Was that ever an understatement! I had stood by the palace gate for no more than a minute when the great doors cracked apart and brought me face to face with an immense, hideous half-orc wearing the trappings of the sadistic engineers known as Steel Eaters, his nose and ears scarred down to nubs and his one remaining eye as big as the palm of my hand. I'd met friendlier faces in the killing fields of the orc kresk.
"In the name of His Gruesomeness and His Benevolence, the Great Chieftain Grask Uldeth," rumbled the massive orc, somewhat mechanically, "whose nails run red with gore, whose boots we are not worthy of being trod beneath, whose piss is our wine, I bid you welcome."
He paused. My bones were still rattling from the depth and rumble of his voice; my hair was still curling from his breath. The huge orc was flanked by two others. With a mostly steady hand, I drew out my token.
"Pinkskin!" the huge orc boomed. "Urgir is a welcoming city." The words must have sounded strange, even to him. Uldeth was clearly ordering his soldiers to try their best. "Uldeth hears all, and knows of your coming."
"—Yes?" I managed.
"I bid you welcome. Follow."
He followed his luck, and did what he had to. A surreptitious glance told me my wayfinder still pointed straight down.
How had I gotten here? Orcs as a race are not exactly known for observation of decorum, but I still could hardly believe the good fortune provided by my bad manners. I was getting an audience simply by showing up.
As we followed a wide torchlit corridor into the palace, I studied the architecture. The dwarves who had built this palace and fought to the death to defend it knew what they were doing, no question. The masonry—even where smeared with filth or blackened with lamp oil—was faultless, the vaults worked with intricate designs only half-effaced by the chisels of the latest residents. Scrawled upon the walls, at something closer to orc height, were pictographs of great orc victories and slaughters, done with cave-painting energy and crudeness. The earth under the palace trembled once in one of the brief tremors I was already growing used to, a grind and rattle at the edge of hearing, but the masonry didn't budge. Where torches and lamps had sputtered out in the long palace corridors, the big orc steered us through passages of treacherous darkness, where I knew which way to step only by the puffing and gurgling of the guards' breath. I was briefly sorry I'd left Brunoe behind, but the timid merchant was undoubtedly happier this way.
A noise I first took for my pulse slowly mounted, until I realized I was hearing drums. One more sharp turn and I saw we had arrived at Uldeth's throne room.
A dank smell of burning peat filled my lungs. A vaulted ceiling covered with a dwarven mosaic soared over the hall; smoke-fogged bay windows admitted a weak, milky light, gleaming over a hall of crude gold and iron statues of massive orc warriors. In the room's corners, torches burnt against the daylight, and orcs beat wide drums slowly with mallets made from awfully human-sized femurs. A straight row of hulking orc guards, all bearing the black fist emblem of the Empty Hand tribe, stood at attention.
Before me stood a tremendous orc clad in black and violet, his smile a knife wound across his face.
I gaped. Next to him was a tall, severe man, well dressed and with straight black hair that hung to his shoulders. At his belt hung an ornate rapier, and a large leather-bound tome under one arm identified him as easily as the ink staining his fingers
The Pathfinder.
The orc captain growled and knelt, like a tree bending. His two guards knelt beside him with a scrape of armor. The regal orc motioned, and with a perfect smile, the human stepped forward and bowed. "On behalf of the benevolent chieftain of Urgir, Grask Uldeth, and borne forward by the honorable Will of the Ten, I, Arnois Belzig, Pathfinder and humble advisor and historian to the Lord of Urgir, welcome you."
It's been a long time. I struggled for a moment to remember the formal greetings between Pathfinders. The three orcs around me remained stooped in a bow. "For the glory of the Pathfinders, the Will of Ten, and the memory of Durvin Gest," I said, "I, Eando Kline, thank you for your welcome."
I turned to the huge orc that must be Grask Uldeth and gave my deepest bow. "Benevolent Lord of Urgir, I thank you for your welcome."
Uldeth nodded. He gave another wave. As silently as they could manage, the three guards rose and withdrew, shuffling backward out the door of the throne room. It shut with a disturbingly final boom.
