By Moonlight Wrought (Bt Moonlight Wrought) (43 page)

         “I don’t want to go,” she said one last
time as she rejoined her friends.

         “We need you,” Fiona said.  “Besides,
you’re our good luck charm.  All we have to do is rub your bottom.”  Fiona did
and Cinder giggled.  Fiona winked at Dirk and he looked back unpleasantly at
her.

         “Would you like to rub me for luck, Dirk”
she asked with a huge playful smile, running to him eagerly and adorably.

         “No,” he said plainly, despite his
attraction to her gentleness.

         “Please,” Cinder pleaded, batting her
lashes irresistibly.

         “Oh, all right,” he sighed and he touched
her backside quickly.  Cinder smiled with glee and Selric made Melissa simply
touch her arm, which was the most he could get her to do.  Selric rubbed Cinder
long and softly, kissed her cheek then lifted her down the ladder to Dirk.

         “That is the stupidest thing I have ever
seen,” Melissa complained, totally displeased, but not out of jealousy.  She
knew Cinder was sweet, and she sort of felt like an older sister to the playful
nymph, but she did not believe that where they were going was the place or
occupation for her.

         “Quiet, Mel,” Fiona said.

         “Oh that smell!” Cinder cried, pulling
forth a perfumed kerchief and tying it around her face to cover her mouth and
nose.  “Give me your gold,” she said to Selric, quickly, immediately changing
her mood and playing the role of a highway bandit.

         “Real scary robber you make Cinder,” he
said.

         “Thanks,” she answered seriously.

         “Do you want a ride?” he asked, turning around
and hunching over.

         “No I can walk, but hold my hand, like
you promised.  Oh wait!” she said, “I know a trick.”  She mouthed an
incantation and soon Dirk’s sword shimmered with a glow as bright as a lantern,
lighting the tunnel for dozens of feet.  “Okay, let’s go,” she said, walking
along, an innocent child in their adventure.  She batted her eyelashes at
Selric.  With the rest of her face covered, her eyes were even more alluring,
seeming as big as coins and as colorful as the bluest sky had ever been. 
Selric took her hand and smiled.

         They searched passage after passage,
looking for some cave or door of obvious origin.  They had no idea what they
sought, but they did know to start in the city’s underground.  After hours of
walking, Cinder began to tire.  “I don’t want to walk anymore.  These shoes
hurt my feet, and my perfume is wearing out.  I want to go up.  It’s starting
to stink.”

         “Then find the place,” Melissa said
impatiently.

         “What place, and what makes you think I
can find it better than anyone else, even if I knew
what
it was?”

         “If Will saw It in here more than once,
or felt It, at least, then It must have some type of entrance or lair here
somewhere,” Selric said.  “It probably doesn’t use the sewers to travel around
the city, It seems to use the rooftops for that.”

         “Well, I’m tired,” Cinder continued. 
“What does
It
look like?”

         “What?” Selric asked.

         “The thing, the thing that uses the
sewers.  The
thing
,” she whined impatiently, with a stomp of her foot.

         “It’s large and black, like a big man-shaped
form, cloaked in shadow,” Selric said. 

         Dirk noticed Cinder stop, as if she heard
something far off.  “What is it?” he asked softly.  She came back to her
senses, the description not strong enough to recall the dreams which were too
tightly locked away. 

         Cinder shook off the feelings of dread
which seemed to be closing around her.  “Fine,” she said, not having heard Dirk
as she walked, seemingly bravely, ahead of them all.  “Stay back.”  She went
almost out of the edge of their light and bent down near the edge of the water,
squeaking softly.  In seconds, a large brown rat swam up to her.  “Not so
close,” she said, standing up away from it.  “Yuck.  Tell me, have you seen a
big shape, all dark, like a big man?”   She turned to Selric, “Right?” 

         He nodded his agreement.  “Evil,” he
added, leaning forward as if that would help him see her at the edge of his
vision, but obeying her orders not to go near.

         “Evil,” she said to the rat.  The
creature sniffed for a few moments, almost as if thinking, then started
squeaking fiercely.  Cinder said, “Ah, yes.  Oh, I see.  And then?  Ah!  Oh,
okay,” then she turned to Selric.  “He says this way,” and she pointed. 

