The wide road leading left from the square is the forging district. Black smoke billows from the wide entrances of forging halls, and rises into great holes dug into the ceiling. The sound of metal on metal is all-consuming and everywhere are runeknights. Most of them are in bronze, which I remember is the Red Anvil Guild's favored metal, though there are a few in titanium or just steel.

  Here the glances I get are more suspicious than fearful. They make me nervous—I may be powerful, but there are a few runeknights around who look stronger even than me, and of course even a group of weaker runeknights can overwhelm a stronger one, so long as they plan their attack carefully. But there is nothing to indicate that this part of the city is forbidden to outsiders.

  At the end of the district is Runethane Halmak's so-called castle. Like every other dwelling in Brightdeep, it is not a freestanding structure but instead dug directly into the wall. Four columns of barred triangular windows stretch from floor to top, reddish firelight glowing from them. A massive pair of bronze gates dominates the center. Elongated and triangular in shape, they look like a jutting spearhead. Above them, written into the stone in bronze, is the same poem that was inscribed on Halmak's Allabrast guildhall, the one praising bronze in lengthy bezethast script.

  Fascination calms my anxiety a little as I stop to read over the poem. Hundreds of runes, all to make something so simple. Why give each sub-meaning and connotation in the script its own rune, and also make it so they can be linked in only rigid ways? And besides the why, how did the First Runeforger do this?

  I approach the gates. Bronze-clad guards stand either side of the entrance, spears and swords glinting in the bright red light of smokeless braziers fixed to the wall. I look around, searching for the entrance to the fort. I spot it: a square of darkness a dozen yards from the gate. No one is standing sentinel over it. No one is even standing near it. I approach it, look to the castle guards, but though their eyes follow me closely, they say nothing and do not move, even as I step right up to it.

  Within the black are spiraling steps. Down I climb, down and down until all light is gone and it has grown cold and silent. I don't recognize these stairs, nor the black corridor that they eventually emerge into. The echoes are unfamiliar.

  I walk forward with Life-Ripper grasped tightly in both hands. My sabatons clink with unnerving loudness. The corridor turns sharply and I collide with the wall. I'm knocked back, thrown off my bearings. I continue to walk, but am I still going in the right direction? Might I be going backwards? Or into some offshoot, some dead end mine that ends in a thousand yard drop?

  I am among friends, I tell myself. Why not shout out? The deep dwarves wear runic ears and will hear me easily. Yet what else might such a call attract?

  I walk further. My sense of time is beginning to fade: my legs get sore so I rest, then stand back up when the fatigue is gone, yet as for how long I rested, or if I slept or stayed awake, I can't quite tell. I restart my walk, but again, am I going the right way? I reach out and touch the wall to steady myself.

  Just an hour or so, and I'll meet my old friends again. Just an hour or so. This journey won't take much longer than that.

  An hour? How much time has passed since that thought? A moment, or is the hour already up?

  I can't stand it any longer:

  “Nthazes!” I shout. “Nthazes, are you there? Jaemes? Notok? Melkor? Hirthik? Anyone? Where are you, dwarves of the deep? I've returned—it's me, Zathar!”

  The only reply is silence. My steps grow quicker. I must be nearly at the end of this tunnel now, I must be!

  Then I hear it: a faint echo, an echo of an echo. It says, “Zathar...?”

  “Yes!” I cry back. “That's me!”

  “That's me...” comes the echo.

  “No!” I yell, in frustration and terror. “No! Where is everyone?”

  “Everyone...”

  “Did the darkness get you all? Well?”

  “Well...?”

  “Or did we not kill Fjalar as thoroughly as we thought? Well?”

  I remember bloodless corpses and life-robbed ones. Fear seizes me.

  “Well?" I scream. "Where are you? Come out!”

  “Zathar...?”

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  A white glow appears ahead, so faint that I almost think it's a dream. I shout out and run toward it. It resolves into two glows, two soft sparks. They're maces. I hear the clank of armor. They're running for me just as I am for them—two dwarves in silver-pale armor, with triangular plates affixed to their helms like bats' ears.

  I slow. “It's me!” I shout. “Me! Zathar!”

  They halt a dozen yards away and raise their maces. Two other runeknights emerge from behind, armed with long spears of titanium grafted with runes of silver. That's the last thing I see—the brightness of the maces becomes too much for my eyes and I must close them.

  I raise my visor. “Don't you recognize me? Can you hear the shape of my face, now?”

  I hear steps as one of the two in front approaches. The outline of his mace is visible even through my eyelids.

  “I think I do,” he says, slowly. “You've changed, but yes. Yes. It's you.”

  “Who are you? I don't recognize your voice.”

  “Don't you now?” The tone of his voice suggests he's scowling. “We had a few long chats, I remember. In which you accused me of a couple things.” The light dims—I think he's put his mace behind his back. “Put yours behind you too, Polkud. His ears seem to be blocked, but let's see if he recognizes my face by sight.”

