by T. H. Lain
"Campfire?" Naull asked.
"No," Regdar responded. "We don't need one, anyway."
Shivering in the shadows, Naull wanted to disagree, but Regdar was right. Their packs were loaded with dried meat, bread, and a few blankets. They wouldn't starve or freeze.
"Aren't deserts supposed to be hot?" she asked.
"Not at night," replied Regdar. "Krusk, I can take the first watch. I'll wake you in a few hours, and then Alhandra can take over from you."
"Don't I get a turn?" Naull asked, pretending hurt.
"So you can complain about how your sleep-deprived mind can't accept the magic patterns? No. We're not spending more than eight hours here. You sleep the whole time, starting now."
"Yes sir!"
She grinned and leaned over to pat Regdar playfully on the cheek. He looked up at her and the warmth in his eyes made her blush.
Someday, she thought as she thanked Wee Jas for the darkness surrounding them, we might have to talk about this. But we're partners now, she concluded, lying back on her blanket.
Grawltak panted eagerly as he held the packet in front of him. They fled northward from the village and found a stand of trees to welcome them. They discarded the torches and lanterns as they ran—always into a convenient haystack or shack, of course. The soft-skins wouldn't forget this night in a hurry! He drew out his disk-shaped amulet and spoke the words that invoked its power.
A whine from Kark stopped him. They'd carried the wounded lieutenant away from the inn. Three younger whelps were lost in the battle and another failed to keep up on the road. If he managed somehow to catch up, then they'd consider bringing him along too. Otherwise, he was bait for the softskins. But Kark ...
"Draw the bolt—carefully!" Grawltak instructed one of the gnoll pups.
He shoved the disk back inside his armor but held the packet eagerly.
Gnolls seldom knew much about healing, unless they became the chosen of Yeenoghu. Grawltak shuddered again at the thought of the shamans his mistress employed. She followed Hextor, he knew, but at least one of her pet clerics was a follower of the gnoll god.
Kark writhed in pain. Blood stained his mottled fur. He was unconscious and looked as if he would live, but his body wouldn't let him rest. Grawltak's dark eyes studied the older gnoll carefully, then he reached a decision.
"Give him this," Grawltak snapped.
He pulled a dark flask from his belt pouch. One of the younger gnolls opened it and sniffed it, but at a growl from the leader, he stooped and poured it between Kark's open jaws. At first, it seemed the older gnoll might choke on the elixir, but he coughed and stopped writhing. In moments his breathing returned to normal. His dark eyes opened.
"Leader ..." he said, sounding almost confused.
As uncharacteristic as Kark's sacrifice back at the inn had been, it was obvious Grawltak's generosity surprised the old gnoll.
It surprises me as well, the gnoll leader thought angrily. That's the second time I've saved you from death, though at least this time it was in return for your favor.
He growled angrily, "I have to have someone to keep these pups in line! I have only ten left. Get them into order while I call the mistress or I'll have all your hides."
Kark stood stiffly and nodded. He turned his head, exposing his neck in supplication, but Grawltak turned away. The younger gnolls looked on in confusion, much as his pack had watched him years before when he'd first spared the old pack-master's life and made him his lieutenant. Grawltak knew he had Kark's loyalty, but the younger gnolls couldn't help but mistake his gesture-sharing precious healing magic with a mortally wounded underling—as a sign of weakness. Grawltak knew his alliance with Kark made him strong, stronger than other gnoll pack leaders, but he wasn't sure the rest would see it that way.
All thoughts of reestablishing pack dominance left Grawltak's mind as he took out the amulet again. He grinned, his tongue lolling to one side. His mistress would be very pleased with him. So the half-orc got away. So what? Even the mistress said the half-orc itself was of no matter, as long as what it carried was delivered to her. Grawltak would soon be rewarded, and his pack would see it.
Placing the amulet on a stone before him, he chanted the magic words. They weren't easy for the gnoll to speak clearly, as they were in a language even more foreign than the soft-skins' common speech. There was much hissing involved, and the sibilants made his jaws ache from forming the words.
