by S. R. Witt
“Well, yeah,” I answered. The worshipers were obviously crazy, but that didn’t change the fact that they believed in their particular crazy.
It also didn’t change the fact that Corvus was here, somewhere, and she’d stirred up this hornet’s nest for a reason. Crazy or not, the cultists were playing into the nightspawn’s claws.
Cringer joined us and sat on the floor between Bastion and me. “They’re not crazy. They’re fanatical. This isn’t just babbling, it’s part of a ritual.”
That wasn’t comforting. “What kind of ritual?”
Cringer squinted pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not a summoning, exactly, but close. They’re gathering energy. They’re calling something.”
The Key. It had to be the Burning Key.
“How close are they?”
Cringer shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. But close.”
PASSIVE LISTEN SKILL SUCCESS!
Your keen ears pick up the sound of someone’s approach. You detect:
One or more armored wargrai; medium range
You have increased your mastery of the Listen skill. (Rank 6)]
“Hush,” I whispered.
The rest of the group stared at me, alarm stamped across their features.
I held a finger to my lips and crept to the staircase we’d climbed to reach the balcony. I slipped down the stairs, using every stealthy skill I had in my arsenal to remain silent.
At the bottom of the stairs, I poked my head around the corner to look down the hallway.
The wargrai I’d dodged earlier was at the far end of the main passage, and he’d brought a whole pack of friends. They sniffed the air and pointed at the floor before creeping down the hall toward the sanctuary.
Every few yards, they’d stop and sniff the air, then whisper together before coming to a consensus and continuing. They weren’t fast, but they had our scent, and they weren’t letting it go.
I hustled back up the steps. “We need to move. Some of our friends from outside have come in looking for us. We need to decide what to do, and we need to decide now.”
Bastion nodded toward the staircase. “You want me to wait here and bash the fuckers when they come up the stairs?”
The plan had a certain appeal. It was blunt and straightforward, but I wasn’t sure Bastion could handle the group of hunters on our trail by himself. Even if he could, they’d raise the alarm, and we’d have every lunatic in the whole damned temple coming after us
Below us, the priestess’ ranting wound down. “I go now, to prepare the way. Continue your prayers, sons and daughters of the Devourer, make your voices heard in the outer reaches. Our time has come!”
The crazy bitch ended her sermon by taking a drink straight from the bowl in her hands. She twitched and shook as the burning poison coursed down her throat. Her mouth blistered and her lips swelled to three times their normal size. She drained the bowl, then tossed it aside. The priestess stumbled from the stage and vanished from our sight.
The balcony ran around the sanctuary, and there was a staircase on its opposite side. It would be tricky, but I thought we could do what needed to be done. “We need to be quick. But I have a plan.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Bastion almost got us all killed. We were halfway across the balcony, picking our way through the irregular rows of cracked stone pews when he stepped on a little chunk of fallen masonry. It gave way beneath his heavy boot with a sound like popcorn kernels crunching between a pair of enormous jaws.
The noise sucked the air from my lungs. My legs wouldn’t move, no matter how much I willed them to start running. The rest of the party froze, too, incapable of doing anything, but staring at Bastion and waiting to see how bad this would get.
Meanwhile, the worshipers continued smacking their skulls into the stone. I guess if you’re busy wailing and beating your brains out, it’s kind of hard to hear anything else.
Chalk one up to being saved by the ridiculous power of zealots to ignore anything not related to their religion.
We made it across the balcony without anyone the wiser and started down the steep marble staircase leading to the sanctuary’s perimeter.
Of course, nothing can ever be that simple.
We were almost down the stairs when the wargrai peered over the far side of the balcony. They hadn’t noticed us, yet, but they were gaining ground. They were relentless in their tracking, and it was only a matter of time before they caught up to us.
The cultists didn’t stop banging their heads as we crept around the sanctuary’s perimeter. Even when we slipped behind the curtain at the edge of the dais, not a single one of them stopped abusing themselves. I had to admire their single-minded devotion to the ritual.
