by Cam Banks
“Well, I daresay I have had better days,” Theodenes replied. “Also, I have deduced we’re in separate cells.”
“So gnomes can see in the dark!”
“Of course not. Don’t believe the rumors. I have deduced this because right now I am holding bars in between myself and your voice.”
Vanderjack rubbed at the short stubble where the lump on his head was. “Gredchen? You conscious?”
A weak and annoyed voice said in response, “Only just.”
“Theo and I are both here. I think we’re in the dungeons underneath Castle Glayward.”
“What makes you so sure?” Theodenes replied. “We could be anywhere.”
“I know, but based on what you two were told by Rivven Cairn, that sadistic cow’s probably got us set up for an extended stay in the baron’s castle. I know these highmasters and highlords. They like the drama.”
“If this is the dungeon,” said Gredchen, “then my memory tells me there are six cells. Three on either side of a hallway, with iron bars between each.”
“It’s a good thing I have my people’s expert senses,” said Theodenes.
“You have big noses, if that’s what you’re talking about,” said Vanderjack.
“Extraordinary senses of smell, yes,” grumbled Theo. “But hearing, too—unless you’re in the Guild of Resonant Sonics, perhaps—which I have been employing as we talked.”
“Congratulations are in order, then?” Vanderjack said, groping his way to the bars near where he thought Theodenes’ voice was coming from.
Theo ignored him. “Gredchen and yourself are linearly arranged about me,” he said. “Which means that I am in the middle cell of a group of three.”
“If we’re lucky,” said Gredchen, “the current occupants of the castle don’t know about the loose slate in the floor near one of the cell doors. If you’re where I think you are, Vanderjack, then feel around underneath the door to your cell.”
Vanderjack did so. The floor was covered in fitted stones, the slates Gredchen had spoken of. Most of them were stuck fast, caked in foulness and a kind of mucilage produced from years and years of straw breaking down in the muck of vermin droppings. One, however, shifted slightly when he pressed it.
“Got it,” he said.
“Great,” Gredchen said, relief in her voice. “Then the door to the dungeon’s next to my cell. See if you can pull that slate up.”
“While I’m doing this, I don’t suppose these bars are wide enough for Theo to squeeze through, are they?” Vanderjack dug his nails into the muck around the slate and tried to get enough purchase to lever it up.
“The baron was plagued by kender for a while,” Gredchen said. “He made sure the cells were designed with that in mind.”
“Typical,” Theodenes said. “Once again, gnomes are lumped in with kender. As if we shared anything in common beyond stature.”
“I think I have it,” Vanderjack said. He gave the slate a final tug, and it came free from the floor with a thick squelch.
He heard Gredchen move around in her cell, coming as close to the bars as she could. “All right. Now you should be able to slide the vertical iron bar immediately above where you removed the slate down and out of the socket, and then lift it free from the other bars.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought, haven’t you?” he said. He wiggled the bar she had described; it was definitely loose.
“Of course. It’s one of my duties as the baron’s aide to oversee the security of his person.”
“Not doing a lot of that at the moment, though,” Vanderjack said and pulled on the iron bar. With a creak of metal, it came free, and Vanderjack almost tumbled backward into the darkness.
“Was that it?” asked Theo from nearby.
“Pretty much, yes,” Vanderjack said. “Now what?”
“In an ideal world, Theo would be in that cell, not you,” said Gredchen. “However, as ample proof has already indicated, this is not an ideal world. Pass the bar through to Theo. If you work together, you should be able to lever it horizontally through the bars on the front of his cell and pop a couple of them out. Then he can squeeze through.”
“This isn’t a very secure dungeon,” Vanderjack noted.
“The baron didn’t anticipate a lot of residents,” Gredchen said.
After a few minutes of blind fumbling around, the banging of iron against iron, and some curses from both the gnome and the sellsword, the plan went into action.
“Ready, Theo? Pull!” Vanderjack threw his weight into the effort. He heard the gnome do the same, which only reminded him of just how strong the little gnome was in proportion to his size. He’d seen Theo wrestle with Star the saber-toothed cat many years before. Although Star was twice Theodenes’ size, and probably three or four times his weight, Theo had been an equal match for the cat.
