by Krpoun, RW
Or so she hoped.
‘Night’ camp was made not long after entering the last cidhe; Durek had hoped to camp very near the entrance to the raith, but recruiting Rolf had cost them too much time. Their camp was made in a warehouse whose main entrance was near a still-functioning fountain, providing the Badgers not only with drinking water but also the means to bathe.
Morale was high due in no small part to Rolf’s novelty value: the skinny half-Orc was in deep culture-shock after having spent so many years alone, but it was possible to drag comments and answers from him if one was patient. Of greater entertainment value were his two trained cave rats, Eek and Squeak, the latter being the son of the former. Eek was a glossy black monster weighing nearly twelve pounds and easily as large as a house cat, with the characteristic short, fuzzy tail that, besides his size, set him apart from the ordinary rodent and made him resemble the larger sort of guinea pig. It was Eek who had delivered the strip map to the Badgers, having been taught to perform a wide variety of tricks by his master, both for entertainment and practical means, tricks the husky creature was happy to demonstrate for small rewards of food. His child was far less trained and much more shy, crouching on his master’s shoulders and chittering unhappily whenever anyone drew too near.
Durek watched the antics of his raiders as he tended to his weapons and armor, glad that their morale was improving, for by this time tomorrow they would have scouted the area of the mud pit and have a clear idea of the task ahead of them. He finished oiling his breast and back plates and began with his weapons, first his axe, then his belt dagger, and finishing with his dirk, a beautiful weapon that had started life out as a Dwarven short sword, well-forged and richly engraved. Durek had left the point and two inches of the blade buried in the spine of a great carnivorous fish called a water drake while rescuing Gabriella from its attentions in a cold mountain lake some years ago. A master Dwarfen sword smith had been able to restore a point and adjust the balance so it became a very serviceable dirk without ruining the weapon’s temper, but the engraving had suffered very badly in the process.
The Captain eyed the newcomer while he worked, as any new Badger was a source of concern in a Company as small as the Phantom Badgers. Proper militaries such as were fielded by nations could absorb misfits and failures without serious effect, but in a unit of thirty-odd warriors there was scant margin for error. Rolf’s unusual manner of entry was of little concern in and of itself as several Badgers past and present had been recruited under unusual circumstances, Nuilia as a good example, and the Company had not suffered. Mercenary units took their recruits where they found them, and veterans whenever they could. Over the years the Badgers had developed fairly sophisticated methods for screening their applicants, a process which had not failed them to date, and Durek hoped that that record could be sustained. As a common precaution, however, the half-Orc would not be put on the guard roster or tasked with any crucial task until he had proven himself to the satisfaction of the Company hierarchy, competence being as much a concern as allegiance to the Eight and unit loyalty.
Rolf’s being a half-breed was of small concern to Durek, although he knew that it was a source of prejudice in many realms, both Human and demi-Human, especially if they were of Orcish or Goblin stock. Although they were guiltless, half-Orcs and half-Goblins were blamed for the depredations and atrocities caused by their forbearers, no matter how the individual was raised. However, since mercenaries were generally looked down upon by most citizens of civilized nations, the presence of a half-Orc could hardly impact upon the Badger’s popularity. If Rolf worked out, he could stay.
‘Morning’ underground came too soon, just as it did on the surface; with the usual grumbling and complaints the Badgers broke camp and prepared to move out. The highlight of the morning came when Rolf was observed feeding and grooming the komad despite warnings to avoid the sadistic brutes, and what was even more shocking was that the half-Orc was able to do it without serious injury. Accordingly, Durek put him in charge of the pack animals, a job that would both take an unpleasant duty from the veterans and keep the untested recruit in the center of the formation where he could be watched and kept out of trouble.
