Chapter 15
Arun barreled down the confines of the narrow tunnel like a boulder rolling down a steep slope, heedless of trap or ambush. His arm stung where a skulk’s rapier had briefly penetrated his defenses, but he ignored the hurt as a trifling thing, certainly nothing in the face of the evil that required immediate smiting.
The others might be behind him, or might not; the thought did not distract him from his purpose. He was used to fighting alone, outnumbered but standing fast against the forces of evil. His new companions were competent enough, he supposed—even that bumbling boy-cleric. The gnome girl had surprised him again, forcing him to yet again rethink his assumptions about the inhabitants of the world outside the Rift. A world that was in many ways till new to him, a world into which he’d been thrust eight months ago.
He’d been engaged with a pair of the skulks, and had already taken one hit to the arm when she’d rushed boldly into the melee, apparently fearless, stabbing one of the skulks in the back with her shortsword. The creature had turned to face her, opening itself to a crushing blow from Arun’s hammer that had dropped it flailing to the ground.
He’d gotten a glancing hit on the other before it had disengaged and fled into this tunnel, but Arun was far too canny to assume that it was no longer a threat.
The tunnel ended up ahead, slanting up steeply to a small opening in the ceiling a good seven feet above the floor. This wasn’t going to be easy. Arun barely hesitated before shrugging out of his shield, and sliding his warhammer into the straps across his back. With his strong hands and feet working in unison he propelled himself up the steep slope, latching onto the edges of the opening and pulling himself through.
He’d expected the attack, so it was no surprise as he sensed the movement behind him. The attack was rushed, though, desperate, and instead of running him through the rapier just glanced off of his shoulder-plate, narrowly missing his neck. Arun heaved himself clear of the opening and rolled forward, one of his light hammers coming into his hand as he regained his feet and spun to face his adversary.
The skulk was fleeing, darting toward the far side of the room where one of the round gear-doors could be seen. It didn’t make for that closed portal, however, instead reaching for an empty torch-sconce set into the wall.
Its hand closed around it at the same moment that Arun’s hammer slammed hard into its back.
The skulk crashed into the wall and spun away, its legs thrashing as it let out a terrible moan of pain. Arun stepped forward to stand over it, his second hammer ready to hurl in his hand.
“No keel,” the creature said, huddling against the wall, covering its head with its arms. It spoke in Undercommon, a tongue in which the dwarf was fluent, a language commonly understood within the deep ways under the Great Rift. “Warf no keel, me helps, no hurts, no keel.”
Arun regarded it coldly, tapping the butt of his hammer against his open palm.
* * * * *
Mole, Zenna, and Ruphos found him there just a few minutes later, Ruphos’s mace glowing with the bright glow of a light spell. Zenna briefly reported the outcome of the failed ambush from behind, but their attention was fixed on their captive, who shrank from their scrutiny. The dwarf indicated the sconce that the creature had been trying to reach, and Mole quickly discovered that the wall contained a secret door, operated by turning the bracket to the side. They left that, for the moment.
The room was relatively compact, with one corner dominated by the hole leading down to the tunnel below. A foul stench filled the place, the source immediately obvious as the carcass of a slain creature. The thing was some sort of giant worm-like insect, its body culminating in a gaping maw ringed with almost a dozen long tentacles. Arun identified it as a “carrion crawler,” and all of them gave it a wide berth. There was also a small heap that turned out to be a collection of chain shirts and bucklers, obvious designed by and for gnomes. Mole examined those, and admired the workmanship. After a moment’s consideration, she took one of the chain shirts and shrugged into it, replacing her breastplate of boiled leather.
“Well, if we’re going to be getting into all these battles,” she said, at Zenna’s querying glance. Tucking her hair back over the rear of the shirt, she spun and asked, “How do I look?”
The others did not reply, their attention focused instead on the captive skulk, whom Arun was interrogating in a harsh, guttural language. Zenna walked over to them, noticing that the skulk cringed at her arrival.
“What have you found out?” she asked him.
