Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,90
city,” Remy said. “An underground dwarven city.”
“Yes, but the roofs of that city weren’t three inches above my head,” Diana pointed out. She’d turned into her werebear form almost the instant the cave-in had taken place.
“Not that I want to tell you how to live,” Remy said, “but maybe change back?”
“I need to be ready for whatever we’re about to face.”
“The mole people?” Remy asked.
“Weremoles,” Irkalla said. “That would be new. And I’m not sure that moles would be all that frightening. They eat worms.”
“Depends on the size of the mole,” Mordred said.
“This is not helpful,” Diana told everyone, her tone suggesting they immediately shut up.
“My father was out there,” Mordred said after a few minutes of silence. “Leading those . . . soldiers.”
“I saw,” Remy said. “He’s still a dick, then, yes?”
Mordred nodded. “I doubt that will ever change.”
“It will when he’s dead,” Irkalla said.
“No, he’ll still be a dick in ghost form,” Mordred said. “There’s no getting away from it.”
The group stopped as the tunnel opened out into a large cavern with runes burning on the walls. “What is this?” Lucifer asked. “These runes . . . they look familiar.”
“A prison,” Zamek said. “This is a prison.”
“Where are the cells?” Diana asked.
Zamek walked over to the nearest rune and placed a hand on it. It flashed bright pink and vanished, the wall behind it folding away as if it had never been there.
“Oh shit,” Remy said from beside Zamek as they looked through the newly created hole in the wall.
Mordred walked over to join them and saw the prison beyond. It was the size of a football stadium, with a dozen tiers, each littered with large cages. Each cage was separated from its neighbors by a few feet of empty space, and inside the dozens and dozens of cages were thousands of dwarves. The hole in the wall led to a set of steps that would take them down to the top floor of the prison. They would have to follow the floor around and use the steps at the end of each section to get to the lowest floor, a hundred feet below them, where heavily armed guards—all wearing red armor—patrolled.
Diana grabbed Zamek as he took a step forward. “Not yet,” she said. “What’s behind the other runes? We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Zamek grudgingly touched each rune in turn. Two of the six chambers that were revealed opened into long tunnels with more cages, although these had shackles attached to the ground and blood splatter inside them.
“Torture chambers,” Diana said with a low growl.
Two more chambers were full of weaponry and torture implements. Mordred wanted to collapse the chambers, but that might give them away, so it would have to wait.
The last rune opened a part of the wall that led to a set of steps heading upward. In the far distance, Mordred made out a small window of light.
“The way out, I presume,” Diana said.
“They bring people here to torture or imprison,” Irkalla said. “Now can we burn this all to the ground?”
“Why hasn’t anyone come after us?” Mordred asked.
Everyone looked back up the tunnel they’d arrived through.
“Zamek,” Lucifer said. “I think we should shut that tunnel down as a means of getting to us.”
Zamek wordlessly touched the tunnel, collapsing it. “There’s forty feet of debris between us and the open tunnel.”
“They must know we’re here,” Lucifer said.
Mordred nodded. “I would imagine so, yes.”
“So why haven’t they come to get us?” Remy asked.
“Because they know where we are,” Diana said. “They can come and get us whenever they like. There’s no hurry, because we can either go up and get captured, stay here and stew in our own hate, or go into the prison and fight the guards.”
“They know we’ll go to the prison,” Mordred said, looking back out of the hole in the cavern at the layout of the prison. “But I don’t see any guards up here. There should be. There should be guards on every floor. Why take them away? Unless you’re so confident you can win that you don’t care—or you’re trying to make someone believe that all is okay when it isn’t. That it’s safer than it really is.”
Everything began to shake, and for a moment it felt like the entire cavern would collapse as pieces of it fell from the ceiling, but the shaking finished after only a few seconds.