The deep had become a tomb, and its wardens were hollow — armor with no one inside, burning with a light stolen from the living. And deeper still, the thing that kept it waited.
They rested in a straight antechamber on the approach to Grithmaar Deep, and Jamal told them the rest of it: he was the last of the place, and his people had been miners, ready for vermin and not for armies, and organized raiders had put them all to the sword — a thing apart from the great monster deeper down. They carried the dragon's spoils in the Living Fortress. Heyou hid Jamal under Invisibility, though he bore a torch, so a light went floating ahead of them; and at a three-way fork they took the rightmost way in.
A tremor ran through the rock, and then a rope-trap brought the ceiling down — Jamal battered under it, You Bastard snapping the line, the fall so narrowing the passage that the Living Fortress and the mount could not pass and the rest squeezed through. Out of the dust came a figure ten feet tall in horned iron, and drove a barbed, chain-tethered spear into the Living Fortress and pinned it to the wall; goblinoid spearmen came with it. A second such figure charged from behind and ran Jamal through, holding him fast, and spoke into his mind: you were among those meant to be destroyed; I will finish the work.
It was a long grind in the dark. Draz ran the chain toward its anchor and put arrows off layered plate; Heyou found a weak link and hammered one tether free of the Fortress; the mount took a spear meant for Jamal. Then Sylvie opened the iron thing with the Voice of Dread and laid a curse on it and, at the last, caught it in a Time Lock and froze it where it stood; Jamal cleaved three of the goblinoids in one stroke; Draz put an arrow through its visor-slit; and Draz tore the helm away and found no one inside it — only Splendor, blazing in the empty armor, the god-light that had been torn out of Sylvie, which billowed out of the broken suit and went dark. Her compass for that light spun and would not settle.
They took the suit apart and stacked the rubble into a wall to rest behind. Sylvie sent the Umbral Raven on ahead, and through its eyes saw the thing that waited below — Mollthain's Warden, the god Mollthain's own pet, set among a gathered host — before the Warden felt the raven watching and tore it out of the air. Jamal knew it for the ancient monster under Grithmaar Deep, whose power they had come all this way to take.
She slept, and in the dream found Ygva — a mote of dark in a blazing sun — who told her the ways a thing's power might be taken: destroy it and keep the remains, or rebuild it into a vessel, or siphon it off into some container that would hold it. And Ygva's answer woke in Sylvie a power she had not had before: to take a thing's whole essence with the killing blow, at a heavy cost to draw it up again. While she slept the others took a goblinoid alive, and Jamal and the mount threw back a rush from behind, the poison of it working in him. She woke and burned two of them, and came to the captive — glowing faintly with that same stolen Splendor — which shrank from her and named her a witch who drinks the lifeblood of the living. She reached to draw it out of him, and the power turned aside from her, and killed him, and gave her nothing; and she saw too late that she should have poured the light into a vessel, into the Living Fortress. They held the rubble at their backs, the Warden below them, and the new and untried power waiting in her.