Contrary to her words, they had not moved on immediately. Some fancy had come over Simo mere moments after her remark, and she had insisted on taking a sample from the corpse of the crossbow-bearing thrall before they departed.
Degel and Sorus had been all too happy to let her do so, instead busying themselves with picking over the ruins of the camp as the scholar set to her bloody business. The torn bags were rifled through, the stock of mouldering chests and containers tipped out onto the ground for closer examination. Little of it was of any interest: scraps of bread and fruit, made hard as solid stone by the freezing temperatures of the Tundra; rust-stained armour and weapons of ancient design, their wooden handles fracturing and leather embrittled to render them useless. Scraps of ice-crusted paper, their contents made near-unreadable by age and weathering.
Out of idle curiosity, Sorus had picked up one of the less-damaged sheets and held it close to her face, squinting slightly to help make out the words.
Log of the D________ Expedition, 2 Frost 8XX[/u]
Storm knocked us off course something fierce. Had to cache the wagon – axles completely broken. We salv… gh food for a few weeks - tents for shelter. The… last that long if the storm passes. We hope that V____ and the rest… ail toward the Conf.From thereon it was illegible, the words worn away and the paper torn apart. Sorus shook her head to herself. Another lost caravan of migrants or traders. For a moment, Sorus wondered if it had been hunger and cold or the thrice-cursed thralls that had claimed the unfortunate souls in the end, before forcing that thought away with a shudder. Nothing could be done about that now, though they might at least provide them with decent funereal rites.
Like all the rest, it went into a single pile in the rough centre of the abandoned camp. The broken bodies of the thralls Simo had expressed no interest in swiftly joined them, followed in turn by the necessary kindling and a few splashes of raw alcohol that their employer was kind enough to lend them.
“Why’d you stop us here?” Sorus asked, bluntly. Simo have a little start at the sound of her voice and turned toward her, head tilted slightly to the side, seemingly considering whether or not to deny Sorus’ request outright. After a moment, however, she slowly nodded her head and began to quickly rummage about in the bag storing her samples.
“Here.” Simo held up the first jar for Sorus to see, letting the yellowish liquid shift and the brain within bump gently against the glass side. “Take a look here, at the central partition of the organ. These sections of the brain are damaged – not by blade or bludgeon, but by blister and blood loss. But in
this specimen,” And here she held up the other, fresh from one of the thralls slain in the abandoned camp.
The jar’s label had been written in haste, the letters of her spidery writing running into one another, but the caricature of a crossbow on the very end made its source clear enough. “The very same section is unmarked, while the lower regions of the brain bear very similar degradations.”
“So?” Sorus raised an eyebrow.
Simo sighed aloud. “Consider this further, Chantscar.” Her finger moved idly, resting upon a small section at the very base of the brain; small, whitish branches of tissue floated free in the solution around it. “This organ is the source of the nerves, which give motion to our limbs; it houses our consciousness, which determines our behaviours in this world. If it were to be damaged, or diseased, it stands to reason that these would both change, yes?
“Lady Cosmosclean, I am a plain woman.” Sorus rolled her eyes in irritation, baring her teeth. She was in no mood for riddles, or this routine of leading questions. “So please – speak plainly. Exactly what do you suspect?”
Simo sighed again, a low, sharp noise that stirred a flare of irritation in Sorus’ chest. She was hardly a learned figure; she was not so arrogant as to deny that. But she could still tell when she was being condescended to, and it was an effort not to snap back at her.
“Very well.” Simo frowned, jaw tightening slightly into a grimace. “I theorise that the thralls we encountered in the tundra were able to fight as they did – to ambush us, and to even use at least one crossbow – because the Blight struck upon a different region of the brain to the usual.” She tapped a finger against the glass. “Yet see here! This was the only major internal difference between them. A different region of the cortex is necrotic and lesioned, and with it, the thralls behave differently.”
Sorus made a non-committal noise from somewhere in the back of her throat, rapidly tiring of the scholar’s preoccupation with the organs of the dead. Simo’s hawkish eyes narrowed to slits for a moment, before she slowly breathed out and placed the samples back in her bag, recognising the mercenary’s unwillingness to continue the discussion.
