A new hope- part 2
The night was warm and damp just like the day had been, and bugs and mosquitos were feasting on the adventurers' blood.
In the morning, they marched on, and after a few hours, they discovered a shallow and calm part of the river, where it could be crossed easily. Once on the other side of the river, they marched eastwards, and there was a forest to their right and a formation of white rocks to the left. Less than a century ago, there had been quarries and small settlements of workers and craftsmen at the western edge of the rockformation, mining marble for the temples of Mithril. But than, the blood monsoon and the growing threat of pirates had made it almost impossible to maintain an outpost in the middle of the blood sea, and so it had been abandoned eventually.
All through the day, they could see the formations to their left. The shining white of the marble and basalt was gleaming like pure white snow in the sunlight, and it looked oddly out of place, like giant blocks which had been dropped into the plain. When they got tired of looking into the light to their left, they could rest their eyes by turning their head to the wood to their right. Even though it was still warm, the trees felt the coming of autumm and were getting ready to shed their leafy skirts. Everywhere the friends looked, they saw beautiful autumm colors, and the leaves were covering the wood in every shade of orange and red.
The mosquitos were left behind with the river and the marsh, and the day was so pleasant, that they were able to forget their worries for a while. When the sun set, they were all in a rather cheerful mood, and they settled down for a peaceful night.
In the morninglight of the next day, the heroes discovered a breach in the forest to the south. Looking into it, they saw that there was a corridor leading southpark with wheel-tracks visible in the grass covered ground. Since there were no new trees or bushes there, it was clear that this path had been used until not too long ago.
Trepat took a closer look and found boot imprints as well. He told the others and Jan said:" Well, maybe some pirates were pulling marble here... After all, they are supposed to hide somewhere here in the toe islands."
Niklas pulled out the map:" The strange thing is that it looks like the breach leads down to the ruins of Hor'Kung... I wonder what that could mean..."
"If there are really pirates at the end of this corridor, I wonder how they will welcome visitors", said Trepat.
Niklas shrugged:" We want nothing from them. So, if they ask us, we can tell the truth. In any case, I think it would be best if we would avoid them. Especially since they wouldn't be too happy to see a Paladin around...".
They turned into the breach, Donanngar and Ben on their steeds and the rest of them on foot. The corridor was about twenty feet wide and over it, the branches of the flanking trees were meeting, making the path feel like a wooden tunnel. The sound of their steps were muffled by the leaves and grass on the ground and they only talked in whispers with each other, so that their own noises were drowned by the sound of the leaves in the winds.
In the afternoon, Trepat was the first to hear it: In the distance, the sound of axes hitting wood was echoing through the forest. He signalled his companions to stop, and now they all heard the sound of a tree crashing to the ground, accompanied by a shout.
When the last echo of the crash had gone, Trepat said:" I think that was Ledean for "Timber"".
Ledean was the language of an empire that had once, before the divine war, covered almost all of Ghelspad. The empire was long gone, but their language still served as a lingua france.
"Makes sense," Niklas said,"if those are really pirates, they probably come from all kinds of different countries..."
"But we are in the middle of the island here. It doesn't make much sense for pirates to stay so far away from the coast...", Ben added.
Niklas nodded in agreement:"Who knows. Anyway, I will go and take a look now".
And with that, he left into the woods. The monk moved swiftly southward, gingerly avoiding twigs, branches and other things that might give him away, if they would break under his feet. As he scouted ahead, the sounds of the axes chopping down trees grew ever louder, until he reached a clearing.
He hid low in the bushes and peeked through branches and leaves and with a shudder, he now saw the "woodworkers" for the first time.
They were dead.
There were a dozen of them. All of them were moving and except for two, they were all chopping wood or preparing a log for transportation, but each of them was in a shape that shouldn't allow him to live on. Some of them had open skulls, or bones that were showing through rotting flesh, while others looked like they had been immolated or smashed. Furthermore, each of them looked like their flesh had decayed for a while until the process of decay had stopped and they were conserved in this state.
Each of them seemed to have been a soldier in life: they were wearing a uniform-armor, which was oldfashioned and worn but in good fighting shape. And even though they looked like the zombies the friends had encountered back in the blood steppes, those undead didn't seem as clumsy and mindless as those brainless living dead at all.
These undead behaved every bit like professional soldiers, and from the looks, the two who weren't doing the physical labor were their officers. And now that Nikas took a closer look, he saw that the ones he considered to be officers were actually wearing different badges on their shoulderpads than the other ones.
Niklas watched them preparing two logs for a little while. When the undead soldiers talked, or when the officers gave orders, they spoke a strange form of Ledean, the likes of which Niklas had never heard before. Once he had seen enough, he crawled away as silently as he had come and returned to his friends to report to them what he had seen.