The Doomed Bastards: Reckoning (story complete)

[Lazybones]

So, did you ever decide on the MTWTF vs MWF schedule?

Hopefully today's post answers this question!

EDIT: I've also updated the Rogues' Gallery thread.

* * * * *

Chapter 26

BLOOD


The ghasts came forward toward Varo, eagerness flaring in their shining yellow eyes. A last ghoul, unwilling to pass up easier prey within reach, reached with equal eagerness for the helpless form of Velan Tiros.

Varo showed no fear or doubt as he lifted his symbol once more. “Dagos commands you, you pathetic wretches! As you were small before His gaze in life, so are you nothing before Him in death!”

Violet energies flared. For a moment, had his companions been able to see him, Varo would have resembled something far different than the unassuming, ordinary-looking priest that they knew. Power surrounded him like a cloak, and the ghasts, despite their fury and passion and hate, could not withstand it.

Fortunately for Tiros, the last ghoul succumbed to it as well.

Varo looked down the corridor. Ghouls and ghasts were everywhere, unable to approach him; but likewise he knew that he could not go near them either, lest he sunder the effects of the rebuke. Dar and Tiros were on the far side of the two nearest ghasts; he could not go to them.

“This will be close,” he said, taking his mace into his hand. He waited, as seconds passed.

Dar groaned. At once, Varo’s voice cut through the corridor with the stentorian echo of command. “We don’t have much time; the first rebukes will begin to fade within moments. You must destroy them all, now.”

The fighter pulled himself to his feet. He looked around for his sword, lost in the clutter of bodies, but finally just drew out the heavy club he’d taken from the dead barbarian guard. “Which ones go first?”

“I do not know... just start killing,” Varo said.

And Dar did. He didn’t stop to help Tiros, who after a few more heartbeats stirred as well, pushing the cowering ghoul off him. He hacked it down with Valor, but it was Dar that slew the rest, surging down the corridor like a madman himself, crushing skulls, knocking broken bodies left and right into the rough passage walls. He ended with the two ghasts still facing Varo, taking one down with a blow that smashed its head like an overripe melon, and following with a sideswipe that caved in the torso of the second.

“Is... that... all?” he asked, his chest heaving.

Varo nodded. He touched Dar, channeling healing energy into him. He did the same for Tiros, granting him a more potent spell that closed the terrible wounds that he’d suffered in the brief but violent battle. The short passage resembled an abattoir, with blood and bodies everywhere. It sucked at their boots, as they walked. Varo was the only one not splashed with it. Tiros, still suffering from the sickening effect of the ghasts’ presence, bent over and voided his stomach.

“Come on,” Varo said. A hint of the power he’d summoned still hung about him, giving him an added measure of presence. “Let’s see what these monsters were guarding.”

The room beyond the door was shaped like a giant five-pointed star. A smaller pentagram was set into the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by battered wooden coffins, some little more than scraps of wood clinging together hopefully. There were bones everywhere, layered almost half a foot deep in some corners of the room. There were also numerous mounds of assorted trash, and the occasional glint of metal from their torches. The place smelled absolutely foul, and was almost as rank as the chamber where they’d encountered the dung monster, above.

“No exits,” Tiros reported, once he’d given the room a quick scan.

“What have we here,” Dar said, kicking a pile of refuse and lifting a short sword. The weapon was cast in an antique style, with a thick crossguard and a dense single-edged blade, but to his surprise, when he tested it he found it still razor-sharp.

“This is Olmaran steel,” he said. “This sword has to be ten years old, if not twice that. A masterwork blade.”

Varo, standing at the edge of the pentagram, looked around. “I would imagine that these monsters have been collecting from the remains of their victims for quite some time,” he said. He looked sad, but he turned away from the others, perhaps unwilling to share the source of his gloom.

“Hey, there’s gold here... a lot of it!” Dar reported. Tiros, looking around, had come up with a light steel shield that was etched with the sign of a rearing lion. “There does seem to be some useful material here, but it will be hard to find it with all this junk about.”

