Story HourPost your ongoing tales from your campaigns, and read those from others for inspiration. Lots of other RPG boards post "Story Hours", but this is where it started!
I've been incapacitated this week with a bout of stomach flu (nasty business), so I'm a bit behind in my postings.
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Chapter 26
Mara had no time to think, only to act.
She fell forward, rolling over onto her chest, then onto her back. Her foot brushed something heavy and she kicked off, coming into a spin even as the ground vibrated with the clang of steel on stone, so loud that it seemed like it must have been scant inches from her ears. As she pivoted, she lashed out with her longsword. Again, it was instinct rather than design that guided the blade, and she felt the steel bite on something, heard a grunt of pain, followed by a loud thud and a clatter of metal that she recognized as an armored body striking the floor.
She didn’t stop to see what had happened. She completed her spin and kept going, using her momentum to come up awkwardly to a crouch. She didn’t bother looking for her short sword, raising her remaining weapon in a guard position.
The hobgoblin was already regaining his feet as well. He’s faster than me, she thought, parrying a spear thrust that she realized was a probe rather than a serious attack. She could see the deep dent in the poleyn of iron plate protecting his right knee, and realized she’d gotten in a lucky hit. He seemed to favor the leg a bit, but the wound certainly didn’t look like it was enough to stop him.
The room had grown quiet around them. Mara paused, breathing heavily; opposite her, the hobgoblin chief did the same. Someone groaned beneath her; Mara glanced down to see the soldier from Fallcrest lying there, half-conscious. At least he was alive; the same could not be said for most of those scattered across the room. Goblins, hobgoblins, and humans formed uneven mounds where they had fallen. Blood formed trails across the floor, gathering in pools where the stone dipped. The stink was ferocious.
She saw the warcaster, standing with his back toward her. As she watched, he slowly fell over, like a tree being toppled by a lumberjack. When he landed, his arms splayed out from his sides, Mara could see several arrows jutting from his body, including one that jutted from his left eye, trailing a line of blood down his face like a stream of tears. Behind him stood the halflings. All of them bore wounds, and Tarra was supporting Torrin, who clutched a right arm that looked broken, but otherwise all four were intact.
She glanced right. The balcony was silent. She could see the divots in the wall behind them where sling bullets had missed; she could only guess at what the ones that had hit had done to hobgoblin bodies. One of the archers was slumped over the lip of the ledge, his face frozen into a death mask. Literally; she could see the rime of frost even from here.
She glanced left. Gral was back on his feet, although he leaned heavily on his staff. There was another human soldier behind him, one of the ones she remembered from the Halfmoon Inn, holding a bow. Dwellin was already running to help Torrin. As Tarra handed her brother off to the healer, she took up her sling again and plopped another bullet into its pouch, stepping forward to join Jaron and Rendil.
“Looks like you’re the one who’s alone, now,” Mara said.
The warchief’s response was a snarl. He lunged at Mara, only fractionally slower than he had been before. She met the attack and deflected it, although once again the spearhead cut her, this time edging her right arm above the greave, almost at her shoulder, clipping a scale hard enough to cut the flesh beneath. It hurt, but she was feeling the boundless endurance of a trained fighter, minor wounds ignored until the heat of battle was concluded. She twisted and prepared her counterattack, but the hobgoblin was already disengaging, his goal obvious as he started toward the exit.
Arrows and bullets knifed through the air, but most of them bounced off the hobgoblin’s heavy armor. Gral stood in the hobgoblin’s path, the battered dwarf looking almost insignificant against the sheer size and strength of the hobgoblin veteran. But the dwarf held his ground, even when the hobgoblin lowered his spear and surged ahead.
He didn’t get more than a few steps, for as his charge took him past the fallen Carzen Zelos, the semiconscious fighter managed to stick out his foot enough to catch the warchief’s heel, ruining his balance, and sending him toppling forward onto the floor.
The hobgoblin still refused to give up. He was able to get his feet under him even as more missiles lanced into him, including a bullet that caromed hard off his left arm just above the elbow, and an arrow that stabbed through his right boot into the flesh of his leg. He almost made it back to standing, but even as he started to turn Mara hit him from behind. Her sword clanged hard into his neck at the base of his skull. The blow failed to penetrate through the coif of heavy chain links he wore under his helm, but the impact was still enough to deliver mortal damage. Somehow, even as his body began to fail, the hobgoblin stayed on his feet; he took one step forward, then another, as his limbs started to stiffen and spasm. His spear fell from his grasp, and clattered on the floor.
It was Gral who finished it, lifting his staff with obvious effort, driving the tip into the center of the hobgoblin’s breastplate. The thunderwave tore through his body like a tsunami striking a seaside village, the sound of it echoing off the chamber walls long after the clatter of the hobgoblin hitting the floor had faded.
Even before the last enemy had fallen, the companions from Fallcrest and their new allies were working to sort the dying from the dead.
The gods of the world above must have been watching the confrontation, for none of the adventurers were among the latter. Carzen and Vhael were dragged back from the brink by the combined efforts of the halfling herbalist, Dwallin, and the healing elixir carried by Gral. Despite the grievous wound he himself bore, the dwarf wizard split the last few swallows of that precious draught on the two fallen warriors, bringing them back to consciousness. But all of them, save the miraculously fortunate Gezzelhaupt, bore serious wounds.
As Gral helped Vhael back to his feet, Mara turned from checking the hobgoblin fallen, and started toward him. Some invisible sense warned the dragonborn, and he tried with partial success to conceal the incredible pain of the wounds he bore as he turned to face her. The gazes of the pair met, and suddenly the room was filled with an electric tension only slightly less intense than the violence that had been wrought here just moments before.
Jaron had barely paused to accept a helping hand from Rendil, who tied a cloth around the bloody wound in the ranger’s shoulder, before he started toward the ruined doors on the far side of the room. “We have to find Beetle,” he said. The halfling hardly looked capable of another fight, but even in his diminutive stride there was something that would accept no hindrance to his march. Carzen started to say something, but before he could speak, a shadowy form materialized in the doorway.
“Beetle?” Jaron asked, but instinct had already given him an answer, and he reached for the nearly-empty quiver at his hip, refusing to retreat as he faced this new threat.
The shadowy figure split into two, and as they emerged into the chamber, the companions could see that they were duergar, members of that evil, corrupted race of dwarves that thrived in the deep places far from the light of the sun. The dark dwarves were clad in plain but functional suits of leather and blackened metal, their spiny beards jutting from their faces like wire brushes. One of them had a large bulge under his cloak, but it was difficult to see if it was a weapon, some bit of stolen loot, or just a misshapen feature of his body.
The halflings quickly shifted to face the new danger, even Torrin, who held a dagger in his good hand. Vhael recovered his sword and moved forward to join Jaron. Belatedly, Mara and Carzen followed.
Having fitted an arrow to the string of his bow, Jaron lifted the weapon to a ready position, half-drawing the fletchings to his cheek. But the larger of the two duergar merely opened his cloak, and revealed the object he was carrying.
It was Beetle, dangling limp and bloody, the duergar’s hand wrapped around his neck like an iron manacle. He’d been hastily but thoroughly bound with segments of rope at wrists and ankles, and seemed especially tiny against the armored bulk of the dwarf.
“Let him go!” Jaron hissed. He almost charged forward, but Carzen was able to grab onto his shoulder, and hold him back. The duergar merely shifted slightly, enough for them all to clearly see the curving knife he held in his other hand.
“Do you speak the Common language?” Vhael asked. “Do you understand me?”
“We understand,” the duergar holding Beetle said. “Your fight was with these,” he added, indicating the fallen Bloodreavers with a stab of his knife. “You want your little friend here to live, you’ll just let us be on our way.”
“They’re Grimmerzhuls,” Rendil said quietly, from where he and the other halflings were standing, a short distance back. “Slave traders.”
The duergar warrior hadn’t missed the presence of the halfling or his companions. “Didn’t know that the Halfmoons was taking sides,” he said. “Could be trouble, even in the Hall. Labyrinth’s a dangerous place to be, without friends.”
“You are not in a position to be making threats,” Vhael said. “We are here for the prisoners taken from Fairhaven.”
The two duergar shared a quick look. The one holding Beetle made a slight motion with his knife, and Jaron tensed, but he only wiped the blade on the lapel of his cloak. The other one, after a moment’s hesitation, said, “They ain’ here, they been sold. It’s not our concern; you’ll have to take it up with Kedhira in the Hall.”
Vhael’s draconic features betrayed nothing of his reaction to that news. “Leave our companion, and if he lives, I give you my word that we will not obstruct your escape. But give your masters a message—”
“We’re not interested in your ‘message’, General,” the duergar holding Beetle said. “Yes, we know who you are. This world down here, this isn’t yours. It’s ours. I’d tread lightly, all of you, lest the Grimmerzhul be forced to inflict a painful lesson.”
“Sometimes those lessons can inflict pain on the teacher as well,” Carzen said, although something of the menace in the statement was undermined by the way that he kept tottering on his damaged leg, looking like he could collapse again at any second.
The duergar came forward, alert to any attempt at trickery. But at Vhael’s gesture the companions moved back enough for the dark dwarves to make their way around them, toward the exit. The halflings had their weapons loaded and ready, although the Halfmoons kept their slings at their sides, not quite directed at the Grimmerzhuls but threatening nevertheless. Gez, who’d been lingering near the exit, moved aside as the duergar approached, although he too had an arrow ready.
The duergar turned at the mouth of the exit passageway. The bigger of the two fixed them all with a hard look, then with a flick of his wrist he dropped Beetle onto the floor at his feet. Then the two turned and vanished into the darkness of the tunnel, so fast that a blink of the eyes would have missed it.
Jaron was at his cousin’s body in an second, followed only a beat later by Dwallin Halfmoon. The others came over as quickly as they could manage. “Is he…” Carzen began, craning his neck over the small forms of Mara and Gral before him.
“He lives,” Dwallin reported, not looking up from his bandages and medicines as he worked. “But he’s in bad shape, real bad. He will survive, I think, but we will need to carry him from this place, back to the Hall.”
With that resolved, Vhael turned back toward Mara. A space opened between them, as the unspoken tension there reasserted itself, but this time Carzen stepped—or more precisely, limped—between them.
“I don’t know where you learned to fight, girl, but I for one am damned glad that you came.”
“I’m not a ‘girl,’ and I didn’t come here for you.” Her eyes didn’t shift from Vhael for even a heartbeat. “I came here because I owed Jaron and Beetle a debt, and now I’ve paid it.” She turned and strode away, pausing to recover her shorter sword where it had fallen during the battle, before bending to check again some of the hobgoblin bodies.
“What of you?” Vhael said to Rendil. “It sounds as though you may have complicated your position in the Hall by helping us.”
“Yeah, well, we had a debt of our own with the Bloodreavers that needed settling,” the halfling said. “If it’s okay with you, I’d suggest we not linger her any longer than necessary. We’ll help you scout out the place, see if there are any prisoners in there, but I’d be surprised if the Grimmerzhuls left anyone behind. It had best be quick, though.”
Vhael nodded. “Gral, Gezzelhaupt, go with the halflings. We’ll stand guard here at the entrance. Disengage and signal if you encounter any additional resistance inside.”
The wizard nodded, and moved off to join the Halfmoons, Gez in tow. Carzen walked over to where Mara was looting the hobgoblin chieftain, but she ignored him, moving over to the fallen warcaster. Carzen grimaced, but didn’t press the matter, not with blood oozing from plenty of rents in his battered hide. He started to unbuckle one of the straps of his armor, but after considering a moment, decided against it. The suit of metal scales that wrapped around his body might be the only thing keeping him together, he mused grimly. Thankfully for him, the hobgoblin arrow that had caught him square on the chest hadn’t fully penetrated, or it would have been his burial wrap as well.
Jaron and Dwallin had moved Beetle off to the side away from the chamber entry, and while the healer folded an extra shirt to cushion his head, Jaron drew his cloak over the battered halfling’s body. Beetle let out a tiny moan but didn’t regain consciousness.
Jaron stood, and turned back toward Vhael. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. We’ll get you back to the Hall, but then we’re done with each other.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve completed half of my assigned task, the destruction of the slaver gang that’s been terrorizing the Nentir Vale. I will complete the second, the recovery of the prisoners from your village. However, I made it clear that I will not tolerate challenges to my authority that threaten the safety of both the team and our mission. Your cousin did that, with his precipitous action earlier.”
