by Ben Stivers
Then the cocoon flattened and undulated, slid across the top of him, much larger than the smaller infant Alones. Despair rose, but he denied the dire emotion, assuring himself that nowhere in the world was he ever alone. If nothing else, he would always be in Scralz’s thoughts.
Distracting himself, he reflected upon the pregnant Alone. If it could be pregnant, how—a small piece of a human finger floated past his eye, so close he anticipated it would poke him. The finger was thin, slim, nearly childlike, but not quite. A small woman’s perhaps.
That was how they multiplied. They propagated themselves by ingesting human flesh, and if this particular one were an example, the people of Hellsgate had a menace on their hands. He had seen this sort of thing before, and infectious, deliberate predators such as these did not occur by themselves. Something wicked lived under Hellsgate, something more than these creatures. He needed to uncover the way back to the surface to let the others know.
Another hour passed before he had fully withdrawn from the cavern, tiptoed away for a small distance, lit a torch and then ran until he reached the point where he had agreed to meet his men.
With three torches left, he waited, looking upward, hoping they would soon return and with enough rope to haul him out of his wakeful nightmare.
Wolf and two other men sprinted along the path the men had marked with four fifty-stride ropes. It had taken a good bit of time to gather that much rope.
“It’s right up ahead,” the lead man advised, and true to his word, there was the gap in the wall. Had one walked through it in the dark, it would have been a deadly fall to the stalagmites below and plenty of time to think of all the things you might have done with your life besides explore a labyrinth.
While they examined the hole, a hand torch lit up the broad chamber below. Wolf saw the flame, but seeing Anthony remained difficult in the heavy gloom.
“Hurry!” Anthony called, which confirmed to Wolf that his friend and not someone else, was at the bottom of the lurid well, but who else could it be? His mind offered a few swarthy suggestions, but he set them aside.
The men dropped the first length of rope, then tied it to the second, securing it tightly.
“Make sure the knot cannot slide,” he said, compelled to say so, but knowing that the men would. They threw the second set into the hole, two of them holding tightly to ensure no slip occurred. Anthony would not be able to throw the rope back up.
“I can almost reach it,” Anthony called. Like the first two, they tied the third and threw down about half the coil. “Got it!”
“Tie on,” Wolf said. “Don’t bother to climb, we will pull you!”
After a few moments, Anthony called up. “Ready!”
With the rope wrapped around the three of them, Wolf and the two men began to haul. The rope scratched along the edge, allowing them to haul Anthony up from the floor until they reached the first knot. At that point, the rope bound to the edge of the hole, the knot preventing it from continuing.
“Damn it!” Wolf growled. “Stop! Stop! We have to let him back down. This is not going to work. Anthony! We are letting you back down. We need to redo this!”
When the rope went slack, Wolf said, “We can’t all have the rope tied to us. Here is what we will do. Alternate the side of the rope. As we back up four steps, the man in the rear come to the front with a call out first. When we get to the knot, move one at a time to get two to the hole. Pull the rope up past the knot and then repeat. Always two of us have a firm grip. Is that understood?”
The men said they did and Wolf called down. “We’re ready!”
Anthony yelled with some franticness in his voice. “Hurry! Something is coming. Pull!”
When his feet had touched back down on the ground, Anthony felt his hope of rescue slipping away. Wolf’s assurances otherwise shored him back up and then in the silence between, he heard a slithering sound approaching from the direction of the chamber.
“We’re ready!”
Anthony called back urging them to hurry as through the opening a scant forty paces away, and at the edge of his torchlight, an Alone slithered into the same chamber as he.
The thing squalled and leapt forward half the distance in the first bound. The rope pulled tight and Anthony felt himself rise up quickly into the air and then pause nearly ten feet up. He felt certain the Alone would have no problem reaching him from the way he had seen them stretch across the street. If it grabbed him, Wolf and the other men above would have a terrible surprise.
“Heave!” he shouted. “It’s coming!”
