“How did the rats close the door?” She pointed down and it was clear that the fresh rat prints led inside.
Just then a sound of clanking dishes came to them. After that there was nothing but silence.
Thorn watched as Barb concentrated on a spell. She was beautiful, he’d already decided, fierce and smart, and then he was forced to channel his sudden ardor, lest the battle berries get something besides his blood up.
Barb’s eyes shot open in what Thorn thought might have been fear, and the door creaked open of its own accord before them. The elven mage cautiously pushed it the rest of the way and eased inside. Thorn followed her, drawing the Glaive as he went. They both saw a flittering rat-tail as the creature to which it was attached shot up the chimney. A disturbed saucer rolled and rolled on a table as if that had been where the rat had been feeding when they startled it. The sound was nerve-racking and went on and on, until finally it ceased in a frantic rattle.
“Maybe the wind blew the door closed,” Thorn suggested.
“Maybe,” Barb nodded. “But I sense something bad here. I sense real evil.”
“It smells like that fireplace has been used recently.” Thorn took a deep breath and let the power of the battle berries lift his courage.
“That’s brimstone you’re smelling, not the fire hole,” Barb said before she pointed her finger at one of the cabinets and caused the door to swing open, revealing a score of beady red eyes.
Both elves were instantly on guard. Thorn couldn’t figure how they were all stuffed in the cabinet so tightly, but it didn’t matter because the not-so-little vermin were now leaping out to attack.
All around the two surprised elves the cabinet doors flew wide and rats of all sizes came pouring into the room. The main door slammed shut and Thorn sliced the first one that came close enough. He’d hoped the violent move would have scared the others, but instead they went into a frenzy, even snatching up the pieces of their fallen and ravaging them as if they hadn’t eaten in months.
Barb cast forth a streak of yellow energy and Thorn saw that the rats squinted and shied away from the brightness of it. When the magic connected with the cabinet on the far side of the room, a bloody, furry mess exploded outward and those rats which weren’t torn apart in the blast came charging over the others to get at them. It was all Thorn could do to step in front of Barb and stab the nearest of them as they came.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Barb called over the squeaky, roaring noise. “There are just too many of them.”
“Arghhh,” Thorn replied as he stepped into the fray and used his decades of training to wield the magical blade.
A stab here, then a twirl, and a hacking slice that split a couple of the smaller beasts in two. Then the battle lust was on him. He saw Barb standing slack-jawed as one of the larger rats leapt onto her back, but then he was forced to fight again as another wave of them closed their circle.
Blood splattered Thorn’s face and his weapon was almost torn from his grasp when it didn’t come completely free of his last victim.
He saw Barb again; this time her expression was savage and her face was bleeding. The sight of her gave him strength and he yanked his blade loose and attacked with even more vigor than before.
Another streaking flash of yellow energy shot across the room and more rats exploded into bloody pulp. Before him, one of the largest rats he’d ever seen, a toothy bastard that was three feet tall at the shoulder, had set its beady eyes on him. This one was a real dire rat, and Thorn knew from experience that if they killed the dire rats the others would lose their courage and flee.
“Just kill the big ones!” he yelled as he lit into the one before him with a series of savage thrusts, spins and hacks. He sank his blade into it but was tripped by some of the smaller rats as they got under his feet. In a matter of heartbeats he was swarmed over so thickly that he couldn’t even see anymore. One of the little buggers shoved its head in his mouth and he felt them pushing into every opening his armor would allow them. He felt their teeth as they started taking tiny bites. Then the dire rat pounced on his chest, sending the other vermin scrambling away. Finger-long teeth were bared in anticipation as warm slobber dribbled across his face.
Thorn tried to raise his sword, but his arm was pinned. He tried to roll away but couldn’t. He could do little more than squeeze his eyes shut and say a prayer to Babd, the elven god of battle, and hope his life left him quickly. To make it worse, the last thing he heard as the dire rat’s teeth closed over his face was Barb screaming. Somewhere in the room she was meeting the same sort of end as he.
Barb yelled again, but this time she was calling his name.
“Thorn! Don’t move a muscle!” she yelled, and he wondered why she hadn’t seen that he was pinned.
There was a low, grinding sound, then a powerful whooshing of heat flashing over him. Then he realized the dire rat was no longer there. In fact, his whole area was free of them. Without hesitating, he rolled to his feet and understood why she hadn’t wanted him to move. A blast of her arcane fire had scorched everything in its path to cinders. The path, he realized, had passed less than a finger’s breadth over his armor, which showed clearly, with soot, how close her spell had come to ending him too.
“Look,” Barb was pointing as she wielded her dagger against the last dire rat Thorn could see. Thorn turned and saw that her fiery spell had not only killed a good portion of the rats but had blasted away another set of cabinets, revealing a stairway leading down. “Go down,” she grinned through the bloody mask her face had become.
“You’ll not want to be up here when I cast again.”
Then her dagger bit deeply into the dire rat’s neck and her hands started moving the gestures to a spell.