“You got a more pressing appointment?” Dar said, kicking away more bones as he continued to search. In addition to the sword, he’d filled a small sack with coins, and he uncovered more as he kept sifting through the mess.

“I can help,” Varo said. The cleric cast a detect magic spell, and began pointing to areas where magical auras were located.

The spell revealed a good deal. They found a quiver of arrows buried under a heap of bones that radiated magic, a punching dagger, a throwing axe, a hefty warhammer, and three vials that contained magical potions. Varo took the potions, while the two fighters argued over the weapons. Tiros, equipped with Valor, had little interest in most of the weapons, but he took the throwing axe, and a silvered but otherwise mundane dagger that he turned up. Dar took the rest of the weapons, except for a heavy mace that was also of masterwork quality, that he turned over to Varo as a replacement for the shoddy weapon he’d drawn from Sobol’s cache. The fighter also found a shortbow with a still-viable string, obviously a recent acquisition by the ghouls, and a new breastplate to replace the suit he’d lost before.

“Now I feel properly dressed,” Dar said, as he rejoined the others. The fighter was positively bristling with weapons, with several jutting from his belt, slung across his back, or sticking out from his backpack.

“Can you handle all that weight?” Tiros asked. The fighter had found a good quantity of gold and silver coins among all the trash, and once he’d filled his sack, he’d just started dumping handfuls into his pack.

“Don’t worry about me, marshal.”

They’d searched the room for more secret doors, but it didn’t look like there were any other exits.

“I guess it’s back out into the dungeon,” Dar said, as they gathered again near the door.

“We need to find water soon,” Tiros said. “And we’re almost out of torches.”

“Cheer up, marshal,” Dar said, as they made their way out. “We’re alive, we’re armed to the teeth, and we’re reasonably rich. It could be worse.”

He had no idea how right he was, as the three of them made their way back into the main corridors of Rappan Athuk.

 

[jfaller]

Wow...

What a close call. Well written LB! Great conveyance of dire straights. ;-)

Keep em coming my good man.

 

[Brogarn]

Whew! Finally I get a chance to get over here and start reading what I'm sure will be another entertaining story. Welcome back, LB.

Now to start reading. Woot.

 

[Brogarn]

And woot! Caught up!

Holy crap, this is a good one, LB! So far, this one is my hands down favorite of yours. I'm hoping that elf comes back, though, because I'm very curious about him.

And Dar rocks. Gotta love the pragmatic smart ass.

 

[Lazybones]

Glad I was able to properly convey the intensity of that clash, jfaller. Thanks for the kudos.

And glad to see you on board, Brogarn! You read fast... although I checked and it's only been 37k words thus far. I have a ways to go to get to match The Shackled City, which ended up at 734 thousand...

And we continue, with at least one Bastard's fortunes having taken a turn for the worse...

* * * * *

Chapter 27

RUNNING IN CIRCLES


Tiros could not move. His lungs felt like they were on fire with every breath, and he felt like he was drowning, all of his efforts barely sucking in enough air to keep him alive. Every now and then he coughed, and those moments were the worst, ending with him gasping desperately for air.

“Is he going to live?” came a voice. Familiar, yet not quite identifiable. All he could think about was the pain, and everything else faded into the background.

“I do not know. He is fighting hard, but there is barely any strength left in him.”

“I know. I only caught a bare whiff of that stuff, and I feel like I’ve been on a two-day bender. What in the hells was that crap?”

“Yellow mold. It is exceptionally... toxic. If he succumbs, we will have to burn the body, or it will become dangerous to us as well.”

Tiros felt like he was falling, the voices swirling away as he fell into a weird semi-conscious haze. In that narrow space between life and death, images formed, as recent events replayed themselves in his mind...