A tunnel led away from the dais and descended further into the fractured earth. A trail of blood and glistening goo marked it as the path the priestess had taken. “Down we go,” I whispered.
We hadn’t gone far when Bastion called us to a halt. “How can you people see anything?”
Mercy shrugged. “Dark sight. Perks of being a dragon born.”
“Same,” Indira said. “You have a torch?”
Bastion dug around in his pack and came up with a tar-coated stick of wood. “Yeah. So everyone but we poor, downtrodden humans can see in the dark?”
Havelock snickered. “Looks that way, but what about Saint?”
That was unexpected.
Indira’s eyes slid in my direction, suspicion plain on her face.
I guess one of the benefits of being a thief was getting to creep around in the dark, but I needed a better excuse in a hurry. To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed it was dark, and I was surprised that Bastion couldn’t see. Everywhere else in the world, even where it didn’t make sense, humans didn’t have a problem with the darkness. “Weird, maybe it’s because I have points in the Spelunking skill?”
Not that I’d discovered a Spelunking skill, but it could be a thing, and the explanation satisfied my traveling companions.
Indira wiggled her fingers and formed a magical pattern over Bastion’s torch. A flickering flame caught in the tar, and soon we were traveling again.
We followed the twisting, turning tunnel for what felt like a day before it leveled off.
The passage changed around us. It grew narrower and smoother as if the stone had been melted into this shape instead of carved. Thin cracks spiderwebbed across the walls, forming a treacherous latticework of deadly faults. Every few yards a trickle of powdered stone leaked from between the cracks in the ceiling and onto our heads. The crash of falling rocks echoed from a distance. There were boulders as big as my head scattered around the tunnel. How long would it be before the whole place came collapsed on us?
We were getting too close to the priestess. My Listen skill picked up her wheezing and gasping for air not far ahead of us. She had a long stride, but it was mostly eaten up by lugging her bulk around. It took a lot of energy to move that much weight and it didn’t sound like she had any to spare.
“Hold up,” I whispered. If we got any closer, the deranged woman wouldn’t be able to miss Bastion’s torch light.
While we waited for the priestess to catch her breath and move on, Cringer ran his fingers along the crumbling stone. “This is shale.”
He said it like we should all know exactly what he meant. There was an ominous undercurrent to his tone, enough to irritate Indira and goad her into speaking. “Which means what?”
Havelock tugged on Indira’s hand. Like dwarves, gnomes spent most of their lives underground. Understanding worked stone and natural cave formations was a survival trait for them. The gnome grinned and rubbed his hands together. “It means if you want to have one last fling with me, honey, now’s the time. Shale is soft, and its fracturing. It’s under a lot of pressure, probably has been for a few centuries. Good news is it hasn’t collapsed yet. The bad news is it’s only a matter of time before it does.”
Cringer pulled a piece of the stone awa
y and pinched it between his fingertips. The gray stone cracked and crumbled into fine shards. He held them in the palm of his hand and showed the gritty powder to the rest of us. “See? Soft.”
As bad as that was, the dwarf wasn’t done spreading gloom and doom. He traced one of the cracks with his fingers. He squinted, and I realized the pale blue flicker across his eyes meant he was looking at some message from the game. “This fault runs through the whole complex. Too much pressure on it,” he clapped his hands together loud enough to make us all jump, “and the whole place comes down.”
I glared at the dwarf. “We’re trying to be sneaky here,” I whispered.
He blushed a vivid red and clamped both hands over his mouth.
I whispered, “Let’s hope our little buddy is far enough ahead she didn’t hear that, and the wargrai are far enough behind us their fuzzy little ears didn’t pick it up. Cross your fingers folks.”
A minute passed with no sound from the tunnel ahead or behind us. We were safe, for the moment.
