“Are you ready?”
“I will go as I have no choice,” Igs said in a tone different than any Morlonn had ever heard.
He no longer sounded like a young child wanting to play a new game. Instead he seemed like a tired and grumpy old man, except that his voice was abnormally clear. Morlonn stooped over and helped him to his feet.
Igs would no longer lead. He demanded that Morlonn head up the stairs first, and together they climbed up the flight of steps, Morlonn in front of the little chrok. With great caution, they mounted each step as if they were counting the paces to their doom. As far as Igs was concerned, they probably were.
When Morlonn was five steps away from the top, he heard talking. He could not make out what was being said, but he knew it wasn’t Alaezdar’s voice. He turned around and held his finger to his lips to make sure Igs knew he needed to be silent.
Igs looked up at Morlonn giving him a look as if to say --you really need to tell me to be quiet?--
Morlonn strained to listen more, but he still could not hear. He took off his sword belt from around his waist and held it in his hands as he went down on all fours and climbed two more steps. Igs did not follow.
At this point Morlonn did not care. He had no real plan for what Igs could do to help him anyways, nor did he know what he was going to do other than fight. He heard the wraeth speaking again. He seemed to be explaining something to Alaezdar, like a teacher lecturing a student, and then Morlonn heard a third voice that sounded as if it were in a tunnel.
He climbed one more step and peeked his head around the corner to get a quick look. He saw one elven figure in long gray robes, elaborate and ceremonial, with runes and figures sewn across them. The elf looked regal, but also charismatic.
Alaezdar knelt before him with his hands on the ground and looked down into a hole in the hallway. A light above them shone through the ceiling and seemed to be directed towards the hole in the hallway in front of them. The light, Morlonn realized, was daylight.
Morlonn hoped that they were now near to exiting out of the catacombs. All he had to do was find a way to steal Alaezdar from this creature and then – hopefully with Igs’ help -- they could find a way out of this mess.
“Move out of my way!” Igs suddenly shouted. “If we are going to do this, let’s do this!”
Shocked at Igs’ newfound courage, Morlonn stood and let him pass. Morlonn unsheathed his sword, dropped the belt and followed Igs, now running towards the wraeth.
Kroejin stopped talking when he saw Igs and Morlonn charging at him.
“Chroks!” he shouted and he skirted around behind Alaezdar, planted his foot on his back and quickly pushed him down into the hole.
“No!” Morlonn shouted.
He ran past Igs and raised his sword over his head to bring it down with all his might on top of Kroejin’s head, but he only sliced purple mist as he was dematerializing.
A second later he disappeared altogether from the hallway.
Chapter 26
Smack led Tharn and Rivlok to an exit from the catacombs where he was able to crawl through a small hole. He crawled outside and then came back in, straightened out his clothes and looked at the two. He was still limping and bleeding from the leg wound he had gotten from the goblin’s bite.
“You can leave now,” he said as if he were letting his houseguests know he was done entertaining for the evening.
When Rivlok and Tharn only exchanged glances, Smack grumbled and slipped back through the hole and entered for a second time, as if he were training a stupid dog.
“See. Simple. You can leave now,” he said.
Rivlok bent down and looked through the hole. He could see the morning daylight shining through even though the crawl space wasn’t more than four feet long. He could make out dew dripping from the foliage that hung over the top and concealed the hole from the outside view. He shrugged his shoulders, looked at Tharn and struggled to squeeze through the hole.
Once he was out, he stuck his head back in and motioned to Tharn that he could follow. Tharn wanted out, but there had to be an easier way, he thought. He was worried because they had just fought their way through a hive of venomous snakes and into a den of sleeping goblins. Smack had helped them scare away the snakes without incident, but even Smack didn’t know about the goblins. He said later that they must have been staging for a big battle because the goblins never massed this far away from the pass.
“Sometimes they fight each other,” he said as if it was no big deal or as if there were no danger that would befall them, but the fight before that point had been vicious enough.
They did not want to run into any more trouble now. They just wanted out. Tharn had to use every ounce of experience and courage to stand and fight and to not let Rivlok know that he was terrified.
When they had first come across the snakes, they thought they were going to have to turn around. They had been walking through tight corridors for hours when they came out into a large opening where the walls seemed to have been chiseled away by hand. The area opened up into three parallel corridors where the walls on all six sides had open crevices dug into them. In the holes were the skeletons of elven soldiers. Each wall also had a row of shelves full of skulls and skeletons reaching all the way to the end of the corridor. Each row went up to the ceiling as high as they could see and disappeared into the illusion of they sky.
“These are the Forgotten Heroes,” Smack announced as they had walked down the center row. “They have been here for hundreds of years. These ones do not turn into wraeths, but the elves say that someday they will.”
They had marveled at the elves bones, lying in their crypts, and were thankful that they were not going to rise. Each of the remains had on the same or similar battle armor that they had been wearing when they died. The elves that had placed them there had not even bothered to replace their armor with anything ceremonious or decorative. It all just covered their skeletal remains as it rotted away in the dark.
