Before them stood the sheer fifty-foot rock face leading up to the narrow archway high in the cliff. The otyugh lay dead in the black lake behind them, and Garnel was already on his way back to the pool. Nibbles stepped forward and slung the climbing gear over his shoulder.

“Fifty feet?” he said. “Easy. I’ll have a rope down in two minutes. And if anyone wants to pay me for the service, I’m open to offers.”

He made it twenty feet up before disaster struck. A wet shelf of rock crumbled away beneath his boots, and Nibbles fell backwards with a yell and landed hard on the cavern floor with a thud that knocked all the breath out of him.

“Of course,” said Derek, to nobody in particular. “Of course.” He hurried to Nibbles’ side and laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, murmuring a low prayer to the Sun Father. A warm golden glow spread over the rogue: Derek’s Guidance, clearing the fog from his head and steadying his limbs.

“Try again,” said Derek. “The Sun Father guides your footing.”

“Does the Sun Father want paying?”

“The Sun Father,” said Derek, “would like you to stop falling off things.”

With the blessing humming through him, Nibbles wiped his scraped hands and sprang back onto the cliff. This time his claws found handholds as if he could see them glowing. In a few minutes he hauled himself over the lip of the archway fifty feet above, hammered an iron piton deep into a crack, tied off a thick rope and threw it down. One by one, Thorn, Derek, Dave and a very indignant Loki were hauled up into the high passage.

At the top, the air changed. The damp stink of the lake fell away, and in its place came the dry smell of old stone, faint coal smoke and iron. The corridor ahead was grand dwarven work: massive granite arches and beautifully dressed masonry from Ethium’s golden age, though centuries of neglect had smudged the fine carvings with soot.

“Dwarven stonework,” murmured Derek, running his hand reverently along a pillar. His beard twitched as he sniffed the air. “Over a thousand years old. But my people are long gone from these halls.” He frowned. “No dwarf would ever leave a bridge fallen in ruins like that, nor let this stone go uncared for. Be on your guard. Whatever lives here now, it isn’t dwarf.”

“How do you know?” whispered Dave.

“Because the floor,” said Derek, with deep disapproval, “hasn’t been swept in a hundred years.”

---

They reached a wide crossroads between an old well room and a ruined shrine. The flagstones were littered with crude iron spikes and gnawed animal bones. Then Loki gave a sharp bark, and the air itself seemed to shimmer.

Out of nothing, four squat grey-skinned dwarves in spiked iron mail appeared, their eyes glowing like dull embers. Before Thorn could even raise his shield, the duergar let out harsh, guttural shouts and began to grow: their bodies swelling until they towered eight feet tall, their iron war picks doubling in size in their fists.

“Group up! Stay together!” shouted Thorn, raising his axe and shield.

And behind the giant duergar, two wild, shaggy beasts burst out of the shadows: huge, ape-like brutes covered in white fur, with long claws and flat, snarling faces. Quaggoths. They wore iron collars. Slaves.

“Why,” groaned Nibbles, diving sideways as an enormous iron pick smashed into the flagstone where he’d been standing, “is it always the big ones?” He rolled behind a pillar, took a deep breath, and breathed out a roaring blast of dragon fire that caught the nearest quaggoth full in the chest.

“Dave, clear the corridor!” grunted Thorn, holding off two giant duergar with his shield while his axe rang off their mail.

Dave wove his claws through the air, chanting. A globe of roaring orange fire, a Flaming Sphere, burst into being behind the duergar line and went rolling forward, scorching their legs. Dave steered it with great concentration and his tongue sticking out. “Left,” he muttered. “Left. Your other left.” Derek slammed the head of his weapon against the stone and called down a Spiritual Weapon: a glowing spectral hammer that hung in the air above the fight and struck the duergar leader again and again with holy force.

With Thorn holding the front, Dave’s sphere rolling up and down the corridor and Derek healing the claw wounds on Nibbles, because of course it was Nibbles, the companions slowly turned the fight. The last giant duergar shrank back down to normal size with a heavy groan and fell, and the crossroads went quiet.

“Everyone all right?” asked Thorn.

“No,” said Nibbles.

“Everyone except Nibbles?”

“Yes,” said everyone else.

---

Past the shrine, the hallway opened into a square chamber built from polished pale stone that stood out sharply against the rough dwarven tunnels around it.