         The rodent dove away and Cinder motioned
her friends to her and she led them off into the dark.  At every turn, Cinder
would ask another rat for directions, and eventually the group was directed to
a tunnel which had no life in it at all.  The last rodent had told them the
way, so that was the direction they traveled.  They walked a good distance when
Cinder stopped and pulled on Selric’s arm, pointing at the wall.

         “What?” he asked, looking.

         “A door, silly,” she laughed.

         “Where?” Fiona asked.

         “There.”  She pointed again.  Cinder took
Selric’s knife after they stood stupefied longer than she cared to wait, and
dragged the blade up and down the stone.  Eventually, watching the line she
traced, the others noted a completely disguised door frame.  “Gosh..can we go
now?!”

         “How do we open it?” Dirk asked.

         “I don’t know,” Cinder said in a bratty
tone.  “My goodness, do I have to do everything?” she gasped, looking closely
at the wall.  Soon she found a small knob flush with the wall and pushed it. 
The door slid inward and Cinder appeared to have her breath sucked from her
chest, and she fell back into Selric, grabbing his sleeve tightly, gasping and
panting for air, nearly falling over.  Dirk, however, moved inside, his sword
still aglow.  Melissa knocked an arrow and followed him, Fiona close behind.

         “I can’t go in there,” Cinder said, looking
not like herself at all and unable to breathe.  “No...no!” she gasped
terribly.  She showed no sign of innocence or immaturity, but seemed more like
an older, able woman, totally capable of reasonable thought, not the flighty
irresponsibility she was known for.  Cinder did not plead or whine, but
insisted, and was quite convincing at it.

         “Come on,” Selric urged, gently leading
her.  “I promised that you would not be hurt.  I still promise.  I will give my
life before I let another harm a hair on your beautiful head.  You can’t stay
in the sewers.”  He kissed her forehead gently and she seemed to relax.  Cinder
moved as slowly and shakily as one afraid of heights who is led to stand at the
edge of a tower parapet high above the ground.

         When Cinder stepped in, she and Selric
saw the room the others had already searched.  They found blood saturated earth
beneath two manacles on one wall, implements of torture racked along the other,
and a ladder up to a trapdoor that Dirk was then trying to force.  “Oh...oh”
Cinder moaned and gasped painfully, as if she would cry.  “The evil...I can’t
stay here...please take me...” then she fell silent as her eyes caught
something.

         Unseen to all, except Cinder, was Bixby
Goreman, the apparition.  He was faded and almost completely invisible even to
her.  “Hello?” Cinder said curiously.  Her friends were startled, scared in
fact, when Cinder seemed to be talking to no one.  Slowly the ghost became
visible as he floated to Cinder, hungering for her immortal blood; his eyes sunken,
his appearance unnerving, though not yet frightening.  Dirk nearly lost his
grip on the ladder and had to quickly jump down before falling at his sight of
the creature.  “Selric...” Cinder stuttered.

         As Cinder let the specter near, he
changed, then looking like a laughing, hideous ghoul, his skin rotting and his
bones pressing against his gaunt, sallow flesh.  He reached for Cinder’s tender
throat, believing no one there had any weapon which could harm his
non-corporeal body.   But Melissa did, and she used it.  She shot through the
ghost, the shaft, enchanted as it flew from the magical elven bow, dragging the
monster with it and pinning him to the wall.  Fiona took out the symbol of her
goddess, a small golden dagger she wore always around her neck, and she shook
it at him, chanting in her holy tongue as she moved ever closer.  Bixby Goreman
screamed and struggled, wounded from the arrow, feeling his soul being forced
from the world to roam the netherworld instead by the priestess’s power over the
souls of the dead and undead.  In a flash, his form vanished with a whoosh of
the wind that sounded like a sigh of relief, and the arrow fell smoldering to
the floor.  “Leave it,” Fiona said, restraining Melissa as she tried to bend
low and pick up the shaft.

         Dirk again tried the trapdoor, looking
over his shoulder for more ghosts, and pounding the wood with his gauntlets,
trying to bash it open.  Fiona gave him her mace and after only three strikes,
he smashed it to splinters.  “Well, Its had plenty of time to flee, hasn’t It?”
Dirk quipped.

