“A human lectures a dwarf on his duty!” The dwarf laughed harshly, but sweat had broken out on his forehead, glittering in the lamplight. His eyes shifted about. “Besides—rock once broken like this will never be dross.”

“It was ill done, then, to injure healthy rock, and for the sake of so little. Sertig’s curse will not fall on me.”

The dwarf seemed almost to shrink, but then he burst out of the crack, letting the gnome fall back into the crevice. “You at least must die, having seen our rock-magic.” He had his ax in hand now and a blade longer than Arvid’s dagger in the other hand.

“This is foolish,” Arvid said, moving out of reach. “You and the kteknik could escape. Why attack me?”

“Vengeance,” the dwarf said. “You betrayed us; you ruined our plan; you are my enemy and the enemy of all rockfolk, for what you have seen.” He waved the ax in a complex design and spoke words Arvid did not know. In an instant, with a shriek and showers of grit, stone flowed across what had been the doorway. Even if the knights outside awoke, they could not help him now.

A moment’s panic almost cost him his life, as the dwarf charged. Arvid shifted aside just in time, taking a slice from the dwarf’s knife on the outside of his left arm. His body took over, years of training producing parries and attacks, over and over, as the dwarf, rock-strong and angry, came at him without pause. Simyits! Help! But here in Gird’s Hall, the trickster god, the two-faced, had no power, if indeed he ever had. Arvid wondered, in the fourth time around the margin of the room, using the wall to help ward him from the ax blows, if he dared call on Gird.

That thought struck him as funny, and in that moment of utter relaxation, he managed a kick at the dwarf’s elbow, and the ax flew clear. With his next thrust, he buried his blade in the angle of jaw and throat. The dwarf staggered; Arvid shoved and twisted; the tip of his sword was stuck in the back of that hard, thick skull. The dwarf grabbed at the blade one-handed and thrust at Arvid with the other, but could not reach him. Finally—too slowly—the dwarf slumped to his knees and fell over. Arvid waited … the dwarf was, at last, obviously dead.

So he hadn’t needed Gird after all? A man’s laugh—whose?—rang in his head, and someone—who?—asked how he planned to escape. The lamps were guttering now; the air already smelled close and stale. He could die here—suffocate here—and be entombed forever. Even if other rockfolk came, they would not give his corpse any honor, not with a dead dwarf in the same chamber. No one would ever know—

Panic returned. No one would ever know what he had planned to tell the Archivist about Paksenarrion.

Well, then, the voice suggested, best use the wits the gods gave you and find a way out.