Dark Path: Book Three of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Bending over, he twisted one scaly paw around and examined it thoughtfully. "Just how intelligent are they?"

  Kroh shrugged. "Smarter than a dog, but they can't think. Why?"

  "Because they are what's been herding the rats." The Threll stood and wiped his hand on his wet trousers. "Any ideas how or why?"

  "Musk," offered Rolf. "Hydras have a musk they use to lull guard dogs into, well, sort of a dull trance, sleepy-like. It could work on rats too, I imagine; they did all kinds of strange things when they bred these buggers."

  "They only have to mate once to produce litters for a couple years, laying eggs," Kroh offered. "There is probably a fertile female that has moved into this area and started a litter; it would explain why we've two different age groups here."

  "It would fit with the spider colony's expansion as well," Halabarian nodded. "How big do the adults get?"

  "Females would be cow-sized if it isn't full of eggs; of course, if it was, it would be nearly helpless. About half the eggs never hatch or die stillborn." Kroh shook his head. "Still doesn't explain why it’s herding the rats that way; after all, down here rat would figure largely into the hydra's own menu." He shrugged, and examined his axe blade. "Still, it doesn't matter; once it's dead the problem's solved."

  "What do you mean, once it's dead?" Halabarian demanded. "You don't mean for us to go after it today?"

  "Absolutely," Kroh grinned. "We have to. We just wiped out a bunch of its babies; by the time we come back for another shot at it, it will have moved away. Besides, these things are like spiders, they rely on surprise to win their fights."

  "Two questions," the Threll held up two fingers to illustrate his points. "First, why bother to kill it at all? We can come back with a saw and some axes and simply cover the vent with tree trunks; secondly, even if we need to kill it, how could we find it in this labyrinth before we run out of light?"

  "That's right," Rolf agreed. "At least the second question."

  "First answer," Kroh's voice was climbing with excitement. "First, we live here, singer, this thing can find another exit, and will, given time; best to kill it now, while it has fewer babies than it might a year or more from now. Second answer: its own baby will lead us to it." He held a torch out from the shoulder pointing downstream; the light revealed a dragging set of blood-flecked tracks in the sand leading away from the battle site. "I clipped off a few secondary heads off a young one; it's crawling home to mama." The Waybrother grinned. "They're tough, it'll get close if not all the way. We just give it a little lead time and follow. Never have an easier time of it."

  "And what if it's just crawling off blindly " Halabarian suggested.

  Kroh shrugged. "We won't lose anything if it does, but I don't think it will. Hydras are group creatures, they hunt in packs, and live together in the same lairs, all that, like wolves. A hurt young one ought to head home, let momma make it better."

  Halabarian was amazed to see a strange emotion flicker across that small portion of the Dwarf's face that wasn't hidden by hair. 'Pain? Homesickness?' the Threll wondered. It was hard to imagine the Waybrother missing his mother. "You're right, I concede," he said to cover the awkward pause that followed. "We've nothing to lose by trying, so long as you believe that we can handle an adult and whatever is left of its young."

  "We should," Kroh laughed, his eyes dancing. "I hates hydras, killed dozens, I have. They're not that tough if you know they're about; like I said, they use surprise."

  "I wonder," Rolf offered diffidently. "If this hydra escaped from the Stone Adder; Cave Goblins use them as war and guard beasts. They might have trained it to gather rats for food; even though it's lost, it still keeps up the job, not knowing any better."

  The other paused in their preparations to consider it; after careful thought, Kroh nodded grudgingly. "That could be; it could have been trained to drive them up certain shafts based on air smell, and our shaft comes close to what it's used to."

  "Brilliant, Rolf," Halabarian thumped the embarrassed Badger on the shoulder. "I believe you may have solved the why of this business." Privately, he thought it unlikely, but it did no harm to encourage Rolf, and it was just strange enough to be a real possibility. It would do for an explanation until more facts came to light, if ever they did.