Another strong haul as the Alone leapt again, landing but a few feet from where Anthony had just stood. Exuding an ear-deafening yowl, the slimy creature threw itself upward.
At the same moment, the rope hauled him further, but the Alone stretched, its front row of razor teeth clamping onto Anthony’s boot. Immediately, he felt the rope slip down a foot and his leg felt as though it would be pulled out of the socket.
How could the damned thing weigh so much? Looking down to kick it in the face, he saw that the Alone had not lunged upward, but stretched upward, its tentacles anchored to the rock floor like miner’s spikes. The rope pulled again and a lightning twinge ran up his leg and through his spine. Air left his lungs and refused to reenter as the rope constricted around him in a monumental tug-of-war.
He kicked the beast in the face, but it paid him no attention, as if nothing he could do could even distract it from its meal. He kicked again as the rope tugged again and the Alone yanked back. He felt like a rag in a tugging match with a large dog. The only thing giving was Anthony’s body.
Still, the opening above was closer. Another pull like the last and he would be half the way but only half of him. Thinking quickly, he kicked again, but this time, not the Alone, but his boot.
Once. Twice. The boot slipped.
“Anthony!” Wolf called. Anthony could hear the frustration in his voice as the first third of the rope reached the opening. Anthony kicked frantically. Dizziness pushed against his eyes as his lungs crushed.
Suddenly, something flew past his face, nearly striking him. He tried to look up, but his arms had already started to lose their grip and his head felt too heavy to left. Thus, he was looking down through a tunnel of his fading vision when the flask struck the Alone flat on its snout, burst, and liquid splashed down its side.
A banshee would have made less noise as the thing released his boot and tumbled back to the floor, melting and coiling on the floor like a headless snake. Scralz had sent the gold elixir!
In the distance, an answering howl echoed, but not far away. As the rope resumed its strain, Anthony attempted to raise his head to no avail. It was easier to close his eyes and let go.
When Wolf and his crew hefted Anthony through the opening, the knot in the rope was so tight they could not loosen it.
“Get out of the way,” Wolf ordered, and with the flash of his skilled knife, the rope gave way before steel. Without checking to see if Anthony was breathing, Wolf put some more of Scralz elixir in his own mouth, tilted Anthony’s head back and blew it into him.
After a few seconds, Anthony shuddered, took a first good deep breath and opened his eyes. A terrible fear resided there as he tried to back up the tunnel before realizing he was safe. He snatched the flask from Wolf and drew a long drawl. Gasping, he said, “We have to get out of here. We have to get out now. No questions.”
“Go,” Wolf ordered, unsure why they needed to hurry. They had disabled the Alone that had chased his friend, and from the howling down below, he knew its mate must still be down there. A couple of Alones did not instill a lot of fear for a man who had seen the horrors that Wolf had seen. Still, he also knew not to ask questions if a rescued man said to run. Quickly, he put Anthony’s arm around his neck. “I’ve got him. Go!”
The other two men took off down the hall as quickly as they could, both holding hand torches. As they got underway, Wolf asked, “Can you make it?”
“I think so, but one favor?”
Wolf kept them moving and Anthony grew stronger as they went. “Sure. What’s that?”
“Don’t ever kiss me again.”
Chapter 16
Scralz did not consider that the end of her hard life would come on a bright summer afternoon. She stirred a freshly blended cauldron of elixir over the wood stove in the back room of the Dead Whore Tavern, hoping she would not need the extra cask, but knowing she might before the Alones and Snipes problem came to an end. She spent her few spare moments wondering how Anthony, Wolf and the contubernium of Templars fared down in the labyrinth beneath the streets of Hellsgate. Intertwined with that, she thought of Arthur. When last she had seen Crabwell, he had told her that Arthur would recover, but that he had not yet awakened.
“Your wife is going to kick your ass when she sees you next,” Scralz had muttered, a departing swipe at the wounded and unconscious Arthur, but even that well aimed barb had not jostled him from the concoction Crabwell had slipped into Arthur’s tea.
