Loghain and Rowan and Katriel walked with the supply carts in the middle of the procession, the rear guard watching warily for any signs of darkspawn attack. As near as Loghain could tell, they had stripped down the outpost completely and had left nothing of importance behind save one: the great statue of the dwarven king that held up the cavern. As the dwarves efficiently went about their tasks collecting their supplies, each stopped in turn at that statue to respectfully touch its base. They closed their eyes, and Loghain wondered if they offered a solemn prayer to their ancestor. Perhaps they asked him to watch over them, or to send a speedy and honorable death. Perhaps they apologized for leaving him alone once again, to be defiled by dust and the darkspawn taint.
The few members of the Legion of the Dead who were not warriors, such as the cooks they had met earlier, pulled the carts quietly and stared at Katriel out of the corners of their eyes. Rowan asked one why they did so, and the answer was simple. They had seen few enough surface folk during their days at Orzammar, but not a one of them had ever seen an elf.
They made good time. The dwarves knew the Deep Roads well, and the farther they traveled, the more it became apparent that Katriel’s idea of navigating the passages to Gwaren was unlikely ever to have worked. Even if there had been no darkpawn, it was likely they would have become lost. With little food and water, the chances that they would have made it out alive at all would have been slim.
But fortunately they had found the dwarves, Loghain reminded himself. Katriel’s plan was going to succeed after all. He watched her as they traveled, saw her hover away from himself and Rowan and keep her gaze focused solely on Maric up at the head of the procession. Either she knew how Loghain and Rowan felt or she had guessed. Loghain supposed that they had not gone out of their way to keep their suspicions hidden.
He moved up to walk beside the elf, and she regarded him with sullen wariness. Rowan did not join him, but watched him go with mild surprise.
“I want you to know,” he said to Katriel, “you’ve been a great help.”
She narrowed her eyes warily. “Have I, ser?”
“You have. You obviously knew that the dwarves would value any help we could offer their relatives, no matter how remote the possibility.”
She shrugged, looking away. Rather than being pleased by his comment, she seemed disturbed. “They become one of the Legion of the Dead,” she said faintly, “because they have no other choice. They are broke, or ruined. The best the Legion can offer them is to wipe the slate clean, set the balance back to zero.” She glanced back at Loghain, her look significant. “If they could do more than that . . . who wouldn’t want to try?”
“Who indeed?”
She looked away from him once more, resentful. Her chilly demeanor told him he was unwelcome, but he ignored it. Following her line of sight, he realized she was watching Maric again.
“Why do you stay?” he asked. “Is it for him?”
“Do you stay for him?” she rejoined coldly.
He thought about his answer for a long time. The blue lanterns swung overhead on their long poles, bathing the Deep Roads in their sapphire glow. They passed a dwarven statue that stood long-forgotten against one of the passage walls, now mostly a crumbled and silent guardian that watched them go by like they were intruders in this eternal darkness.
“No,” he finally answered. “I stay for me.”
It was a serious answer, and Loghain noticed that Katriel had turned to regard him with a thoughtful, almost melancholy look. “Maric is a good person,” she said bitterly. “And when he looks at me, he sees the same thing in me. He sees the good I didn’t think was even there. The longer I’m with him, the more it seems like it might almost be possible that I really am that person.”
Loghain nodded knowingly. “Almost,” he agreed.
His gaze met Katriel’s, his icy blue eyes probing her strange green ones, and she was the first to turn away. She seemed oddly vulnerable all of a sudden, rubbing her shoulders and looking off toward Maric longingly. He almost felt sorry for her.
“He’s not ready to be King yet,” he said evenly. “He’s too trusting.”
She nodded silently.
“But he needs to become ready. And it’ll be hard for him.”
“I know.” Her voice was hollow, resigned.
There was nothing more that needed to be said. Loghain returned to Rowan’s side and the column continued its trek through the shadows.
Less than a day later, they encountered the ruins of what had once been the dwarven outpost under Gwaren. Several times the Legion had been forced to stop to clear away rubble from collapsed tunnels, and Nalthur grumped at the darkspawn tendency to sabotage even “solid dwarven engineering.” Each time it was uncertain if there would be anything behind the rubble at all, but luckily each time they found more tunnels beyond.
The darkspawn were present. They lurked at the edges of the blue lights, watching. Always watching. Twice they surged out to make surprise raids, once from the fore and once from behind, but both times the Legion of the Dead assembled quickly and repelled them with bloody force. The calm precision with which the dwarves slaughtered a path through the monsters was uncanny, and sent the darkspawn scrambling to retreat back into their side caves.
Nalthur let them go. He said that even the Legion wasn’t about to follow the darkspawn down into the side caves. Down there the darkspawn were on their home ground, and only death awaited. While death was something the Legion did not fear, they wished to go out while taking as many of the darkspawn with them as possible. Not ambushed and killed to a man.
After those two attacks, the darkspawn kept back. They hated the dwarves, that much was clear, but they also respected their numbers. For a time all anyone heard were strange highpitched shrieks off in the distant shadows. The dwarves said that was another type of darkspawn, a tall and lanky thing with long talons that was incredibly fast. This made them nervous, as they said such creatures often brought the emissaries with them—darkspawn who wielded spells like mages.