“He didn’t mean…”
Vhael silenced him with a hard look. “I have nothing personal against either yourself or your cousin. I had my concerns about your status as civilians on this mission from the start. It is clear that you can take care of yourselves. But it is equally clear that the two of you lack the emotional distance and personal discipline to handle this mission.”
“Damn it, those are my people…”
“Indeed. And what would have happened to them, had your cousin’s action resulted in the death of our entire squad? Which would have certainly happened, had it not been for the unexpected aid that saved us. Can you promise that he would not do something similar again, given the opportunity?”
Jaron’s face was uncharacteristically angry, but he had nothing to say; Vhael’s words had too strongly echoed his own private thoughts of late. “I swore to find them.”
“As did I. And I shall keep that promise. When we have found your people, we will escort them, and you, back to Fallcrest.”
“You cannot stop me from seeking them out on my own.”
“No. But I can stop you and your cousin from accompanying us. And if you are considering shadowing our group, I strongly encourage you not to test my resolve in this matter.” Something flashed in his draconic eyes, and for a moment Jaron felt something cold clench in his gut. In that instant, he understood how the dragonborn warlord had gained something of his reputation.
Vhael broke the contact, and moved to a warding position flanking the entry corridor. He did not look back, drawing out a rag from his kit, which he used to start wiping the blood and gore clean of his huge sword. Quiet returned, broken only by the faint moans that rose from the unconscious figure of Beetle, as the survivors of the battle waited in silent company for the others to finish their search of the Bloodreaver lair.
The mood in the Halfmoon Inn was muted, tense, anticipatory. It was an echo of the feeling that suffused the entire Seven-Pillared Hall of late.
Word had spread quickly of what had transpired at the Chamber of Eyes, and many of the Halfmoons’ regular patrons had quietly departed, avoiding the place for now until the potential for trouble that followed the raid sorted itself out. Erra Halfmoon had excoriated her nephew and his cousins for their participation in the attack on the Bloodreavers, although neither she nor anyone else in the Hall particularly mourned their passing. She had gone to visit the Grimmerzhul outpost personally—and alone—in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and when no retaliation materialized, the Hall seemed to let out a collective breath of relief. The Mages remained as distant and aloof as ever, and everyone continued with the more present business of eking out a life in the dangerous environment of the Labyrinth.
But there was still worry in the air at the Halfmoon Inn.
Jaron parted the curtains of their private booth, took a long look out into the common room, then pulled them shut again. Rendil and the other veterans of the raid on the Bloodreavers were nowhere to be seen; Erra was keeping them on a tight leash, and out of public sight for now. He couldn’t blame her, but it would have been nice to see at least a relatively friendly face. He couldn’t help but fidget, and for about the tenth time that morning, mentally berated K’rol Vhael.
But his eyes shifted inevitably to Beetle, and his hostility faded.
His cousin looked… deflated. He’d spent the last two days recovering from his ordeal in the Chamber of Eyes, and while his wounds had healed, the experience had taken something from him. Jaron felt a stab of guilt at the recurring thought that things were easier now that Beetle was more tractable; he’d carefully checked his cousin’s pockets each night, but it seemed that Beetle couldn’t even work up the energy to steal. He barely seemed to notice it when Jaron slid over the platter containing the last of their lunch, chunks of sliced mushrooms, dark bread, and meat of some undetermined origin.
“You need to eat more,” Jaron said. “Get your strength back.” Beetle took a piece of bread, but he merely held it in his hand. Jaron sighed.
He tensed as he sensed someone approaching the booth from outside. But it was only Mara, who stepped in and closed the drapes behind her. Jaron jumped up, and couldn’t help himself despite the woman fighter’s cautioning hand.
“What did you find out?”
“Keep your voice down,” Mara said, glancing back at the curtain. Jaron had already learned that the key power groups in the Hall actively spied upon each other, up to and including the Mages of Saruun. They had some privacy here, but the curtain was a scant reassurance. They could have met up in their room, but Jaron had started to feel trapped there, despite the reassurance of the thick stone walls.
Once Jaron had settled down, and Mara had seated herself on the human-sized bench opposite the booth, the fighter leaned in close. “You were right, the dragonborn met with the Grimmerzhuls this morning.”
“Damn it. I wish we could have gotten in there.”
Mara shook her head. “The place is a fortress, and the duergar are more alert than ever, now. There’s no way of finding out what they talked about, but at least there wasn’t blood spilled. I tried to track down one of the men from Fallcrest, but they are staying someplace outside the Hall, and the dragonborn’s too clever to be easily followed. I heard that the dwarf, his wizard, talked to a few people as well, and made a brief visit to the customhouse to talk to the Ordinator as well.”
“I might have a better chance of scouting out where they’re hiding.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. You don’t know the Hall. And I bet that the Grimmerzhuls would love to get their hands on you.”
“What about you?”
“I can take care of myself.”
Jaron started to protest, and I can’t? but he looked over at Beetle again, and felt that cold fist clench again in his gut.
Mara put a hand on his. “Don’t worry. I’ve got another contact I can talk to. Ulthand, he’s a dwarf that runs the Deepgem Company, he usually keeps his ear to the stone, as it were. I did him a favor when I first arrived here, and he might have heard something. I’m going to meet with him later today, see what I can find out.”
“And if we learn where the captives were sold?”
Mara didn’t let go of his hand, but her jaw tightened. “I’m sorry, Jaron. I’ve got responsibilities here, and the Halfmoons need more more now than ever.” Jaron didn’t need to see the subtle way her eyes shifted toward Beetle to hear the unspoken addition, and maybe the dragonborn was right. “They’re my people,” Jaron said, simple determination overriding everything else in his voice.
The dragonborn warlord, he was becoming convinced, was insane. But that was the least of their problems, as far as he was concerned.
He hadn’t signed up for this. They’d taken out the slavers, true, though they’d come damned close to buying it at the end there. His leg twinged at the thought, and while the limb had healed fully, he still started to limp sometimes when he put his weight on it, remembering the intensity of the pain. He’d saved the head of the bolt that had punched through his thigh, for some reason; it was in his pouch, wrapped in a swath of cloth.
He was tired of this, all the fighting and blood. At first it had been his father’s stern gaze and hard words imagined in the back of his mind that had kept him here, but somehow that had started to fade in the days since they’d first ventured into the Labyrinth. Now he wasn’t quite sure why he was staying around. The scaly might have some grand notion of the noble mission or somesuch, but Carzen wasn’t one for sacrifice in the name of the cause. Of course, getting out of here was its own problem, as all these underground tunnels and chambers had turned his usually decent sense of direction inside out. He supposed that he could hunt down Jaron and get his help finding the exit, but from what the halfling had said back in the Chamber of Eyes, he wasn’t interested in leaving any time soon either.
He glanced over at Gez, just visible in the shadows on the edge of the glow from the second lamp. The other soldier didn’t say much; he seemed resigned to whatever fate awaited them down here. Of course, he hadn’t been stuck full of arrows like Carzen had.
So why was he staying?
He leaned forward over the ledge, and spat, the glob of spittle glimmering in the light for an instant before it vanished into the darkness below. At least Vhael had picked out a defensible hidey-hole before he’d up and disappeared. He would have much preferred to stay in the comfort of the Hall—odd, to now consider that “comfortable”—but at least here nobody was trying to kill him. Well, almost nobody; there had been a skirmish with a weird dog-thing with long tentacles jutting from its shoulders that had seemed to shift and twist strangely as it moved, but they’d driven it off with missiles before it could maneuver up the thin ledge that led up to their hideout. Carzen was glad for that; he’d thrown a javelin that had hit it (he’d thought) straight between the eyes, but somehow the damned thing had shifted slightly at the last minute, and his spear had gone straight past it.
A slight droning noise drew his attention back toward the cave. Gez had heard it too, he saw, and the soldier fidgeted uncomfortably before turning back out toward the cavern below the ledge. Carzen didn’t blame him. Surina gave him the creeps as well. It wasn’t just having another dragonborn in the group—though he didn’t like that either—but she seemed even stranger than Vhael, if such a thing was possible. He still wasn’t quite clear where Vhael had dug her up, only that she’d appeared as they were leaving the Hall again, heading toward this new temporary lair. She was a warlock, and Carzen had to admit that her magic had really been the reason that odd dog-creature had been driven off yesterday. Vhael seemed to know her, and while he hadn’t bothered to explain the reason for her presence here to a mere soldier like Carzen, he could guess. Whatever was coming, they would need more firepower to deal with it.
She hadn’t spoken much to them, or to Vhael and Gral, for that matter, on the rare occasions that they were around. Instead she spent most of her time sleeping, or doing what she was doing now, muttering quiet chants to her god, Erathis. Carzen had met servants of the Civilized God in Fallcrest, but he’d never met a priest who’d had his mark drawn into their skin in a hundred places, or whose eyes shone with an undisguised light of fanaticism whenever they spoke his name.
There was something else, too, a weird feeling he couldn’t quite place. He sometimes felt she was watching him, even when she lay asleep in her bedroll. It made his skin crawl.
A hiss from Gez drew his attention back. He’d let his mind wander again, and he cursed himself quietly as he took up his javelin and crawled forward to where he could get a clear shot at the path leading up the ledge. But this time there was no monster creeping about, only a soft glow that revealed the approaching forms of Vhael and Gral.
“Took you long enough,” Carzen muttered to himself, acknowledging Vhael’s signal with a curt wave of his hand. The pair made their way up the treacherous path. Carzen and Gez were there to meet them, and Surina appeared suddenly as she often did, materializing silently out of the darkness behind them. Carzen felt a tingle at the base of his neck, and forced himself to ignore it. Gral was carrying several bulging satchels, he saw. “More supplies?” he asked.
“We’re moving out,” Vhael said. “Get your things together.”
The dragonborn started to move into the cave, but Carzen stepped in front of him. “I don’t suppose you’d deign to share the plan with us underlings?”
Vhael’s gaze fixed him for a long few seconds. “The prisoners have been taken to a place known as the Well of Demons. They are held by a tribe of demon-worshipping gnolls, who are planning to sacrifice them in a few days. I’ve arranged for a guide to meet us on the far side of the Hall, near the Road of Lanterns. He will show us the way. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some preparations to make. We depart in ten minutes.”
“Praise be to Erathis,” Surina said, her long tongue sliding along her teeth in a way that made Carzen’s skin crawl. She followed Vhael into the chamber behind the ledge like a puppy.
“Don’t worry, lad,” Gral said. “He knows what he’s doing.” The wizard dropped one of his bags at Carzen’s feet, then followed after his master.
“Oh, now I feel better,” Carzen said. He looked at Gez, who stood there like a statue. His gaze traveled to the path down the ledge, lingered there. Finally, with a sign, he turned and snatched up the heavy pack, and headed back to where he’d left his bedroll and other gear.
“I’m sorry, lass, but the stones ha’ been silent o’ late, an’ the chatter one usually hears in the tunnels been tapered off quite a bit as well.”
“Nobody wants to run afoul of the Grimmerzhul, I imagine.”
“Aye, damned dark bastards an’ their foul habits. Part o’ me wishes I were back in me adventurin’ days. Easier when you run into a problem in a dark dungeon corridor, when the biggest question be whether to use the hammer, or th’ axe.”
Mara snorted. “Sometimes the easiest solutions are best, Uthand. Any word on your boar?”
“Nae, but I thank ye for askin’. It’s gnolls, I tell ye… I can feel the smile o’ them bastards from a league off.”
“If they’re attacking the mining teams, might be the mages can do something about it. The flow of trade affects the entire population of the Hall.”
The aged dwarf pursed his lips, but Mara knew that he’d rather cut off a finger but spit on the floor of his own business. His displeasure showed clearly, however. “Them mages have their own agenda. Haven’t seen much of them of late. Somethin’s goin’ on with them, I reckon.”
Mara looked up; that was potentially important news for the entire Hall, but she hadn’t overheard any talk of this at the inn. “Oh? You heard something?”
“Just a feelin’. Ye find any more o’ them bloodstones, bring ‘em by. I’ll give ye a good price… ‘specially if they’re taken off the stinkin’ corpses o’ the likes o’ them Bloodreavers.”