The bars of the cell creaked and groaned, grinding together with a rasping sound that might have been heard all the way up the stairs into the castle. Vanderjack didn’t want to waste any time, so with one final shove, he pulled on the iron bar and heard the loud tang-tang of two bars ripping away from their sockets. The clattering of the bars rang more loudly than ever.
“Theo!” shouted Gredchen, trying to be heard over the clatter. “It’s up to you! Get through the bars and then up to your left at the end of the hallway is the door out, which should be unlocked. Once you open that, there will probably be a torch or lantern or something lighting the stairway up.”
Vanderjack heard Theodenes moving around in the darkness, then a deep creaking of wood shed light into the dungeon. Vanderjack squinted as his eyes readjusted; he saw for the first time what the cells around him looked like and just how fetid and awful they were. He wouldn’t even keep a gully dwarf down there. Though a gully dwarf might like it.
Theo stood silhouetted in the warm, orange glow of the doorway. Gredchen had been right. There was a torch mounted in a bracket outside, close to expiring but still serviceable.
“Great, Theo,” said Gredchen, who was covered in muck herself. Not all of it looked like it came from the cell. She looked as if she’d fallen into a pig’s pen face-first. “The next thing to do is open the cell doors. There should be a series of—”
Theodenes made a sound of excitement. “By the Great Engine! Levers!”
“Yes,” continued Gredchen. “Those. Another of the baron’s design specifications. He thought keys would only get lost.”
Theodenes manipulated a few of the large brass levers by the door. The sound of more metal against metal echoed around the room, and the cell doors in their group of cells swung open.
“That was easy,” Vanderjack said, frowning suspiciously. “In fact, too easy. I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever escaped from a cell as easily as that since the time I was locked up in a Qualinesti elf hut and got out through the hole in the roof where the smoke went up.”
Theodenes waited by the door as Gredchen and Vanderjack stepped out of their cells. “Nonsense,” Theo said. “I was present at that great escape, in case you had forgotten. We were freed because one of your companions lowered a rope down into the hut. And this only after a long, argumentative conversation about how you could just force yourself out because you were a mighty sellsword who could take on as many elves as the Speaker could throw at you.”
“Now why do you have to go and ruin a perfectly good anecdote like that with the truth?” Vanderjack said, grinning, and looked around for his sword. Finding it absent, he cursed and scanned the dungeon hallway for something that he might use instead. There wasn’t a scrap of wood or metal anywhere, other than one of the long iron bars, so he picked that up and motioned for the others to follow him up the stairs.
The dungeon stairs led up in a spiral, the stones slick with moisture. Building a castle in the middle of a rainforest wasn’t the most sensible of ideas, Vanderjack thought. His head was feeling somewhat better, but he felt something deep in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go away. It
was like being hungry for a side of beef at a Majerean monastery in Khur, where they ate only rice and the shoots of plants.
“Where are we headed?” Vanderjack asked over his shoulder.
“This comes up where the stables once were, but shortly before the dragonarmies invaded, the baron sealed those up and turned them over to storage,” Gredchen said. “Even the windows were bricked up. It smelled like horse for such a long time …” Her voice trailed off.
Theodenes came up near Vanderjack and sniffed at the air. He was also carrying the torch, so Vanderjack had to lean out of the way to avoid being singed. “Watch where you put that!” he said, putting his back against the wall of the stairs. “Are your amazing gnome senses telling you anything?”
“Still smells like horse,” the gnome said and fell back in line.
At the top of the stairs, the trio stepped into the rear of a large stone area lined with many stalls. In many of the stalls were wooden crates filled with dry goods, bundles of woven cloth, casks of Southlund wine and Palanthian brandy, and what appeared to be a set of four earth-filled wooden troughs. Each of those was more than six feet long, set two abreast within a pair of horse stalls just to the left of what Vanderjack thought was the stable entrance.
“Mushroom gardens?” Theodenes asked, pointing at the troughs.
