Mac chirped gleefully, then dropped onto the empty altar with a thud, making himself visible as he landed. That answered that.
***
Three hours later, they were far south of the Cruel Citadel, at the edge of the Traitor’s Forest, following Mac while he rooted around between the trees and in the underbrush. Kaz hovered over the Young Turtle Dragon, delightedly inspecting every one of the little mud-covered balls as they came out of the earth before declaring them “another common black truffle.” The silver lining was that these at least were edible—unlike the coquelicots—so it fell to Roark to harvest them, stowing them away in his pack for later use.
As they searched, Roark remained on guard with his rapier and dagger out. He didn’t trust this place. The silence felt wrong. Too heavy. Moonlight filtered down through the leaves in bright silver beams. The branches overhead moved to unfelt breezes, making the moonbeams dance and shift like the mistwraiths that haunted the seaside villages of Traisbin. And everywhere, lengths of tattered rope hung down from the branches. It made the skin down the nape of his neck crawl.
“Kaz, do you know anything about this place?” Roark asked, batting another tangle of rotted rope out of the way as he passed.
“Kaz knows there are white truffles here,” the Behemoth Thursr said with burning conviction. “Kaz can feel it.”
Roark eyed a shifting moonbeam. It almost looked like a woman. Then again, it almost looked like nothing, too.
Ahead, Mac had begun sniffling at the foot of an ancient oak. A hanging oak, the people of Korvo would’ve called it, with that thick branch jutting out. A tattered rope swung from it, swaying in a breeze that Roark couldn’t feel.
“I meant something more along the lines of why these ropes are everywhere,” he clarified.
“Ropes?” Kaz knelt beside Mac, watching eagerly as the Turtle Dragon pushed his lizard-like nose into the dirt and rooted around. “Kaz hasn’t seen any ropes.”
Roark turned in a circle, counting just the ones he could see from where he was standing. Six, seven, eight, nine …
“There are a dozen of the bloody things within spitting distance. Maybe if you—” He broke off abruptly as he turned back around to Kaz and Mac.
They were gone.
The loamy ground Mac had been digging up lay undisturbed. But Roark knew his friends had been at the foot of that ancient oak just a moment ago. The hanging oak.
“Kaz?” Roark took a few steps, searching the nearby trees in case there were two that looked similar enough to mistake.
Except now every tree was a hanging oak. Each one with a noose dangling from that jutting branch. Not rotted and tattered rope anymore, but newly woven and ready to give some unlucky soul an Ustari necklace.
His eyes were playing tricks on him. It was the way the moonlight kept shifting. That was the only possible explanation.
“Macaroni!” Roark shouted. They were here somewhere, he’d just wandered a bit too far and lost sight of them. He turned in circles, scanning the trees. They couldn’t be far away, he was sure of it. “Kaz!”
Someone was whispering, but they stopped as soon as Roark stopped shouting. He thought the sound had come from just over his shoulder, but when he spun around to find its source, he nearly walked headfirst into a noose.
The stench of rotting flesh filled his nostrils, and Roark realized the noose dangling from the hanging oak was mottled with dried bodily fluids. Shreds of putrid flesh and clumps of hair were caught in the fibers, as if a corpse had hung in it for weeks before rotting enough for the head to fall off and the body to drop.
“This is some sort of spell. An illusion.” He looked around for signs of the mage or creature that had cast it. “Show yourself!”
This time the whispering continued for a breath after Roark fell silent, then died off. He strained to pick out the words, but he couldn’t understand what it was saying. Had it been a woman’s voice?
Something moved in the corner of his vision, a bulky shape moving at a weird clip. His head whipped around to follow it, but the thing disappeared behind the trunk of another massive hanging oak before his eyes could focus. He caught a glimpse of gray, then it was gone. Nothing walked out on the other side of the tree.
A breeze sent goosebumps prickling down Roark’s back and arms—the first breeze he’d felt since walking into this forest—and made the branches overhead creak and groan.
The groans sounded almost human. Or post-human, perhaps. The groan of a putrefying cadaver sighing out trapped gasses over the vocal cords.
