Chapter 32

Pillaster died within the hour, gasping painfully for his last breath.

By that time, Innova had dismantled the aqueduct, his thoughts and his glance drawn constantly to the pool of light on the chamber floor, where Pointillo and Lucretius knelt by their dying comrade, offering solace and company and prayer.

Labor with the axe hurt, as the wood and stone of the aqueduct splintered beneath a heavy rain of blows. He had bruised something in his flight to the span, in his headlong collision with the very thing he was destroying now.

But what hurt more was the scene below.

The greatest pain of all came when the colonel and the old gnome bowed their heads, and Pointillo removed one of his blankets to cover the spent form of Pillaster.

His eyes welling with tears, Innova doubled his efforts on the span, his axe rising and falling in sorrow and anger. The aqueduct split before him, and the coursing water tumbled onto the floor in a sad waterfall.

He heard Pointillo's shout, and looked down.

The colonel, it seemed, had been calling to him for some time, his words lost in Innova's fury.

"Come down," Pointillo said, lowering his voice. "We've one more aqueduct to find. It would be a great disloyalty to them—to Lozenge and Triquet, to Roundell and Pillaster and the dwarves—if we did not complete this task."

Innova breathed deeply, recovering balance. He caught a faint, acrid whiff of brimstone and smoke and steam, and the hot smell brought him back to his senses. Carefully, he climbed down the nearest abutment, and stood beside his comrades on the floor.

"How?" he asked at last. "When that horrible man—that cleric—tried to hurl the green mist onto you, Lucretius… how did you avoid it? How did you survive?"

"I'm not sure," the old gnome replied. "It was a form of grace or miracle, or perhaps even something in the old clerical bloodline—residual, but still powerful, like an inheritance of a cowlick or an unattractive squint."

"Perhaps it was the bloodline," Innova agreed. "After all, Oliver seemed to recognize it in you."

"He did, indeed," Lucretius acknowledged, shouldering his bag of jewels and glass. "But as for me, I'm not prepared to discount grace or miracle as well. I expect it's a heartening thing not to discount the things that drop out of the math, wouldn't you say? But forgive me if I don't feel heartened now."

Lucretius nodded at the wrapped body at their feet. "This makes the victory hollow," he murmured.

"There's no victory without costs like these," Pointillo said mysteriously, wrapping his topmost cloak more tightly about his shoulders. "We can take all the stands we like, ignore the causes and effects in the doing, but it still comes down to consequences, doesn't it?"

Lucretius stood in silence, placed his hand on the colonel's shoulder.

"All the more reason to pursue that victory," he said finally. "In honor of those consequences."

"It's a Life Quest of sorts," Pointillo said. "Even if you lose your life in achieving it."

The journey to the First Level seemed the longest of all.

Weighted down by weariness and sadness, the three gnomes circled the stairway that led to their last destination. The heat that struck them when they set foot on the bottommost excavated floor of Mount Nevermind was virtually unbearable: Smoke veiled the passages, and the rocks virtually sizzled underfoot, as the magma skimmed only a foot beneath the surface.

The mountain itself seemed to breathe, possessed of an alien life.

At places along their lonely path, the ground beneath them was broken entirely. Fissures and cracks glowed in the stone, and on several occasions they were forced to sidle around pools of magma, spreading slowly across the beleaguered cavern.

"It's our good fortune," Lucretius called out over the hiss of steam and the mysterious, ragged rumbling, "that the aqueduct lies near the outermost part of the mountain. It's almost as far away from the core as you can get, while still being underground. If the fire follows us, we've half a chance to escape—maybe even sixty percent, according to my geometry and secondary algebra."

To escape? Innova stopped short in the vaporous passage.

He had been so busy doing the next thing, banishing cause and effect, that it had not occurred to him.

When they had destroyed the final aqueduct, how could they escape the magma and eruptions that might follow?

Lucretius seemed to read his thought.

"The glade!" he shouted, in his voice more than a glimmer of hope.

Innova remembered the story. Remembered Lucretius's account of the small secluded spot at the foot of the mountain, filled with fresh air and sunlight—the place to which he retreated for a while, when the closeness and the dark grew too much for him, when his "gatherings" grew too heavy to carry and he needed a place to store them.

The old gnome's subterranean habits would save them yet!

Encouraged, Innova approached a threshold where the tunnel opened into a small chamber virtually consumed by the rising magma. A narrow footpath, barely the width of his axe, circled halfway around the bubbling pool and exited the chamber through a low tunnel.

They had come to this place barely in time. Odds were that they could not return the way they came.

Cautiously, the gnomes took the path, skirting the edge of the glowing magma. Innova and Pointillo averted their eyes: Lucretius had warned them that staring into the stuff was like staring into a doubled sun. It could blind them in a matter of seconds.

Which was why they were surprised when Lucretius shouted.

They turned to face the old gnome, who pointed into the pool of magma.