This last cidhe was noticeably different than the previous city sections they had traversed, as this was the youngest area in Gradrek Heleth. The level of decoration was much less here than anywhere else, and considerable amounts of space had not yet been excavated into usable quarters when the halls were abandoned, the city having not fully ‘grown’ into the area. It gave the place a certain unfinished look, an unlived-in appearance that only increased the Badger’s unease. There were fewer signs of despoilment by intruders here, although the effects of looting were just as widespread. The Badgers moved with as much caution as they had before, however; although they might be off the beaten track insofar as Gradrek Heleth was concerned, the dangers remained as real as anywhere else in the hold.
It was nearing ‘noon’ when Durek located the entrance into the raith that they had been looking for, an old Felher siege tunnel that broke through into a Dwarven warehouse complex, a simple shaft hacked out of the stone leading still deeper into and under the mountain. Durek called for a midday break before entering the tunnel, not wanting to waste any time once they entered the wild underlands.
Kroh came and sat with his Captain while the Badgers took their afternoon meal, and the two discussed the terrain and problems that could be expected within the raith, a region both had serious misgivings about, based more on cultural mores than actual facts.
Their conversation was interrupted when they noticed Iron Tusk, free of her pack saddle for the duration of the break, sidling towards Robin, who was carelessly sitting with his back to the beast. “He’s in for a stomping,” Kroh observed, squinting to hold a slice of dried green apple in one eye socket in the manner of a monocle.
“If they weren’t so useful when the chips are down we would have a barbecue,” Durek nodded, trying to catch Robin’s eye. Both Dwarves were startled when Rolf whistled sharply, if not over-loudly, but they were truly stunned when the komad hesitated, then turned away from her unwitting intended victim and moved to the half-Orc, who produced a curry brush and began working at the sow’s ears while the gray-muzzled beast (which had outlived two riders and once routed a half-dozen Goblin wolf-riders by herself) sat back on her haunches and peacefully let him groom her.
Durek shook his head, speechless. The two komad had been with the Badgers since the Company’s formation, and although they had routinely displayed courage, intelligence, stamina, deep-seated sadism, a weakness for strong drink and a willingness to commit burglary to obtain same, they had stubbornly refused to obey any save the most basic commands, and even those had to be periodically re-enforced with bribery. Outside of combat they teetered on the brink of mutiny on a good day, and good days were not overly common. “That’s incredible.”
“The females fuss over him, too,” Kroh sneered. “Even Janna’s nice to him, and she’s not much easier to deal with than Iron Tusk. It’s enough to make you want to retch.”
Durek nodded, frowning absently; the new Badger was definitely making an impact on the unit, quiet type or not.
The roughly hewed siege tunnel ran straight and unchanging for six hundred paces, sloping smoothly downward so that at its end they were perhaps fifty feet below Gradrek Heleth. The tunnel terminated in a huge natural fissure that extended upwards for twenty feet and to either side far out of sight, the walls and ceiling pockmarked with cracks and crevices, and the floor littered with rock falls and rubble. Peton moss flourished in great reefs here and there, brought in by the Felher to aid their work and spreading out over the decades so that it was very nearly as bright as in the city itself. Travel was harder given the uncertain footing, but the Badgers went forward with a will, eager to come to grips with their last objective. They followed the great fissure for nearly a mile, carefully painting marks here and there to aid their return, before turning down an
old water runoff channel which made for easy walking, sloping ever further downward for a half-mile until it opened into another fissure.
As they travelled they saw signs of the Felher’s handiwork, mainly rotting transport carts, passages widened by tool-work, graffiti and directions carved into stone walls and half-covered with limestone drippings. Rats, bats, and ordinary spiders were much in evidence, as were the colonies of peton moss.
Kroh found a few worn bones and a glaive nearly rusted away to nothing; from the faint tool marks on the corroded polearm he determined that the remains were that of a Felher. “Spider got a rat,” he grinned, tossing aside the badly pitted weapon. “I hate spiders, killed dozens, I have.”
“Titan spiders? But I haven't seen any webs,” Starr observed; the great tree dwelling spiders were a common danger in the forests.