“I have no idea what those are,” Gredchen said, “other than horse troughs filled with soil. I can’t think of any reason to do that.”
“There’s plenty of wine at least!” Vanderjack grinned, fetching up a wineskin and filling it from one of the barrels. Gredchen made no move to stop him, so halfway through the process, he looked over his shoulder and said, “You don’t mind?”
“Those aren’t the baron’s,” Gredchen said simply.
“Ah. Must be the spoils of war for our friend Rivven Cairn and her highlord masters. Theo, maybe you should poke your head around the corner of that entrance and see what’s what.”
Theodenes gave the sellsword a scathing look. He placed his torch into a bracket on a nearby horse stall and strolled over to the large wooden gates. He pushed one of them just slightly ajar, enough to stick his nose through and get a good look at the hallway outside.
Gredchen cried, “Watch out!” and Vanderjack spun around, almost dropping the wineskin. He followed her pointing finger toward the dirt-filled troughs, which were only about a dozen feet away from the gnome. Bodies, still somewhat caked with soil and dirt, had sat up from underneath a cover of earth with their pasty white features bearing expressions of utmost malice.
Vanderjack’s hands gripped the iron bar tightly. It was about seven feet long, so it would make a handy quarterstaff, but it wasn’t Lifecleaver. That knot in his stomach turned and throbbed. He looked around and saw only the gnome, the baron’s aide, and the four figures pulling themselves into standing positions from their troughs—no ghosts, no Sword Chorus.
The gnome dropped into a rudimentary fighting stance of his own. With no weapon, he raised his fists in a show of bravado, but Vanderjack had the feeling that anything that had at one time been dead and was moving around would not be intimidated by a gnome. Theo needed help.
Vanderjack sprang forward, charging across the stable’s main floor toward the stalls that housed the troughs. But he didn’t feel strong, he felt overwhelmed by the smell and the odds. He thought he might throw up.
The corpses, exposed once they had climbed fully out of the dirt, were remarkably well preserved. These weren’t mindless undead, the kind of thing a necromancer animates to perform his household chores. They were definitely intelligent, with empty eyes that seemed to emanate wickedness and tongues that slavered from their rictus grins, barbed and wormlike.
“Ghouls!” screamed Gredchen. “Like those in Willik!”
“Why didn’t you mention ghouls before?” Vanderjack said, choking down the rising bile and bringing the iron bar around in a wide swing. He aimed it at the nearest ghouls’ legs.
“Back then I had a shovel, and Theo had his multipurpose polearm,” she said, climbing up onto a crate and looking for something to use as a weapon herself. “And I didn’t think it was going to be a trend.”
“Seriously, no mention at all?” Vanderjack knocked the ghoul off its perch on the edge of the trough, but it tumbled over and over in the air and landed on the balls of its feet, hunched over like a gargoyle or a feral cat.
Theodenes threw a couple of experimental punches at the ghoul that had closed on him. His first left hook was cautious. The follow-up right into the ghoul’s midsection was more confident. That punch set the ghoul back a step, more surprised than anything else, and it hissed.
“Just a quick ‘Rivven had some ghouls’ … something like that would have been fine.” Vanderjack raised the iron bar to fend off the ghoul’s nails as it lunged forward to scratch at his face. He withdrew one or two steps and looked quickly to his left, then his right. He knew there were at least two other ghouls somewhere in the stables. They had leaped away from their troughs. Not knowing where everything was made sweat bead across his back, his face, and on his forearms.
Gredchen leaped upward, grabbed one of the long wooden beams that crossed the room, and pulled up onto it. There she found a loose board hanging from the sloping wooden roof of a horse’s stall and grabbed it up, eyeing the room below warily.
“Really, I could have used a little warning about the ghouls,” Vanderjack muttered, spinning the iron bar in his hands. He aimed one end fiercely at the ghoul before him, driving it into the creature’s face. It left a nasty dent, and the ghoul hissed and rasped, twitching.
