Chapter 167
THE POWER OF DARKNESS
The power of the unholy blight seared all of them, and Talen and Shay were both staggered, voiding the contents of their stomachs onto the stone floor as the foul sickness of the spell seeped into their bodies.
Varo was the first to recover, as the blight faded. “There, down the side tunnel!” he warned, pointing with his mace.
Dar did not suffer the way that Talen and Shay had, but he still felt a foul, cloying thickness in the back of his throat as he turned back around. A small horde of undead came charging forward into the light, a mix of skeletons and ghouls, all of them only three feet tall. There was over a score of them altogether, and they came on in a full run, rapidly closing the distance between them and the companions.
“Bah, even as undead, they look weak,” Dar said.
Talen reseated his helmet and stepped forward to join Dar. The knight’s sword pulsed with holy flames, as eager as he was to destroy these undead abominations.
But before he could strike, Talen froze, overcome by a hold person spell from the still-unseen enemy cleric. Dar, sensing that something was wrong, glanced over at him. He tapped the knight’s shoulder with Valor, but Talen did not react.
“Wonderful,” he said, moving forward to take up a blocking position in front of the paralyzed knight.
Holy power flooded the tunnel as the clerics unleashed their power, the brilliant light of the Father underlaid by the violet pulses of the Dark Creeper. Serah’s turning disintegrated half a dozen skeletons in the front rank of the charging enemy force, and a pair of ghouls recoiled, overcome by the power of her god. A moment later four more ghouls suddenly froze, rebuked by Varo. A pair of arrows from Kalend and Baraka struck the next leading ghoul as it charged past its turned companions, the long shafts slamming deep into its chest just a few inches apart. The ghoul let out a hiss and collapsed.
That still left almost a dozen of the undead, a majority of them ghouls, which surged at Dar, claws extended. The fighter lifted his sword, ready to cut down the first wave.
But then Allera stepped forward, and unleashed a powerful surge of positive energy that filled the corridor. Undead, both skeletons and ghouls, just came apart as blue fire surrounded their bodies. Within a heartbeat, the only undead left standing were those that were fleeing, or were cowering under the effects of Varo’s rebuke.
“Overkill, I think,” Varo said. “But we must stop that enemy cleric, before he can secure aid.”
“I’ll get him,” Shay said, darting quickly down the corridor at a speed none of them could match.
“Shay... no...” Talen said, but his words were barely audible as he struggled against the evil cleric’s paralysis. Dar followed after the scout, almost casually decapitating one of the rebuked ghouls as he ran past them. The others followed behind, but Talen, finally able to move again, held up Serah and Kalend, who were bringing up the rear.
“Secure the prisoner, and watch our backs,” he said, gesturing to the goblin lying on the ground out in the main corridor. “I don’t like this...” Without waiting for a response, he hastened after the others.
Dar heard the sound of swords clanging before he saw the foe. The side tunnel opened onto a much larger cavern after less than a hundred feet, where the light from Varo’s spell only barely penetrated. Shay was engaged with three armored hobgoblins, clad in chain shirts and armed with longswords and shields. One of them was wounded, seriously by the way he favored his right side, but they had spread out to flank Shay, and as the fighter watched, she cried out and covered her eyes with her free hand.
“Ah! I cannot see!”
The hobgoblins immediately surged in to take advantage of their foe’s blindness, but Dar drew their attention with a loud battlecry that echoed through the cavern. One of the trio turned to face him, but it barely got its sword up before Dar swept Valor up in a stroke that came up under its shield, ripped deep into its body, and kept on going. The hobgoblin didn’t even cry out, it just tumbled to the ground, its spine severed neatly by the blow.
Looking around, he finally saw the cleric, a goblin clad in a black robe, standing a short distance off to the side. It was casting another spell, it looked like, but Dar’s attention was drawn to the two remaining hobgoblins, who left the blinded scout to face the greater threat posed by Dar. They paid for underestimating Shaylara, who used sound alone to guide a wild swing that caught one of the hobgoblins in the back of the leg. The creature, already wounded, staggered forward, right into a powerful swing of Valor that sheared its head from its shoulders.
The last hobgoblin hesitated just an instant, but even that slight moment of weakness cost it, as Dar slipped Valor past its guard, thrusting a foot of the axiomatic steel into its chest. Blood erupted from the wretched creature’s mouth, but somehow it managed to fight on, attacking Dar with a clumsy swing that he easily caught on the crossbar of his weapon.
But the cleric had put the delay to good use. An arrow from Baraka caught it in the shoulder, but it maintained its concentration, and completed a summoning spell. With a sudden whoosh of greasy black smoke and a whiff of brimstone, a howler materialized in front of it. The abyssal creature turned to the corridor entrance, where Allera and Varo had just arrived, the cleric’s light source blazing out to drive back the darkness of the cavern.
The creature let out a howl and immediately charged toward them.
The goblin cleric, clearly not liking the odds, turned and fled.
Varo pushed Allera behind him, taking the howler’s rush. It seized the cleric’s arm in its jaws, trying to wrestle him down, its spines scraping on his breastplate as it thrashed about. But Varo held his ground, and a moment later Talen and Baraka were there, the ranger drawing the monster’s attention with his sickles, just in time for Talen to deliver a devastating critical hit with Beatus Incendia, a crushing blow to the back of its neck that drove it to the ground, where it started to dissolve into nothing almost immediately.
