The Dark Warden (Book 6) (18 page)

“This from the man who tried to steal from Tarrabus Carhaine,” murmured Morigna. 

Arandar gave the Master Thief of Cintarra an incredulous look.

Jager shrugged. “To be fair, he really deserved it.” 

Ridmark tapped the end of his staff against the walkway. Some mechanical traps were triggered by mechanisms hidden beneath stone tiles, but the walkway was a single massive piece of stone. He put his weight upon the staff, but nothing happened. He took several strides upon the walkway, but still nothing happened. Ridmark crossed halfway into the room, his muscles tensed, but saw no sign of movement.

At last he shrugged.

“We may as well move on,” said Ridmark. “Be ready to run at the first sign of trouble.”

“That would have been weeks ago,” said Jager. Ridmark paused, waiting for the others to catch up with him. Perhaps if there had been a trap here, the mechanism had broken down millennia ago, or the Warden had removed it.

The walkway quivered beneath his boots, and a click reverberated through the gallery. 

The realization flashed through Ridmark’s mind. Usually the dark elves hid the triggers for their traps beneath stone tiles. The walkway was one solid piece of stone, which meant in essence it was one large tile. His weight had not been enough to trigger the trap, but when his companions strode onto the walkway…

He spun just in time to see a slab of stone seal off the way back, landing with a thunderous crash. Ridmark whirled towards the exit on the far end of the gallery just as it vanished beneath a similar slab of stone.

The echoes lasted a long time before they faded away. 

“Fool, fool, fool,” said Ridmark. “My weight wasn’t enough. It took all of us to set it off. If I had sent us across one at a time, that would have let us pass unharmed.” 

“A more pressing concern,” said Caius. “How shall we escape?”

“I have no spells to open the door,” said Calliande. 

“I might,” said Morigna. “This white stone of the dark elves is most easy to manipulate with earth magic. I think I can command the doors to dissolve into sand.”

“Truly?” said Calliande.

“It will take a few hours,” said Morigna, “but I believe it can be done. You shall have to be patient, though.”

“I suppose we are in no danger of encountering any foes here,” said Kharlacht. 

“Not until Morigna opens the door,” said Ridmark. “The sound will have drawn creatures from the rest of the catacombs. We may have to be ready to fight.” He thought he heard a faint murmuring whisper. Perhaps a side effect of his headache. “It…”

“Water!” said Gavin. “Water is coming out of the holes!”

Ridmark followed the boy’s pointing finger and saw water flowing from the holes. It was just a trickle, but already the flow was increasing. The white stone floor foamed and bubbled wherever the water touched it, releasing a strange, sharp odor…

“Then we are to be drowned?” said Jager. “A cruel trap.” 

“Oh,” said Caius. “That’s not water.”

“What is it, then?” said Ridmark, though he already knew the answer. 

“Vitriol,” said Caius. “Acid.” 

“I fear we might wish we had been drowned,” said Kharlacht.

Ridmark turned in a circle, watching the small holes. Every single one of them was leaking acid, and widening puddles of the stuff were spreading across the recessed floor. Wisps of white smoke rose from the edge of the pools. Standing too close to the smoke made Ridmark lightheaded, and he kept well away from it. 

“We shall likely be asphyxiated first,” said Mara, waving a hand in front of her face.

“The door,” said Ridmark, pointing at the sealed slab of stone on the far end of the chamber. “Quickly!” 

They rushed to the massive slab of stone, and Ridmark’s heart sank. The damned thing had to weigh at least two or three tons. Arandar touched Heartwarden’s hilt and drew on the sword’s power to fill him with strength, and Calliande cast a spell. White light flickered around them, and Ridmark felt stronger as her magic augmented his natural strength. They gathered around the stone, heaving and pulling, but it did not move a single inch. 

“Morigna,” said Ridmark, “your spell.”

She stepped forward, purple fire flaring around her fingers. An inch of acid now covered the floor, foaming and smoking where it touched the wall. Mara was right. The toxic smoke rising from the acid would asphyxiate them long before the acid covered the walkway. 

Morigna placed her free hand upon the stone door, eyes closed tight in concentration. For a moment nothing happened, and then a steady trickle of white sand fell from the door, her palm sinking into the stone. Her magic was working, unbinding the stone and collapsing it into sand. 

But it was not doing it quickly, and Ridmark suspected the acid would overflow the walkway long before Morigna’s hand got more than three or four inches into the door. For that matter, the fumes would likely kill them first.

