Greyhook Men

Mara came back to herself coughing blood-colored mud.

Dust filled the gallery so thick the lamp glow became a brown smear. Her ears rang. Something heavy pinned her left leg below the knee. Not crushed. Trapped. Pain spoke carefully, as if saving worse news for later.

She shoved herself up on one elbow.

“Noll!”

No answer.

“Torrun!”

A cough. Then dwarven cursing, which counted as life.

“Mara?” Pell’s voice came from somewhere to her right, thin and panicked.

“Here. Who is hurt?”

“Everyone,” Torrun said.

“Useful details.”

“I’m deciding which organs are decorative.”

The dust shifted. A shape crawled toward her. Noll, face streaked black, hair singed at one side, eyes too wide.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“You took your time.”

“I was under a dog.”

“Are you still?”

“No.”

“Then improve.”

He grabbed the stone pinning her leg and heaved. It did not move.

Torrun appeared beside him, bleeding from one ear. Together they shifted the beam enough for Mara to drag free. Fire licked weakly along spilled oil near the wall, dying for lack of air.

“Pell?” Mara asked.

“Here.”

“Map?”

A pause.

“Here.”

“Good.”

At Torrun’s boot lay a shard of black stone veined with pale metal. The blast had torn it from somewhere below and thrown it clean across the gallery. Torrun stared at it for one breath too long, then folded it into his torn powder pouch with the quick shame of a man pocketing a prayer.

Mara saw.

She had no breath to ask.

“Vael is gone.”

Mara turned too fast and nearly fell.

The place where Vael had been was empty except for dust and one torn black glove.

Rusk’s side of the gallery was worse. The lower passage had collapsed in a jagged slope of stone and broken timber. A man’s hand protruded from the fall, still twitching. Another Greyhook man lay half across the rubble, neck bent wrong.

Brindle was alive.

The ridge mastiff crouched near the collapsed passage, one foreleg twisted, muzzle bloodied, chain trapped under stone. It growled when Mara looked at it, but the sound broke halfway.

Noll raised a knife.

“No,” Mara said.

“It’ll come for us.”

“Not on that leg.”

“It would if it could.”

“So would most men. We don’t stab them for ambition.”

Torrun stared at her.

“What?” she snapped.

“Nothing. Just noting the moment you chose mercy for a company mastiff while bleeding.”

“Note faster.”

Ilyra stumbled out of the dust near the lower wall. Her left sleeve hung torn. Blood ran down her hand. Her axe was gone.

“Rusk?” she asked.

Nobody answered.

Then rubble shifted.

Rusk Calder dragged himself over the collapse from the lower side.

His face was grey with dust. Blood ran from his scalp into one eye. His crossbow was gone. In one hand he held a short knife. In the other, Ilyra’s axe.

He looked at Brindle first.

Something passed over his face. Not tenderness. Ownership damaged.

Then he looked at Mara.

“You cut the line,” he said to Torrun.

“You set it wrong.”

Rusk spat blood. “It worked.”

“The ridge worked. You were incidental.”

Rusk smiled, showing red teeth. “Dwarf humor.”

Ilyra moved toward him.

Mara caught her shoulder. “No.”

Ilyra did not look back. “Move your hand.”

“He wants you angry.”

“I am.”

“And tired. And bleeding. And standing where the roof is cracked.”

Rusk lifted the axe slightly. “Listen to your forewoman.”

Ilyra’s whole body trembled.

Pell, to Mara’s surprise, stepped forward.

“Rusk Calder,” he said, voice shaking, “by witness authority granted under Starfall Reach trade compact and northern toll agreement, I record—”

Rusk threw the axe.

It spun once.

Mara shoved Pell down.

The axe struck the wall where his head had been and rang hard enough to send dust from the ceiling.

“Record that,” Rusk said.

The ceiling answered with a long crack.

Torrun looked up. “We need out.”

“Which way?” Noll asked.

Ilyra wiped blood from her eyes and pointed toward a narrow side cut above the old warning mark. “Vent line. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Pell said.

“Would you prefer certainly buried?”

Rusk laughed and lunged.

Mara met him.

He was bigger. Less hurt than he looked. He drove her back with two hard strikes of the knife, professional and ugly. She gave ground because the floor was broken and pride killed faster than steel. His third strike came low. She caught his wrist, turned, and slammed him shoulder-first into the wall.

