by Ari Marmell
Stars, what do I do? His own weapon wouldn't do a damn thing to a creature of bone, especially not one capable of laughing off a troll-wielded axe to the face. So far, the thing was focusing on Katim, but Gork had no doubt that if and when the troll fell, kobold was next on the menu.
And then, as his cheek was stung to bleeding by a small sliver of brick thrown loose by the whirlwind, he had an idea. It wasn't much of an idea, granted, but this didn't really seem the time to be choosy.
“Katim!” he shouted, gesturing wildly to attract her attention. “Down there!” He pointed to the door from which the beast had emerged.
Apparently, the creature didn't appreciate his interference. Skull and shoulders rotated atop the miniature cyclone so that the empty sockets and gaping grin were suddenly aimed at Gork. Before even the nimble kobold could dodge, those bony fingers reached out to score two deep scratches across his other cheek.
For an instant, it felt as though the tower had abruptly righted itself. The room spun, and Gork staggered sideways in a clumsy dance as his entire center of balance became, well, uncentered. His arms were dead weights at his sides, and he felt exhausted to the point of tears. He struggled to breathe and broke into a horrible choking fit, exhaling gust after gust of stale air. He felt the winds rippling through his body, flowing from his wounds and his orifices.
The thing spun back again, clearly recognizing the troll as the greater threat. By then, however, Katim had already darted by it—slamming her axe into its shoulder as she passed, for all the good it did—and dropped through the doorway.
Gork cowered, struggling to catch some measure of breath, and actually sobbed with relief when the thing chose to follow the troll rather than turn its wrath on him. Sometimes, it's good to be the little guy.
He watched as it drifted down into the sunken cell, determined to slay the troll first, and Gork gave serious consideration to just slamming the door. But he still wasn't certain he felt up to facing the rest of the tower alone; there was no way he could move that bar by himself even at full strength, let alone in his current condition; and if he tried and failed, it was purely a question as to whether the skull-thing tore him apart before Katim did.
Come to think of it, I wonder if Katim only went down there because she knew I couldn't move that damn thing on my own….
Every inch a struggle, Gork lowered himself into the cell, slipping and tumbling the last few feet, and began creeping—lurching, really—along the wall. The cell's current floor was coated in a nigh-solid mass of ancient straw and an age's worth of dust and insect carapaces. Some were flung about by the creature's winds, but enough lay unmoving, ready to crunch beneath a careless foot. The kobold squinted, trying unsuccessfully to protect his sight from the stormy barrage. In fits and starts, fighting for every step, he drew near his goal. He just had to get there before Katim faltered….
He very nearly did not.
Katim crouched in the opposite corner, axe bobbing wildly in a desperate attempt to hold the spectral thing at bay. Deep scratches marred both skeletal arms, and the creature's constant wail had risen in pitch, frustration now mixed with the hatred and fury they'd heard before. But still it came, clearly undaunted by the myriad wounds the troll had inflicted, and each time she drove it back. Stalemate.
But not for long. Her greatest efforts merely pained the thing, while it could kill with a glancing blow. She, for all her strength and trollish determination, would tire; and this odious apparition, she was certain, would not.
And speaking of odious, where was Gork? She'd gone where he indicated, assuming he had more of a plan than she did—in other words, any—but she'd seen neither hide nor, well, more hide of him since. If he'd trapped her down here without good reason, she would make damn sure she survived this monstrosity long enough to wring the little bastard's neck so hard that his spine popped out his—
A loud clanking, not unlike the fall of a lazy portcullis, sounded from across the cell. His outline blurred by the spinning detritus of the whirlwind, Gork faded into view behind the apparition. He staggered as he walked, as though weighted down by some unseen encumbrance. Well, all right, it was heartening (if only slightly) that he hadn't chosen to abandon her, but she wasn't certain how much good he'd do.
