MILLION?!” RACHEL SAID.
“There are another one or two million young ones,” Sikurgurd said. “They won’t be a problem for us, so that’s something.”
“Not really!” she responded.
Fort wasn’t feeling much better than Rachel about the whole thing, but he pushed Gabriel to continue on. It didn’t matter if there were two hundred or twenty million dwarves waiting for them. Somehow, they’d find a way through any obstacle…
“Whoops,” Gabriel said, coming to a stop as he rounded the corner. “The way’s blocked.”
Fort looked past him to find a gate made of lightning, the same one he’d seen in his dreams. Ten or fifteen bolts of lightning arced across the exit from the tunnel, any one of which had enough power to stop their hearts dead.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Sikurgurd said. “I told you, I learned how to control magic. I can open it.”
Gabriel gently set him down on the tunnel floor, and for a moment, the dwarf looked a bit dizzy. “Head rush,” he said, leaning against the wall. “I’ll be all right.”
Rachel began tapping her foot impatiently.
Sikurgurd quickly recovered, then approached the gate of lightning, his hands held out before him like he was trying to calm a wild animal. As he neared it, he slowed to a stop and closed his eyes, moving his hands in elaborate gestures.
First one, then more of the lightning bolts began to flicker, then die as Sikurgurd moved his hands up and down the gate, until finally the way was clear.
“How did you do that?” Rachel asked him in amazement. “I can create lightning, but I’m nowhere near good enough to be able to control it like that.”
“Oh, I can’t create it,” the dwarf told her, waving them through. “None of my kind can. D’hea created us without the ability, and instead, made us fairly resistant to magic of all kinds.” He beat his hand against his chest. “Makes dealing with the Dracsi much easier, after all. But we still needed to control magic, for the lightning if nothing else.” He nodded back down the way they came. “It’s required to feed the Dracsi, so D’hea made sure we could still manipulate magic, even if we couldn’t cast it ourselves.”
Fort would have loved to have asked Sikurgurd a thousand follow-up questions, but now wasn’t the time. “Shouldn’t we be quiet?” he asked instead. “I thought we’d reached the city.”
“Oh, we should be safe while we’re in the tunnels,” Sikurgurd told him. “There’s not another group of feeders scheduled for a while.”
As they passed the gate, the dwarf released his hold on the lightning, letting it cascade back across the tunnel, closing off their exit. With no real choice, Fort led the others around a corner, then stopped abruptly, throwing out his arms to keep the others from falling as he almost had.
He and his father had once walked on a glass path that overhung the Grand Canyon, standing over a mile above the canyon floor. Nothing felt like it could possibly go deeper than that, at the time.
But now, Fort stood on the edge of a dimly lit cavern that had to extend for dozens, maybe hundreds of miles below him, with masses of Dracsi-kin milling about each and every level down as far as he could see.
Lightning tubes began at their height, and ran up, down, diagonally, and in every other direction, connecting both to the gate behind them, and continuing on from there. Elaborate crystal gondolas ran throughout the cavern along some of the tubes, zooming up or down along with the lightning, only to coast as the electricity passed, waiting for the next bolt to strike.
And everything was covered in gold, silver, and gems of all kinds. The city of Dra had to be one of the richest in existence, if you went by rare minerals. But the dwarves weren’t collecting or hoarding the gold and jewels; instead, they’d built with them, using gold for roofs and creating elaborate decorations with gemstones.
The biggest display of wealth lay in the middle of the cavern, rising all the way up to their level from potentially the bottom floor. From what Fort could tell from the random lightning blazing by, it looked like a sculpture. From here, he could make out the very top of a human or dwarf head, so enormous that Fort could barely see down to its forehead. That meant the sculpture could be an entire body or more, depending on how far down it extended.
The strangest, most wonderful part of it all was that the sculpture was made entirely of diamond.
“Welcome to Dra, humans,” Sikurgurd declared almost sadly. He gestured across the open cavern before them. “The tunnel to the mines is directly across from us, but there’s no way to get there without descending into the city first.”
Fort looked where he’d pointed, and slowly filled with despair. The cavern had to be at least a few miles across, and getting there while avoiding an entire city full of dwarves couldn’t be done, not in the time they had.
“I’m sure it’s not as fancy as human cities,” Sikurgurd was saying. “We’ve heard tales of you using something called ‘wod’ to build, making your homes out of living things.” He sighed. “I would love to see that. No Dracsi-kin has ever seen wod, alive or dead. It must be magnificent.”
“Yeah, wood’s pretty amazing,” Jia said. “What’s that statue in the middle?”
“That would be Q’baos,” Sikurgurd said, his face contorting in disgust. “The city of Dra was built on the site of the very first mine for the Dracsi, but the substance of the statue can’t be digested by them, so instead, the miners created a tribute to Q’baos as they dug, merging all the useless gems into it as they went.”