Grawltak's perseverance paid off, however, and the amulet glowed. An image formed in its clear, flat face then tilted ninety degrees and rose up above the stone. A face—his mistress's unarmored face, glowing in various shades of red—hovered above the magic talisman.
"What is it?" the red face asked. The lips moved but the words made sounds at a different speed. Grawltak looked into the red, glowing eyes and reflexively turned his head.
"Mistress ... it is Grawltak. I have succeeded."
The eyes narrowed, focusing on him.
"Bring light," she said. "I can barely see you, gnoll."
Grawltak cursed and shouted for a torch. Kark came forward and lit one. He held it off to one side, illuminating his leader's canine features.
"You have the half-orc? Finally?" The voice sounded impatient, but also pleased.
"No," Grawltak started, then hurried on as the image's eyes widened. "But we have this!"
He held up the oilskin packet. The flaming sigil gleamed in the torchlight.
"Open it!" demanded the red face of his mistress.
Hurrying to obey, Grawltak nearly dropped the packet and its contents to the ground. He fumbled it open and held it out to the face.
"Take everything out, fool! I cannot see!"
His claws moving as deftly as they could, Grawltak pulled papers and a few small coins out of the packet. Something was wrong... he stuck his snout into the packet, but saw nothing else. This couldn't be all his mistress desired.
"Open the papers! Show me!"
The sinking feeling in the pit of Grawltak's stomach started growing. His mistress hadn't said exactly what should be in the packet, but... papers and a few meager coins? Very carefully, one by one, he opened the folded sheets and showed them to the face. He couldn't read them himself, but none looked much different from any other.
His mistress made him go through each and every page but Grawltak didn't need the darkening of the flame-face to tell him he'd somehow made a terrible error. Her voice grew more and more angry as he revealed each page more and more reluctantly.
When he picked up the small coins to show her, she shrieked at him, "Enough! You've been tricked, you idiot! Where is the half-orc?"
Grawltak didn't know what to say. The truth wouldn't do at all, he knew, but lying to the mistress ...
Kark broke in, "We are on his trail, Mistress. He is not far. He is wounded. I have his scent, but I am old and slow. Grawltak did not want to delay reporting to you. We will catch him soon."
Staring at Kark, the red face considered the older gnoll.
"Grawltak is a fool, then, old one," she said. "Capture him," she ordered, her eyes turning back to the pack-master. "Do not fail me this time, gnoll! I'll string your intestines along the ground and make your pack eat them for dinner." It was no idle threat, Grawltak knew. "And I'll make sure this old one is the first to dine."
Both gnolls nodded eagerly, their ears cocked forward.
"Where are you?" she asked.
Grawltak told her.
"Catch the half-orc. Do not kill him if you can avoid it, but I will join you soon, with the shamans. I should be with you in no more than a day."
The gnoll shuddered. It had taken them more than five days of hard traveling to reach their current position. If she could get to them in a day....
"Mistress," Grawltak ventured carefully, "we do not know where the half-orc might lead us. We should, as Kark says, catch him soon, but—"
"Do not worry, Grawltak," the red face smiled cruelly. "I can find you, wherever you are.
Never, forget that. Now, go!"
The face held their gaze for another second, then winked out. The amulet's glow faded.
Turning his head toward Kark, Grawltak started making the sign of thanks gnolls showed only to their leaders. Kark did not let him dip his head.
"You are my captain, pack-master. I live to serve."
With that, the older gnoll stood up and went to get the younger ones back in order.
Grawltak wondered at this one small spark of good fortune in a conflagration of disaster.
The night passed uneventfully in the canyon. When Krusk and Regdar woke, Alhandra was tending the horses and Naull sat reading her book. She looked at Krusk as the half-orc hopped up and stretched his muscle-bound, ugly limbs.
"I was cold all night," she said dryly.
"How long before we find the gate?" Regdar asked Alhandra as he strapped on pieces of his armor.