The kobold shrugged, and Katim saw a strange, shapeless weight fall from his shoulder. More clanking and clattering, and he bent down to lift whatever it was he'd dropped. Hands clasped together, he rocked back and forth, building momentum. Between the haze of the whirlwind and the constant blur of her own axe, she still couldn't see what he held.
And then, whatever it was, Gork heaved it into the air with the all the pathetic strength he could muster. Finally, Katim saw what it was, and she chortled with delight at her sudden understanding.
The heavy manacle, attached to the wall by its thick iron chain, hurtled across the cell and vanished into the spinning winds. The apparition didn't even seem to notice.
Katim stepped to the side, parrying a bony arm, stepped again, and again, always waiting for the thing to follow.
It jerked to a halt, somehow stumbling in midair, the chain taut behind it, tethering it to the wall. Again Katim choked back laughter; for a creature without flesh or muscle on its face, it was astounding just how confused it managed to look.
It was a neat trick, quick thinking on the kobold's part, but it wouldn't hold the apparition long. The manacle hadn't latched onto anything solid, but was held in place only by the spinning winds. Even as she watched, the thing yanked itself forward a few inches, two links of iron sliding obscenely from inside its “body.” It reached down and clasped the chain in skeletal hands, tugging another few links free. In moments it would be loose once more.
But for those moments, its attentions and its deadly claws were directed elsewhere. Katim took a deep breath, summoned every bit of strength remaining to her, and swung her axe at the now-defenseless skull.
Bone cracked and the creature howled, but still it lived, still it struggled against the chain. Three more links; less than half a minute, and only the manacle itself would remain within the vortex.
Katim dropped her axe, shook loose her chirrusk, and leapt. She wasn't strong enough to make the doorway above on her own, but by hooking the weapon onto the stone lip she succeeded in hauling herself out, gasping and panting the entire way.
Like Gork before her, though of course she couldn't know that, she considered slamming the door and leaving her ally behind. But the troll couldn't be sure that replacing the bar would be enough to restore whatever magic had held the apparition at bay.
Which did not, she realized with a grin, make it useless.
Heaving the massive bar into the air, wincing as she felt muscles pull and threaten to tear in her stomach, she stumbled back to the edge of the cell-turned-pit, took an instant to orient herself, and dropped it end-on.
Beneath that plummeting weight, the creature's skull became powder.
The winds ceased as abruptly as someone blowing out a candle, allowing masses of straw, clouds of dust, chips of stone, and one corroded manacle to rain loudly across the floor. The bones themselves, including shards of skull, landed at Gork's feet. The troll watched as the kobold spent the next several moments gleefully pounding them into so much powder with the manacle.
He, like Katim, was obviously reveling in his newfound strength. When the creature died, the both of them felt an incredible rush of vitality; whatever the thing stole from them had now returned, and with reinforcements to boot.
“Well, that was fun,” Gork said once he'd climbed his own way out of the cell and the pair of them had progressed back into the horizontal stairwell.
Katim snorted loudly. “Kobolds have a truly…odd notion of fun.”
“Look on the bright side, Katim. It probably can't get any worse.”
With a snarl, she backhanded Gork halfway across the hall. Trolls aren't superstitious, as a rule—their efforts to gather slaves for the afterlife aside—but damn
it all, some things you just don't say.
“Actually,” she said as he crawled his way back to her, “there was an upside…to us discovering that thing.”
“Do tell,” Gork said sourly, prodding at his jaw with two knuckles.
“If Trelaine had abandoned…the tower, he would surely have either taken…or destroyed that thing. Its presence…suggests that he indeed died here…as the rumors claim.”
Gork wrinkled his snout. “Um…Yay?”
“Yay, indeed. While you're…celebrating, climb back down there and bring…back my axe.”
As it turned out, though, the kobold's prognostications, however much they might have tempted fate, proved accurate. They encountered no further danger as they explored the last group of rooms: Trelaine's own bedchamber and bath. There remained, finally, but a single door left. Had the tower been standing properly, it would have led to the room at the absolute top.