Mara managed a smile. The gems had been her share of the loot taken from the Chamber of Eyes, and had filled her purse quite satisfactorily. Gold tended not to go as fall in the Hall as it did in the towns on the surface, however. “If I ‘find’ any more, you’ll be the first to know. Thanks, Ulthand.”
“Aye, lass. I’ll tell me boys to keep their ears to the stone, an’ I’ll let ye know in a beat if we hear anythin’.”
Mara nodded, and left the dwarven merchant to his trade. Ulthand Deepgem kept well-informed about events in the Seven-Pillared Hall, and if he didn’t have any information about the operations of the Grimmerzhul, then it was unlikely that she’d hear anything from her other sources in the Hall. The dwarf was a former adventurer and a priest of the dwarf god Moradin, and he hated the duergar with a passion.
She headed to the right around the far edge of the Hall, giving the customs station a wide berth. Brugg would likely be on duty now, and she didn’t want to risk a confrontation, even if a Mage was there to keep order. She’d avoiding clashing with the ogre since their return to the Hall, but knew that the big enforcer liked to keep a grudge.
She’d made it barely halfway to the nearer of the two bridges that crossed the stream bisecting the Hall before she realized she was being followed.
Mara had spent enough time in the Hall to know to trust her instincts. She shifted her course slightly, just enough to take her past one of the large stone buildings that served as headquarters for the more significant mercantile concerns active in the Hall. She’d never met the owner of this particular establishment, a tiefling, she thought she remembered, but she silently thanked his appreciation for decoration as she moved amongst the pillars that supported the broadly overhanging roof of the structure. Accelerating once she was out of easy view of anyone behind her, she slipped ahead and ducked into an empty recessed doorway on the back side of the place, a service entrance or somesuch with a narrow door built of iron that looked thick enough to withstand a ram. The weak phosphorescent lighting that illuminated the Hall barely penetrated enough here to see her hand in front of her face, but her other senses had sharpened in the eternal twilight of this place, and she settled down to wait.
She didn’t need to wait long; she heard the quiet patter of footsteps just seconds after she stepped into hiding. Drawing out her shorter sword, she waited until the pursuer was right on top of her before she sprang out of concealment, her sword coming up into a ready position.
Her stalker was caught by complete surprise, and let out a panicked squeak. He tried to run, but Mara quickly moved to block him, her sword stabbing into the wall to cut off his avenue of retreat.
“Well now, Charrak. What’s with the sneaking around after me?”
Charrak was a kobold, a runt even by the standards of his kind, clad in rags that seemed to cling to his scant frame more out of habit than through any quality of the fabric. His beady eyes darted back and forth, looking for a non-existent route of escape, but he mastered himself quickly, shrinking against the wall at his back to make him seem even more non-threatening. He didn’t have any obvious weapons on him, but Mara wasn’t stupid enough to assume that meant he was unarmed.
“No stabby! Me have good knowings for you, Mara human. Know you interest, slave trade in Hall.”
Mara frowned. Charrak was a wretch, a beggar, and a sneak, but the kobold also seemed to have an uncanny ear for the goings-on in the Hall. But if he had heard about her interest in the Grimmerzhul, it was possible that others knew as well, and that could be dangerous.
“So what?” she asked. “Everyone who’s smart keeps ahead of events, if they want to stay alive in the Hall.” She wondered if he knew about the events in the Chamber of Eyes, then inwardly grimaced. Everyone in the Hall knew by now, in all likelihood.
Charrak nodded in agreement. “Yes, yes! But me just get special knowings, and me come to you, know good friend, many helps in past.” He squirmed just a bit, keeping away from the razor-sharp blade that was poised inches from his scaled throat.
Mara grunted. “I don’t have time for this. Spill it, Charrak, and it better not be a waste of my time.” Without shifting the blade from the wall, Mara spun it in her hand, stirring a slight breeze that she knew that the kobold would be able to feel.
“No waste! Good knowings, best knowings! Share free to friend!” Mara knew that “free” wasn’t in the kobold’s generosity, but she let him finish. “Have friend, new to Hall. Goblin, escape prisoner from dark dwarf slavers.”
“Goblins and kobolds aren’t usually boon companions,” Mara said.
“In Hall, little guy need stick together. Friend hide, not want be slave again, ha, ha. He leave soon, but need stake, supply for trip out to surface world. Me say, halflings have food, good stuff for travel. Need little gold, to buy. Friend have nothing, but knowings, they worth too. Maybe other friend talk to goblin, share knowings, that help.”
She noticed he’d dropped the “free” part, but admitted that intelligence from someone with inside knowledge of the Grimmerzhul operation might be useful. But she knew better than to let Charrak know that. “I’ve got to start work in a little while, and you know that Erra doesn’t tolerate tardiness, Charrak.”
“Goblin not far! Hide in old empty place next mine. Roof bad, so people no come.”
“Wonderful,” Mara muttered. With her luck, the place would collapse on her. But she allowed Charrak to lead her to his lair.
The kobold resided in one of the precarious cliffside houses perched upon the edges of the Hall. Built over centuries, some of these hideyholes were little more than crevices in the rock, while others were cavernous multilevel lairs that penetrated dozens of feet into the cliffs, complete with shuttered windows, secure doors, and wooden furnishings smuggled in from the world above.
Charrak’s place was very much one of the former. She could detect the stink even before she reached the narrow, low doorway, covered only by a tatter of curtain.
She hadn’t sheathed her sword, and reminded Charrak of it before she let him go inside. “If you wasted my time…”
“No waste! He inside back. No ever go out, bad idea, he very nervous.” Still chittering, the kobold thrust the curtain aside and went inside.
“Yeah,” Mara said, ducking to follow him.
She was alert, and realized almost instantly that it was a trap. But by then, it was too late.
Jaron’s first thought when he stepped back into the tiny room that he and his cousin shared at the Halfmoon Inn was that the place was starting to feel like a prison cell. That was followed by a sudden surge of frustrated anger, and when he threw his bow down onto his bed, still as disheveled as when he’d left the room that “morning,” it just seemed to fit when it clattered off the headboard and fell into the narrow space between the wall and the bed.
It actually drew Beetle’s attention, and his cousin shifted from where he’d been lying facing the opposite wall to look at him. Beetle may as well have not moved since he had left, either.
“No one’s seen her,” he said. “Erra’s starting to get worried, and she’s got some of her family asking around, but it’s like she vanished into thin air.”
Beetle sat up, and ran dirty fingers through his wild shock of hair.
“Dragon-man? Ice dwarf? Gezzle?”
“No, they’re gone too, all of them. I heard a few people say that they had holed up in the Labyrinth not far from the northeast end of the Hall, and I even took a few quick looks out there, but nothing. Nobody sees anything, nobody says anything, nobody knows anything in this place. Blast it all!”
“Friends in trouble. Need help.”
Jaron sighed. “I agree with you, cos, but I’m not quite sure how we’re supposed to do that. This isn’t our place, and I feel as lost here as I ever have before.”
The anger seemed to drain out of him, and he sat down on his bed facing Beetle. The other halfling seemed more engaged than he had in quite some time, tilting his head and he tried to get a look at his cousin’s eyes.
“Find Mara?”
Jaron sighed again. “I wish I knew how. We don’t even know who took her.”
“Your friend is being held by the Grimmerzhul in the Horned Hold.”
Jaron and Beetle both jumped; neither of them had heard the newcomer, who stood in the open doorway of their room. Jaron had sworn he’d closed and latched the door behind him, but Rendil was standing there, watching them, a slightly odd look on his face that seemed out place against his typical light-hearted expression.
“What? The Horned Hold?” Jaron said, landing on his feet next to the bed. “What… who…” Jaron trailed off, confused, but he felt a strong hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see his cousin standing there at his side. As they eyes met, Beetle’s mouth spread into a wide grin.
When Jaron looked back at Rendil, his indecision was gone.
Carzen quite nearly took a foot of steel in the face as he spun wildly around, trying to recover his balance and bring his shield back up into a semblance of a defense. Blood covered his hand and made his grip on his sword tenuous, but for now it was all he could do not to get skewered; actually venturing an attack was out of the question.
The gnoll whose blood dripped from the blade was expiring noisily at his feet, but his companions were making a good start on getting revenge. Carzen grimaced at the pain where the marauder had scored with his initial thrust, but he couldn’t afford more than that, as he and the big humanoid danced their deadly dance.
A deafening roar came from his left, but he couldn’t spare it a glance. He only hoped that Vhael and Gral were able to handle the gnoll scourge. The initial exchange had seemed to go well for their side, but then, even as Carzen had taken down his first foe, the big gnoll had summoned up some sort of demon, a hulking ape-thing that had torn into Vhael like a tornado.
The battle had lasted for all of maybe thirty seconds thus far, but Carzen’s arms burned, and his heart pounded in his chest like a hammer as he sought to fight off the gnoll spearman. He had no idea who had the upper hand. The two sides had met in an almost comic fashion, moving around a bend in the tunnel to find themselves facing each other across maybe twenty feet of space. Carzen had barely had enough time to register the presence of enemies before Vhael’s order to charge had penetrated his consciousness. It had been a good idea, probably, as he’d caught sight of a number of archers in the enemy ranks. Surina had hit them with some sort of fireball that had roasted the hell out of most of the gnolls before the fighters came close enough to attack. But he didn’t imagine Vhael had wagered on the demon, either.
Well, he had his own hands full, as he finally got his shield up and around to turn another thrust of the spear. His sword followed, and his confidence began to return as he drove the gnoll back a step with a powerful sweep of his blade. He actually grinned as the marauder snarled at him. He parried another thrust, and shifted his feet in preparation of another lunge.
That’s when he tripped over the gnoll he’d taken down earlier .
“Oh, sh—”
He wasn’t hurt, although the impact of the hard floor on his back knocked the air from his lungs. But his shield suddenly felt very small, the steel spearhead of the marauder’s weapon huge, as his foe stepped around his fallen companion and bared his teeth at Carzen.
He was trying to gauge where the thrust would come when the gnoll abruptly exploded.
Flames roared out in a bright flare that blinded him for a second, followed by a wash of heat that singed his face hard enough to hurt even through the pain in his side. But the gnoll was in much worse shape than he was, a fact that he realized as the fire died and the starbursts filling his eyes began to clear.
Never one to refuse a gift, he rose to a crouch and slid half the length of his sword into the gnoll’s gut.
He looked over his shoulder and saw what he expected. He still wasn’t quite sure about dragonborn facial expressions, but he thought that maybe Surina was grinning at him. Wondering if he still had eyebrows, he nodded, “Yeah, thanks.”
“Look out!” the warlock returned, lifting a clawed hand that burst into bright red flame.
“Shit!” Carzen exclaimed, as an arrow sliced past his face, close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. Training replaced thought as he turned and ran, and he was swinging even before he had clearly marked the archer. The gnoll was drawing out another arrow from the quiver at his belt even as Carzen attacked, and he brought his big longbow up in an attempt to deflect the crashing sword. The huntmaster succeeded, at the cost of his weapon, which snapped as Carzen’s sword smashed into it. The gnoll reached for the long dirk stuck through his belt, but before he was hit he was struck by the fiery pulse that shot past Carzen to strike him solidly in the left shoulder. The gnoll fell back, screaming in pain, and gave up, turning to flee.
Which just made it easier, as far as Carzen was concerned.
Once he’d cut down the injured gnoll, he returned to the others. The battle was over. Vhael stood over the mangled body of the ape-demon, and the gnoll leader who had summoned it was in little better shape a short distance away, one clawed hand jutting up, frozen in a rime of ice crystals. Surina and Gezzelhaupt seemed okay, although the warlock had taken an arrow to the arm that she hadn’t bothered to pluck out. Crazy bitch probably doesn’t even feel pain, Carzen thought to himself.
“Everything all right?” he asked. “Got the last one, tried to flee.”
Vhael scanned the area with experienced eyes. “Where’s Terrlen?”
Oh, crap, the guide. Carzen saw no sign of the man, but Gez said, “I think he took off into a side tunnel once the fight started.”
“All right, we’d better find him,” Vhael said. “Stay together, and stay alert. It’s likely that anything lairing nearby would have heard the battle.”
It didn’t take them long to find the tunnel where the guide must have fled; this part of the Labyrinth was not as criss-crossed with side passages and crevices as it was in the neighborhood of the Seven-Pillared Hall. The tunnel they’d taken from the Hall had led them deeper under the earth, and more of the passages they passed showed little sign of working or indicators that intelligent creatures used them regularly.