He grunted, headbutted her, and the world flashed white.

Noll came in from the side with more courage than sense.

Rusk kicked him in the stomach.

Torrun hit Rusk with a rock.

Not heroic. Not clean. A two-handed swing with a stone the size of a loaf. It struck Rusk’s forearm. Bone cracked. The knife fell.

Ilyra picked it up.

Rusk looked at her then.

For the first time, fear showed.

“Berrik begged?” she asked.

Rusk breathed hard.

“Did he?”

Mara said, “Ilyra.”

Rusk smiled. “No. That old bastard cursed better than most priests pray.”

Ilyra drove the knife into his thigh.

Rusk screamed and dropped.

Not dead. Not clean. Hurt badly enough to stay.

She leaned close. “Then hear mine.”

The ceiling cracked again.

Torrun grabbed her by the back of the coat and hauled her away. “Curse while moving.”

Ilyra wrenched her axe free from the wall as they passed. The blade came loose with a shriek of metal on stone.

Then they moved.

The vent line was barely a passage. It sloped upward through old dwarven stone, narrow enough that packs had to be dragged. Noll went first because he was thinnest. Pell after him, clutching the map and marker fragment against his chest. Ilyra followed. Mara forced Torrun ahead of her after seeing how he favored his left side.

Behind them, Brindle growled weakly.

Mara looked back.

Brindle’s eyes caught hers.

It was still trapped, chain pinned beneath stone. The lower gallery groaned. If the ceiling came down, the animal would die. If she freed it, it might kill someone. Or limp after Rusk. Or run.

Rusk, on the floor, saw her looking.

“Leave it,” he spat. “Worth more than you.”

Mara almost did.

Then Noll’s voice came from the vent. “Mara!”

She stepped to Brindle.

Brindle snarled, but there was pain in it. She kept low, knife ready, and cut the leather below the chain where the collar had torn loose. Brindle snapped once, slow from pain. Its teeth closed on empty air near her sleeve.

“Go on then,” she said.

Brindle dragged itself back from the chain.

For a moment it looked toward Rusk.

Rusk held out his good hand. “Here.”

Brindle stared.

Then it limped into the dust away from him, toward a dark side crack too small for men.

Rusk’s face changed more at that than when Ilyra stabbed him.

Mara climbed into the vent.

Behind her, the gallery gave a deep, final groan.

The last thing she heard before stone swallowed the sound was Rusk Calder calling for a mastiff that did not come.

The vent rose through blackness.

They crawled until knees tore and palms went numb. Dust thickened, thinned, thickened again. Once the passage narrowed so badly Pell froze and whispered that he could not move. Mara, trapped behind him, put one hand between his shoulders and told him very calmly that he could panic outside or die inside, but he did not get both.

He moved.

At last cold air touched her face.

Noll kicked loose a screen of rotten branches and tumbled out into night.

One by one, the others followed.

They emerged above the old road, half a mile east of the main entrance. Frostcut Ridge stood black against a sky hard with stars. Below them, dust leaked from cracks in the slope like breath from a sleeping animal.

No one spoke for a while.

Pell lay on his back, clutching the map.

Torrun sat with his head between his knees.

Ilyra stood facing the mountain, blood drying on her hand.

Mara counted.

Noll. Pell. Torrun. Ilyra.

Vael gone.

Rusk buried or soon to be.

The map alive.

The mithril sealed, maybe.

For now.

From deep under the ridge came one long sound.

Not a collapse.

Not thunder.

A low metallic note, fading slowly through the stone.

Noll began to shake.

Torrun looked at the mountain and whispered something in dwarven.

“What?” Mara asked.

He swallowed.

“An apology,” he said.

“To who?”

Torrun did not answer.

Far below, in the darkness of the old road, a lamp appeared.

Then another.

Men moving.

Company men, maybe. Locals. Survivors. Enemies.

Mara forced herself upright.

“We move,” she said.

Pell groaned.

“Where?” Noll asked.

Mara looked toward the east, where the old Durnholt road vanished into dark pines.

“Durn Gate first,” she said. “Then Starfall Reach.”

Ilyra turned.

“And Vael?”

Mara looked back once at the mountain.

“If he lives,” she said, “he will try to write first.”

Pell held the map tighter.

“Then we write faster,” he said.

No one laughed.

But Mara nodded.

They started down the old road before dawn.