“Enough of this. We must move on, and quickly.”
That, at least, drew a more favourable response from the mercenary. Sorus nodded in firm agreement and strode away swiftly, calling to Degel as she went. The Hand gave her a short nod from his position beside the bodies and quickly struck a small flame, the alcohol swiftly catching and racing up the gathered mass of paper, dried wood, and other detritus that formed the base of the pyre. When the trio moved on their passage was marked with the roar of newly ignited flames, and the bright light of a dozen burning corpses and their worldly possessions.
The travel that followed was much of the same. They trekked on toward the looming shapes of the dark pits, though more quickly, now; the group was still on edge after the thrall ambush earlier, and had no desire to run across another such threat before the evening began to draw in.
Degel had insisted on taking point, claiming that he stood a greater chance at sniffing out any threats that might lurk in the snow below; behind him, Simo advanced with her hands ready on her daggers. Sorus brought up the rear with her sword in hand, expression seemingly stuck between glaring knives into the scholar’s back after the earlier altercation and her usual deadpan. None of them spoke with one another beyond brief remarks, wrapped up in their own thoughts or lacking the sense of camaraderie necessary to voice them properly.
The snow-dusted fields and barren trees gradually began to draw away as they continued the long walk northwards, the endless coverlet of white giving way to speckled green and white, and then finally to the lush, spring green fields of The Adventurous Steppes. The dark clouds that so commonly loomed over the Tundra of Heroes receded in similar fashion, the sun peeking through to shed some light upon the party and their surroundings. It was a stark change after the permanent, thrall-cursed bleakness of the Tundra, and Sorus could not help but welcome it; it had felt like a long time since she’d seen the sun properly.
They did not slow or stop for long to enjoy it. Simo pressed on with her usual vigour, slowing only when Degel and Sorus began to slow almost to a crawl as their march began to take its toll on their stamina, dropping behind her long, purposeful strides. What few breaks and rests they took were had as close to the northwards-running river as possible, such that they could refill their waterskins and packs with the few fish they could snatch from the water, or the berries from the bushes that grew near the banks. Even then, it was rare for them to last more than a quarter-hour at best before the doctor was chivvying them along again, muttering to herself and looking down at the map she kept.
The next change in the landscape came as they began to draw closer to the sprawling cluster of dark pits that Simo had spoken of at the very start of the journey. The trees began to grow closer together, branches closing together to form a shroud of stubborn leaves and wood over their heads; the undergrowth became thick and dark, roots edging through the path ahead to try and trip them up at every step. Every now and then, a break would come in the forest, revealing distant, fuzzy smears of colour and near-shapeless blobs on the distant horizon, or the looming bulk of a hill off to their side. Degel still led the way, using his axe to clear a path through the wood and foliage whenever the plants became too thick to allow for easy passage; behind him trailed Simo and Sorus, the former projecting tension as though she wished to break into a run, the latter bringing up the rear with an unmistakable note of annoyance in her expression.
Sorus resisted the urge to grumble under her breath as she walked. In a strange way, she found herself almost missing the furious violence of earlier. That at least, had provided a break from the constant, monotonous trudging through the endless plains and forests; this provided no more than a growing ache in her legs, and an increasingly clear answer to the question of whether a living being could indeed die of boredom.
Quite without warning, the scholar suddenly slowed her stride to a halt and began to look around herself, forcing Sorus to stumble to a ragged halt lest she crash into the taller woman’s backpack.
“What-?” She began to snap, but was cut off by her employer’s voice.
“More than enough wood for a fire should we need it, and rather defensible, nonetheless.” Simo said to herself, turning to half-face Sorus. She swept an arm out to indicate the clearing in the forest around them – a roughly oval expanse of grass and roots, overshadowed by the canopy and thickly forested on all sides. A few weak shafts of sunlight peaked through, painting the cavity with an odd yellow-orange hue.
“We’ll halt here for the moment.” The scholar nodded. “Take perhaps a candlemark’s rest; refresh and water ourselves, before we proceed onward. We will need it, for what is yet to come.”
