Location: Level Eight and the Ninth Ward, Fubar’s Dungeons
Timeline: Sixth Age, 53rd Year, Fall
Whatever had silenced an entire level in a single breath did not reveal itself on the stair down to the eighth. Emcorae led with katana bared, Nathily a half-step behind with her falchia ready, both of them straining for that dragging, rhythmic thud to repeat itself somewhere in the dark ahead. It did not come again. That silence — the absence of an answer — proved almost worse than the sound itself would have been.
What waited for them on the eighth level was, if anything, a return to the horror they already understood. Row upon row of cells, packed with raving, clamoring inmates who threw themselves against their bars the moment torchlight touched them, howling to be freed, to be fed, to be anything other than what this level had made of them.
“Middle of the hall,” Emcorae said grimly, already moving. “Stay clear of the bars. We don’t stop for anyone.”
They ran it at a dead sprint, weapons sheathed and packs clutched tight, ignoring the grasping hands and the rising, delighted shrieking that trailed them the length of the corridor — inmates who couldn’t have said, afterward, whether two armed strangers sprinting past their cells had been real or only some fevered dream born of the dark. By the time they reached the far landing, the noise behind them had swelled to a deafening, ecstatic roar.
“Well,” Emcorae panted, glancing back at the chaos they’d left in their wake, “if that doesn’t bring every guard in the palace down on us, nothing will.”
“Then let’s not be here when they arrive.” Nathily was already rounding the next bend Holms’s map promised would lead to the stair down.
It did not. The passage twisted instead through hall after unmarked hall, turn after turn that matched nothing inked on the parchment in her fist, until at last they emerged into a wide, torchlit cavern that was unmistakably no stairwell at all — a guard outpost, supplies stacked in neat towers, armor and weapons racked along the walls in orderly rows.
“It’s a trap,” Nathily hissed, spinning to guard their backs.
“I will end that Aide the next time I see him,” Emcorae swore, dropping his pack and sweeping the shadowed corners for the ambush he was certain waited there.
None came. The outpost stood as empty as everything else on this cursed level, abandoned, it seemed, by whatever guards had once manned it — though whether Holms had led them astray on purpose or simply drawn from a map gone stale with age, neither of them would ever know for certain.
“Gods,” Emcorae breathed, taking in the racked weapons, the stores enough to arm a small company. “If the prisoners up above ever broke free of their cells, they could take this whole level with what’s sitting in this room.”
Nathily didn’t answer. She was already moving again, shouldering her pack, refusing to let the false alarm cost them any more time than it already had. Around the next bend, at last, they found the true stair down — and with it, a final surprise neither Holms’s map nor their own dread had prepared them for.
A portcullis should have barred the way, a massive iron grate meant to seal the Ninth Ward from everything above it. It stood raised instead, its chain slack, the passage beyond left open as though someone — or something — had wanted them to come through unhindered.
“This has to be a trap,” Nathily said, staring at the black stair beyond the open grate with real dread. “Nothing down here has been given to us freely.”
“If it is,” Emcorae said, low and hard, “then whoever laid it will learn we’re not so easily collected.” He drew a slow breath. “We’ve come too far to turn back now.”
“Aye,” Nathily agreed, and stepped past the raised grate into the dark beyond.
Whatever had made an entire level scream itself into silence, it did not follow them onto the stair. That was the only mercy the next several minutes offered, and Nathily clung to it the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood — gratefully, and without any illusion that it would hold for long.
The final stairwell was nothing like the tidy, measured flights that had carried them down through the levels above. Where those had run in orderly rises of ten steps to a landing, this one plunged and twisted without pattern or mercy, steps hewn rough and mismatched by hands that clearly hadn’t cared whether anyone descending them kept their footing. Seven jagged steps brought them to the first turn, and there the last of the torchlight from above finally gave out entirely, leaving them to feel their way down through a dark so complete that Nathily’s outstretched fingers found the wall more by faith than sight. The stone beneath her palm was slick with something she chose not to examine too closely — waste, and rot, and a slime that seemed to breathe its own foul heat up out of the ancient rock, thick enough to taste at the back of the throat. Some of the steps crumbled outright beneath their boots, forcing them to test each one before committing their weight, and twice Nathily heard Emcorae bite back a curse as some fragment of stair gave way and sent loose rubble clattering away into a dark that swallowed the sound whole, never once returning an echo to tell them how far it fell.
“Twelve steps,” Emcorae murmured, more to himself than to her, counting under his breath the way a man counts when counting is the only thing left holding his nerve together. “Turn. Five more.”
They called the count between them in whispers as they went — landing after landing, turn after turn, a rhythm that became, before long, the only solid thing in a world gone entirely to touch and dread. Eleven landings. Eighty-seven steps, though neither of them would have sworn to the exact number afterward, only that it felt like enough to have descended past the reach of the sun entirely, past anything that still remembered what daylight was.
