Felix heard them grind shut as he plunged into the stairway. A useless gesture, he thought. Even if they held, the palace was full of broken windows. As Max caught up with him, the roar of the approaching water drowned out every other noise. The party splashed breakneck down the last flight, slipping and clutching at the walls as water pushed at the back of their legs and rained down from above.
Then, just as they reached the bottom, with a noise like the world ending, a cataclysmic impact shook the palace, knocking them all off their feet and sending huge blocks of masonry crashing down from the ceiling all around them. Felix landed on top of Claudia, his shoulder screaming and his ears nearly bursting as a horrible pressure slammed them.
The whirlpool had closed.
Gotrek picked himself up from the knee-high water as rocks and dust continued to splash down. “Run!” he roared.
Felix found his feet and pulled Claudia up after him, slinging her over his shoulder again and slogging across the antechamber after the Slayer, dizzy from the pain and weaving drunkenly. A deafening thunder roared behind them. The palace doors? Felix didn’t dare look back.
After several endless seconds Felix trudged up the three steps to the vault with Claudia and stumbled through the half-open doors. Water was lapping over the raised threshold and spreading out in a puddle towards the treasures.
“To the side!” called Gotrek.
The elves and humans splashed to the right. Felix started to follow but tripped over the body of a dead elf and dropped Claudia again. The pain as he crashed down almost made him black out. He tried to rise, but his head was swimming too much. Then Gotrek’s powerful fingers grabbed his collar and pulled him across the floor. Rion was doing the same to Claudia. The whole room was shaking.
Felix looked back towards the vault doors as the Slayer dragged him aside. A frothing wall of water was blasting out of the stairwell towards the vault faster than stampeding horses. It’s over, he thought, cringing away from the sight. This is the end.
But then, just as he expected the full weight of the sea to burst in and batter them all to death against the walls of the vault, the doors slammed shut with a deafening boom, closed by the force of the water, and there was silence.
The elves and humans all looked at the doors in shock. They had held. Gotrek looked smug.
“We… we’re alive,” said Aethenir, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
“Good thinking, Slayer,” said Max.
“Dwarf work,” Gotrek grunted with a nod towards the doors. “The only doors I could trust not to break in this elf hovel.”
Aethenir sniffed. “That’s all very well, dwarf, but now you’ve trapped us under the sea. How am I to honour my pledge to Rion and make recompense for my crimes if we all die of asphyxiation down here?”
“Not asphyxiation, my lord,” said Rion, looking towards the doors. “Drowning.”
Everyone turned. The doors had held perfectly, but there was a knife-thin arc of water spraying through the narrow gap between them. The puddle on the floor continued to spread.
“Shallya’s mercy” moaned Claudia, staring with dull eyes. “You’ve made it worse. We might have been dead already. Now we must wait for it.”
Gotrek snorted. “You can all die down here if you like, but this will not be my doom. I’m getting out.”
“How?” asked Aethenir, in a voice tinged with hysteria.
“I’m still working that out,” said the Slayer, sitting down on a treasure chest and looking thoughtfully around the room.
Felix looked around with him. He had been too busy fighting or running until now to take in its details. Though the druchii had made a mess of it during their search for the harp, it was still a place filled with beauty. Below the witchlight chandeliers hanging above were neatly stacked treasure chests, ranks of statues carved from marble, alabaster and obsidian, jewelled suits of armour, beautiful swords, spears and axes, so delicate and exquisite that it seemed impossible that they could be used in battle, paintings, rugs, a throne of gold, complete with a deep blue canopy, and in one corner, a gilded war chariot—and all of it as bright and clean and unweathered as if the doors of the vault had closed yesterday and it had not spent the last four thousand years under the sea. Some elven magic, no doubt.
Aethenir threw up his hands. “He’s still working it out? You ordered us down here and you didn’t have a plan?”
“Would you have rather stayed above?” snarled Gotrek.
“I would rather you had waited for us to form some strategy before charging impetuously into battle with the druchii, dwarf,” snapped Aethenir.