“Let’s keep our heads in the game,” I cautioned. “We’re almost done, it’d be a shame if we screwed the pooch now.”
No one had anything to say to that. They kept their heads down and shuffled their feet. Having everyone take me seriously felt weird.
I kinda liked it.
We followed the trail of blood and ichor left behind the priestess for another fifteen minutes before it happened.
“Did you feel that?” Cringer asked. “Something moved.”
We all stopped, which was exactly the wrong thing to do.
The floor shifted under us. It didn’t tilt but began to descend slowly and smoothly.
“What the hell?” Bastion asked.
A hollow grinding echoed through the stone around us as the floor continued sinking.
Mercy nudged me with an elbow and pointed behind us. “The wall’s coming down.”
At first, I thought she’d meant we were caught in some sort of slow-motion collapse, but that wasn’t the case. A thick slab of stone had descended from the ceiling behind us to seal off any hope we had of retreating.
“Ahead of us, too,” Indira said with a resigned sigh.
Havelock stared at me. “Saint?”
That was my cue to figure out what the hell was going on. “Give me a second.”
I took a look around with my Thief’s Eyes, but no obvious triggers or trap mechanisms jumped out at me. If it wasn’t a traditional trap, then it must have been something simpler. Maybe our combined weight was enough to push the slab down.
Even the priestess, big as she was, didn’t weigh as much as everyone in our party combined. If the riffraff weren’t allowed down in this tunnel, then a sinking trap would be perfect. The priestess could walk through without fear of tripping it, but a party of intruders would set it off without fail.
An eye-watering, pungent odor drifted up to my nostrils. It reeked of decay and something darker, fouler.
Indira wrinkled her nose. “What the hell is that smell?”
The floor had dropped six inches, and I could see the cracks in the walls were wider. They were also leaking a milky mist.
“Gas,” I said in a horrified whisper. And then much louder, “it’s gas. Put out the torch before you blow us all to hell.”
Bastion grumbled but did as I asked. Better for my brother to be blind than all of us to be dead.
In a panicked frenzy, I racked my brain for solutions. Our weight caused the floor to slide down, so if we could reduce the weight, then it should rise back up.
Which sounded simple, but, in reality, it was kind of a pain in the ass. There were no ledges to cling to or handles to grip. The stones that blocked the passage were flush with the boundaries of the pit, save for a very narrow gap where they met. The only place to stand was on the sinking stone block. Unless…
I sheathed my stiletto and pulled the pegs I’d stolen from the Hoaldites’ library out of my inventory. They were only a few inches long, but they were sturdy. I stuck the end of one peg through the gap between the walls and the floor, which was now at waist height.
It wasn’t much, but the peg gave me enough room to rest my feet on something other than the sinking floor. I pushed another one in a couple of feet away from the first one. I scrambled up onto the wedged pieces of wood and hugged the wall. “Havelock, stick your sword in the gap and climb up on it. We have to get our weight off the floor, so it’ll stop sinking.”
The gas clawed at my nose and throat, making my eyes water. A coughing fit threatened to knock me off my perch, and if Bastion hadn’t stumbled over and pushed a gauntleted hand into my back, I’d have lost my balance.
The gnome got the picture and slipped his weapon into the gap next to one of my pegs. He wasn’t as nimble as me, but the gnome was spry enough to get the job done. A quick hop had him off the floor and standing on his short sword.
The floor was still sinking, and the gas kept pouring out of the cracks. It jetted out in reeking streams that filled the hole the sinking floor had created between the stone blocks.
Mercy followed my instructions and rammed her sword into the gap between the block and the floor on my right. She scrambled up onto the wedged blade and dug her claws into the soft stone that had trapped us. Her nostrils flared wide, and she coughed. “Still not enough?”