“I suggest you move faster,” said Arandar. 

“I am trying,” snapped Morigna, eyes darting back and forth behind closed lids. “I make this look easy, but I can assure you that it most certainly is not.” 

“Don’t disturb her,” said Ridmark, stepping away from the door. Nearly three inches of acid covered the recessed floor now. That explained why the gallery had been so clean, the stone of the walls and floor smoother than usual for dark elven architecture. Though the peculiar smoothness only extended six or seven feet above the walkway. The trap must have some mechanism to drain off the acid. The walls and stairs below had shown no signs of damage. There had to be a hidden drain somewhere within the room. For that matter, there was likely a means of disarming the trap entirely. The room of blades in Urd Dagaash had been disarmed with a simple lever located on the other side of the trap. Ridmark had almost been crushed to death by another mechanism during his last visit to Urd Morlemoch, and he had escaped that trap by smashing its machinery with an axe. 

More sand fell from the door. Morigna’s hand had sunk maybe an inch into the stone, while the acid had risen another two inches. 

“Again!” said Arandar, and they tried to lift the door. It did not even tremble.

Ridmark looked for a drain or some sort of mechanism. It would have to be above the level of the acid. Too low and the vitriolic fluid would eat away the metal. His head swam with the fumes rising from the dissolving stone. Where would the dark elves had hidden it?

His eyes fell upon the small balcony high overhead. For the first time he looked at the intricate metal framework of the railing, and saw a metal rod rising beyond the scrollwork.

A lever.

“Stop!” said Ridmark. “Look. I suspect that is the release lever.”

“We pull on it and the trap releases?” said Gavin. “Just like that?”

“It worked in Urd Dagaash,” said Ridmark. 

“Well and good,” said Arandar. “But we have no hope of reaching the lever.”

A foot of acid now sloshed and rippled below the walkway. The air was taking on an acrid reek, and Ridmark was finding it increasingly difficult to draw breath. He did not know how much longer they had until the foul air overwhelmed them, but he suspected it would not be much longer. 

“Can either of you reach it with your spells?” said Ridmark. 

Calliande shook her head. 

“If it was closer,” said Morigna. 

“Ridmark,” said Mara. “I could…”

“Not yet,” said Ridmark. It was entirely possible that the Warden was watching them. If he was, Ridmark did not want to reveal Mara’s unique abilities. Those abilities might be their only advantage against the Warden. But if it was a choice between revealing them and choking to death…

“Oh, ye of little faith,” said Jager, his voice cheerful. “No faith in me at all! I am deeply wounded.”

“This is not the time for jokes, little man,” said Morigna. 

“Really?” said Jager, holding something up. “I was merely trying to lighten the mood before I save our lives in a dramatic fashion.”

A coiled rope and a collapsible steel grapnel rested in his hands.

“You think you can make the climb?” said Ridmark.

“Of course I can,” said Jager, opening the grapnel. “Give me some room, please.” They backed away, and Jager whirled the grapnel over his head. “Not only was I a thief, Gray Knight, I was a very good thief. Exceptionally good.”

“Until you got caught,” said Morigna. 

Jager ignored that. “And one of the keys of competent thieving is to be good at climbing things.”

He flung the grapnel, the rope arcing over the pool of acid. The grapnel hit the intricate railing and stuck fast. Jager tugged the rope several times, leaned on it with his full weight, but the grapnel remained in place. 

“Splendid,” said Jager. “Kharlacht, please hold the rope, as you are the largest and the strongest of us and I really don’t want to fall.”

“Sound logic,” said Kharlacht, taking the rope and pulling it taut. 

“Be careful, my love,” said Mara, kissing her husband.

Jager grinned. “I am always careful.”

“You are as a bad a liar as the Gray Knight,” said Mara. 

“Now that was an insult!” said Jager. “Though I’m not sure to which of us.”

He grabbed the rope and clambered up hand-over-hand, his legs coiling around the rope for support. The halfling kindred were not as strong as humans or orcs or dwarves, but they were far more agile, and Jager scaled the rope with the ease of a cat prowling along a rooftop. Ridmark watched, hoping the rope would remain in place. It would have been a cruel fate for Jager and Mara to escape the Iron Tower only for Mara to see her new husband burn to death in a pool of acid. 

Yet Jager retained his grip, and rolled over the railing and onto the balcony. 