She could not fault Crabwell. Arthur was a cranky patient and his lack of concern for his own condition would someday kill him if Shanay were not there to badger him. Several days had passed already and Wolf had been fidgety to get on with the mystery of the Alones and Snipes. Several nights of stalking them from the rooftops had turned up nothing, but no one else that they knew of had vanished from the town.
The elixir had begun to thicken and reached its amber point. Soon the liquid would turn a sweet honey color that told her it was done. She stuck her finger into the boiling cauldron, flinched only slightly for her troll hide did not scorch easily. Withdrawing the digit, she poked it into her mouth for a taste.
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, not because of the luscious taste of the stuff, but because she mentally percolated a dash of this and a smidgeon of that. Usually, she had Anthony to compare thoughts with, but he was probably badgering Wolf’s ear with his charming chatter. She smirked at that thought. Served Wolf right.
Turning from the cauldron, she crossed the room to a door in the floor and hauled the slab of wood open by a heavy cast iron ring. Steps lead down into the root cellar. As hot and muggy as the day was, even inside the tavern, the root cellar blessed her with a breath of coolness as she pulled the door up and rested it against the wall.
Still considering the ingredients she wanted to add to the latest batch of elixir, she started down the steps. The room was nearly as large as the tavern’s serving room, but did not open out under the tavern above. Instead, the room ran out under the ground beyond where the alley ended. Had anyone taken the time to search, they might have found another trap door buried under a few inches of dirt, but no one wandered around behind the buildings of Hellsgate in search of hidden doors.
Not much good could come of that. What was in Hellsgate that was worth the trouble?
During the reign of the Apostles, Rumbar hid many a fugitive in that room, but those years were long ago. Now, the room contained a variety of goods, including rakes, hoes, vegetables, plants from as far north as one could travel and as far as the Sawtooth. There were bags of human waste that she sold to the farmers to fertilize the crops in the distant countryside. Besides them, she had collected several sealed urine barrels from a trough she had built under the street. The urine she used to bleach her rags. She traded any overage she had to a trader that passed between Hellsgate and Ploor and she had made quite a profit from the arrangement.
“Should have thought of it earlier,” she mumbled, casting her gaze to the left and about several crates of herbs.
Had she two good eyes, she might have seen the hole behind the piled sacks of potatoes. If she had been cooking stew instead of elixir to pay off the Downs for Arthur’s medicinal needs, she might have seen the loose dirt on the packed dirt floor.
If she had been a human, she might not have heard the Snipe as it sprang from the shadows.
Octavus and Joanie spent four days building pyres, placing two druids upon each one. On the first day, they sent Lieala to the Wheel, followed on the next day by two pyres at a time, using the branches hewn from the fallen trees. Octavus worked quietly, giving her time to grieve, think through the horrendous deed that had been done, and what Mrandor’s being alive would mean to Drybridge.
Three of the archdruids were unaccounted for in the wreckage, but Joanie and Octavus only knew that by numbers. On the evening of the fourth day, a bobbing dot poked up from the horizon, then finally a single young man in a brown robe.
He had a square face, curvaceous hair and a long beard. His blue eyes hinted years far beyond his face. He had a squatted nose that looked as though it wanted to eat his face. His eyes carried weight and his mouth scribed an eternal frown, but when he spoke, his voice was kind.
“My name is Leet. I come in answer to a great shriek. Who are you and what has happened here?”
“Are you a druid?” Octavus asked, instinctively inserting himself between Joanie and the man. He had never seen Mrandor and neither had she. She understood his tension. She edged left of him, but did not try to step around.
“I am the great-grandson of Lock,” he replied. Had Joanie not spent the many months with her grandmother, she would not have known what that meant. “I am the Unifier of clans. I will one day be a Council member.”
“A necromancer slaughtered the Council,” Octavus injected much more bluntly than Joanie would have liked.
