Dream (30 page)

“Do you guys ever stop arguing? If you’re not bickering about something you’re accusing each other of being gay or harassing Derek,” Sam threw his arms up in disgust. “Six days of walking and the only time you assholes shut up is when you make me sing the Firefly songs.”

“Do all Japanese whine as much as you do?” Shad asked.

“Look, dude, being Japanese means I piss liquid awesome.”

“Nippon, the land of ten thousand kinks,” Jeff observed.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, tentacle porn, yadda yadda yadda. You guys were in a real war, and you still play combat video games.”

“That’s because combat video games and war have zip in common,” Shad explained. “Its like the difference between comic books and great literature.”

“Hey, some comic series are pretty good,” Fred objected.

“Zap! Pow! Ker-biff!”

“There are some pretty well-developed plots and superior artwork.”

“Mostly of DD bust lines in spandex.”

“Nothing wrong with DD busts in spandex.”

“True, but just call it porn and get over it.”

“It never stops,” Sam whispered to himself, shaking his head.

“We’re here,” Fred gasped, dumping his pack.

Derek simply collapsed onto his face.

“That was an entirely new flavor of suck,” Shad sat heavily on a handy rock and dropped his pack. “This must be what it is like in Afghanistan.”

Derek rolled onto his side and squirmed out of his pack. “I think the rod in my back bent about two miles ago.”

“March or die,” Jeff mumbled as he lowered his pack to the ground and laid down next to it. “I miss Ula.”

“She would have helped,” Shad agreed. “Where’s Sam?”

The Night-grifter pointed wordlessly to where the Bard had dropped about twenty yards further down the slope.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t really care either way.”

“Are you sure we’re here?” he asked Fred, waving a hand to take in the terrain.

For the last day and a half the Black Talons had been following an animal trail that looked no different than any other animal trail as it ascended the ever-steepening side of a tall snow-capped mountain in a shallow curve that appeared to have been chosen solely to maximize the amount of slope traversed. Some people might have recognized the peace and beauty of the trim pines growing on the slate and gravel-littered slope, but none were amongst the five bravos, who cursed the mountain as a whole and the individual rocks with a deep and personal loathing. The climb’s saving graces were a steady reduction in temperature and the ready presence of snow-fed streams, but these were not graces the Talons felt much appreciation for, a feeling they expressed with great regularity.

“Yeah,” the barbarian gestured towards a pile of scree that looked like any one of fifty or more that the Talons had cursed as they had struggled upwards.

“Seriously? Why that one? No, I’ll take your word for it,” Shad waved away the papers Fred offered. “Let’s find a place to camp, and we’ll think about it tomorrow.”

“It’s only early afternoon,” the barbarian pointed out.

“Thanks, I thought it was midnight. You can go in and do the deed if you want, but I’m going to soak my feet and not walk for a while.”

“We may have to bury Sam, too,” Jeff observed from where he lay.

“Screw that. Birds gotta eat, too.”

The Bard managed to lift one trembling hand and extend a single digit.

The notes from the outlanders included the location of a good campsite and without much trouble but with a great deal of vulgar language the Talons moved the hundred yards and settled in.

“No junk food, lots of walking, I mean miles and
miles
of walking…I thought I was in better shape,” Jeff mumbled around a piece of jerky he was tiredly chewing.

“We have been walking on pretty flat ground,” Fred observed. “You guys might not have noticed, but the last three days were all on a gentle incline, which got pretty pronounced the last two days. The air is getting thin.”

“I thought she was
under
a mountain,” Shad said from where he lay on his bedroll.

“A loose term.” The barbarian shrugged.

“I hate this place.”

Sam staggered into the camp, dragging his pack by one strap. “I hate all of you.”

“Ok, everyone takes a full canteen, one day’s rations, your own escape harness, and all combat gear. Derek, you take the pay-off box and the tomb lock polishing gear; I have the first aid kit, and Sam carries the Chest. What else?”

“Everyone gets ten torches and a dozen candles,” Derek gestured to the stacked items.  “Make sure your tinder boxes are up to speed. Everyone takes a coil of rope; I have the enchanted rope, too. Fred has a mallet and twenty big iron spikes we can use as pitons, just in case. Shad, you get the two caltrop bags, I have the scrolls, and Fred has the maps and notes. I think that’s it.”

“OK, the group before us created a cache point where we will leave everything else.”

“Why are we carrying all this gear? Why not just put them in the Chest?” Sam asked as he tied his torches together.

“Because the Chest is full of food and essential gear, and because if we had everything in it and something happened to the Chest we would be completely screwed,” Jeff explained.

The scree pile looked solid, but using a short shovel they had brought for the purpose Fred quickly exposed a crate lid covering yard-wide shaft going in at a slight angle, rusting iron spikes pounded in at intervals to serve as rungs and handholds.

“Use the enchanted rope, or tie off a regular rope and leave it here?” Derek asked. “According to the notes its forty feet down.”

“Enchanted rope; last one in pulls the lid back over the hole.” Shad thumped his hands together to settle his fingerless gloves. “How long do your scroll lights last?”

“Four hours each.”

“Fire one up; no point in saving them at this point.”

“I’ll take point,” Jeff offered.

“OK. Derek, you go last.”

The Shadowmancer produced a small roll of vellum, which he unsealed. Reading a dozen words in a language that sounded Arabic, he gestured and the page crumbled to dust as a ball of light rose from the ground near his feet. “There we go.”

The shaft opened into a natural chamber barely seven feet high and further across than Derek’s light could reach.

