Light suddenly washed through the room. The rounded and worn head of Saysi's mace now glowed like an enchanted crystal. Clear illumination spilled up the chimney, which proved to be a straight shaft leading upward. The grate still blocked entry, but otherwise the soot-lined passageway was open and led as far as we could see.
Looking back across the room, my heart sank as I saw how close to the ceiling the water level had risen. Waves chopped all around, and with our increasing buoyancy, it was hard to remain standing on the hearth.
"Here—Saysi." Barzyn suddenly pulled her away from me.
"What?" she squawked in surprise as he tugged at her backpack.
"You'll have to get rid of this or you'll never fit through."
Her eyes widened in comprehension—and fear. Nevertheless, she nodded grimly and shucked out of the straps, letting the knapsack float away as the dwarf wrapped his hands around her and hoisted her onto his shoulders.
"Grab the bars. Let me give you a push."
Immediately I saw what he had in mind. The gap where the dwarf had bent the bar looked perilously narrow, but there was clearly no other choice. Saysi took hold of the metal rods, steering carefully around the downward-jutting spike of the dislodged pole.
With a grunting heave, Barzyn pushed. I heard Saysi cry out in sudden pain, and then she was gone, popping upward like a cork exploding from a bottle. She squatted on the grate, balancing on her small, bare feet, holding her glowing mace down to shed its light into the room.
"Yer next," Barzyn said, clapping a hand on my shoulder.
Dubiously I examined the narrow gap. It looked as if I'd have to scrape off an inch or two of flesh in order to get my shoulders between the remaining bars. Still, I dropped my own backpack. Moving my scabbard around to the small of my back, I let Goldfinder hang loosely as I tried to make myself as small as possible.
"Up you go." The dwarf hoisted, and I extended my arms, slipping into the gap and kicking and squirming as my shoulders jammed against the metal rods.
"Breathe out," Saysi urged. "And relax."
Easy for her to say, I thought grimly. Still, I exhaled, feeling Barzyn pushing hard from below. Bracing my feet on the dwarf's broad shoulders, wriggling back and forth, I felt one of my shoulder blades scrape through the grate. Saysi seized my wrists and pulled, and in another instant, I squirmed through the narrow gap.
Only then did I fully comprehend the nature of Barzyn's sacrifice.
Water swirled around the brawny dwarf's shoulders as Saysi and I perched on the grate. "C'mon!" I shouted. "Reach up—we'll pull!"
"Thanks, friends," he said, with a remarkably cheerful grin. "But I think this is where the trail ends for me."
Saysi reached through the bars and took one of Barzyn's hands in hers. "Kip's right—you've got to try!" She pulled courageously, choking back her sobs, but it was clear that the dwarf's burly physique was far too broad for the narrow gap in the bars.
"Try to tread water as it rises," urged Barzyn, tilting his head back as the churning liquid sloshed over his shoulders. His long red hair floated in rusty tendrils, beard spreading from his chin like a long, stringy napkin. He was floating now, his face lifting through the gap as the water reached the ceiling of the room.
"Good luck!" he shouted as that upraised face was buried by the rising tide.
"Barzyn!" cried Saysi, reaching down, seizing the dwarf's muscular hand. I saw those blunt fingers close once around her fingers, squeezing; then he let go, and the rapidly rising water quickly overwhelmed our courageous companion.
"You've got to help him! We can't just let him drown!" cried the priestess, grasping down through the water, turning her soaked face to me with a look of blazing accusation. She waved the glowing club as if it were some kind of magic wand, but all I could do was shrug helplessly.
"He's gone, Saysi," I shouted, acutely aware of water spuming upward from the grate, chest high and rising fast. "There's nothing we can do!"
"No!" She turned away, plunging face first into the churning torrent. The glowing head of her mace shed its brightness through the flow, but I could see no sign of the heroic dwarf. Suddenly buoyant, I felt my feet lift from the metal bars. Treading water with one hand, I reached for Saysi with the other, grasping her sodden tunic and pulling her upward with me.
