“You’re suggesting we just boldly stroll in the front door?” squealed Flint in disbelief.
Tas shrugged, twirling his topknot nonchalantly. “If you prefer, we could find a side entrance. I still have my tools, so these locks would be a snap—” he snapped his fingers—“to open.”
“Pick, you mean,” sighed Tanis, running a hand wearily through his thick hair. “I hate to think we’ve sunk to breaking in—it puts us at Delbridge’s level of thievery.”
“What’s this talk about thievery?” scoffed Tas. “Just because we let ourselves in?”
“It does not lower us!” agreed Selana, her nose wrinkling. “He stole something that did not belong to him. We’re simply retrieving what is rightfully ours.”
Tanis held up his hands in mock defense, then waved everyone ahead of him. “Lead the way, Tas.”
Tasslehoff stepped brightly out of the pump house’s shade, then paused with his hands on his hips, studying the keep. Flint fidgeted next to him, nervously clutching the head of his axe and glancing over his shoulder. Selana and Tanis stood nearby. Within seconds, Tas spotted what he wanted and was hiking briskly toward the keep with his friends bustling behind.
At the spot Tas had chosen, a smaller building abutted the keep. Where the two structures met, a deeply recessed doorway led into the tower. The kender strode straight into it and nearly disappeared in its shadows. The door was set back six or seven feet from the keep’s outer wall, so all four travelers could easily crowd into its space.
Selana watched in fascination as Tas pulled an oilcloth bundle from his pouch. He extracted a bent wire and a handleless knife blade with deep notches filed into it. Within moments, a solid “thunk” told everyone that the lock was open.
“After you,” said Tas, pushing the door open and stepping aside. The three others filed past into a narrow corridor temporarily lit by sunlight, then Tas gently closed the door.
After several moments of waiting for his eyes to adjust, Tas spoke up. “I can’t see a blasted thing in here.”
“We dare not strike a light,” whispered Tanis, and Selana and Flint mumbled soft agreement.
“Sure, you dwarves and elves can see in the dark. What about me? It’s pitch black in here.”
“You’ll just have to do the best you can,” said Tanis. “Just hang on to the person ahead of you. I’ll lead, then Selana, Tas, and Flint in the rear. What do you make of this place, Flint?”
The dwarf was peering ahead into the darkness, tuning his innate ability to see outlines in the dark. “I don’t have much of an answer, Tanis. It looks like a blind passage: no doors or connecting hallways in sight, though what’s farther ahead than about twenty feet I can’t say. The whole thing seems to curve to the left, and it’s mighty narrow.”
Tanis agreed. “The only way to go is forward until we cross an intersection.”
They moved slowly along the corridor, footsteps echoing softly in the damp air. Tas hobbled along with one hand on the rough stone wall, the other clutching a corner of Selana’s scarf.
“Where should we look first?” whispered Tas to no one in particular. “Say, come to think of it, why don’t you just cast that spell again, Selana? You know, the one that tells you where the bracelet is.”
“It’s not like a divining rod, Tasslehoff,” the sea elf explained. “It gives me only vague directions, though they can be narrowed down by asking the right questions. But I can cast that spell only once a day, and I’ve already done my quota for today.”
Bringing up the rear, Flint cleared his throat softly. “The old fellow at the gate said the knight’s son had been kidnapped from his bedchambers. I say we look there. If Delbridge is responsible for the abduction, he may have dropped the bracelet in his haste to leave.”
“The only problem with that suggestion,” whispered Tanis, “is that this hallway seems to be spiraling sharply down, not up, and if we turn around we’ll only end up back at the dead-end door we came in.”
Flint, trying desperately to clomp quietly over the stone-block floor in his heavy leather, hobnailed boots, gave Tasslehoff’s shoulder a shove. “Nice job, doorknob. You probably picked the only entrance in this castle that didn’t lead up into the keep. Instead, we’re tromping to gods know where down this endless corkscrew hall. Haven’t even seen one doorway yet.”
“We’re inside, aren’t we?” Tas shot back. “Besides, I didn’t see you—”
Tanis clapped his hands over his pointed ears. “Enough!” he hissed, whirling on them. Selana skittered to the side. “Your bickering could make a half-elf’s head split in two, not to mention alerting anyone within a hundred yards of our presence.”