“So,” Sorus said, leaning back against the base of a tree. She’d shucked her pack onto one of the hollows amid the roots, and was idly checking the length of her sword for any sign of chipping or bending. Despite the battles of the past couple days and the conditions it had been subjected to, the sharpened copper had held up remarkably well. “What d’you know about this place we’re headed?”
“This pit is an old one,” Simo commented, tracing a finger across her red-inked map. She was perched on the still-living stump of a long-felled tree, half-standing in a y-shaped gap between two beams of wood. The past hour’s rest had given her the opportunity to check their position and re-read whatever notes she had on it, stashed away in one of the many books that the scholar seemed to have crammed into her backpack. “Both in true historical age, and the time since the living last visited it. We should expect strong resistance, both from whatever thralls have already manifested their disease and any goblinoids still occupy the caverns.”
Sorus grimaced at her response, flicking her eyes over to Degel for a moment. The Hand had opted to stay on guard duty for their rest, standing vigil near one of the few gaps in the treeline with his axes drawn. His battered iron and bronze plate was still mottled with brownish-scarlet and black stains from earlier battles; his axes’ edges bore bloodstains and a few stubbornly clinging woodchips from their trek through to the clearing. To his credit, he did not look back. Sorus wasn’t sure if it was out of simple focus on his duty, or whether he was still trying to impress their client with his dedication to her strange mission.
“I cannot say for certain how many of them are down there,” Simo continued. “The greenskins are ill-disposed to visitors at best; what few population censuses I could find were estimates, at the best. Perhaps all of them are dead. Perhaps there’s nothing down there but hundreds of thralls, howling into the dark and waiting for a door to give way and spew forth into this world again.”
A long moment of tense silence passed, before she slowly breathed out and raised a finger.
“The good news, at least, is that these pits tend to follow the same general layout. Perhaps a half-dozen strongpoints at the very heart, where the bulk of the population gathers; the remainder are little more than guard towers and workhouses, occupied during the day and controlled by a skeleton crew during the night.” She gestured back and forth with a hand, almost uncertainly. “With luck, there will be… fewer threats, than normal.”
“…With respect, lady Cosmoscleaned? You’re terrible at not making this sound like a suicide run.”
The doctor gave a hoarse, faint chuckle at Sorus’ remark, shaking her head slightly. Almost idly, one of her long fingers tapped against the red ink of the map annotations.
“Perhaps. But no endeavour is without risk - least of all one such as this.” Her voice dropped, and her features writhed with an unfamiliar emotion – a strange mix between wrath, melancholy, and a trace moment of guilt, appearing for a heartbeat or two before being buried under her usual stoic features. One of Simo’s gloved hands curled into a fist, crumpling the edge of the map as she spoke her next words. “Science requires sacrifice, as we once said.”
“We?”
Simo did not answer Sorus’ question. Instead she turned her head away from her map, craning her neck so as to look up through the canopy that loomed overhead. Through the leaves, the sun was beginning to dim as a thick veil of bruise-coloured clouds gathered overhead; the air was beginning to grow clammy and thick with gathering moisture, causing a pressure to gather at the back of her skull.
The scholar nodded to herself and dropped down from her perch, landing on the mossy ground beneath with a gentle thump. She gestured sharply with one hand, already rolling up and packing away her map with the other.
“Come. It will be raining, soon; we should make good time for the pit before it starts, lest we be slowed overlong.”
Thankfully, there was not much further to go after that. The woods began to thin out as they drew closer to the dark pits’ border, the living trunks giving way to blunted stumps and darker spots of earth where trees had once stood. The land before them was mostly steppeland, flat plains of the green-brown grass and dried-out soil that stretched from the treeline’s end to the bases of the stone towers that lay ahead, marking the core of the dark pit’s sprawling form. Deep, broad gouges had been cut into the ground and the soil piled up into berms about half the size and twice the width of a man, each one reinforced crudely with interlocking wooden planks and iron bands; trenches to match the tunnels below.