Five
Thorn didn’t doubt her ability, but he had a hard time just jumping into the stairwell and leaving her. When the crackling power started gathering in her hands, though, he didn’t wait. He took three strides and leapt headlong, only to crash into the far stone wall, fall to the landing, and start tumbling down the fancy stone-worked stair.
Barb’s shadow met her at the same wall, and a flash of orange and yellow blinded Thorn so that he didn’t see her until she came rolling down and stopped right beside him.
“You alive?” he asked.
“Barely,” she sat up with a groan. “I think we’re closed in now.”
“Looks like it, but at least the rats all seem to be up there.” Thorn looked at the bites on his exposed skin. There were others that he couldn’t see. They were far from debilitating, but left untended they would fester and eventually blacken his blood. He dug a cork-stoppered vial out of his gear and stood before Barb.
“Let me tend your face before we go any farther.”
The claw slice was thin, but had bled enough that her neck and the collar of her belted robe were saturated.
She let him work, and he didn’t try to hide his admiration for her. He never said anything, but several times while he was cleansing her wound, their eyes met.
Another time and place, he thought hers said.
He had to agree.
Even though he wanted her at that moment, the weight of their quest and the loss of Bristle wouldn’t slip from the back of his mind. The way she shied away and batted her long lashes, though, told him she was indeed interested in pursuing the idea after they were home.
This time Thorn only took a tiny sip of the juice, then he unlaced his chest armor and removed his gauntlets so that he could apply the salve to himself. In the meantime, Barb searched the room with her magic and went straight to a cabinet similar to the one she’d just destroyed. After a few moments she opened a small panel and pulled the lever she found behind it.
There was the sound of what might have been a rolling marble, followed by a small splash, and then a hissing noise. After that, the wall sparkled and started disappearing, revealing a far cleaner and better-maintained stairway leading down.
To Thorn’s amaze
ment, the torches ensconced on the walls came sputtering to life and a slight, yet noticeable, breeze of fresh-smelling air passed across his barely covered torso. He shivered and saw Barb smile at him.
“You’ve missed a bite or two, I think.” She came over, took the vial, and went to a knee behind him.
He wiggled and almost yelped as her finger slid through a hole in the back of his leather britches. She found three more bites that he’d missed as well. Thorn was thankful for her help and made a mental note to strip down to his skin and double-check again just as soon as he could. He knew a brownie that had been bitten on the earlobe once by a dire rat. Three days later, the thing was swollen to the size of a gourd.
Thinking about that caused Thorn to draw his sword and use its shiny surface as a mirror. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Barb shaking her head at him.
“What do ya think I’m gonna do back here?” she asked with a forced grin.
“I was thinking about that brownie who lost his ear to a rat bite a while back.”
“They call him ’Whatter,’ now,” she nodded as she stood. “Says ‘what?’ every time you speak to him.”
This time her giggle was a little more genuine.
“I didn’t miss any of the bites, unless they’re under your skivvies. If you feel obliged, take it all off and look.”
Thorn blushed despite the battle-berry juice he’d been sipping. She gave him the salve and then took the flask of juice and downed its contents. After that she helped Thorn back into his armor; all the while his head was filled with a mixture of battle lust, embarrassment, and quite a bit of desire. But finally it was time for them to move on and Thorn took the lead, letting Barb advise him from behind.
Six
“I sensed a small area with quite a bit of magical protection cast around it. That is where we’ll go first,” said Barb.
“There’s only one way to go at the moment.”
“There will be a floor or a landing soon. I don’t think we will have to go much deeper.”
No sooner had the words finished leaving her mouth than Thorn was peeking around the wall of the curving stair to see what was in the room that opened off of the landing. She was wrong this time, though, for the stairway did continue down. Apparently that wasn’t where they needed to go because Barb stepped around him and walked right up to a table displaying several candles and a bookstand with an open volume sitting in it.
The room was tiled and remarkably clean. The same type of ensconced torches flickered along the walls and two paintings stood out from the rest of the ornate furnishings. One was of the Ice Falls, shining brightly under the sun. The other was of an old, bearded man in a wizard robe. Thorn could only guess that the crooked-nosed fellow was Falriggin.
Barb stood there still for a long enough time that Thorn grew alarmed and stepped over to see her face. She was in deep concentration.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat on a stool and waited.
Eventually Barb started feeling around the table and the wall behind it, but nothing presented itself. The tip of her tongue was poking out of the side of her mouth and she seemed oblivious to everything else around her.
She got on her hands and knees and began feeling around the underside of the table, but eventually she huffed out in frustration and plopped her rear end on the floor.
“There’s not a series of leaping stones set over a bottomless pit we have to cross, or a maze, or some foul guardian to fight?” He sounded disappointed even to himself.
“I can’t find the mechanism to open up our hidey-hole, if that is even what I am sensing.” She swatted her hand backward and hit the table, and Thorn saw a few pages of the open text flip over.
“Did you look under the book?”
“Now I know why your Mama named you Foxwise, Thorn. That has to be it.”
Barb stood excitedly, and indeed the lever they needed to push was there, mounted on the tabletop under the bookstand. This time the rolling marble sounded like it was as big as Thorn’s head, and instead of a splash there was a deep, rock-on-rock thump.