Roark felt a presence behind him—huge, hulking, and evil beyond imagining—just before the sound of shuffling footsteps reached his ears. He spun around, rapier at the ready.
Nothing but an ocean of moonlit forest, punctuated by swaying nooses. Roark swallowed hard, forcing the motion through a dry throat and trying to fight down the dread swelling in his chest. He could hear the whispering again, just under the clanging hammer of his heart. The whispering was close, but he still couldn’t make out any of the words. His rapier arm gave an involuntary shudder and the short hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Something was in this forest with him. A horror so deep he couldn’t begin to comprehend it. The longer he stood there, the more convinced Roark became that he was staring the thing down, but his mind refused to see it. Whatever this horror was, it was so terrible that his mind was covering it with nothing but empty forest and swinging ropes.
“She’s here,” a voice whispered in his ear.
Roark whirled around, so terrified that he forgot the dagger in his off hand and hacked wildly dalla spalla with the rapier. He couldn’t see anything, but he felt the resistance against his blade with every chop. The shining edge came away stained with the blood of the unseen horror.
Motion out of the corner of his eye. Something grabbed the wrist of his dagger hand. A noose. He tried to jerk away, but the rope held fast. The fraying fibers dug in, tearing up the ghostly pale skin of his wrist. Panicked, Roark slashed at the rope with his rapier. As soon as he cut through the first rope, a second latched onto his arm in nearly the same place.
A heavy mass slammed into his ear, leaving his head ringing and his feet stumbling. The invisible horror.
The whispers were a constant susurrus now, filling every corner of his mind. How could he have ever thought they sounded female? They were evil given voice. A deep, churning madness pitched so low that it could only be felt in the deep places of the soul—but never understood. Never.
Another noose wrapped around his calf, biting into the flesh like teeth.
In the right corner of his vision, Roark’s filigreed Health vial flashed green.
He tried to turn and hack at the noose poisoning him, but it just dug in tighter and started shaking him back and forth. More ropes twined around his arms and chest until he could barely move his hands or arms. He would’ve cast Infernal Torment or another of his written spells, yet with his hands bound by the implacable ropes, his magick was less than useless. Besides, what would he have cast it upon? The trees? The nooses themselves? In a last-ditch effort, he tried biting at the ropes, but to no avail. They dragged him to the ground, holding him down for the invisible horror to feast on. He fought and kicked and cursed, but a cold weight settled on his chest and stomach, forcing the air out.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t escape. He was going to die here, caught and held fast like a fox in a snare.
A sticky tongue slapped against Roark’s cheek.
“... to stop! It is Kaz and Macaroni! Please, Roark, can’t you hear Kaz?”
A bearded lizard’s head covered in muddy dirt hovered an inch from Roark’s face. For a moment, Roark panicked, uncertain what sort of creature had him in its grasp. That is, until the beast blinked its bulging eyes slightly out of time with one another.
“Mac?”
“Roark?” Kaz’s voice was rough with desperation and right in Roark’s ear.
“It’s me.” Roark
tried to move, but found he was still trapped in place on the ground. Not only was Mac sitting on his chest, but a pair of dark blue, thickly muscled arms were wrapped around his stomach, pinning his arms to his sides. “Let me go, mate.”
The arms didn’t budge.
“Say something to prove that Roark is himself again,” Kaz demanded. “Something only the sane Roark would know.”
“But something only I would know automatically precludes you from knowing it, Kaz.”
The arms squeezed the air out of Roark’s lungs.
“Fine.” Roark winced. “The first food you ate was skewers in the Averi City Marketplace, your battle cry is ‘For salt,’ and you’re interested in Mai for more than leveling up your cooking.”
The blue arms squeezed once more, but this time Kaz gave a cry of relief. “Roark is all right again!”
Finally, the Behemoth let Roark go. Mac waddled off his chest and up the side of a tree. Roark rolled up to his feet, favoring his right leg as searing pain throbbed through a deep gash just the size and shape of a Turtle Dragon’s maw. Another wound in his stomach wept blood and an unidentified clear fluid. The liquid in his slowly refilling Health vial was bright green rather than red.