I rose. How to proceed? Belzig watched me, his expression cool.
"My lord," I said to Uldeth, "thank you for sparing the time to see a Pathfinder."
The orc smiled. I could see his teeth were white—the first white teeth I'd ever seen in an orc's head. "I have found my relationships with your society… immensely beneficial," he said in a growl. Then he turned suddenly and walked away, stopping at an elaborately patterned table with legs made of worked bone. He mounted two steps to a chair set on a dais before it, leaving me standing there below him. Belzig stood beside his chieftain. They waited. After a long moment I broke the silence.
"My lord," I began. "Might I ask that our audience—" I looked around the chamber, then at Belzig, who smiled faintly, "be private? For my situation—"
The orc lifted his hand, cutting me off. He rumbled, "Grask Uldeth strives to make this city welcoming to all. Secrets among its members benefit no one." I winced. "In the last week, several of Rovagug's faithful who opposed an arrangement with the Steel Eaters were robbed. Now a strange human asks for an audience, through one of the weaponsmiths' key traders." Uldeth looked at me. "Perhaps this new human is capable of more than he appears. I don't know. But," and here his voice lowered, "I know he has a secret." Uldeth's teeth sparkled in the torchlight. "Urgir does not care for secrets."
Uldeth waved, indicating his throne-room guards, still at attention with a discipline alien to their race. "Secrets are the privilege of rule, and Grask Uldeth confers with only one human alone." Belzig bowed again. With our great stores of knowledge and our gift for unlocking secrets, Pathfinders make great assets to kings, chieftains, and lords—but to be kept as a pet has always seemed to me completely at odds with the heart of our trade. I despised this sycophant already.
"Now," the orc lord said, settling back in his chair, "what does this human ask of the Empty Hand?"
I took a deep breath. "Lord Uldeth," I began. "I have been tasked with following certain visions granted to me by unknown forces, forces which have guided me here, and now direct me to descend beneath the city. As the only remaining entrance to the world below lies under your palace, I must fall on your benevolence. I ask no assistance, only a lack of hindrance. In the interest of discovery and the friendship of the Pathfinder Society, will you grant me passage?"
Neither Belzig nor the orc chieftain budged for a moment. The only sound was the crackle of the burning torches. In their absolute stillness, I sensed a communication I couldn't decipher. Then the orc, without turning to his advisor, shook his head slightly. "My chronicler and I," the orc lord growled, "will discuss this." Belzig nodded, smooth as butter. "And you, Pathfinder, will wait here."
He stepped down from his dais and swept out of the room to a small antechamber, Belzig at his side. At his exit, the drummers in the corner beat out a flourish with their bone mallets. Two of the unsettlingly silent guards suddenly appeared on either side of me.
I waited.
Suddenly the door to the antechamber banged open. "Eando Kline!" Belzig called out. I turned to look. A smile, all simple generosity, covered the Taldane's face. "Great news."
Grask Uldeth lumbered back into the room. The drummers beat and the orc guards behind me stiffened.
"Pathfinder Eando Kline," he grunted, "what is it that you expect to find in the Darklands?"
I answered honestly. "I have no idea, Lord."
He laughed—a sound like a millwheel grinding sand—and said, "You're
wiser not to speak. Even if you knew, you would keep your own counsel."
"As you say, Lord."
"Very well." He clapped his hands together, an unsettlingly human gesture. "My shamans of the Rough Beast will open the way to the city's foundations, and you'll have your admittance. The condition is thus: Grask Uldeth leads an open city, one welcoming to all. You enter this portal only because of this generosity. Spread word of my gesture."
I bowed my assent, and he chuckled again.
"Pray you find what you seek quickly, pinkskin. The ways beneath were sealed with good reason, and by those who once called them home. I expect you to return shortly, or not at all." He waved to Belzig.
"Take him there."
