Legacy of Steel

14

She should have reported to the officer of the watch. He would be expecting her shortly, and her absence would be seen as dereliction of duty, an offense the knights punished harshly. But Sara did not believe Massard had gone to a tavern. It was too late, for one reason, and for another, she hoped fervently he had slipped away to do something he shouldn't. It was worth the risk to her to look. The trick would be finding him in the maze of streets and alleys both outside and inside the walls.

She had a bit of luck at the main gate. The officer of the watch at the walls was the young Knight Officer Targonne, who was a frequent guest at General Abrena's dinners. Sara had impressed him considerably by her actions to stop the assassin's knife, and he had altered his opinion of her age-worn abilities.

"Massard?" he replied to her query. "Yes, I know him. He went through perhaps an hour ago. Bundled in his cloak and reeking of spirits." The young man lifted his nose disdainfully at the memory. "He headed up that way, toward The Broken Barrel."

Sara gave him her thanks and walked up the road toward the notorious tavern. The Broken Barrel was one of those places where the patrons went for the brawls as much for the brews. There were usually more broken heads than broken barrels in the decrepit old place.

Despite the late hour, there were still some customers in the tavern when Sara poked her head in the door. She quickly scanned the drunken faces and ducked out again before someone saw her. Massard was not there.

How far could he go in an hour? Where did he go?

Sara studied the street in both directions and saw nothing more than a couple of draconians walking into a distant building and a gully dwarf poking through a pile of trash. She heard rats scuttling in the alley behind her. A few lights gleamed in the windows of the crowded tenements.

She began to walk slowly along the street, keeping her eyes open and her ears attuned to the night noises around her. She nearly walked past the gully dwarf, then changed her mind and paused beside him.

The furtive creature saw the black-cloaked figure and backed away warily. "No hurt, no hurt," he croaked at her in Common tongue. "I only look for food."

"Don't be frightened," Sara said softly. "I'm just looking for a friend. I thought he might have passed by here a little while ago. A big man, a knight like me. He has a beard and walks hunched forward."

The gully dwarf peered at her face through the darkness. "Huh! Friend of yours, is he? Poor friends you have. He came. He kicked me. I hope he falls in privy!"

Sara couldn't help but chuckle. "To be honest, so do I. Did you see where he went?"

"Bad friend," the gully dwarf muttered, wrinkling his flat nose. His long, scraggly beard drooped down his chest. "When he kick me, I follow to see if I could help him down a privy. But he go in that shop, the one with three hands on sign. He not come out yet."

"Thank you," Sara said, and she gave him a copper coin for the information. She left him gleefully stuffing the coin into a ratty bag by his feet, and she hurried along the street to the shop he described.

It was there on her left, a new wooden building and one of the few of stout construction. Its shutters were closed, and the door, when Sara tried it, was firmly locked. The sign above the entrance showed three red hands in the form of a triangle and read "The Red-Handed Pawnshop."

Figures, Sara said to herself. The front of the shop was totally dark, but when she checked the sides of the building, she noticed a slip of light shining from one of the rear windows. She slipped noiselessly down the side alley and found a crack in the shutter of the window. When she applied her eye to the crack, she could see two men sitting at a worn table in what looked like an office. The men were drinking from flagons and engaged in a spirited conversation. Although she could not see the second man well enough to identify him, she recognized the first man immediately. She had found Massard.

Her excitement rising, she pushed closer to the window and tried to hear what the men were saying. It was difficult to hear them because they were across the room and the stranger had his back to Sara. She only caught a few words: "Nightlord"… "artifacts"… "good prices." It was enough to send her curiosity soaring.

Then Massard picked up a bag lying on the floor near his feet. He tipped it over and dumped the contents on the table in front of the strange man. A number of items of different sizes spilled out. Sara strained to see what they were.

The stranger moved his oil lamp closer to the objects to examine them, and the light gleamed on their surfaces. Outside, Sara's mouth fell open. She knew at least one of those items. She had found it herself that afternoon in the rubble removed from the temple and had given it to Massard to pass on to the Nightlord. She could not mistake it, a silver armband decorated with a geometric pattern of lapis lazuli. The other things appeared to be equally as interesting: a delicate silver cup, a tattered pouch full of rolled scrolls, some bits of armor, and a dagger encrusted with jewels.