In the middle of the room, on a couple of raised stone steps, stood the Ethium Viewing Table: a huge, rectangular table cut from a single block of Ethium stone. Its smooth top had a large circular opening at the centre ringed by interlocking grooves, with a stone socket at its rim and a shallow carved tray beside it.

They climbed the steps and gathered round.

“What do you make of it?” asked Thorn, leaning over the smooth stone. “Some kind of altar?”

“It’s a machine,” said Dave, tracing the grooves with one claw, and for a moment he did not sound seven at all. “It’s an Ethium machine. It’s just asleep.”

He reached into his pouch, pulled out a smooth blue Ethium Stone, and pressed it firmly into the socket in the table’s rim.

The table hummed with a deep, rising note. From the circle in the middle, a perfectly clear crystal sphere two feet across slowly rose up into the air, and glowing runes flared along its rim. A calm, gentle voice spoke inside Dave’s head:

system active… awaiting item…

“It’s working!” gasped Dave, clutching his forehead. “It talks! It wants an item!”

Nibbles stepped up first and put a copper tavern token on the tray. Nothing happened. The sphere stayed blank.

“Try a dagger,” suggested Thorn. Nibbles put his iron dagger on the tray. Again, nothing.

“Try your button,” said Dave.

Nibbles put the brass button, the one with the anchor on it, carefully on the tray. Everyone waited. Nothing happened. Nibbles took it back, looking quietly hurt on its behalf.

“It must need something connected to Ethium,” said Dave slowly.

Thorn unslung the ancient battleaxe they had taken from the alcove beneath the ruined tower, its heavy head engraved with Ethium runes, and laid it carefully across the tray.

The moment the metal touched the stone, the runes along the grooves blazed bright blue. The voice spoke again:

accessing [ Memory ]… memory updating…

The crystal sphere flickered to life and filled the room with a brilliant three-dimensional picture.

First they saw ancient Ethium as it had been more than a thousand years ago: a great dwarven forge, bright with roaring fires and loud with the cheerful clink of hammers, where dwarves and Ethium craftsmen worked side by side. Then, with a static glitch, the picture shifted to a gloomy, shadowy view of the same forge, now dim and ruined, filled with iron cages and crates, and grim duergar riding giant spiders through the dark.

“Ooh,” said Dave. “Spiders. Big ones.”

“Old memories,” said Thorn, a little uncertainly.

Dave was already rummaging in his pack. He lifted the axe off the tray and sprinkled a few drops of water from his canteen onto the stone in its place: water he had filled, without telling anyone, from the healing pool. “Just to see,” he explained.

The sphere flickered again. It showed a brief, gentle memory of a citizen of ancient Ethium being lowered carefully into the glowing pool. Then it glitched, and settled into a clear, moving picture.

It was the pool chamber, barely half a mile behind them. And there was Garnel Stoneblender, kneeling beside Poopy Joe at the water’s edge, the zombie laid out on the warm stone, while Garnel traced the old runes along the channels with a charcoal pencil, glancing from his notes to Joe and back again, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth.

“Wait,” said Derek slowly, leaning closer. “Look at Garnel. He’s moving.” He looked round at the others. “That’s not an old memory. That’s Garnel. Right now.”

A heavy silence fell over the steps. Dave’s eyes went wide as the realisation landed.

“If the pool shows what’s happening now,” he said, “then the forge wasn’t an old memory either.”

Thorn’s grip tightened on his shield. “The duergar,” he said. “With the spiders. They’re in that forge right now.”

“It’s a network,” said Derek quietly, laying his palm against the cool stone of the table. “The old Ethium network. The table can see any place where the stones are still alive. But I can feel it. Most of it is broken now, and dark.”

“Can it see Fallcrest?” asked Dave. “Can it see my room at the inn? Can it see what Tobbs is having for dinner?”

“I hope not,” said Derek, with feeling.

Dave tried one more thing. He pressed in a different stone: the one they had found on Rulden’s table in the cellars of the old manor near Fallcrest.

The sphere hummed and re-tuned itself. First it showed a splendid scene from the past: Ethium’s nobles in shimmering robes, holding court in a soaring palace of pale stone, high on a cliff-ringed hill. Then, with a pulse of static, it showed the present. The same palace, now a blackened ruin, crudely patched with timber barricades. Goblins swarmed its halls. Huge ogres lumbered through its courtyards. And on a stolen throne in its great hall, a hobgoblin in red armour barked orders at them all.

