by Max Anthony
“That’s Jera’s sword, isn’t it?” asked Rasmus, taking it from Viddo’s hands in order to get a closer look. “Yes, see here. It’s got the same pommel that her father mentioned. It’s quite distinctive, isn’t it?”
“This is troubling,” said Viddo. “Combined with the evidence of a third party’s involvement in the melee upstairs, it suggests that she has been taken down these stairs by force, wouldn’t you say?”
“I think you might be right. Perhaps she dropped her sword on the way, or had it torn from her hand.”
“The exact circumstances are not important, but I have seen enough to convince me that the lady we seek lies ahead of us, rather than behind.”
They stared at each other for a few moments in consternation.
“This isn’t ideal,” said Rasmus at last. “We have little idea of what lies ahead and we are not well-prepared for whatever it might be.”
“We must play the hand we have been dealt,” Viddo replied. “On the bright side, I’ll put her sword to good use, since I wouldn’t like to be stuck down here with naught but a single dagger and my crossbow.”
Without further word, they continued their descent, this time with a far greater caution. Rasmus kept his light low and did his best to walk in silence, a feat which Viddo accomplished without effort. The stone through which the steps had been cut changed in hue, from a light grey, to a darker and more sombre colour. There was no decoration to draw the eye, the stairwell being entirely utilitarian in its crafting.
They lost track of time, though it wasn’t because they had walked for so long that days had passed. Each man was thinking his own thoughts and not especially concerned about the length of time it took them to go down the steps. They were aware that they’d eventually need to climb back up this way, but that was for the future. All told, it took them a little over one hour to reach the bottom.
“I see light ahead, I think,” said Viddo.
Rasmus dutifully ended the light from his own spell and stood for a minute until his pupils had fully dilated. “I see it,” he said at last, to indicate that he was ready to proceed.
Sure enough, there was a light ahead. It was a very faint light in the distance, suggesting that they had almost reached their immediate goal. Not knowing what to expect, they slowed to a pace that would ensure they made the smallest amount of noise. They came closer, but the light grew no brighter – whatever the source was, it wasn’t producing a huge amount of illumination. Viddo patted Rasmus on the arm to warn the wizard to wait for a moment as he scouted ahead. Rasmus dutifully sat on a step and waited as the thief went on ahead. Within moments, Viddo’s already dark outline was completely lost from view as he called upon his ability to conceal himself within the darkness.
Rasmus found the wait a longer one than he’d expected and he was almost ready to take himself off to investigate when Viddo returned.
“There’s a vast cavern down there,” he said. “Like that one in which we found the hidden city, but not on the same scale.”
“Are you sure it’s not the same place?” asked Rasmus.
“I’m sure – the city we found is at least fifteen miles over that way,” the thief replied, waving his arm off to the left. Viddo had an exceptional sense of direction, so Rasmus had no reason to doubt him.
“What took you so long?”
“It’s not deserted like the last one was. There’re lots of things in there.”
“What sort of things?” asked Rasmus, not sure he liked the idea of what they might be.
“Things that look a bit like us, but aren’t us, if you know what I mean. They look like some of those statues we saw – squat, broad and cruel.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Come on, let’s go and look.”
They completed the descent and emerged into the cavern which Viddo had mentioned. Had Rasmus not seen an even larger cavern on his recent adventures, this one would have left him awestruck. Where they emerged, they had a fairly clear view of it all. Viddo pulled Rasmus off to one side into the cover of a stone wall, but not before the wizard had taken in a good view of the sights. The walls and floor of the cavern had been carved until they were smooth and flat. Not perfectly smooth like a piece of sculpted marble, but enough that there were no indentations or tool marks. The roof was at least fifty yards above them and it too had been made smooth, for reasons that neither man could fathom. The cavern was irregular in shape, being narrow at the end in which they had entered and widening to over a hundred yards in the middle.
Having got the nod from Viddo, Rasmus put his head over the four-feet-high stone wall they were hidden behind, so that he could get a better look. There were buildings here – dozens of them, with the closest being thirty or forty yards away. These dwellings were all single storey or two storeys high. They had been carved from the same stone of the cavern walls and were square in construction. The houses were ugly through their plainness and each had small openings in the walls, presumably meant as windows. Other openings were visible and these looked suspiciously like doorways. From his vantage point, the doorways looked to Rasmus as if they were sealed with stone slabs.
There was light everywhere, coming from fist-sized glass balls which were embedded into the walls of the cavern and the walls of the houses themselves. These glass balls had also been perched on top of low stone pillars, which were dotted uniformly about the place. The light they gave off was very dim, but it nevertheless pervaded the entirety of this enormous space and allowed Rasmus to see as clearly as he needed to.
As he continued to watch, Rasmus saw one of the door slabs hinge open and a figure emerged. It was slightly shorter than an average-height man and walked with a slight stoop. The distance was too great to make out any specifics, but it was thickset and broad, with grey skin and a collection of rags gathered about its frame. It moved with an easy gait and headed away, further into the collection of dwellings.
