The Howling Delve

Johnson Jaleigh

Haroun was shaking her head before she'd finished. "No need. That way is closed."

"Closed?"

"Tunnel's sealed off," Talal spoke up. "Bastards caved it in, put something on it when we tried to dig out." He made scooping and filling motions with his hands. "We dig—stays full."

"An enchantment," Meisha said, remembering the wizard from the raiding party. "Probably activated from the other side of the cave-in. All it would require is a new casting each day, perhaps not even that often." She looked at the boy. "They trapped you in the Delve? How long have you been here?"

Talal and Haroun exchanged glances. "I'll show her," the boy offered, shrugging.

Haroun hesitated, appearing almost upset, but finally she nodded. "Go. She'll need to see the places where it's safe to walk. Show her gently, Talal. Do nothing foolish."

The boy flashed an indignant, "do I ever" look and offered his sleeve to Meisha in imitation of a grand lord escorting his lady. Meisha suppressed a groan, selected the cleanest possible scrap of cloth to grasp, and they were off, weaving among the cubed warrens to a cleared central path that led to an attached passage.

Talal yanked a torch from the wall sconce. He ignored the shouts of dismay from the corner of the cavern subsequently plunged into darkness. "This way."

They walked a short distance down a passage Meisha remembered. It led to a series of carved out alcoves fitted with thick wooden doors.

When Varan had first come to the Delve, he'd used the spaces as storage, but later they became small, private quarters for the apprentices. The wizard's domain was only a small part of the tunnel system. Varan's magic had placed the age of some of the lower tunnels as contemporaries of Deep Shanatar. The wizard speculated the Delve might even have been an outpost of that great dwarven realm.

Talal tugged on her arm. Absorbed in her thoughts, Meisha hadn't noticed when they'd stopped. Framed by a pearly, flow-stone waterfall, Talal pointed behind her to a stretch of wall. Meisha turned and blinked.

Numbers covered the stone from floor to ceiling, arranged in neatly ordered columns like a moneylender's account. All were dates, marked with the change of month and the change of year. They ended Marpenoth 3 of 1374 DR.

"Iadra marks a new one every day," said Talal.

"1370," Meisha read from the top of the first column. "Eleasias 20. Four years ago."

"Date we found the entrance. Wish we hadn't," Talal muttered.

"You—all of you?" Meisha shook her head. "Impossible. Varan shields the entrance with magic and places a ward on the perimeter."

A shadow passed over the boy's face. "There was no magic. The way was just sitting there, open as you please. We wouldn't have gone in, but the brigands had started to circle. There were too many of us not to be noticed out in the open."

"What were you doing all the way out here?"

"Running," Talal said.

Meisha waved an impatient hand. "From brigands, yes, but what—"

"No—from Esmeltaran."

"Esmeltaran?" Meisha echoed. Then it hit her: 1370. Meisha didn't need to do the calculation. She knew. "The ogres," she said, and Talal nodded. "You're refugees from the war."

"We were headed for Keczulla when they started shadowing us."

"The men from the portal?" Meisha asked.

Talal actually laughed. "No, the brigands—soft bellies by comparison. There were a lot more of us then. We moved in a group, tight as Tyr's arse. Only thing kept us alive—they didn't want to take on the whole bunch of us. But they smartened up, the longer they stayed with us. Picked off the stragglers, set traps—that sort of thing. We never saw any of the cowardly bastards. Thought we could wait them out in the caves. We should've known something was wrong if damn brigands wouldn't follow us inside."

"Did you explore? Was there anyone living in the caves?" Meisha wanted to know.

Talal hesitated. He swung the torch at one of the alcoves.

Meisha went for the door, but the boy caught her wrist.

"Don't burst in like that!" he hissed. "You want to kill us all?"

"It's Varan, isn't it?" Meisha said. At his blank look, she pressed, "You found a wizard here."

Talal's lip curled. "Pity us, yes."

Meisha freed her arm. "He's the man I came to see—my teacher! He can get us all out of here."

The boy stared at her. "Certainly, Lady," he said, bowing her mockingly toward the door. "You go right on in and ask him to do that."

Dread welled inside Meisha, but she pushed past Talal. The door scraped the stone floor as she wrenched it open, dripping dirt and cold sediment down on her. She ignored it in the face of what lay within.

The room was littered with garbage. Broken bits of junk covered every available inch of floor space, like the aftermath of a child's tantrum. Varan sat in one corner of the squalid room, his back to her, arms moving as if in the midst of a complicated spell. Small, white maggots swarmed over an uneaten plate of meat and bread on the floor next to him.

Meisha slowly circled the rear wall, putting herself in the wizard's periphery so he would know she was there. Varan held an object in his hands, an opaque sphere caged in a knot of iron bands. Within the sphere, tiny lights winked and danced like trapped stars. Wherever Varan touched the bands, the lights would gather, drawn zipping across the empty space to swirl around his fingertips. The collected magic in the room was so intense it hurt Meisha's head to concentrate too closely on any one point. And the Art did not issue only from the sphere.