The Bellows Gate was a round iron door at the bottom of the third gallery, set into the rock like the hatch of a ship. Warm air breathed out through the grating in long, slow sighs, smelling of stone and damp and something faintly sour, and every so often the whole door shivered with the distant beat of the Anvil.
I arrived before the first bell, because I am a man who arrives before the first bell.
I was wearing my coat, a pair of dwarf-made trousers that Torvi had lengthened for me with a broad band of extra cloth sewn onto each leg, since dwarf trousers on a human stop somewhere around the thigh. Boots from Halvard, and a borrowed leather jerkin two sizes too wide. The starsteel sword hung at my hip and pulled my belt crooked. My pack held a day's bread, a skin of water, a coil of copper wire, the ledger, and the little wooden marionette, wrapped in a cloth.
Clara was not with me. It was the first time I had left her since the wall opened. Torvi had promised to keep her company. I had believed her, and I had still looked back at the door of the Ticking Hall twice on my way down.
The hunting party came in ones and twos.
There were six of them. I read their tags as they arrived, and tried not to look as though I was doing it.
Dwarf Lv. 23 Shieldwarden
Dwarf Lv. 21 Hunter
Dwarf Lv. 17 Miner
Dwarf Lv. 15 Smith
Dwarf Lv. 13 Brewer
Dwarf Lv. 12 Crossbowman
The last one grinned at me under a sparse ginger beard. It was Bolli.
"Counter!" he said, delighted. "They let you down here?"
"They summoned me."
"Same thing!" He slapped my shoulder, which hurt. "Don't worry. First hunts are easy. I've done four. You just stay in the back and try not to die."
"Is that what you did?"
"The first three times," said Bolli, with dignity.
The Shieldwarden was a broad, gray-braided dwarf woman with a scar running from her eyebrow into her beard and a round shield on her back that looked heavy enough to anchor a boat. She looked at me for a long moment, from my boots to my borrowed jerkin to the sword dragging my belt down. Then she looked at my tag.
Human Lv. 14 Puppet Maker
"Gudrun Ashfist," she said. "I lead this lot. You're Greymantle's human."
"Yes."
"Ever fought anything?"
"A slime," I said. "Goblins. A boar. An owl. A bear."
The Hunter, a lean, weathered old dwarf with a white beard tucked into his belt, raised an eyebrow. "Bear?"
"Stonehide."
"Alone?"
"With poison."
There was a short silence.
"Huh," said the Hunter.
Gudrun did not say anything. But she looked at me a moment longer, and her eyes went to the sword at my hip, and back to my face, and I thought something in her expression shifted, very slightly, from liability to maybe.
"Middle of the line," she said. "Behind me, ahead of Bolli. You don't swing that sword unless something's in front of you. And if I say down, you get flat on the stone before I've finished the word."
"Yes."
The first bell rang somewhere far above us, a deep, round note that I felt in my teeth. Gudrun put her shoulder to the Bellows Gate, and it swung inward with a long iron groan, and the warm sour air rolled over us, and we went down.
I had thought I understood the Hold. I had walked its great hall and its galleries and its stairways for a month. I had thought I knew how deep it went.
I had no idea.
Below the Bellows Gate, the dwarven Hold did not end. It simply stopped being kept. The tunnels went on, wide and square and well-cut, with the same carved light-runes set into the walls every twenty paces. But the light-runes were old down here, and dim, and some of them had gone out altogether, and nobody had come to fill them again. The floors were dusty. The walls were scored with marks I did not want to think about. We passed empty storerooms with their doors hanging open, and a long gallery lined with rows of rotted wooden racks, and once, a great vaulted hall with a stone fountain in the middle of it, long dry, with a carved dwarf woman pouring water from a jar that held nothing but dust.
"Old Khazrund," said the Hunter, walking beside me. His name was Harek. "The first Hold. Nine hundred years ago, all this was full. Then we dug deeper and found better ore, and moved down. Then we found worse things than ore, and moved up again." He shrugged. "Now it's the beasts' Hold. We come down once a month and remind them whose it was."
"How deep does it go?"
Harek laughed, softly, the way old men laugh at children. "Nobody knows," he said. "Nobody who's gone to the bottom has come back to say."
We walked for an hour. Then two. Nothing came. Gudrun led without a word, her shield on her arm now, her axe loose in her other hand. Behind me Bolli hummed under his breath until the Miner, a stout, sour dwarf named Fenna, hissed at him to stop.
The air grew warmer. The light-runes grew fewer. My shoulder ached under the weight of the sword. And then, at the mouth of a long, low tunnel lined with old cart-rails, Gudrun raised her hand, and everyone stopped.
She tilted her head. Listening.