* * * * *

After the desperate battle with the ghouls, the three survivors of the Doomed Bastards had taken their new gear and returned to the corridors of Rappan Athuk. They made their way back into the entry room through which they had first entered the level, cautious lest they encounter either the wererats they had fought above, or the implacable dung monster. But the room was as empty as the first time they had entered it.

There were two doors that they had not explored last time. Choosing the first, they had found a corridor that had twisted around several bends before depositing them in a small crypt. There were several somewhat fresh bodies decomposing in the chamber; a dead human woman lying in an open stone coffin, and what looked like a goblin sprawled out on the ground next to it.

But before they had a chance to investigate the bodies, a rumbling sound from an arched exit in the wall to the right had drawn their attention. They crept to the entry to find a passage occupied by an iron ball festooned with hundreds of spikes. The odd device was rolling up and down the corridor seemingly of its own volition. As it had approached the companions had drawn back cautiously, but it slowed as it neared the arch, and ultimately retreated back in the opposite direction. They had watched it complete several such circuits before they retreated back to talk.

“Well, that’s the dumbest trap I’ve ever seen,” Dar commented. “You’d have to be as stupid as Ukas to walk into that corridor.”

“Perhaps there is something valuable on the far side,” Varo noted.

“We should investigate the other door first,” Tiros said. In the weird haze of his dying dream, it was as if he hovered over himself, watching himself speak. “If we do need to go this way, perhaps we could rig a shield using the materials in the storeroom we found earlier.”

In his disembodied state, Tiros saw Dar kneel to search the body of the dead woman. He was merely an observer, and so he could not warn the fighter, could not do anything as he watched Dar rear back, looking down at his hands in horror. The fighter spat a curse.

“What is it?” the then-Tiros said, coming over to him. But Varo was faster, lifting his torch to shine it on the fighter’s hands. There were... things bulging under the flesh, moving...

“Rot grubs,” Varo said. “Do not move,” he said to Dar.

“But what are you.... aah!” the fighter yelled, as Varo thrust his torch at the fighter’s hand. Dar jerked back. “What in the hells are you doing?”

Varo did not hesitate. “The grubs are burrowing deeper as we speak. If they get deep enough within your flesh to avoid the flame, you are dead. You have seconds to decide. I will heal you afterwards, but this is the only way.”

Dar looked wide-eyed at Tiros, then back at the cleric. He nodded, and thrust out his hands.

The fighter’s screams echoed loudly in the crypt.

Afterwards, Varo was as good as his word, and he used his divine powers to heal the fighter’s blackened hands. The grubs were all destroyed—or at least Tiros had presumed so, since he didn’t drop dead—but there had been a haunted look on Dar’s face as they left the crypt and retraced their steps. The fighter had confronted the various horrors of Rappan Athuk with a grim stoicism, but somehow this, where a careless touch could mean a slow and certain death, had unnerved him.

The other door back in the entry room had led around in a circle that had ultimately connected with the corridor of the rolling ball. It had also contained the black skeletons.

The dream-Tiros watched as the creatures came up behind them, disgorged from a secret room that they had missed in their exploration. Their bodies were a flawless ebony, each carrying a pair of ancient shortswords that were surrounded with the faintest hint of a cerise glow. A foul aura surrounded them, and their torches dimmed as the creatures drew near, as if the light itself sought to flee at their arrival. They ignored Varo’s rebuke, laying into them with their weapons, striking with expert strokes that avoided parries and clipped through armor. There were five of them in all, and for a moment it had looked like the three humans were doomed. Watching the battle again, Tiros felt a tremor as he recalled feeling just that, as a pair of skeletons flanked him, cutting deep gashes in his torso with their blades. His own strike with Valor had been almost useless, as the creatures lacked skin or organs to cut.

Then Dar had laid into them. The fighter fought with a berserk insanity, dropping his shield and nearly useless sword, and taking up the magical club that he’d won from the mad barbarian that had murdered Navev. The weapon proved deadly effective where Tiros’s sword had not, and the fighter had reduced the first skeleton to bone shards within moments, immediately slamming into the next.