Almost unconsciously, Sorus’s hand tightened on the handle of her sword. The hair on the back of her neck was prickling up. She looked closer. Many of the wooden planks were green with moisture or moss; the iron bands were fuzzy with rust. The towers with apertures were lightless. Several of the berms were worn down, their sides spilling dirt back onto the soil it had been cut from. A suspicion bloomed in her mind, and was out of her mouth in moments.
“Degel!” Sorus hissed, looking to her employer and fellow mercenary. “D’you see any guards out there?”
Degel’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he took his own moment to peer closer, before slowly shaking his head. “Yer right, ‘Rus. I don’t see anything out there – goblin or otherwise.”
“Then we must assume they have all succumbed.” Simo finished, grimly. She drew her daggers with a quick flick of her wrists, raising one to point toward the central tower. “They’ll be in there, or down in the tunnels below. Not easy to dig out, particularly if they’re underground.”
“We’ll get ‘em out, boss,” Degel nodded firmly, twirling his axes with a half-grin. “Who knows? Maybe the gobs will’ve done some of our job for us?”
They laughed at that, though there was no real levity in it.
The moment quickly passed as they resumed their approach toward the tower, creeping carefully across the dark, bare earth. Their first destination was ahead of them: a berm reinforced with mouldering planks of wood, marking the outer edge of the pit’s trench networks. From there it would be a matter of following the trenches to their source, the cluster of towers squatting at the heart of every goblinoid fortress, and from there into the tangled morass of tunnels that lurked under the dirt and stone.
Degel was the first to reach the parapet, the Hand of Planegifts rapidly scrambling up the wood and soil before practically vaulting into the trench below. He landed with his knees bent to absorb the impact, head snapping left and right as he searched for any sign of a threat. Both his axes were drawn and ready, held in a white-knuckled grip in anticipation of violence; anything unfortunate enough to be in the trench would not be given the chance to sound an alarm.
There was nothing. No sentries came forth to challenge the intruder; no cries of alarm rose from goblinoid throats. Not even the skittering of vermin in the undergrowth.
It was a silence that weighed heavily on them all as they climbed down to join him in the trenches. It brought the journey in the Tundra of Heroes – and the brutal, bloody battle that had followed – back to the forefront of their minds. Exchanging wary glances and tightening their hands around the handles of their weapons, the group continued on in unspoken unison.
Their advance was slow, and wary – each one kept a careful watch to their sides and above, half-expecting a thrall to leap down from above with gnashing teeth and flailing limbs at any moment. Their weapons were drawn and ready to strike should something come around the sharp corners of the zig-zagging trench; their ears and eyes strained for so much as the sound of a breaking twig, hearts thundering as they crept along. At each severe turn in the earthworks they would pause, allow the leading member of the trio to carefully edge around the corner with their weapon drawn, seeking out any sign of life or undeath.
They found nothing. A few scraps of discarded, rust-stained armour slumped against a wall in a manner unsettlingly like that of a body. Dark stains around the earthen walls or on a set of broken, mossy boards. Bones scattered and flung like dice in the crevasses of the trench walls and passages. But nothing alive.
Sorus refused to let her unease show on her face as they continued to creep along, even as the grip of her sword began to bite into the palm of her hand. It showed in her voice, however, when Degel came to a sudden stop barely a step ahead of her, nearly causing her to crash face first into his armoured back.
“What the hell—?” She began to snap, but was cut off a moment later as Degel – still not looking back – raised a finger for silence. His head twitched back for half a moment, enough for her to see the wary look in his eye.
The low clatter of glass and leather behind her made it clear Simo had encountered the same problem as Sorus mere moments before. The scholar sidled up to the pair, her expression dark.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Something’s ahead.” He said, voice barely above a hiss. The hand of Planegifts was gripping his axes tightly in readiness for battle, his body going taut as a bowstring. “Can’t tell if it’s empty or not.”
There was a building ahead of them – a small tower, covered in dried leaves and festooned with bare branches from a few tenacious saplings. The sides were blank and worn, bereft of windows or openings to allow light and air in, but pitted with dozens of small dents and scars from weathering. There was only one way in – a simple stone slab of a door was invitingly open, hanging loosely upon its worn-down hinges and looking similarly weather-beaten. As the group drew closer, they began to make out a new, unsettling detail: around the base of the building and across the front of the door, the stone was covered in dozens of small, ragged white marks scraped into the rock.