I listened too. At first I heard nothing. Then, very faintly, under the far-off beat of the Anvil, I heard a sound like rain on a roof. A soft, quick, scrabbling, pattering sound, coming from somewhere ahead in the dark, and getting louder.
"Gnawers," said Harek, very quietly.
Gudrun nodded. "Lights low."
The Brewer, a young, round-cheeked dwarf named Ottil, covered the lantern on his belt with his hand. The Smith set her feet. Bolli raised his crossbow. Fenna, beside me, hefted a pick with a head as long as my forearm.
"What are gnawers?" I whispered.
"Rats," said Fenna. "Big ones. Blind. They hear you through the floor." She looked down at my boots. "Stand still."
I stood still.
They came out of the dark like a flood.
There were five of them, perhaps six. I could not count them properly. They were the size of dogs, pale and hairless and pink as a newborn, with long naked tails and blunt, eyeless faces that were nothing but a nose and a set of yellow incisors as long as my fingers. They did not run so much as pour, low to the ground, so fast that their feet blurred.
Blind Gnawer Lv. 14
Blind Gnawer Lv. 13
Blind Gnawer Lv. 15
Gudrun met them with her shield. The first gnawer hit it with a crack like a hammer on a door, and she twisted, and threw it into the wall, and her axe came down. Bolli's crossbow thumped behind me, and another gnawer went sprawling. The Smith and Fenna stepped up on either side of Gudrun, and the tunnel was suddenly full of thrashing pale bodies and grunting dwarves and the horrible squealing chatter of the gnawers.
And I stood in the middle of the line, and did exactly what I had been told. I did not swing the sword.
Then one of them came over the top.
It went up the wall. I had not known they could do that. It ran up the rough stone beside Gudrun's shoulder like a squirrel up a tree, and along the ceiling over her head, and dropped, straight down, onto the space between Gudrun and me.
It landed facing me. Its blind, blunt face swung toward my boots, toward the tremor of my feet, and its yellow teeth parted.
I did not think. I swung. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The starsteel was so heavy that the swing nearly pulled me off my feet. I had no form, no training, no idea what I was doing. But the weight that had fought me for a month suddenly worked for me. It carried the blade through its arc like a stone at the end of a rope, and the edge came down across the back of the gnawer's neck, and went through it as though it were not there at all.
The gnawer collapsed.
I stood there with the sword buried in the floor of the tunnel, a full inch into solid stone, and stared at it.
"Down!" Gudrun roared.
I went flat. Something pale and fast went over my back, and Bolli's crossbow thumped, and something squealed and stopped.
Then it was quiet.
I lay on the stone with my face in the dust and listened to my heart.
Party kill: less experience gained.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a blind gnawer.
Experience gained: 55 XP (Blind Gnawer, Lv. 14; party share)
First-time-defeat bonus (Blind Gnawer): +518 XP
"You alive, Counter?"
Bolli was standing over me, grinning.
"I think so," I said.
"You cut a gnawer's head off." He sounded thrilled. "First hunt! Took me three tries to even hit one."
"It was the sword," I said, getting up. My knees shook. "Not me."
"It's always the sword," said Harek, who was crouched over one of the dead gnawers with a knife, already working at its jaw. "Till it isn't."
"The Registry said less experience gained," I said. "It only gave me fifty-five for it. A lone gnawer that size should be worth three times that."
Harek glanced up from the jaw. "You hunt in a party, it splits the kill," he said. "Everyone who fought it gets a piece. The one who struck the killing blow gets the biggest piece, but it's still a piece. Less for each of us. But we all go home." He shrugged. "You'll have had a share or two for the others as well, I'd wager. Every gnawer that died while you stood in that line."
I checked. He was right. While the dwarves had finished the rest, the Registry had slipped me a handful of small, quiet panels, ten points here, ten there, each one marked party kill.
"But the first-time bonus wasn't touched," I said.
"That's yours alone. A first is a first." Harek pried the incisor free with a soft crack. "The Registry's fair about that, at least."
Gudrun walked over to where my sword was still stuck in the floor. She bent, and wrapped one gauntleted hand around the grip, and pulled it out of the stone with a short grunt. She looked at the edge in the dim light, turning it, and then at the clean slot it had cut in the rock.
"Greymantle made this," she said. It was not a question.
"She lent it to me."
"Then she likes you." Gudrun handed it back to me, hilt first. "Don't swing it like a woodsman. You'll pull your arm out of its socket. Let the weight do the work, and keep your wrist straight." She paused. "You did well. Next time, step back before you swing. You had a dwarf at your shoulder, and you nearly took her ear off."
I looked at Fenna. Fenna looked at me, and touched her left ear, which still had a tuft of beard-hair missing beside it.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"You'll buy the beer," said Fenna.
They taught me to harvest on the spot.