Dwarf and kender fell into a sheepish silence.
“Is that a door, ahead on the left?” asked Selana, pointing around the half-elf’s shoulder.
Tanis squinted and saw a vague outline about twenty feet down the spiraling hallway. Taking a half-dozen quick steps, he reached out a hand to touch the wooden surface. He groped around the left side for a knob.
“Wait!” whispered Tasslehoff, elbowing his way past Selana to Tanis’s side. “You never just walk up and rattle a strange door, especially not in a place like this. It could be trapped or rigged with an alarm or all kinds of things.” The kender rifled through a pouch and quickly found what he needed, then set about the delicate task of searching for springs, wires, latches, balance points, and a host of other hazards his companions could barely guess at.
Tanis was glad for the darkness, because he was blushing with embarrassment. He had been so anxious to get somewhere, anywhere, that he’d forgotten his common sense. Only a rank amateur charged through a door under such foreboding circumstances.
“I think it’s clean,” pronounced Tas at last, “but it was locked. You never can be too careful. Why, once my mother’s eldest brother’s eldest boy, Old Uncle Latchlifter—actually, that would make him my cousin, wouldn’t it? Why do you suppose we called him uncle, then? Anyway, Old Uncle Latchlifter—not Uncle Trapspringer, who’s far too clever about such things—Uncle Latchlifter got careless picking a lock. Kablooey! Of course, you only have to do that sort of thing once, don’t you?”
“Open the door, Tas,” Tanis ordered in a monotone.
“Certainly.” Tas pushed it open and stepped through. “Before he died, Old Uncle Latchlifter was a great one for giving advice. ‘Never hit your mother with a shovel,’ he used to tell me. ‘It leaves a big impression on her mind.’ ” Moved by the memory, Tasslehoff shook his topknot. “Poor Uncle Latchlifter. He was as crazy as a bugbear, you know.”
Beyond the doorway was a small room, not more than ten feet by fifteen, with a ceiling so low as to make even the dwarf feel he should duck his head. Another, smaller door was set into the far wall. The room was very nearly empty, with only several large urns and some scrap lumber piled neatly in one corner and a crudely built, closed box the size of a very large trunk on the floor in the corner near the other door.
Selana wrinkled her nose in distaste. “It smells like something died in here.”
“Probably rats,” said Tanis, his breath lingering before him in moist, white wisps.
Selena unconsciously moved a bit closer to the half-elf. “Bes schedal,” she whispered, and a dim glow, its source undetectable, immediately filled the room with amber fog. The sea elf shivered under her thin cloak as she scanned the floor for movement. “We must be quite far underground.”
Flint shuddered as well, though not from the cold or the thought of rodents. “This place gives me the willies,” he confessed. “The bracelet’s obviously not down here, so let’s—”
“Great Reorx!”
Tanis, Flint, and Selana all jumped at Tasslehoff’s curse. Spinning about, they saw him at the wooden box, his hand on the now half-opened lid.
“This is where that awful stench is coming from.” Throwing his shoulder into the task, the kender was working at prying the lid the rest of the way off.
“Wait, Ta
s—” Tanis began, but his warning came too late.
Grunting with exertion, Tasslehoff flung the wooden cover back and looked into the box. His eyes went wide with wonder, then watered up from the smell, until he had to blink back tears to see.
“A body!” he coughed. “Boy, is it disgusting, all blue and puffy-looking. Come and take a look.”
Flint and Tanis both glanced at Selana, who was holding her stomach and looking more pale than usual.
“Tas, shut the lid. We’re getting out of here now,” the half elf ordered, taking Selana by the arm and steering her back to the door.
Tas was peering intently at the body inside the box. “Something about this guy seems very familiar, Tanis,” he muttered. “Short, fat, pug-nosed—”
Flint, who was about to severely chastise the kender, recognized the description, too. Taking a deep breath and holding it, he stepped to within three feet of the stinking box, looked in, and nodded firmly. “I’d bet my favorite axe that he’s our man.”
Despite her revulsion, Selena’s ears perked up. “Someone check for the bracelet!”
Tas leaned into the box eagerly.