Alhandra shrugged, then looked over at Krusk. The half-orc drew out the packet, and with only a little hesitation, he tossed it to her. The paladin opened it and started looking through the papers.
"I can't read any of this," she said.
Regdar shook his head. He couldn't, either.
Naull stepped over to the pair. Krusk prowled around the campsite, as if looking for signs of danger.
"Doesn't Krusk know how far we have to go?" she asked.
"I suppose," the paladin answered. "Captain ... Tahrain? He made Krusk repeat the directions to him when they fled the city. He has a wonderful memory, I guess."
They looked at the half-orc. He crouched in the sunlight near the middle of the canyon, looking up at the sky and blinking furiously.
"Let me see ... Hey, it's in Draconic!" Naull said. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; the most common name of the City of Fire, Secrustia Nar, is draconic, too."
"You read Draconic, though, right?" Regdar asked hopefully.
"Of course. Most wizards write in draconic. It's a very old language, and hasn't changed much for centuries. Dragons aren't much for change," she added dryly.
"No, they just get bigger and nastier," Regdar added.
Naull flipped through the pages carefully. Someone had obviously copied them from the original, but the paper was still very old and stiff. She wondered, considering the legends of Secrustia Nar's age, how many times the descendents of the City of Fire's refugees had duplicated the contents of the packet, all the while preserving its secrets. She shook her head in amazement.
"It's tricky," she said at last. "It's in a sort of code. The first part is clear enough. There's a tunnel somewhere in this canyon, on the western side. The tunnel leads to another rift, or something like it. Beyond that, we're supposed to see signs that lead us toward the gate. That's where the code gets tricky."
"How?" Alhandra asked.
"Well, as near as I can tell, the code's arranged so that we'll find clues to solving it as we go, but it would be almost impossible to solve the next part of the code without actually following the path. Whoever made this didn't want you to be able to just decipher the code and jump to the end."
"Nasty," Regdar said.
"Why so much concealment?"
Naull answered, "Not everybody is as nice and trusting as we are." The paladin looked up sharply, but Naull smiled, taking a little of the sting out of her words. "Whoever did this wanted to make sure that if outsiders—people who didn't know the dangers of the trail—found it, they'd have to go through those dangers before reaching the gate. Since we don't have any of the original inhabitants of Secrustia Nar on hand, we're going to have to run the gauntlet."
"Oh, that's just fabulous," Regdar said. "Any idea what's in this gauntlet?"
"Well... not really," Naull replied. "I mean, I think it can't be all that bad. From the descriptions I can make out, it seems this was just a guarded trade passage, not a series of death traps. You wouldn't want to kill off visiting merchants just because they forgot the password."
That observation made both Alhandra and Regdar relax a little, but Naull secretly wasn't certain. Secrustia Nar's reputation was infamous in some texts she'd read, especially near the end of its days.
"Let's get started, then," Regdar said.
Travel through the canyon went slowly. Naull imagined Krusk moving through it alone, hopping, skipping, and sometimes running. She looked around Regdar's shoulders at the many caves and pits in the canyon walls. It seemed a terrific place to hide from enemies.
They ate quickly, giving Windlass and Stalker just enough time to rest. Regdar named his steed after the inn; Naull thought it an overly generous name for the nag. They walked the horses through narrow passes but rode them more often than not. Both Krusk and Regdar felt certain the gnolls would be right behind them.
"Surely they need to sleep, too," Naull said.
Krusk shrugged and said, "We were a day ahead of them in the desert, but they caught us."
"We have to keep pushing," Regdar concluded.
"Whoever this black knight is, she'll be pushing them," Alhandra said. She'd made sure Krusk related his description of the gnoll's human leader to the rest of the adventurers.
Naull shuddered. When Krusk spoke of the woman who led the attack on his companions, she heard the hate in his voice, and the fear.
Regdar reined Stalker to a halt.
Naull peered over his shoulder and asked, "Why are we stopping?"
"Krusk stopped."