Rasmus ducked back below the wall. “What was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it’s called - it’s definitely not human. There are lots of them living there – I got close enough to look into one or two of the windows.”
“Are they hostile?”
“I think we should assume that they aren’t friendly at the very least. It seems likely that they killed some of those adventurers in the dungeon above and kidnapped one of their number.”
“So we’ll stab first and ask questions later?”
“That is how we should handle matters,” confirmed Viddo.
“Do you think Jera is within those buildings?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see or hear anything. I’d have expected those creatures to talk amongst themselves, but they give no sign of communication.”
“Are they undead?” asked Rasmus. “Everything we came across on our last trip underground was undead, apart from those slugs. And a few flies.”
“And that big spider that burst all over you,” said Viddo, reminding the wizard of something he did not wish to be reminded of.
“Yes, yes,” said Rasmus testily. “We were discussing the matter in hand. Are these creatures undead?”
“I hadn’t thought about it until you asked, but now that you say it, I would not be surprised.”
“What on earth would the undead want to kidnap someone for?”
“We don’t know if it was these creatures we see before us. Perhaps it was something else, that is able to travel unhindered through their village,” suggested Viddo.
Rasmus was not entirely convinced, though he had nothing better to offer. “Are we going to try and fight our way through?” he asked, girding his loins for the unleashing of a spell or two. “It’s been almost a week since I cast anything. I don’t want to get rusty.”
“We are going to try the more noble method of sneaking,” Viddo responded. “We could probably fight our way through and out the other side, but we don’t know what lies beyond those dwellings, since they stretch right across
the cavern floor. I reckon there could be upwards of a hundred of those things living in that village and there may be hundreds more beyond, yet out of our sight.”
“You know I don’t like sneaking,” huffed Rasmus. “I’ll stand out like a sore thumb.”
“I shall steal some suitable clothing for us,” replied the thief. “Stay here for five minutes.”
Without waiting for an acknowledgement, Viddo slipped around the wall, which appeared to have been the early stages of another dwelling which had never been completed. It definitely provided a handy place to hide behind if you were a wizard or lumbering mail-clad oaf with a massive sword.
The cavern floor was clear between the incomplete wall and the other houses, apart from a few of the pillars carrying their light globes. Viddo thought he could probably cross over the open space without being seen, but he preferred to have a wall at his back. With that in mind, he slinked over to the nearest cavern wall and skulked along it, confident that he was almost invisible. He saw two or three more of the creatures through a gap between the buildings. They were standing close to each other, unmoving and giving no sign that they recognized the presence of their fellows. Now that he was near, Viddo noted that they carried weapons – one had a short sword and another an axe. If the third one was armed, it had its weapon hidden from sight.
Viddo reached the nearest of the stone dwellings, which was joined to the cavern wall. There was a window facing him and he cautiously looked through. There was only a single, featureless room, fifteen feet to each side and unfurnished, apart from two light globes which were in shallow alcoves on one wall. One of the creatures was inside, lying prone on the floor, with its face pointed away towards the closed stone door. There were brown, filthy rags covering its body, hardly enough to cover its modesty, if such a thing existed in this place.
The window was about two feet square and placed five feet from the ground. Quieter than the smallest and quietest of mice, Viddo pulled himself up, through the opening and, in a feat of great agility, managed to land smoothly on his feet on the other side. He’d had a lot of practise climbing through windows and other, less conventional means of entry. The creature on the floor didn’t move, nor show any sign that it was aware of Viddo’s presence.
“The undead have no need to move until they are driven to motion by whatever it is that motivates them,” Viddo reassured himself. In fact, he had started to think that something was amiss. As he crept over the clear floor, his sharp eye caught sight of something else – there was a short tear across the cloth of the creature’s robes. Not wishing to deviate from his plan, Viddo covered the last few paces and then delivered an almighty chop to the neck of the unmoving creature. He didn’t necessarily want to go about killing things just for the sake of it, but wanted to be safe, rather than take risks. The blow he’d struck would mostly likely do nothing more than render the recipient unconscious for a while, though there was also a chance it would kill.
As soon as the side of his hand made contact, Viddo became convinced that the creature was already dead. Its body jumped slightly under the force of the attack, but for a man as experienced as Viddo, the signs were clear that something wasn’t right.
He knelt down next to it and felt for a pulse – there was nothing to be found. He pulled at the rags it wore, looking for the rip he’d noticed. He found it and pulled aside the cloth. Beneath, there was a large, deep wound, made by something sharp and pointed - probably a short sword. Viddo rolled the body over, finding it to be heavier than he’d expected. As it flopped onto its back, he caught a full view of its face. The skull was wide and with a heavy brow. The features were broad and undeniably evil in appearance. The nose was square and the mouth drooped partially open to reveal overly-long pointed teeth of a type which seemed unsuited to the consumption of either meat or vegetables. The eyes were closed and, certain that it was dead, Viddo pried up one of the eyelids out of curiosity. Underneath, the pupil was massive, covering almost the whole organ and giving the appearance that the entire eye was black.