“That is—improbable,” Leet replied, his eyes looking at the ring of destruction and back at Octavus repeatedly as though sorting through what he saw and what he believed.
“Unfortunately, the circumstance is dreadful, Leet. I am Octavus, former soldier in Rome’s Legion. This is my wife, Joanie. She is the granddaughter of the archdruid Lieala, but Lieala was killed with the others. Three of your brethren remain unaccounted for.”
Neither man showed any remorse, as if this sort of thing happened every day. Deciding to take Octavus at his word, Leet remarked, “Apparently, they were murdered by—a snare,” he said, and bent down and touched the ground at his feet, traced his finger in the dirt and tasted it. “Blunt magic. Foul.”
He spat.
“The same as near the shore where Daemon left,” Leet continued, looking at Joanie and suddenly dismissing Octavus as if he had left the conversation.
“Daemon was my grandfather,” Joanie added, not wishing to disengage the discussion.
“Of course, of course,” Leet replied, but his eyes were trained on the shattered forest. “Sister, these trees. It is their cry that summoned me.”
Leet took in the entire scene, slowly turning, stopping for a reverent moment at each burning pyre and burned out pyre to nod his head. “Excuse me,” he said after completing a full turn. Tugging on his beard, he went to the center of the circle and knelt, took out seven colored stones and beckoned Joanie to come and kneel with him.
Octavus said to Joanie, “Let’s get back to this. We need to finish and get to Drybridge.”
“Wait,” she said, curbing his impatience. “Let’s see what he has in mind before we bolt to Drybridge.”
The two knelt down across a small circle with Leet.
“You seem true of heart,” he said. He looked down at the center of the circle. “I suspected I would find a murderous scene when I came, though I had hoped my intuition attempted to trick me. Even so, I did not think it would be you that I found here alive, nor the Council the ones who are dead.” Joanie narrowed her eyebrows, questioning him with her eyes. “I asked you into this circle for a single reason.”
“What might that be?” she replied.
Leet paused, looked around and then back at the two of them. “My followers have been here since the second day after the killing. Seeing strangers among the dead, I suspected you were responsible. Yet, we have no reason to believe you are not who you say you are. You observed the proper rights.”
“Who is we?” asked Octavus.
Leet raised both hands in
a lifting action. Around them hundreds of wild-haired clan members stood up, painted in dark green and brown paints. “You did not see us. Could we have, we would have continued our charade, but what comes, you cannot stand against alone. That something, however, will not be us.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I do not,” Leet admitted, “but I know the sickness that wove this spell. The Council has seen the like of it before. All druids of any age know this wickedness. We will need the help of all of the clans if we are to get the populace safely away.”
Octavus sighed. “We have no time for puzzles, riddle-maker.”
“I remember you now,” Leet said, shaking his finger at Octavus and ignoring Octavus’ soft slur. “You were in Britannia for a time when Rome stalked us through the land.”
Octavus raised an eyebrow, gazed long at Leet and replied, “I was.”
“You were as impatient then as now. Yet, you were kind to a small boy in a village. That boy was me.”
Octavus remembered no such thing and said so.
“Here, here let me,” and Leet searched through his robe until he withdrew a hand hewn wooden knife. “You made this.”
Suddenly Octavus did remember. “You were this high,” and he raised his hand to his chest. “You had brown hair, darker than now. Dirty most of the time.”
“To my mother’s chagrin.”
Octavus took the meaning. “What has happened?”
“Much has happened, but that is not your doing. You were kind to my grandfather and my father and here I find you again, married to the granddaughter of an archdruid and at the scene of a catastrophe. The Mother does not cast die like this without reason. We must prepare for hostilities.”
“I have heard much of Mrandor’s armies from the past,” Joanie said. “My grandfather fought him on the large continent when my father was but a young man. Your bows will not stave his attack.”
“Let Me and my fellow druids worry about that. As for you, we must spirit you away. What Mrandor wants, he must not obtain.”