Sineater

The level we stopped at was huge.

Most of the tunnels had been between seven and eight feet tall. That was more than enough room for the Dwarves to swing their pickaxes and for most of the regular beings to walk comfortably. This level was closer to fifty feet high and easily fifteen hundred feet wide, though I suspected that it was larger than that, because as soon as we’d started to fall into the floor, I’d recognized the honeycombed buildings that the Dwarves had dug a hole through.

They had burrowed into an Exindo hive.

The Exindo were one of the native sentient races of our prison planet. They were insectoids that looked like an ant that walked upright. There were some that had wings, and others who had stingers, but they all had an exoskeleton and mandibles with multi-faceted eyes. The Exindo were a hard working race that built massive structures underground, and almost never left their hive. They also rarely abandoned a nest, which meant that something had wiped this particular hive out, otherwise, I’d have seen insectoids walking around before we reached the floor of that level.

The two guards that had gone down before us were waiting at the landing along with a few more guards. None of them looked happy to see us, though considering that it was almost impossible to see a Dwarf’s facial expressions behind all of their facial hair, all I had to go off of was their eyes and the ominous silence that clung to them.

“You want us to look at some Exindo ruins?” I glanced around. “How long has this been abandoned?”

“They were wiped out during the Great War.” The white-haired Dwarf shook his head. “We assume a monster wave took them out while we had the mines sealed up. By the time we’d opened them back up, they were all gone.”

There were enough faded claw marks and broken buildings that I could believe that, but it could easily have been a group of raiders who had a few monster pets that they let run wild. There were also plenty of sentient races that could make marks like that while fighting.

“You’ll have to forgive me.” I stuck my hand out to the white-haired Dwarf. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Tharkun Gladstone the third.” The mountain of hair gave me a bow instead of shaking my hand. “You’ve probably heard of Gladstone Jewellers? My kin run most of the gem trade on the eastern coast.”

Saying they ran all the gems was a bit of a stretch. There were Gladstone shops in most of the towns I’d been in, but they weren’t the only ones and usually not even the biggest. While many people admired Dwarf craftsmanship, they preferred to deal with hosts that didn’t bring an ax to price negotiations. But I wasn’t going to correct the first friendly Dwarf that we’d met in this mountain.

“I’ve seen the shop a few times.” I motioned around. “This is where all the gems come from?”

“Sure does!” Tharkun puffed out his chest. “I make sure only the best specimens leave our walls. The rest get broke down.”

“So you’re the boss.” I saw the dark look that Gaelun gave me, which was all the answer that I needed. Gaelun was our guide, but Tharkun was the one that we needed to be dealing with.

“I run the crews.” The old Dwarf had to move braids out of the way so he could motion with his hand. “The rock is this direction.”

The other Dwarves fell behind us, while Tharkun led us down the glowstone lit streets. The soft blue light gave the trip through the empty town the added feeling of it being haunted. Glowstones were nice because they didn’t require much magic to operate and raw ones would constantly give off a faint glow, but I found myself missing the clearer light that Starna had been providing.

I assumed the Dwarves would be insulted if I asked my Elf companion to increase our illumination, though if there was something that they were wanting us to inspect, I didn’t see how we were going to be able to do it without extra light. But that was a problem for later. Right now, I just had to keep my eyes on our short guide and try not to trip over the debris that sparsely littered the ground.

Hopefully we wouldn’t have to travel too far.