Chapter 8 | Part 3

They weren’t walking anymore. They were fleeing, though neither of them had used the word yet.

The leisurely pace of the last three weeks had vanished, replaced by a grind that Dulint felt deep in his sixty-year-old joints. His right knee—the one he’d twisted in the DeepShaft collapse decades ago—complained with every step on the uneven road, a sharp, rhythmic spike of misery. He ignored it. Pain was just noise, familiar and ignorable. The silence stretching out on the road behind them, heavy and watching… that was a signal he couldn’t ignore.

“I was the one who pulled it from the stratum,” Balin said. He kept his voice low, pitched to be lost under the crunch of their boots on gravel. “I held it first, Uncle. It was cold stone. Dead stone.”

“I know.”

“Three weeks in your pack. Not a hum. Not a flicker.” Balin’s hand shot out, grabbing Dulint’s forearm and halting him. The grip was iron—young muscle, fresh mine-calluses, the sheer, unthinking strength of a dwarf just hitting his prime. “What did you do to it?”

Dulint met his nephew’s eyes. They were dark, sharp, and currently narrowed in the specific way that meant Balin was calculating odds. The boy wasn’t stupid. He’d grown up in the tunnels, watching the guild politics, learning that every silence had a price and every shadow held a knife. He knew how to spot a hustle.

“Nothing,” Dulint said, letting a sliver of his real exhaustion bleed into the tone. “I swear it by the Stone. It was dormant until this morning. I showed it to that hedge-witch in Zuraldi, and she just stared at it. Said some rhymes I didn’t catch.”

“What rhymes?”

“Nonsense. Prophecy garbage about ‘waking’ and ‘paying’.” Dulint shook his arm free and started walking again, forcing his stiff legs into motion. The road hooked left ahead, hugging the contour of the gray hills. “You know how seers are. They sell smoke because they don’t have fire.”

Balin scrambled to catch up. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re omitting,” Balin corrected, stepping in front of him and forcing a second halt. “That’s the same as lying in the tunnels, and you taught me that. I know your ‘stalling for time’ face. I know your ‘rambling to distract’ voice. And right now? You look scared.”

Dulint shut his mouth. Damn the boy. He was right.

“It’s my find,” Balin pressed, lowering his voice to a hiss. “I reached into that gap when the rest of the crew said the geometry looked wrong. I touched it. Now it’s doing… whatever this is. And you won’t tell me why.”

The accusation hung in the cool air. Dulint remembered the moment vividly—the way Balin’s hand had vanished into the impossible shadow of the ruin’s wall, the way the air had smelled of ozone and stale dust. The boy had pulled the cube out like a prize, grinning through the rock-dust on his face. He’d been so proud of the perfect angles, the way the basalt seemed to eat the torchlight.

We should have collapsed the tunnel right then, Dulint thought. We should have buried it and run.

“And now it wakes up?” Balin demanded. “Just like that?”

“Maybe it’s proximity. Maybe it’s time. I don’t know.” Dulint glanced back. The road was empty, but the feeling of being watched scratched at the back of his neck. “What I know is that thing started heating up an hour ago, and now we have shadows trailing us that don’t match the sun. Coincidence doesn’t stretch that far.”

“It’s pointing,” Balin said. He fell into step again, his frustration radiating off him almost as palpable as the heat from the pack. “North.”

Dulint shifted the pack straps. The cube was hot against his lower back—not burning, but thrumming with a distinct, rhythmic warmth. Like a heartbeat. “North-east. Past the Iron Peaks. Toward the Wyrmreach coast.”

“It’s a rock, Uncle,” Balin snapped, his voice cracking. “Rocks don’t point.”

“This one does.”

They walked in silence. The valley deepened, the hills rising on either side to cut off the late afternoon sun. Shadows lengthened, merging into pools of grey. Dulint’s mind ran through the tactical options, clicking them off like tumblers in a lock. Return to Zuraldi? The followers would cut them off before the gates. Hide in the hills? The cube was broadcasting a signal loud enough to feel. Fight? Two pick-swingers against professionals?

“I know a contact,” Dulint said finally. “In Riverhold. A scholar. Xandor.”

“A human?” Balin wrinkled his nose.

“Half-blood. He was old when I was young.” Dulint had been keeping Xandor as a last resort, a card up his sleeve he hadn’t wanted to play. “He worked the Eldric excavations. He knows about Pre-Sundering tech. If anyone can tell us how to turn this thing off, it’s him.”

“And you think we can make Riverhold before—”

Balin stopped dead.

“Uncle.”

The tone froze Dulint’s blood. It was the flat, colorless tone of a scout who sees a cave-in before it happens.

“We’re tagged.”

Dulint turned slowly.

The road behind them wasn’t empty anymore. Figures—three, maybe four—had crested the rise. They moved with a fluidity that was entirely wrong for travelers. No wasted motion. No conversation. They flowed over the terrain, silent and inexorable.

“How long?” Dulint asked.

“I saw dust ten minutes ago. Thought it was wind.” Balin’s hand drifted to the heavy mining knife at his belt. “They haven’t broke stride. They aren’t tracking prints, Uncle. They’re looking right at us.”

Dulint felt the pulse against his spine. Thump. Thump. Thump. It was getting faster. Louder. Calling out to whatever was hunting them.

A beacon, the witch had said. Or a lure.

“Move,” Dulint said, turning back to the road. “Double time. Don’t look back.”

End of Chapter 8.3 —> 8.4: The Road from Zuraldi: The Followers