental push. Unyielding. He dismounted, grasped Nis with his off hand, and tried again.
Nis pulsed in his grip. Blade-sent geometries, dark and subtle, flared behind his eyes. A logic born of emotionless calculation bent his mind and suffused his body. Mere mortality was suppressed, and his musculature pulsed with certainty. He placed his hand again upon the door and stove it from its hinges. The other door fell as quickly.
Beyond was a natural bore through stone. The passage was basalt, but the walls were streaked with the same white stone as the previous tunnels. The same strata of ancient death lay compacted amid those pale veins.
Telarian surrendered his hold on the soul-forged blade, and the hint of recognition Nis felt toward the strata vanished. The knowledge of who might have been responsible for cutting these passages was again beyond his conjecture.
They made good time then, traveling straight and level, without any side passages to dilute their resolution to move forward. The wind's strength slackened as they moved farther from where it had first assaulted them, and finally failed altogether, so that only the sounds of clopping hooves rushed down the narrow corridor.
They camped once, strung out over several hundred horse spans, with Knight apprentices moving up and down the line with feed, food, and water for mounts and Knights alike.
When they rode next, they traversed not more than a few miles before they broke into an underground city.
Telarian found his steed traversing what had once been a street, its cobbles now buckled and misaligned. Squat tenements of white stone crowded along the road, mostly collapsed