“I see the lever!” he shouted down. 

“Pull it!” said Ridmark.

Jager did not answer. A moment later Ridmark heard a loud click, followed by a series of clanks and clangs. The walkway began to tremble beneath his boots.

“I don’t think that did anything,” said Jager. 

Two more clangs came from behind the wall, and then a pair of trapdoors opened in the recessed floor. The flow of acid from the holes shut off, and the acid pools poured into the trapdoors. A fresh plume of white smoke rose from the trapdoors, and the slabs sealing the doorways rose with rasping groans.

“Jager, get back here,” said Ridmark as a fresh wave of acrid stink rolled through the gallery. “Those fumes…”

Jager was already hurrying down the rope. He jumped the last few feet and landed on the walkway, and Mara caught him in a hug. 

“Celebrate later,” said Ridmark. “Go.”

He urged the others to the far archway. Gavin and Caius were both coughing, and Arandar was rubbing the side of his chest. Ridmark did not know how long it would be before the trap reset, but he wanted to be out of the gallery before then. They hurried through the archway, and Ridmark saw another set of steps leading up. That was good. The higher they went, the closer they came to the surface…

A loud click echoed through the trapped gallery.

“Go!” said Ridmark, shoving Morigna and Calliande through the arch.

An instant later he heard another click, and a massive thud as the stone slab slammed shut again behind him, landing only a few inches from his boots. Ridmark looked around, afraid that someone had been trapped behind the door, but everyone had gotten through.

“Disappointing,” said Jager.

“I fail to see how,” said Kharlacht, “since we are still alive.” 

“I really liked that grapnel,” said Jager.

“God and St. Michael and all the apostles!” said Arandar. “If we live to reach Tarlion, I shall buy you a dozen grapnels from the best smiths in the city! A thief you may have been, but not many men would have the nerve to climb over a pool of acid.” 

Jager offered a bow. “Thank you, sir knight. I confess I have never received praise from a Swordbearer before.”

“To be fair, you’ve never saved a Swordbearer’s life before,” said Mara. 

“Well, yes, that.”

“Let me heal each of you,” said Calliande, summoning her magic in a pulse of white light. “Those fumes would have damaged your lungs and airways, and perhaps your eyes as well.” Ridmark’s chest did hurt. “We need to be uninjured for what is to come.” 

Calliande moved to each of them, healing the damage from the fumes. 

Once she was done, they took the stairs, climbing higher into Urd Morlemoch.

Chapter 12 - Guests

Morigna sniffed at the air.

“I think,” she said, “I smell sea air.”

It was a relief. She had seen dark magic, had seen the power Coriolus wielded, had seen the might of the Artificer’s sorcery.

They were as nothing against the dark majesty of Urd Morlemoch. She could not imagine the scale of the power that had raised the wards around the citadel, the skill with dark magic that had gone into their creation. It horrified her.

It also fascinated her. Such power…what could it do in the proper hands? Such as hers, for instance? 

A small part of her admitted that Calliande and Ardrhythain were right, that she was vulnerable to this kind of temptation. 

At the moment it did not matter. Even if she possessed ten times her current power, the creator of those wards could still have crushed her like an insect. The briny smell of the sea was a reminder of the world that existed outside of this maze of dark magic. 

“Good,” said Ridmark. “We must be drawing near to the surface.” 

After leaving the chamber of acid, the stairs had ended in a series of linked galleries of white stone, all lit by more red-gleaming crystals. Some rooms were carpeted in bones, ancient armor and weapons lying scattered about the floor. Others held statues upon plinths, showing dark elven warriors and wizards in armor and robes, some holding swords, others brandishing staffs. Fortunately, none of the statues concealed any undead creatures. 

Twice they were attacked by packs of urvaalgs, and once by a pair of urshanes. Calliande’s magic and Arandar’s soulblade, coupled with the skill of Ridmark and the others, made short work of the creatures. The Old Man had spoken sneeringly of the Swordbearers, calling them fools wielding weapons they could not possibly understand. Yet after seeing Arandar in action, Morigna could not entirely agree. Arandar was a stubborn, rigid-minded fool, though she sympathized for his son’s plight at the hands of Tarrabus Carhaine. But with Heartwarden in his hand, Arandar was a terror. Little wonder the High Kingdom of Andomhaim had stood fast against the pagan orcs and the dark elves and the urdmordar and the Frostborn, if warriors like Arandar defended the realm.