This passage was like that, a narrow, twisting corridor that looked as though it might have originally served as the conduit for an underground stream. Fortunately there were no forks or branches, allowing them to press on without danger of losing their way.
Vhael smelled it first. “Blood,” the dragonborn said. They slowed, alert for an ambush, and found the body a few moments later.
There was enough of it left for them to immediately identify it as a gnoll huntmaster. The remants of the creature’s bow were scattered about, and his dagger was nearby, the blade broken off just above the hilt.
“Grim,” Gral said, and none of the others could disagree.
The gnoll had not died well. Deep gashes covered his throat, arms, and face. They crossed one eye, where blood trailed from the ruined socket. The gnoll’s jaw had been broken, the lower half jutting from his face at an impossible angle.
“Lot of nasty things down here,” Surina said.
“Over here!” Gez called, drawing their attention ahead, where the passage opened onto a small chamber. The others joined him, giving the dead gnoll a wide berth, Vhael stepping into the lead again as they entered the place.
The chamber was a bubble in the rock, a natural formation with a floor that sloped down to a pool that took up the back third or so of the space. As Gez lifted his miner’s lamp, the spread of light revealed Terrlen Darkseeker, their guide, lying on the edge of the pool.
“Careful,” Vhael said, as Carzen and Gez started forward. But as they edged closer, it was clear that the chamber was empty save for Terrlen. Their guide was a human just on the near side of middle age, with a face lined with the experience of a difficult life, and pale skin from years spent underground. He shifted as the others approached, and looked up at them with haunted eyes. He looked as though he’d been knocked around some, his shirt torn in several places, but he bore no obvious wounds.
“What happened?” Carzen asked him.
“I… I ran,” he said, his voice unsteady. His clothes were wet; apparently he’d fallen into the pool at some point. “The gnoll… chased…”
“Yeah, we found him outside,” Gral said. He glanced at Terrlen’s belt, where his dagger remained in its sheath. “What killed him?”
“I… I don’t know. I’m not sure. I was running, and this…this thing, it came out of nowhere… I heard the gnoll… it… I fell… I don’t know…”
“He’s in shock,” Carzen said. Now that the battle was over, he was starting to feel the sting of his own wounds. “If those gnolls were guards, there’s going to be more of them coming. Might be a good idea to get out of here before they arrive.”
Vhael glanced at Gral. “Burned a lot of my spells back there,” the dwarf said. He didn’t say anything about the gashes that trickled blood down Vhael’s arms, and Carzen had learned enough not to bring them up either. Apparently the fight with the demon hadn’t all gone the warlord’s way.
“We’ll fall back to that chamber we passed a half-hour back,” the dragonborn said. “Can you walk?”
For some reason, the dragonborn’s tone made Carzen feel more solicitous to the stunned guide, and he helped Terrlen to his feet. The man flinched when Carzen touched him, but he seemed able to stand. “He’ll be all right,” Carzen said.
“All right. Take what you need from the bodies, and wreck anything you don’t. We move out in two minutes. And fill the extra water bottles, while we’re here.”
He turned and left the room, with Surina on his heels. Leaving Carzen with the others. As Gral and Gez filled their waterskins from the pool, Carzen looked at the man standing next to him. Terrlen hadn’t stopped shaking, and just watching him sent a shiver down Carzen’s own spine.
“Wonderful,” Carzen said to himself, reaching for his own waterskin.
LB you have me so paranoid my closing thoughts on the post was: I bet Terrlen's a demon.
which was followed by, I wonder if they should drink the water?
Heh, if you think Carzen's got troubles, keep reading...
* * * * *
Chapter 33
Like Carzen, Jaron was starting to have second thoughts about his current venture.
He looked down into a vast open blackness, a chasm that promised only a long and terrified plummet should he enter it. For the tenth time he cursed himself for letting his attention wander, then turned his attention back to the stone to which he clung.
His position was precarious at best. The halfling clung to the underside of a stone bridge that swept across the chasm in a graceful arc. The stones that formed the bridge were ancient, and covered with tiny cracks and crevices that made adequate handholds, especially for canny halfling fingers. Jaron had been climbing since he was a boy, and in different circumstances, this would have been an easy crossing, maybe even fun.
Say under a bright sky on a clear day, above a slow-moving river, instead of over a dark chasm far under the earth, next to a citadel filled with evil dwarves all too eager to do nasty things to him if he was discovered.
Berating himself for his distraction, the halfling returned to his crossing. At least he could see, although the goggles that Rendil had provided for him and Beetle made it difficult to make out small details. That was fine on a climb like this, when he had to rely on touch more than vision. His feet were bare, his boots carefully stashed in his pack along with only the most essential of his gear. Everything else had been left behind on the far side of the chasm.
He reached another relatively safe spot, where one of the supporting struts of the bridge provided a junction where he could hold on with just his feet. Hanging almost upside-down, he paused to drive a piton into a gap where two of the massive stones that formed the bridge were joined. Moving slowly, careful not to threaten his grip, he reached down to the harness he wore over his clothes, and drew out first a piton, then the tiny padded hammer. The pad on the end of the hammer muted the sound, and the nearly constant wind through the chasm likely absorbed the rest within a few paces, but even so Jaron thought it sounded unnaturally loud, certain to draw attention from above.
But no shouts rose from atop the bridge or from the adjacent citadel, no crossbow bolts shot out of the darkness to put an end to his infiltration. He wrapped the rope trailing behind him around the hooked end of the piton, and started to shift forward toward the next part of the climb. He judged he was about halfway across, but still couldn’t see the far side of the chasm, and the bridge blocked his view of the odd witch-lights that shone high along the walls of the place. The Horned Hold looked malevolent, and when he and Beetle had first arrived, sneaking along the approaches, he’d almost frozen in fear. The citadel extended across both faces of the chasm, its thick towers joined by two bridges.
If what Rendil had told them was true, the slaves were held within the far one, his current destination.
He only got a moment’s warning, a slight tug on the rope. He desperately shot back to the junction, and set his feet before it grew taut. Fortunately the piton held, although his heart froze in his chest as he thought of Beetle tumbling away into the chasm.
But as he looked down, he saw his cousin swinging on the end of the rope, streaking across the chasm on the end of the line that ended first at the piton, and then around Jaron’s waist. The rope whipsawed as its burden swung, and for a moment Jaron feared it would slip free. But he’d wrapped it well, and the piton held in place as Beetle reached the bottom of his swing and started up. Jaron wasn’t sure, but he thought his cousin’s mouth was open in a silent shout of joy and wonder.
He shook his head. Of course it was.
Beetle’s rising arc ended at the far wall of the chasm, almost as he came to a stop in his ascent. For a moment Jaron thought he would fall back—there was only so much abuse the piton could take—but then Beetle got a grip on the rocks. With the magical vision of the goggles the rock face looked like a vague gray blur, with only his cousin distinct. He watched as Beetle found a jutting rock spur and looped the rope around it several times, waving to Jaron once he was done.
Jaron shook his head. Well, at least this was faster. After checking the piton again, and securing a second just in case, he shifted to the rope, locking his legs around it and then pulling himself to where Beetle waited. It took about five minutes, by which time he’d swallowed his anger; it wouldn’t have done any good with his cousin anyway. Beetle was waiting for him, sitting atop the rock spur with his back to the cliff face. He was smiling, but even he knew better than to say anything, this close to the citadel above.
Jaron glanced back at the rope. It was a risk, but he judged that it would have been even worse to drop it, given the possibility of their needing to make a hasty retreat back. He glanced up and saw what looked like a battlement maybe twenty feet above. The cliffs here were rugged, an easy climb. Shrugging out of his harness, careful not to let the remaining pitons jingle off the rock face, he stashed the gear in a crack next to the spur that anchored the rope, taking only a short spare coil of rope with him. With a gesture to Beetle to wait, he started crawling up.
He gained the battlement without incident, and carefully peered over. Once again Rendil had been right; the dwarves did not keep a watch here. There was a heavy iron-plated door to his left with a covered slit in the center. To his right he could just make out a second, recessed door in a deep alcove on the far side of the battlement.
After another quick look around, he unrolled his rope and looped it quickly over one of the squat merlons that fronted the battlement, dropping the remaining length down for his cousin. Beetle was beside him in a flash, and Jaron drew up the rope, coiling it into a tight wad before stashing it in the deeper darkness between the notches atop the battlement wall.
He turned to see Beetle almost at the iron-plated door to the left. He hissed a warning, but Beetle either didn’t hear, or pretended that he hadn’t. Jaron ran over to him, catching his hand even as it reached out for the door’s handle.
Neither of them spoke, for as they stood there, they heard a soft sound, muted through the door, but recognizable as coarse laughter. Words followed, indecipherable, but it was easy enough to guess at the identity of their owners.
Jaron pulled Beetle away, and headed toward the other door. A quick scan of the stone floor around it suggested that this route was rarely traveled by the inhabitants of the Horned Hold. The door was locked, but Beetle was able to manage that in just a few moments. The click as the mechanism tripped seemed like the sound of a bell being struck to Jaron’s sensitive ears. Beetle pulled the door open a crack, looked inside, and then slipped through.
Jaron had no choice but to follow.
The chamber beyond was utterly dark, and without their magical goggles the halflings would have been at a loss. With those aids, they could see that the chamber was both of considerable size and in an advanced state of decay. The place looked as though it had once been a shrine or chapel of some sort, although it was difficult to tell to which gods it had been sacred. A massive statue missing one arm and a considerable portion of its head rose up above them; enough was left to suggest it had depicted some sort of horned creature. Jaron let the door slide shut behind him.
Beetle yanked on Jaron’s arm so suddenly that he nearly fell. He barely kept his feet under him as he was pulled into a crack in a nearby pile of rubble. He opened his mouth to say something, but caught sight of Beetle’s face, pressed close against his, and snapped it shut.
A moment later, he sensed the creature. Even with the goggles, it was little more than a shadow as it passed by. A strong stink filled Jaron’s nostrils, a stench of decay tinged with something fouler, which made his skin crawl. He felt a cold sensation trickled down his spine. The thing—whatever it was—lingered for a moment, and Jaron’s hand crawled to the hilt of his sword. But then it moved on, probing at the door for a moment before it crept away, back into whatever part of the chamber had spawned it.
Jaron waited a full minute more before he stuck his head out of the crevice. There was no sign of the creature, but he knew it was here, somewhere in the room with them. His gaze lingered on the door, on the way out. Better by far not to push their luck, to flee now. But instead he found himself making his way around the back of the room, toward the door he’d spotted on the far side of the room. He willed himself to be small, hidden, his booted feet stepping between piles of loose stone as though each one was a deadly scorpion poised to sting at the slightest touch. Behind him, Beetle echoed his movements precisely; his cousin was even better than him at remaining unseen. Jaron scanned the rest of the room as he moved forward, but saw nothing, not even the slightest hint of movement in the piles of rubble that cluttered the far end of the chamber. But there was something there; he could feel it, in the part of the mind where nightmares found purchase.
He was still looking, waiting, as they reached the door. This one was an even more formidable barrier than the first; solid iron, set into hinges as thick and heavy as a ogre’s elbow. There was rust evident on those hinges, suggesting that this door would not be easily defeated. But Beetle went to work on the lock, a bent piece of metal sticking out of his mouth as he adjusted two others with steady fingers. The lock was high enough that he had to stand on his toes to reach it, but that didn’t stop the halfling, and it only took a few seconds longer than it had outside for Jaron to hear that familiar click.
Unfortunately, something else had heard it as well. Jaron saw the hint of movement in the shadows on the far side of the room. Then the creature stepped into view, a ragged, tainted echo of a human being that was now no longer anything close.
And this time, it wasn’t alone.
“Quick!” Jaron hissed, as Beetle tried to pull the door open. The corroded door resisted, and squeaked as Jaron added his effort, yanking desperately on the handle. Behind him, five creatures of nightmare charged forward, claws extended, eager to rend warm flesh.
Mara leaned her head back against the cold stone behind her, and tried not to give way to despair.
Her head hurt still, and her vision out of her left eye was still a little spotty after the blow she’d taken from one of the duergar warriors that served as their jailors. That escape attempt, her second, had probably been ill-advised, but with each passing moment spent here she felt increasingly desperate.