  The trio gave the wounded hydra a few minute’s head start and then followed, weapons at the ready and senses straining for the first hint of attack. The bloody, dragging trail followed the stream for four hundred paces before angling off into a large crevice, an opening that was slightly larger than the shaft they had come down. As they approached it, instinctively spreading out, the stillness was torn asunder by a reptilian scream that soared up and up like a demented bat spiraling into a night sky, the suddenness of it ripping a cry from Halabarian and a uncharacteristic oath from Rolf; the Threll saw with shock that even Kroh appeared unnerved for a moment. The unearthly howl was repeated in a hundred echoes up and down the stream passage, chipping at the nerves and seeming to dim the light generated by sword-pommel and torches.

  "Mama found her wounded baby," Kroh observed, his voice sounding weak and strained in the deathly silence that followed the single howl. "I don't think we'll have to go in there for her."

  Halabarian chose a spot centered on the crevice opening and grounded the butt of his spear to receive a charge, thrusting his torch into the sand next to him. "I believe you are right, friend Dwarf. Either she or we will die, and the issue to be settled forthwith."

  "I wonder how many more young she's got," Rolf commented, working his shoulders and moving Moonblade in short, experimental swings.

  "We'll know in a minute," Kroh grinned, cocking his head; a moment later the others could hear the leathery sound of reptilian feet on stone down the crevice.

  The sounds continued, growing faintly louder, then fading, as if the creature was advancing and then retreating, or had stopped just short of the light. The rustling began again, then stopped again; over several eternal minutes the pattern was repeated again and again. Several times Halabarian heard an odd high-pitched chittering sound that he could not identify coming from the crevice; he desperately wanted to ask Kroh if he knew what that could be, but dared not shift his attention from the inky oval hole in the rock wall in front of them, confident that when the attack came they would have little warning.

  Rolf stood to his right, and Kroh, torch rammed into the sand next to him, was to his left; the Threll was very glad for their company, although he dearly wished he was not where he was at the present. Although a capable enough fighter, he was primarily a wandering musician, poet, and artist whose interest in the world at large was seven parts curiosity and three parts his position as an agent of the Lords of the Solus Forest. It was a task that Halabarian was extremely well-suited for, although at the moment he was wondering if he would live long enough to be able to pursue it any further.

  "Keep an ear to rearward attacks," Kroh cautioned in a low voice. "Not too likely that it will have picked a lair with only one entrance."

  The attack came with the nerve-jangling shock that accompanies any attack, no matter how expected, a bursting sensation behind the eyes that dances across the tendons of every limb and sends a tremor through every muscle and joint. Halabarian saw scaled bodies and weaving heads in the flickering light as a sudden rush erupted from the crevice. Time and perception in combat is a complex thing, unparalleled in normal experience; the body reacts, the mind perceives, all in a state that is darkly similar to dreamlike. And like dreams, the images seen in the whirlwind of battle will often fade from memory to simple impressions.

  As the hydras burst from the crevice Halabarian angled his spearhead towards the one coming most directly at him, a fast-moving sub-adult, and braced himself. If the beast were cunning or nimble enough to sidestep his weapon, it would be a short fight indeed.

  The hydra, heads weaving like a crowd of pugilists, did try to slip to the side, but the Threll had been ready for it and swung the steel point
just enough to bring it to bear without dislodging the weapon; an older, more experienced creature would have charged slower to give itself more options, but this beast was young, strong, and inexperienced; it charged full-tilt, failed to dodge enough, and spitted itself on six feet of ash topped with a steel head nine inched long and three wide at the blade’s widest.

  Its momentum drove it over the head and down two feet of shaft, heads straining at full extension and jaws snapping furiously in an attempt to reach its foe, before the spear broke with a heart-stopping crack that echoed in its wielder’s joints. Halabarian had felt the quiver in the wood before the shaft parted, and changed his stance, sliding back towards the butt of the weapon; as the hydra lurched forward, unbalanced by the sudden removal of forward resistance, the Lanthrell darted in, using his height and reach to drive the broken end of the spear-shaft between the beast's shoulders. The jagged wood hardly penetrated, but the force of the blow knocked the creature to its knees and forced the other half of the spear deeper into its entrails.