Even so, it had been close, damned close. By the time that the last skeleton had fallen, all three of them had been covered with trails of their own blood. Varo and Tiros had worked together to bring down one of the monsters, but Dar had destroyed the other four. The fighter staggered, and would have fallen had not the others caught him. A jagged shard of bone from one of the creatures stuck through Dar’s right bicep, dripping blood, and one of his ears hung from a slender dongle of flesh, nearly hacked from his head from a blow that had shorn off the cheek-guard of his helmet.

“I hate this freaking place,” Dar had said.

After Varo had restored them as much as he could—using up the last charges of his wand in the process—they had continued their search. They briefly revisited the chamber where they had fought the barbarian, only to find that both bodies, his and Navev’s, were gone.

“I’m sure the ghouls had a nice meal,” Dar had said, but now, as the dream-Tiros watched himself and the others leave, he felt a cold chill, and suddenly he wasn’t quite sure.

Having circled the level, the three had elected to check one of the rooms they had passed, the packed-dirt chamber near where they’d first encountered the ogres. Leery of the uncertain-looking ceiling, they made their way into the corridor on the far side of that room. The place proved more sturdy that it had looked at first glance, and they soon found themselves in another large cavern.

Memory began to return as the dream-Tiros watched the three men enter the place. The scene began to blur, and he felt himself falling into a soft gray. But he forced himself to watch what happened next.

The place was full of fungi of all shapes and descriptions, clinging to the walls, forming mounds that turned the floor of the cavern into a subterranean forest. But the three men’s attention had been focused on the more obvious feature of the place, one that had given them immediate hope.

“Sunlight!” Dar exclaimed. The shaft was narrow and diffuse, and it came from the far end of the place, from a deep cleft in the ceiling, but the source of the light was too... pure, to be anything else than that.

The screaming that had followed the fighter’s words came from the ground, the wall, everywhere; it was as if Rappan Athuk itself was shouting its defiance at this new hope that had shown itself to the three men.

In response to the piercing shriek, the three could see movement among the dense knots of tall fungi stalks. A dozen man-sized, shuffling things, resembling nothing more than animate, purple-colored toadstools, emerged from the forest and shuffled toward them. Long violet tendrils dangled from around the perimeter of their bloated caps, probing the air.

Varo was screaming something that the others couldn’t quite hear over the continued shrieking. The cleric shoved past Dar, who was waving his sword in a wary defensive stance, and grabbed something off the floor. Tiros hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, but now as he hovered above the scene he could see that it was the corpse of a giant rat. Or at least what was left of it; half of the creature’s body had rotted away.

Varo hurled the rat at the approaching mushrooms. The dead creature hit one of the toadstools, and was immediately tangled up in one of the creature’s tendrils. Varo’s message got across clearly this time; they could all see the thing fall to pieces, the flesh coming apart, sloughing off the rat’s bones to fall in limp heaps before the fungus-creature.

Just in case they didn’t get the message, Varo grabbed Dar’s arm and pulled him back. The creatures were moving slowly, but they were within twenty feet now, and their tendrils began to extend toward them, seeking.

Tiros could only watch the dream-image of himself as he drew back in alarm. Now he could see the dense patch of yellow growths that he stepped into, and the cloud of violent mist that exploded out from the mold, engulfing him.

That was the last that he remembered. The scene dissolved into gray, and Tiros fell back into the cold embrace of oblivion.

 

[jfaller]

"..and Tiros fell back into the cold embrace of oblivion."

Uh...oblivion? As in gacked? Croaked? Bit it? Or is he only "partly dead"? Where's Miracle Max when you need him?

Man they're goners... Varo and Dar are a done deal now. No way that two under-prepared adventurers could make it out of Rappan Athuk alive.

 

[Brogarn]

I don't imagine that LB had a TPK in mind when he started this up so I'm anxious to see how the DB's get out of this. They're basically screwed (only I'd use stronger language) unless they get reinforcements or a crap load of good luck.

