Frostborn: The First Quest

by Jonathan Moeller

  Chapter 6 - The Swordbearer

  Ridmark moved through a silent corridor, Heartwarden ready in his fist. Stone statues stood in niches lining the corridor, showing dark elven warriors in elaborate armor or wizards in ornate robes, their alien expressions so lifelike that Ridmark almost felt the arrogance and contempt pouring off them. After everything else he had seen in this evil place, he half-expected the statues to come to life and attack him. Who knew what terrors the black sorcery of the dark elves could unleash?

  Certainly it would explain the bones and broken armor that littered the floor of the corridor. Ridmark saw more orcish bones, the fanged skulls of beastmen, the delicate skulls of dark elves, and bones he did not even recognize. There had been a great deal of violence in the dungeons of Urd Morlemoch.

  But the statues remained motionless as he passed them.

  Ridmark kept walking.

  He had twice fought and defeated urvaalgs after leaving the urshanes’ lair. So far he had seen none of the mutated blue orcs in the tunnels. Perhaps they only lurked on the surface and never entered the dungeons.

  Which made sense, given that the urvaalgs and the urshanes would likely kill them.

  The corridor opened into another hall, and Ridmark paused. Both times he had fought the urvaalgs, they had been lurking in halls like this, no doubt to use their superior speed and agility in the larger space.

  This hall looked different from the others.

  It bore no decorations, no reliefs, no statues. No balconies, even, and the ceiling was not vaulted. The walls were two slabs of unadorned white stone, rough and unpolished. Ridmark saw another archway in the far wall, more stairs climbing up. Two plates of blue dark elven steel stood affixed to the wall on either side of the archway.

  Bones littered the floor, along with crushed pieces of armor and twisted weapons.

  The bones bore no sign of claw or tooth marks. Instead they looked as if they had been crushed, as if some hulking giant had squeezed his foes to a pulp with his bare hands.

  That was a disturbing thought. Some of the dark elves’ creations had the kind of strength.

  Ridmark took another step forward, and the stone tile beneath his foot sank a few inches into the ground.

  He heard a loud, metallic click, followed by the grinding sound of stone upon stone.

  And before he could react, a slab of white stone slid across the far archway, sealing it off. He spun, hoping to retreat through the archway he had used to enter the hall, but another slab fell over it.

  He had walked right into a mechanical trap. The dark elves had filled their strongholds with such things. Given their love of cruelty, the dark elves had delighted in a particularly well-constructed trap, watching as their victims died a slow death in the grasp of unfeeling machinery.

  Ridmark turned again, Heartwarden raised in guard. Would the trap keep him sealed in here until he died of thirst? That seemed like the sort of torment the dark elves would enjoy. But that did not explain how those broken bones had ended up on the floor. Had the trap sealed him in here with a deadly creature, one that had the ability to turn invisible? Ridmark's eyes scanned the room. He saw no trace of the telltale rippling that indicated the presence of an urvaalg. He looked at the flat ceiling, wondering if something lurked up there, but saw only empty stone.

  Then he heard another metallic click.

  A shudder went through the floor, and the walls on either side of Ridmark began to slide towards him.

  He looked at the bones, at the walls, and then back at the bones, and suddenly knew exactly how those skulls had been crushed.

  A surge of sheer panic went through him. Heartwarden’s magic gave him superhuman strength to match the power of an urvaalg, but not even a soulblade could give him strength enough to rip open those stone doors. It certainly could not give him the strength to stop those massive blocks.

  He looked back and forth, his heart racing. The walls were not moving quickly, but the room was already two or three feet smaller. In another few minutes, he would not have enough room to move, and then he was going to die quite painfully.

  It might have been better to let the urshanes or the urvaalgs kill him.

  Ridmark looked for something, anything, that would let him find a way to escape. He did not know much about machines, about gears and levers and screws. The Dux’s engineers and blacksmiths attended to that, men with faces dark from soot and grease as they labored to repair and maintain the catapults and ballistae upon the walls of Castra Marcaine.

  Maintenance…

  His eyes fixed on the plates of blue dark elven steel on either side of the far archway.

  The rest of the room was built of white stone. Why hang those plates on the wall there, without any artwork upon them?

  Unless the dark elves had needed a way to maintain the guts of the machine powering the trap.

  Ridmark raced across the chamber, drew on Heartwarden’s power, and wrenched at the blue plate. The metal groaned, and then pulled away from the wall with a shriek. Behind it Ridmark saw a set of whirling gears of black metal, clicking and clanking. Each of the gears looked as if they weighed as much as Ridmark. If he stuck his hand in there, it would be torn to pulp. If he tried to stab the gears with Heartwarden, they would rip the sword from his grasp.

  He struck his fist against his side in frustration, and felt the weight of the dwarven axe in his belt. It had hung forgotten during his fight with the urvaalgs and the urshanes. But dwarven steel was the finest metal in the world, harder and lighter and stronger than anything else.

  Ridmark rammed Heartwarden back into its scabbard and drew the dwarven axe, taking the haft in both hands. The walls shuddered closer, the grinding growing louder.

  He had to act now.

  Ridmark swung the axe with all his strength into the gears.

  The blade sank into one of the gears and got stuck. The turning motion of the gear wrenched the weapon from his hand. The gear continued to rotate against its neighbor, and the axe got pulled into the teeth. The gears stopped with a horrible metallic screech, shivering like a rope under too much tension.

  And ropes under tension broke.

  Ridmark ducked into the meager shelter of the archway.

  An instant later the gears exploded out of the open panel. One bounced off the floor with a tremendous clang and stopped against the base of the moving wall. Another shattered into a dozen jagged pieces. The walls stopped, shuddered a few times, and then stopped again.

  The slab of stone next to Ridmark slid back into the ceiling with a low rasp. Ridmark grunted, got to his feet, and looked into the opened panel. The smashed gears quivered, the axe trembling in their midst. The machinery looked like it was still under stress.

  And if the axe gave out, Ridmark suspected bad things would happen.

  He hastened away from the panel and up the stairs, leaving the chamber of the trap behind.

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