"Nice work, Brother Tarl. I think you just killed a friendly messenger. Take a look at this." Ren held up the chain. An embossed medallion hung from it.
Tarl looked on in horror. Ren was right. The warrior had tried to offer them a medal of Tyr to wear inside the keep. Tarl let out a slow breath as he examined it. It was identical to the medallion Sot had given him, and it showed no sign of corrosion despite the years it must have spent in the ground. Tarl had let his fear get in the way of his faith.
He held the medallion skyward. "Great Tyr, the Even-Handed, God of Justice, once again you have demonstrated your presence with us. Forgive me for not recognizing your messenger."
Tarl held the medallion out to Ren. "This is for you. I guess you didn't need to steal it after all. He meant for you to have it."
The wooden gates of the keep had fared poorly against the elements. Tarl had only to push, and the big doors swung open, revealing a large courtyard lined by the charred remnants of several buildings. In the center of the keep, reasonably unscathed by dragon fire, was an airy building filled with tables, probably the mess hall. To the right were the blackened shells of what appeared to have been the stable and blacksmith's shops. The tallest building in the keep, and the only one built of stone, obviously the temple, stood in the far left corner of the courtyard, intact except for what must have been a wooden bell tower at the top. The wooden buildings in front of it had suffered extensive fire damage.
Here and there in the courtyard, the tall, unkempt grasses grew very thick, as if the blood and flesh of the men who had stood to face the dragons had nourished it. Tarl knew that the men living inside Sokol Keep must have died much as his brothers had in the graveyard- screaming in terror and without adequate defenses, pained beyond imagining by their own suffering and their inability to prevent what followed. No wonder a dark shadow hung over this place!
"Something's been here-something alive," Ren said softly. "And not long ago. See the way that grass is matted down over there on the left? There's also a lingering smell that doesn't fit this place. You remember what Cadorna said about the Lord of the Ruins sending troops to meet us? We need to watch our step."
The three had gone no more than fifteen feet into the courtyard when clods of grass and earth started flying up everywhere. Screams and moans erupted all around them as dozens of skeleton warriors burst from the ground. More emerged from the buildings and ruins of the keep. All walked deliberately toward Ren and Tarl and Shal, their weapons raised. Ren pulled out his two short swords and planted himself in front of Shal. "We've got to get out of here-now!"
"No!" said Tarl firmly. "These are warrior clerics who serve my god. Hold up your medallions."
Bony arms stretched out toward Shal from every side. Her body seemed to go cold, refusing to function normally. Her breath came in constricted gasps, as it had in the boat, but this time the pressure was even heavier. She had to fight merely to breathe, and she struggled even harder to regain control of her arms and hands so she could lift up the medallion.
Ren was shaking his head violently. "They can see the medallion on my chest, and it's not stopping them! I'm getting me and Shal the hell out of here!"
Ren pushed the nearest of the skeletons back with one short sword. When a second skeleton started to wrap its bony hand around Shal's arm, he raised the other sword and brought it down swiftly, chopping the creature's hand off.
"Behind you!" Shal shouted. A large skeletal warrior, Ren's equal in height, was directly behind him, about to swing at Ren with a rusty long sword.
Ren spun and met the swing with both short swords, but when he tried to push the creature back, he momentarily lost his balance when he stepped in one of the holes from which the vile monsters had emerged. Instantly another skeleton burst partway out of the earth and grabbed Ren's legs from behind in its icy grip. Ren fell hard, but the skeleton did not release its grip. Instead, the bony fingers closed tighter and tighter, till Ren thought they would surely sever his legs.
Two more skeletal warriors had grabbed Shal, one by the right arm and one by the left. They were pulling in opposite directions.
Tarl was oblivious to Shal's predicament. He was overwhelmed by the terror these creatures must have experienced before they died. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of brothers had been slaughtered here but remained undead, their lives unfulfilled. Like Tarl, they'd had no chance to complete their mortal missions. Their screams were his screams. Their pain was his pain. His mind was barraged by dozens of messages unsent to loved ones, and an untold number of emotions ranging from panic and terror to remorse and relief assaulted his psyche. Tarl lifted his holy symbol high. "Rest, brothers!" he shouted firmly. "As Tyr is my witness, we mean no harm!"
