A Thief in the Night

Epilogue

The water surged furiously, smashing its way back and forth through the submerged shaft. Pebbles and small stones went streaming past like shots from a thousand slings, smashing into his body and cutting his skin to ribbons. The last trapped breath in his lungs, long since gone stale, sought desperately to get out. It pushed at his battered rib cage and filled his mouth, yet opening his lips now would mean certain death by drowning.

It was impossible to swim up the shaft. It shook wildly every second, and he could feel the immense pressure of water building behind him as parts of it collapsed. His cloak wrapped around him like the coils of a constricting serpent. He tore it away and kicked to propel himself up the passage, the water pushing him from behind like the cork in a bottle of shaken beer.

He bounced off the walls of the shaft many times, hard enough that he could barely feel his arms as he was launched out of the mouth of the shaft, back into the clean sunlight of the surface world. The shaft was set into the face of a sheer cliff, and the water that came spurting out fell away into open air. It was all he could do to grab at the edges of the shaft’s mouth to avoid being hurled into the chasm below. With fingers like iron claws, he dug into the rock and held on for dear life. He could only watch as the body of a dead elf was ejected from the shaft and went spinning down into empty space below. When he heard the crunch of the elf’s eventual impact, he winced and looked down to see the corpse in a heap on the rocks far below.

Eventually the water subsided, filling the shaft but no longer lapping over its edge. He climbed down the cliff face, finding easy handholds in the broken rock.

He knew this cliff.

When he had thrown himself into the central shaft of the Vincularium, a bare moment after he’d touched flame to the black powder in the ancient dwarven barrels, he had not expected to live. He’d been thrown this way and that by the explosions and the shifting ground, tossed about with the water until he couldn’t even think straight. He had fully expected to die. Yet somehow his body had been sucked into one of the emergency escape shafts—the same one, in fact, that he had watched the demon slither through years earlier. The pressure of the water behind him had been enough to shoot him free just before the mountain collapsed inward on itself.

And now—now he was still alive.

The landscape before him he knew. It was the land of his birth, the eastern steppes of the clans. He turned and looked back, and looked for the familiar shape of the mountain Cloudblade, that stood as a sentinel between this land and the more civilized kingdom of Skrae, to the west.

The mountain was gone.

Utterly gone.

In its place was a wide valley of broken rock, filled with smoke and roiling dust. When the Vincularium collapsed, it had taken Cloudblade with it. Now there was a gap in the Whitewall. What had been an impassible barrier of rock and snow that no man could climb was now . . . open. The mountain had fallen and become a pass. A serviceable, if rugged, new pass through the mountains. A pass so wide that an army could march through it.

Looking out on what he’d wrought, Mörget tilted his head back and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.