“High one, please,” said Felix, trying to be a voice of reason so that he wouldn’t succumb to panic too. “We cannot change the past. Do you have any spells that might help us? Can you make us able to breathe water? Can you create a bubble of air?”
Aethenir blinked. “I… I can do none of those things. My few skills, as I said before, are in healing and divination.”
Felix turned to Max. “Max?”
The wizard shook his head. “Such spells exist, but they are not the purview of my college.”
Felix looked to Claudia. “Fraulein Pallenberger? You can make the wind blow. Can you not make air?”
She shook her head dully. “I require air to make a breeze. I cannot make it out of nothing.”
Felix sagged. No air. They were doomed. Even if they could get out of the sealed vault, their lungs would burst long before they reached the surface. Damn magic and damn all magicians too! All they seemed to be able to do was kill people and predict disaster. Never anything useful.
“Ha!” said Gotrek, standing.
Everyone, even the stoic Rion, turned to him with the eager light of hope in their eyes.
Gotrek strode past them towards the vault’s treasures. “Collect nine of the largest wooden treasure chests, the biggest rug, as much rope as you can find and the chains from those chandeliers.”
The others stared after him, dumbfounded.
“But, Slayer,” said Max, struggling for calm. “What do you intend to do? How will this get us to the surface?”
“Just do it!” snapped Gotrek, upending a treasure chest the size of a courtesan’s bathtub and spilling golden treasure in every direction. “We don’t have much time.”
By the time Felix, Rion and his elves had assembled the nine largest wooden treasure chests they could find, the water in the vault was up to their ankles. Gotrek collected the chandelier chains by the simple expedient of chopping through the winches mounted on the walls by which the chandeliers could be raised and lowered. They crashed to the ground in an explosion of delicate silver and crystal as the witchlights shattered. Aethenir wailed at this and the hundreds of priceless lost treasures uncaringly dumped on the floor, but the vandalism continued. While Felix and Gotrek and the elves worked, Aethenir and Max called them over one at a time and used their healing arts on them. Felix bit a piece of leather against the pain while Max used a pair of tweezers to tug bits of cloth and broken links of chainmail from the wound Felix had received from the druchii swordsman, all the while murmuring spells of cleansing. Then Aethenir attended to him, and though by this time Felix was of the general opinion that the elf needed his neck wrung at the earliest opportunity, in this at least he was a useful addition to the party. Felix watched amazed as his long, slim fingers weaved over the wound and seemed to sew it up without touching it. The skin around the puncture glowed from within and the wound began to knit together at the ends, and then gradually close towards the centre, until finally there was nothing left but a pink scar and a deep ache.
“It is still weak,” said the high elf when he had finished. “You must rest it for a few days.”
Felix looked around at where they were. “I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity, high one.”
Nonetheless he did his best not to tire it—leaving most of the heavy lifting to Gotrek and the elves, and instead pulling the gold tasselled ropes from the ca
nopy of the throne and coiling them. The elves stripped the ropes and leather straps from the gilded war chariot. Claudia, recovering slowly from the druchii sorceresses’ mind blasts, sat cross-legged on a chest and untied the cords that held ancient war banners to their poles. Max searched the vault and determined that the largest rug was rolled up in the back right corner, but by the time they found it, it was half-soaked in the rising water and it took Gotrek, Felix and Rion’s elves to carry it out to the corner into the open. Felix’s head spun with every step, his shoulder aching like a hammer blow.
When everything was brought together, Gotrek laid three of the gold tasselled ropes parallel on the ground near the door, each about a long pace apart—actually they floated in the water, but there was no dry space left to lay them now, so it had to do. Then he hacked the lids of the chests off with his axe and set the chests upside down on top of the ropes in three rows of three, wedged as close to each other and the door as possible. They bobbled and bumped a bit in the water, floating. Gotrek nailed the ends of the ropes to the sides of the chests with gold-headed nails pried from the golden throne.
“Now unroll the rug over the chests,” said Gotrek.