Again arid again, he repeated the words as he turned slowly in a circle, letting the reflection from the holy symbol of Tyr shine in every direction, touching each undead warrior. One by one, the skeletons lowered their weapons to their sides. The three holding Ren and Shal released their grips. When the two of them held up their medallions as well, the rest of the skeletons closing in on the party halted their advance. They appeared to remain agitated and continued to move about, but it was obvious they were no longer interested in harming Tarl, Ren, or Shal.
"Whew!" Shal breathed quietly. "I've heard of clerics turning the undead, but I've never heard of anybody turning a whole army of them!"
Tarl heard Shal's words, but this was no time to celebrate. "Something or someone is keeping these men in motion, but I think we'll be able to explore in peace now," he said.
From where he lay on the ground, Ren did his best to quell a chill of revulsion at the word "men." He realized that Tarl was somehow seeing human characteristics in these rotting, maggot-covered creatures. "My legs and ankles feel as if they're frostbitten."
"I'm sorry, my friend," said Tarl, and he rushed quickly to the big man's side.
Shal beat him there by a step. Immediately she pulled Ren's leggings loose to reveal several white-yellow rings of nearly lifeless skin circling Ren's ankles. She didn't question Ren's self-diagnosis. Her own two arms had felt a biting, bone-chilling cold when the skeletons had grabbed her. When the cleric reached forward to lay hands on Ren, Shal stopped him. "No, Tarl, save your strength. I have just the thing." Shal pulled from her belt one of the healing potions she had helped Ranthor prepare. "We'll need your powers soon enough if one of us gets hurt badly. For frostbite, this should do nicely." Shal daubed the pasty liquid on the rings of whitened flesh. Within seconds, a healthy pink color began to return to the affected area.
Even after Ren was able to stand, the memory of the icy grip was still with him. He found walking among the skeletons unnerving, medallions or no, but he forced himself to lead the small group through the keep. Nothing but kindling remained of the first building on the left, probably once a storage shed. The roof of the second structure was totally burned off, but the base of the building was still intact. As they approached the building, the skeletons wandering in the courtyard converged from all directions. A number of the undead warriors followed the party of three, then assumed gruesome positions of death among what remained of the cots that lined the walls.
"What-what are they doing?" gasped Shal, sickened by the sight of the creatures.
"They are showing you… showing us… how they died," Tarl replied, once again feeling the men's anguish and frustration. "Many of them died here, in their beds. They never had a chance to prove themselves." Tarl tried to describe the myriad of sensations, from frustration to horror, that were somehow being communicated to him.
They moved on to the other end of the building, but found nothing new. As they passed the corner of the building, they noticed that they had gained a new entourage of earth- and fungus-covered companions. Without touching any of the three, the new group of skeletons seemed to be pushing them on to the next doorway in the complex. They entered the door cautiously and found themselves in a foyer. They peered through an open doorway off to the left, an
d as soon as they did, a dozen or so undead warriors brushed past them and began moaning and crying in an almost deafening dirge.
"The high clerics' quarters," said Tarl, as if his companions had requested an explanation. "The ghostly remains of these men suffer the most, because they were unable to protect the fledgling clerics they vowed to safeguard."
Ahead, still whole and beautiful, was an ornately carved double door that bore the hammer and balance of Tyr, the Even-Handed. Tarl felt compelled to enter the temple, but Ren was already stepping cautiously through an open doorway to the right.
Tarl and Shal followed. Just as the three companions entered, the tongue of a giant frog shot out, circled Ren's leg, and tripped the big man. Tarl rushed forward and slammed the man-sized creature's head hard with his hammer. The weapon merely glanced off the frog's wet, slippery skin. It took two more blows before Tarl's hammer connected solidly. When it did, the creature's flesh buckled and splattered under the force of his blow, and it fell to the wet floor, quivering. Ren hacked its encircling tongue off and leaped to his feet, just in time to face six more of the gigantic amphibians. He hurled a dagger at the frog closest to him. Like Tarl's hammer, the knife deflected off the tough, slimy hide of the frog.