Experimentally, Degel pushed the battered stone door with his free hand. It shifted slightly on its hinges with a long, low groaning noise, swinging precariously for a moment before sweeping open completely. He nodded in satisfaction, before stopping dead as he sighted the inside panel of the door. Just like the outside, it was covered in dozens of tiny, white scratches – and for far more than those without, dark brown-black stains.
Throwing caution to the wind, the hand of Planegifts shoved his way through the doorway with axes raised, pounding heartbeat shooting up even further. If his suspicions were right – if what he feared to be within
was within – he’d be the first one it saw and went for, rather than his client and comrade.
He need not have worried. The room within was gloomy even with the open door allowing in the weak sunlight and thick with dust from ages of disuse, but nothing stirred within at his rude entrance. Its occupant was a sole goblin, seated against a wall with its arms at its side, head sunken down onto its chest.
“Interesting…” Simo muttered. She raised her head and nodded toward the door, eyes flickering slightly. “Guard the door a moment, would you kindly?”
Simo leaned down, studying the corpse with professional curiosity. Three things were immediately apparent. The first was that the goblin had been dead for months, at least – his flesh was drawn tight on his bones; his clothes were rotting and falling apart, the chainmail overlaying them mottled with great sections of rust. The second was that he was no thrall, as Degel had originally feared – the goblin’s decaying flesh was bereft of blister or boil, or even of the greater malformations that marked many of the Blight-cursed’s bodies.
The third was the book in his hand.
With careful movements and the use of the flat of a dagger, Simo extricated the volume from the goblin’s stiff fingers, rested back on her heels, and began to read. Sorus shot the occasional wary glance back into the room from her position beside the door, but didn’t speak until Simo rose back to her feet and gestured the two of them inside.
“Well.” She said almost immediately, raising a finger to forestall questions. “That was… interesting.”
“Really?” Sorus bared her teeth. “Care to share, doc?”
“He was part of this pit – a soldier, or part of their militia. When an attack struck this pit, he was in one of the tunnels below, on guard duty; according to these pages, he fled when it was overrun by ducking into one of its tributaries and fleeing toward the surface. He came up into this place, collapsed the tunnel behind him to bury the thralls and prevent them following him up. But the door was already locked from the outside…”
Simo trailed off, nodding slightly at Sorus and Degel’s identical bleak expressions.
“No windows, no way through the door, no way further up…” Degel shook his head. He prodded the goblin’s desiccated corpse with the edge of his boot. “No way to get out. Poor bastard.”
“Indeed. But we have learned something.” Simo grimaced, fingering one of her daggers. “Most of this pit’s residents will have been devoured by the horde or succumbed to the Blight. I cannot say how many belong to either category – these tunnels are a rat’s nest, and if they decided to collapse some of them, there might still be living souls underground.”
“Brilliant.” Sorus muttered under her breath, her perpetual scowl deepening even further.
“What’s happened has happened, Sorus.” Degel shook his head, voice firm. “We have come too far to back out now.”
“I know, Degel, I know.” Sorus grimaced. “Doesn’t mean I won’t curse that fact, aye?”
“Come now, both of you.” Simo shook her head, already walking toward the door. “Standing here and bickering will not drive us forward.”
The tower was a blunt, monolithic thing. It was without window or balistraria, its blank grey sides breaking open at the very top to form a saw-toothed crown of crenelations. Much of the walls’ surface was scarred by the action of many seasons, pockmarking the surface with dozens of small weathering-scars and holes; at the very base, the stones were stained with faded brown and green marks that blended almost seamlessly into the soil. Two outsized slate doors mounted in an arch at the bottom floor completed the construction.
“Gimme a minute.” Sorus remarked, confidently. “I’ll have this thing open.”