Fort had a similar reaction to Sikurgurd’s as he realized that what he thought was a forehead was actually a screaming human face, just like he’d seen on the Old One back at the previous Oppenheimer School. “How can you merge two diamonds?” he asked. That didn’t seem possible.
Sikurgurd appeared confused. “Any child can do it. Diamond is as malleable as every other substance left to us by D’vale, who created this place. All you do is—”
“Wait, you’re saying an Old One created this place?” Jia asked. “But why?”
“For the Dracsi,” Sikurgurd said, sounding even more confused now. “Haven’t I mentioned? We were brought here to care for them, once they were changed into their present form. The Dracsi have only ever been able to digest metallic minerals, so we mine the gold and silver to feed them. Whatever we have left, we use to house ourselves.” He sighed. “The Dracsi would be perfectly able to feed themselves, if we let them out of their caves. They’re better diggers than we are, and prefer the heat of the underrealms anyway. Helps them digest their food.”
“Can’t they just… escape?” Jia asked. “There didn’t seem to be much holding them back when we saw them.”
“D’vale infused their cave prisons with some kind of magic to keep them confined,” Sikurgurd explained. “There are thousands of them down here in the underrealms, and obviously they’re very strong. But the magic in the rocks keeps them trapped, so if we didn’t care for them, they’d not live very long.”
“Okay, enough,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “There’s no way we can cross this whole city, not in a few hours. We have to turn back.”
“Can we take one of these lightning carriages?” Gabriel asked, looking down into the city. “They move pretty fast.”
“You’d be fighting your way through hordes of my kind,” Sikurgurd said. “People are headed to their daily tasks now, so the carriages are always full. Four went by before I could even get on one when I was on my way here..”
“Fort, think about this,” Rachel said, looking him in the eye. “Do you really want the Old Ones to return because of you? Would… would your father—”
“Don’t,” he growled, cutting her off. “Don’t… just don’t.”
She sighed. “You’re right, that was too far. But still, we can’t just—”
“We won’t put anyone in danger,” Fort said, turning around so he didn’t have to look at her. “But we can’t go back now. We can’t.”
“What about using the Teleport spell?” Jia asked.
Gabriel shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. You can only teleport if you’ve seen the location you’re going to. And even from here, I can’t make out that tunnel.”
He was right. There was no way they could open a teleportation circle, not without at least some kind of telescope or something. If only Fort could have read Sikurgurd’s mind, and seen what the mining tunnel looked like. Or…
Or seen it in a dream?
Fort’s eyes widened, and he turned back to his friends. “Jia, that actually might work.”
Gabriel gave him a questioning look as Fort quickly cast a teleportation circle on the wall next to them. It opened into darkness, but Fort didn’t wait for Rachel to light it, and quickly stepped through.
He emerged into a long, dark tunnel, dimly lit on one side by light filtering through some vertical rock formations that more than anything resembled the teeth of a dragon.
“It’s okay, you can come through,” he whispered back through the teleportation circle. “I got us here.”
Gabriel was first through the circle and looked around in amazement. “But how? You’ve never been here.”
“Not physically,” Fort said. “But it looks like I’ve had some pretty realistic dreams of it.”
He didn’t add what he’d seen at the end of the tunnel in those dreams, the thing that terrified him almost as much as the Old Ones.
But whatever was there, they’d handle it. Because after almost eight months, he had finally caught up to his father, and nothing was going to stop Fort from bringing him back home.
“I told you not to come here,” Sikurgurd said, watching them from the other side of the teleportation circle.
“You were right,” Rachel said as she stepped through after Jia. “What’s in here, anyway?”
The dwarf just looked at them sadly. “It’s called Dragon’s Teeth. What do you think?”
A long, low growl echoed through the tunnel, shaking the ground beneath their feet with its power.
A small movement out of the corner of Fort’s eye caught his attention, and he saw Jia reach out and squeeze Rachel’s hand supportively. He hadn’t realized how close they’d gotten since coming to the new school.
“I’m sorry about this,” Sikurgurd said as they all stared down the tunnel. “I really am. But if the Old Ones can go back to your home, maybe they’ll leave my people in peace.”
His words made Fort move, but it was already too late. Sikurgurd had his eyes closed and was slowly closing his hands together. “Hey!” Fort shouted, and leaped for the teleportation circle, but it closed as he reached it, with the dwarf on the other side.
“Betrayed again,” Rachel said, glaring at Fort. “Does he not realize we can just open another circle?”
“That’s what makes me nervous,” Fort said. He attempted to open a circle back to where they’d just come from. The magic filled his hands, but just like when he’d tried to teleport somewhere he hadn’t seen, no circle opened.
“Um, why aren’t you teleporting?” Jia asked, sounding a bit panicky.
The ground shook with another growl as Fort turned to his friends sadly. “Because I can’t. I think we’re trapped here.”