Her face broke the surface, and I couldn't tell if she was choking or crying. Crooking an arm around her neck, I supported her face above the water—until her elbow jabbed me in the ribs. I released her, drawing a deep, ragged gasp that included far too much spray.
"I can swim!" she insisted forcefully, treading water beside me as we continued to bob upward. "I don't need your help!"
"Fine," I groaned, leaning away from her and turning my own face upward, both to keep my mouth out of the water and to try to get a look at the upper portions of the chimney. I saw nothing except the enclosing walls of darkness, though by touching the sooty surface, I knew that we still rose steadily.
"Hey!" I cried, smashing my fist against something that brushed past my face. Remembering the bodies floating in the room below, I had a panicky vision of the naga slithering after us, wrapping a scaly coil around an ankle or waist.
But as my hand splashed through the water, I knew immediately that this was not the naga or any other body. Instead, it was something much smaller, and as my fingers brushed the bobbing chip, I realized that the shiny piece of wood I'd noticed on the floor was floating upward with us. Relieved, and irritated with myself for admittedly childish apprehension, I forgot about the stick and resumed looking upward.
It seemed much darker in the chimney now, and I realized that Saysi's club was once again under the water.
"I—I can't hold it up any longer," she gasped, sputtering and coughing.
"Here." My own hand fumbled for the weapon. She let go, but it slipped from my hand, sinking through the water that quickly swallowed our light source.
Yet I could still see! A grayish illumination spilled softly from the side a short distance overhead. Another shaft linked to the chimney, and somewhere not too far away there was a source of daylight!
The rising water quickly carried us to the juncture, where the current spilled into the side passage with an onrush of white spray. Kicking and wriggling, Saysi turned the corner and disappeared into the shaft. I bobbed after, kicking hard to propel myself into the horizontal pipe.
"Turn around—feet first!" I shouted to Saysi, who skidded helplessly before me. My mind recoiled from a grim fear as I imagined her smashed against some unforgiving brace. At least, if she absorbed the impact with her feet, she might have a chance to spare herself serious injury.
But that was a futile hope, as more and more water rushed along the shaft. The circular pipe was not quite high enough for a halfling to stand, even if we could have tried, and now it was about half full of water. Of course, it was half full of air, too, but this was hard to remember as I gasped and choked on the thick spray that filled my lungs with each breath.
The brightness I had noticed earlier continued to grow, and finally I saw a haze of daylight up ahead somewhere. The circle of gray light expanded, though it was hard to see details through the mist and spray. Abruptly there was brightness all around, and a disorienting sensation of weightlessness as the shaft ended. The feeling lasted less than a heartbeat before I smashed to the ground in a muddy ravine, skidding and plummeting downward amid a strong current.
"Kip—here!" Saysi's voice cut through the churning noise, and I reached out to feel her strong fingers grasp my wrist. With a grunt, I came to a halt, my arm nearly jerked from its socket. But we were outside, with wonderful air all around us and an apparently limitless sky overhead!
Scrambling up the muddy bank, aided by Saysi, I finally perched on a patch of dry ground. It was several moments before I could catch my breath and dry off enough to take a good look around.
The first thing I saw was the little priestess. Concern radiated from her large brown eyes and tight
ened the corners of her mouth, bringing her round face into a terribly fetching expression of caring attention. Damp curls, the color of pale copper, hung in a bedraggled mess to either side of her plump, frowning cheeks. Only then did I realize that her robe had been torn in the current, and now trailed in ragged tatters down around her waist.
Blushing, she immediately drew the sodden material over her shoulders, and by the time she brushed her hair back from her eyes, her expression of sincere concern had turned to a stern and accusatory stare.
"Well, I guess you're feeling better!" she declared.
Her tone was decidedly huffy, but I decided to ignore that for the moment. "We're pretty lucky," I admitted instead. Casting nervous glances across the hillside, I saw a lot of scrub brush and boulders, but no sign of ogre or goblin patrols—another piece of good news.
