The Iron Veil

by Randy Nargi

  “Truly macabre,” Klothar said, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen anything like that in all my days.”

  “It looks like the dwarves had been turned to stone or something. Ugh.”

  Fifty feet north down the hallway, they found the top half of the statue. It was wedged under a massive iron portcullis set within an arched door and it prevented the giant gate from completely closing.

  “Keep back!” Klothar said, getting down on his hands and knees to inspect the gap beneath the portcullis. “A tight fit. This can’t be more than a foot or so. But they most certainly squeezed through.”

  Pari looked at Klothar. “We’re going under, aren’t we?”

  “It should be fine, as long as we don’t nudge the statue. But you two need to go first. I might not fit.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Justin said.

  “We need to proceed with extreme caution,” the ranger said. “You must crawl right where they crawled. Not to the right. Not to the left. Just straight ahead.”

  “I can do that.”

  “First let me check for traps.” Klothar swept Justin’s staff under the portcullis. It looked like he was probing the floor for any hidden pressure plates or other switches.

  “You never know,” Klothar said. “Proceed, lad, but steady.”

  Pari said, “Don’t worry. If you mess up, you’ll just end up just like that dwarf statue—cut in half at the waist.”

  “Thanks for that pleasant thought.”

  Flattening himself on his stomach, Justin inched slowly under the portcullis.

  “You’re doing great!” Pari said.

  “Straight as an arrow lad, straight as an arrow.”

  Eventually he cleared the archway and slowly stood up. He felt a little lightheaded and shaky from fear, but tried not to let it show.

  “No biggie.”

  “Now, lad, I want you to sit right down there where you’re standing, and face us.”

  “But what if something sneaks up behind me?”

  “’Tis the best way to go, lad.”

  “What the hell!”

  “He’s kidding,” Pari said. “We’ll keep an eye out. This is just so you don’t accidentally trigger anything from that side of the gate.”

  “Whatever.”

  Justin sat down on the cold stone floor and watched as Pari inched under the portcullis. She was a lot more graceful than he was.

  “Okay, lad, slide back a few feet, but stay in the same line. You just need to make room for Pari to sit.”

  “I have to sit too? I have done this before, you know.”

  “Please, my lady. Just for my own peace of mind.”

  She got into position and sat in front of Justin.

  “This is cozy,” he said, and yanked at her hair playfully.

  “Stop it!” she said, swatting his hand away. But she giggled just the same.

  Klothar slid his pack and his rope and his lantern and bow under the portcullis and Pari and Justin gathered everything and held it on their laps.

  Without touching it, the ranger inspected the statue one more time—and then took a deep breath and started to wiggle under the portcullis. Even though Klothar had a slim build, he was well-muscled, like a professional athlete.

  “It appears that I’m stuck,” he said calmly.

  “What if you turn?” Pari asked. “To your right.”

  The bottom of the portcullis was a line of iron spikes, a foot long. Pari was right. The ranger had a little more space to maneuver if he could turn his body a bit.

  Klothar started to twist. “Help me. I can’t move in this position.”

  “I’ll do it,” Justin said. “Let’s change places.”

  He and Pari stood up and she put her arms around him like they were slow dancing. “Don’t get any ideas,” she murmured. And then they pivoted around each other so that Justin was closer to Klothar.

  “I got you.” Justin squatted down and took the ranger’s outstretched hands.

  “Easy, lad! Straight back.”

  Slowly and steadily, Justin pulled the ranger along the floor. The guy weighed a ton—like he was made of stone too—but eventually Justin pulled Klothar nearly clear of the portcullis.

  But the ranger’s boot must have jostled something because all of a sudden there was a loud grinding sound and the portcullis began to shudder.

  “Pull!” Klothar yelled.

  Justin yanked with all of his might—just as the statue splintered to fragments and the portcullis clanged to the ground. Bam! One of the spikes missed Klothar’s foot by no more than a half an inch.

  Coughing and gagging from the dust, the two of them scrambled to their feet.

  Justin’s heart drummed in his chest. “That was close.”

  “Well done, lad. I really didn’t think you had the strength to get me through. Thank you!”

  “Right on, Justin.”

  They gathered their equipment and Klothar aimed his lantern down the hall—which was narrower and built of black stone blocks. They were so black that they seemed to suck up the meager light from the glowstones.

  “The footprints continue this way.”

  As they walked, a chilling breeze blew through the hallway.

  “Could this be a way out?” Justin asked.

  Klothar shook his head. “By my reckoning, we’re still sixty or seventy feet underground.”

  The black hall turned a corner and then ended in a T-junction.

  “Hmmm, the tracks appear to go in both directions,” Klothar said.

  They soon discovered why. To the east the hallway was blocked by a floor-to-ceiling pile of rubble where the roof had collapsed.

  “We’re not getting through that without a bulldozer,” Pari said. “Let’s check the other direction.”

  The west hallway led to a small chamber that looked like some kind of deserted barracks or guard station. There were low benches and tables—all covered in dust. Empty torch holders and hooks for weapons dotted the walls. And a few tattered, rotten banners hung from the ceiling. But other than a few broken halberds and some fragments of wooden shields, there wasn’t much here.