Felix, Rion and the elf warriors did as he asked, pushing and lifting the heavy rug until it covered the nine chests completely. Felix was still unsure what Gotrek was up to, but at least staying busy kept his mind off their impending drowning.
“Now the chains.” Gotrek picked up the end of one of the chains and started pulling it around the covered chests. Felix grabbed the other end and pulled the other way. They met on the far side of the chests with several feet of chain to spare. The elves did the same with the second chain.
“Tuck the carpet as close to the chests as you can while I pull,” said Gotrek, taking the two ends of one of the chains.
The rest of the party stepped to the chests, folding and pushing down on the carpet all around the edges of the chests as if trying to tuck in the sheets of a bed. All the while, Gotrek hauled on the ends of the chains, taking in the slack.
“I think I begin to see what you intend, Slayer,” said Max as they were at it. “The wooden chests will float, and also hold air, and binding them together keeps us together, and makes it harder for any of the chests to flip over and spill its air.”
“Aye,” grunted Gotrek, heaving again. “And the ropes underneath are to hold on to.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Aethenir. “Even if this bizarre contraption works, we will never get out of the vault. There are hundreds of thousands of pounds of water holding the doors shut!”
Gotrek snorted. “And you call yourself a scholar. When the vault fills with water it will equalise the pressure.”
“When the vault fills with water we will drown!” cried Aethenir.
Gotrek didn’t dignify this with a reply though Felix wished he had, because he wanted to know the answer too.
When the carpet and the first chain were as tight to the sides of the chests as they could make them, Gotrek attached a jewelled, dwarf-made crossbow to one end of the chain and hooked the cleat into the other end, then used the ratchet to winch the chain even tighter. When it was so tight Felix feared that a link would break, Gotrek lashed the crossbow in place with a length of the leather chariot reins and did the whole thing again with the second chain and another crossbow. By the time he was finished, he was cranking the crossbow’s handle under a foot of water, and the nine chests were floating like a raft.
Max looked at the raft uneasily. “Slayer, I foresee a problem. When the water rises so will this. And the roof is far above the top of the vault doors. It will press against the ceiling. How will we get it out?”
Gotrek didn’t answer, only stepped to the nearest full treasure chest, picked it up as if it weighed nothing, then carried it to a corner of the raft and set it down. The raft dipped down into the water at that end.
“Ah!” said Max. “Excellent.”
“Space them evenly,” said Gotrek. “The raft must be just heavier than the air and wood.”
“How do you think of these things, dwarf?” asked Aethenir, shaking his head as Rion and his elves lifted a single chest between them and staggered with it to the raft.
“Dwarfs are practical,” said Gotrek. “They look at the ground. Not the sky.”
“Which is why they so rarely soar,” sneered the high elf.
“They don’t drown much either,” said Gotrek dryly.
Felix scratched his head, still not quite understanding. “I assume we’ll float up on other chests as the water rises in here, but then how will we swim down to the raft? I’m not sure I can dive so deep, and I doubt Fraulein Pallenberger can.”
“I have never swum at all,” she said in a small voice.
Gotrek grinned and nodded towards the ranks of beautiful ceremonial armour along the left wall. “We will carry armour for weight,” he said. “Though you should put your own armour on top of the raft, or you won’t be light enough to float when we rise.”
As Felix struggled out of his armour and threw it onto the raft with the treasure, he marvelled once again at the change that had come over the Slayer. Only two weeks ago he had been slumped in the Three Bells, unable to string more than three words together, and now he was solving problems of engineering and survival of which Felix would never have been able to conceive. It was an amazing transformation.
The waiting was the hardest part. With all the work done, there was nothing to do but watch the water rise. They sat inside empty treasure chests, rising slowly with the water, hour after hour, inch by incremental inch, with the elven armour that Gotrek had insisted they use for weight belted around themselves so that they could swiftly drop it when they needed to later.
“What do you know of this Harp of Ruin, Lord Aethenir?” asked Max as they rose. His voice echoed strangely in the enclosed space.