Like the lees spilling from a tipped wine cask, the bricks of the chamber's floor slid back into place over my head. I murmured a few words of a light spell, and a globular glow gathered a few feet before me and shone down the mildewed steps—frail light at first, then rising as the torchlight from the chamber above was blocked out. I heard Belzig call out, "Farewell, comrade!" and the grim voices of the Rovagug shamans completing their spell, but I was already hurrying down the steps, the glow following me and my wayfinder pointing east once more.
The steps went on and on. I felt—and most assuredly was—hundreds of miles from anything safe, or familiar. My stomach rose as I descended: the air here was horrible, a suffocatingly close, sweaty smell of mold, dank water, and years. Condensation sweated from the dwarven runes carved into the stone walls, slick with fungus and dotted here and there with unfamiliar little clawed footprints. On the surface, the noises and quakes of the city settling were faint and occasional, but in the dungeons it was a near-continuous groan and rumble, sometimes terrifyingly amplified by chambers out of sight, punctuated by squeaks and scrapes like someone shaking rusty chainmail.
Then, abruptly, I was out of stairs. The passage below my feet was blocked by a rough stretch of gray-brown mortar, much newer than what it sealed and covered in dust and rubble.
A dwarven defensive move? An attempt by the orcs to prevent the ascendance of further subterranean denizens? Only the gods know, I suppose. With a wave of my hand, I called my globe of light forward and slid it over the surface. Near the ceiling, a tunnel two and a half feet wide opened out. The detritus on the floor had undoubtedly been deposited there when the tunnel above was excavated—though by what, I tried not to guess.
I looked back the way I came. Stairs up into darkness. I tested the walls—plenty of space to get a hold between the blocks of stone. I looked up once more. My globe of light cast a glow deep into the tunnel's arc. Fortunately, I'm no stranger to tight squeezes.
It takes an awfully proud Pathfinder not to talk to himself at certain lonely stretches of his journeys. "Eando," I said softly to myself, dragging ahead on my elbows, doing my best to arch my body over the droppings scattered across the tunnel floor, my light always a few feet ahead of me, my back half feeling horribly exposed. "Eando," I said, "when you find what this wayfinder is leading you to, you'll take a little break. Perhaps your next adventure will be someplace warm. Warm and flat. Warm and flat and sunny."
After minutes—or hours?—I tried another deal. "Eando, if this tunnel doesn't end in five hundred breaths, you'll turn around and shuffle backward and—"
And then I was tumbling headfirst through the air, my globe of light spilling after me, skidding down a long earthen wall. Foul air whistled by me and I reached for purchase, any purchase, my heart thudding in my mouth, beginning the words of the same levitation spell that had saved me and Joskan at the dragon mountain.
I didn't finish them. My plunge through the air stopped abruptly—I bounced hard on nothing, struck the wall, then swung, head down, as if at the limit of a rope. My globe of light shot ahead, and I saw for a moment forty feet beneath me a long winding platform carved out of living rock, facing into the measureless vault's hungry black.
Then I turned around, twisting in the air, to see what had caught me.
Thrust out from a crack in the wall, an orange, insectile monster as big as a man was gently sniffing the toes of my boots. Its ropy, red-furred antennae and front legs wound tight around my ankles, its hind limbs and strange, fan-shaped tail braced in the crack of the wall from which it had lunged. Wet eyes looked me over; foul fly-like mandibles worked the air.
To catch me, the beast must have been incredibly fast—must, indeed, have smelled me approaching this vault through the tunnel many paces before I tumbled in.
My stomach muscles began to cramp in their half-curl as the monster's coiling prehensile antennae unfurled and brushed the steel-reinforced toes of my boots, and suddenly I recognized the beast from a dozen fireside tales. The metal hissed and sputtered and dropped flakes of burnt rust. Its mouth closed over my toes. I knew I only had a second before the creature would begin to sniff along the rest of my body and smell my sword. As carefully and smoothly as I could, I drew my metal city token from around my throat, lifted it over my head and—just as the scorching secretion of the monster's antennae ate through the steel of my boot-toes—tossed the token down my body, up into the air, and directly in front of the monster's face.