  Leaping out of reach, Halabarian was struck on the blind side by a leathery boulder and sent flying into the stream, icy water and stony encounters robbing him of reason and coordination for several eternal seconds. When finally his senses cleared enough for him to roll, gasping from pain, shock and cold to the far bank, he was amazed to realize that he was still alive and unattacked. Pushing himself to his knees, clawing at his knife-hilt with numb fingers, he shook wet hair from his eyes and tried to make sense of a scene as observed through eyes that were having trouble focusing.

  The fight was over, that much was obvious; his sub-adult was still thrashing, but pain had overtaken its senses, and it would pose little threat in the last minutes of its life. Rolf stood over two ripped corpses of young hydras, and Kroh was wrestling his axe from the corpse of the young hydra he had maimed earlier and followed to this point; another sub-adult lay nearby. Halabarian's torch had been knocked into the stream and extinguished, but the Dwarf's still burned; that and Moonblade were enough to illuminate the small battlefield. The Threll ceased fumbling at his knife-hilt and instead gingerly felt the back of his aching skull; the hand came away black in the poor light. Rinsing the blood off, he pulled a bandage from his pouch and tore away the layers of waxed paper that had kept it dry.

  "Here, let me do that," Rolf knelt and leaned Moonblade against his shoulder. "Nasty gash and a pretty good lump; looks like you won't be wearing a helm for a while."

  "If you were wearing one, you wouldn't have the lump," Kroh commented, pulling his own helm off to free up his hearing now that the fight was over. "If you're going to roll around in a rocky stream bed you ought to dress for the occasion."

  "Where's the adult?" Halabarian held his hair away from his forehead so Rolf wouldn't get it under the strips of boiled cloth he was using to bind the bandage to his wound.

  The Waybrother jerked his head upstream as he lit a new torch off the one still stuck into the sand. "Took off just after we were fully engaged chopping up its young; didn't even make a single attack. Only reason it hit you was that you got in its way, seems like." The Dwarf shook his head. "I don't like this a bit. I'm going to follow it; you two make sure there aren't any live eggs in its lair and follow as best as Halabarian can. Leave the spear; we'll come back and dig it out when we deal with the spiders." Without another word the sturdy Badger moved off down the tunnel.

  "We've only one more torch," Rolf observed, handing Halabarian the brand that had been left in the sand by Kroh. "Yours was snapped in two by the adult hydra. We can't waste much time down here; do you feel up to checking the lair, or do you want to wait here?"

  The Threll stood experimentally and worked his shoulders. "Give me a minute and I'll go with you." He motioned towards the orange light that marked Kroh, now disappearing around a curve in the waterway. "That's the soberest speech I've ever heard him make."

  The big Badger shrugged. "Something's wrong here, very wrong. A mother hydra shouldn't have abandoned its young like it did, they're clannish like wolves. That, and that chamber above has Kroh worried, and I can't remember the last time I've seen him that way."

  "Some sort of enchantment on the hydras?" Halabarian frowned. "Making them herd rats, and the mother to abandon its young?"

  "Don't know. Want to borrow one of my dirks?"

  "Not just yet; with any luck we've no more fighting this side of the surface." Halabarian moved his head about carefully. "Let's go."

  "Can you hear anything?" Rolf whispered to the Threll, who started to shake his head and stopped, choosing instead to make a negative gesture. The two were crouched in the shaft that led from the waterway to the odd chamber, at the point where the passage grew too steep to climb without a rope. "Kroh can handle any hydra, unless it caught him as he was coming through the hole in the floor of the chamber; not too likely, though, Dwarves know about things like that."