“Well, they’ve been working with the gnome—the locksmith—all right,” Arun said. “Though he blames the kidnapping of the children on the ‘creepers.’ I imagine that they’re the ‘short ones’ that Ghelve spoke of.”
“Where are the children now?” Ruphos said. He looked at the wounded skulk with a mixture of pity and revulsion, but made no move to help it.
“It says that they’re somewhere below, in ‘Dar Drumbos Malachot’... ‘the Malachite Fortress’.”
“Why do I not like the sound of that?” Zenna asked.
“Oh, and he says he knows where the gnome’s rat is, if you care,” Arun said.
“Well, if we run across it, let’s take it,” Zenna said. “It can keep him company in prison.”
While Arun, Zenna, and Ruphos confronted the skulk, Mole had walked over to where they carcass of the carrion crawler lay. Her nose wrinkled as she studied it, but then she saw something that caught her eye. Walking around to the side of the creature, she prodded it with her sword.
“Hey, guys, I think I found something here...”
They turned as she lifted a heavy flap of rotting flesh that had been cut in the creature’s side. The smell redoubled as she revealed the creature’s insides, but she also revealed a pair of small wooden coffers that had been jammed into the crawler’s guts.
“Ah, sneaky little buggers,” Mole said. She grimaced as she reached in, her boot making a sickening plop as it stepped in the crawler’s decaying organs. After a few more exclamations, “Oh, that’s just gross! Oh gods, I’m going to be smelling that for a week!” Mole had both coffers out where they could all see them.
“We don’t have time to be playing around with dead bodies and treasure chests,” Ruphos said. “Remember the divine message... we may have already lost our chance to find the children!”
“Oh, there’s always time to play around with treasure chests,” Mole said cheerfully as she scraped the crawler’s guts from her boots with her sword and tried to get most of the gunk off of the coffers. Then she knelt before them, examining them carefully. “You guys have to finish questioning that skulk anyway—hey, shine that light over here, will you?”
Zenna caught Ruphos’s gaze and smiled, shrugging while she and Arun turned back to the skulk. The dwarf continued with his interrogation, while Zenna suggested a question or two for him to pose. The skulk seemed utterly broken, occasionally breaking into a screech or a wail of pain, his cries only growing worse when the dwarf threatened him. It became clear after a few minutes, however, that it knew little more than what it had already told him.
“It’s stalling for time,” Zenna finally said. “It knows that an alarm has probably been issued, and it expects others to come looking for us.”
“I suspect you’re right,” the dwarf said.
“Hoo, boy!” Mole exclaimed. She’d gotten the first of the coffers open, and was exclaiming over a hefty pile of copper, silver, and gold coins inside. Ruphos stood over her shoulder, holding aloft his lighted mace, impatience written clear on his face. “So what do we do with him?” he asked, gesturing at the skulk.
The answer came swiftly, as Arun suddenly brought his fist down, crushing the skulk’s head with a single solid blow from his hammer. Ruphos jumped, then turned on the dwarf with an angry look on his features.
“He’d surrendered!” he protested. “You... you killed him in cold blood!”
“Aye,” the dwarf said, meeting the cleric’s gaze squarely. “And what do you think he’d do, if our places were reversed? How do you think those children felt, when him and his pals crept into their rooms at night, and tore them away from the safety of their beds?”
Ruphos did not answer, but his feelings were clear in his face. Biting off a curse, the dwarf turned away. “Get your stuff,” Arun told them. “We’re getting out of here.”
Mole let out a small sound, hurriedly pouring the contents of the second coffer into a small sack. She tried to fit the sack, already bulging with the coins from the first coffer, into her backpack, but had some difficulty getting it to fit.
“Oh, here,” Ruphos said, taking the sack from her and lifting it. “Hey, this is heavy!” Still, he managed to fasten it to his belt, tying it fast with a simple knot.
Mole smiled. “Oh, yeah.”
The dwarf crossed to the torch sconce, turning it so that the secret door in the wall popped open. All of them, with the exception of Mole, who was trying to estimate how heavy the sack carried by Ruphos actually was, had grim looks on their faces as they moved back into the halls of Jzadirune.
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