“Perhaps.”
“Do you actually believe we should trust her?”
“No.” Loghain glanced farther down the cave, where Katriel and Maric were clearing rocks. “But that does not mean she is lying about this.” Rowan seemed unconvinced, and Loghain attempted a reassuring smile. “We will go in as far as we can. If it proves unsuitable, then we return.”
“And what if we can’t? Return, I mean.”
He went back to his count, his face grim. “Then we die.”
It was not long before they managed to find a way down. Parts of the cavern were nearly blocked, as if there had been an effort long ago to seal it up with rocks. Whether that had been to keep something below from getting out or something above from getting in was impossible to tell. Either way, it was possible to squeeze by most of these piles with only a little effort.
Otherwise the passages were largely regular and flat, having long ago been smoothed by dwarven craftsmen. They might even have been beautiful once, but now they were coated in thick dust, moss, and a great deal of bat guano. There was evidence of graffiti near the beginning, crude drawings left by those who had inhabited the early section of the cave and left a reminder of their presence, but these disappeared as the passage dropped off sharply.
They traveled in silence, the tension growing as the faint light vanished completely to be replaced by a stuffy gloom. Dust floated in the still air, giving a faint corona to their torches, and Loghain expressed concern that air might become limited. Katriel explained that dwarves used ingenious ducts to keep the Deep Roads supplied, but who knew if such things were even working still?
It would certainly explain why no one had seen darkspawn on the surface in so many centuries, if they had all suffocated down there in the still shadows. That idea brought little cheer with it.
After several hours, they reached what might have been some kind of way station or checkpoint built into the passage. Perhaps it was intended as a fort, and certainly the building would have been defensible had its walls still been intact. Katriel pointed out where a gateway might once have closed off the passage entirely to traffic, but whatever had been there had been demolished. Littering the halls were a great number of rusted mining carts, loose sacks near faded away to nothing . . . and ancient bones. Old webs clotted with dust hung from the ceiling and gave them the feeling that they were walking into a graveyard. Nothing moved here. No bats were this deep, and though it seemed as if someone had looted the remains of the way station long ago, there was nobody there now.
“Was there a battle here?” Rowan asked, examining the bones. No one could answer her. Most of the bones were barely distinguishable as belonging to humans or dwarves or even elves. A few of them were very definitely none of those things.
After that came the steps—wide steps that seemed to lead down forever into darkness. They had to be careful, as many of the steps were cracked and brittle and likely to give way under their weight. . . . Indeed, many had already done so. Occasionally they needed to use the steel rails that lay in the middle of the hall for purchase, rails that once must have been used to carry the metal carts.
The old webs covered everything now. Mostly they were clotted with dust, nearly unrecognizable lumps of gray hanging like sacks from the walls and ceiling, but occasionally Loghain would point out new webs and even little spiders that scuttled away from the torchlight. He was reassured by the sight, he said. Spiders meant insects. They meant life.
By the time they reached the bottom of the steps, they had been traveling for many hours. Rowan expressed nervousness that they seemed mostly to be going down rather than heading in any particular direction. Maric, however, was just glad that they had seen no darkspawn. They cleared away a section of the road in order to make a camp, though Loghain insisted they keep the fire small. There was no telling how much air was down in the tunnels, or what might be attracted to the light if they kept a blaze going for too long.
It was a discomforting thought, and that first night, none of them truly slept. They took turns keeping watch with a single lit torch, staring into the shadows that danced around the camp. In truth, anyone could have crept up on them. With the dust in the air and the dim light, anyone keeping watch couldn’t see more than ten feet. But having someone on guard made them feel better, and it let the others close their eyes while trying to pretend that many miles of rock weren’t pressing down on them overhead.
If anything, the silence was the worst. It lay heavy, like a shroud, broken only by the sound of labored breathing and the faint scratching sounds of feet moving on stone. When the group stood still, sometimes they could hear the faintest clicking sounds off in the blackness. The clicks came and went, and none of them could identify what the sounds might be. They kept their weapons out after that, but no attack manifested.
For two days, they traveled in this way, heading farther and farther underground. They stopped regularly to rest and get their bearings, and this allowed Katriel the opportunity to attend to Maric’s bandages. She worried about infection, particularly with his head wound, but after a time declared that the poultices were working. He was healing nicely. Maric declared that it was about time something good happened.
The fact that they were traveling on a road became more evident. Even with the general sense of decay, they could see the regular stone columns along the walls and statues of grim dwarven figures barely discernible for all the wear. There were deep grooves along the bottom of the walls, which Katriel claimed would once have channeled lava. That same lava would have been collected in pools along the walls for light. Loghain asked where the lava came from, but she didn’t know. It might have been magic, though the dwarves didn’t use any. Wherever it might have come from, there was none now. There was only the dust and the quiet gloom.
The first intersection of passages they reached had great runes carved into the walls, and after clearing away as much dust and debris as they could, they waited while Katriel studied them closely with torch in hand.