“That’s the castle,” said Thorn slowly. “The castle on the great hill. We walked right past it.”

“And that,” said Nibbles, “is somebody who’s taken over the castle. With ogres.”

“I really,” said Dave, “don’t want to go there.”

“Nobody’s going there,” said Derek firmly.

Before they left, Dave took out his leather journal and a stick of charcoal and drew the table carefully, with his tongue out: the socket, the tray, the rising sphere and every groove along the rim, so that he could show Garnel when they got back. It was, Derek noticed, the most patient thing Dave had done all week. He suspected it might be an apology.

---

The companions stood at the chamber door, arguing about what to do next.

“We know there are duergar in the forge ahead,” said Derek quietly, adjusting his shield strap. “Riding spiders. Should we go back to Garnel and regroup, or push on?”

“We’ve come this far,” said Thorn. “If we fall back now, they might strengthen the tunnels. We need to see what’s further down, and how many of them there are.”

“I vote we go and look,” said Nibbles, “and if it’s a lot, we come back. And if it’s treasure, we take it.”

“I vote for lunch,” said Dave.

They agreed to press on, very carefully, after lunch. They crept down a long hallway until the passage turned sharply up a wide flight of stone stairs towards a large, open chamber above. Staying low in the shadow of the corner, Dave sent Peggy gliding silently up the stairwell to scout. Through her eyes, he saw a vast, high-ceilinged hall held up by giant stone pillars. At the far end, behind barricades, stood four heavy duergar guards and two chained quaggoths, waiting in silence.

“They know we’re coming,” whispered Dave, opening his eyes. “They’re waiting at the top of the stairs.”

“We can’t go back now,” said Thorn quietly. “We push through.”

---

They charged up the stairs into the great Assembly Hall. The duergar captain roared an order. The guards swelled to giant size once more and unchained the quaggoths. Along the side wall, a duergar crossbowman stepped out from behind a pillar to catch the party as they came in, and an iron bolt grazed Thorn’s helmet.

“Flanker on the left! Rush him!” shouted Thorn, leading the charge to overwhelm the crossbowman before he could reload.

“Nibbles, move!” yelled Derek.

Nibbles sprinted into position and slammed his hands together, and a deafening Thunderwave boomed out across the hall, shattering the wooden barricades and sending two quaggoths staggering backwards. But as he tried to leap clear, a quaggoth’s heavy claws raked across his back and brought him down onto one knee.

“Nibbles!” yelled Dave, steering his rolling Flaming Sphere to cut off the flanking duergar while Derek rushed to help.

Then the wall moved.

A sound like grinding stone rolled through the hall, from somewhere behind the great pillars. Dust poured from the high ceiling. Cracks raced across the side wall, and then the whole wall burst inwards in a shower of granite blocks, and out of the hole came the Grey Burrower: a colossal blind worm, forty feet long, its round mouth lined with hundreds of razor-sharp teeth in rings that went on and on, down into the dark.

Nobody made a joke. Not even Dave.

“Worm!” bellowed Derek, dragging Nibbles backwards just as the monster’s jaws slammed shut on the spot where the rogue had been lying.

The Burrower struck blindly at anything that moved. With one terrible snap it swallowed a quaggoth whole, and then it thrashed its great tail across the hall, smashing two duergar into the pillars like skittles.

The Grey Burrower tears through the Assembly Hall — swallowing anything that moves.

The Assembly Hall became total chaos. Derek’s spectral hammer struck the monster’s side again and again. Thorn and Dave’s Flaming Sphere brought down the duergar captain. Then a stray swipe of the worm’s tail clipped Dave across the chest and knocked him flat, and he lay very still.

Derek had been patient all week. He had been patient with the climbing and the falling, with the questions, with the oh dear, oh dear, with Nibbles valuing the statues. He was not patient now. He crossed the shattered floor in a few strides, dropped to his knees beside Dave, and poured out a prayer of healing with a fierceness none of them had heard from him before. Dave gasped, and coughed, and opened his eyes.

“Did we win?” he croaked.

“Not yet,” said Derek, and stood, and turned to face the worm with an expression that would have frightened a much braver monster.

But the fight was turning on its own. The last surviving duergar guard broke ranks, threw down his shield, and fled madly down the long corridor towards the distant city gates. The Grey Burrower let out a terrible roar, turned, and surged down the tunnel after him, its huge body scraping the stone walls as it went.

