The Ways of Khrem

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  These were the tools of Mr. Chance, relics of a former life.

  Regardless, they were what I needed and I had them.

  At my insistence, Grabel climbed down into the pit with me. When I got down there, I was going to need somebody whose intelligence I could rely on to pass orders between me and the men who would be manning the ropes. For all his snooty prickliness, Grabel was competent and could be counted on to follow instructions. Besides, I would know who to fire if somebody screwed up and got me killed.

  The time had come to give the poor kid down there a little light.

  I quickly measured out a length of rope that would be five feet short of making it to the water below. I made a tautline hitch knot at the end, and attached the lantern to it.

  “Sir,” Grabel leaned over and muttered in my ear, “have you considered the questions that may arise from this?”

  “I’ll just say I found the lantern and gloves in the basement after I had the house built. Must have belonged to one of the workers.”

  “No, sir,” the manservant persisted as I checked to make sure the knot was secure, “that is not what concerns me. These people will find your gloves and lanterns mere novelties, nothing more. It’s the skills you are so brashly demonstrating that might cause remark.”

  Lovely.

  I worried over Grabel’s remark as I clambered out of the pit and went over to the poplar again. I tied the charcoal marked place of the rope to the tree with a slipknot, and then tied the other end of the rope to the tree further down the trunk. Now the lantern could be lowered to hang five feet over the water, and the slipknot could be pulled if I needed more rope.

  I borrowed a red scarf from one of the women who watched in the growing throng of onlookers and tied it to the rope.

  “This rope is now Holik’s Rope,” I told the crowd. “It will hold a lantern for light, and it will be the one we’ll use to bring the boy back up.”

  I hopped back into the pit, and prepared to lower the lantern.

  “I suppose we could tell them you used to be a pirate,” Grabel quietly voiced over my shoulder.

  Bastard.

  He knew that was a sore point with me. I can think of at least two rich merchants in Khrem who used to be pirates, but now they are honored citizens and it’s considered impolite to even point out little indiscretions like their entire past. I guess when you’re raiding, stealing and murdering somebody else on the other side of the sea, it’s all water under the bridge.

  “No, thank you, Grabel,” I growled, making a last check for obstructions that could snag the lantern. “I’ve never set foot on a ship in my life, which I’m sure would somehow come up and blow the whole story.”

  “Excellent point, sir,” he demurred. “Besides, you’re not really the ‘pirate type.’”

  I’m sure there was a calculated insult in the statement somewhere, but I chose to ignore it and focus on the task at hand. I lit the first lantern and started lowering it down the hole. Motioning everybody to be silent, I put my head close to the shaft, closed my eyes, and strained my ears to the utmost. After playing out about twelve or thirteen feet of rope, I heard what could only be described as a shout of joy from below.

  Holik was still with us.

  “He sees the light,” I reported to the excited crowd above me.

  The news elicited a cheer from the onlookers and another downpour of gratitude and blessings from Venita Solitos.

  With a bow, I borrowed a green scarf from another lady in the crowd.

  In hindsight, I might have been hamming it up a little by this point, but I thought by involving the crowd, it would make my preparations less mysterious and cut down on the speculation of how I came to know all this. Make it seem simple, like something anybody could have come up with.

  “This,” I said as I tied the green scarf to a second rope, “is going to be my rope. We’ll call it ‘Cargill’s Rope’ because it’s the one I’ll be climbing on. I’ll have a lantern on the end of it as well, just in case something causes the first one to go out.” I knotted a series of loops down the length of the rope, giving me a hand or foothold about every four feet.

  Knots were one of the skills that separated me from the average thief of yore. In a profession where your life depended on a rope used to lower yourself from a tower top or five-story roof, it was the correctly tied knot that spelled the difference between the successful haul of the professional and the broken body of the amateur on the cobbles below.

  I attached the second lantern to the bottom of my rope and set it by the hole. Looking around, I realized I still didn’t have one important item I had requested.

  “I still need that hand spade,” I called up above me. “This shaft could still have dirt or rocks I might need to clear out of my way as I make my way down.”

  “We don’t have one of those,” the older servant apologized. “The gardeners come from elsewhere and bring their own tools with them.”

  For a moment, the crowd murmured in consternation. I even heard one neighbor say he would run back to his house up the hill to get his, when Venita suddenly spoke up again. “Just a second,” she stoutly commanded. “I’ll be right back.”

  She stormed off toward the back door, parting the crowd as she went. The large woman disappeared inside, and less than twenty seconds later, the door flew open again and she came marching back out toward the pit. In her hand, she gripped a big silver serving spoon. Nobody said a word when she dropped it down into the pit for me to examine.

  A large, heavy affair with a baroque handle. My professional eye confirmed it was worth a nice bit of coinage—and it would also serve perfectly in the task ahead.

  With another short bow to the lady of the house, I slid the spoon into my belt and bent to light the other lantern. Then I told the crowd I needed three strong men to man the rope. After three sturdy-looking fellows sorted themselves out, I told them that Grabel would be giving directions while I was down in the hole.

  The moment of truth had arrived.