The stranger looked pleased. Massard sat back and smirked.

Sara grinned. So that's what the old thief is up to.

She heard a sound behind her. Then something very hard hit her on the back of the head.

The first sensation she became aware of was a throbbing pain in her head. The second was of being carried by her arms and legs.

She heard a voice mumble through a thick fog, "Let's dump her in the ruins. The horax will dispose of the body."

She was dreaming. Surely this was a nightmare. It had to be.

She felt hands on her ankles and on her arms. Her body jerked and swayed. She heard footsteps pad on stone.

Suddenly she was falling. She hated dreams about falling. They always ended with a sickening crunch, and she'd wake in her bed sweating and panting. This time was different. This time she landed with a sickening crunch, and she woke to find herself on a dirt floor in total darkness.

Terror jolted her back to reality. Her first compulsion was to freeze. She could see absolutely nothing around her, no walls, no floor. She could not even see her own hands. She huddled on her stomach where she landed and felt panic build within her like the nausea rising in her stomach.

Somewhere, far in the distance, she thought she heard footsteps that quickly faded away. A heavy silence closed in on her. No! No! her consciousness cried. Don't leave me here!

But she knew it was already too late. Whoever had dropped her in this black hole had already left. She was alone.

She lowered her pounding head, too terrified to move. She wanted to scream, but some subconscious knowledge kept her quiet. There was danger here, wherever here was. She vaguely remembered hearing someone say something, something about… what?

In frustration, her fingers dug into the loose dirt and gravel under her. She paused and ran her hands through the dirt again. The feel of that crumbled earth and broken rock felt familiar, and the familiarity jolted another memory loose in her aching mind. The voice had said "ruins." That was it! They had dumped her in the ruins!

Ever so carefully Sara eased to her knees and reached her hands outward in a circle around her body. Far to her right, her fingers brushed a stone wall. Her breath came out in a sob of relief. It was something substantial in the endless darkness, a solid barrier against her growing terror. She scrambled close to the wall and pressed her back against it. With the comforting stone behind her, she could let her whirling thoughts slow down into some semblance of sense.

She put her pounding head between her hands. A large lump, sticky with blood, lay under her hair on the back of her head. Nausea still roiled in her belly. She took several slow, deep breaths and tried to think through the waves of dizziness that rolled through her.

She realized now she was in the ruins of the old temple-that blasted shrine so aptly named the Temple of Darkness. Just knowing that eased much of her fear. The lord mayor had said the work crews had only excavated a few of the lower levels. If all else failed, she could just sit here until daylight when the slaves returned to their labors.

But even as part of her mind took comfort in that, another scrap of memory intruded into her thoughts. There was something else the strange voice had said, something about a… horax? The name sounded vaguely familiar; she just couldn't remember why. Her head was still dazed from the blow, and her mind seemed slightly out of focus.

She inhaled deeply and began to take stock of her situation. The air was very cold and smelled of dust and old stone and dank mold. She realized her cloak was gone and her sword, too.

Her hand suddenly grabbed for the thong around her neck. Cobalt! If she could summon him, he could help her out of this hideous darkness. But the thong and the dragon scales were gone, and a burning sensation at the back of her neck told her it had been torn off.

She slumped against the stone, feeling terribly alone and vulnerable. Horax… a doubt nagged at her. What was a horax?

The cold began to penetrate her uniform, and she shivered. What she wouldn't give for a cup of tarbean tea and a light.

Sara dug her fingers into her knees. This was ridiculous. Why should she sit here the rest of the night and slowly freeze to death while Massard sat in his warm tent, counted his money, and laughed up his sleeve? That son of an ogress had done this to her, and by any god that still paid attention to Krynn, she was not going to let him get away with it! She had to get out. She had to confront him with his crimes and make him choke on his own arrogance.

She lifted her hands above her head and felt her way up the wall until she was standing upright. If there was a ceiling to this corridor or room or whatever she was in, it was beyond her reach. Keeping her hands flat on the wall, she extended her senses outward to seek any clue she could find that could help her find a way to go.

