Aramis Simara said:
May the Gods have mercy on their souls.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Heh, there's only one god in Rappan Athuk, and he isn't known for mercy...
Thanks for posting and supporting the SH, Tonks, Aramis, and SoT.
A quick note: I am
slightly censoring the language in the SH due to the Eric's Grandma rule here at ENWorld (although I have noted that a number of popular story hours don't bother). When I release the story as a PDF, it will have the more... colorful... language more or less intact. Now for the Friday cliffhanger:
* * * * *
Chapter 9
BLOOD AND CRAP
Dar, still obviously in pain but unable to move, lifted his sword into a ready position as the giant rats surged forward toward him.
Before the first creature could get close enough for the fighter to strike, Ukas leapt forward, hurdling over Dar and landing at the base of the stairs five feet away. The half-orc’s boots crushed a rat that was too slow to get out of the way, and as the creatures leapt at the barbarian’s legs, he started swinging around him with his chain in wild abandon. Rats squeaked loudly, took incredible blows from the iron manacles that weighted the ends of the chain, and were hurtled away, their bodies broken. Several rats nipped the half-orc’s muscled legs with their jutting teeth, gouging out thumb-sized hunks of flesh from the limbs of the massive warrior. But those wounds only drove Ukas to a greater frenzy, laying about him with wild abandon.
Tiros squeezed past Dar as the fighter impaled a rat on his sword. Another leapt over its dying companion, aiming for his wrist, but he swiftly snapped the weapon up, smashing the rat hard under its jaw with the iron ball at the base of the sword’s hilt. The rat fell hard on the next step, its body quivering violently.
“Are you pinned?” Tiros asked.
“No, I’m leaving my foot there because it’s so damned comfortable! Aaargh!” he cursed, as his movements worsened the pain in his trapped leg. Another pair of rats crept forward, warier now, but they hesitated as Tiros summoned
Valor, and stepped forward to block their path to the injured warrior.
“Try not to move,” Varo said, as he crouched beside Dar. He lowered his torch. “Looks like a reverse-spike trap; they’ve got your foot pretty good. I’ll have to cut them away for you to get free.” He looked up at the fighter. “This may hurt.”
“Just do it,” Dar replied, his jaw tight.
The intensity of the rat attack was fading now, as Ukas continued his onslaught. Only a few rats from the original rush were left alive, and as the last few slipped on the bloody floor, the barbarian reached down and grabbed a rat that was trying to latch onto his ankle. With a triumphant roar, the half-orc stuffed the rat into his jaws, crushing its neck with a loud cracking noise. Ukas lifted his head so that the rat’s blood coursed down his cheeks and across his breast, then he shook his head, tossing its corpse aside.
Tiros slew the last two in quick order, and as the chaos of battle settled Varo helped Dar work his leg free of the pinning trap. The warrior leaned on the wall, grimacing as the priest cleaned the wounds before applying healing from one of his wands. “I feel weakened,” Dar said, propping his weapon against the wall next to him and flexing his sword hand.
“The barbs were poisoned,” the cleric explained. “I can help you, but I want to cleanse these wounds first, lest you add a disease to the list of things that I will need to treat. Ukas, too... rat bites are known to fester.”
The half-orc, covered in blood, merely grinned and walked away.
Dar, benefiting from a
lesser restoration from Varo, straightened and took up his sword again. He looked over his shoulder at Navev, who’d hung back at the rear during the brief melee. The warlock’s eyes flickered red briefly before returning to their usual deep brown. “Keep up the good work,” Dar said, his voice thick with sarcasm as he joined Ukas and Tiros in the area ahead.
With the rats defeated, the companions examined the room at the base of the stairs. This one was smaller than the chamber above, and was occupied primarily by old bones. An intact skeleton sat propped up in a chair facing them, across a small wooden table that lay in the middle of the room. For a moment the companions regarded the skeleton warily, but it did not stir as they approached, and Varo shook his head, indicating that it was not animated as an undead creature. There was a faint tapping sound that echoed softly off the walls, difficult to place.
As they got closer, they could see that the skeleton and the table were covered with trails of large red ants. There was a deck of cards laid out on the table in front of it, with one skeletal hand extended toward the deck.
“Ah, looks like he lost,” Dar said.
There didn’t appear to be anything of value in the room, so they crossed to the exit on the far side. As the light of the torches drove back the darkness, the source of the tapping was revealed as a metal plate lying on the ground near the wall to the right. A slow but steady drip of water from a crack in the ceiling above provided the noise. A corridor seemed to extend beyond to the left and right just ahead. Ukas stepped forward, his foot poised to kick the annoying plate aside, but as he stepped forward into the arched exit, the floor suddenly dropped out beneath his feet.
“Ukas!” Tiros cried, leaping forward, Dar and Varo only a step behind.
