“You’re not my father and never were!” Morlock snarled, holding his digger like a knife. “My father is dead! His ashes rest in the Holy Halls under Thrymhaiam!”

That startled Deor out of his skull nightmare. Morlock was having a nightmare about Merlin, of course. He knew his harven-kin often did.

“I wish Oldfather Tyr was with us now,” he whispered to Morlock. “There was nothing that he feared.”

Morlock shook his head—not like he was disagreeing; like a man waking. Then he whispered, “We must be close to the interior. The nightmares will be thickest there.”

“Joy of joys.”

They dug.

The horror that Krida felt for mandrakes and dwarves was not hard for Deor to understand. He himself felt it for Other Folk at times, especially when they were dead. A dwarf’s soul, he knew or believed, mounted into the sky and fled the world through the gateway in the west on the morning after its body’s death. But there was nothing in any teaching about the souls of men and women doing the same thing. They lingered, like mist, in the dark places of the earth; they haunted graveyards and possessed dead bodies.

Deor knew where he and Morlock were and what they were doing, but at the same time he became convinced that they were digging into the mausoleum of a human graveyard. He had seen them, great buildings just like this but full of corpses rotting in boxes. And Other Folk went there and left flowers and had picnics and engaged in their bizarre and ugly mating practices on grass fed by the filth of rotting flesh. It was deeply disgusting. He hated those places and he couldn’t imagine why he had come to this one. Soon they would break through to the interior and it would be filled with bodies. But they would not be dead bodies. Not anymore. . . .

His digger broke through into empty darkness. Not far away were staring eyes, gleaming silver in the moonlight.

“Stand away,” Morlock directed, and Deor didn’t need to be told twice. When Deor was clear, Morlock swung around so that his feet were facing the pitted wall. He braced himself and kicked until the hole was big enough to crawl through.

“Rope,” he said.

Deor was a little surprised that Morlock was about to hang himself, but on reflection he decided that it was really the only escape. He handed Morlock the bight of rope hanging from his belt.

Morlock drove his digger between two paving blocks and anchored the rope to it. Then he loosed the bight and, with the free end in hand, slithered feet first into the hole.

Morlock saw eyes—dozens of them staring at him in the bar of moonslight falling after him into the cellar. He heard the hiss of many mouths breathing, smelt the stink of many bodies and their waste.

“Kelat!”

“That’s me!” said a voice just behind him. “You killed me and buried me once, but you won’t do it again!”

Something sharp slashed the side of his neck. He leaped away but not before his blood fell burning to the ground.

The moon-wounded darkness of the pit gave way to a blood-colored twilight as Morlock’s blood burned on the fungal floor. Kelat stood astonished in the dim, fiery light, watching burning blood drip off the sharp stake in his hand.

If there was ever any chance of talking to Kelat through the haze of nightmares, it was obviously lost. Morlock kicked the stake out of Kelat’s hand and continued the kick to land with his full weight on the pit of Kelat’s stomach.

Kelat oofed out the air in his lungs but was not so bemused that he didn’t get a grip on Morlock’s foot. He twisted it viciously. Morlock was compelled to spin with the twist, or limp through the rest of his life. He landed on his back in a pile of filth. Kelat charged him, shouting in a language Morlock didn’t know; he thought it might be Vraidish. He kicked Kelat in the knees and the stranger went down, striking his head against the cellar wall. He did not get up again.

Morlock climbed to his feet and went over to check on Kelat. He was still breathing, thank God Sustainer. Morlock hefted up the twitching stranger, clearly in the grip of a nightmare, and stuffed him like a sack of beans up through the gap in the cellar wall. Deor began to help from the other side, and soon the way was clear for him to leave.

He turned and looked at the Khnauronts. They were huddled up against the far wall, watching him in the dim light of the fire burning on the floor. He was tempted to let the fire burn—let them all die. They deserved it. But it wasn’t up to him to decide what they deserved. He stamped out the bloodfire and climbed up the rope through the gap into the free air of the alley.

Deor was there, examining Kelat’s skull with his fingers as the stranger breathed stertorously and muttered gibberish or Vraidish.

“He’ll live,” the dwarf said, banishing at least one of Morlock’s fears. “We weren’t exactly quiet.”

“Let’s get away quickly.”

“Sew you up first,” Deor said, taking an incombustible needle and thread from a couple of pockets.

“You’ll burn your fingers,” Morlock said.

“So what?” Deor said, and had him sit down in the street as he deftly sewed up Morlock’s wound (jagged, but not serious), then smeared it with a healing paste, then anointed his fingers with the same.

“Thanks, harven.”

“You’d do the same.”

They went to pick up Kelat and started carrying him down the alleyway.

Thains with long hooded spears began stepping out of the shadows.

“Chaos in a wheelbarrow!” Deor cursed.

They dropped Kelat in the street.

Into the moonslit street strode a tall woman with white hair, wearing a red cloak.

“Surrender, Guardians!” called out Noreê in undisguised triumph. “You will not take the prisoner away. But you will explain yourselves at Station tomorrow.”

“You have no authority to stay us, Vocate,” Morlock called back.

“I do have the power to do it, Vocate,” Noreê replied. “Stand away from the prisoner and you won’t be hurt.”

“Approach the prisoner and you will be hurt,” Morlock replied. “What I say, I say to you all. I am on the Graith’s business and I will kill anyone who stands in my way. Maintain the Guard!”

“Maintain the Guard!” replied several of the thains reflexively, but Noreê shouted over them, “Brave words, Guardian! But you can’t fight your way through my thains; there are too many of them.”

“The odds were worse at the Hill of Storms,” Deor remarked. He unslung his axe and flourished it.

Morlock drew both sword and spear. He and Deor stood back to back.

“Thains, unhood your spears and advance,” Noreê directed. “Do not kill the dwarf if it can be helped.”

Most of the thains shook the hoods off their bright spears and advanced slowly up the street. Glancing about, Morlock saw that there were thains cautiously advancing from the shadows on all sides of them. And there were others who stood indecisive behind them.

“Khuknen vei vedorna,” Deor remarked in a low voice (“Their hearts aren’t in this”) and Morlock agreed, “Zhai!”

Morlock had become fairly skilled at using a thain’s spear, and he thought that if he could take one away from the first unfortunate who approached him, their odds would go up. His stabbing spear was well-balanced for throwing, and that might take them off guard. If they could open up a hole in the wall of thains, it would be well to pick up Kelat and retreat into a narrow area between the houses, where their opponents’ numbers would matter even less. . . .

Then there were other shadowy forms running into the street, hooded men coming through the gaps between the buildings, filling the empty moonslit streetstones between Morlock and Deor and the other Guardians. None of their faces could be seen, but each one wore a ring made of blackiron on his right hand.