A high-pitched cackle drew her attention up to the lip of the pit, where one of the devils was perched. The thing would have been small for a human, but the devil’s harsh features and the nasty spines that jutted out from all over its body gave it a fearsome appearance. She shifted, raising her manacled hands in front of her in what might have been a defiant gesture, had the chains holding her been long enough to let her stir more than two feet from the wall. The devil laughed at her and moved on.
“It won’t be long now,” the goblin whispered.
“So you’ve said,” Mara said, her own voice low to match that of her fellow captive. Gru was one of the prisoners that had been here in the pit when she’d arrived. The goblin seemed healthy enough, though he had several old scars that crossed the left side of his face. She was more concerned with Tandrin, who’d been less and less responsive in the day and a half since she’d arrived here. The halfling now lay against the wall, his manacles forcing him to stretch his arms up above his head even at rest. She hissed his name, quietly, but the halfling didn’t stir.
There were other slaves in the pits, maybe a dozen in all, but she hadn’t really gotten a good look at any of them since she’d been dragged in here by her captors. Tandrin had apparently come from Jaron’s village, along with about a dozen other halflings, but he hadn’t known more than Mara about the other captives. When he’d been awake and communicative, he had told her that their captors had taken off one of their number a few days back, the priest from their village, a woman named Yarine. Mara seemed to remember Jaron saying something about her, before. From what she knew of the slave trade in the Labyrinth, she and the other prisoners that were taken out of this chamber by the duergar could be almost anywhere by now, and the chances of tracking them down were almost nil. She hoped for her friend’s sake that he and his cousin had left the Labyrinth, and not looked back.
Good advice, if too late for her to take it.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Gru persisted. The goblin seemed more annoyed than anything else at having been enslaved. “I’ll show these dwarf bastards, once I get out of here. You’ll see, as soon as I’m sold, I’ll be free faster than you can spit.”
Mara mumbled something non-committal and craned her neck as she head the bolts on the door to the slave quarters being thrown back. The pits were deep enough so that she couldn’t get a clear view of that part of the room, but she could hear the heavy tread of her captors, the gravelly sound of their voices as they spoke. The duergar barely came up to her shoulder, but they were tough, a fact she knew all too well.
And then there was Murkelmor, who made her shudder even to think of him.
She couldn’t hear what was being said, but after about a minute, she heard footsteps approaching. One of the duergar guards was shouting orders, and she heard the cackle of one of the spined devils, followed by the ugly noise of a whip being cracked.
“Looks like you were right,” Mara said to Gru.
“Don’t meet their eyes!” the goblin warned, cowering against the wall. But Mara wasn’t one to cower, and so when the duergar appeared at the lip of the pit, Mara’s stare was raised to face his. She didn’t falter, even when she saw that it was Framarth. The theurge let out a cruel laugh at her defiant look.
“What are you going to do with us?” she asked him. She already knew how dangerous Framarth was, but the duergar seemed to be in a fine humor. He gestured, and another duergar appeared at his side, holding several sets of manacles linked by a long length of black chain.
“You and these others have become a liability,” the duergar theurge said. “Fortunately, we have arranged for a buyer who will happily… remove… the problem for us. We don’t normally deal with their kind, but for you, we will make an exception. Take the woman and the halfling,” he said to the guard. Mara tensed, but she felt the cold chill that warned her even before she looked up to see the spined devil perched on the lip of the pit directly above, looking down at her.
“You can resist, but you may prefer to save your strength,” Framarth said to her. “You may have need of it, when the troglodytes get their hands on you.”
If Mara had felt cold before, she now felt an iciness pierce her gut. As the dwarf loomed over her, his shackles clinking in his hands, she could hear the theurge’s laughter, closing around her like the crumbling walls of a grave.
“PULL!” Jaron yelled, desperation tearing at his muscles as he put his words into action, yanking on the handle of the iron door. Opposite him, Beetle had worked a dagger into the jam, and was using it as a lever to try and pry the heavy portal open.
Jaron heard the hiss of the wights behind him as they rushed forward; only seconds separated them.
The door creaked open a mocking inch. Beetle dropped his knife and thrust his grubby fingers into the crack, grunting as he pulled. With a last groan the door suddenly gave, sliding open a full foot. Beetle shot through, grabbing Jaron and pulling him after him. The pair tumbled forward into a narrow passageway beyond, thick with dust and cobwebs.
Behind them, the door shuddered as the first wight slammed into it. The heavy iron door jerked halfway shut from the impact. Even as the halflings fumbled back up to their feet, a pale gray arm appeared in the crack, probing hungrily.
Drawing another knife out from somewhere, Beetle stabbed it into the wight's elbow. The razor-sharp blade penetrated deep into the creature’s wiry flesh, and it let out a strangled hiss. The arm drew back, and in that scant moment of reprieve Jaron took the handle on this side of the door and yanked it shut. He shot the bolt even as the wights started pounding on the door, their nails creating a terrible sound as they scratched at the metal.
“They won’t get through that easily,” Jaron said, his heart pounding in his chest. “Are you all right?”
Beetle lifted a thumb, and grinned.
Shaking his head, Jaron turned to explore this new area.
The corridor led straight ahead, and was evidently long-undisturbed. Ancient carvings decorated the walls, depicting horned humanoid creatures engaging in activities it was impossible to clearly discern. Cobwebs hung over everything, and the two halflings could hear vermin skittering away from them as they made their way forward.
“Creepy,” Beetle said, pausing to step on a bug. The crackling noise as its shell broke made Jaron’s skin crawl. “Don’t do that,” he whispered. “There might be someone up ahead who could hear.” The warning seemed unnecessary; they’d made a lot more noise getting through the iron door. But Beetle complied, or at least didn’t kill any more bugs as they pressed further ahead. The sound of the wights at the door died away behind them; either the creatures had given up, or they were waiting for their prey to return.
Either way, the two of them had few options left.
They passed several side tunnels that ended quickly in bare stone walls. The place had the air of an ancient crypt, but if there were remains interred here, they were well sealed away from prying eyes.
They entered another hall that crossed the passageway. A large statue of a minotaur stood here, looming over them like some terrible guardian, a broad-bladed axe held ready in its massive fists. A trick of its construction seemed to make its eyes follow the cousins as they approached. Jaron was wary of a trap, but Beetle did not appear to be intimidated by the hulking thing. Or at least, if he was, he concealed it well, springing up onto the statue’s leg, then jumping off to catch the stone handle of its weapon, flipping forward into a somersault that reached its apex some eight feet off the floor. Jaron rushed toward him in alarm, but Beetle landed lightly on his feet, turning with a broad grin on his face.
Jaron opened his mouth, but closed it, the words left unsaid. What was the use?
“Light,” Beetle said, drawing Jaron’s attention down the side-hall in the direction he’d jumped. The two halflings rushed forward, and quickly came to another door. This one looked as ancient as their surroundings here, slabs of old wood bound in iron that was crusted with rust and decay. The light came from a thin crack under the door. Beetle didn’t wait, dropping to the floor to put his eye on the same level as the crack. Reluctantly, after looking at the dirt that covered the floor, Jaron copied him.
The two watched in silence together for a long minute. Then Jaron finally drew back, and sat up against the wall next to the door. Beetle pulled up a moment later, a black streak of grime marking the entire left side of his face. Jaron drew out a cloth and rubbed at what he imagined was a similar mess on his. He looked at his cousin, and shook his head.
“Now what are we supposed to do?” he asked quietly, his expression that of someone in way over his head.
Beetle pointed to the lock in the door. “Open?”
“And then what? You saw what I saw, cousin.” He lowered the dirty rag and lowered his face into his hands. “We’re trapped.”
LB,
I know it has been along time since I ventured back onto these boards/SH - however, I just want to say thanks. It is great to come back to ENWorld and see a new SH from you.
Hey, glad you're still following along, djordje! Not many readers left from the "good old days" of Travels.
* * * * *
Chapter 36
The campsite was good, with a nearby source of water, relatively close proximity to the main tunnel, and best of all, defensible. A crevice just too wide to jump bisected the small chamber, and a natural battlement of weathered stone formed a rampart in front of a hollow space maybe six paces across on the near side of the gap. Carzen looked around and saw signs of others that had used the place before; black streaks along the walls where lamps and torches had left marks, small bones and other detritus scattered in corners, and the faint but familiar stinks left behind whenever travelers lingered at a place for any length of time.
His body whispered the need for sleep, but he knew that Vhael wouldn’t let them linger too long here. The warlord was closeted with his war council over near the gap in the wall that formed the exit. Gral and Surina attended to his every word; Carzen didn’t bother trying to listen in.
He walked over to where Terrlen was sitting. The guide was wrapped in a cloak that seemed to cover him like a shroud, his weathered features just visible in the faint light of the miner’s lamp that illuminated their shelter. He glanced up at Carzen’s approach.
“Tough gig, eh?”
The man shrugged. “I’ve seen worse,” he ventured, when Carzen didn’t shift his gaze.
“So how far were we? To this Well of Demons, that is.”
“Not far. I’ve never actually been inside,” Terrlen admitted. “But it’s a well-known site in the Labyrinth.”
“Oh? Any idea on what we’ll face there? Other than demons, of course.”
Terrlen shook his head, but said nothing. Carzen tried a different tack.
“What do you think of our fearless leader?” he asked.
“He seems to know his business.”
“Oh, sure. He’s led us out of a few scrapes, I suppose. Nasty business with those gnolls, eh?”
The man flinched and shot up so quickly that Carzen almost ran into him. “Excuse me. I need to… I need to take a piss.” He hurried over to the far edge of the camp, where a gap in the rampart offered access to the chasm.
“Right,” Carzen said, to his back. He glanced over and saw that Vhael’s little conference had ended; the dragonborn was standing alone by the exit, sipping something from a small cup that looked ridiculously fragile in his clawed hand.
“Hey, general! That isn’t coffee, is it? Been holding out on us?”
Vhael’s expression was inscrutable but Carzen was starting to be able to read the dragonborn’s looks. Not that there are that many, he thought, forcing his smile against the warlord’s cold stare, just to annoy him.
“It is a mild stimulant derived from the bark of the wilanthas tree,” Vhael said. “I believe it is somewhat toxic for humans, causing chills, muscle spasms, and riotous diarrhea. Would you like me to brew you a cup?”
Carzen smacked his lips. “Sounds delicious, but I think I’ll stick with my more familiar poisons.” Gods, he would have murdered someone for a flask of brandy. Leaning in closer, he said, “I think we might have a problem with Terrlen.”
“Oh?”
“There’s… something wrong with him. I can’t quite place it, but I get a feeling around him…”
“Indeed. Gral believes that he may be suffering from a lycanthropic curse.”
“A what?”
“Lycanthropy. A magical disease that causes the victim to experience involuntary transformations into a were-creature. I believe that werewolves are the most common example with which you might be familiar, but there are literally dozens of varieties.”
“Were—” Carzen began, but he cut himself off when he realized that his voice was too loud. Clenching his jaw, he began again. “And you just let him stay with us?”
Vhael drained the last of his beverage. “Do you know how to get to the Well of Demons?”
Carzen did not back down. “This is… reckless. I can’t believe it, you ditched the halflings for less than this, and we could have actually used their help. For this kind of thing…”
Vhael’s stare was like iron. “I did not ask for your counsel, lieutenant. I have made provision for Darkseeker, if it comes to that. Once he has helped us reach the Well, we can be done with him. Until then, you will obey orders and do your job, do you understand?”
“Oh, I understand, general,” Carzen hissed. Turning away, he strode over to where he’d left his pack. But he couldn’t help looking over at the chasm, where Terrlen stood, a vague outline at the edge of the lamplight.
Hey! I'm still reading. I just don't find 4e interesting enough to comment. Characters are well rounded and developed as usual, it just lacks certain flair. Might it reflect your own uninvolment with the system?
Well, I've stated in the past that 4e, while introducing some interesting concepts like the powers system, isn't really drawing me in the way that 3rd edition did. I can't really tighten it down to something specific, maybe it's the lack of "flair" that Neurotic described. Or maybe I spent too long with 3.0/3.5 and just don't want to invest the time in a new system. I haven't bought anything besides the core books and the first two modules and have no intention of doing so.
My next story won't be based on 4th edition, although I'm still enjoying writing this one, and I don't regret taking the time to learn the new ruleset.