“Of course,” Gork grumbled, his words slightly slurred by a faint swelling in his bruised snout. “I knew it. I just knew it! Next time, we start at the top and work down!”
Katim couldn't resist. “Okay, I promise. The…next time you and I have…to search a fallen wizard's tower…for his bones, I will…listen to your advice.”
Gork's left eyelid twitched. “I’m just going to go check that last door,” he muttered darkly, setting his shoulders and pretending not to hear the troll's low chuckling behind him.
It was, they discovered, a most unremarkable door. It wasn't even locked. Very slowly, Katim edged it open with the tip of her axe. This was, or rather had been, the absolute height of Trelaine's abode. From all the tales Katim had heard of mages, the skeletal specter they'd faced was a well-heeled puppy compared to what they might find in here.
But the chamber, like the door, appeared mundane enough. Well, except for the fact that it stood right-side-up, despite the tower's horizontal orientation, but that discrepancy didn't bother them at all. At this point, such benign magics weren't even worth noting.
An old, dust-covered table stretched the length of the room, cluttered with crinkled parchments, bowls and pestles, and crystal vials. A wizard's laboratory straight from fairy tales, except for the other end of the table—perhaps a quarter of its length, all told—which was hideously blackened as if by some long-ago fire. That section was barren, suggesting that anything atop it had been hurled aside. Indeed, shards of broken glass, and chunks of metal melted into abstract shapes, were scattered across the floor nearby.
“Trelaine's accident,” Katim said.
Gork agreed. “I don't see any bones, though.”
“Nor do I. Let's…keep searching. They're bound to be…” The first of the swirling lights grabbed her attention and she peered upward.
“Oh, good,” the kobold said, craning his neck back to follow her gaze. “Ghosts. I was just thinking that I hadn't really gotten my fill of dead things.”
Roughly eight feet over Katim's head, where the ceiling sloped inward to form the tower's peaked roof, a ring of something spun through the air. Bursts of a pale luminescence—now an off-white shade of pearl, now of red, now blue—limned the apparitions in a faint aura, invisible unless one were looking directly at them. Gaping holes in the spectral forms vaguely suggested facial features, too lacking in detail to determine any expressions. They spun in an endless path, circumnavigating the room scores of times each minute. Although they moved too swiftly for an accurate count, Katim estimated somewhere between fifteen and twenty of them.
Hovering in the precise center of the phantom ring, a dancing marionette with an epileptic puppeteer, was a collection of bones. Even as they watched, the cracked and pitted skull rotated downward as if to stare at them, until it was knocked aside by a wildly flailing femur.
“I think I'll just go and see how the others are doing,” Gork said.
Katim glanced down at the bronze brooch given them by Queen Anne. It, too, was glowing, nearly bright enough to wash out the ghostly radiance above.
“Those?” Gork asked.
Katim nodded. The kobold scowled. “Figures. What do you suppose they're all doing here?”
“Perhaps these are…the beings that perished in Trelaine's…experiments?”
“I suppose it's possible. Think they'll let us just take what we need?”
“Feel free to…ask them.”
Gork, apparently, did not feel free to do that.
Slowly, keeping a weather eye above, Katim moved to stand directly beneath the floating remains. She yanked at a strap on her belt and allowed her chirrusk to fall into her waiting hand with a loud clank.
“I think, using this…I can jump high enough…to reach. I pull them…down; you stand beside me…and catch them.”
“What? I’m not touching those things! No way! Not a chance. You can just find someone else to—”
Katim lifted the kobold off the ground by his collar. “And I am not…willing to turn around and leave…empty-handed after all the trouble…we've gone through. Do…you have a better suggestion?”
“Actually,” Gork said, his whole face lighting up, “I do!”
