Willard bowed her head and mumbled a prayer for the dead, then ordered Banderas and another man to scout the area to try to figure out what had happened. She had the rest of the soldiers take the bodies off the posts. While they worked, she radioed a report back to the helicopter pilots, saying that we had proof that hostiles were in the area and needed the choppers to come pick up the bodies.
I wasn’t sure who her reports went back to, but someone higher up her chain of command must have given permission for the outing. She would have to keep them in the loop.
The dark elves were here for several hours. Sindari walked past a spot where a campfire—or sacrifice fire—had recently burned, then headed deeper into the cave. But there is no access to deeper tunnels. At least not now.
As I followed him, we passed a vent spitting sulfuric smoke into the air. The ceiling grew lower after that. When we reached a spot where I could reach up and touch it, Sindari stopped. The way ahead was blocked, not with ice but with boulders. The way those boulders had been precisely packed to form a wall made me doubt Mother Nature had arranged them so.
Sindari nosed the ground. I pulled out a flashlight and fanned the beam over the area. There was more dirt than rock, and I could make out footprints. Human—or elf—sized footprints made by shoes, not bare feet.
I believe they closed this off recently, Sindari said, because there are old trails as well as fresh here. They may have been using this entrance for some time.
Can you tell if a tunnel continues on the other side of the blockage? Would there be any point in blowing up the boulders and trying to get back there? I looked over my shoulder to where Banderas had his hand in the ashes while Willard took photos of the bodies.
I cannot tell if there are tunnels back there, but I do not sense anyone with magical blood within my range.
And your range is larger than mine. So there’s not a dark elf for miles.
Correct, he said.
We should look for another access point then.
Even if there were miles of tunnels back there—I assumed the promise of something expansive to study had drawn the scientists to this place—they would probably be even harder to traverse than the glacier outside. These passages, formed by warm gases from vents, wouldn’t be as spacious and open as something like an old lava tube.
It is possible the dark elves are there and cloaking their auras, Sindari pointed out.
That’s true. Let’s see what Willard wants to do. I had grenades, but I’d seen her team pack explosives specifically designed for clearing rock.
“Anything back there?” Willard asked when I rejoined the group.
“They blocked the passage with boulders. Sindari doesn’t sense them anywhere behind it. If this was the entrance to their new underground lair, they’ve moved it.”
“They were here last night.” Banderas rose, wiping ash off his hand. “There’s still a hint of heat within the embers.”
“They may have come specifically to deal with the scientists,” Willard said, “to make sure nobody stumbled across them and could report their existence to the world.”
One of the other soldiers brought over something he’d found. A smashed cell phone.
“Definitely no reporting back,” I murmured, then raised my voice and shared Sindari’s thoughts on the blockage.
“He speaks to you?” Clarke asked.
“Telepathically.”
The men regarded Sindari curiously, but again, nobody questioned it beyond Clarke’s query.
The helicopters arrived while Willard and Banderas were checking the back of the cave. I helped the others carry the dead scientists outside and carefully wrap them up to be airlifted out. Not that their comfort mattered much now. They’d been killed and their bodies maimed. What would their families think? What had they thought? They’d thought the dangers of the mountain would be the worst thing they would face and had probably only stayed in that cave for protection from the storm.
“We can blow up those boulders,” Willard said after the helicopters departed and we reconvened in the cave mouth, “but I have to have a good reason. This is a national park.” She looked at the posts where the dead scientists had hung. “I think that’s reason enough. Sergeant Parekh, set up the charge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As the rest of the team climbed the gully slope back up to our anchors and ropes, I quietly asked Willard, “Is there any chance an explosion up here will set off the volcano?”
“No. I had Einhorn—our physicist—do a big analysis yesterday of what dark elves could possibly be planning to do to make Rainier erupt. He spent an hour on the phone conferring with a volcanologist. I was hoping the answer would be nothing, that the dark elves are deluding themselves.”
“I take it the answer is that they aren’t?”
“We don’t think so,” Willard said. “We’re all fuzzy on what exactly they can do with magic and what kinds of devices they can make, but we’ve seen a lot of magical goblin devices, so we can make guesses about what’s possible.”