Slowly small details nudged into her awareness. There were tiny sounds she had not noticed before: the steady drip of water far away, the scuttling of a rat's feet on stone, and a very faint rattle, as if a bit of gravel had slipped loose and rolled down a slope. She also felt a slight movement of air on her right cheek. And where there was moving air, there had to be some sort of opening.

With infinite caution, she inched her way along the wall to her right, one tiny step at a time. Each time she moved, she extended her fingers and her foot forward to feel the stone ahead. It was slow going, but at least she felt as if she was doing something.

After a while, Sara decided she must be in a corridor. The wall was very straight, and there was no feeling of space around her. The air continued to waft gently past her, moving sluggishly through the blackness. She gritted her teeth and pushed blindly on.

After what seemed a very long time, Sara's fingers found the edge of a door and the end of the corridor. She felt all around the opening and discovered it was an arched entrance into an open space. Keeping her fingers on the stone wall, she stepped into the chamber.

Her eyes, so accustomed to the Stygian darkness, nearly passed over the faint luminescence. She blinked and looked again, and there it was, a ghostly blob of pale greenish light. Then she saw another and another scattered across the floor and walls of the large cavern. A largish patch gleamed like a will-o'-the-wisp on the wall several steps beyond her hand, so she edged over to take a look.

To her surprise, the phosphorescent gleam came from a round growth of lichen that clung to the wall like thick gray moss. The patch came off easily in her hands and lay on her fingers, softly glowing. Excitedly she looked around for more and found two other patches growing within her reach. She peeled them off, too, and fastened them into a ball with the leather thong from her hair. Their combined light barely lit the floor by her feet, but any light was a joy after the impenetrable blackness of the corridor.

She made her way across the floor of the chamber and added two more glowing clumps to her ball. At last she had enough illumination to take a look around.

The slaves had obviously done some extensive work in this room. The floor was cleared of almost all the fallen rock and debris, and only a few large pieces remained. The ceiling had been shored up by timbers in several places, and any artifacts and bones had been removed. Best of all, to Sara's mind, there was an obvious trail of booted prints leading through a layer of dust on the floor to a second entrance on the far side of the chamber. Her head-bashing friends, no doubt.

The skittering sound of falling gravel came across the room from the corridor she had left. Sara froze. Her blood throbbed in her head, and the hairs rose on the back of her neck. She felt it once again, that insistent warning that something was watching her.

All at once the hazy words came back to her: "The horax will dispose of the body." The horax. An image formed in her memory of something she had heard about years ago, of a large insectlike creature that lived in subterranean tunnels and fed off the living and the dead. Her breath rushed through her chest, and she hurried forward into the second hallway.

In the pale light of her lichen clump, she could see two pairs of tracks. One set led into the chamber the way she had come, while the other set led out along this other corridor. Sara stumbled forward gratefully.

With something to guide her, she could move faster through the ruined halls, though not fast enough to suit her. She had to move carefully for fear of losing the tracks in the darkness or falling into occasional fissures that split the floor. Other arched doorways led off the corridor, but Sara continued to follow the footprints in the thin layer of dust.

The strange scuffling sound came again, a little louder and a little closer this time. Something chittered in the dense darkness behind her.

Sara stifled the urge to look back and kept her eyes pinned to the tracks on the floor. She came to a flight of stairs and stumbled up the steps as fast as her shaking legs could carry her.

"Please let there be an opening. Please let me out of here!" she panted softly.

Another large chamber opened up before her. This one, too, had been cleared, and more clumps of glowing lichen grew on the walls and the high ceiling. A few rats poked their heads up when she entered, then slipped furtively away into the thick darkness.

The footprints led plainly across the wide room past a huge crack in the floor to an arched entrance. At the far side, where the tracks exited the room, they joined with a much larger trail of barefooted prints that came up from a staircase. That trail had to be the footprints of the labor gangs that were excavating the temple's levels.

The movement of air Sara had noticed earlier was noticeably stronger. A definite draft, similar to the smell of the city above, blew through this entrance, stirring her hair.

