“Nae hort,” it cried, the voice both gruff and high-pitched. “Nae hort!”

It took a moment. “Don’t…don’t hurt you?” He leaned closer, glaring. “Don’t think to trick me, creature. I want to go out, but I can’t find the surface—the light. Where is the light?”

The little man stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Yow beyst in Rootsman’s Nayste—ouren Drowhame. High in mountain, beyst, wuth caves and caves, ken? Wrong way to dayburn.”

If he listened carefully, he could make sense of it. So he was climbing inside the mountain itself—no wonder he couldn’t find the surface! He was relieved, but if the creature considered the weak light of the shadowlands worthy of being called “dayburn,” he hoped it never found itself in the true light of day on the other side of the Shadowline.

“How do I get out. Out to…to dayburn?”

“Thic way.” The Drow squirmed gently until Barrick loosened his grip. It turned and pointed with a stubby, crack-nailed finger. “Yon.”

Barrick gratefully transferred his blade to his good hand. “Very well. Lead me.”

“Willae set a free?”

“If you lead me to the dayburn, yes, I’ll free you. But if you try to run away from me before we get there, I’ll stick you with this!” He was sick of blood and killing, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of a short, miserable life in these caverns, either.

Barrick didn’t know if it was a good or bad sign that the farther the creature led him, the more deserted the corridors became. They moved mostly horizontally at first, through rooms that clearly had some kind of function, mostly as storehouses stacked with bent and broken digging tools, battered, empty ore buckets, broken wagons awaiting repair, ropes and other supplies, or with less comprehensible things—piles of what looked like fired clay chips covered with incised marks, leaking bags and barrels of different colored powders, even one chamber so misty and chill that at first he thought they had stepped out of the mines at last and into the midst of a terrible winter storm. He was several paces into this last cavern before he realized they were still deep under the earth, and that the tooth-chattering cold was because the room was piled high with blocks of snow or ice. But why? And where could such things come from?

The answer to the second came a few moments later, as he began to see what was stacked along the walls, largely hidden by the mist. Corpses, although of what it was hard to tell, because they had been quartered as if by expert butchers. His already cringing spirits plummeted even farther. What was the reason for such madness? In a trembling voice, he asked the Drow, but the creature only shrugged its ignorance.

Was it meat? But certainly none of the prisoners had been fed any, and there hadn’t seemed enough guards to need such a monstrous supply: the frost-blanketed carcasses were stacked like kindling all around the huge room. And where did the ice itself come from? It had been cold outside, rainy and often miserable, but there had been nothing like snow, let alone such vast quantities of ice.