With a snuffle, front legs still fast around my ankles, it lunged its head forward, the armor plating down its back shifting, exposing the bare length of its neck just for a moment. It was all I needed. With a flash, I drew my sword and, just as its proboscises caught my token in mid-air, cut its head cleanly off. Its grip went slack, and I fell.
What kind of Pathfinder plays lapdog to an orc?
Plummeting through the dark, I shouted my levitation spell and was arrested in my plunge once again as the corpse tumbled past. Below, the rust monster's corpse missed the platform and spun off into the dark; its head struck the stone beneath and rolled into a corner. Swimming through the air slightly, I guided myself to the wide ledge. As my feet touched the solidity of the living stone, I shut my eyes.
It took me a minute to get my pounding heart under control. When I stood, pulling myself up on the fence of short stone columns along the platform's edge, my toes scraped the bare ground where the monster had eaten through my boots' steel and gnawed the leather.
Where was I? Clearly, over an immense chasm. Who knew how far down it went, or what waited at the bottom? Golarion has many secret places, a few of which I'm unashamed to leave unexplored.
I looked up. I knew I was still on Urgir's side of this chasm, but as far as I could see above me rose walls of damp earth and stone. Down the length of the platform squatted hulking dwarf monuments, much abused by time. Every scrap of decorative metal fixed in the statuary on this side of the rift had been eaten clean out, and in places the features of the statues were corroded and scraped away as if by a serrated knife. Arching above me, huge columns and buttresses of masonry that looked to have once been steel-reinforced cracked and strained, and in a few places great steel supports hung like stalactites, rusted completely away at head height, no doubt by a rust monster who didn't bother thinking ahead. Suddenly everything clicked into place—the tremors, the sealing of the tunnels—and I wondered how much longer Urgir had before its final supports were consumed and the great city sank into the earth. The dead eyes in the head of the rust monster I'd slain glowed with a mischievous light.
A faint repetitive chittering filled the air above me, then, far off, a long rumble that shook the stones. Another joist, somewhere, sagging at its base. I suddenly wondered how close the closest rust monster was, and whether they all smelled the sword I thought momentarily of drawing. I thought of the scraped-out faces and decorations of the statues, and concluded that it might be the last bit of scavenge-worthy metal anywhere close by.
I was only half-right. Opposite me, perhaps eighty feet across the measureless depth of the chasm and shining in the glow of my light, there was another long platform of worked stone. On and around this on
e, however, the dwarf statues were untouched. Gold belts, oversized steel weapons, and ornate ceremonial armor were still set in the living rock and reflecting the feeble glow of my light. And in the center, directly across from me, stood two massive metal doors.
Of course. It must have been an easy thing for a rust monster to burrow through loose mortar and earth that formed the walls of this chasm and the sections above, but digging out dwarven stonework or crawling headfirst down the sheer walls must be another matter.
I hope I never know what it's like to be that hungry, that close to a meal you can never touch.
Feeling that the doors' position across from me was too convenient, I studied the wall behind me and my suspicions were immediately rewarded. Next to the hole I'd emerged from, the stone of the wall changed shape, becoming one long, narrow slab that stretched into the darkness above, flanked by two similarly thick and boxy pillars. Across its surface, in dwarven runes several inches high that glowed faintly, a verse was scrawled. Though the stout folks' tongue has never been my strongest, I set to work immediately, and after a grueling hour sat back and read the poem aloud.
The way is barred, the way is barred,
But dwarven folk have traveled hard,
And ask assistance, door, of you,
That you might let these travelers through.
The stones heard. With a deep rumble and a squeal of protest, the long slab shuddered and began to descend out from the wall, an entire chunk of the ledge rotating to become a curved support structure for the emerging drawbridge. As I scrambled out of the way, I noted that the thick chains guiding the bridge were fed out from a previously concealed opening in the boxy pillars. Even if the rust monsters had smelled them, they must not have been able to break through their monolithic stone housings. The great drawbridge drew down slowly, parting the dark of the chasm like the hand of a clock, then settled with a heavy boom on the far side before the great steel doors.
The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline Page 17