Sara clutched her ball of lichen and hurried forward.

Behind her, at the far end of the room, a long, slender shape, as black as the darkness around it, skittered in through the door. A second followed, then a third. Two more crawled out of the crevice in the floor. They met in the middle of the chamber, chittered among themselves, and all five scurried after the fleeing woman.

Sara heard them coming. The noise sounded dry and rattling, like the bones thrown by a soothsayer. Fear surged through her. She broke into a trot, then a run. She had to be close to the opening. The breeze was stronger, and the smells were different.

All at once, the ceiling opened up into a huge hole, and overhead she saw the gloomy night sky of Neraka and the faint reflection of distant torchlight. Dropping her bundle of lichen, she scrambled under the opening and looked frantically for the way out.

Her shout of joy died in her throat, for all she saw were the sheer walls of the hole. Paths came down the upper slope of the huge crater, but at the bottom, where the hole broke into the remains of the temple, there was a twelve-foot drop down to the old floor. Sara looked around frantically. There had to be something the slaves used to climb out of the ruin. She saw gouges in the dirt walls where ladders must have stood, but now there was nothing. No boxes, no ladders, not even a step-stool.

What a stupid arrangement! she cursed. They couldn't build a simple set of steps for the slaves to use?

Suddenly she whirled. Something moved in the darkness, its hard feet scratching against the stone. She could see nothing beyond the faint glimmer of the lichen on the floor where she dropped it. The thing moved again, then another thing clicked along the wall to her right. They sounded large and solid and quite at home in the darkness.

Sara's hand automatically flew to her sword, only to meet the empty scabbard. Her attackers had left her with no weapons. Or had they missed one? Her heart in her throat, she bent and reached for the slender blade in her boot. She cried with relief as her fingers found the stiletto still safely tucked away.

"Get out of here!" she shouted at the unseen things, and she brandished her knife in their general direction.

"There you be," shouted a voice above her. "Are you fine?"

Sara's head jerked up in surprise. "No, I'm not fine! Please, help "me!" She searched the hole overhead and finally saw a small black figure perched on the edge of the drop-off. It appeared to be peering down at her. "Who are you?" she cried.

"I Fewmet, the gully dwarf. You give me coin and kind words. I see men drag you off, so I follow," came the raspy, hesitant voice.

Sara did not think she had ever heard a sound so sweet "Fewmet, please, could you see if there is a ladder or a rope or anything I could use to climb out of here? There's something down here that wants to eat me."

"Oh, the horaxes. I no like them," commented the gully dwarf.

"I no like them either!" Sara shouted. "Would you please hurry?"

She heard a scrambling noise as the gully dwarf climbed out of the crater, then her attention flew back to the horax. They were scuttling closer from several directions. She stamped and shouted and waved her knife, and for a moment they seemed to hesitate. One edged warily into the glimmer of light from the lichen, and for the first time, Sara was able to see her pursuers.

Her breath caught in her throat. The thing in the greenish light was long and low to the ground, shiny black, and segmented like an armored centipede. It had six pairs of legs and short but powerful-looking mandibles that moved slowly back and forth as if the creature were tasting the air.

"Fewmet, hurry!" she shouted. She backed up until her shoulders touched the wall.

A horax made a feint toward her leg. Sara screamed and kicked at its head. The force of her blow sent it rolling back into the darkness. Chittering sounds echoed out of the silence and rattled around her head.

"Knight woman?" came the voice of the gully dwarf.

"No can find the ladders. Men move far away. Did find this." Something long and thin fell out of the sky and crashed at her feet, just barely missing her already battered head.

"What is it?" she yelled.

"Torch!" he answered proudly.

Sara swallowed her frustration. "Fewmet, I don't have any way to light it."

"It already lit. Just blow on it."

Cautiously she reached out and picked up the torch. One end was very hot and glowed a faint red as if the flame had just been banked.

The horax suddenly chittered, and two of the creatures charged at her from left and right. Sara did not have time to think. She blew frantically on the torch, then whirled the end outward toward the horax on her left. To her surprise and the horax's, the torch burst into bright yellow flame. The horax chittered in rage and fell back, its eyes blinded.