"Barzyn..." Saysi's eyes filled with tears as she stared at the mouth of the pipe. "And Hestrill... Benton... Dallzar... I can't believe they're gone. All dead..."
I remembered that Saysi had been new to the adventuring life when she first joined up with us, a year or so ago; this was the first time she'd lost companions in the course of a dangerous quest. In my own experience, I had learned that such occurrences were not uncommon. One had to simply carry on in the face of such setbacks.
"Don't worry. It gets easier after you've gone through it a few times," I assured her. "Just be glad that we were able to—"
"How can you say that?" she demanded, whirling to confront me with a glower that made her earlier glare seem positively benign. "Barzyn bent the bar so we could escape. He sacrificed himself for us!"
"Not exactly," I demurred, my feelings hurt. After all, I'd been involved in hair-raising escapades for more than the last decade, and it bothered me that she didn't give my superior experience a little more respect. "I mean, he bent the first bar before he knew that he couldn't bend any of the others. He was trying to get a way out for himself as much as for us!"
"So? Even if he knew there was only room for halflings to get out, do you think he would have left the bar in place just so we'd... die with him?" Again tears filled those dark, luminous eyes, and I wanted to comfort her but didn't seem to have the words.
"No... Barzyn always was decent that way," I acknowledged. It was true, and I would miss the grumpy old curmudgeon, garlic and all.
I felt a twinge of sadness as I recalled a paladin we'd been forced to leave to a gelatinous cube some years ago, and the twin warriors who'd held a narrow breach against a mob of enraged trolls, allowing Hestrill and I to escape with our lives. Then there had been that half-elven scout who'd been tortured by hobgoblins, but limped back to our camp to warn us about the impending ambush, and...
I forced myself to stop thinking along those lines, since it was getting pretty depressing.
"And all the others... poisoned by that—that thing!"
"It was a naga," I reminded her, trying to be helpful.
"I know that!" she snapped, still not getting the point.
I took the opportunity to look around. We were sitting on a steep, scrub-covered hillside above the bank of a stream. The outflow from the chimney pipe was splashing through a narrow ravine below our feet. It was from that ditch that Saysi had plucked me, sparing me a long slide into the churning waterway below.
"I guess we came out on the north side of the hill," I suggested, deciding that a change of subject might be the best thing. "If we follow this stream to the east, we should come out in the valley."
That would lead us back to the trail, and the trail would take us down to the valley road to Oakvale town, the only outpost of civilization for a long distance in any direction. The goal seemed like a worthy objective as I got to my feet and tried to wipe some of the drying mud off of my skin and clothes.
Sighing, Saysi, too, stood up and cleaned herself off as best as possible. The torn robe barely provided her with the minimum of privacy, and her shapely legs were in view as far as the middle of her thighs—though I tried not to stare, comprehending that the timing was less than perfect for any amorous attention.
In addition, we'd lost our backpacks, and Saysi her weapon. I removed my short sword and dried Goldfinder as best as I could, while she polished some mud off of her eight-sided amulet and let it flop loosely onto the wet silk between her small, well-defined breasts. Once again I tried not to stare.
"Do you think we can get back to Oakvale from here?" she asked.
For once, I had the answer ready and explained to her my deductions about this stream and the eastward-leading valley we'd find on the other side of the hill.
"What's that?" she asked suddenly, pointing to the ground as we started down the steep hillside, trying not to skid all the way to the bottom.
At first I didn't see what she meant, but then I discerned a flash of bright ebony against the dark brown of the mud. "It's just that stupid piece of stick," I declared bitterly, realizing that the little stub had floated all the way out of the dungeon with us. Somehow, in the course of splashing down the ravine, it must have bounced out of the water to land on the bank beside us.
I picked it up and looked at it with a startling feeling of distaste. The chip was round, blunt at one end and marked with a curious pattern of geometric shapes at the other. It was pure black in color, and harder than any piece of wood I'd ever held.
For some reason, the little thing angered me. If we could have only one item salvaged from that deadly room, why did it have to be something so utterly useless?