The goblin cleric had gotten a good distance away, the darkness of the cavern swallowing it up as it fled. But a fluttering noise ahead of it warned it of another foe, a moment before a gust of sweet-smelling gas puffed into its face. Unfortunately for Snaggletooth, the cleric of Orcus had a very strong will, and it stabbed a hand blindly toward the noise of the little dragon’s wings. The goblin managed to just brush Snaggletooth’s tail as it tried to withdraw, enough of a contact to deliver an inflict critical wounds spell. The faerie dragon screeched in pain and flew back up into the dark vaults of the cavern interior.
Back at the tunnel mouth, Allera let out a sharp cry and clutched her head, feeling the pain of her companion through their telepathic link.
A loud clatter drew the cleric’s attention around before it could resume its flight. It lifted its morningstar to defend itself, but the armored human moved with deceptive speed, and the blue-tinged sword in its hand flashed in a brilliant and violent arc. They were on the farthest edge of Varo’s light, and Dar’s stroke was guided more by instinct than by deliberate intent, but it hit the goblin’s weapon arm, severing the limb at the elbow.
The goblin did not cry out or beg for mercy. Instead it countered with a touch attack, invoking the power of Orcus to deliver an inflict serious wounds. The spell hurt, but Dar barely flinched, lifting his sword in both hands and driving it down through the goblin’s skull, cleaving through its helm and finally wedging deep into its breastbone. Blood exploded out from the wound, as the shattered halves of its head flopped down onto its shoulders.
Dar was yanking his sword free from its body when Baraka, Serah, and Varo came up to join him. “I think that’s all of them,” the fighter said.
“Are you all right?” the priestess asked.
Dar grunted. “This prick got a good lick in, but it will take more than one of those damned touch-of-pain spells to bring me down.”
“What the colonel is saying, I believe, is that he would appreciate one of your healing spells, Serah,” Varo said. The cleric nodded, and came up to Dar, a bit tentatively.
“I will take a quick look around,” Baraka offered.
“I would recommend caution,” Varo said. “The two ghouls that Serah drove off may return, once her turning wears off.”
The ranger nodded, and trotted off across the cavern.
Varo looked at Dar. “I will attend to those that I rebuked, before they recover.”
Now that the battle was over they could see that the place was some sort of gathering area, with trash and other detritus littered all over to hint at the frequent use to which it had been put. Several large circles had been marked on the floor; hints of old blood staining the stone hinted at their use. Dar, who was no stranger to fighting rings, nodded to himself; this he understood.
He let out a breath as a warm glow of healing energy passed into him, easing the pain of his wounds. As it so often happened, he didn’t realize how much his injuries had hurt until they were gone. He nodded to Serah in thanks. “Let’s go see what the commander wants to do with this mess.”
They returned to the tunnel entrance, where Allera was holding Shay, both the healer’s hands on the sides of the scout’s head, her thumbs pressed gently against her eyelids. Talen was watching intently from a few paces away. Kalend was nearby, the captive goblin lying on the ground beside him, its hands and legs tightly bound.
“Do not move, this will just take a few seconds,” the healer was saying. She summoned her power, and her hands began to glow, the divine energies flowing into the scout. Once it was done, Allera drew back, and Shay blinked, letting out a sigh of relief.
“Damn, that is not something I want to repeat any time soon.”
“Let’s find a quiet place where we can talk to our prisoner,” Talen said.
“What about the bodies?” Dar asked.
Talen looked around, at the wreckage of yet another battle. Blood stained the ground in generous quantities around the hobgoblins that Dar had killed, and while the howler had disappeared, it had left a long slick of ugly ichor staining the floor where it had died. The stink of death hung in the air like a thick fog. “Leave them,” the knight finally said, his voice tired. “We don’t have the time or the means to clean all this up, and it’s not like they don’t already know we’re coming.”
Baraka returned, informing them that there was no sign of other threats in the cavern. “It looks like there’s a few exits from this place, but it was too dark to see clearly.”
Talen looked at Varo. “Our way lies in another direction,” the cleric said. “But it may be useful to hear what our guest has to say.”
“Back to the main tunnel,” the knight said.
Talen pulled aside Shay as the others retraced their steps back to where they had begun the encounter. “Damn it, Shay, you can’t just go charging off alone like that!” the knight said, not bothering to conceal his anger.
Shay’s voice remained level. “Varo warned of the goblin cleric. Standard protocol is to deal with enemy casters first in a battle, is it not?”
“Varo is not in command here.”
The scout lowered her voice. “Just answer me this, commander. If you had not been paralyzed, and you’d gotten the same warning, would you have charged down that tunnel to do what I did?”
Talen opened his mouth to speak, but he hesitated; Shay knew that he would have likely acted in exactly the same way, if it had come to risking his own life for the good of the group and the mission.
“I’m sorry, Talen,” she said. “But we’re here, in Rappan Athuk, and we have to face the reality of what that might mean.” She didn’t have to refer to Pella and the legionaries; Talen knew what she meant.
Talen couldn’t quite meet her gaze. The scout let out a sigh, and then headed after the others, leaving Talen alone in the cavern.
After a few seconds, Talen turned and followed her, a pure darkness settling again over the cavern as the light of Beatus Incendia disappeared with him back down the tunnel.