  I smeared lard on the front of my tunic, and then let Grabel smear it on my back and buttocks. Faces framed against the gray sky as the crowd moved in all around the edge of the pit. Having this much attention on me made me feel more claustrophobic than the tight hole before me.

  Trying to ignore the press of people above, I pulled on my gloves, and then started lowering the “ladder rope” down into the shaft. I stopped when it reached a predetermined point. Then I got down on my hands and knees and put my foot through a loop in the rope. That was all the security I was going to have, but it should be enough.

  Pulling out the spoon and taking a deep breath, I leaned over and started working myself headfirst into the hole.

  Chapter Four

  “Redemption is a deed.” —Bardockian Proverb

  For the first time in years, I was in the blackness again.

  I hung upside down by my ankle in the narrow shaft, prying loose rocks and dirt from the corners and walls. The lanterns hung somewhere below me, which meant they cast no useful light for me to work in, but at the moment that didn’t matter.

  This stage of the job could be done by feel.

  I exhaled, collapsing my ribcage, and started pulling myself further into the grimy pit. The space quickly got so close that I found it possible to halt my progress by merely taking a deep breath. It was a good thing they had owned lard, because this would be tight.

  Probing down below me with the spoon, I dislodged more dirt and rocks in my path. There had already been enough room for the boy to slide through, but I was going to need every inch I could get. I occasionally called instructions back to Grabel, to halt or allow my descent as I worked my way downward.

  Dirt fell from the sides of the shaft above me as I dug and pried my way ever downwards. Being upside down meant that most of the filth fell inside my tunic, sticking to the lard and sweat covering me. Sometimes worms or bugs of a best unimagined nature fell along with that dirt. I already had at least one
crawling around between my shoulder blades, and another exploring the contours of my armpit.

  My skin itched from the combination of sweat and filth, and I remembered how much I used to hate underground work in my former life. After I got out of this hole, I intended to go down to Ludo’s Imperial Bathhouse and Barber and turn his largest private tub black.

  I needed a trim, anyway.

  It took ten more long minutes of scraping, prying, digging and dragging, and then I finally managed to poke my head into the chamber below. After pushing through the shaft in the dark for the past ten minutes, my eyes were adjusted to the point that the lanterns illuminated most of the cistern quite clearly for me.

  It wasn’t what I expected.

  My destination turned out to be a long, egg-shaped chamber with a thirty foot wide pool of water in the center of the fat end. The air smelled of brine, which I found surprising.

  From my vantage point in the ceiling, I hung about twenty-five feet over the direct center of the water. Tall columns rose from the floor and surrounded the pool, except for the side facing the narrow end of the room. They had been carved with a strange scaly texture and twisted upwards as if made to resemble braided snakes. The narrow end of the room stretched off into darkness, with one lone, short stone post rising out of the floor, in the direct center of the room.

  In the dim light, I could barely make out strange murals of submarine vistas on the surrounding walls. Bizarre, hideous creatures were depicted as they frolicked through towering pillars of leprous coral and seaweed draped ruins of some submerged city.

  Whatever this was, it wasn’t a cistern.

  Not anymore.

  But where was the boy?

  Still hanging upside down, I called back to Grabel to lower the rope ten more feet and tie it off. Once done, and the line had steadied, I loosened my foot from the loop and did a controlled summersault down the rope to bring me to an upright position. It was a maneuver I pulled many times in the past, but I never remembered it taking this much effort.

  Age, easy living and Grabel’s stuffed mushrooms just might have taken some slight toll on me.

  I now “stood” upright with my foot in a lower loop, about eight feet above the surface of the pool. The two lanterns hung, side-by-side, on the bottoms of the ropes, about three feet below me.

  “Hollee!” I called. “Where are you? Let’s get you out of here!”

  Visions of the boy huddled dead from exposure in some corner started to nag at me, visions that held too close a resemblance to too many memories.

  I angrily pushed them away. This wasn’t Little Mol, still and cold in the arms of his dying sister. This was here and now, and this time things didn’t have to end that way.

  “Hollee!”

  For a second, I didn’t see him, and began to fear the worst. Then the motion of him peeking around the corner of that stone post in the middle of the room caught my eye.

  “Hollee? Are you alright? My name is Cargill and I live just up the hill from you. Your mother sent me down here to get you.”

  It was easy to see the boy shivering, even in the gloom. He needed me to get him out of this place as soon as possible before he passed out from exposure. I had thought about bringing a blanket down with me, but wrapping it around him would probably make him too bulky to fit back up the hole. Besides, the best way to get the boy warm would be to get him up to the surface and next to a fireplace in his own house.

  Holick stood and came out from behind the post, arms wrapped around his middle and teeth chattering. His skin shone pale in the dim light, and his lips were blue from the cold.

  “Hollee, stay right there. I’ll be over in a minute and we’ll get you out of here.”

  He shook his head.

  “Y-Y-You c-cant g-g-g-o in th-the w-w-wat-ter,” he chattered. “Th-theres s-s-some-th-thing b-bad in th-the w-water!”

  I spent a few seconds deciphering what he said, then looked down at the water between the two lanterns below me.