The doors to the tower had once been barred from the outside, but whatever sturdy wood had held them closed was now little more than a pair of splintered halves upon the dirt, a few mouldering splinters resting between the two. Even so, they held strong against an experimental push from Sorus, refusing to so much as budge even as she threw her full weight against them and shoved for all she was worth.
“Something the matter, Sorus?” Degel smirked, as his fellow mercenary stepped back, puffing and red-faced.
“Screw off, Degel!” Sorus groused, scowling at the doors like they’d personally offended her. “I don’t see you trying, do I?”
The Hand smirked slightly at that and stepped forward to join her. Hauling with full force, sweating and straining, Hand and human worked together to prise the heavy stone doors open. Simo stood off to the side, seemingly content to observe; a closer look would reveal her head twitching lightly from side to side, keeping watch for any sign of movement from the nearby towers.
She knew full well the kind of beasts that lurked in even the smallest of dark pits. If even one of those creatures had been infected and made it to the surface, Simo deeply suspected that it could pose a significant threat to them all. It would be a fascinating topic for research, admittedly – she had yet to come across a specimen that did not belong to one of the more populous species of the world, let alone to dissect one and see what effects the Blight had wrought on its physiology – but a dangerous one, nonetheless.
(
Then again, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you.)
A cry of triumph from the direction of the doors broke her from her thoughts. Degel and Sorus had finally managed to lever them open through a combination of simple brute force and a makeshift lever, using one half of the splintered beam to help push the doors apart.
The atrium of the tower was dark as pitch; the few torches in the brackets had long since burned down to useless stubs of charred wood or guttered out once their fuel was spent, so the only illumination came from the wavering fingers of sunlight poking in through the newly opened doors. Degel took the first, cautious steps into the room with his axes at the ready, his eyesight quickly penetrating the gloom.
The walls, he noted with a start, were covered in scratch marks and deep green-brown stains. It was worst around the stairwell, where a set of stone steps stood out amid the gloom – dried blood was pooled around the topmost stairs, and streaks of it ran into the abyssal darkness of the shaft below, as though something had been dragged down it. Faint noises drifted up from the tunnels below: dulled scratching, scraping noises, as of nails against stone. Degel flicked his head back to exchange a glance with Simo and Sorus, the pair standing beside the door with weapons drawn as their eyesight accustomed to the shadowed room.
“I don’t see any of ‘em here, Lady Cosmosclean.” Degel remarked, warily. “Just a whole lot of stains, a few scratches…” He raised a finger to point at the dark pool and streaks around the stairs. “And a trail of blood. Leads right on into the stairs and down.”
“Then what y’feared is right, boss.” Sorus remarked. She stamped on the flagstones; as the ring of her boot on stone faded, a fresh round of scratching noises came from somewhere below, as if in answer to her blow. Hearkening to the sound, the mercenary turned to face her colleagues. “They’re in the deeper tunnels. Place is going to be a rat’s nest down there, with bastards at every bend.”
“Then we go in, and burn them out.” Degel didn’t bother waiting for a response from Sorus, in favour of striding straight for the stairs. Simo joined him after a moment of surprise at his sudden, almost impetuous change of temperament, her daggers already drawn. The Hand of Planegifts looked back for a moment as he reached the top, seeing the swordswoman still hesitating beside the entrance doors.
“Come on, Sorus! Time ta earn our pay!”
“I’m on the way, Degel.” She strode forward to join them, before lowering her voice to a mutter: “But I got a bad feeling about this.”
They moved into the dark shaft below as a body, each member gripping the next’s shoulder with one hand to ensure they would not fall. The stairs were slick with cavern-moss and condensation, rendering every step treacherous; one wrong move could send them skidding down the rest of the stairwell, crashing bloodily down every stone step until they would land in the middle of the thrall-nest the pit had become. More than once Sorus and Simo nearly fell or slipped, escaping a nasty fall only through the action of the other, or by digging her weapon into the stone to serve as a makeshift, momentary support.
As they emerged from the winding stairwell, they came to face an unexpected obstruction: a large stone door like those which stood at the tower’s entrance, this one barred with a broad beam of pitted iron. That was easy enough to wrestle free of its mountings, but when Sorus gave the door an experimental shove it refused to budge even an inch. She almost stumbled from the force; she might as well have been trying to push a noble’s mansion onto its side for all the good it had done. Glaring at the door for a few moments, she turned her head over her shoulder.