The gnome shot the sellsword an exasperated look but was busy trying to lay blows upon the ghoul, which was equally busy scratching and raking at Theo’s face. Theodenes was an excellent pole fighter but a poor pugilist. The diseased scratch of a ghoul often sent the ghoul’s victim into shock or paralysis; Theo’s arms and legs looked as if they were already becoming stiff and ungainly.
Thinking quickly, Vanderjack shouted, “Heads up, Theo!” and threw the iron bar in the gnome’s direction. Theodenes nimbly caught the bar and immediately pushed his opponent back, extending the distance between them and delivering a series of well-placed blows to the ghoul’s head.
Of course, that left Vanderjack needing another weapon of his own. Spying the still-burning torch Theo had left behind, the sellsword darted over to the horse stall it was mounted on and tore it from the bracket. His ghoul opponent was still jerking spasmodically where he’d left it.
“Ackal’s Teeth,” Vanderjack cursed. “Where are the others?” He waved the torch in front of him, unable to see any of the other creatures. He glanced up at Gredchen, who shrugged, just as mystified as he was. Then at the same moment, one ghoul leaped from behind a stack of crates at him as its companion scaled the wall and jumped across to the wooden beam Gredchen was standing on. Both ghouls hissed, their long barbed tongues snaking out to taste the air, as they advanced.
“So why is Rivven Cairn keeping these things here?” Vanderjack called. “Ghouls hang around necromancers. Isn’t fire her thing?” He lunged forth with the torch, searing ghoul-flesh and causing the creature to recoil.
“My guess is she inherited them from the ogre shaman in Willik,” Gredchen called back, swinging the wooden board at her own ghoulish opponent. The ghoul crawled up onto the ceiling, claws allowing it to cling to the wood as if it were an insect. It grasped and reached toward the baron’s aide in an effort to knock her from her perch.
Meanwhile, Theo had delivered a final crushing blow to his ghoul, but the paralyzing toxin in the creature’s claws finally overcame him. His muscles had grown rigid, and his fingers were stuck as if in a rictus; the iron bar dropped to the floor, and he followed soon after.
Vanderjack cursed to see the gnome topple and drove the burning brand into his ghoul opponent’s face. It screamed, darted forward with its head smoking, and knocked Vanderjack over onto his back. The sellsword turned away his own face as
the ghoul smoldered and expired on top of him. If that didn’t make him throw up, nothing would.
“Are you quite done with that one?” Gredchen yelled at the top of her lungs. “Because I could use a little help!” Vanderjack pushed the ghoul aside and looked up to see the baron’s aide clinging to the beam by one hand. The last remaining ghoul was tugging at the wooden board in her other hand, shrieking.
“Let go!” Vanderjack said, climbing to his feet. His head was hurting again; he must have hit it again, reopened the old wound. “Just drop!”
Gredchen did so. She fell to the floor of the stable, landing with a heavy thump on a pile of old horse blankets stacked on a crate. The crate flew apart with the sudden weight; the wind was knocked out of Gredchen’s lungs.
With nobody on the other end of the wooden board, the ghoul fell backward, dropping from the support beams and smashing through the rotting wooden roof of the horse stall below. As it fell out of sight, Vanderjack heard a disquieting crunch.
The sellsword staggered over to help Gredchen up, and as she dusted herself off, he went to investigate what had happened to the last ghoul. Opening the stall door, he saw that it had fallen on the rusty prongs of a hay fork, carelessly left point up within the stall.
“Couldn’t happen to a better undead,” Vanderjack muttered and let the stall doors swing back shut.
“He’s completely immobile,” Gredchen said as the sellsword came back over to where the baron’s aide was cradling the little gnome in her arms. “I don’t know anything about ghoul paralysis. Is it permanent?”
Vanderjack shook his head. “No. It should wear off in a couple of hours. The only problem is we can’t exactly stay in here. If all the noise in the dungeon didn’t alert the master of the castle, crashing about in here fighting ghouls would have done so, no question.”
“So we take him with us?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Now if you’ll excuse me just a moment, I’m going to be sick.”
Cazuvel sat patiently in the high-backed wooden chair in the great hall of Castle Glayward.