  There was, indeed, something bad in the water.

  A ghastly white face, illuminated by the lanterns, stared up at me from a point about eight inches beneath the surface of the pool.

  Some horror from the sunless depths, its enormous head featured a mouth over five feet wide, with long, translucent teeth jutting out from both the top and bottom jaws. Two bulging black eyes stared up at me from the pallid face…eyes that only viewed the world with blind hunger. Pale, yellowish bladders rhythmically inflated and deflated themselves on the sides of its head behind those awful eyes. We looked at each other for a few seconds, then the face slowly sank out of sight.

  The years and stuffed mushrooms seemed to just fall away from me as I scampered back up my rope, and not a second too soon.

  The water exploded beneath me, and I reflexively swung my legs up and out of the way. Its jaws slammed shut directly below me with an audible “clomp.”

  In the same instant, I heard the kid scream from across the room.

  The lanterns were both swinging in crazy loops, causing the light and shadows in the room to veer in a confusing swirl. I hung on as tight as I could as the creature fell back into the pool below with a mighty splash that soaked me and half the room with salty spray.

  Hugging the rope until it stilled, I looked down to see the horrid face emerging from the depths to resume its place right below the surface.

  So much for Plan A.

  I needed to figure out a different approach, since swimming had been removed from the itinerary. I started to make myself comfortable so I could come up with a new plan, then remembered the boy shivering below. He was losing body heat by the minute, and didn’t have time for me to just hang around engineering in my head while he waited.

  “Grabel!” I bellowed at the top of my lungs. It took me a moment to remember I could do this, since silence always played such a large role in my previous capers.

  “Sir?” His voice wafted back down to me.

  “I’m going to need a blanket! Make sure it’s tied up tightly in a roll. This may take a while!”

  “A blanket, sir?”

  “Yes, a blanket! There is some kind of creature down here!”

  “And you want to put a blanket on it?”

  One of these days, I swear…

  “No, you idiot! The blanket is for the kid! He’s freezing, so hurry it up!”

  And this was the man I put in charge on the surface for his intelligence.

  I looked down to see that pale, toothsome face once again glaring up at me from under the water.

  What in all the hells was that thing doing down there? Whatever it was, it must have had some kind of access to the sea. That would explain the salty water in the pool. Somehow, the large pit had either collapsed into a submarine cavern that led to the sea, or somebody had dug down to it. Whether this place had been a cistern or not, it certainly didn’t serve that function anymore.

  And the presence of the stone post Holik hid behind bothered me, as well. I also started to worry about what might be at the darkened end of the room.

  “Hollee? Can you see the other end of the room?”

  “Y-yes, s-sir. Th-there’s a d-door down there. It w-wouldn’t open.”

  That suited me just fine. It would have either led to a collapsed tunnel, if this turned out to be a ruined cistern, or somewhere worse, if this turned out to be something else.

  I prayed to any god listening—please don’t let this be part of the Undercity.

  That fear had niggled at the back of my mind since I looked down the shaft for the first time. But due to the fact the kid still lived, and the situation had so resembled a cistern, I had managed to put that fear in the background. Just being underground doesn’t mean someone is in the Undercity. Still, the possibility existed, and we needed to leave. One horrific, man-eating monster was enough, thank you very much.

  “Sir? The blanket,” Grabel’s voice announced.

  A few seconds later, they lowered a rolled up b
undle down through the shaft. It looked to be a fine brushed wool blanket with a dyed pattern. I hoped they weren’t attached to it because it would not be coming out of this hole. I started to untie the blanket from the rope…then a better idea presented itself.

  “Grabel?” I called. “Is this blanket tied to one the longer ropes?”

  “Yes, sir. Is that okay?”

  “It’s just fine. Tell the men above you to tie the other end of the rope to the tree, but leave me all the slack. Then I want you to tie a white rag to it, and we’ll call this rope the ‘Guide Rope.’ I just figured out a way to get the kid out of here, past this damned fish.”

  I retied the blanket with a tautline hitch knot of my own, then started pulling down more rope until a long loop hung below me. Then I let the blanket hand down about eight feet and started swinging it.

  “Hollee, I’m going to throw you this blanket, but I need you to do what I tell you. First, don’t go near the water. If I don’t throw this far enough, just leave it alone and I’ll pull it back and throw it again. Once I throw it, pick it up and bring it and the rope back to that post you’ve been hiding behind. Just throw the loop at the end of the rope over the post. Do you understand?”

  “Y-yes!”

  I could tell he was excited that things were finally starting to happen. He wanted out of this hole, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “Okay, get ready!”

  I swung the blanket around in a circle a couple of times to build up velocity, and then let it go—all the while keeping an eye on the monster in the water below me. The rolled blanket arced out over the pool and landed almost at the post itself. Holik jumped over to it and pulled it back to where I indicated.

  Without hesitation he wrapped himself in the blanket, but remembered to drop the loop over the post.

  Excellent. I now had my guide rope anchored.

  “Grabel!” I yelled, “have those men take up the slack on the guide rope and tie it off!”