Tharn and Rivlok stood admiring the crypts when they heard Smack hissing.
Snakes had began to both drop from the sky and come out of the walls and immediately after Smack had started his hissing, the ground had begun to turn from hard stone to mud.
Tharn looked down and noticed that his feet sank into the mud up to his ankles. A handful of small black snakes slithered out of the mud and curled up around his ankles and twisted around his calves as they worked their way up his legs.
Rivlok had cursed at the top of his lungs and yelled for his companion. Tharn had dropped his sword and was fumbling to reach for his dagger from the scabbard behind him which he kept on his waist belt.
“Don’t move,” Tharn cautioned Rivlok.
They heard Smack running towards them yelling at the top of his lungs, “Wraeeeethssss!”
As he dragged out the ”sss” sound at the end of the word, Tharn and Rivlok froze in terror. What they now saw brought them more fear than the snakes that were working up their legs. Smack’s mouth had turned into a gaping hole in his head as if his whole face were nothing more than an open pit with teeth that not only covered the outer edges of his mouth, but also rotated in a circle like the outer edge of a grinder. They could no longer distinguish any features on his head such as eyes or a nose.
He ran towards Tharn and Rivlok, his mouth continuing to make the hissing sound, and as he did so, a bright orange light swirled inside his mouth and the snakes closest to him were sucked up out of the mud and off the walls right into his mouth. They made noises not like common snakes, but more like loud whining dogs as they flew through the air and into the vacuum Smack created until they eventually disappeared into his mouth.
The faster he
ran and the closer he got to Rivlok and Tharn, the more snakes he sucked up and the louder the screaming of the snakes became. Tharn felt the snakes on his legs tighten their grip, as if frozen in fear, and they stopped moving upward. Smack ran and ate snakes with an amazing appetite until he stood in front of Tharn and Rivlok and tilted his head upwards.
What now stood before Tharn and Rivlok was a freak of nature, a headless body with an orange and black swirling mass between its shoulder which sucked up snakes at an amazing rate. The snakes around Tharn and Rivlok soon lost their grip on the legs of the two and became caught in the vacuum before they disappeared into the orange cyclone. The mass of snakes were either swallowed up or had worked their way past Smack’s vacuum and had slithered back into the walls for safety.
Without warning the orange swirling stopped and Smack’s head returned to normal with a sharp pop. Proud and satisfied, he looked over at Tharn and Rivlok.
“It’s time for you to go,” he said, “but you need to move before the mud turns to stone or else you too will become a forgotten warrior.”
With the snake-show concluded, Tharn and Rivlok realized that Smack was right. Their ankles had begun to harden in the mud. Rivlok stepped out of the mud first, but Tharn started to have a harder time pulling free and the thick mud began to tighten even more around his ankles.
Rivlok jumped back into the softer mud and grabbed Tharn from behind, his arms underneath Tharn’s arm pits, and wrapped his hands around the back of his neck and pulled him out. As soon as he was free, the ground returned to its solid state.
Smack said nothing more. He turned around, ran to the end of the hallway, and turned right, leaving the open crypts behind them.
Tharn and Rivlok ran without abandon to follow Smack. They suspected that he knew exactly where he was going, but that was when they came upon the goblins snoozing in another large corridor that looked to be their staging area.
Neither Smack, Tharn, Rivlok, or the goblins had expected a battle, but that is what they all got. The goblins seemed to be the most surprised, sitting as they were against the walls, pounding, twisting, and tweaking the leather of their armor. Some had the armor in their laps. Some were teamed up and tightening the leather pieces up for fit.
Smack had seen them first, and when he did, he fell flat to his stomach and rolled to the left against the wall.
Tharn did not hesitate. He knew from instinct and experience that if he retreated, he and his cohorts would lose the element of surprise. He withdrew his sword and yelled as he attacked by slicing the neck of the first goblin he saw, nearly taking his head off. The goblin crumbled to the ground as his head bent backwards and rested on his shoulders. He fell face first and his blood splattered on the ground in red splashes.
Tharn’s initiative gave Rivlok the opportunity to realize what was happening and gain some ground as well. He did not have the experience Tharn had and he froze for a second, but only a second. Once he realized what he should be doing, Rivlok attacked, and attacked vigorously, either from pure, violent aggressiveness, or purely out of fear, Tharn could not tell, but attack he did. He killed three goblins, splattering their blood against the cavernous walls, and they sat, paralyzed on the floor before any of them thought of standing up to defend themselves.
By the time the band of goblins had realized what was happening, there were only six left to fight back, and Tharn wasn’t going to lose the initiative. He kept attacking and pushed two more goblins back against the wall, slashing and hacking them with his sword until they gave up the fight and slumped to the ground, either dead or dying.
Rivlok had three goblins upon him by the time Tharn finished his attack and could get close enough to help him.
“Smack, do something!” Tharn yelled.