“Did Mac poison me?” Roark asked, retrieving his dropped rapier and dagger and putting them away.
Kaz shuffled to his feet.
“Roark was acting so strangely,” he said, looking down at the ground. “Talking about ropes and hanging oaks, and then he started yelling for Kaz and Mac as if he couldn’t see right in front of his face. Kaz tried to get his attention, but Roark kept yelling.” Kaz shrugged. “Then he started slashing Kaz and Mac with the rapier. Kaz was afraid Roark would kill him and Macaroni both.”
“I’m sorry, mate.” Roark slapped Kaz on the back. “Thanks for stopping me. You did the right thing.”
A tremulous grin broke out across the Behemoth’s face and his huge blue shoulders relaxed.
“Truth be told, Kaz was more worried that Roark would damage them,” he said. He strode over to the base of a gnarled oak and gathered something from a natural bowl in its roots. He turned around and held his filled hands out to Roark proudly.
Muddy little puff balls. They didn’t look any different from the “common black truffle” Kaz was dismissing earlier, but Roark ventured a wild guess anyway.
“White truffles?”
“White truffles!” Kaz crowed, cackling like mad.
A breeze shivered through the branches, but didn’t touch Roark’s shaggy hair or the black feather plumes of Kaz’s antlered headdress. The low rattling of the leaves almost sounded like a feminine whisper.
“Good,” Roark said. “Let’s get the bloody hells out of this place.”
THIRTY-FIVE:
It’s a Trap!
A plate-mail-wearing hero slipped through the gaping hole between a pair of Thursr Knights, hamstringing the closest one with a slice of one Steel Natagama.
“No, you two have to come in at the same time,” Roark said, trying not to sound as frustrated as he felt. He sidestepped the level 4 hero’s wild swing, then ran him through unceremoniously with the rapier. The last of the hero’s red bar drained away and he crumpled to the floor. Dead. Roark absently cast Infernal Invigoration on a level 5 Changeling who’d taken a glancing blow during the tryst, healing him to full health, then turned back to the Knights. “If you don’t cut him off in tandem, the heroes will be able to slip past you like he just did.”
The squad of high-level Trolls stared at him as if he were speaking some unheard-of language.
Roark sighed and rubbed at his temples. He’d come upstairs for a shift griefing—he could use all the levels he could manage before he challenged the Dungeon Lord—but instead, he’d spent the last few hours trying to teach the newest band of Mugwump Trolls how to work together. The hulking Knights, gangling Champions, and weird Shamans didn’t seem to be getting any closer to grasping the concept.
“Another raiding party!” the Changeling, now positioned at the top of the stairs, shouted down. “Eight of them, levels 15 to 24!”
Roark nodded and the Changeling disappeared into the shadows behind the crumbling staircase.
“Everyone set up again,” Roark told the group. “We’ll take this from the beginning.”
Luckily, with the notoriety the citadel was gaining these days, the stream of heroes to practice on was nearly endless. That last party had been low-level compared to what had become the norm. Roark hoped a tougher band of opposition would force these Trolls to come together. That or die. Death, especially in this world, could be an excellent teacher.
The first hero into the antechamber, a mage in flowing black robes, raised his fist over his head and shouted out a word like thunder. The citadel shook as if an earthquake had hit; lightning flashed overhead, then fiery hail rained from the ceiling. The small burning stones sizzled against Roark’s skin, raising red welts wherever they hit and eating away at his Health vial. With his Regen rate, the hail wasn’t fast enough to be lethal to him, but it was painful enough to be annoying and would almost certainly kill the Changeling if it went on unchecked.
Roark wrote a quick dispel in his Initiate’s Spell Book and triggered it, cutting off the fiery hail mid-storm. Then he signaled the archers—a pair of Reaver Champions set up on either side of the antechamber facing the stairs.