“Rock Titans; they don’t make webs, they just jump out on you, twenty feet at a hop.” Seeing the wide-eyed look of horror on the young Threll, the Waybrother backpedaled. “But they would never mess with a large group, just individuals, and they mostly just eat cave rats.”
After four hours of hard travel into the raith Durek called a halt. “We’re nearly there,” he announced to the gathered raiders. “First order of business is to find a safe, defensible place to establish our camp, and then we will scout the mud pit and the surrounding area. Myself, Bridget, and Janna will take care of this, aided by the maps the wizard provided for us, thoughtful bastard that he is.”
“You know, I’ve always been curious about this: he can send his cleavage-goddesses halfway around the continent to deliver his demands and instructions, so why can’t he just pop a couple of his personal guard to where we’re standing, have them grab the books, and then bring them back?” Gabriella wondered, cleaning dried clay from her fingernails.
“As a matter of fact, I asked Axel that very question,” Durek grinned. “It seems that enchantment, bulk power, messes up gating magic such as he uses to send his couriers flitting about. Gradrek Heleth is strongly wrapped in enchantments, mundane ones to move air and water around mostly, but enough to keep him from using his courier-magic within miles of the place. He would have to send someone in to set up a physical device, a Gate egress Axel called it, to open the way, and if you have to walk in to do that, you might as well walk out as well. Or so he figures, not having to do any of the dirty work himself.”
Dropping their bedrolls, the three Badgers slipped forward to explore, Durek noting details and changes onto the maps they had been given. The area was a seething mass of cracks, crevices, odd-shaped chambers, and old watercourses, with more than a few small streams and pools in the area. After some hunting they found a suitable camp site, a small cavern with three widely-spaced openings, a roof crevice that would vent away the smoke from their braziers, and easy access to a clear running stream. The cavern was about four hundred yards from the mud pit; the scouts returned to the main body and led them to the camp site to get settled in while they moved forward for the final leg of their explorations.
The mud pit where the books had been lost was on a supply route used by the Felher in their siege of Gradrek Heleth, at a point where the route crossed a bowl-shaped cavern. According to the notes provided by Bluefire the cavern was a rough oval running east-west, four hundred feet long, two hundred fifty wide, nearly one hundred feet from the surface of the mud to the ceiling. The walls were a mass of cracks and crevices, as was the whole area; a Felher tunnel (which had been dug along the path of a fault line to speed progress) bisected the cavern very nearly at its center, the tunnel openings halfway up the cavern’s wall on both sides and connected by a plank and chain bridge. It was on this bridge that the group which had recovered the books had come to grief.
The Badgers were camped south of the cavern; moving as silently as they could, the scouts slipped forward to, and down, the Felher supply tunnel. Fifty yards short of the cavern’s opening they halted in a niche carved by the Felher for some unknown purpose and conferred in hushed tones.
“There’s too much light, and what are those noises?” Janna asked, a frown twisting her scar. “It sounds like voices.”
“Leofric said there was interest in the books,” Durek muttered. “Looks like that was old news.”
“So how do you want to do this?” Bridget asked.
The Captain thought about it. “Janna, you stay here on guard. Bridget and I will creep up and peek in. One quick look to get an idea of what we’re up against here, and then we trot back to the main body and start making plans. This might be tougher than we thought.”
“Or easier, if they’re close to finding the books,” Bridget suggested. “We let them do the hard work, then ambush them and run for sunlight.”
“That’s always a good idea,” Durek nodded. “If it works out that way. Let’s get moving.”
Crawling for thirty feet was hard on elbows and knees despite their heavy clothing, but Durek had no intention of revealing their presence a second before it was necessary; surprise doubled an attacker’s effect, and with only eleven warriors at his disposal he needed all the help he could get. At least whomever was making all the noise hadn’t bother to post a guard on the bridge. Easing forward an inch at a time, the two Badgers moved to the mouth of the tunnel. Bridget, who being taller reached a vantage point quicker than her Captain, suddenly hissed and urgently elbowed the Dwarf in his plate-covered ribs. Scowling with annoyance at her reaction, the Captain slid forward the last foot and looked in the direction the advocate was pointing with her chin.