Aethenir looked guilty at the mention of the thing. “Nothing more than Belryeth said,” he replied. “I believe I might have read the name in some old texts, but I remember nothing else. There were many weapons created out of desperation during the first rise of Chaos that were later deemed too dangerous to use safely, and also too dangerous to destroy” He looked around the flooded room. “Thus they were locked away and often forgotten.” He sighed. “One would have thought that this harp was doubly safe, hidden in this vault and buried as it was beneath the sea.”
“Yes,” said Rion bitterly. “One would have thought.”
Aethenir hung his head in shame.
After that, conversation faltered and they all just stared at the walls, glum and silent. With the water of the deep sea all around them, the vault, which had been chilly to begin with, now grew painfully cold, and they all shivered and hugged their knees. Only Gotrek, shirtless though he was, bore it without any sign of discomfort.
When it got too much to bear, Max cast a further spell of light which gave off a mild pleasant warmth as well. It wasn’t nearly enough.
Eventually the water rose above the doors, and its climb slowed even further. Still Gotrek told them they must wait, saying that the pressure must be completely equal or the doors wouldn’t budge. Now that the air wasn’t escaping through the crack that the water was coming in through, the air started to become compressed, and Felix could feel it pushing on his eardrums and his chest. A while later it seemed to be pressing against his eyes. His head ached terribly, and the others were similarly affected. Aethenir got a spontaneous nosebleed that he had difficulty stopping.
Finally, after an hour where Felix’s pulse pounded in his temples like an orc war drum and they had to hunch down in their floating chests to avoid knocking their heads against the carved and gilded beams of the vault’s ceiling, Gotrek nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Into the water. When you’re on the floor, lift the raft over your heads and set it down over your shoulders. Walk forwards and push the chests against the door. When we’re free of the palace, drop the armour. I’ll shift some of the
treasure off the top too so we’ll rise.” He looked around at them all. “Ready?”
Everyone nodded, though they didn’t look particularly ready.
“Go,” said Gotrek, and, taking a deep breath, he leaned to the side, tipped out of his chest and sank like a stone.
Rion and his warriors followed his example instantly, but Felix, Claudia, Max and Aethenir all hesitated a moment, looking around at each other with unhappy eyes, then they too took deep breaths, capsized their chests and plunged into the icy water.
The cold shock of it was like a blow to the head, and Felix fought a desperate urge to flail back to the surface. He opened his eyes. Max’s magical ball of light shone just as well under the water as above it, and suffused the sunken vault with an eerie greenish light, suspended silt sparkling like diamond dust in the murky water. Gotrek was already on the floor, the elves landing with dreamlike slowness all around him. Felix saw Max, Claudia and Aethenir sinking as well, their robes billowing around them like living flowers, then they too were on the floor and stepping with strange, bouncing strides to the treasure-laden raft, which hovered at about knee height.
Felix touched down a second later, his slow impact raising a puff of silt. His lungs were now crying for air, and the pressure on his chest was like a crushing fist. He bounced to the front of the raft and grabbed for an edge. Gotrek’s hand stopped him and he looked up.
The Slayer held up a hand and looked around at everyone, then, when he had their attention, motioned for them to lift all at once. The raft, which not even Gotrek would have been able to lift by himself on dry land, came up with ease and they raised it above their heads, then shuffled around until they were all under one of the upside-down chests—Felix, Gotrek and Rion in the first rank, Aethenir and the two remaining elf warriors in the middle rank, and Max and Claudia in the corner chests of the last rank.
Felix’s blood was beating in his throat now, and black spots danced in front of his eyes, so it was a great relief when they pulled on the underslung ropes and lowered the strange contraption down over themselves. Felix gasped in great gulps of air as his head broke the surface, then he tried to slow his breathing as he realised how little air was within the inverted chest. Though it might save his life, the little cubicle was terrifyingly small, and he felt more closed in here than he had pressing against the roof of the vault. He hoped that none of the others suffered from a fear of small spaces.
[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer Page 15