“Oh, no you don’t,” warned Flint in a low voice. He took the kender by the arm and escorted him back to the door through which they had entered the room. “You’re not going to touch that bracelet again, if I have anything to say about it. And I do. You stay out of trouble here and stand watch with Selana.” He gulped before adding, “Tanis and I will check out the stiff.”
Flint and Tanis approached the box warily. They converged on opposite sides, both looking down distastefully.
“I’d been expecting all along that it would be us giving him a rough time when we finally met up, but he’s turned the tables on us, eh, Tanis?”
Tanis smirked at his friend’s dark humor. “He might not see it that way. Let’s get this over with.” Tanis crouched down on one knee and reached into the box, then withdrew his hand and wiped it furtively on his leather legging. Irritated, he stared at the hand as if it had betrayed him and reached again, this time grasping the shirt sleeve on the dead man’s left arm. He tugged, but the hand was twisted and pinned under the body. He tugged harder and pulled it free. The arm bent forward stiffly at the shoulder. Using both hands, he slid the sleeve back from the wrist, but found nothing but puffy ashen flesh.
Flint, working on the right arm, had similar luck. “What do you suppose our boy died from?” he wondered. “No wounds on the body that I can see.”
Flint’s comments were cut off by a gasp from Tanis. He looked across the box and his blood nearly stopped in his veins.
The dead man’s hand, rings sparkling on the gray fingers, was locked around Tanis’s left forearm, his lifeless eyes wide open but unseeing. The body struggled into a sitting position and its pallid head lolled hideously on an overly long neck, as if it were now just a stretched and broken spring.
“Zombie!” the half-elf cried, desperately fumbling with his right hand for the dagger on his left hip. His fingers locked around the hilt and whisked it free, then brought it slashing down on Delbridge’s cold, dead forearm, but the zombie seemed hardly to react as the blade sawed through its toughened hide.
Flint was there in a flash, chopping at the arm with his axe. Tanis stumbled away from the box as the zombie crashed back into it, minus its left hand. The quivering, severed hand of the dead man maintained its grip on the half-elf, but Tanis frantically pried up the ringed fingers one at a time with the blade of his dagger until the hand fell to the ground with a dull thud.
The zombie did not hesitate or even cry out, but continued struggling to grasp the edge of the box with its oozing stump.
Flint was ready. The hearty dwarf raised his axe high and swung it down again and again with the rhythm of a practiced woodcutter, mindless of the ichor that splattered with each blow, or even of Tanis standing next to him, slashing with his dagger. He knew that a zombie never veered from its single obsession until destroyed, turned back by a priest, or called off by its master.
“I think you can stop now, Flint,” Tanis panted at his side, gripping the dwarf’s shoulder. The undead creature, or what was left of it, twitched reflexively twice more, then stopped moving.
Ears ringing with the thunderous pounding of his own blood, Flint’s gore-spattered hands clenched and unclenched the haft of his gruesome axe.
Selana and Tas stared with unabashed horror and shock. The room, still bathed in the soft amber light of the sea elf’s spell, fell quiet between the ragged breaths of its occupants.
Almost clinically, Tasslehoff watched a little red mote dance in the rafters. It seemed to grow before his eyes, a weaving scarlet swirl containing infinite gradations of red, until it was at least as big as his head.
By now the others had noticed the spiraling, growing mote and knew that in a room that housed a zombie, it could not be good news.
“Run!” cried Tanis and Flint, almost in unison.
But before anyone could move, the air in the tiny room was rent with a flash of lightning that singed Flint’s beard and sizzled Tas’s topknot, leaving behind a cloud of choking, oily smoke.
Amongst the roiling clouds stood a hulking figure, well over six feet tall. Selana screamed at the sight of its horned head and dark, leathery wings. Then Tas was at her side, shouting, “It’s a man, not a monster!” and she realized that the horns were a cap fashioned from a ram’s skull and the wings were a cape that was supported beyond his shoulders by a frame.
An enormous scar ruined the right side of his face and sealed his eye socket. His remaining eye blazed with fury.
“Who have we here?” The magician focused his lone eye on the red-faced half-elf and dwarf standing over the hashed zombie, then on the wide-eyed kender and trembling woman standing on the far side of the catacomb. “What have you done to poor Omardicar the Omnipotent?”