Tharn ran over to help Rivlok and stabbed the first goblin he met in the back just before the creature could swing his short sword onto Rivlok’s head. The goblin dropped his sword and crumbled over, reaching his hands behind his back as he fell. Smack stood up with his back to the wall, but did nothing more until one of the goblins that had been lying on the ground, wounded, grabbed his leg and started biting it and chewing into his calf.
Smack screamed. Tharn turned away and broke from helping Rivlok. He charged the goblin and sliced the creature in the back of the neck cutting his spinal column in half. The goblin stopped biting and slumped over. The hot, wet blood spraying from his neck mixed with the bite wound on Smack’s leg.
Tharn turned back around to help Rivlok, but he saw that all the goblins were either dead or dying. Rivlok stood there smiling. The blood splattered from one goblin dripped from his left ear.
“I really can do this,” Rivlok said and he sheathed his sword.
“Yes, and you’ll get used to it,” Tharn said.
He put his arm on Rivlok’s shoulder and guided him back to Smack. They both bent over to inspect his wound.
“I hate, hate, hate goblins,” Smack repeated a number of times before Rivlok finally hit him in the chest and told him to shut up. Smack whimpered and stood up.
“Can you walk?” Tharn asked.
“Yes, I can. Follow me. It is time for you to go,” he said and he limped down the hallway.
They didn’t have much farther to go before they reached the hole that led out of the catacombs. Tharn had been excited to see the dark little escape route, but then he realized he wasn’t going to fit through that hole.
“How am I going to get out here?” Tharn asked.
“Not my problem. I have helped you all I can, and now it is time to me to find Igs.”
“We are still so far away from Aaelie,” Tharn said. “I am not sure how we are going to find her, but I will look for another way out while you check things outside.” Rivlok nodded and scrambled through the hole. It was a tight fit even for him and Tharn had to push against his butt in order for him to squeeze all the way through.
Once outside, Rivlok turned around, stuck his head through the hole and told Tharn that he would only be a short while. Then he was gone.
Tharn wasn’t going to wait around. The hole was the remains of an exit at the end of a hallway that had collapsed hundreds of years earlier and had left large boulders blocking the original exit. He backtracked a few hundred feet through one of the main corridors and went back to the goblin staging area to get a shield, just in case he ran into more goblins or ravages.
When he entered the area where their dead goblins lay scattered on the floor, he was surprised how much goblin blood had been spilled. He hadn’t seen that much carnage since he had been a warrior in the service to the Trielian King. It made him proud of Rivlok. He had fought well, Tharn thought, but he also felt scared because of how much Rivlok had liked it. Unabated rage such as his, without experience, Tharn knew, tended to get young warriors killed before their prime.
Tharn stepped in between the dead and performed several mercy killings on those few still clinging to life, but nearing the end. He picked up two small shields and then came upon one that he recognized as Corben’s, mineshaft foreman at the goblin-touched steel ore mine. Shocked, he turned it over a number of times. He couldn’t believe what he saw and a revelation came to him about the swords.
He picked up the nearest sword to him, wrenching it free from one of the dead goblin’s hands, and inspected it. His fears were confirmed. The swords were goblin-touched steel. He knew those swords were made only in one place, but he inspected the hilt anyway and saw the Trielian Kingdom stamp upon it.
Tharn dropped the sword and heard it clanging on the stone floor of the hallway as he ran back to the hole to find Rivlok.
His mind raced. There were so many questions and possibilities about his finding. Foremost on his mind was the question of whether hi
s own king had betrayed him by allowing these goblins to have finished swords. He supposed that the goblins could have stolen them after one of their kills, but he did not think that was the case because the Trielian army did not go further east than Valewood. That is what they had him for.
Second, these goblins could somehow be connected with the goblins who had stolen Aaelie. When he had first found Corben’s shield, he had begun to suspect that this corridor was part of a tunnel that ran through the catacombs and led to the goblin tribe. This was a staging area for them. Even Smack had said it wasn’t common for the goblins to congregate there.
Tharn was willing to bet this tribe had something to do with Aaelie’s kidnapping and he was going to gamble on his gut feeling that this was the case.
He ran back to the hole Rivlok had gone through and he crawled through it as far as he could. He stuck his head out the end and looked around. Tall, majestic pine trees stretched to the sky above him, and a shimmering hazy light shone through millions of pine needles. He wanted to yell for Rivlok, but he was afraid to attract any attention either outside or behind him. He waited.
After about an hour, Rivlok returned.
“I got lost,” he said, frustrated.
“Could’ve used Morlonn, eh?” Tharn asked.
“Get back in there.”
“What? Are you kidding? Why?”
“I think we can find another way out,” Rivlok said, “a way that might take us directly to Aaelie.”
Chapter 27
Alaezdar had fallen to the bottom of the cavern and lost consciousness but he was awakened by someone cupping his head with a soft hand behind his neck. He had been in a haze for quite some time and did not realize where he was or where he had been for the past twenty-four hours. He heard rushing water nearby and the air smelled fresh since it was moving, but it also had the trace of ancient air to it, air that had never seen the light of day.
The Warrior's Bane (War for the Quarterstar Shards Book 1) Page 34