With a grimace of disgust, I gave it a toss, watching as it fluttered through the air and plopped into the water that still gushed through the ravine. In a second, the current swallowed it up, though by the time the piece of stick was out of sight, we had already turned our backs, seeking the safest way down this steep, wet hillside and along the bleak road back to Oakvale.
CHAPTER 3
THE RED GARTER
"Are you sure you didn't steal this money?" Saysi asked me for about the fiftieth time. "I don't see how you could have earned enough to pay for these rooms and all that food in just one morning."
She was speaking to me in the dressing room of our suite at Oakvale's swankiest inn, an elegant gambling house called the Red Garter. Of course, a lot had happened in the twenty hours or so since we had escaped Scarnose's lair, but was I to blame that Saysi had slept through a good portion of it?
"I told you, every one of these silver pieces I earned, in fair trade with a local money changer," I replied.
It was the truth, as a matter of fact. It had been an honest trade. Of course, I neglected to add that I had stolen my goods for barter—a charming necklace studded with gems—from a silver merchant's stall in the Oakvale marketplace. "Why don't you stop worrying about it?"
She huffed, her irritatingly suspicious nature still unmollified. Still, she was forced to admit that a hefty lunch and an afternoon's sleep in real beds—two beds, despite my best efforts to consolidate—had done wonders for both of us. She looked radiant, even in her torn, travel-stained gown and leggings. As I looked in the mirror, I flattered myself with the thought that I, too, had cleaned up pretty well. My longish hair was combed into thick waves of brown, nicely augmenting my eyes of smoldering black. At least, I thought that they smoldered; Saysi, on more than one occasion, had referred to them as "beady." Even the tufts of hair on my feet had been combed, and now I felt ready to take on the world—or at least the portion of it that was Oakvale.
We had reached the town only that morning, in a sad and bedraggled state after a long night's dejected march from the ogre lair. Lacking lodging and money, we had made for the public marketplace in the town square, where Saysi had quickly fallen asleep on a bench. That gave me the chance to slip away and work my skills amid the bustling shops.
Quickly I had found a silver merchant. The overfed shyster never saw me slip behind his curtain and crawl under the table. While he haggled with a customer over a few copper pieces, I stealthily lifted a piece w
orth nearly fifty gold! Trading the goods had been easy, since, from an earlier visit to Oakvale, I had remembered a money changer's shop on a narrow side street. Going there, I had quickly swapped my ill-gotten baubles for a substantial sum of coins. Indeed, my purse was so well filled that I had taken pains to conceal it from Saysi, knowing that it would only arouse her suspicions.
It was damned inconvenient sometimes, her being a priestess who held the law in such high regard. When she had awakened, I made up a story about trading a silver ring that I supposedly had kept concealed in my boot for just such an emergency. Even so, I had been forced to talk her into accepting the shelter of this comfortable, even luxurious, inn.
"Here—I got you something," I offered, handing her a thin bundle of green silk, which she held up to reveal a small vest I had purchased.
"Kip—it's beautiful!"
I nodded in agreement, certain that the color would perfectly complement her fiery hair.
"Did you steal it?" she asked quickly.
"No. I bought it," I asserted truthfully, still ignoring the minor details—ancient history, really—of how I had come into the money in the first place.
Our bedrooms were connected by a well-appointed dressing chamber in our suite on the second floor of the Red Garter. The innkeeper had been delighted to provide us with these splendid accommodations as soon as he saw the number of golden coins I was able to plink into his well-oiled palm. Now night had fallen, and our appetites for food returned. Having glanced into the gaming room earlier, I felt a tingle of anticipation and was more than ready to try my luck after we filled our bellies again.
The smell of roasting meat rose from the kitchens, and for now I was set to dig into a hearty slab of beefsteak.
"Are you sure we shouldn't save your money? I'd be happy with bread and cheese," Saysi suggested after hearing of my dinner plans.
"I might be able to trade something else tomorrow," I assured her, thinking of the gold and platinum coins safely secured in my deepest belt pouch.
The Rod of Seven Parts Page 4