  The two waited, staring upwards at the dull flickering light that was faintly visible at the opening to the chamber. "If he's up there, why hasn't he given us any sort of signal?" Halabarian hissed to Rolf. "If he killed the hydra he would want to brag, wouldn't he?" The big half-Orc shrugged and darkened Moonblade, slung across his back, with a touch before drawing one of his dirks. Carefully extinguishing their guttering torch, he gave the rope an experimental tug before beginning the climb towards the chamber; the Lanthrell watched him ascend as quietly as he could, pausing just below the level of the floor. With one swift lunge the Badger took a quick look into the chamber above and dropped back into the shaft. He repeated this again twice, facing a different direction each time, before sticking his head into the chamber and saying something that Halabarian couldn't catch. After a moment, Rolf motioned for the Threll to follow and climbed into the chamber between the shafts of the log anchor.

  When Halabarian climbed into the chamber, knife in hand against the unexpected, he found Rolf, Moonblade off his back and ready for use, making a careful ascent up their tree-trunk ladder to the surface, presumably to recover their packs and check the outside for danger. The hydra was a bloody heap against the center of one of the long walls of the oval-shaped chamber; Kroh squatted opposite it as far away as he could get, axe upright between his knees, staring at the corpse with an intent look on his face, or what could be seen of his features given the hair and poor light. Sheathing his knife, the Threll moved his bowcase and quiver to a usable position and hauled the rope up, coiling it neatly next to the anchor; the Waybrother having not moved or acknowledged his presence unnerved Halabarian more than anything that had happened so far this day, including crawling around the guts of a mountain like a hysterical gopher.

  "Kroh," he called in a low voice, unsure why he was keeping his voice down. "What are you looking at? The hydra's dead, isn't it? Are you wounded?"

  For a moment he thought the Dwarf was going to ignore him, but finally he spoke. "Nope, not hurt at all. It never even turned around until I had given it a good one, broke its back with the first swing, I did. Strangest thing I've seen in while. 'Course, it wouldn't likely have heard me over all the noise it was making."

  "What was it doing, digging?" Halabarian picked up Kroh's torch and stepped over to the wall. "By the Eight," he breathed in a low voice, involuntarily backing up a step.

  The hydra, its body the size of a good-sized steer, had attacked one of the chamber's walls. Halabarian, unfamiliar with the ways of stone, had assumed that the chamber's walls were solid rock until Kroh had told them otherwise, on their way in; now it was obvious. There was an inch-thick layer of rocky material like plaster coating the wall, limestone deposits the Lanthrell guessed, and wondered how many years it had taken to build it so deep. The creature's efforts had uncovered an area about five feet square, exposing a wall made of blocks of cut stone mortared together; a wall closing an opening, Halabarian amended, noting where the block work met with a sill of living stone on either side. It was not the damage that caused his exclamation, though; it was what was on
the stone themselves.

  Neatly incised onto the surface of every worked stone so exposed, and running in a belt on the sill of living stone, were carved characters in a language unfamiliar to the Threll, each incised at least an inch deep, dozens of words on each stone, and probably hundreds in the sill-belt. Enough limestone still clung to the wall to obscure the writing as a whole, but what had caused the Lanthrell alarm as the fact that every character exposed was empty of limestone or other debris; although the mortar showed signs of advanced age that was plain even to a forest-dweller, each character still showed as clear and clean as they had an hour after being inscribed.

  "Enchantment," Halabarian managed in a strangled voice, backing up until he bumped into Kroh's feet.

  "A big one," the Dwarf agreed. "Keeping something in. And I don't think in is where it wants to be anymore."

  Chapter Eight

  Maxmillian and his three companions, who had light-heartedly dubbed themselves The Torc-Bearing Arm Of Vengeance And Retribution Acting To End An Ancient Evil And Safeguard Our Own Lives, Property, And Loved Ones, or The Raid Group for short, had benefitted from excellent weather and good planning, making the first stages of their trip easy and efficient.

  They had gone south on a river-barge to Hohenfels, where they picked up a pair of pack horses and supplies dropped off there by the main body, and proceeded by land westward on the Old Ward Road. Travel was safe, relatively quick, and was as comfortable as a mounted march could hope to be, for every night they stayed at one farmhouse or another, and every fifth day they stayed at a good inn for hot baths.