Behind him, Shal was muttering something in the language of magic. As she finished her incantation, she tossed a handful of powder past Ren and extended her hand toward the lead frog. Immediately it shrank to normal size. Ren kicked it with his boot and sent it flying up at one of the waiting monster frogs. The creature shot its huge tongue out, and in an instant, it slurped the small frog down whole.
The remaining frogs, caught up in the prospect of a feeding frenzy, began to leap willy-nilly-up, sideways, backward-in a primitive, instinctive dance designed to freeze their victims in terror. In a frantic reaction to his own revulsion, Tarl lashed out again and again with his hammer, but it only slipped off the sides of the giant frogs. When one got too close, though, he bashed it with his shield with all his might and sent it slumping to the floor, where he finished it off with a blow from his hammer. A wave of nausea surged through him as he watched the frog's legs twitch wildly, independent of its pulverized head.
Shal, meanwhile, had called for her staff, and she was swinging it wildly at the huge slimy creatures. Swoosh! Thwack! The walls echoed with the sounds of her brutal attack, and the strength of her frenzied swings was so great that when one connected solidly, it was as if Shal had folded the center of the monster's body in two. Its flesh folded over the staff and stayed that way until Shal could pull the staff out. She must have broken the creature's spine, for when she removed the staff, the monster's body folded grotesquely in the opposite direction. Just as Shal freed her staff, another giant frog came leaping toward her. In an almost instinctive defensive measure, she pointed her staff straight up at the flying monster and then watched in horror as it skewered itself on the staff's sharp end and slid down over her arms. She screamed loud and long and immediately pulled back for all she was worth, extending her arms outward to get the disgusting animal away from her.
At that moment, Ren, who was fending off another frog, backed into the one Shal had just unskewered. The frog he was battling took advantage of the distraction to jump and land on top of him, squeezing his body against the body of the dead frog.
Ren became a human sandwich, folded deeply into the dead frog's soft, quivering belly, and covered by the mass of the live frog. He flailed out in panic, slashing up, down, sideways, pushing frantically at both of the creatures as their guts began to ooze over him. Soon both frogs lay jerking spasmodically on the floor on either side of Ren, who was shaking the slime and gore from his arms and retching…
"Behind you!" Tarl yelled, but it was too late. The last of the frogs was leaping at Ren with a vengeance. It smacked into his back with a wet thwack and sent him sprawling into the back wall of the room. As he struck the wall, it collapsed, and Ren fell to the floor of the next room with the frog on top of him. Shal spoke the final words of a Magic Missile spell, and three projectiles shot from her fingertips and buried themselves in the cold flesh of the frog. It jerked to its death on top of Ren before Shal and Tarl could reach their friend and pull the creature off him.
When they finally got Ren out from under the giant amphibian, his complexion was a pasty white, and his black leathers and armor were dripping with blood and ocher-colored ooze.
"Are-are you okay?" Shal asked, anxiously releasing her tight hold on Ren's hand.
Ren lay silent for more than a minute, then rose slowly and shook himself head to foot. "God, I need a bath! I've fought some of the most disgusting creatures in the Realms, and I've never felt this filthy…" He noticed their expressions of concern turning to relief. "Some valiant fighter, huh?" he asked, embarrassed.
"We should all stand up so well," Tarl said sincerely. "For a minute there, I thought I was-"
"Hey, you two, come and take a look at this." Shal was standing near the frog she had just killed, pointing at it. A grayish-green band encircled the creature's broad, damp neck. If it hadn't been for a triangle of silver that hung from it, the band would barely have been visible. The triangle, embossed with a small silver pyramid, glistened even in the dull light from the larger room. "It looks like a collar or something," said Shal, gingerly reaching for the medallion.
Ren grabbed her outstretched hand with startling speed. "Don't touch it!" he hissed. "Who knows what cursed master these god-awful animals served? That's not a symbol I'm familiar with, but these creatures sure weren't sent by anything friendly."
