The Ghost King by Robert Anthony Salvatore

Author:Robert Anthony Salvatore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

* * * * *

A chorus of weary cheers erupted when at last the beleaguered refugees of Carradoon saw a stream of daylight. Never had any imagined how deep and dark mountain tunnels could be—except for Pikel, of course, who had been raised in dwarven mines.

Even Rorick, who had warned against going outside, couldn’t hide his relief at learning that there was indeed an ending to those lightless corridors. With great hopes, they turned a long and curving corner leading to daylight.

And arrived with a communal, profound, and disappointed sigh.

“Uh-oh,” said Pikel, for they had not come to the end of the tunnel, but merely to a natural chimney, and a very long and narrow one at that.

“We’re deeper than I believed,” Temberle admitted, staring up the shaft, which extended upward for more than a hundred feet. Most of it could not be climbed, and was too narrow in many places for any attempt, even for nimble Hanaleisa or Rorick, who were the slimmest of the group.

“Did you know we were this far down?” Hanaleisa asked Pikel, and in reply the dwarf began drawing mountains in the air, then merely shrugged.

His reasoning was correct, Hanaleisa and the other onlookers knew, for their current depth was likely more dependent upon the contours of the mountainous land above than the relatively mild grade of the tunnels they had been traversing.

The high shaft confirmed, though, that they were indeed moving deeper into the Snowflakes.

“You have to get us out,” Temberle said to Pikel.

“To battle hordes of undead?” Rorick reminded him, and Temberle shot his brother an irritated look.

“Or at least, you have to show us … show them”—he glanced back at the many Carradden moving into sight around the corner—“that there is a way out. Even if we don’t go outside,” he added, looking pointedly at his little brother, “it remains important that we know we can go outside again. We’re not dwarves.”

A cry sounded down the line. “They’re fighting in the back!” a woman yelled. “Undead! Undead sailors again!”

“We know there’s a way out,” Hanaleisa said somberly, “because now we know there’s a way in.”

“Even if it’s the way we already came,” Temberle added, and he and Hanaleisa made their way along the line to take up arms once again, to battle bloodthirsty monsters in an unending nightmare.

By the time Hanaleisa and Temberle arrived at the scuffle, the small skirmish had ended, leaving a trio of waterlogged and rotted zombies crumpled in the corridor. But one of the Carradden, too, had fallen, caught by surprise. Her neck had been broken in the opening salvo.

“What are we to do with her?” a man asked, speaking above the wails of the woman’s husband, a fellow sailor.

“Burn her, and be quick!” another shouted, which elicited many cries of protest and many more shouts of assent. Both sides in the debate became more insistent with each passing shout, and it seemed as if the whole argument would explode into more fighting then and there.

“We cannot burn

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