Harek showed me where to cut a gnawer's jaw to free the long yellow incisors without cracking them, and Fenna showed me the core, a cloudy, marble-sized stone buried in the chest, which she pried out with the tip of her pick and held up to Ottil's lantern.
"Lesser," she said. "Not much. They're all lesser up here."
"What are the teeth for?"
"Chisels." Harek wiped one on his trousers and handed it to me. It was as long as my finger, curved, hard as stone, with a natural edge that ran along the inside of the curve like a scalpel. "Gnawers chew through granite. Their teeth never stop growing and never stop sharpening. Masons pay well for them. So do carvers." He looked at me sidelong. "Puppet makers, too, I'd think."
I turned the tooth over in my hand. I thought about the carving knives in my tool roll, the ones I had brought from another world, worn thin from two years of whittling and re-sharpening. I thought about elderheart, and how Torvi had said it bled if you cut it wrong.
"Can I keep one?"
"You can keep the one you killed," said Gudrun. "That's the rule. Kill's teeth to the killer. Cores and hides go in the common pot, and the pot's split by shares when we're back up. Your first hunt, you get a half share."
"That's fair."
"I know it is," said Gudrun. "I made the rule!"
We went deeper.
The second fight was stonelings: three lumps of living rock that crept out of a collapsed storeroom as we passed, looking exactly like rubble until one of them rolled over Ottil's foot and he screamed. They were slow and very heavy, and blades skated off them, and they could crush a leg flat if they got on top of it. The dwarves broke them with hammers and picks along the seams of their bodies, where the stone was cracked and grainy, like breaking open geodes.
I watched the first two. I watched where the hammers fell, and where the stone split. When the third one came at me, I did not swing at it. I stepped aside, the way I would step aside from a cart, and as it rolled past, I brought the pommel of the starsteel sword down on the seam that ran across its back, as hard as I could.
The pommel was starsteel too. The stoneling split like a dropped egg.
Party kill: less experience gained.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a stoneling.
Experience gained: 51 XP (Stoneling, Lv. 13; party share)
First-time-defeat bonus (Stoneling): +481 XP
Nobody said anything. But Harek, kneeling over the broken stoneling to pick out the core and the knot of glittering raw ore it had swallowed, looked up at me, and nodded once.
The third fight nearly killed us all.
It came near the end of the day, in a long, low gallery with a vaulted roof where the light-runes had all gone out. Ottil uncovered his lantern to see, the light fell across the floor, across the walls, and across something that hung on the ceiling over our heads in a long, glittering curve.
It was a centipede. It was the length of two men laid end to end, and as thick as my thigh, and its back was covered in overlapping plates that glowed softly blue-green in the lantern light, like moonlight on wet stones. Hundreds of legs moved along its belly in slow, rippling waves.
Glowback Centipede Lv. 22
It dropped.
Gudrun got her shield up. The centipede hit it like a falling tree, it wrapped around it, and around her arm, then its jaws came down on the rim of the shield with a sound like a smith's hammer, Gudrun went to one knee. The Smith swung, and her blade skated off the plates. Bolli fired, the bolt bounced away into the dark. Fenna hit it with her pick, the plate under the point cracked, and came off, glowing, then went spinning across the floor, where it had been there was only more plate beneath.
"It sheds them!" Harek shouted. "Go for the joints! Between the plates!"
The centipede let go of Gudrun whipped around, and its tail caught the Smith across the chest threwing her into the wall. Its head swung toward Ottil, toward the lantern, toward the light.
I understood then. It was not hunting the dwarves. It was hunting the light. Every time Ottil's lantern swung, its head followed.
I did not have a lantern. But I had a lit stone in my pocket.
It was my first rune, the light-rune Torvi had sealed for me on the ninth day. I had carried it everywhere since. I pulled it out of my coat, and it shone in my palm, steady and white, brighter than Ottil's lantern.
The centipede's head turned toward me.
"Kenji, no—"
I threw the stone.
Not at the centipede. Past it, down the gallery, as far as I could, so that it skittered and bounced across the floor and came to rest against the far wall, shining like a small white moon.
The centipede went after it. It turned, all its glittering length uncoiling, and flowed down the gallery toward the light in a long, rippling wave of legs and plates. New chapters come out on NovelPing first.
And as it went past me, I saw the joints.
They were as clear to me as the joints of a marionette. Every plate overlapped the next. Every overlap opened, just slightly, when the body curved, showing a thin line of soft gray flesh beneath. It was the same thing I had spent my whole life doing. Looking at a body that moved, and seeing exactly where it bent.
I did not swing. I stepped in, set the point of the starsteel sword into the gap behind the centipede's head, where the first plate met the second, and leaned on it with all my weight.
Starsteel does not bend. It went in to the hilt.