Naull swung down off the brown horse and saw the barbarian looking up at the sky and at the west wall of the canyon. It looked like the rest of the rift; rough, rocky, and barren. There were a few holes in it, but nothing to set it apart from any other stretch of rock.
Krusk pointed.
Naull squinted up into the light. The sun had barely dipped below the west wall, where it glared unhelpfully right over the lip and into her face. Still she thought that perhaps she did see something.
"It looks like ... is that a cave up there?"
Regdar and Alhandra dismounted and retreated from the west wall, shading their eyes. Drawing out the papers Krusk had allowed her to hold onto, Naull studied them. The first part of their trip was clear: Come to a certain point in the canyon and there would be a cave leading west. The papers said nothing about the cave being more than fifty feet up the canyon wall.
"This can't be it," she said.
Krusk didn't agree. He pointed toward the lip of the eastern wall. They all looked and saw a rock formation that resembled five teeth jutting up from the wall.
"No, no..." Naull disagreed. "There are supposed to be six of them, and they're supposed to be taller, and curved, almost like bolts of lightning or fire. Pillars of fire—there!" She pointed to one page that had a crude diagram.
Regdar looked over one of her shoulders and Alhandra the other. The fighter shrugged in half-agreement, but Alhandra pursed her lips and shook her head.
"Like you said, Naull, it's been what... centuries? Don't you think one of the 'pillars' might have fallen? And don't those look like the bases of pillars? The tips—the flames—probably wore away."
Nodding, Naull agreed, "Of course. I didn't think of that. What about the cave, though?This route was for trade caravans. Who's going to haul a wagon up the side of mountain?" she asked the others.
The paladin considered for a moment, then ventured cautiously, "Centuries... thousands of years, perhaps. Could this canyon have deepened, or widened since then? Maybe there was a river, or a stream, even—or there could even have been an earthquake."
Nodding agreement, Naull folded the papers and put them away.
"I suppose so," she said, "but who's going to climb up to make sure?"
The two armored figures looked at each other. Finally, Regdar shrugged and started taking off his armor. Alhandra stopped him and pointed.
Krusk, still wearing his chain shirt and with his axe slung over his back, was already climbing. Digging into the stone with his big hands and feet, he was nearly fifteen feet up the wall.
/> "Leave it to Krusk," Naull chuckled, shaking her head.
Alhandra smiled, too. Regdar, surprisingly, took out his bow.
"Might as well cover him," the fighter said.
Moving to Windlass, Alhandra retrieved her own bow and strung it. Naull simply limbered up her fingers. If anything came out of the cave or down into the chasm, she didn't want to trust to her crossbow.
Krusk moved slowly up the cavern wall, occasionally stopping entirely. They watched at first eagerly, then warily as he made his way up the cliff face. Twenty feet... twenty-five ... thirty-five.
If he slips now, Naull thought, we'll have to scrape him off the canyon floor with a stick.
Sure-handed and sure-footed, as well as amazingly strong, Krusk didn't slip. He reached the bottom lip of the cave mouth and pulled himself over. Moments later, he lowered a knotted rope almost to the canyon floor.
Regdar went up first, then Naull. Alhandra wrestled with her conscience, trying to decide what to do with the horses. Finally she led them around the next bend in the canyon and stripped them of their gear. What she couldn't carry, she hid in a shallow pit and covered with a rock. She emptied a waterskin onto a bowl-shaped stone hidden by shadow.
"I hope we won't be too long," the paladin said minutes later as Regdar helped her into the cave. They drew up the rope and Krusk tucked it back into his small pack. "Or that the gnolls don't find them."
Her voice sounded pained. Naull didn't say anything, but she saw Regdar reach up and pat Alhandra's shoulder. He looked over at the wizard.
"Well, what now?"
"According to the directions, we just head in. Krusk? Anything to add?"
The half-orc stopped for a moment, thinking, then he recited in a sing-song voice, "The passage leads down, down and around. Do not turn, do not vary. When you reach the floor, the key shows the way."
He blinked and looked at the others.
"All right, then. Naull, I guess we'd better use some light."