Drakis glanced over at Braun.
“It’s going to be all right now,” Braun said to him quietly. “Sometimes it has to be truly dark before we can make out the stars in the sky.”
Drakis took in a breath to speak but then let it out again as a sigh. He stepped between the Impress Warriors even as their masters were organizing them into defensive lines. He was blind as he stepped quickly toward their manticorian captain, the darkness seeming a complete void beyond.
“Captain?” Drakis spoke as he came near.
ChuKang turned to the Proxi, pointing to the stones beneath his feet. “Gate symbols! The first one right here, and then start propagating them along both sides of this landing as long as possible! Do it now. . we may not have much time.”
Braun bowed slightly and then shrugged his shoulder out of Drakis’ grasp.
Drakis looked at him with slight embarrassment. He had simply forgotten to let go.
“As the Emperor wills,” Braun said with a crooked smile. The Proxi immediately swung the Standard around smartly, its steel point jabbing into the stone as Braun knelt next to it. The stones beneath it were cut by the strange purple glow at the staff’s tip-an unnatural color that Drakis found difficult to look at. Meticulously, Braun moved the tip across the stones, inscribing their surface with the familiar interlocking ovals of the gate symbol. Once completed, any Tribune could use them to transport their own Centurai to this same spot-the last location of their most forward progress. Many a valiant warrior had died for the honor of moving these symbols a few yards forward on the battlefield.
“KriChan,” ChuKang said quietly to his lieutenant at his side. “Have you ever seen the like?”
Drakis watched the two manticores stare into the darkness together.
Then Drakis realized that the darkness was not entirely dark. As his eyes slowly adjusted from the brilliance of the halls they had just left, he could make out fires burning in the distance, their vague reflection on still waters and in the distance. .
“The Yungskord!” Drakis breathed.
ChuKang turned at the sound. “Yes, Drakis. The Yungskord. . the last cavern of the dwarves. It’s said to be over a third of a league long.”
Drakis stepped up next to where ChuKang stood. He could see now that they were standing on a wide, stone landing that ran across the face of the dwarven city from which they had just emerged. Below the landing, the natural cavern sloped downward to the edge of the fabled underground Lake Kigga. The fires appeared to dot a rugged island in the center of the lake that rose upward toward an impossibly regular and enormous oval of stone. Drakis pointed toward it. “Is that. .?”
“The Stoneheart?” KriChan said through his fanged grin. “The last throne of the dwarves? Yes, Drakis, I believe we have found it.”
The Stoneheart, Drakis thought. Every Impress Warrior had been thoroughly instructed in it from before the battle began. It was a single, massive granite disk, polished by the dwarves to a glassy smoothness, though Drakis had wondered why dwarves would want to go to so much trouble to put a brilliant finish on something that would never be touched by light. It was nearly a hundred yards in diameter and perhaps twenty yards thick in the center. Most remarkable of all, the entire stone sat atop an enormous geyser whose channeled energies pushed upward with such force that the stone seemed to float atop it. It was the flow from this geyser that fed the torrents raging across the floor of the cavern.
“We may have found it, but how do we get to it?” ChuKang mused. “These gate symbols we’re laying down will make this the entry point for the entire army once they are engraved, but charging that island with an army isn’t going to get them any closer to the throne. Look-to the left-that small dwarven city on that side of the cavern. There’s a causeway that runs up from those buildings to that gate. .”
“The Thorgreld,” Drakis said aloud.
The Stoneheart was accessible only via a single bridge carved from the stone that extended from the doors to the Heart outward toward the Last Gate of Thorgreld. It was the final defense of the Last Dwarven Throne, for on the order of their king the entire Stoneheart could be rotated atop the geyser by the dwarves within, moving both bridge and entrance door away from the Last Gate and making it unreachable. The Tribune had told them a great deal about it as they prepared, for battle within the Stoneheart was the prize coveted by all the Houses of the Rhonas Imperium, but hearing it described did not convey to Drakis the enormity of the experience of seeing it himself.
“We’ve got to get to that causeway,” ChuKang said, his voice rumbling as he considered the problem.
“Were any of our warriors over there before?” Drakis asked.
Both ChuKang and KriChan turned toward him. “The Tribune would know. . but if they were that close to the causeway, wouldn’t they have pressed the attack?”