“Damn thing’s heavy as a boulder.”
A couple minutes of strain, cursing, and effort forced it open, shunting aside the weight that had kept it shut and opening the way into the tunnels proper.
Stale air wafted from the mouth of the tunnel in a sudden, stinking wave, as though the pit was taking a deep breath after years spent in silence.
The reason for the absence of any goblins up above became disturbingly clear.
The tunnels were choked with the bodies of the dead. They rested face down in passageways, broken weapons rusting where they’d fallen. They slumped against walls, seated amid pools of dried blood. They hung from walls, pinned in place by a spear or a sword. They lay in piles around the door like stacked, dried wood, limbs and heads and clothes tangling together until it was impossible to tell what belonged to which body. More than a few bore wounds to the throat or arms; long, deep lacerations, different to the ragged punctures of a bite. The stone was black with dried blood.
“Gods’ teeth,” Sorus muttered. “They were trying to run from the thralls. And this – this would’ve been the last thing any of them saw.”
“These ones are fresh.” Degel nodded toward a pair of goblinoid corpses near the wall. Both still clutched rusted blades in their fingers, the joints beginning to swell with the early stages of decay. He shook his head to himself, beginning to step forward once more. “Poor bast- argh!”
Simo edged around Degel’s back to look ahead. Two decaying corpses lay, blocking the way ahead into the deeper tunnels. One was an adult; the other, no larger than a child. Both had died violently, their hands locked around each other’s throats.
Degel had accidentally stepped onto one of the two, coating the bottom of his boot in a film of stinking fluid. The Hand stepped back with an almost exaggerated shudder of disgust, scraping the bronze against the stone to wipe the worst of the filth off; his axes were raised in an almost instinctive motion, ready to strike if the corpses suddenly lurched to life.
At a nod from Simo, Degel carefully moved the bodies apart, inwardly shuddering as he felt the corpse shift under his grip. Flaky, waxy, whitish matter puffed from the skin and settled on his gauntlets as he placed one of them back down against the wall; the other leaked something foul-smelling as he pushed it opposite the first.
The group moved on hurriedly now that the tunnel was clear, unwilling to stay among the rotting corpses for so long. The next set of tunnels seemed to be some kind of residential area, the walls lined with doors at even intervals or hung with sheets of fabric for privacy. Whether made of metal or stone, each of the doors was barred with a strong beam of wood or a sturdy metal. From behind the doors, there came a low, insistent scratching sound, as of claws rubbing against stone. From others, a slow rasping of breath echoed, or the sound of something like low, broken sobbing.
It made Sorus’ skin crawl as she continued to follow Degel’s lead down into the darkness. She stole a glance ahead of her, but the ash-haired scholar kept her gaze fixed grimly ahead, and Degel was too far ahead for her to easily make out.
On and on they went, through the twists and turns of the tunnels and the darkness. They found nothing but the dead, and the small flights of insects or skittering vermin that rose from walls and corpses as they advanced ever closer to the central cavern.
It was almost a relief when they arrived at the central pit. It was a huge, roughly circular room with a high ceiling, worked or evolved from the stone beneath the tower. Much as everything looked like little more than shades of gloom to Sorus, she could make out points where the darkness was particularly thick – great pits in the natural stone, where the floor gave way to seemingly endless plunges into the abyssal cavern-depths below. Shapes moved in the murk, dozens of reddish lantern-lights bobbing up and down amid the shadows as the goblins and gods-know-what else moved about.
One in particular turned its head to regard them, glowing red eyes fixating on the trio of adventurers who had stumbled into its nest. It staggered free of the dark like a drunk – a goblin corpse, its mouth agape, crooked limbs groping through the air toward them. Dried flakes of skin peeled away as it moved, drifting in the stagnant air.
Behind it, more figures were turning and starting to advance. Dozens of them.
The resulting stream of alleyway invective could have turned the air blue.
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 409864 times)