“Oh, come on. It can’t be that heavy!” Encouraging his friend to move aside with a well placed nudge, Jaikus crawled into the recently excavated cavity and grasped the hand. He shook it, causing clods of dirt to be dislodged. “See?” he said. “I can move it.” Then, giving it one last shake, he started backing out of the cavity when the hand moved.
In stunned silence, Jaikus watched as the portion of the statue they had thus far uncovered shook, then toppled backward. He could hear a solid thud as the statue came to land somewhere below.
“Rene!” Jaikus shouted.
“What did you do?”
“I…I don’t know. Hand me one of the torches.”
When Reneeke passed him the burning brand, Jaikus climbed further into the hole with torch held before him. “Oh man, Reneeke.” Voice filled with awe, he glanced back over his shoulder. “You have got to see this.” Scooting forward, he disappeared into the hole.
A circle of over a dozen statues, each looking to be constructed of solid gold, leaned toward a central point at a roughly forty-five degree slant. Their upper ends had come to rest against the bole of what appeared to once have been a massive tree. Its upper reaches couldn’t be seen as an earthen dome had formed over the backs of the statues, leaving an open area beneath.
Half a dozen other, smaller statues were either standing, or lying, within the dome’s interior. Three others were partially encased within the earthen wall of the dome, just like the first one had been before Jaikus dislodged it, causing it to topple over.
Sliding down the embankment to the area below, Reneeke said, “This is incredible.” The reflected light from the golden silhouettes gave the area a surreal glow.
“How much do you suppose these would be worth?”
“More than a man could ever hope to spend,” replied Reneeke. “Though I doubt if any of these could be brought to the surface.” Stepping toward a small statue of a fawn, he tried lifting it. Strain though he might, all he managed to accomplish was to rock it slightly on its base. “Far too heavy.”
“Too bad.”
Jaikus went to the bole of the tree and was surprised to find it rock-like. “This is stone!”
“It is?” Leaving the fawn statue, Reneeke joined his friend at the tree. Running his hand along its surface, he nodded. “It sure enough is.”
“A tree statue?” questioned Jaikus.
Shrugging, Reneeke replied, “Why not?”
Turning his gaze toward the statues forming the ribcage of the dome, he shuddered at the thought that they were watching them. Why he felt that way he didn’t know.
“We must be at ground level,” surmised Reneeke. “This may have been a garden, or maybe a plaza at one time.”
“I wish there was more here than just statues,” Jaikus complained. “A ring, or better yet, a sword like yours would be great.”
“True. Though we couldn’t keep it.”
“Why not?”
“Anything we find belongs to the group,” explained Reneeke. Jaikus made a rude noise. Reneeke fixed his gaze upon his friend. “That is what we agreed to, and that is what we will do.”
Jaikus frowned, but finally nodded beneath Reneeke’s withering gaze. “I suppose.”
They spent some time going over the statues and testing the earthen wall of the dome, though not too intrusively. The last thing they wanted was for the dome to lose cohesion and crash down upon their heads. When they failed to turn up anything, they made their way back through the window.
“Sythal must have been a great place to live in its day,” observed Reneeke. Following Jaikus from the room, he allowed him to take the lead.
“You may be right.” Not really thinking about what his friend was saying, Jaikus instead had visions of hidden areas secreted in the building’s basement. “Wonder if we can find another stairway leading down?” he mused. A short time later, they did.
It was after coming across what had once been the entrance hall. Most of the large room was choked with earth, having come through the massive opening that at one time must have held a pair of double doors. They followed one of the several passageways still opened to them from the hall and came to a fair sized room to which three other, smaller rooms were attached. It was in the middle room of the three that they discovered the stairwell; a flight of narrow, stone steps descending in a tight spiral.
Before they went down, Reneeke took a moment to study the floor area surrounding the stairwell entrance. When he saw the holes where hinges had once been attached, he nodded to himself. “I thought so.”
“You thought what?” questioned Jaikus.
“Oh, that there was a trapdoor here. Whether it was hidden at one time or not is hard to tell.” He flashed Jaikus a grin. “I like it when I’m right.”
“Aren’t you always?”
Reneeke laughed. “You know me better than that.”
Jaikus joined in with laughter of his own. “Even still, you are right more often than I am.”
“You simply need to take the time to see what’s before you. Why, just take a look…”
“Not again, please,” he interjected, cutting his friend off. Reneeke had for years tried to explain how and why he did things, explanations that did little to improve the way Jaikus saw the world. He simply figured Reneeke was smarter than he about such things and left it at that.
Jaikus took the lead as they headed down to what he hoped to be the dungeon, or basement. What treasures could be waiting in the dark for a pair of intrepid adventurers to uncover? Jewels? Gold? Magic rings? How he had always wished to have a magic ring all his own.
Spiraling around three times, they finally came out at a passageway extending straight ahead. As they made their way from the stairwell, Jaikus’ torch illuminated something they hadn’t seen before in all of Sythal: a door.
True, there wasn’t much left of it. Constructed entirely out of metal as it was, the door sat skewed in a doorway with a covering of rust reminiscent of an animal’s fur coat. Jaikus drew his knife and tapped upon the door with the tip. The door disintegrated with the first blow to collapse in a cloud of rust.
