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Jeff Crook

Dark Thane

Book I

1

Tarn Bellowgranite hurried along the tunnel, surrounded by his personal guard of twelve dwarf warriors in jangling plate armor. A stiff, wet wind shrilled in his face, whipping his straw-colored beard over his shoulder like a scarf. Miles behind him now, King Gilthas led the last of the refugee elves away from their homeland of Qualinesti. Against the advice of his own Council of Thanes, Tarn and his dwarves had dug escape tunnels to help the elves avoid detection as they fled the green dragon Beryl. Somewhere ahead, Tarn’s army of dwarves was battling Beryl and her legions of goblins, draconians, and human Knights of Neraka. Somewhere behind, the elves they had come to save were fleeing to safety.

For a moment, the thirteen dwarves slowed their steps as they listened to the wind blowing up the tunnel. Dwarves could tell by the sighing of an underground breeze what kinds of stone it had blown through, or so it was said. It was also said that a dwarf could hear a copper coin rattle in the shoe of a troll standing in a cesspit. What Tarn heard, though, were screams. Terror, pain, anger, and the rending of stone, the scream of the very earth as it succumbed to some great force.

The floor of the tunnel suddenly dropped from beneath their feet, sending the dwarves plunging down a slope of loose gravel and soil that had not been there moments before. The thirteen heavily armored dwarves crashed in a heap on a level twenty feet below, sounding as if a tinker’s cart full of pots had been thrown down a well.

“What in the name of the Abyss!” Tarn swore as he rose, groaning and knuckling his back. The other dwarves climbed to their feet, battered and bruised, covered in dust and gravel, grumbling like the dead crawling out of their graves.

A wild-eyed dwarf with an unkempt beard jutting furiously from his mail coif leaned against the damp stone wall as though caressing it. “The very rock groans,” he hissed after a few moments.

“I can feel the strain of the earth through the soles of my boots,” Tarn said.

“The dragon,” one of the other dwarves cryptically pronounced. The others nodded while dusting off their beards.

“Where are we now?” Tarn asked. The collapsed tunnel had dumped them into a deeper passage, one that crossed beneath their tunnel at right angles. All around them, they smelled the soft, peaty loam excreted by the monstrous Urkhan worms the dwarves had used to delve these tunnels.

“Urkhan holding pen,” the first dwarf said. “If we follow this passage, it should lead us back to a main tunnel. ”

“You know these passages better than I, Captain Mog. Lead the way,” Tarn said.

The other dwarves fell into protective positions around Tarn as they trotted off together. Mog ranged ahead a dozen yards to scout the way. The round passage led them along a meandering course through more worm pens and past the abandoned quarters of the worm wranglers. Several worm harnesses still hung from the wall of a chamber chewed from the earth by the worms’ passage. All the pens in this area were empty, as the Urkhan worms had been moved into the tunnels beneath the city in preparation for the dragon’s attack. Eventually, the tunnel led them into a wider passage.