They hear a story of two warriors –
New recruits – They set out
Though, yes, a blazing light had been
seen falling to the south and the Jarl of Aski was in a froth of
excitement at the prospect of new star-metal for his forge, a
mud-spattered fungus-picker had in the meantime trooped into the
freehol and in between slurps of hot, honeyed gin he told of a
strange sight: a tireless pair of warriors, full-armoured to conceal
all flesh, were doing battle in a mushroom patch a day's hike away
west. The adventurers sidled closer to the fire to listen but there
was nothing more to hear. The tale was too plain, the teller too dull
to be a liar.
The freehold's apriarists would not set
out on their great journey until the moons' shapes augured better, so
with a half-score of empty days ahead the party decided to set out
for the mushroom patch to see what could be seen.
They were six now: the grim ursar and
Dr. Pilsner the therapist had entrained Tuskilla, the mercenary
janissary (pleased with the gift of a suit of chainmail), as well as a half-mad seer, and a cheerful young apiarist
with time on his hands. At the last minute they were joined by the
jarl's own skald who went by the outlandish name of Manzanita – a
fistfighting harpist with a bow and a single turnip to his name.
There was also the bat-winged hound the ursar kept tied to a stick,
but this creature was proving difficult to tame and so it did not
enter into the party's official muster.
They took bearings from the
fungus-picker, provisioned themselves for four days and headed west
at next sunrise. None of them would ever return.
ADVENTURE BEGUN: FIRST DAY
Man-hounds of the frogoid strangers
–Ambush, bloodshed and misfire – Ambiguous messages from the bird
gods
They left Aski's meagre tarnich fields
and entered a broken land of lichen and stone. At noon the ursar was
in the party's head when he saw movement in the gully below. Two tall
figures leading a brace of leashed and snuffling hounds. The
strangers stopped and the hounds scented the air then reared and
yelped, and at this the ursar saw that the hounds were not hounds in
fact but hairless and dirty men who trotted brokenly on all fours.
Their handlers looked for all the world like man-sized frogs.
Wordlessly, the ursar drew back and gestured. They hid.
They saw the frogoid creatures brake
their hounds and then make up out of the gulley towards their
position. Three bolts found the first handler and it fell heavily to
the earth, but its dead claw dropped the leash and its three hounds
leapt. The janissary laughed and swung his blunderbuss toward the
naked, charging creatures and depressed the trigger. The blast
exploded the gunbarrel and threw the fighter backwards into a heap as
the snarling things leapt through the smoke into the adventurers'
front line. Blood splashed the stone as the first was halved with the
ursar's sword. Dr. Pilsner beat off the next with his flail but the
third butted Manzanita to the ground and then bit down hard on the
skald's exposed belly. The back-rank apiarist was enjoined to make a
counter-charge but the youth did not hear the order for he was
already running from the fray as fast as he could.
Meanwhile the seer had nocked another
arrow and let fly at the second frog-man now hopping away from the
scene and the extreme range of the shot proved no impediment for the
shaft pierced the creature's inflated gizzard-sack and stuck fast in
its spine and it toppled. The man-hounds danced away and then bolted
and were gone.
The skald's attacker was finally
bludgeoned to stillness. Dead, the creatures looked simply like shorn
men and women in repose, albeit ones whose thumbs had been removed
roughly with clippers, and whose limbs were twisted strangely by
their manner of moving. The janissary was roused – charred and in a
foul mood but otherwise unhurt. The seer washed and bound the skald's
wounds. The frogoids carried cubes of dried vegetable matter in
pouches and wore bands of silver and copper on their limbs and these
the adventurers sliced free of the corpses with their knives. As they
did they saw the brown blood sizzle in the air. The skald drained his
clay bottle of whatever spirit it contained and then, variously drunk
and bloodied, they all took the ursar's hook and chain and hung up
one of the frogoid corpses on the rockspire and put the empty bottle
underneath and let it fill with the juice that dripped slowly out. Of
the apiarist there was no sign. They ate lunch and set out again.