Taken by surprise, Jaikus jumped backward as the cloud of rust spread throughout the passageway. “I guess that’s why we haven’t come across any other doors,” he surmised.
“Yeah,” agreed Reneeke.
Once the rust cloud settled, Jaikus moved to the doorway and extended his torch through to the room beyond. As he made to enter, Reneeke grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back. “We need to be extra careful from here on out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think Charka and the others ever made it down here,” he explained. When confusion appeared on his friend’s face, he explained. “The door, Jaik. If they had come this way, they would have been the ones to have caused its collapse, not you. I seriously doubt if Charka would have forwent taking a look at this room because he didn’t want to ruin a door.”
“You mean, there could be treasure down here?” he asked excitedly.
Reneeke nodded. “Treasure, and traps. Keep in mind, Jaik, that we don’t have any healing scrolls or potions should things go badly for us. And it’s a long way back to the surface.”
Jaikus took a moment to digest that. When he was done, he said, “Let’s go until we find something. Then we’ll head back to the surface.”
“Okay. It’s probably getting late anyway. Just be careful.”
“You worry too much.”
Reneeke’s eyebrows creased in a frown as he asked, “After what we’ve been through today…?”
Turning back to the doorway, Jaikus stepped over the remains of the door and into the room. He could feel tension on the rope as Reneeke kept a firm hold on it in the event Jaikus ran into trouble.
Evenly spaced recesses dotted the wall across from the doorway as well as the walls to the right and left. Each wall held four, two rows of two, one atop the other. In the dim torchlight, they could make out that each recess contained so
mething. Eager to discover what awaited them, Jaikus crossed over to the quad in the wall opposite the doorway.
Three held mounds of red powder, the remains of metal having long succumbed to rust. The fourth held a crude black stone. As it was almost an exact duplicate of the stone Lady Kate’s spell had indicated was cursed back in the underground room, Jaikus decided to play it safe and pass it by. After all, there were still eight more recesses to check.
Next he headed over to the right side and found only disappointment. Each of those four recesses held nothing but mounds of powder. One mound still retained the shape of the object it had once been: a small, curve-bladed knife. Jaikus blew on the knife’s shape causing a small cloud of rust to fill the recess.
On his way over to the left side of the room, he glanced to where Reneeke waited in the doorway. “Nothing,” he announced. “Not one thing has survived intact except one of those black, lumpy stones like what that golden naked-man statue had held in the palm of his hand.”
“The cursed stone?”
Jaikus nodded. “I thought it best not to touch it.”
“Good thinking. We’ll have to let Charka know it’s down here so maybe he could recover it on his next trip.”
The remaining four recesses held but four more piles of rest as well. Jaikus was not happy. He had figured to have come away with at least something after all this.
“Are you ready to head back up to the surface?” inquired Reneeke.
“Not yet, no,” he replied as he made his way from the room and re-entered the passageway. “Let’s see what’s at the end, first.” Taking the lead once more, Jaikus proceeded down the passageway.
The next room yielded nothing of interest, and the one after that was just as void of treasure. Hoping the third to hold something of interest, he hurried along, a little too fast as it turned out. For just before reaching the doorway, the floor fell away beneath him.
Screaming, his arms and legs flailed wildly before the rope snapped taut. The suddenness of the halt brought his outcry to an end with an, "Oof." As he crashed against the side of the shaft, the torch slipped from his grip.
“Are you okay?” came Reneeke’s voice from above.
It took a second or two before he could get his wind back. “A bit sore around the middle from the rope, but I would rather have that, than hitting the bottom.” Glancing downward, he saw where the torch struck the bottom some forty feet below. This was a deep one!
“Do you want me to pull you up?”
Jaikus searched the floor at the bottom before answering. He could see the barbed spikes protruding upward to snare the unlucky that ran afoul of the trap. In the flickering torchlight, it looked as if there might be something down there, but it was hard to tell. The shadows kept shifting about as the torch’s flame flickered wildly.
Maybe it was his turn to be observant, or perhaps it was simply the years spent with Reneeke that caused a thought to cross his mind. “Rene? Should a torch be burning quietly, or wildly when it sits at the bottom of a hole?”
“It should burn fairly steady. Why?”
“The torch slipped from my hand and is now lying down there. The flame is whipping around pretty good.”
“The only thing that would cause such an occurrence is a breeze, and you don’t get those at the bottom of a hole,” Reneeke explained.
“Unless there is some sort of access at the bottom, like a tunnel?”
There was quiet for a moment before Reneeke, replied, “I take it you want me to lower you down?”
“Is there enough rope? It’s still forty feet to the bottom.”
Another silence, then, “I think so. It will be close.”
“Then lower me down.”
Chapter Twelve
At the bottom he found a narrow opening, barely wide enough for him to pass. The breeze was coming from there.
His torch lay among dust, dirt, and naught else. Unlike the pit Reneeke had earlier investigated, during which he had found his sword, this pit was lacking in victims. Either it had yet to claim any, or they had been removed.