More crawling, more banging of hands and knees, and more cursing in multiple languages finally brought them back to one of the storerooms on a lower—sideways?—level. There, after a few minutes spent searching, they located a large sack with only a few small holes worn through the fabric by the passage of time. Again with the crawling and banging, and they returned to the topmost room, where they commenced a slightly modified variation of Katim's plan. It took her a few tries before the barbed hook caught one of the bones at the proper angle. (Gork refrained from laughing at the sight of the troll bouncing up and down in the middle of the chamber, since he felt that his internal organs were perfectly fine where they were, thank you very much.) And once she'd snagged it, it briefly resisted her efforts to move it, as if it were jammed in place. With a final tug, however, she broke it loose; the bone tumbled earthward, and Gork caught it in the sack without difficulty and without touching the nasty thing.
It took time, far more time than they were comfortable spending, what with their companions (presumably) weathering the siege outside. Each bone had to be snagged at just the right angle, and some were too small or just the wrong shape for the chirrusk to hook. Once they'd gotten about half the visible remains, including the skull, they'd agreed that it would have to be enough.
Which, of course, led to even more crawling through those damned stairs.
It was sheer happenstance that Gork chose to glance back as they were roughly halfway back down/through the tower. Katim started at his sudden yelp, cracking her head on the steps. She'd been trying to navigate a particularly arduous twist in the spiral case and wasn't really in a position to turn and look. “What is it?”
“The ghosts!” Gork whispered. “They're following us!”
Katim cursed. “Are they…gaining?”
“No,” the kobold said after a moment. “They seem to be keeping a set distance, actually.”
“Let me guess. About…as far as they were circling…from the bones?”
“Uh…Well, yeah, about that.”
She nodded and resumed her crawl. “If they start to get any…closer, by all means, yip.”
Katim felt another surge of panic as they approached the door, hanging open, revealing the green-tinted wall of water beyond. Ruthlessly, she repressed it. The trip up, she told herself sharply, wouldn't be as difficult as the trip down. Once through the door, she could just climb the curve of the tower; shouldn't require being in the water more than a few seconds.
She hoped.
Thankfully, she discovered that getting to the door was the hardest part. The curve of the wall forced her to climb practically upside down, fingers wedged into tiny stones. Gork made it look easy—she almost reached out and knocked him off the wall, just because—whereas she nearly lost her purchase on three separate occasions. Each time, she found herself hanging precariously, and while the fall was
n't far, she'd have landed head-or back-first on the stone below.
But she managed, time and again, to retain her hold, to spur herself onward, and finally her fists closed on the doorframe, her fingertips suddenly soaked as they protruded into the murky waters beyond. Taking one last deep breath, she hauled herself out into the swamp.
Maybe the climb up was easier than the journey down, maybe it wasn't; but this time, Katim kept both her wits and her grip. It was less than a minute later that she clambered, soaked but otherwise unharmed, out onto the uppermost curve of the tower. She breathed deep, sucking in the fragrant miasma of the swamps.
And came damn near to losing her snout in the process, as Cræosh's blade missed her face by a matter of inches on its way to severing the claws from one of the waterlogged corpses. “Took your bloody fucking Ancestors-damned sweet time about it, didn't you?!” he ranted as he stomped past, sword falling as he methodically chopped inches off the undead thing's arm. “If I didn't know better, I'd think you wanted these things to finish us off!”
“It might have been worth it to…shut you up.”
“Whatever!” The orc lunged and split a second corpse, one that was giving Jhurpess something of a hard time, down the middle. The bugbear, in turn, flipped over Cræosh, crushing the skull of the one Cræosh had been fighting. They exchanged brief nods and then turned to face the next in the seemingly endless wave. “Did you get it?”
“Yeah, we got it!” Gork shouted from his new position behind the ogre, keeping her tree-trunk legs between him and the enemy. “Not the whole skeleton, but it should be enough!”
“Great! Then all we have to do is find some way to get the hell away from here without being eaten, torn to shreds, disemboweled, or otherwise rendered nonhomogenous. Any ideas?”