The light was so bright to Sara's eyes after the blackness of the ruin that for several moments she couldn't see either. The creature on her right scuttled under her desperately waving knife and fastened its mandibles on her ankle.

Sara shrieked a cry of mingled pain and rage. She whipped the knife around to an underhanded grip and drove the point downward toward the black shape she could barely see by her leg. Her stroke fell true and pierced the horax just behind one of its eyes. The terrible pressure on her ankle relaxed, and the creature slumped to the ground, mortally wounded.

Furiously she kicked it in the direction of the other horaxes. One of them grabbed the body and hauled it out of sight. The others fell back to regroup.

Slowly Sara's eyes grew accustomed to the change of light. The torch burned merrily in her hand, throwing a myriad of dancing shadows on the wall of the corridor. The horaxes remained out of sight, although she could still hear them chittering and scuffling just beyond the torchlight.

"Fewmet?" she called hopefully. "Can you find a rope?"

Silence met her query.

"Fewmet!" she bellowed again. To no avail. The night above remained quiet; the gully dwarf had left. Sara fought down a surge of panic. Maybe the gully dwarf had gone for help; maybe he was seeking for a ladder somewhere else. Surely he hadn't just taken off to look for a snack in some trash dump.

A strange sound burst out of the darkness where the horaxes lurked. A high-pitched humming sound reverberated along the corridor and vibrated down into the depths of the ruin. It lasted several seconds, stopped, and started again.

Sara shivered. The noise sounded too much like a signal.

The humming stopped, and a deep silence settled back over the lightless chambers. Then, far away, from somewhere deep within the old temple, came an answer.

The woman gasped. She dropped the torch and made a desperate leap upward toward safety. She managed to jam the blade of her knife into a crack in the wall above her head, and she hung there trying to find purchase for her feet. But the walls were smooth stone at her level, and her body, weakened from the blow to her head, could not muster the strength to make the sheer climb. The blade of her knife slipped loose, and she tumbled to the ground beside the torch. She lay still, sick and dizzy.

The horaxes seemed to sense her weakness. Three of them moved closer, clacking their mandibles.

Sara managed to stagger to her feet. Her ankle hurt like fury and her head was ringing. She picked up the torch and waved it at the creatures. "Get away!" she hissed.

They stopped just out of her reach, but they did not retreat. They had her pinned against the wall and they knew it. They simply waited, their round, black eyes watching her every move.

Sara waited, too, her knife in one hand, the torch in the other. Her eyes never left the shiny black horaxes.

Two sounds simultaneously registered in her throbbing head, a man's voice and the clatter of dozens of horax feet coming along the corridor.

"Is there anyone down there?" the man's voice yelled.

"Yes! I'm here! Hurry, please! They're coming!" she screamed.

"Sara Conby?" the man cried, amazed.

"Yes! Hurry! I need a rope!"

Shouts echoed down the crater. Someone called an order, and suddenly a rope snaked down. Before she could wonder how she would find the strength to tie it around her, another rope dropped down, and a man slithered to the ground beside her. He took one look at the horaxes, spat an oath, and grabbed Sara around the waist.

"Haul us up. Now!" he shouted.

The horaxes lunged forward. Sara threw her torch at the creatures and wrapped her arms around the man's chest. In the guttering torchlight, she realized she was face-to-face with Morham Targonne. The young knight grinned at her, and suddenly they were hoisted into the air.

Their bodies banged against the wall as they were dragged upward. Sara held on with all her remaining strength until she found herself lying on the path above the opening.

The knight chuckled. "You can let go now before you crush my armor."

Sara lay back on the dirt and gazed upward at the blessed sky. Dawn lit the eastern horizon with pale gray light, and the air was bitterly cold. A few snowflakes drifted down to land on her face. She smiled at the world. She had never seen anything so lovely.

A wizened face with a long beard blocked her vision, and Fewmet the gully dwarf looked worriedly down at her. "Knight woman all right? I find help."

For an answer, Sara threw her arms around him and hugged him, rags and all. Then the world whirled through her mind, and she slipped quietly into a peaceful darkness.