There was another wound on its chest and Viddo tore away the rags to inspect it further. The cloth tore easily, as if it were close to perishing with age. The creature had been stabbed at least twice in the chest, and bones were visible through the holes, a sickly mixture of grey and yellow in colour. Viddo stood and looked at the creature from his full height. It was very heavily muscled about the arms and shoulders, with the legs almost stunted in comparison.
“This one had spent the years chipping away at a rock face,” concluded the thief. “I should not like to receive a punch from one of its fellows.”
Viddo had planned to steal some clothing so that Rasmus could walk through the stone village in plain sight, but the flaws in his plan were apparent now that he was close enough to see the poor state of the rags and also just how different to humans the creatures looked. Not a man to abandon his own plans without giving them a chance, Viddo crept to the stone door. It was probably a marvel of the stonecutter’s trade, but what it boiled down to was that it was a plain slab of grey stone, mounted on four stone hinges. There was even a round handle carved onto the surface, which Viddo gripped in order to swing the door open a little and allow him to look outside.
The three creatures he’d seen earlier were no longer visible, having wandered away on whatever business was important to the undead. Viddo took advantage and slipped out of the dwelling. The stone village didn’t have organised streets as such, and the other houses were placed here and there, rarely more than six or seven feet from another. This meant that line of sight was limited, and Viddo sneaked easily to the next house, this one also close to the cavern wall. His sharp hearing picked up the sound of soft footsteps on stone. Although he was using the darkness to his advantage, Viddo didn’t want to find a group of these undead bumbling into him. The closer something got to where he was hiding, the greater the chance they would spot what he was up to. With this in mind, he first looked through one of the two windows of the second dwelling and then threw himself head-first inside.
He was just in time to avoid a group of six of the creatures, as they walked by. He peeked carefully out of the window and watched them pass. They were close together, but something about them gave Viddo the impression that it was by coincidence, rather than because they were working in tandem.
Once they’d gone and the footsteps had faded into the distance, Viddo turned his attention to the room. He’d already seen that it was empty, apart from a single dark shape in one corner. He crossed over to investigate what it was, finding it to be a grey arm, hacked off at the shoulder. There was no sign of an associated body.
Aware that he was getting further away from the wizard’s hiding place, Viddo hauled himself out of this second house by means of another window aperture on the opposite wall to that by which he’d entered. There was a space about three feet wide between this house and the next. There was no facing window, so Viddo had to sneak along this most narrow of alleyways and around to the front door, which he opened quickly with his crossbow loaded and in hand.
“Hmmm,” he thought to himself. “Another of the creatures, also dead.”
This, the third of the square houses, was as drab as the others. If there had ever been furniture, it was gone and if there had ever been wall hangings, they were also missing. The dead creature he’d seen was slumped in an undignified pose, face down and with its backside in the air. It was missing a foot, which was nowhere to be seen, and had been savagely attacked with something sharp. Viddo rummaged through its clothing in case there was anything worth having. The undead were so uninterested in money that they only ever carried incidental treasure and Viddo was not disappointed when his search was fruitless. As he searched, he sized up the faded blue rags it wore – little more than a loincloth really – and decided that they wouldn’t hold up as any sort of a disguise. Consequently, he left the house and made his way back towards Rasmus’ hiding place, arriving without incident.
“Y
ou’ve been busy,” he commented, looking at the two charred bodies and the single uncharred wizard.
“They arrived from that house over there only a few minutes after you left,” said Rasmus. “I was forced to set them alight. Luckily, they are definitely undead, since if they’d been living creatures they’d have run around screaming in pain and bringing all manner of attention upon my hiding place. As it was, I ran off up the stairs and they followed me until the flames killed them. They stink a bit, but since they’re six steps upward, the smell is tolerable.”
“Do you want the bad news?” asked Viddo.
“Bad news? Aren’t you meant to present me with a choice between bad news and good news?”
“Nope, I’m afraid not. The news is only bad. We’re still going to sneak across the village, but a disguise isn’t going to work.”
“That’s a bit of a bugger,” said Rasmus. “No matter how hard I try to be silent, I always end up making some noise that is overheard. Can’t you just lure them all out and I’ll cast a firestorm spell on them?”
“You’re just bursting to cast that firestorm spell, aren’t you?”
“Well it’s a very exciting spell to cast, though I have others I might use.”
“Let us try sneaking for now,” said Viddo, who was reluctant to revisit his role as the sacrificial thief, a part he’d played admirably during their recent adventures in another place underground.
During his return from the nearby village, Viddo had taken care to steal several of the light globes from their pillars in the intervening space between the stairs and the houses. He’d stuffed them under his tunic next to the fist-sized diamonds and he now glowed eerily in the darkness. Without ceremony, he fished out the globes and dumped them straight behind the wall, hoping that no one would notice the increased illumination in the area.
“Let us be going,” he said to the reluctant wizard.
With that, they crept towards the cavern wall, Rasmus already struggling to stifle a sneeze and fighting the urge to clear his throat loudly.