The Champions loosed their arrows, but the mage ducked back into the doorway, trading places with a massive Necroknight—[GrumpyAlpaca]—decked out in black scale mail etched with glowing green runes. The archers let fly another volley, but the bolts rusted as they closed with the Necro, crumbling into dust when they hit her mail. GrumpyAlpaca charged. The two Thursr Knights who’d let the level 4 hero from the previous band slip between them raised their weapons—a wicked-looking morning star spiked with curved talons from an unknown beast and a massive battle-notched scythe—and prepared to meet the Necro’s attack.
Before Roark could signal the three Shaman planted around the room, one hurled a caerulean Slow Spell at the Necroknight just as another shot an ice javelin at her. The javelin shattered inches from the Necro’s armor. The caerulean light hit full force, however, slowing her charge to half-speed.
“Her armor’s impervious to physical weapons, but not magick,” Roark called to the Shaman favoring the icy spikes. “Try a plague or health-draining spell.”
The Shaman scowled, but gave a curt nod and fired a burst of green at the sluggishly charging Necroknight. This plague spell slipped through the armor’s enchantment, quickly wicking away red from the Necro’s Health bar.
The black-clad mage was back, calling out another thunderous prayer at the ceiling. One of the Shamans hurled a fiery whirlwind at the caster. The mage threw up both hands, conjuring a shield of white light that absorbed the attack.
An arrow hissed through the air and thudded into Roark’s shoulder.
[2x stealth multiplier!]
A handful of red liquid from his filigreed vial drained away. Roark’s eyes snapped up to the doorway, searching for the source, but caught only a shadowy haze before it disappeared again.
“Assassin!” Roark warned his Trolls, still scanning the myriad pools of shadow.
He didn’t want to be pulled into this battle, that would serve no one, but he certainly didn’t feel like acting the part of a pincushion to these would-be killers. He cast a level 2 Hex-Armor spell. Cold power settled around him like a heavy cloak, sinking down through his skin and deeper into his bones. He felt momentarily weaker—the spell extracting its price and temporarily reducing his Constitution by 5—but the sensation quickly vanished as a shield like glimmering crystal surrounded his body like a second skin.
Another barrage of arrows sailed through the air, several slapping into Roark’s Hex-Armor, only to bounce away harmlessly as they depleted a small portion of his Magick. An excellent addition to his arsenal.
Several more arrows found a home in the gut of a nearby Reaver Shaman.
/>
“Ooooh! The heroes have an assassin in their party!” She dropped to a crouch and disappeared in a curl of inky smoke.
Not the hottest coal in the fire, that one. Roark shook his head and turned back to the fight.
The Thursr Knights were trading blows with the fearsome Necroknight, GrumpyAlpaca. The plague spell had eaten away a small fraction of the Necro’s health, but it was wearing off, and the Thursrs’ two-on-one advantage was mitigated by her enchanted armor. Their weapons didn’t disintegrate as the arrows had, but they weren’t dealing out damage from their dual Flame and Ice enchantments, either.
Across the chamber, the mage and a Shaman hurled elemental whirlwinds, balls of lightning, and deadly javelins at one another as fast as they could conjure them. Though the Shaman was five levels higher than the mage, they seemed equally matched, each raising shields or countering attacks before the spells could land. The other two Shamans were engaged with a second enormous opponent, a massive level 20 Ronin Arcanist whipping around a flaming chigiriki and shooting spells from a carved wand in his off hand.
At the top of the stairs, a level 18 Executioner—[DeathBySnuSnu]—wielding an enormous axe was making quick work of the hail-damaged Changeling. Though the Changeling was trying to retreat to the safety of his group, the Executioner had cut off the lumpy little creature’s access to the stairs, stealing away his only viable escape route. As Roark looked on, the Changeling glanced down the side of the crumbling stairway, obviously trying to decide if he could survive the jump.
Either none of the griefing party noticed their smallest member’s trouble or none of them were able to get free long enough to help.
Roark scowled. He tried not to step in on these fights unless absolutely necessary—the more Experience the recruits got griefing the better—but this time it couldn’t be helped. The Changeling had fought and scratched his way to level 5. Roark didn’t want those hard-earned levels to disappear, both for the Changeling’s sake and the sake of the overall strength of his army.
Civil War Page 26