The centipede thrashed. It threw me off my feet into the wall, I lost my sword, then lay there with my head ringing while the great glowing body coiled and uncoiled and slammed against the floor. Then Gudrun, Fenna, and Harek started hacking at the joints. The thrashing slowed, then stopped.
The gallery was very quiet. At the far end, my little light-rune glowed against the wall.
Party kill: less experience gained.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a glowback centipede.
Experience gained: 86 XP (Glowback Centipede, Lv. 22; party share)
First-time-defeat bonus (Glowback Centipede): +815 XP
Underdog bonus (target 2 or more levels above): +35 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 15.
Max HP: +2 HP 19 / 40
I lay against the wall and read the panel. Then another panel opened beneath it.
STAT POINT AVAILABLE (1)
I did not even need to think about it.
Attunement 1 → 2
MP 5 / 5 → MP 10 / 10
And this time, I felt it.
It was very faint. Not a hum, not a fire, nothing that would have impressed anyone. Just a small, quiet warmth that settled into the tips of my fingers, like the feeling of holding a cup of tea a moment after you have put it down. It was the size of a held breath. It was there.
I held up my hands in the light of the far rune and looked at them, and they looked exactly the same as they always had. I flexed the fingers. The warmth stayed.
"Counter?" Bolli's face appeared above me, pale under his ginger beard. "Are you hurt? You're smiling. Why are you smiling? Did you hit your head?"
"A little," I said. "I'm fine."
We came back up through the Bellows Gate a little before the last bell, filthy and bruised and very quiet. The Smith had two cracked ribs. Ottil limped. Gudrun had a dent in her shield the shape of a centipede's jaw, which she said she would keep, because it would make a good story.
At the gate, she stopped me.
"The stone," she said. "Throwing it. That was quick thinking."
"It was the only light I had."
"It was the brightest light in the room." She studied me. "And the joint. Behind the head. Harek's been hunting those things for a hundred years, and he didn't see that gap till you put a sword in it."
I did not know what to say. So I said, "I've spent a long time looking at how things bend."
Gudrun nodded slowly, as if that answered something.
"Full share," she said. "Not half. You earned it." She turned away, then turned back. "And you're on my list, next month. Don't let Greymantle tell you otherwise."
Torvi was waiting at the bench in the Ticking Hall when I came in. Clara sat in the corner, exactly where I had left her, with the clockwork crow on the shelf above her head. Both of them looked at me. I would swear the crow looked relieved.
"Well?" Torvi said.
I set my share down on the bench in front of her. It was more than I had expected: one lesser core, cloudy and faintly warm, a knot of raw ore picked out of a stoneling; a glowing plate from the centipede's back, which Harek had pried off and pressed into my hand; and the long, curved, yellow incisor of a blind gnawer, wrapped in a strip of cloth.
Then, last, I set down the light-rune. Fenna had gone and fetched it for me from the end of the gallery, without being asked, and had dropped it in my lap without saying a word.
Torvi looked at the pile for a long time. Her gears clicked.
"Gudrun gave you a full share," she said.
"Yes."
"On a first hunt."
"Yes."
"Gudrun Ashfist hasn't given a first-hunter a full share in forty years." She picked up the gnawer's tooth and turned it over in the light, and then she looked at my face, and at whatever she saw there. "What else?"
"Level fifteen," I said. "A stat point."
"And?"
"Attunement. Like you said."
She waited.
I held up my hand, fingers spread, in the light of the lamp. "I can feel it," I said. "Just a little. In my fingertips. Like warmth from a cup."
Torvi set down the tooth very carefully. For a moment her face did something I had never seen it do. It was not quite a smile. Dwarves do not smile at the important things. But it was very close.
"Well," she said. "That's a start."
I sat down on my stool, and every muscle in my body informed me that I was forty-four years old and had spent the day being thrown into walls. Torvi pushed a mug of the bitter brown drink across the bench to me without a word. I drank it. Then I opened the ledger.
Day 566.
Level: 15. XP: about 10,500. (Party kills pay less. First-time bonuses do not.) Max HP 40.
Hunt: Gudrun Ashfist's party. Old Khazrund, below the Bellows Gate.
Killed: blind gnawer (sword), stoneling (pommel, on the seam), glowback centipede (between the plates, behind the head).
Share: full. One lesser core, stoneling ore, a glowing plate, a gnawer tooth.
Gnawer teeth never stop sharpening. Carving tool?
Owed: one beer, to Fenna, for her ear.
Lesson: things that move all bend somewhere. Find where.
I read it over. Then I unwrapped the gnawer's tooth and set it beside my carving knives on the bench, and looked at the two of them side by side for a long time. The knives from my old world. The tooth from this one.
The tooth was sharper.
I went to bed with my fingertips still warm.