Thorn, Derek, Dave and Nibbles scrambled to the archway and peered round the corner.

Far down the long stone avenue, the fleeing duergar ran straight into a patrol of duergar cavalry mounted on giant, wall-crawling spiders. The dark dwarves lowered long iron lances, swarmed the Grey Burrower with deadly discipline, and drove the colossal worm back into the rock it had come from.

And before the companions could do anything else, a heavy grinding of metal echoed down the hall. Great dwarven cogs turned. Ancient chains rattled. And with a deafening BOOM that they felt through their boots and in their teeth, the great iron-bound gates of the lower city slammed shut.

Nibbles slid down the wall and sat on the floor, getting his breath back. “Well,” he said eventually, wiping soot off his forehead. “At least the worm’s gone.”

“I liked the worm,” said Dave weakly.

“You did not like the worm, Dave.”

“I liked it a little bit. Afterwards.”

---

Before they left, they searched the fallen duergar captain and the supply crates by the shattered barricades.

Tucked in an inner pocket of the captain’s tunic, Dave found a small brass case. He clicked the latch open. Inside was a compass: the Explorer’s Compass. Instead of pointing north, its delicate glowing blue crystal needle spun round smoothly and then locked firmly onto the nearest Ethium Stone. Dave turned in a slow circle. The needle swung to the stone in Nibbles’ pouch, and stayed there, no matter where Dave pointed.

“It finds stones,” breathed Dave.

Nibbles looked at it with the expression of a man seeing the most important invention in history. “Do you know,” he said reverently, “how much money that thing could make us?”

From the captain’s belt, Nibbles unhooked a heavy pouch holding gold coins, a polished platinum ring, an iron duergar emblem, an old fragment of a dwarven key, some written orders in Dwarvish, and a heavy ring of four iron keys stamped with dwarven runes for side doors, supply stores and slave pens. He weighed each item in his palm, valued it out loud, and wrote it down in his ledger, and for once nobody minded.

By the barricade crates Thorn found a perfectly preserved Ethium Smith’s Hammer, its masterwork head bearing ancient guild marks: the kind of tool that might one day mend, reforge or simply understand Ethium metalwork. It was not an axe. But Thorn held it with great respect all the same.

Tucked beneath the hammer, Derek found a fragile piece of parchment: a child’s drawing of a happy dwarf family, a hunting dog, a small stone house and a glowing blue crystal. It had no gold value at all. Derek smoothed it flat with great care, and looked at it for a long time, and then folded it and tucked it inside his tunic without saying a word. Even Nibbles didn’t ask what it was worth.

Finally they gathered up the coiled rope ladders and spare climbing gear stacked beside the crates: a very welcome find that would make the lake and the fifty-foot cliff a great deal safer on the way back.

“Four keys, proper rope ladders and a compass that finds treasure,” whispered Nibbles, slinging the gear over his shoulder. “We’re leaving with far more than we came with.”

---

With the lower city sealed tight and the duergar patrols on high alert, the companions fell back through the hall of statues and the tunnel they had dug, to regroup at the healing pool.

As they stepped back into the warm, blue-lit chamber, Garnel looked up from his papers with an enormous, triumphant grin. And there beside him, standing upright for the very first time, was Poopy Joe. The peat-stained zombie had been cleansed by the pool’s waters, his grey leather gleaming, and he bowed politely to them, holding Garnel’s inkpot with delicate care.

“You’re back!” Garnel beamed, waving his quill. “And look! The pool’s resonance washed out the old rot. I managed to line up the ancient channels and get him moving!”

Nibbles stared at Joe, his jaw dropping, and then a huge grin spread across his face. “Poopy Joe! You’re walking!”

Poopy Joe blinked his empty eye sockets, took a slow, creaking step forward, and held out Garnel’s leather folder to Dave with surprising grace.

Dave took it. Then, very carefully, he held out his journal, open at the drawing of the Viewing Table. “That’s for you,” he said to Garnel. “I drew it. Every bit. I was very quiet when I did it.”

Garnel looked at the drawing, and then at Dave, and something in his face softened. “That,” he said, “is genuinely very helpful. Thank you, Dave.”

Dave glowed like an Ethium Stone.

“See?” said Nibbles, nudging Derek with an elbow and pointing at Joe. “Our very own butler.”

Poopy Joe bowed to Nibbles, turned smartly round, took three proud, creaking steps towards the pool, and walked straight into a pillar.