And then, at the bottom, they found something neither of them had felt in what seemed a lifetime: quiet.
Not silence — there was a faint, distant sound of activity somewhere ahead, and torchlight flickered dim gold along a corridor lined with cells, many standing open and empty, their doors long since rusted or broken. But the cacophony that had hounded them since the second level, that endless roaring chorus of the mad and the dying, simply wasn’t here. Nathily stood a moment at the foot of the stair, breathing it in like a woman surfacing from black water, before she trusted herself to speak.
“Pan help me,” she whispered. “I can hear myself think again.”
Emcorae’s shoulders dropped an inch — the first easing she’d seen in him since the reading room. “I didn’t know I could miss silence this badly.” He shook himself, some of the old wariness returning to his eyes. “Doesn’t mean we’re safe. Can we still trust Holms’s map?”
She traced the ink lines by torchlight, found the corridor ahead marked true against what lay before them, and nodded. They pressed on.
What the Silence Hid
The first stretch of the Ninth Ward gave them little to fear and less to explain. Cells stood in various states of ruin, some occupied by prisoners who did not stir at their passing — whether dead, or sleeping, or simply too far gone in terror to risk drawing attention to themselves, neither Azora paused to learn. There was no time left to spend on mysteries that weren’t Barkla.
It was at the last corner marked on Holms’s map that Nathily raised a hand, halting them both.
“Light,” she breathed, nodding toward the flicker spilling from the passage ahead. “And listen — dost thou hear that?”
Emcorae strained against the quiet and heard, beneath the trickle of unseen water and the restless spit of torch flame, something else entirely: a low, wet, rhythmic sound, half gurgle and half sigh, rising and falling with no rhythm a living throat should make.
“Guards,” he murmured, setting down the pack of dwarven gear — no. There was no pack of dwarven gear, he reminded himself grimly; whatever finery Ramssee’s men had stripped from their prisoner, it hadn’t followed him down into this hole. There was only his own katana, already sliding free of its sheath. “Could be soldiers waiting for us. Holms’s kindness may yet prove to be our grave.”
“Wait.” Nathily’s face had gone pale in the torchlight. “Em — this is the level where the Pietromi is kept. If there are no guards on any floor above us, and now we hear this—” Her voice caught. “What if they’re finishing him even now? What if every soldier in this palace has gathered to watch?”
Whatever answer Emcorae might have given died unspoken. Nathily was already moving, falchia bared, her earlier caution burned away by the sudden, furious certainty that they had come one hallway too late. Emcorae followed a half-step behind, his own blood rising to match hers, and together they rounded the final corner Holms’s map had promised would lead them to the Pietromi’s cell.
A blade hissed out of the dark and very nearly took Nathily’s head from her shoulders.
She dropped flat on pure reflex, driving herself backward into Emcorae hard enough to carry them both stumbling around the corner’s safety, and the thrown dagger buzzed past where her skull had been an instant before, ringing off distant stone somewhere down the passage behind them.
“That was close,” Emcorae hissed, furious at himself for the carelessness of it.
“Aye,” Nathily managed, chest heaving.
A voice answered them from around the bend before either could recover further — deep, grating, thick with a fury that had clearly been simmering long before they’d arrived to catch the edge of it. “What are you waiting for, cowards? Come and meet the fate of your brothers! Has Fubar run so short of men that it sends its women down to die as well? Come! Come and learn what death tastes like!”
Nathily’s breath caught. “That voice. I know that voice — from Arbola, last autumn, the Pietromi brothers who came seeking counsel from my father—”
“He’s alive,” Emcorae said, something fierce and relieved warring in his chest. “He thinks we’re more of Ramssee’s men, come to finish him.”
Something heavy and metal cracked against the far wall of the passage, thrown blind and hard enough to gouge stone. “Come and see, cowards! What, has your courage failed you already?”
“Barkla!” Nathily called out, pressing herself flat to the corner’s edge rather than risk the open corridor again. “Hear me! We are not Fubar’s men — we’ve come from Arbola to free you!”
A short, ugly laugh answered her, followed by another crash of metal against stone. “Even if I believed such a lie, I need no rescue! Barkla needs no one!”
“It’s true,” Emcorae shouted back, ducking as a third projectile ricocheted far too near their shelter. “We fought half this cursed dungeon to reach you — will you kill us before we’ve even said our piece?”
There was a long pause. Nathily took the risk of it, scooping up the dagger that had nearly ended her a moment before and tossing it gently around the corner, into the light, rather than keeping it as any soldier surely would have. “There. Your own blade, returned rather than kept. Would a guard do that, Barkla? Would Ramssee’s men?”
The silence that followed stretched long enough that Emcorae’s hand tightened again on his hilt. Then, at last, the grating voice came again — quieter now, wary rather than raging. “…Show yourselves, then. Let me be the judge of your honesty with my own eyes.”