Casting his eyes down, Innova blinked stupidly at the blinding glow. Then he saw it—the red and black of the roiling surface replaced, only briefly, by something rising and diving and vanishing under the magma.

Black and red as well, but solid and living…

The rising of a scaled back, of a monstrous thing surfacing for a moment.

Innova's breath fled him. He heard himself scream.

He remembered nothing until, in a shadowy room, the light of a lantern brushed his face and Lucretius stood over him, shaking him back to his senses.

"Innova!" the old gnome called. "No dawdling, now! I need you!"

Dragonfear.

That awestruck, paralyzed state that rushes on you after you glimpse the great beast. It dazes some, stuns others, and has been known to kill less complicated creatures.

So Lucretius Climenole told his two companions as they sat by a lantern on the chamber floor, some distance from where the dragon had surfaced in the magma pool.

He assured them that, fortunately, the dragon was bound for some nether caverns far beneath the excavated part of the mountain. Whatever type of creation it was, it seemed to thrive in magma and fire.

It was the source, he believed, of the mysterious rumbling.

"Good or evil?" Innova asked, his thoughts still addled by the sight he had seen.

"I beg your pardon?" Lucretius asked. "Here we are, but a brisk walk away from more interesting questions of leverage and hydraulics and infrastructure—the kinds of things that boggle the most incomprehensible engineers—and you're stuck on a question of ethics, for the sake of great sweaty neutral Reorx!"

Chastened, Innova shrugged. The old gnome's next words were softer, more soothing.

"I expect that the creature is oblivious to manners, much less more eternal questions. If it's born of the same Chaos that is working the bottom of this mountain, it probably cares for only dragon things—riches and destruction. No moral philosophy in that!"

"But why didn't the dragonfear take you as well?" Innova asked. "And how did you get us here?"

"I don't know and wheelbarrows," Lucretius replied, answering both questions at once. At the edge of the lantern light, Innova could see the still wheels of a capsized barrow.

He could not get over the way Lucretius knew this place—the nooks and the stockpiles, tools produced out of nowhere, and the one right path chosen among many. The little glade that would serve as their refuge if it all came to explosions and hurled fire. The endless supply of pure water.

Something in the old rascal's nature, evidently, protected him against malign spells and natural phenomena.

"You're like a wise man in an old story, Lucretius," he whispered.

"The one who comes and makes it all right?" Lucretius asked ironically. "The wizard with the key? The cleric with the healing spell? No, Innova. It's been all I could do to guide you this far, to keep you at task in the midst of all these disasters and disruptions. So come, enough of heroic fantasy. The last standing aqueduct—if it is indeed the last standing—is not far from here."

Feebly, Lucretius helped his two companions to their feet. Pointillo was listless, his movements slow and constrained, as though he walked in a great depth of water.

Innova moved slowly as well, because once again he was distracted.

If it is indeed the last standing? What in the name of great Reorx could that mean? Had Lucretius brought them this far, only to doubt and dither?

He watched the old gnome shoulder Grex Pointillo, guide the colonel down the middle path of a thrice-branching tunnel.

No, Lucretius wasn't dithering. He was just old. And the added anxiety of enemies in the depths, of rising heat and a difficult task that needed to be performed quickly…

Well, it all added up to exhausting days. Exhaustion and doubt, the diseases of a journey's last steps.

Yet the old fellow persevered. Ahead of Innova now, his knees bent, Lucretius guided the staggering Pointillo toward the threshold of another chamber, where he stopped, leaned the colonel against the arched entrance, and continued through the portal, his lantern raised.

Somehow, Innova had thought this room would be bigger. It was the last of the aqueducts—he told himself it was, despite Lucretius's cryptic, doubtful comment. So he had expected it would be huge and vaulting, the father of all aqueducts arching breathtakingly over vast spaces.

But it was a narrow chamber, tapering to a ceiling more narrow still, where the aqueduct emerged from one outcropping of shadowy rock and tunneled into another, its visible span no longer than two gnome paces.

Innova wiped his hands on the front of his sweaty tunic. In some ways this would be easy: no debating where to strike the structure, because so little of it was within reach. At the same time, good purchase and good leverage would be hard to come by, because up among those jutting rocks there was scarcely enough space to swing an axe.

Still, it could be done, and he was almost cheerful as he searched the sloping walls for a handhold. That cheer evaporated when a rustling sound rose from the shadows past the aqueduct.

At first, Innova froze in place, imagining that somehow the dragon had returned. He was almost relieved when the four forms that emerged from the darkness were smaller, human-sized.

Until he saw what they were.

Whether it was the darkness of the cavern or the darkness within the creatures that made them seem almost insubstantial, Innova was never sure. But now they stepped forward with certainty, spreading out as they approached the huddled gnomes.

Innova had already seen them in action. Four of them, armed and ready, were more than a match for his wearied party.

He glanced up at the aqueduct. After all this time and suffering, it was just out of reach.