  I open my eyes to flabby cheeks, small eyes almost obscured by the folds around them, and a large nose, blobbish and trunk-like.

  “Hirthik?”

  “The very same. Glad you recognize me, Zathar. You're just as uncouth as I remember.”

  I grin, then begin to laugh. He begins to laugh too.

  "Hirthik! I remember our time in the kitchens well."

  “As do I. But ah, to see you changed so much! What a scar. Nthazes told us about the trial, though he said there was just forging and no fighting.”

  “The trial was long before I got this.”

  “Well, whenever”—he seems to have trouble pronouncing that word—“you got it, it suits you. He's a real fighter, this one.”

  “He's the one who killed Fjalar, isn't he?” says the runeknight called Polkud. “After the fight against the darkness.”

  “That's right. More importantly, he was the one who found him out.”

  “Why is he back?”

  “Damned if I know. Zathar, why are you back? Nthazes said you probably wouldn't be back here for some time, whatever that was meant to mean. I take it that some time has passed, then.”

  “It's a long story,” I say. “Best told over ale and food, and to Nthazes and Jaemes, the two I owe the most to.” I swallow. “Are they down here?”

  “Nthazes is our guildmaster. Jaemes—ah, the humans have something called old age. He fell sick, I'm afraid.”

  “Oh.”

  To be honest, I'd been half expecting this. I know well that humans have nothing like our amulets of immortality, and live even shorter lives than regular dwarves do also.

  “But he told us he was satisfied with how his life went, in the end, if that makes you feel better. Though I think he might have wanted to meet you one last time. Was very interested in that nonsense you apparently told him about making new runes.”

  “I would have told him everything.”

  “Maybe you can tell his daughter.”

  “Daughter?”

  “Or don't,” warns Polkud. “Best stay away from her. Far away.”

  My head is spinning. “I need ale,” I declare. “And good food. And I want to meet Nthazes as soon as I can.”

  “He's probably at the Shaft,” says Hirthik. “Polkud, Qrestad! Lead our returned friend to him.”

  Just a couple hundred yards later and we come to the first place I recognize: the fort's old entrance. It's not where I first arrived to the fort, of course—I vividly recall crashing in through the ceiling of their forging hall. But it is where I last left from. The gate still stands closed between here and the road out, though there are no signs of caravans. None come all the way down here, Polkud informs me. They have no reason to anymore.

  “You weren't here when I left,” I say. “Have there been many new recruits?”

  “A few, from Jaeltham, like me. Not as many as Guildmaster Nthazes hoped for.”

  “That's another thing I want to ask about. You were never a guild before.”

  “No, we weren't. But Runethane Halmak said we ought to form one when he first arrived, to separate us from the dwarves in his new city. And there are legal and financial benefits too—not that I understand much about those. But we thought why not, and Nthazes, who we consider to be quite wise, became our guildmaster.”

  “So now you are called the Guardians Against Darkness.”

  “We already called ourselves guardians, I'm told. No one much cares about the name, to be honest. Only our duty.”

  He holds his mace close to his chest as he walks so I'm not blinded by direct light. Even so, it's still hard to see anything, hard to recognize where I am. But I still get the feeling that I've walked these particular tunnels many times: these tunnels haunted by fear of the dark. That fear, soaked into their stone walls, has not gone away. They exude foreboding.

  Deep down we go, then the walls fall away before a seemingly endless black void, lit only by a dot in the distance. We have arrived. I recognize this great, stepped circular cavern. Just faintly, above the dot of light, I can see a mass of machinery: the ancient elevator. We have reached the Shaft.

  The two guardians lead me down the steep steps toward the dot. It resolves into another runeknight in titanium, though his form is almost totally obscured by the light blasting surface-sun-like from his cube-shaped hammer.

  He stands while we are still many yards away from him, and speaks softly:

  “Polkud? Qrestad? Who is the third with you?”

  “It's Zathar,” I say. “Nthazes? Is that you?”

  He turns. His visor is down and I do not recognize the shape of his new armor, nor his tall, curved runic ears.

  "Zathar?"

  "It's me. I'm back. I've returned. Nthazes?"

  He steps up one step, two. He nearly takes a third but stops himself.

  “That's right."

  He lifts his visor. The light is too blinding for me to make anything out, yet I think recognize his soft tone of voice. My heart lifts.

  "Nthazes!" I hurry down a dozen steps, nearly tumble, steady myself.

  "Careful there, Zathar," he says. It's definitely his voice. "Is it really you? I can hear that the shape of your face has changed a little.”

  “It's me. I've been through many battles since we last met. It's been a long while, old friend. A very long while.”

  “Some time has passed, as they say. To us it makes little difference. Welcome back, Zathar, from wherever you have been. Many things have changed here, or gone away entirely—but our gratitude has not.”

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