And had to bite his lip from cursing aloud.
Chapter Six
The raiders gathered in their camp site to hear the scout’s reports. Durek grimly ignored all questions as he smoothed the dirt on a large patch of floor and began drawing on it with a crossbow quarrel; Bridget and Janna held their tongues as well, on orders of their Captain. Some assaults could be ordered, the Dwarf knew, and some assaults had to be persuaded. This was going to be one of the latter.
Finished, the Captain borrowed Janna’s partisan to use as a pointer; keeping it simple, he described the dimensions of the target cavern, which he named the bridge cavern, adding that the accumulated depth of the mud pit was roughly twenty feet, created by a muddy underground stream that entered in the west end of the cavern and drained away through crevices largely clogged with silt, which had created the mud-pond that the books had been lost in. The lighting in the place was nearly as good as that in the city above them, he informed them, as apparently the hot steamy atmosphere of the mud pit had agreed with peton moss; in any case, the upper reaches of the walls were covered in the stuff.
“Except that there’s no mud now, it’s all dry dirt, which brings us to the crux of the matter: apparently a lot of items have ended up in that mud pit over the years, or maybe a caravan loaded with a lot of goodies got tipped into the stew just like the books did. In any case, there is another group already in the bridge cavern digging for treasure, and finding it from all appearances.”
“Aha,” Gabriella nodded. “And let me guess: they wouldn’t care to trade for the books and just let us be on our way.”
“No, it’s not likely as the group consists of a Minion of the Dark One and his personal Talon, plus slaves and some Fortren engineers. From the Dark Star nation-cult, to be specific.”
“What are Fortren again?” Trellan wanted to know. “I know I’ve heard the term before in one of the endless briefings I’ve had to endure, but the meaning escapes me, cogged as my mind is with all the details rammed into it from all these damned planning, pre-planning, post-planning, and general-purpose briefings I’ve suffered through.”
“Dwarves from the clans given over to the Void, what you would call Dark or Black Dwarves,” Kroh rumbled, missing the ex-sailor’s sarcasm. “I hate Fortren, killed dozens of the bastards, I have.”
“Tell us more about this Scarred One and his Talon, Captain,” Robin’s voice was silky smooth, but his face was set as stone. �
��A few more details, if you please.”
“Details? They’ve diverted the stream with common engineering, and dried the mud with enchantment. Now the slaves sift the silt for loot, of which they’ve apparently recovered a good deal, including the chest of books we were sent for. The Scarred One is a Draktaur, and his Talon consists of thirty-three Direbreed divided into three sections, a human mage of the dark arts, and nine Fortren, whom I believe are attached and not actually part of the Talon. Plus the slaves, about thirty all told.”
“A Draktaur, a spellcaster, and forty-two warriors against eleven Phantom Badgers,” Robin drawled thoughtfully. “Even with surprise on our side that will be one damned tough fight. If we hit them, that is.”
“Scared, Robin?” Kroh put a hand over his mouth, or more accurately over the middle region of his beard, and produced a surprisingly realistic hen’s cackle.
“No, but I’m not suicidal, either. Leofric can find something else to read,” the swordsman snapped, glaring at the Waybrother, who shoved a finger up each of his own nostrials and mimed dragging himself along. “I’m not dying for any damned books. I’ve never had to face a Draktaur and I’m not interested in trying it.”
“Draktaurs die if you hit them just right, same as anything else,” Kroh sneered, surreptitiously wiping his fingers on Trellan’s trousers.
“It’s more than just books,” Durek interjected. “Bridget, tell them the rest.”
“Children,” the advocate faced the rest of the raiders squarely. “They’ve got eight children down there, along with a full altar; apparently the power to dry the mud and keep it dry is coming from the regular sacrifice of the children. Who here will walk away and leave eight young boys and girls in Dark Star hands? Speak up so I can spit in your face and name you for the cowardly bastard that you are.”