They looked down to see Ukas clinging to the edge of the pit with one muscled hand. The shaft fell a good twenty feet below them, and was clearly deliberately designed as a trap; the cover was already beginning to slowly creep shut, operated by some hidden counterweight mechanism. A solitary explorer would have likely found himself trapped, even if he’d managed to survive the initial fall.
Dar and Tiros were able to help the barbarian out of the pit. There was enough space around the sides of the trap to pass safely, although the rim was narrow enough to make it dicey if one was in a great hurry. By the time that Navev slipped past, the pit door had closed almost halfway.
“Don’t forget it’s here,” Dar said, as they started down the corridor to the left. In that direction the passage quickly ended in another doorway, this one empty save for a collection of wreckage that only barely resembled a door. Several arrows jutted from the stone jam, and directly beyond, several skeletons lay splayed across the floor.
“Looks like a battle happened here,” Varo commented, as they carefully moved into the room.
This place was larger than any of the chambers they had explored thus far, easily forty or fifty feet across. The outline of the room was uneven, and again resembled a natural cavern rather than a worked chamber. The foul odor was even stronger here than in the other rooms. There was a ruined wooden object along the wall to the right, an old desk by the look of it. Dar moved over to it; he barely prodded it with his sword before it toppled to the side, even more broken than before.
“By the Father’s puckered arse, this place is more cleaned out than the Duke’s jail on Hanging Day,” the warrior said.
“Must you blaspheme?” Tiros said.
“In case you didn’t notice, this ain’t exactly the High Sanctum, marshal,” Dar returned. “The gods have crapped on us, so forgive me if I don’t give ‘em much ado.”
“Not all of the gods have abandoned you,” Varo said. The cleric had crossed the room and now stood along the far wall to the left. “Over here.”
The others joined him. As they drew near, the cleric prodded a space of the wall with his torch. “Look.” The flames flickered slightly.
Tiros examined the spot indicated. “A secret door here. It looks like it wasn’t closed all the way.”
“Somebody got careless, maybe,” Dar said. He gestured to Ukas, and the half-orc pulled a stone slab about four feet high out of the wall. Beyond, a narrow corridor stretched out into darkness.
“Oh, gods, that even worse,” Navev said, holding his hand in front of his nose.
Dar and Varo exchanged a look. “What do you think?” the fighter asked.
“Secret doors are not easy to construct,” the cleric said. “Invariably they conceal something important.”
“Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say that,” Dar said. Sliding his sword into its scabbard, he took the torch from Varo and slipped through the door. The others followed.
“I have a real bad feeling about this,” Navev said. He did not linger behind, however.
The corridor turned to the left before opening onto another room. This chamber, smaller than the last, was roughly ovoid. The odor, a mélange of fecal smells mixed with the sweet sticky stench of rotting flesh, was overpowering here. The only thing of note was a long stone platform in the middle of the room. The function of the place was evident in the three head-sized holes arranged in a row across the edge of the platform. The one in the middle was provided with a seat of clean white stone; marble, perhaps. It seemed wholly out of place in the foulness of its surroundings.
“A crapper. Wonderful,” Dar said. “’Something important,’ eh, priest?”
“This place is obviously populated by sentient inhabitants,” Varo said. “Someone kept the toxin on the stair trap fresh, and obviously someone has make an effort to keep that seat clean. Unintelligent monsters are not quite so... diligent, in their toilet hygiene.”
“We should still search,” Tiros said. “We cannot afford to miss anything important.”
“Yeah, well you can go check out those holes, marshal,” Dar said. “Damn it, this place is really starting to get on my nerves.”
Tiros and Varo started a quick survey around the perimeter of the room. Ukas, meanwhile, crossed to the marble seat. Tugging off his breechclout, he seated himself upon the “throne.” A series of clearly audible noises rose from the seat.
“I would have thought that nothing could have made this place more disgusting,” Navev said, still holding his nose shut.
Dar watched Tiros and Varo as they completed their search. “Can we go now?”
Ukas grunted a last time, and shifted to rise. To his surprise, however, the half-orc found that he could not get up. He grunted, leaning forward, a look of confusion on his face.
Navev said, “Hey, what’s wrong with—"
The barbarian’s confused look became one of pain and alarm as a cascade of foul liquid spurted out from around the edges of the seat, and up between his meaty thighs. The stuff had the consistency of explosive diarrhea, an ugly brown mess of stinking, tainted pollution. As Ukas cried out in distress, the brown slick became streaked with garishly bright red.
For a heartbeat, the companions could only stand there, stunned. Finally Ukas began to topple forward, but they could see that the stone “seat” remained affixed to him, the white marble already beginning to meld back into the corrupt brown mass that rose out of the sewer hole below. The half-orc looked at them, pleadingly, as the... thing... flowed up onto him, absorbing the lower half of his body into its fetid mass.