Towards sunset they were trudging
through a low forest when they observed a great murder of black birds
circling a spot some ways off their path. They went until they found
a tree full of the creatures though there was no obvious reason for
this. The ursar, strangely moved, called aloud to the bird god to
show a sign. One of the black things dropped from the branches and
pecked at the ground. There the ursar began to dig. The others slowly
joined in this labour and after some time their fingers met something
hard. It was a shiny cylinder a forearm-long, warm to the touch. Dr.
Pilsner remarked that they would all be likely dead or hideously
changed within the week for touching such a thing. Again the ursar
asked the bird god for a sign but if the bird god gave an answer this
time it was not intelligible. The flock dispersed. By now it was near
dark and none of them relished the thought of staying in that place
so they pressed on to the edge of the forest and there they camped.
In the night they heard a deep animal moaning sound.
 |
There is a thunder lizard – What
thunder lizards cannot abide – They encounter the duellists –
Rabbuck hunting
They heard the sound again the next
day. It came from a four-legged thunder-lizard that stood by a muddy
stream, bellowing. It wore a kind of broken harness on its leathern
hide and its flank was streaked with blood that ran from a half-dozen
broken arrows stuck there. For a moment they all stood rooted to the
stone and then the ursar regained himself and stepped out low to the
ground towards the creature whispering the invocations of his craft.
As he drew close the monster sighed and shook its horned head and
lolled its tongue. At this pathetic sight Manzanita felt moved to
play upon his harp but no sooner was the first string plucked than
the lizard grunted and charged at the sound and bucked at the lot of
them so the song was never learned for when the dust cleared the
beast was gone and Dr. Pilsner lay with broken ribs and the skald
himself had been kicked or trampled and his harp crushed too but his
misfortune did not earn the man any pity from his companions who
merely cursed his harp and all other harping besides – and what
fool did not know that thunder lizards hate the sound of the plucked
cat-gut?
Dr. Pilsner could barely walk unaided
let alone carry his pack so they rigged a kind of sled for him and
went on.
Finally they came to the mushroom field
and there were many kinds of mushroom here, many tall, drooping and
pink-canopied with thick, woody stalks. The also could hear the
clanging of metal on metal, and in their eagerness they forgot their
aches and raced through the maze towards the sound.
They found a clearing. Two men –
garbed alike in fluted, all-covering, ceramic armour – swung swords
at each other with awful strength. For all their might however, the
fighters were evenly matched, and each blow glanced away or missed
and struck the earth in time so regular that it seemed the
adventurers were watching less a duel than a dance. And never did
either fighter turn to them or give sign of having seen them, nor
respond to their hails.
The party watched this display for some
time, then circled round the battle till they came upon the tracks
that showed the way these strange combatants had come. One set of
tracks went due south and this they elected to follow.
Provisions were now running low, but
their trail led to a higher, southerly plain and the seer and the
skald both anticipated game could be had. So, of the afternoon, when
their trail passed by a little stream they split up and set to wait
in the grass. They were almost dozing off under the sun when a small
herd of rabbuck trotted up to drink. The wind was right, and in the
hail of spear and arrow they felled a slender doe which soon was
dressed and quartered and set to roasting over coals. Dr. Pilsner
flayed the rabbuck's head thinking that the resultant long-eared
furry face would make a warm and pleasing hat. And with such sartorial imaginings the party ate and camped and
went to sleep under the stars.
ADVENTURES CONCLUDED: THIRD DAY
The trail goes on straight – A
strange aperture – Into the ground – The helmet of the ancients –
Spiderbites – An underground river – The name of the ursar –
Darkness and death
Next day they were much refreshed,
though Manzanita's wound was not closing yet. They went along for a
long time and never once did the easy trail they followed deviate or
show any sign of its maker having once paused or slowed or given heed
to any care of the body or spirit. At last the tracks passed over a
strange circle patch in the ground that was crusted as with a net of
ancient, dead and questing weed roots – none of which had ever found
purchase on its smoothness. Nearby, another, smaller aperture, wide
as a simple mineshaft, marked the end of their trail. They hacked and
pried at the pearl metal or whatever it was and at last it opened
with a pop and showed a way down by a helix of stairs into darkness.