  “They came this way,” Klothar pointed towards the north wall where the tables and benches had been pulled away from the wall.

  “It seems like the tracks dead-end here,” Justin said.

  “Look at that,” Pari held up her glow staff to illuminate another chalk mark on the wall. It looked like a rounded U shape.

  “What does it mean?” Justin asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I think I do,” Klothar said. He gently tapped the wall with his hammer, left and right, up and down. Then he started to feel around each stone block.

  “A-ha!”

  He nudged a block and a loud click sounded. Then he pushed the section of the wall forward and it opened just like a door.

  “So cool!” Justin said. “My first secret door.”

  Pari rolled her eyes. “Yeah, because this is your first dungeon. They’re actually a dime a dozen.”

  “Pray tell, what is a dime, my lady?” Klothar asked.

  “Never mind.”

  Klothar went first.

  “All clear,” he called.

  Justin followed the ranger and found himself on the middle landing of a stone staircase with stairs going both up and down. The stairs were made of the same black stone blocks as the hallway.

  “Our guides seemed to know exactly where they were going,” Klothar said. “Down. They didn’t even explore the stairs that—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, there was a blur of motion and a heavy writhing shape flew from the darkness above. It slammed into the ranger, knocking him down the stairs.

  Justin staggered back, his heart pounding. What the—?

  “Klothar!” Pari lunged after the ranger, shortstaff raised.

  Justin grabbed his own weapon and raced down the stairs.

  Fifteen feet below, the ranger sprawled on the stairs wit
h a bloody gash on his head. Perched on his chest was a horrific creature trying to choke Klothar to death, as it rocked and gibbered insanely. It was shaggy and apelike, but only the size of a child.

  Pari didn’t hesitate. She stabbed the end of her staff at the creature’s head, but it moved like lightning, ripping the staff from her grip and jumping up and down like a rabid ape.

  Justin knew that Pari should be healing, not fighting, so he had to do something.

  “Hey! Over here!”

  He raised his own staff above his head and jumped up and down, mimicking the creature and trying to attract its attention. Justin didn’t have much room to maneuver and his back was up against the wall, but his yelling seemed to do the trick.

  The creature let out an unearthly howl and launched itself at him, flying through the air.

  Justin brought his staff up, wedged against the wall, and point first at the creature.

  An instant later, he felt something slam into him, and then everything went black.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  When he awoke, he wasn’t at a Life Tree. He was slumped against the wall on the black stone staircase.

  Pari and Klothar stood over him and Pari checked his eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I didn’t die?”

  “No, but that thing sure did.” She jerked her thumb down towards his feet where the shaggy ape creature lay, his staff impaling it through the mouth.

  “Fast thinking, lad. Thank you.”

  “You sure you’re not a warrior?” Pari grinned at him.

  He stood up slowly and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t even hurt?”

  “Oh, you were hurt pretty bad. That thing hits like a jackhammer. But luckily, I’m an awesome healer and I saved your skinny ass.”

  “Well, I guess now we’re even.”

  “Even? How do figure that?”

  “Who pulled you out of that sinkhole?”

  “Uh, Klothar, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Well, who saved you from the assassins?”

  “That would be the Hawks, but don’t remind me.”

  “Well, who do you think got the Hawks to come save you? Huh? That was all me,” he said smugly.

  “Ok, I’ll give you that.”

  “If you two youngsters are quite finished bickering,” Klothar said. “I’d like to move out of here to someplace less confined.”

  He yanked Justin’s shortstaff out of the ape creature’s corpse, wiped the blood off on its fur, and handed it back to Justin.

  “Same order. Keep your eyes open. There could be more of them.”

  At the bottom, the stairs dead-ended into a little square room, eight feet on a side.

  “More secret doors,” Klothar said, pointing to where the tracks in the dust led.

  “Maybe I should go first,” Justin said. “I’m more expendable.”

  “Nonsense, lad.” The ranger felt around the wall and triggered another secret door. This time he peeked through much more cautiously.

  “Stay here,” Klothar said in a hushed voice. “Until I give the word.”

  Soundlessly, he slipped through the secret door.

  Justin leaned over to Pari and whispered to her. “Are we totally crazy for trying to figure out this dungeon with just the three of us?”

  “Probably. You’re supposed to have six players. And at least two should be mages. But we haven’t encountered many mobs, so who knows?”

  Klothar returned. “The hall is safe, but don’t open any of the doors. And you might want to hold your nose.”

  “What?”

  As he walked through the hall, the smell hit him.

  “Ugh—what is that?” Justin pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose.

  It smelled like a combination of rotten eggs and dog poop on a hot day.

  Pari, “I don’t know, but it’s nasty.” She covered her nose as well.

  “Smells like death to me,” Klothar said ominously.

  “Do you always have to be so dramatic?”

  “Gird yourself, lad. A delving such as this is no place for a sissy.”

  “Sissy? Did you just called me a sissy? Who even says that?”

  “Ignore him,” Pari said.