* * * * *
Chapter 37
The door opened with a creak that sounded like the end of the world, filling the chamber with the sound. It instantly drew the attention of the duergar guards, who had been dicing at their table along the far wall of the chamber, and of the two spined devils, who had been arguing in their own foul tongue from their perch high among the rafters of the chamber.
The door swung open ponderously, continuing the scream of tortured metal from its hinges. Beyond, only a dark tunnel was visible, gaping malevolently.
The duergar guards exchanged a look, and then one of them hurried to the door on their side of the room. The other one drew out his weapon, a big warhammer with a striking head fashioned out of a slab of black metal. The dwarf gestured to the devils, who dropped free of their perch and glided toward the dark opening. One of them flicked its tail, dislodging a number of spines that flew into the gap.
“Hold yer blasted darts!” the duergar said. “If’n there be someone in there, take ‘im alive!”
The devils hissed something less than flattering at him in Infernal, but they flittered aside as Framarth arrived, the other guard at his heels. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked the other guard.
“Don’t know, yer lordship,” the dwarf replied. “Door just opened. Nobody’s s’posed to be in there. Was going to send the devils in to have a look.”
The theurge’s eyes narrowed as he regarded the dark opening. Abruptly he lifted a hand, and conjured a spell.
An eruption of green flickers materialized in the tunnel beyond the door, followed by tendrils of olive vapor that trickled out into the great chamber. The fumes hung cloyingly in the air, twisting slightly as some invisible gust of wind shaped them.
And then the smoke cloud parted, as a small horde of wights burst into the room, screeching as they eagerly sought out warm flesh.
Jaron was greeted to a scene of chaos as he tentatively peeked out from behind the heavy door. So far their plan had worked, with Beetle opening this door and he the one leading to the room holding the wights. The two of them had hidden behind the minotaur statue while the situation progressed naturally. He’d agonized over which door to give to Beetle, knowing that his cousin was likely to get into trouble no matter which one he chose, but for once Beetle had done exactly as he’d said.
A violent battle raged in the chamber directly in front of him. There were three duergar, currently being swarmed by the five wights in a violent close-quarters melee. Thus far the defenders were holding their own, but the wights seemed to shake off the pounding from the dwarves’ hammers, snarling before leaping back in to try to grab hold of their living foes with their claws. A bright flash of fire blinded Jaron for a moment, and he realized that one of the dwarves was a spellcaster. The wight the mage had hit staggered back, trailing wisps of black smoke from his charred chest, but the monster came in again, forcing the dwarf back onto the defensive.
A form out of nightmare streaked down from above, flying low over one of the wights. The flying thing was not much larger than the dwarfs, but as it shot past Jaron could see a forest of dark spines jutting from the wight’s back, and it began to flail wildly as tendrils of smoke rose from the nasty wounds.
All in all, chaos. And they had to go out in that…
For a moment, Jaron’s resolve faltered, then Beetle shot past him, and started running around the room to the right, toward one of the open pits they’d spotted earlier, when looking under the crack in the door. They’d recognized this place as the slave pits that Rendil had described to them, and they knew that if the Grimmerzhul still held Mara, they’d likely find her here. That had given birth to Jaron’s desperate plan, to set the wights against the defenders, and hopefully find their friend in the confusion.
But as he ran after Beetle, that part of his brain still capable of reason started whispering to him all the ways that the plan could go wrong. Another burst of fire that sounded like it was right on top of him added urgency to his movement. But as he approached the pit, he felt a new sensation of dread overcome even that surging terror.
The pit was empty.
Or more precisely, empty of prisoners; he could see the shackles bolted to the walls, the foul slicks of waste, the tattered scraps of clothing that spoke of slaves now gone.
Beetle was already running ahead, around the perimeter of the pit toward the next one. Jaron followed, but as he glanced over across the room, he saw another pair of duergar guards appear through the far door, these two clad in heavy mail, and visored helms that shielded their features but which allowed the wiry forest of their beards to protrude out beneath. One of the wights was down, its thrashings abruptly ended as a duergar warrior brought his hammer down upon its skull with hard finality. The dwarves had been driven back, but now, as they saw the reinforcements coming, they surged ahead once more, the theurge summoning fire and brimstone to blast the undead before him.
They couldn’t stay here much longer without being detected, Jaron saw. As he drew close enough to the second pit to see that it too was empty, he tried to signal to Beetle, to warn him. But the other halfling had already surged on ahead, and as Jaron watched he leapt down into the last pit, vanishing from view.
Jaron swallowed his fear and followed. A fearsome warcry swept through the room, and he turned to see with amazement one of the duergar newcomers smite one of the wights with his hammer. The duergar, through some magical faculty, had expanded to a size that rivaled that of an ogre. His armor and weapons had likewise grown in size, and Jaron felt an involuntary twinge of sympathy for the wight as its broken body was hurled into one of the empty slave pits.
They didn’t have much time…
An instant later, he realized they had none, as an angry cry drew his attention back over his shoulder. He looked up to see one of the spined devils diving toward him, a hissing sound issuing from it as dozens of deadly needles hurtled out from its body toward the halfling.
Posting this late due to the site being down for a few days.
* * * * *
Chapter 38
Jaron hurled himself forward, rolling into a crouch as he heard the ragged pings of the devil’s spines hitting the stone floor behind him. His momentum almost carried him over the edge of the open pit, and he had to roll his arms for a moment to recover his balance. Behind him, he could hear the devil shriek as it swooped around for another pass.
His gaze passed over Beetle twice before he recognized his cousin, pressed up against the wall in the deep shadows that filled the open pit. “We have to get out of here, now!” he hissed.
Beetle glanced up at him, but returned his attention to whatever he was doing down there in the slave pit. Jaron looked up to see that the devil had completed its circle and was coming back around toward him. The duergar had dropped another of the wights, its struggles fading even as the theurge continued to blast it with tendrils of bright fire. One of the guards had been knocked onto his back, but even as Jaron turned his head one of the enlarged shock troopers bashed the wight tearing at him, knocking the undead monster off before it could get a good hold with its claws. The last wight had taken a pounding from the other trooper and the last guard, but it continued to attack even as it absorbed hammer blows that would have left a living creature lying in a broken heap on the floor.
The devil dove, and before it could launch another barrage of spines, Jaron swallowed and leapt into the pit.
He landed lightly on his feet, coming up in a roll that absorbed the shock of impact. The stink was even worse down here, but like in the other pits, the shackles set into the walls dangled empty. Or nearly empty, he realized, as Beetle came away from the wall and moved toward him. His cousin was carrying someone, a prisoner.
With a start, Jaron realized that the captive was a goblin. The wretched thing was in poor shape, but he was conscious, and found his footing as Beetle dragged him toward the narrow ramp that led up out of the pit. Jaron got there first, and led the way up.
He was almost at the lip when the devil dropped down from above to block his path.
“Going somewhere?” it hissed at him.
Jaron started in surprise, but something flashed past his head and caught the devil on the side of its face, drawing another furious shriek and staggering the thing. Jaron didn’t hesitate and rushed past before it could recover, Beetle and the goblin close behind. A pain exploded in his arm, and he looked down to see a pair of five-inch spines jutting from his sleeve. He didn’t stop to pull them out, only glanced back to see that Beetle was still with him as he ran toward the door.
The only problem was that they weren’t the only ones.
The wights were down, and the shrieking of the devils had drawn the attention of the dwarves, who’d belatedly spotted the halflings trying to escape with their last remaining prisoner. Jaron spotted more duergar coming into the room through the far door, but his more immediate concern was the two ogre-sized shock troopers that started lumbering toward him, their heavy boots causing the ground to shake with their coming. Behind them, the wounded theurge was shouting orders, punctuated by a bolt of flames that thankfully flew wild, striking the wall a good five paces above the diminutive raiders. Beetle shouted something taunting that thankfully Jaron could not make out; his full attention was on the door ahead, ten paces, eight, five…
The second devil dropped out of the air ahead of him like a rock, intent on blocking their escape. But through some instinct Jaron jerked aside from the sweeping claws, unbalancing the devil as it landed with a hard thrust of his shoulder. He felt pain again as the blow drove several spines through the leather of his tunic, but then the reassuring bulk of the doorway was there, and he was through. He glanced back to see Beetle stomp on the devil’s face with both booted fee, knocking it over onto its back, laughing as he sprang through the opening a step behind the panicked goblin. Beetle kicked the door shut behind him a scant instant before it shook with the force of a heavy impact from outside. The door held; they’d rigged the lock earlier so that it would engage when the door was closed again. But as the door rang again, this time from the blow of a duergar hammer, Jaron knew that it wouldn’t stop their pursuers for more than a few seconds.
“Hoot!” Beetle exclaimed, leaning forward with his hands on his knees as he caught his breath. The goblin sagged against a pile of crumbling stone, his body trembling with fear. But Jaron wouldn’t let them linger. “Come on!” he said, drawing Beetle and the goblin after him as he led them back down the passage they had navigated earlier, back to the room where they’d narrowly escaped the wights. The dusty chamber was as they had left it, save for fresh tracks left by the undead where they’d gathered around the iron door. Jaron hoped that there weren’t any more of those foul things lurking around the chamber, but he didn’t let that fear slow his steps as he ran toward the other side of the room and the door that led back out onto the battlements. Behind him the pounding grew louder, and he could hear the ugly sound of wood cracking.
The door leading outside resisted his tug, but it gave way as Beetle added his strength to Jaron’s. Creaking open, it revealed the empty balcony bounded by the jagged stone teeth of the battlement. Jaron let out a relieved breath—he’d half expected to find a dozen dwarves waiting for them here.
As if summoned by the thought, the door on the far end of the battlement burst open, and three armored duergar warriors emerged.
“Beetle, no!” he said, as his cousin turned toward them. The duergar spotted the fugitives and lifted their weapons, confident that their foe had no way out. Jaron saw another pair of dwarves emerge from the citadel onto the bridge, these two carrying massive bolt-throwers that were cocked and loaded.
Jaron found that he was running, not toward the duergar and certain death, or back toward the slave pits and an almost equally certain fate. He was running straight ahead, toward the low wall of stone teeth that separated them from a vast chasm, and a darkness that seemed to go on almost forever…
Beetle was running beside him, all but carrying the goblin between them. The dwarves were almost on top of them, and Jaron saw that there would be no time to stop, no time to think about this as the pair on the bridge lifted their crossbows, took aim…
Oh, gods, I’m not going to do this, he thought, even as he shouted, “Grab onto me!” and the three of them leapt forward, onto the top of the battlement, then over. Jaron felt something pluck at his cap, then it was gone, and he was falling, falling…
The rope was there, right where he’d left it. He almost forgot to grab it until it was too late, and only the fact that he’d all but fallen directly onto it gave him the chance to take hold of the narrow strand with both hands. The loop he’d tied around the stone jut to anchor it couldn’t hold against the sudden weight of two halflings and a goblin, and as it tore free the three of them went plummeting downward, picking up speed as they were catapulted through empty blackness. The rope creaked under their weight as they reached the bottom of their arc, still accelerating, and Jaron offered a prayer to whatever gods might be watching that his pitons held. Their downward momentum was turned into forward flight, and they started to slow—incrementally—as they were flung forward toward the far side of the chasm.
“Woohoo!” Beetle screamed in triumph, as the duergar peered down into the chasm, trying to figure out exactly what had just happened.
Mara’s thoughts were black. There was nothing she could do about her circumstances at the moment, but she swore to spend her life at as dear a cost as she could, before ending up as a bound sacrifice on the altar to some slimy reptilian god.
Thus far, the duergar had been careful not to allow her that opportunity. The iron bands around her wrists and ankles were heavy, the chains binding them designed to only give her the barest minimum of motion necessary to shuffle along with the other prisoners. The duergar, perhaps respecting her obvious strength, had fastened her wrists behind her back, and her shoulders were already burning from the strain. She was connected to the prisoners ahead and behind by another length of chain. At least all of the prisoners ahead of her were halflings, so she could see where they were going.
There wasn’t much to see. The duergar seemed to recognize that their captives needed at least some light in order to march, but the odd lamps they wore strapped to their helmets cast a faint, uneven light. Mara’s feet were bruised from the dozens of times she’d stubbed them on rocks she hadn’t seen, and her bare soles were already crisscrossed with gashes from sharp edges she’d trodden upon. Their progress was slow, but the duergar did not seem to care about the harsh cost of the trek on the bodies of their prisoners.