         “Cinder,” Selric asked, “are you sure
there’s no more doors down here?”  She looked carefully and shook her head,
shivering from some unfelt cold, though his arm was tight around her.  The
other three were already upstairs and Selric put his hand under her rump as she
climbed, thrusting Cinder up and out the door.  They emerged up into a
normal-appearing back room common in most city shops, obvious by the tools
lying about.  There were many worktables, and bits of leather lay here and
there.  A set of steps led up, and a curtain covered the way to the front of
the building.  Fiona let out a gasp when she passed through the curtain.

         “I’ve been here,” she said.  “I buy my
whips and pouches and armor here.  This is Olaf Svenson’s leather shop.”

         “Isn’t this where we met?” Melissa
asked.  It
was
the same place, and the store was filled with the same
tables and the same leather items, nothing having changed.  The only thing
missing was Olaf Svenson.

         “Upstairs,” Selric said.  He ran first,
followed by Dirk, Melissa, then Fiona; they’d forgotten about Cinder.  There
was a small landing at the top of the staircase and the steps wound their way
up again, but there was a door ahead of them and one to the left, lying over
the back room downstairs.  Selric opened that one.  Inside was a kitchen.  He
opened the door all the way and went inside slowly; cautiously.  Melissa and
Fiona went through the other, and gasps of horror and astonishment came from
both rooms simultaneously.

         As Selric explored the kitchen, he found
many blood covered items, from awls, knives, even forks; to the counters and
the floor.  In the corner, partially hidden between a huge table and the wall,
lay a butchered teenage girl, her leg chained to the floor, staring blankly at
the ceiling.  Her skull had been smashed in, bits of white bone protruding from
her once-brown hair, now a dark, dripping mess.  The blood was fresh, her body
still warm.  The other room looked like a slaughterhouse.  The walls were spattered
with blood and several enormous pools of the liquid lay on the wooden floor. 
Fiona could tell that the room had been insulated much like her own temple,
since the blood should have dripped through the floor onto the heads of
customers below.  There were also two women there.  One had been beheaded, the
other hacked to death with a large, heavy blade.  Fiona examined them:  no one
else had the stomach, even Selric. 

         “They’ve been beaten severely...over many
days.  They each have broken bones and were malnourished, but they were killed
quickly, within the last few minutes,” she said, swallowing heavily and looking
up in fear at Selric who stood within the doorway.

         “Dirk, help me,” Cinder called softly. 
He ran to the landing; Cinder had gone up a few steps toward the next level,
and stood there, frozen in place.  Dirk heard a deep-throated growl and he ran
up the steps and stood next to Cinder.  Once there, he saw the large gray,
wolf-like dog above them.  She had never seen any in her mother’s forest; only
wolves and other wild creatures and they would do whatever the half-elven maid
asked of them.  She understood them, and they her. 

         When Dirk moved beside her, Cinder leapt
down the stairs, right onto Selric, who barely managed to catch her.  “No.  Don’t
run,” Dirk screamed.  The dog leapt onto him, knocking Dirk down to the
landing, and ran on, stopping before Melissa.

         “Okay puppy.  It’s all right,” she said,
holding her hand out.  She had always been able to calm even the most vicious
of dogs, but this one had evil in its eyes, some influence of the Fiend,
Melissa guessed.  It snapped at her hand, then jumped toward her.  Dirk had
already risen, and he struck it with his sword as it flew on, severing its
spine.  The beast fell, snarling and yelping to the floor, only its head able
to move.  Dirk raised his sword and hacked off the dog’s head, ending its
tormented life.

         “Oh, Selric,” Cinder whined as she lay in
his arms.

         “I said I’d protect you.  Now, you’re
fine,” he said, stroking her hair.  “You are fine!” he urged as merrily as he
could in that house of horrors.  A shuffling and thumping came down from the
top of the stairs and Melissa ran to their foot, bow drawn.  The string sang
and they heard the arrow strike the wall at the stair head.  “He’s there!” she
said, the fear in her voice undeniable.  “He just ducked back.”  Then something
slammed, a door maybe, but all the friends jumped at the sound, then looked at
each other, wondering what to do.