  The hall was at least twenty-five feet wide and nearly as tall and it stretched off to the north. There were multiple doorways leading off to the east and west. But most fascinating was the door they had just come through. On this side the door was a cut-out image of a dwarf made of iron and about twice the size of the dwarf statues they had seen in the other hallway.

  The iron dwarf was wearing a crown and holding a hammer in one hand and some tongs in the other.

  “Pretty cool!” Justin said.

  Pari and Klothar turned and scrutinized the dwarf artwork.

  “He looks pretty grim,” Pari said.

  Around the door was a scene rendered in stylized shapes made of iron. The scene depicted the king dwarf in some sort of cave with flames in back of him and snakes at his feet.

  The partially open door was making it hard to see, so Justin started to close it—

  “Stop!” Klothar yelled.

  But it was too late. The door snapped shut with a resounding clang!

  Justin stepped back. “I hardly touched it!”

  Klothar pulled and prodded at the dwarf artwork, but the door was now locked shut.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Pari said. “That happens all the time. All these secret doors tend to lock in back of you. If we had spikes or something, we could have prevented it from closing.”

  At least he could see the full scene now. There was some dwarvish writing over the dwarf king’s head. Amazingly, Justin found he could read it.

  “You guys see that?” He pointed to the inscription.

  “Some Dwarvish gobbly-gook,” Pari said.

  “Not gobbly-gook. Not to me, at least.”

  “You can read Dwarvish?”

  “Sure can. It says For the Glory of Xyurn, Forge Master to Us All.”

  Pari’s face blanched. “Did… did you say Xyurn?”

  “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  “The Temple of Xyurn. That’s where my fellowship died.”

  Klothar rubbed his chin. “This Xyurn seems to be a Dwarvish entity of some sort. A king or a god, perhaps.”

  “Maybe there’s some connection,” Pari said. “I’ve never seen it myself, but the Temple of Xyurn is in Hell’s Gate.”

  “Let us not mention that cursed place,” Klothar said.

  Justin knew a little about Hell’s Gate from his lore skill. It was a massive delving in a chasm that stretched for several miles. Hell’s Gate was filled with a seemingly endless array of dungeons, stacked one on top of another like condos in a high-rise. According to what Klothar had told him, Dynark’s tomb was located somewhere within Hell’s Gate.

  “Can we get out of this place, before I barf?” Justin pulled his shirt up even more to filter out the rotting stench.

  “The tracks lead north.” Klothar waved them forward, and they made their way to where the hall ended in a tall set of double doors made of iron or bronze or some similar metal.

  One of the doors was half open and as Justin got closer, he was that the doors were decorated with a bas-relief sculpture of a tree, similar in style to the dwarf king sculpture.

  The smell was much worse here, but Justin tried to put it out of his mind, because he was intrigued by the art on the doors. If he closed the doors, he’d get a better view of the tree, but he wasn’t about to make that mistake again. Instead, he peeked from one side to the other, assembling the image in his mind.

  The scene showed an ancient and gnarled tree with three exposed roots and a big snake coiled among them. The branches of the tree spread wide and there were various animals tucked in there: lots of different birds, including a big crow, and even some odd choices like a wolf, a bear, and—strangest of all—a horse. At the very top of the tree was a fierce-looking eagle, and then over
its head was the arc of what appeared to be a rainbow.

  Justin had no idea what any of it meant, and neither did Pari and Klothar.

  The tracks definitely led to this door, but just out of curiosity, they spent a half hour exploring the other doors in the hallway. The side passages didn’t lead anywhere immediately interesting; they just wound endlessly around with a lot of empty rooms and dead ends. At one point, Klothar told them he saw a humanoid shape shambling down one of the corridors, but it had kept their distance.

  “This level is huge,” Justin said. “How would you ever explore this whole thing?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Pari said. “At least not without a large party.”

  They returned to the north end of the main hall. Justin wanted to examine the double doors some more, but he was outvoted. They squeezed through the open half of the door into a vast chamber with pillars. But Justin couldn’t focus on their surroundings because the source of the horrible rotting smell was right there in front of them.

  From a distance it looked like a dead knight mounted on a dead horse, sprawled on their sides, but with the rider still in place. But as they got closer, Justin saw that the knight’s body had been fused into the horse’s. And judging by the curves in the chest area and the delicate jawline, the knight had been female.

  “That’s far enough,” Klothar warned.

  Justin’s gorge rose as he saw thick white worms, the size of his thumb, slither in and out of the corpse and into sticky pools of congealed blood.

  “That’s a centaur,” Pari said, stunned.

  “Yeah. A huge one.” Justin tried to picture how tall it might have stood. Could have been twelve or fifteen feet tall.

  The human half of the centaur was clad in fierce-looking armor with horns and spikes and chains and blades that made her look like some weird S&M nightmare. Part of the horse half was draped in a tapestry which appeared to have been carelessly torn from the walls.

  “Lo!” Klothar called out. “This way.”

  He had moved towards the back of the chamber, a dozen yards away. There was a raised stone platform and in the center of it a square pit. A pair of ropes tied to nearby pillars hung down into the pit. As Pari and Justin joined him, Klothar peeked down into the pit.