A section of the wall, right where Barb had been searching only moments before, slid down into the floor, revealing a cubbyhole containing a wooden chest and three glass vials. Barb inspected these by pulling the cork and taking a whiff. By the way her nose scrunched up, he knew he didn’t want to smell them. She tucked one of the vials away in her robe, and then with an arcing red flare from her finger, cut through the lock and opened the chest.
From where he had moved up behind her, all Thorn could see was the yellow glow of gold reflecting the light around them. It didn’t draw either of them all that much, for the elves of the Lurr Forest had little use for gold, but it was beautiful.
Barb turned suddenly and Thorn felt a cold wave of nauseating bleakness waft over him. He turned, too, and the power of the battle berries fled him, for there was Pwca.
Pwca was only two feet tall and he looked like a tadpole, or maybe a living turd, with flipper-like appendages. It had a round, apple-sized head, and a toothy mouth that opened up far too wide. He could probably pose an immediate physical threat to them, but Thorn wasn’t sure how. The little devil commanded legions upon legions of rats, and the rumor was that he owed the Hoar Witch a few favors.
“Give that chest to me,” a voice that grated inside their heads and was as loud as thunder sounded.
“Now!”
“There is your terrible foe,” Barb heaved out a sigh and then darted past Thorn toward the stairs. Thorn started to follow, but Pwca’s menacing chuckle and the squeaking snarls of all the large dire rats coming down the stair stopped him. Thorn wasn’t sure what happened next. The stuff in the chest was clattering and ringing as it spilled all over the stairs and the rats.
Pwca made a whistling sound that was accompanied by a deep hum, and a pulse of dark devilry shot forth and slammed Barb violently into the wall. She hit the floor limply and blood poured out of her mouth and ears. Then the battle rage consumed Thorn and he started killing rats, as swiftly as he could manage, with no regard for Pwca whatsoever.
To his great disappointment he eventually collapsed in a heap of exhaustion amid the score of vermin he’d slain. The contents of the chest were gone, though. Besides the rat corpses, only Barb’s limp form remained. Once he could control the heaving of his chest, he crawled to her side. She was breathing, he could tell, but her arms and legs were broken and swelling faster than he thought possible.
“Go,” she croaked. “Heeere. Swallows-- Two swallowsss.”
The vial she’d kept, along with a crystal shard a little bit bigger than Thorn’s finger, fell out of her robe and clanked together on the tile floor.
“I’ll not leave you!” Thorn screamed at the ceiling and gnashed his teeth together.
“Yessss,” Barb hissed through a bubbling gurgle of blood, and then went still.
It took a few long moments for Thorn to accept the fact that she was dead.
His years of service as a soldier, and then commander, helped separate the pain of her loss from the moment. His duty was to get the shard back to Queen Corydalis now, as fast as he could manage. He wasn’t sure about taking two sips of the stuff, but he decided he would do so after he hauled Barb up and buried her deep in the snow so they could come retrieve her later and bury her properly.
He was so exhausted that he could only get her halfway up the stairs. He knew he had to get the shard back to his queen and as much as it pained him, he left Barb’s body there on the ornate stairway and fled the tower.
Any regret over leaving Barb behind was wiped away when Sloffin nearly clawed him from the open expanse of snow between him and the lake.
Two swallows, he heard Barb and as he ran as fast as his tired legs could carry him, he pulled the cork with his teeth and took them and was immediately grateful for the stuff.
The frigid world around him sizzled and popped, and everything took on a slightly blue tint. Sloffin was coming back around, but Thorn
followed the creature’s eyes and saw that it was looking right at his boot-tracks in the snow. Thorn was now looking at his boot-tracks too; he was still standing in them but didn’t see himself.
He took two swift steps backward and made sure to put his feet back as close as possible to where they had been. He was lucky. As he looked up, the witchborn creature swept past where he had just been. Even invisible, he would have surely been mangled had he not moved away. Nevertheless, he charged crazily toward the water while his attacker was turning for another pass.
He knew he was leaving a trail of prints, but he hit the icy liquid and swam, mostly underwater, until the cold and exhaustion sent his mind floating completely away from him.
Seven
When he woke, he knew he was back in the Underland. The sugary smell of the place was unmistakable. He remembered the lake, and the freezing water and having to dive a few times to avoid the Hoar Witch’s beast, but he didn’t remember traveling to the Lurr, or even climbing out of the far side of the lake.
“You’ll be taking it easy for bit,” a tiny, sparkling finger-sized sprite with a white vest marking it as a medika, told him. Another sprite zipped away and Thorn heard her calling down the tunnel ahead of her, “General Posy-Thorn has awakened. Posy-Thorn has come to!”
Within a matter of moments, Thorn’s healing room was filled with his fellow honor guards and Queen Corydalis. The beautiful, lavender-eyed ruler of the Lurr Forest fae seemed sad, and Thorn suddenly remembered that Barb and Bristle hadn’t made it back.
Foxwise: (A Legend of Vanx Malic Short Story) (The Legend of Vanx Malic Book 0) Page 2