His tone was light and mocking, but his left eye had an angry, hard glint as it returned to Tanis and Flint. In a flash, the wizard raised his arms and mumbled a single, indistinct word. A gigantic web materialized, extending from floor to ceiling, and wrapped itself around Flint and Tanis. Sticky goo dripped from the strands and adhered to the struggling victims. The more they twisted and fought to break free, the more the web tangled around them, until they could hardly move at all and finally collapsed to the floor.
Then, with practiced precision, the wizard snapped his attention to the two by the door. Again he muttered his magic word and the twisting strands appeared to engulf Tas and Selana. But instead of wrapping around them, the web splattered against an invisible barrier and slid to the floor, then glowed briefly and disappeared. Selana grinned grimly at her opponent.
“You surprise me, woman,” the mage said in his imposing baritone, a mixed look of admiration and irritation on his hideous countenance, “but I won’t be surprised twice.”
Selana was already preparing her next spell, and surprise Balcombe is exactly what she did. The sea elf extended her hands with the fingers spread and shouted, “Dasen filinda!” A spray of colors burst from her fingers and splashed across the wizard, streaking round his body and spinning him in a half-circle. As he staggered back toward the wall, he tripped over a broken plank on the floor and sprawled into the dirt. The hideous ram’s skull cap fell from the mage’s head and rolled into a dark corner, and the cape’s wing frame snapped. The dazzling colors continued flashing around his thrashing form as he struggled to remove the ruined cape.
“Don’t mess with Selana, or she’ll turn you into a bug!” crowed Tasslehoff, running up with the sea elf to untangle Tanis and Flint. But Balcombe’s webs were tough and sticky. Tas yanked the dagger from his legging and sawed through enough strands to free Tanis’s knife hand. As the elf worked to cut himself out, Tas switched to Flint.
“Hurry, the spell won’t last long,” urged Selana. But the sticky strands of web wrapped around the blades of the knives and clung tightly to Tanis’s and Flints arms and legs.
“I was very lucky that my spells worked against him,” she whispered to the half-elf. “Whoever he is, he’s far more powerful than I am. I have no spells or herbal components left.”
Even as she spoke, Balcombe’s thumbless right fist thrust through the swirling colors into the air. A ring on one of his fingers glowed.
“Run!” shouted both Flint and Tanis in unison. Balcombe’s hands traced patterns in the air as he mumbled, still lying on his back. Sparks crackled around him, and his hands grew red and hot.
Wrenching his dagger free from the clinging webs, Tasslehoff leaped forward and slashed at the wizard. But the blade turned aside inches from the mage’s throat, as if knocked away by an invisible hand. Balcombe smiled an evil grin and reached with his left hand for Tas’s arm, blue sparks, like miniature bolts of lightning, racing across his fingers.
Tas jumped up and away, narrowly avoiding the glowing hand. As he backed up, he bumped into the urn in the corner. With both hands he toppled it onto Balcombe, then kicked the mage stoutly in the stomach. The urn shattered when it touched Balcombe’s hand, and Tas’s kick slid away the same as the dagger had, but left the mage off balance.
Tanis screamed, “Run, Tas, and don’t stop!” while Flint swore and kicked against the webs.
Acting on instinct, the kender grabbed Selana by the waist and pushed her toward the door. He paused for just a moment and looked back into the faintly lit room. Balcombe was shaking off the broken pottery and preparing a new spell. The kender looked to where Tanis and Flint still fought against the snarled web.
“Don’t worry about us, you doorknob! Just get Selana to safety!”
Tas turned and raced down the dark hallway after Selana. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning from Balcombe’s fists smashed into the wall just inside the corridor. With a horrendous crashing, it ricocheted down the narrow corridor after the fleeing pair. Tasslehoff glanced over his shoulder and saw the blazing blue light zigzagging toward him, tearing huge chunks from the wall wherever it alighted. He had nearly caught up to Selana by then and with an enormous leap, he tackled her to the cold floor. The magical bolt sizzled past them, showering them with debris from the walls. A moment later Tasslehoff was on his feet again and dragging Selana forward.
Wanderlust Page 17