After retrieving his torch, he crossed the spike-covered floor to peer into the opening. A narrow passageway extended barely eight feet before turning sharply to the right.
Turning his attention to the rope tied about his waist, he gauged there to be roughly three feet of slack. “Can you lower down any more rope?” he hollered. “I need at least another ten feet.”
“Sorry, Jaik. I’m at the end as it is.”
Jaikus was beginning to contemplate removing the rope when Reneeke said, “Don’t you have a rope too? You could tie the two together. That should give you all the play you need.”
Good ole, Reneeke. He could always count on him to come up with a solution. “Yes, I do.”
“Once you tie them together, I’ll pull up the slack then let it out as needed.”
“Good idea.”
Quickly removing the rope from around his waist, he pulled his rope from out of his pack and secured an end to Reneeke’s. “It’s done. Pull it up.” While the rope began to be drawn to the passageway above, Jaikus secured the other end around his waist. He didn’t have long to wait before Reneeke had taken up all the slack.
Two quick tugs on the rope signaled that Reneeke was ready.
“Don’t let go!” He waited long enough to hear Reneeke’s “I won’t” before entering the passageway. From above, Reneeke played out the rope just enough to keep it semi-taut.
Jaikus felt truly alone for the first time as he entered that passageway. Even though Reneeke stood above with rope in hand to pull him out should the situation warrant, he felt isolated.
Perhaps it was the confined feeling the narrow passageway produced, or maybe the fact that he was in a dark, unknown place with no other human in sight that played upon his nerves. But whatever it was, he felt decidedly uncomfortable.
Upon reaching where the passageway crooked to the right, he saw something white lying along the floor just around the bend. It was a leg bone, one of two attached to a complete, human skeleton.
Both legs showed multiple breakages, as did the right arm. The left was stretched above the head, almost as if this person had crawled along and died in the process. Jaikus figured the long dead human to be one who had succumbed to the trap. Having survived the fall, the person had tried to make it out, only to die in the attempt.
Lying next to the skeleton was a sword whose metal had only begun to be ravaged by rust. Stepping upon it with his foot, Jaikus discovered the blade still retained its strength. He found that curious, as every other blade in this long forgotten city had been reduced to rust. This person, like himself, had to have come along at a later time. Interesting.
Aside from the sword, there were metal snaps from what used to be clothing, the material being no longer present. Also, intermixed with the pelvic bones were three small gems, a score of coins varying from copper to gold, and a silver ring. Jaikus gasped when he saw the ring and immediately picked it up.
“I wonder what you do?” he asked as he held it close. There was a single strip of a red metal running along the outer side which was the ring’s sole marking. He slipped the ring, gems, and coins into his pouch and thought about continuing down the passage to see what else there may be, when, for a fleeting moment, he caught sight of movement in the shadows ahead.
He froze. His sense of isolation increased tenfold. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he stood still and tried to pierce the darkness for another glimpse of what had moved. Could it have been his imagination? Deciding not to tempt fate any further, he began backing up.
“Yes,” he said quietly to himself, “I think it may be time to return to the surface.”
Backing away, he held his torch aloft as he kept constant vigil upon the darkness. There was no scent other than that of the earth being borne upon the breeze coming from farther down the passageway. So it couldn’t be an animal. Then he came up with the thought: whatever it was, it couldn’t be aliv
e!
Visions of ghouls, specters, and other nefarious spirits generated an increase in his backward momentum. Imagination running wild, he turned and raced around the corner back toward the shaft.
“Rene!” he shouted. “Get me out of here!”
He tossed the torch in amongst the floor spikes, and then gripped the rope with both hands as Reneeke began hauling him out.
Terror filled him as he slowly began to rise. Images of ghastly hands reaching for his dangling feet prompted him to shout, “Hurry!” From above he heard Reneeke holler back, “I’m going as fast as I can, Jaik,” as he continued his steady, upward ascent.
It was with great relief when he reached the top and Reneeke gripped him by his pack to haul him the rest of the way out.
“What happened?” his friend asked, concern and worry etched upon his brow.
“I…I thought I saw something.”
“Something?”
Jaikus nodded. “In the darkness. Something moved!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Rene, I wouldn’t make up something like this.”
“All right, calm down.” Moving to the side of the shaft, he looked down to the torch burning far below. “I don’t see anything moving now.”
Coming to stand next to his friend, Jaikus gazed down to see for himself.
Seconds ticked by and nothing appeared. Jaikus was beginning to think it had been nothing more than an overactive imagination when they saw the torch move. It jerked back and forth, paused a moment, then slid across the floor to disappear into the narrow opening.
“…and me and Rene got out of there as fast as we could,” concluded Jaikus.
After returning to camp, they had spent the last hour regaling the others as to their adventure and what they had found. This last episode produced a guffaw from Seward.
“Probably a mole-rat,” he explained. “We’ve seen them a time or two while exploring the lower recesses of Sythal.”
“Would a mole-rat grab hold of a burning torch?” asked Jaikus. “None that I’ve ever heard of.”
Jaikus and Reneeke Join the Guild Page 16