And if Tiros is dead already I'm going to be mighty bummed.

 

[Lazybones]

There are times when it's almost too much to bear, knowing what's coming ahead. *cue evil laughter*

* * * * *

Chapter 28

TOUGH DECISIONS


With a start, Tiros was thrust back into consciousness. This time, he was aware of his surroundings, although it was as if someone had hung a cloth of thin gauze over his eyes; everything was fuzzy, indistinct. He was lying on his back, and he could not move, not even to turn his head. His breath still rattled in his throat, but at least he could breathe; he was alive.

The voices that he’d heard earlier were still there, talking quietly a short distance away. Dar and Varo.

“We should go back, once you’ve restored the marshal,” Dar was saying. “We’re close to the surface, if natural sunlight could make its way into that cavern.”

“And how do you presume we make it out, without rope, or climbing tools?”

“Think of a way. Maybe the marshal will have some ideas. Maybe we can build something, with those construction supplies in that other room... a scaffold?”

“It might work, if that cavern were not populated by the violet fungi, the patches of yellow mold, or the shriekers, which will bring every wandering monster within a mile down upon us. I would not even be surprised if the Duke’s men could hear them, above.”

There was a clatter of metal on stone; it sounded like Dar had thrown something across the room. “Well at least I’m trying. Do you want to get out of here, or not?”

“Believe me, I want to get out of here as much as you—”

“What...” Through a supreme effort, Tiros managed to speak. The one word was all he managed to get out before his weakened body forced him to focus on breathing, but Varo had heard him. A moment later, both the cleric and the fighter—or at least he assumed it was them; they were barely outlines to his damaged vision—appeared above him.

“You really want to live, I’ll give you that, marshal,” Dar said.

“Can you take water?” Varo asked. When Tiros nodded, the cleric helped prop him up, lowering a nearly-empty skin to his lips. The cold liquid made Tiros start coughing again, but it was worth it; the stuff soothed his ravaged throat, and seemed to clear away the worst of the fog that clouded his senses.

The marshal looked around, but still couldn’t see clearly enough to discern their surroundings. “Where... where are we?” he managed to ask.

“Jammed deep up the bunghole of a freaking demon prince, that’s where we are,” Dar said.

“We’re back in the locked storeroom,” Varo said. “It seemed like the most secure location on the level. We’ve cleared everything else.”

“Not everything,” Dar said. “There’s still the black door.”

“You must trust me when I tell you that the only thing that lies in that direction is death,” Varo replied.

“Bah. Death lies behind every damned door in this place. You’ve been less than forthcoming, priest.”

“Without my powers, you would both be dead, several times over,” Varo said. “If you find my companionship too trying, you are welcome to set out on your own, mercenary.”

Dar scowled, but didn’t say anything more.

“No... other... exits?” Tiros asked.

“Nothing that we could find,” Varo replied. “But to be honest, we haven’t done much other than recover from the fungus cavern. We narrowly managed to get you out of there; Dar got a whiff of the mold spores that took you down, and was hit by one of the violet fungi tentacles as well. We managed to drag you out of there just in time, before they could overwhelm us; they followed for a short distance, but couldn’t get through the door to the outer passage.”

Dar smirked, although Tiros thought that his features were somewhat haggard. “I guess I’m just made of sterner stuff than you, marshal.”

Tiros nodded. Exhaustion surged back over him; just the brief exchange had stolen all his strength. Varo saw it. “Just rest. We seem to be secure here for the moment; once I rest again I will do my best to restore you and Dar.”

“And then what?” the fighter asked.

Tiros managed to cling to consciousness for a few more seconds. “And then, we keep going,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

And then he was asleep.

 

[Richard Rawen]

Cool!
Heh, nothing more to say really, just having fun with your frequent updates and awesome storytelling.

 

[Brogarn]

Ahhh. Nothing like a hot cup of coffee and another piece of the story to read during my morning break.