Dark Thane

Shnatz didn't need to remind his band of twenty gully dwarves not to touch any of the skeletons. There was some power left in these old bones, power to chill the heart and fog the mind with terror. The gully dwarves wanted nothing more than to get beyond them. Finally, they left the scene of slaughter behind and entered a wide paved courtyard surrounded by darkly glaring windows and empty doorways. In the center of the courtyard, a fountain had once sent a stream of clear cold water jetting from the mouth of a cavorting wolf. But now the wolfs head lay in the bottom of the dust-filled basin; its tail and one of its legs were broken off and lost amid the ruin of shattered stone that had fallen from the porticos of the surrounding residences.

Shnatz's footprints crossed the courtyard in a meandering line, like a hound upon a scent. In places, the footprints bunched up and overran themselves. But Shnatz ignored the path now and made his way directly across the courtyard, to the place where the footsteps ended abruptly at a large paving stone completely free of any trace of dust. Fresh stone showed through in chips along its edges, and several lines of footprints led away from and back to it. Shnatz stopped here and pulled a small pry bar from some hidden fold of his second-hand tunic. He inserted it along the edge of the paving stone, and on the third try, the stone tilted. He caught it and slid it to the side before it could fall into the black hole beneath.

He turned to his companions and said in as firm a voice as he could muster, "Wait here. You got it?" They nodded in unison, a sea of bobbing heads that made his stomach roll over.

He stepped to the edge of the hole and dropped in, landing with a thump some twenty feet below and immediately splaying himself out on the stone to keep from sliding down the rather severe slope of the glassy floor. After a few moments to get his bearings, Shnatz slipped down the slope until he found the ladder. It wasn't much of a ladder. He had nailed it together from broken pieces of furniture that he scavenged from the ruins, and he certainly was no carpenter. Neither was he a stonemason, but he had managed to chip a pair of grooves out of the floor beneath the hole to set the ladder's feet in to keep them from slipping on the steep, glass-slick floor. Nevertheless, he was quite proud of his ladder and anxious to show it off, even if only to puhungs.

That's when he heard the first one hit the floor with a yelp and a clang of tools. He quickly stepped aside as the gully dwarf went shrieking by, sliding on his back with his pickaxe skittering and sparking behind him. Shnatz didn't even bother to try to catch him. Instead, he hefted the ladder and rushed upslope to try to stop the next one. The cries of the first one died away behind him even as the next one slammed into the ground in front of him. He threw his ladder down and grabbed her before the unfortunate creature could gather any momentum. She clung to his arm in terror, while at the same time instinctively catching her hammer as it streaked by, spitting sparks.

"Wait!" Shnatz hissed even as he saw the next one leaning over the edge of the hole. "Wait for ladder!"

He shook himself free of the gully dwarf he had rescued, after telling her to lie still. She obeyed without question. Feeling around on the floor, Shnatz found the grooves he had carved in the floor. He set the feet of the ladder into the grooves and pulled it up until its top rested just at the edge of the hole. "Come now!" he ordered.

"Is it safe?" one of the gully dwarves asked as he edged onto the ladder's first rung.

"Stupid puhungs" Shnatz muttered. "I not know why I bother with you stupid puhungs. Is it safe? It safer than jumping, stupid puhung."

Once they had safely navigated their descent, Shnatz ordered them to bunch together and hold on to one another. Standing alone, one might slip and fall, bowl into his companions, and send the entire throng sliding to their deaths. But close together, there was less chance that one false step would bring them all down. Plus, Shnatz was leading them and he didn't want to be swept up in the tide of their self-inflicted ruin.

Even so, it was a tricky and dangerous climb down the glass-smooth slope. No dwarf construction, this tunnel had been burned through the solid stone by one of the Chaos dragons that had attacked Thorbardin. After continuing downward for about a hundred feet, the passage made an abrupt right turn and leveled off. Here, they found the first gully dwarf who had dropped through the hole, the point of his pickax lodged firmly between his crossed eyes. Shnatz kicked him to make sure he was dead, then continued onward with a roll of his eyes. The other gully dwarves crept past their dead comrade, snickering nervously, death being one of their most familiar jokes, and the more absurd the death the better they liked it, unless they were the ones doing the dying.