It wasn’t as if they were going to have to worry about marching them back.
She heard a heavy tread coming up behind her, and flinched involuntarily. But Rundarr walked past without paying her or any of the other prisoners any heed. The duergar was big for his kind, coming up almost to Mara’s shoulder, but he radiated a sense of danger entirely out of proportion to his size. It was him, more than the duergar scouts or the orc guards that drove the slave train onward, that gave Mara pause, and killed any hope she had for escape before they reached their destination. She feared him, and hated herself for it.
Behind her, one of the other human prisoners stumbled, suddenly drawing the chain trailing behind her taut, and Mara nearly fell before the others in line helped him regain his footing. She knew almost nothing about the other captives, save that the other three humans were all prospectors, likely captured from the slopes of Thunderspire above by the Bloodreavers. The halflings she knew of, although she had not recognized Jaron’s cleric friend among them. The ten halflings that were here were showing the strains of their captivity, and while Mara had to admire their spirit, they were farmers and herdsmen, and she knew she could not rely on their help if—when, she told herself—an opportunity for escape presented itself.
But with each painful step forward, it seemed as though that chance was becoming more and more remote.
“Here they come,” Jaron whispered, drawing back from the edge of the ledge that gave them an unobstructed view of the broad underground highway that stretched out below them. Beetle lingered another second, staring at the distant but slowly growing specks of light that surrounded the slave caravan. They were at an intersection of sorts, where the main corridor met a number of smaller tunnels, some sized to accommodate a rat, and none large enough for an adult human to navigate without some difficulty. Most of them, Jaron knew from his admittedly limited experience in the Labyrinth, went nowhere. Others might stretch for miles, connecting to similar tunnels throughout the complicated underground warren. It would take a lifetime to even begin to know this place, Jaron realized.
He crawled back down to the level of the tunnel below. The natural curve of the passages would conceal them from direct view of the slaver party for a good while yet, but he was careful to keep his miner’s lamp almost completely shaded. The light was mainly for their companion’s benefit, as neither of the halflings needed it with their magical goggles.
“How long?” Gru asked.
“A few minutes, at most,” Jaron replied. The goblin looked more than a bit skittish, Jaron thought. Beetle had already managed to cow the freed slave in that special way that he had, communicating menace without having to resort to overt threats. But Jaron knew that Gru would vanish the moment that he and Beetle were too distracted to keep an eye on him. But that was all right; the little creature had already helped them considerably.
After their wild and desperate swing across the chasm, evading the duergar pursuit from the citadel had been almost easy. Jaron had worried about the devils coming after them, as their ability to fly would have enabled them to cross the chasm after them with ease, but the monstrous fiends had not made an appearance. There had been parties of duergar scouts and orc warriors that had emerged from the towers on both sides of the chasm, but the halflings, aided by their magical goggles, had been able to slip away without being seen. When his own life was on the line, Gru had been more than up to the task of keeping up with Jaron and Beetle; the goblin was almost as adept at remaining unseen as the two of them.
Gru’s knowledge had made his rescue worthwhile. He’d been able to tell them that they’d only missed Mara and the others being carted off by the duergar by the better part of an hour. Jaron had silently cursed at having just missed the prisoners, but he’d quickly put that failure behind him, focusing instead on the reality they faced. Once Gru had told the halflings of the deep dwarves’ plans for their captives, Jaron had convinced the goblin to help them find a route through the Labyrinth that would enable them to overtake the slavers. Gru had an extensive knowledge of the smaller, less-used side tunnels that riddled throughout the network of main corridors under the mountain, and while he had to be prodded several times to take them in the direction of a new danger, they’d ultimately been able to get ahead of the slow-moving slaver party. Gru’s focus had been on making good his escape, and he urged Jaron and Beetle to accompany him someplace far away from the duergar and the Hall, but Jaron had other plans. Once he’d told Gru what he was looking for, the goblin grew even more resistant, but Jaron would not be swayed from his course. Reluctantly—very reluctantly—the goblin had helped him find what he needed to attempt the rescue he hoped to achieve.
Jaron felt exhausted. He and Beetle had been almost constantly on the run since they’d left the Horned Hall, and breaking in had been anything but relaxing to boot. Gru had spoken at lengths about the capabilities of the Grimmerzhul in an effort to dissuade him from his plans, and Jaron had already gotten a first-hand look at their effectiveness. The slaver party would likely be heavily guarded, and they were just two worn-down halflings and a panicky goblin. He certainly wouldn’t have minded having Vhael, Gral, and even Carzen Zelos with them right now.
But wishing was for children and dreamers, as his father had often said. Having fought in a war and seen a lot of the world outside of his home village of Fairhollow, Jaron knew it was true.
He turned as Beetle dropped down onto the passage floor next to him. They’d picked their ground, and now they had to make the most of it. “You know what to do,” he said to Beetle. “Remember, draw them, but don’t let yourself get caught. I won’t be able to help you.”
“Stab an’ run,” Beetle said, miming the former with a thrust of his fist.
“Be careful.”
Beetle grinned, and darted into a side passage barely larger than he was.
“This is madness,” Gru said, grimacing as he scraped something slimy off his foot with a piece of stone. The goblin was speaking his own language, which Jaron understood more or less fluently. “This is the trouble that a wise hunter gives wide berth, but you two go looking for it!”
“If we’re lucky, two troubles will cancel each other out,” he said, thinking back to the Horned Hold.
“It never work. They no need ears, eyes… they feel steps, through stone. Never sneak up on them!”
Jaron turned to him in alarm. “What? Why didn’t you warn me of this earlier?”
The goblin threw up his hands. “I not stop warning! I say this crazy, bad idea, all of it, you not listen!”
Jaron had taken a step toward the low opening where Beetle had vanished before he stopped himself. A faint glow was just becoming visible down the passageway where he knew the Grimmerzhul party was fast approaching. They were out of time; he could only hope that Beetle was able to take care of himself, and do what he had to do.
“Get back up on that ledge,” Jaron commanded. “Stay out of sight.” They’d lent the goblin a knife, but it was too much to hope that he might actually be of help in the coming fight. Sliding the cover on his lamp shut, he darted across the tunnel to his own chosen ground. It was another small tunnel mouth, opening a good nine feet above the floor of the main passage, the crevice behind it quickly narrowing within a few paces until even a mouse would have been hard-pressed to slip through. It was a dead end, if it came to it… Jaron harshly suppressed the thought. He crawled up the wall and gained the opening without difficulty, and laid out everything that he was going to need.
He was not a moment too soon. The lights carried by the slaving party were coming into distinct view, the prisoners and their guards visible now ahead. With the goggles, he had no difficulty spotting the two duergar in the vanguard, a good fifty paces ahead of the main body. The two scouts—lightly armored, and carrying loaded crossbows—scanned their surroundings intently, although Jaron knew that they would be unable to see him from his relatively high vantage.
The rest wasn’t good. There were three more duergar at the head of the slave train. These were clad in mail, and one of them was a monster of a warrior whose sheer physical presence Jaron could sense even a hundred paces away. The slaves, organized into a line, were further guarded by at least four orcs that Jaron could make out, ugly brutes who carried longspears. They looked to have crossbows slung across their backs, which could mean trouble, he thought.
But his eyes were drawn back to the slaves, chained together in a single line, separated into two distinct groups by size. His heart clenched as he recognized those in the front ranks as halflings. They were still too far away to see clearly, or to make out individual faces, but he could feel the pain that linked them to him. He wondered if Yarine was amongst them, her head low, struggling to summon the courage to continue to lead her people. The thought of her in those filthy pits back in the Horned Hold, tormented by devils and the foul dwarves, filled him with an almost blinding rage. He had to hold it down, however, forced himself to lie utterly still, only the top of his head showing over the lip of the ledge that overlooked the passage below. He’d used some dust to blacken his features, but he need not have bothered; the slaver party was only using a few weak miner’s lamps carried by the orc guards, their glow penetrating barely beyond the immediate area of the chained column. Jaron reminded himself that the dark dwarves needed no light at all.
The duergar scouts approached, moving with cautious deliberation. Jaron realized that the entire group was slowed by the progress of the chained slaves, who he could now see were in poor condition. His gaze was drawn down the length of the halfling prisoners to the first human, ten spaces down the queue, who as he watched stepped into the glow of the lamp carried by one of the orcs, temporarily brightening her features enough for Jaron to identify her.
It was Mara, of course. Jaron had expected to see her, but it was still a shock to see the fighter there, chained like an animal, and he had to deliberately loosen his fingers where they’d tightened around the shaft of his bow.
The scouts came closer, until they were almost on top of him. Careful not to move more than his eyes, Jaron shifted his gaze toward the side passage where Beetle had disappeared. It hadn’t been much more than a minute since they’d parted, Jaron realized, but it felt like hours had passed.
His skin prickled as one of the scouts passed directly beneath his hiding place. He looked across the passage to the ledge where he’d sent Gru, but there was no sign of the goblin. Once again, his eyes dropped to the side passage. He could now hear the clink of the chains as the queue of slaves drew closer. If the slaves were walking past when Beetle returned…
The thought fed fire into his muscles. There was no more time, and he could not afford to hesitate. Rising into a crouch, he fitted an arrow to the string of his bow and drew in a single silent motion. The duergar champion shifted slightly, maybe catching a glimpse of the movement out of the corner of his eye, but he wasn’t Jaron’s target. He released the shot, the faint strum of the bowstring sounding cacophonous to Jaron’s ears.
The orc guard staggered as the arrow slammed into his chest. Jaron knew at once that the shot hadn’t penetrated to a vital organ, but he was already putting his second arrow to the string, shifting his aim to a second orc on the far side of the chain of prisoners. The orc, just starting to turn toward his stricken companion, took the arrow in his side and let out a ragged scream of pain.
The relative quiet that had ruled just moments before exploded into a chaos of noise and confusion. A number of the prisoners cried out, and several fell to the ground as the instinct to flee ran up against the limits of the shackles and chains. The orcs clutched at their weapons, scanning the surrounding tunnels in vain for the source of the attack. The one that had taken the first arrow turned a full circle before settling on a more immediate target for his outrage. Snarling, he lifted his spear toward the string of panicked captives.
The duergar were quicker to recover. The leader had recognized the twang of Jaron’s bow and the subtle whistle of the flying arrow, and by the time the second shot was released, he had tracked the path of the missile back to its source. Lifting his hammer to indicate the sniper’s hiding place, he shouted an order to his companions, pausing to bark a harsh command at the orcs to remain with the prisoners. Ignoring the chaos behind them, the duergar warriors started forward toward the perch where Jaron had taken shelter.
The halfling flinched as a crossbow bolt caromed off the rim of the tunnel mouth less than a hand’s span from his head. The duergar scouts had marked him as well, but all Jaron could see was the wounded orc lifting his spear, and the shrieks of the halflings cringing helpless at his feet, unable to do anything to stop him.
Ignoring the duergar closing in on his position, Jaron drew, aimed, and released.
He cursed as the shot, perhaps marred by some subtle warping in the shaft of the arrow, began to dip almost immediately. He lost it in flight for a fraction of a second, then heard the cry from the orc guard that said the missile had somehow managed to find its target despite the bad shot. The orc’s thrust went wild, the steel head of its spear scraping sparks off of the stone floor. As he spun away, Jaron could see the feathered shaft protruding from the back of the orc’s ankle. The other orcs, perhaps more wary of the anger of the duergar leader, were gathering the prisoners back together in line using the butts of their spears, all too aware of the price that would be extracted from their hides if one of their charges managed to escape.
Jaron started to turn, to look one last time for his cousin, but all he saw was a pair of hands that materialized on the lip of the ledge directly in front of him. Before he could react, even to reach for another arrow, the hands were followed by the fearsome visage of one of the duergar scouts, his beard bristling like a forest of red quills.
With a sudden lunge, the duergar reached out to grab him.
Trying to avoid the grasp of the duergar scout, who had a huge advantage in size and weight over him, Jaron sprang back into the cramped mouth of the tunnel behind him. With the passage shrinking down so rapidly to a mere crack within a few paces, there wasn’t much space to retreat, and he hit his head on the low ceiling as he tried to evade the duergar’s attack. The dark dwarf took advantage of the opportunity to pull himself more fully up onto the ledge, blocking any possible route of retreat.