"Look here!" whispered Tarl. He had come around the frog from the other side and was holding up the far end of the stretch of canvas on which Ren and the frog had landed. Underneath was a veritable armory of weapons-ball and chains, throwing hammers, daggers, throwing stars, axes, shields, armor. Most were rusted or corroded, but two items stood out from the rest: a dagger and a hammer, both of which shone as though a metalsmith had polished them the day before. Each glowed with an eerie green light, and each was in mint condition and obviously of top quality.
"Those wouldn't glow like that unless there was some danger nearby," hissed Ren. "My own daggers do the same." He pulled Right from his boot, and sure enough, it was gleaming with a bluish light. "Listen…" whispered Ren. He pointed toward a gaping hole in the wall of the muddy room where the frogs lay dead. The sound of grating humanoid voices drifted through the air like the buzz of so many cicadas. Quickly Ren handed the hammer to Tarl, keeping the dagger for himself.
Together the three moved silently back into the larger room and worked their way along the wall to the opening. Ren crouched down and glanced cautiously through the hole, then quickly pulled back behind what remained of the wall. "There's a lot of them-orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds… a real mixed lot," he whispered. "Must be at least forty of them. We've got to get out of here-maybe back through the barracks and over the wall."
Tarl shook his head. "We haven't located what we came for," he whispered. "Our information is only partial, and the undead still walk."
"At least we know what kind of creatures are here," argued Shal, also in a hushed voice. "We can tell the council and they can send troops."
"No," insisted Tarl. "I think we should talk with them and try to get more information about their leader."
Ren tugged gently on Tarl's collar. "You're a nut case, my cleric friend. I speak orcish well enough to know that their idea of a pleasant conversation is to say, 'Die, human scum!' " He tugged lightly on Tarl's collar again and whispered with intensity, "Do you understand me? We've got to get out of here!"
"Get out of here?" The sharp, barking voice of a kobold sounded behind them. "Get out of here?" He let out a low chuckle, a perverted sound, like a dog growling.
Tarl and Shal turned to see a kobold strut through the doorway with an entourage of about two dozen orcs and goblins behind him. Ren watched as the troop of humanoids began to climb in through the hole in the wall.
"Th
e party? The party? Is this the party?" snorted a fat orc, obviously, from his dress, a leader of the troop.
"Yes, master," barked the kobold. "The three of them… ours for the taking for the Lord of the Ruins."
The lead orc's yellow, piggy eyes gleamed brightly, and he snorted again in his excitement. "Torture the party… kill the party… get big praise from the Lord of the Ruins!"
"Power to the pool!" shouted the kobold.
"Power to the pool!" Orcs and hobgoblins alike took up the chant. "Power to the pool!" All jabbed cudgels, axes, or swords into the air in time with the chant as they began to circle round the companions, who were pressed together in a small cluster, back to back.
"What's that they're chanting?" Tarl asked, looking to Ren for a translation.
"They're getting ready to kill us, probably by torture, and they're saying something over and over again about 'Power to the pool,' " Ren replied.
Tarl tried to block out the jeering and chanting. He managed to concentrate long enough to cast a spell of Enthrallment. He had practiced the spell many times before, but he had never before tried it on a hostile group.
If the spell were successful, the group of creatures would understand and be receptive to anything he said, at least for a short while.
"Tell me, friends," he asked evenly, "to what pool do you refer?"
The kobold beamed, his tongue lolling over his yellow fangs like a panting canine. "Pool belongs to the Lord of the Ruins. He says to kill, we kill. Pool glows brighter. The Lord of the Ruins grows stronger. We grow stronger. We kill more. Nobody stops us… Power to the pool!" he shouted once more.
Others started to pick up the chant again, and Tarl could feel his control slipping. He waved his arms in a benevolent gesture. "Surely killing us can be of no value to your lord-or to the pool. Can't we do something else to add power to the pool?"
Ren signaled Shal to brace herself for a mad dash. The chances of them escaping from this mob seemed slim to none, but now, while they were still calmed by Tarl's spell, was the time to move if there was ever going to be any.
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