I have heard of stories, he thought, where the hero dies within sight of his goal. I've always thought they were sad, but I suppose it's better than never getting close at all.

Then Grex Pointillo pushed him toward the walls.

"Climb," the colonel said. "Both of you."

Innova looked uncertainly at Lucretius Climenole. But the old gnome seemed to understand something, to recognize something in the colonel's face and bearing.

"He wasn't right, you know," Lucretius said quietly. "At least there's a chance he wasn't."

Innova puzzled over who "he" was, until Pointillo spoke.

"That chance is a thin one. Whatever this is, I'm half as alive as I was an hour ago. Oliver was right. I'll need no reckoning soon."

"Not necessarily. There are poultices and potions, medicines and nostrums and…" Lucretius began. The old gnome was grasping at air. He knew that the colonel was right.

"Go on," Pointillo said. "I believe I can buy you time enough to destroy the aqueduct."

"But there are four of them!" Innova protested.

Pointillo drew his sword. "I may not get them all. But one thing's for sure. I can't get much colder than this."

With a push from Lucretius, Innova began to climb the wall toward the aqueduct. The rocks were almost unbearably hot, even through his gloves, and for a moment he feared he could not hang on. But another boost from behind, a dull pain in his backside from an injury that seemed years ago, told him Lucretius was urging him on.

He took one upward step, then another, climbing the rocks like steaming, scarcely visible rungs of a ladder. Before he knew it, he was to the last outcropping, and a swift step took him to the aqueduct itself. He turned, extended his hand to Lucretius…

Who clung to the wall, unable to take his grasp.

"I've about reached my end, Innova," he said with a weak smile. "Bad lungs and creaking knees'll do you in more surely than any dragon. So much for magic and the wizards in stories, eh? You'll have to take it from here. I'm doing my best just to hang on."

Innova looked down to the chamber floor, where the chaotic warriors circled the colonel. Grex Pointillo lunged at one of the things, which almost seemed to evaporate as it eluded his sword point.

It looked bad on all fronts. Best get this done with.

He propped his haunches against the near outcropping and raised his axe.

At the far end of the aqueduct, scarcely an axe length away, the rocks began to glitter and boil.

Miragos! Innova thought, in the brief second before the outcropping changed from solid stone…

To a flickering nest of spiders.

Many times before, Innova had imagined spiders lurking where he did not see them. Now, by the trickery of the mirago, he saw spiders where he did not imagine they were.

An illusion, he told himself.

"An illusion!" Lucretius shouted.

Still, the spiders boiled out of the rocks in front of him, doubling in number with every blink of his eyes. Reflex drew him back, and the illusory creatures spread to cover the entire aqueduct, the surrounding walls…

The haft of his axe.

Innova closed his eyes, but like an afterimage of light the vermin raced across his lidded vision, and he felt them crawling up his legs, his arms, onto the back of his neck.

He shrieked, opened his eyes, climbed toward the rocks and a hasty descent—

Then he saw them looking up at him. Lucretius, clinging to the rockface, and Pointillo, hemmed in by monsters.

Long ago I thought I had friends, Innova thought. And now that I do—really do—here I am ready to betray them!

With a sudden turn, not stopping to think about the consequences, about the creatures he only imagined swarming at his feet but which were there because he saw them and felt them, Innova brought the axe crashing down into the horde of spiders, into wood and stone and water.

He raised it, brought it down again and again. Suddenly the aqueduct gave way, and the water spilled into the chamber, showering Pointillo and his enemies, spattering across the dangling Lucretius.

The shadow warriors looked up. One of them—Innova could not tell which—shrieked mouthlessly, and two of them retreated into darkness. The other two lunged at Grex Pointillo, who drove his sword through the nearest. The one remaining warrior brought its axe down in a blurring shadow, driving the blade between the colonel's shoulders.

Then quietly, the creatures faded back into the shadows. Whether they had been defeated or simply chose to retreat, it was impossible to tell.

Nor was Innova certain that his work on the aqueduct—their work in the lower levels—had stopped the Paradise Machine that protected the Knights of Takhisis upstairs.

He would have to trust that it did when he had time to think about it. But he didn't much care at that moment.

For Grex Pointillo lay on the hot floor, his beard incongruously crusted with ice and his lips blue and quivering. It was a chill, it seemed, that not even the magma could banish.

Innova descended and knelt by his friend. Pointillo stared at him absently through pale, indifferent eyes.

"Maybe this is the Quest after all," the colonel whispered. "No spells, no wise men, no answers. Just doing what you can for those around you?"

Then, so gradually that Innova could not tell when the final change had come, the colonel refocused his gaze from his comrades onto nothing.

"Had it been a story…" Innova began.

"I know," Lucretius interrupted. "He would have had some revelation for us. Some ultimate truth of moment and importance. I don't know whether we'd have had time to hear it.

"We're not far from the glade, and it's a good thing. Something in all of this is about to change."