“Subtle entry point,” Jeff muttered to the others, shaking his head. “Derek’s ball isn’t going to cut it-I’m going to light a torch.”

“The goats tell a different story about Derek’s balls,” Fred snickered. The Shadowmancer flipped him off by way of reply.

“Which direction?” Shad asked the Shadowmancer.

“We go east.”

“East it is. Jeff, you have point.” The Jinxman passed out an armor charm to each Talon. “No point in runes until something is in the offing.”

It took some time to find the exit from the chamber, which turned out to be a relatively smooth tube that meandered through the rock in an easterly fashion. After his first torch burned out Jeff switched to a candle as the Talons crawled deeper into the mountain. Their route wasn’t hard to follow as there was a groove burned into the side of the tube that kept them from accidently straying into the passages formed by cracks and crevices intersecting with the tube.

“What made this?” Fred whispered to Derek as the Talons took a break.

“Earth-moving magic.”

“This is solid rock.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It doesn’t look old.”

“So?”

“So the notes say the last group just opened an old back way into the complex.”

“I think they burned the hole into the chamber, put the spikes in, and then started the magic that created the tube and burned the groove into its wall. That would have been pretty time-consuming, and involve the risk of someone coming upon them.”

“Still seems easier than our gig.”

“Let me be the first to tell you: life ain’t fair.”

“Let’s get moving. Derek, make sure you’re ready to map if we ever get out of this stone hamster run,” Shad whispered.

It took around forty-five minutes to traverse the tube; as crawling went it wasn’t too hard because the stone surface was nearly glazed and largely free of debris, and they could stand and stretch regularly when they encountered tall enough cracks and other intersections, but all had bruised elbows and knees and a growing sense of claustrophobia by the time they reached the other end, which was simply blank stone.

“If everything went right there’s five feet of stone ahead and then the cavern complex,” Derek whispered as he eased to the head of the line. Placing the jade disk Astkar had given them against the wall he read aloud a fairly lengthy cant and then scrambled backwards. For several long minutes the only sign of anything occurring was that the jade disk remained in places against the wall; finally the surface of the disk shimmered slightly and with a faint sighing gust of breeze the jade and the stone vanished, leaving a hole that extended into darkness.

“OK, step one: get into cavern complex, check,” Derek said with satisfaction. “Step two, find the tomb, step three, polish lock, step four, get back to daylight.”

“Twenty-five per cent is not a passing grade,” Shad shook his head, negative as usual. “But it is a start. Let’s get down to the hard part and see what we’re dealing with.”

Their tube opened into a passage that appeared to be a natural fissure improved and occasionally extended by tools. It wasn’t much more than five feet wide, but to Fred’s relief the ceiling was an average of eight feet, giving him axe room.

Jeff lit a torch from his candle and carefully snuffed the latter’s wick while Derek studied the map and notes.

“I really do not want to get lost in here,” Sam muttered.

“If you can find the tube, you’re home free,” Fred assured him.

“Yeah, but finding one specific hole down here could be tricky.”

“Then you’ll die down here in the dark,” Shad snapped, his slender stock of civility worn through by the weight of a mountain pressing down overhead. “Derek and I have skill in navigating underground. We stick together we’ll be OK.”

“Or we could all die,” Sam said nervously.

“There’s that,” the Jinxman agreed testily. “Or I could kill you myself for talking too damn much.”

“OK, we go that way,” Derek pointed.

“How far?” Jeff stretched, his knees popping.

“That’s the funny thing-from the map, the tube we crossed should take us a third of the way there, as the crow flies, so to speak.”

“What?” Shad stepped over to look at the map.

“Look at the map scale for yourself.”

“That was forty-five minutes spent crawling-we could have walked it in not much more than fifteen. According to this scale we should have been at it for hours.”

“Residual magic effect speeding us up?” Fred asked.

“No,” the Shadowmancer shook his head.

“We get lost?”

“No. They used the wrong scale.”

“Well, they locked her up and threw away the key, its no surprise that in the re-copying the map over the years an error could have crept in,” Jeff pointed out.

“Except that the map is drawn to scale and the Assembly bored that tunnel to within five feet of this passage,” Derek pointed out. “If they were working off a flawed map we would have overshot this point by a wide margin.”

Shad was using the base of an unlit candle to measure distances on the map. “We’re not far from the tomb, maybe an hour’s walk, more or less.”

“That’s good news, right?” Sam said hopefully.

“No, its bad news,” the Jinxman passed the map back to Derek. “For some reason the Assembly made this sound like a dangerous job when it isn’t; the last group didn’t have a very tough job here either.”

“But they got paid anyway,” Derek interjected.

“Yeah, exactly. And the odds are we are getting paid, too. Why is the Assembly over-paying for easy jobs?”

“Maybe the Great Field is the real payoff: they get an artifact and throw in the second mission just for the look of the thing. I mean, it stands to reason an underground complex that would require hours to cross would be a big lure to various beasties,” Jeff pointed out. “Secrecy is how the Council defends it. They wouldn’t want squatters.”

“Anyone ask themselves why the Council doesn’t lube the lock themselves? If it is supposed to be their most well-guarded secret, why don’t they pull maintenance?” Shad wondered

“Because that’s all it is to them: a secret. They’re hoarders, not users. Look at our equipment level when we came here,” Derek pointed out.

“OK, good point.”

“Besides…wait, wasn’t there something about other people trying to let her out?” Derek asked Sam.

“Yeah, the Assembly takes them seriously, the Council doesn’t. That’s why the Assembly wants the defenses refreshed.”