“Yield,” he hissed.
Jaron’s answer was to reach for the hilt of his sword, but before he could draw it he felt a sudden stabbing pain in his arm. He looked down to see several of the thick quills from the duergar’s beard embedded in his skin; they gone through his coat like darts. Almost instantly a fierce burning sensation spread out from the wounds, crawling up his arm.
The duergar saw his distress and smiled, reaching for him again.
Down below, Rundarr and his guards converged below Jaron’s perch. Seeing the enemy sniper apparently contained, the duergar champion turned to make certain that the slaves were under control. The orcs were being free with the butts of their spears, and the duergar bristled at the delay that would follow if any of the slaves earned broken bones.
Neither he nor his men spotted the tiny shadow that emerged from one of the low side-tunnels and slipped to the side. But they heard the scraping noise that followed a few seconds later, rapidly growing in intensity until it seemed to reverberate off the walls.
“Ware!” Rundarr shouted, in the same instant that the first kruthik burst from the crowded tunnel into the open space of the intersection.
Mara’s head swam from where an orc had batted her across the temple with the haft of his spear. Struggling with the pain of her wounded feet and the despair of her circumstances, it had taken her a few seconds to realize that the slaver column was under attack. She’d reacted quickly then, trying to tackle the nearest orc guard, but the chains linking her to her fellow prisoners had caught her as several of the captives had succumbed to panic and tried to scatter in a dozen directions at once. The orc easily evaded her off-balance lunge, and his counter with the butt of his spear had finished the job of sending her to her knees. He followed that with his boot, ruthlessly driving her onto her back. The orc seemed intent on battering her into unconsciousness or worse, and any thought of attack was quickly replaced by a need to protect her already battered body from the creature’s harsh kicks. With her wrists bound behind her, there was little she could do to defend herself.
In that instant, she felt helpless, and was transported back in time to that little girl who’d found herself alone in the world, everything she’d ever had stripped from her by the merciless hand of fate.
Are you just going to lie there and let them kill you? came a voice in her mind, so clear and stark that she was startled into awareness, opening her eyes to see the orc looming over her, his piggish face twisted into a snarl, his boot lifted for another brutal kick.
Penned in by the larger, stronger duergar, Jaron did the only thing he could; he attacked. Pushing off from the wall at his back, he sprang at the evil dwarf. The duergar was waiting for him and had a meaty fist ready, coming across in a hook that would have likely left the halfling missing teeth, had it connected. But with his first step Jaron dropped and dove under the dwarf’s swing, coming up into a roll that planted his bottom right in front of the duergar’s crotch. Drawing his knees up almost to his chin, he snapped his legs out, driving both booted feet into the dwarf’s codpiece.
Jaron was stronger than he looked, and now it was the dwarf that was unbalanced. The duergar stumbled back a half-step, his arms windmilling in an almost comical gesture as he balanced precariously on the very edge of the tunnel opening. For an instant, it looked as though he would recover, but then momentum and gravity conspired against him, and he tumbled over backwards. It was dramatic, although Jaron knew that a fall of nine feet was unlikely to finish off a foe as hardy as a duergar.
Scrabbling for his bow, the halfling pulled himself back up to a crouch and looked over the scene of utter chaos before him.
A violent melee raged in the middle of the intersection. Skittering kruthiks, their spiked limbs clattering on the floor as they moved, were everywhere, shifting and darting as they launched violent attacks upon the embattled duergar. Jaron couldn’t count them immediately, but there had to be at least a dozen, ranging in size from tiny things barely larger than a housecat to armored nasties as big as a wolfhound.
The duergar leader loomed over all other combatants, swollen to almost twice his size by the same inherent magic that Jaron had witnessed in the Horned Hold. As the halfling watched, an adult kruthik launched itself at one of the duergar warriors, and the leader caught it mid-flight with his hammer, delivering a titanic blow that launched the insectoid thing clear across the intersection, caroming off one of the walls before it tumbled at least twenty paces down one of the larger passages. The duergar, moving faster than Jaron had ever seen, reversed the momentum of his swing and caught a second creature with his backswing, flipping it over onto its back. It hissed terribly as it fumbled to recover. A third kruthik sprang up toward the duergar’s legs, stabbing with its sharp foreclaws, but he merely shifted and kicked it away, bringing the heavy hammer up for another strike.
Jaron looked down at the ground directly in front of his perch, where the duergar scout he’d knocked off the ledge was trying to get up. A hint of movement out of the corner of his eye resolved into another kruthik, this one barely half the dwarf’s size, which skittered forward with incredible speed, launching itself onto the duergar before he was even aware of the threat. The dwarf screamed and fell back onto the floor again as the creature slashed at his face and arms, while he struggled to keep it away from him.
Jaron would have preferred to be anywhere but down there, but what he could see of the struggle going on further back down the passage told him that he didn’t have much time to intervene with the slaves. He had no idea where Beetle or Gru were, and couldn’t spare either of them more than a passing thought. Taking a deep breath, he stepped off of the ledge, into the chaos below.
He grabbed the edge of the ledge with one hand as he fell, holding on just for a second before he let go and dropped easily to the floor, transferring his momentum into an all-out run. He gave the struggling duergar scout and kruthik a wide berth, dashing along the near wall, trying not to flinch each time he passed one of the low, narrow tunnels that crisscrossed the entire area. No more kruthiks emerged, and neither the ones already there nor the duergar seemed to notice his passing. From what he’d seen, it didn’t look like the ones already here would last much longer against the duergar; he didn’t have much time.
Then a loud crumbling noise drew his attention to the far side of the intersection, toward the small tunnel where the kruthik had originally appeared. He almost tripped over his own feet as the wall surrounding the tunnel mouth exploded outward, and another kruthik, this one the size of a horse, stepped through the debris into the intersection. It let out a shriek that seemed to shake the walls, and started forward. To Jaron it looked like it was coming straight for him, but as the duergar champion shifted to meet it, he saw that he was fortunately too small to be noticed by either side as a threat.
Then he was past the melee, and the column of slaves was ahead, jumbled into a crowded circle, surrounded by the orc guards. The orcs were all turned away from him, either focused on their prisoners or on the battle between the up-sized duergar leader and the kruthik hive lord. Jaron reached for an arrow, intent on striking before the guards were even aware he was there.
But even as he drew the arrow out of his quiver, a low-pitched hiss from behind him sent a cold chill down his spine. He glanced over his shoulder to see another kruthik charging at him from behind. The thing was barely larger than he was, but it looked no less deadly for that, its claws digging at the floor hard enough to scratch the stone. No doubt they’d pierce his body like daggers, he thought.
A shout from ahead answered the creature’s hiss from behind. Jaron turned back to see that one of the orcs had in fact noticed him, and as he drew closer, the warrior lowered his spear, the steel head coming down to intercept the halfling’s charge.
Caught between a steel point on one side and a set of vicious claws on the other, Jaron found himself suddenly without any good options.
The voice in her mind stirred Mara to action, even as the orc slammed his booted heel down once more at her battered body.
With her hands bound behind her back, and the chain still binding her to the other prisoners, there was little she could do to evade. But she twisted her body, taking the kick on her shoulder instead of her vulnerable torso. Pain shot through her body, but she forced herself to ignore it, turning her body further and snapping up her bound arms. There wasn’t much give in the chain, but she managed to hook a loop of it around the orc’s boot, and jerked her entire body forward to pull him off balance.
The orc grunted something and tried to pull free, yanking hard enough that Mara thought her arms would be pulled out of their sockets. But now the tangling chain served as an anchor, holding the orc in place. She knew it wouldn’t hold him long, and bent her legs back to deliver a blind kick toward where she thought the orc was standing. Her bare foot clipped the shin of his other foot hard, but her momentary sense of triumph died as two hundred and fifty pounds of armored orc tumbled onto her. Her breath was blasted from her lungs, and new pains erupted as the hard edges of the orc’s armor and gear poked her.
Without her hands, she couldn’t fight him off, and he was too heavy for her to wriggle free. She fought for a breath, gasping as the orc’s struggles continued to batter her. At least he wasn’t kicking her any more, she thought, as the stink of the orc’s body filled her nostrils. His squealing sounded like shrieks in her ears.
Then, abruptly, she felt the orc stiffen, and a new, familiar stench filled her nostrils as a trail of hot wetness ran down along her neck. The orc moved again, but it was only to roll off her.
Sucking in a welcome breath of air, Mara pulled herself up to find herself eye-to-eye with Beetle. The halfling was holding a knife covered in blood.
“Hi, Mara!” he said with a grin.
While Mara fought for her life, Jaron faced off against a spear and a charging kruthik. Without time to think over options, and remembering all too well the image of the kruthik jumping all over the fallen duergar scout, he simply acted. He was too close to dodge out of the way of the spearhead, so all he could do was jerk to the side as the steel blade came at him. He felt the hot pain of the blade as it tore a crease along his side, but it didn’t penetrate, didn’t catch on his flesh or his clothes, and then he was through, and inside the guard’s reach. The orc tried to bring his weapon back up in time to strike the halfling, but Jaron was far too quick, and he darted between the orc’s legs before the warrior could do anything to stop him. The orc started to turn after him, but then the kruthik, charging forward, was on him, and he found his hands more than full with sixty pounds of insane reptilian violence.
The other orc guards were quite occupied as well. Another was barely holding off a small kruthik with his spear, shifting wildly as it skittered back and forth in an attempt to get at him. Another guard was wrestling with a pair of human miners for control of his spear; a third human lay bleeding out his life at their feet. The last orc lay in a bloody heap next to Mara, his throat cut; Jaron saw the reason for that a moment later as he skidded to a halt next to her, and saw Beetle, helping to pull the long chain out from the shackles connecting the woman warrior to the panicked halflings cowering nearby.
Jaron didn’t stop for conversation; he lifted his bow and sighted on the orc fighting with the human miners. He was just in time, as the orc tore free, knocking both men prone and lifting his spear to skewer the nearest. Unfortunately for him, Jaron’s arrow beat him to the punch, and he fell to his knees, the spear clattering from his grasp. The men were back on him in a second, pounding at the crippled orc with their manacled wrists.
“Nice to see you,” Mara said, grimacing as she thrust her bound wrists under her feet so they were in front of her. While Beetle freed her from the chain, she stood unsteadily. She was in bad shape, Jaron could see, but that didn’t stop her from reaching down and picking up the orc’s fallen spear. She could barely keep a grip on it with the shackles pinning her hands together, but she looked no less fierce for it.
“We have to get out of here!” Jaron hissed. Mara nodded, taking up a guarding position as Beetle released the last of the slaves from the linking chain. Their wrists were still shackled together, but there was no time to free them from the iron bands now. The battle raging just a few paces away was still going strong, but there were only a few kruthik still moving, and even as he watched the duergar leader delivered a powerful blow to the hive lord that knocked it over onto its side, its limbs flailing in every direction as it tried in vain to recover. One of the duergar was down, but the others had taken up warding positions around him, surrounded by the pulverized carcasses of a half-dozen kruthiks of varying sizes.
“Go, go!” Mara warned, holding the spear clumsily as she warded their retreat. The surviving orc guards, distracted by their own enemies, paid them no heed. The one that had been poking at the kruthik with his spear finally pinned and impaled his foe; he might have noticed the escaping prisoners, except for the arrow that Jaron fired into his back. He sagged against the wall of the tunnel, trying in vain to grab the shaft jutting from his body.
The other orc, the one that had nearly stabbed Jaron, was faring less well. The kruthik barely came up to mid-thigh on him, but it was ripping madly at his legs with its long claws, leaving the orc bleeding from several serious wounds. The orc was trying to push it away with his spear, but the creature was too dogged, springing up at him in an attempt to simply overpower him. It was an odd thing, watching the little monster hacking fearlessly at a foe several times its size, and for a moment Jaron just stood there, an arrow nocked to his half-drawn bow.
It was Mara who finally shook him out of the momentary reverie. “Let’s go!” she hissed in his ear, yanking him back with a hand on his shoulder. Turning, Jaron saw that the others were already gone, heading back down the passage, the weak light from a miner’s lamp already growing dimmer as the freed slaves fled.
With one last look at the bloody mess behind him, Jaron turned and fled after them.
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