Dry, cold and dustless it was and they
lit torches and went down, seeing portals that reflected the light
but gave glimpse through of something pale and soft like a web or a
moth's cloak on the other side in the parallel shaft. The stairs took
them to another great door that opened with a clank and showed a wide
room lined with glinting black obsidian and another window – wide
this time – with a view onto a jungle of spiderweb.
On the floor in the room was, it
seemed, a third sibling of the warriors they'd seen fighting among
the mushrooms. It did not move. They spread about the room and
prodded the walls ineffectually and all was still and nothing was
found so at last they fell upon the body of the armoured fighter and
they turned it over – it was very heavy and as much statuary as
corpse – but there was a catch upon its helmet and this they
removed. There was the skull of a man inside, the flesh as dust. A
circlet or wrapping of a strange light and flexible metal came away in their
hands.
The ursar placed the helmet on his
head. He looked at his companions through a visor or beaver of
orange crystal. This is a space ship or a missile silo, he said. Was
the helmet giving him ideas?
We should return to the surface, they
said as one. But they did not. Let's go down further first. Let's see
what's at the bottom of this shaft.
Their torches still held. On the
steps the ursar trod on a spider big enough to nearly make him lose
his footing. He scraped his boot clean and on they went. At the base
of the shaft they heard a sound as of running water. Branching paths
of smooth-hewn rock showed sharp grooves cut in the floor each way.
They turned towards the water-sound. Let's go back, they said.
But not yet. They went on.
Dr. Pilsner suddenly fell to his knees
beating at his neck. Above them was a canopy of white web. They
screamed under a sudden rain of spiderlings.
This way. The ursar pointed away
from the densest strands of web and further down into the
tunnel. A cloud of fluttering legs descended onto the heads of the
trespassers. Stomping the thickening mass Manzanita and the seer
covered the others who hurled lit torches that flashed and failed to
set anything alight. Manzanita threw his clay jar but the surge of
tiny bodies broke the throw and the vessel did not break. The ursar
tore a strip of cloth and wrapped it deftly round a crossbow bolt and
doused it in their last spirits and the seer locked it in place. The
ursar touched a flame to the bolt and it fired and and arced into the
the darkness and was gone – a wave of tiny spiders hit them bodily
and the Dr. rasped out a groan like a strangled man so swollen were
his lips from venom and the party turned as one and stumbled into the dark.
They only stopped when they splashed
into the freezing water. It was a river eight spans wide where the
tunnel met a larger natural cavern that rushed hissing through a
savage cleft in the stone. One torch still burned. They looked back
and then they looked across.
The ursar looped his hooked chain
around his waist and said, each of you – loop this through your
belt or your skirtflap, and they all did so and then the ursar made
to wade into the water. Then he stopped still and turned back to them
and said, my name is Taul. What this declaration meant, whether a sign of trust or omen of doom, none could say. And then the last torch guttered and Taul
the ursar waded slow into the water. It iced up to his throat and he
groaned but made the other bank. He shook the chain in both
hands and bellowed in the darkness, come across.
First came Tuskilla the mercenary, and
then the seer and then Manzanita the skald, and last of all the
trembling Dr. Pilsner. Tuskilla made the centre of the water but then
gave a cry as he swung away into the current. The chain shuddered and
skittered and the seer slipped and came down hard, striking his face
on the stone and slipping in. The ursar whose name was Taul slipped too and splashed into the water on the far side and then the
darkness was absolute and all of them were in the cold, a score of
dumb appendages thrashing for a hold but to each hand the stone was
icy smooth and purchaseless and each of them was insensible and so envenomed besides that in a moment all impressions of touch and feeling were as one. They heard Dr. Pilsner try to shout,
save yourselves friends – I'm done for! as though with his knife he
meant to cut himself off the chain and so lessen the weight on his companions. But his
words were lost in the river sound and his numb hands insensible to
the knife and the task of cutting. Thus twisting like a drowned centipede the whole string of them were swept away.
In the dark there was a whimper. It was
the winged hound that had been left on the bank still trussed to the
ursar's catchpole, and which had never successfully been broken.
HERE ENDS THEIR ADVENTURE, IN DEATH
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