The dwarves shrugged off the danger the emissaries represented, proudly proclaiming that their natural resistance to magic extended even to the sort wielded by the darkspawn. That didn’t stop them from becoming extra vigilant, however. Their dark eyes became wider as they scanned the shadows, warily watching for the next ambush with their swords drawn.
It never came. As they got closer to the Gwaren outpost, water began to appear in the passages, dripping down from above and draining from stagnant pools into cracks in the wall. Crusty limestone piled wherever the water appeared, the smell of rust and salt thick in the air. Once the group encountered water that filled almost an entire portion of the passage, forcing them to wade through it with equipment held over their heads. Here the dwarves stared resentfully at the taller humans and the elf among them, but said nothing.
All the water made Loghain nervous. Did these tunnels go underneath the ocean? If so, then wouldn’t the first cave-in fill the entire system with seawater? Nalthur dismissed the idea, but still Loghain kept thinking about it. He didn’t know enough about dwarven architecture to be reassured.
The outpost, when they finally found it, was inside a great cavern mostly filled with seawater, an underground lake with a narrow path of rock that led around the water’s edge. Stalactites hung down in multitudes from the cavern ceiling, each dripping water into the murky lake. The echoes of dripping water resounded everywhere, a cacophony of sound that greeted them as they entered.
The other side of the lake was too far off to see, the dark water disappearing into the shadows. Loghain wondered if it didn’t perhaps meet up with the ocean, an underground “port” just as Gwaren above was? An interesting thought. The air was still in the cavern, if heavy and moist.
A great steel structure stood half submerged in the lake, just off the rocky shore and over a hundred feet across. It was now mostly crumbled from rust and covered with white streaks of limestone. Many long pipes reached from it into the rock walls, those, too, brown with rust and falling apart.
It was impossible to tell what the purpose of the structure might have been. The dwarves didn’t say, and merely stood at the entrance to the cavern and hung their heads in reverence. The sounds of dripping were all they could hear. Nalthur eventually remarked to Maric that once there had been hundreds of pipes, that they wouldn’t have been able to see the roof of the cavern for all of them. Now most of them had fallen, no doubt rusting beneath the water on the cavern floor.
Maric asked what it had been for, if it had been some kind of fortress, but Nalthur only looked at him in disgust. “You humans wouldn’t understand,” he muttered.
The way up to the surface required them to march along the precarious edge by the water until they found another door much like the one that Maric and the others had found all the way back in the hills. This one, while covered with lime and rust, was still closed. The lime was so thick on it, in fact, that they couldn’t even see any evidence of a lock mechanism.
Nalthur immediately sent his men to work with their picks, chipping away at the lime and rust to see what lay beneath. The dwarf seemed unsure if it was going to do any good, however. “Even if we manage to get through,” he muttered, “there’s no telling what’s at the top. You humans might have built over it, for all we know.”
Rowan frowned. “I don’t remember anyone mentioning anything about a passageway going down to the dwarven outpost.”
“It would have been sealed centuries ago,” Katriel said. “When the darkspawn took the Deep Roads, the townsfolk would have closed it up to keep them from attacking the town.”
Nalthur sighed. “Then we’ll have two seals to break, if we can.” He glanced at Maric. “Otherwise you’ve come all this way for nothing.”
Loghain stared at the cloudy water in the cavern, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “If you swam out that way, would it lead out to the ocean? Could you swim up to the shore above?”
The dwarf looked at him incredulously. “If the sluice gate is open. And if you can hold your breath long enough. And if the pressure doesn’t kill you.”
The ringing of the picks went on for hours, until finally the great doors had been scoured enough that several older dwarves could take a closer look at the lock mechanism. One of them, Nalthur assured Maric, had been a smith “when he was alive.” After a time, the smith reported the bad news: the lock was rusted shut. They would need to burn their way through.
This process required the use of acid, which the dwarves brought forth from their equipment wagons in the form of small vials full of brackish liquid. They opened the vials with tongs and poured the acid into the lock. The result was a lot of acrid smoke and blue flame, and after three applications the smith finally declared the door ready to open.
Nalthur commanded the Legion to attach several large hooks to the door, each tied to a rope that five dwarves pulled on with all their might. They strained, gritting their teeth and digging their feet into the rock, and ever so slowly the doors opened. They groaned at first, letting out wrenching sounds that reverberated throughout the cavern. Then they began to give, parting by inches and generating an excruciating squealing noise as the rusted metal dragged along the rocky floor.
As the ancient doors opened more quickly, a great cloud of dust began to billow in, blown in by what was immediately recognizable as fresh air. As the dust made the dwarves cough, Loghain stepped forward.
Fresh air? His brows shot up. If there were fresh air, then that meant . . .
Suddenly a great form began to rush forward out of the dust cloud. It was a stone golem, over ten feet tall, and with a great roar it began to swing widely with its fists. The dwarves reacted with surprise as the creature charged into their ranks, its blows sending them flying into the air. Many of them slammed against the rocky walls, while others were flung into the nearby water.