They exchanged one look — Emcorae’s brow raised in a question, Nathily’s answering nod steady despite everything — and stepped together around the final bend of Fubar’s Ninth Ward.
What They Found
The sight that met them was not the execution Nathily had feared, but it was, in its own way, no less terrible.
The cell at the passage’s end stood with its door torn entirely from its hinges, flung aside as though it weighed nothing at all. And scattered across the corridor beyond it — heaped in the cell itself, sprawled the length of the hall, piled two and three deep in places — lay bodies. A dozen of them, more, Ramssee’s own guards by their armor, and not all of them fully dead; here and there among the wreckage a chest still rose and fell in shallow, wet, labored breaths, the source, Nathily realized with a cold lurch, of the terrible gurgling sound that had chased them around that final corner.
Standing amid the carnage, a stolen sword in one hand and a length of iron cell-bar in the other, was a figure that took both Azoras a long, disbelieving moment to recognize as the proud, bearded dwarf-lord who had once graced her father’s hall.
Barkla stood clothed in nothing but a filthy loincloth, his powerful frame streaked in blood not his own, and where a magnificent braided beard and a crown of dark hair should have framed his face, there was only pale, scarred scalp — shaved bald, some deliberate and calculated cruelty of Ramssee’s design, a violation that struck Nathily harder, in that instant, than the field of corpses around him. To take a Drokka’s beard was to take his very dignity; whoever had done this to Barkla had understood that as well as any dwarf could have told them, and had done it anyway, precisely because they understood it.
If Barkla felt any shame in his own state, he showed none of it now. He fixed the two of them with a wild, glittering stare and said, with a rough and terrible calm entirely at odds with the ruin surrounding him, “As you can see. I require no rescue.”
Emcorae’s hand did not leave his katana’s hilt. “Barkla. We knew your brother. We grieve for Brega, and we’ve come at real cost to bring you home.”
Something in the dwarf’s ferocious mask cracked at his brother’s name — the first flicker of the man beneath the berserker showing through, there and gone in an instant, replaced almost at once by suspicion still too raw to fully set down. “You knew Brega,” he rasped. “Then you knew a good dwarf, cut down by cowards who’ll answer for it soon enough.” He did not lower his weapons, not yet, but neither did he move to strike. “Prove your claim, then. Who sent you?”
“Rian and Fara, of Arbola,” Nathily said steadily. “Your family’s oldest allies. We came south hunting our own quarry and found word of your capture instead — and I could not, in good conscience, leave a Pietromi to rot in Diked’s dungeon while I still drew breath to prevent it.”
The stone bar slipped from Barkla’s fingers, clattering unheeded to the floor among the fallen guards. “By the Right Hand of Rhokkii,” he breathed, some vast tension bleeding out of his shoulders all at once. “It is true, then. You’ve truly come.” His eyes swept the empty space around his rescuers, searching, and something in his expression sharpened again with a different, colder fury. “Where is my armor? My axe? Rhokkium wrought by my own father’s hand, and I do not see it among your things.”
Nathily’s chest tightened at having to answer him honestly. “We don’t have them, Barkla. We didn’t know to look, and I fear Ramssee kept them for himself — trophies, more likely than not, locked away somewhere above us.”
The dwarf’s jaw worked, some deep and ancient rage kindling behind his eyes at the thought of his family’s legacy hung on some usurper’s wall. “Then that is a debt I will collect in full, in time,” he said, low and promising. “But it will have to wait. There are still soldiers in this palace who owe me blood, and I mean to have it whether I wear my father’s steel or not.”
“That debt will have to keep a while longer,” Emcorae said grimly, “because we’ve got trouble incoming rather than time to spare.”
As if summoned by the words, a new sound rolled down the passage behind them — the heavy, unmistakable rhythm of many booted feet, drawing closer by the second, echoing off stone until it seemed the whole corridor thrummed with it.
“More guards,” Nathily said, already reaching for her bow. “A great many of them, by the sound.”
Barkla bent and retrieved the fallen cell-bar without any particular hurry, hefting it alongside the stolen sword with the easy confidence of a man for whom weapons were weapons, heirloom or not. “Then we make our stand here,” he said, and something in his grating voice had shifted, at last, from raw fury into something almost like satisfaction. “After all.” He nodded once at the field of ruined men around his feet. “None who’ve come for me so far have managed to leave again.”
Emcorae planted himself at Nathily’s shoulder, blade raised, and Barkla took up position at her other side, stolen steel gleaming red in the torchlight. The footsteps grew louder, nearer, until the passage itself seemed to shake with the weight of what was coming for them.
Barkla began to laugh — a low, rolling, delighted sound entirely unsuited to the carnage around him — and called out toward the dark with open relish, “Let the warrior who opens the door be ready for the enemy who waits behind it! Come, then! Come and see what’s left of you when a Pietromi is finally done being patient!”
The Apocrypha of Azazel 