“Goblins are the demo species? Gondo with his stapler trebuchet?”
Willard snorted. “Some of them make more serious inventions. For the dark-elf plan to work, our guys said it would take a volcano that’s already primed to erupt, one with a lot of magma and pressure built up down there over decades. It’s been more than a hundred and twenty years since Rainier has done anything significant. There was an eruption recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century and volcanic activity all through the last half, but it’s been quiet since 1894.”
As we climbed out of the gully together, I thought of the vents melting the ice, promising a great deal of geothermal activity in the area. But those little vents probably weren’t enough to let off the serious pressure that built up in a volcano.
“So it’s primed to erupt even if the dark elves do nothing?” I hunkered down beside Willard.
“We can’t predict when it would happen naturally, but there’s a reason there are seismic monitors all over the mountain. And then there are the glaciers. Einhorn says Hollywood movies of dropping nukes into calderas aside, the most likely way to trigger an explosion would be to weaken the top of the mountain—the cork on the champagne bottle essentially—and release the lithostatic pressure keeping all that rock in place, then dump a bunch of cold water on the molten magma and let the fireworks start.” Her voice was absolutely humorless as she spoke.
“So all they have to do is make some holes in the roof and melt the ice?”
“Basically.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. It wouldn’t be easy for us to do with explosives—which is probably why you don’t see a lot of terrorist plots to blow up Yellowstone—but your dragon could do it, I’m sure. And we know the dark elves are powerful and that they like to build magical artifacts.”
“They probably know what lithostatic means without having to Google it too.” I eyed my phone and the lack of reception. I couldn’t even pretend to be smart without the internet at hand.
“Probably.”
“Did you know? Before talking to Einhorn?”
“Of course.”
I squinted at her. “I’m debating if I believe you.”
“Try opening a book now and then that doesn’t have dragons in it.”
“Trust me, I’ve sworn off dragon books. I’m reading a romantic comedy now. All of the characters are human.”
“Sounds unimaginative.”
Sindari left the cave, and bounded up the slope to sit next to me. For the briefest moment, I thought I detected some magic behind those boulders.
A dark elf? I rested a hand on his back.
It seemed inanimate, like one of your charms, but it had even less of a magical signature.
Maybe a beacon or alarm to let them know if someone disturbs their rocks?
That is a possibility, Sindari said, but I suspect they already know we’re here and what we’re doing.
You don’t think they’re busy sleeping? I assume they do that during the day.
We’ll find out.
“The charge is set, Colonel,” sounded over Willard’s radio.
“At your leisure, Sergeant.”
Brace yourself, Sindari, I thought.
Parekh trotted out of the cave and climbed up to join the group. The detonator was clipped to his belt.
“Whenever you’re ready, Sergeant,” Willard said.
“Yes, ma’am. Ten seconds.”
Everyone hunkered down on the ice. We were all out of the gully and clear of the blast area, but this was a strange situation set up by a strange enemy, so we expected the unexpected.
When it came, the boom was muffled and not as impressive as I’d imagined. Chunks of ice thudded down inside the cave, while smaller debris shot out on a surge of meltwater.
A magical presence appeared to my senses so rapidly that I gasped.
Willard glanced at me.
“Trouble.” It wasn’t a dark elf. I didn’t know what it was, but its aura was almost as powerful as a dragon’s. “Sindari, that’s more than a beacon.”
Rumbles and scrapes emanated from the cave. They didn’t sound like ice falling.
It blossomed into something more. Sindari trotted to the edge of the glacier to look toward the cave.
Blossomed? Try erupted.
Staying low, I hurried after him. Ominous thumps came from the cave, the ice under us reverberating with each one.
A cloud of dust obscured the entrance, the fine powder wafting out into the clear sky. Something stirred inside that cloud. A huge blocky shape that looked more like a mountain itself than a living being crawled out of the cave on vaguely human-like hands and knees. When the creature rose to its full height on legs made from pillars of rock, it stood almost thirty feet tall and twenty wide.
“Rock golem,” I breathed. “They must have put it back there to guard that entrance.”
“You didn’t sense that behind the boulders?” Willard asked.