“It’s definitely dwarven,” she muttered. She tapped on one rune that was repeated several times. “See this one? It has two parts: gwah and ren. ‘Salt’ and ‘pool.’ ”
“Gwaren?” Maric leaned forward, his head close over Katriel’s shoulder as he studied the rune for himself. She blinked nervously, but he didn’t notice. “That must be it, right? The dwarven outpost has the same name.”
“I believe it’s pointing down the right-hand passage.” Katriel looked up at Maric with a frown. “But I can’t be certain.”
“Better your guess than mine.” Maric grinned.
Rowan and Loghain traded leery glances, but they could do little but trust the elven woman’s knowledge. Loghain had long ago given up on his sense of direction.
Less than a day later—though their estimate of how much time was passing was becoming increasingly inaccurate the longer they were surrounded by constant darkness—they encountered a thaig, a cavern where the dwarves had built a settlement. There was a large amount of debris and rocks at its entrance, perhaps due to some kind of cave-in, and it required hours of labor to clear a passage. Once through, they stood at the edges of a place no dwarf had likely touched in living memory.
The flickering light of their torches didn’t reach very far into the thaig, but what they did see evoked a memory of grand stone buildings rising high up toward the upper reaches of the cavern. The walkways between these buildings had once been lined with giant columns carved with lines upon lines of runes. Now most of these things were collapsed and in ruin, jagged stone skeletons covered in massive webs.
Here the webs were everywhere. They hung from building to wall like gentle gauze, and as the cavern rose, the webs seemed to get thicker and thicker until the torchlight couldn’t penetrate them any longer. It was as if the webs kept this place cocooned, suspended out of time in darkness and quiet.
“Careful,” Loghain warned softly, moving his torch so as not to light the webs. Such a blaze would have spread quickly into the upper reaches of the thaig, and likely brought all of it raining down upon their heads.
“Do you feel it?” Rowan asked, stepping uncertainly forward amid the uneven debris. She touched her cheek and looked around with concern. The others opened up their eyes wide, feeling the same thing she did: a gentle brush on their cheeks, the slightest sense of movement in the dust-choked air.
“It’s air,” Maric breathed. “There’s air flowing here.”
He was right. Air was coming from somewhere high up, and if they looked carefully, they could see the faint glowing webs waving ever so slightly overhead. Perhaps there was a sort of hole leading up to the surface. The dwarves must have had chimneys of some kind, or perhaps these were the ducts that Katriel had mentioned.
There were also sounds. As the four of them stood there, the distant clicking became more prominent. It started and stopped, but it was definitely there. After hearing little else but their own movement, such alien sounds were very easy to notice.
Katriel blanched, her fear made noticeable by her agitated glances up into the darkness despite her effort to conceal it. “What . . . what are those sounds? Rocks?”
Nobody answered her. Even she didn’t really believe it.
“Should we go back?” Rowan whispered.
Maric shook his head. “There’s no way around that we saw. It’s either forward or it’s all the way back.”
There was really no discussion to be had. Loghain moved forward, sword held cautiously in front of him as he stared nervously up into the webs above. “If we need to, we’ll have to burn them.”
Maric stepped closely behind him. “Wouldn’t that be worse?”
“I said if we need to.”
They proceeded slowly, keeping their backs toward each other and blades out. Each step was carefully placed among the rubble, and they made not a single sound. They barely breathed. Each of them slowly waved their flickering torches in the air before them, trying to discern anything in the dark ruins. But all they saw was ruined archways and stone columns and more rubble. The shadows danced mockingly in the silence.
They crept through what appeared to be a long causeway, cracked and crumbled between the towering walls of gutted buildings. One of the walls still had faded chips of colored paint, turquoise and red and the remnants of what might have been a face. The eyes were the only part of the face still discernible, eyes that stared out at them in mute surprise.
Loghain stopped, and Maric almost bumped into him from behind. They were at the feet of an enormous statue, a giant warrior that reached up hundreds of feet into the air and could very well have been holding up the ceiling of the cavern. It was tarnished, and the details were lost in the shadows, but it was easily the largest thing he had ever seen in his life. It looked almost as if it had been made from pure marble.
“Maker’s breath,” Maric breathed, staring up at it.
The others turned, and Katriel walked up to the feet of the statue, her eyes wide. “Don’t touch it,” Loghain cautioned her, but she ignored him. The statue appeared to rest on a great square column, itself covered in dusty runes.
Katriel held the torch in front of the runes and swept some of the dust off with her hands. “This . . . I think this is a Paragon,” she whispered.
“A what?” Maric asked.
“A Paragon. They are dwarves that achieve legendary status among their people. The greatest of their warriors, the founders of the houses.” She brushed off more of the dust, enraptured by what she was unveiling. “I think this one was a smith.”
“Wonderful, it’s a dwarven smith,” Rowan muttered. “Can we keep moving?”
The elf shot a glare with her green eyes. “A Paragon isn’t just anyone. They were the greatest dwarves that ever lived. The dwarves revere them as gods. This—” She stared up at the expanse of the statue above her. “—is something the dwarves would pay a great deal to know about.”