The floor didn’t stop sinking, and the gas didn’t stop spraying out of the cracks. It wouldn’t be much longer before it poisoned us all. “Cringer—”
The dwarf, the shortest among those of us still on the sinking floor, picked that second to succumb to the gas. Poor guy had been breathing fumes for longer than any of us and never complained. He fell against the wall with a sickly groan, eyes fluttering into the back of his head, then flopped onto the floor. His lips were a disturbing shade of blue, and his skin had gone so pale I could see the capillaries surrounding his eyes like dark threads.
Indira grabbed Bastion by the arm and dragged him over to the dwarf. She put my brother’s hand on the dwarf’s shoulder and shouted, “Lift him up! He’s dying!”
Bastion got the picture without further encouragement and hoisted the dwarf onto his shoulder with a surprised grunt. “What does this guy eat? Horseshoes?”
The effort of lifting Cringer cost Bastion. He gagged and choked, and had to lean against the Indira to keep from falling over. And, while the dwarf was no longer in danger of immediate suffocation, his weight was still pressing down on the floor. We needed to change that before it was too late.
“Bastion,” I gasped through the thick fumes, “hand him up here before he gets choked out.”
Bastion took a step forward, and Indira corrected his course before he bumped into the Havelock and knocked the gnome off his perch. My brother lifted the dwarf toward me, with Indira’s help, but warned, “You’re not going to be able to hold him by yourself. He weighs a ton.”
Mercy burrowed the claws of her left hand deeper into the block of shale. “I’ll help. We’re running out of time.”
We each grabbed one of Cringer’s arms and hung on with what little strength we had remaining. The poisonous gas was depleting our health, now, and our stamina was falling at an unamusing rate.
My fingers were about to give way when Bastion choked out, “It’s moving.” He flicked me a thumbs-up with his free hand. “It’s even moving in the right direction.”
Sure enough, the sunken floor was rising back into its original resting place. As it did so, the stone block holding our weapons in place started to rise, too. A few more inches and we’d drop right back onto the floor.
I warned the others. “Mercy, Havelock. Step off your weapons and get your toes onto the ledge before you fall.”
As the stone blocks rose back into the ceiling, the gas cleared out. Before long, I wasn’t lightheaded and my throat no longer felt like it was going to seal itself closed in protest over the poison I was breathing.
Less than a minute later, the block was out of the way enough for Mercy
and me to shove Cringer into the gap between it and the floor, giving our arms much-needed rest. Havelock followed the dwarf, ducking and crawling forward. “What? It’s easier than standing on the ledge while that block slides up into the roof.”
Mercy followed him, shooting me a wink as she ducked under the stone. “He’s got a point. Come on.”
I scrambled through the opening and flopped onto my back. The air was still warm and sticky, but it was clean, and my lungs drank it in. We might survive this after all.
A few minutes later, the block was back in the ceiling where it belonged, and the section of sinking floor was level with the rest of the passage. Mercy and Havelock recovered their weapons from the floor, and I gathered up the helpful pieces of junk that had saved my life.
Bastion slapped me on the shoulder, and even Indira gave me a curt nod. From her, that was practically a standing ovation and a ticker-tape parade.
Once everyone was safe and sound I felt comfortable being a little smug. “See, I can figure stuff out.”
A long, mournful howl echoed down the hall behind us.
“What do you figure that is, genius?” Bastion asked me.
The new threat deflated my ego. “I guess that’s those cute little puppies who’ve been on our trail.
“They caught us.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Mercy slid her bow off her shoulder and nocked an arrow. “They’ll be here soon.”
Too soon. It’d taken the wargrai a while to sniff us out. But now that the humanoid hounds were in the tunnel, it was a straight shot to us. It wouldn’t take them more than a couple of minutes to catch up. “What if we triggered the trap?”
Indira shot that idea down with a sarcastic barb. “I’m willing to bet they know this place better than we do. They won’t get caught in a trap. Especially one so obvious we should have been able to avoid it.”
Ouch.
Mercy defended me, which somehow stung even more than Indira’s jab. “At least it was an idea.”
