Untold Adventures: A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

5.

“And I’m to activate this device, am I?” Rorik asked suspiciously as he trudged along beside Gnarl and Miriam, approaching a great dune of sandy rust. “How exactly?”

“Once we’re there, we’ll know,” Gnarl said. “Or so I’m told. You’ll do it with your many-tool-if we can win past any demonic guardians that may protect it.”

“Oh-is that all we have to do?” Rorik growled.

“But what is this crimson desert?” Miriam asked, shielding her eyes from the metal edged wind. “It doesn’t seem to be sand, exactly-is it really rust?”

Rorik spat into the dune of oxidized particles as they trudged up its slippery face. “It is! A desert of rust-and rusting hulks. During the Blood War, the devils of Asmodeus built strongholds here, in this very plane, around the nameless swamp. Fortresses of solid iron, they were, outposts for attacks on demon rivals, through the Gates of the Nine Hells. There was a nasty pair of demon lords who made poisonous vapors steam up from the local swamps. The fortresses corroded, quick as a dice throw, and fell around the horns of their enemies. The rust was blown into the air and came down like bloody snow! And the devils who built the fortresses were either buried alive, or fled.” He shook his bushy head grimly. “Now you see all that remains, a world of rust and dried blood.”

“You know a deal about it,” Gnarl observed.

“Dwarves take an interest in all things metallic,” Rorik said. “And in magical devices. It is said there are many curious treasures buried hereabouts. Questers have sought them before… ah, I believe we see some of those courageous seekers now. They got here before us.”

Jutting from the crest of the dune, impaled on tall spikes of rusty metal, were five mummified bodies: human travelers, their eyeless, leathery faces contorted in eternal agony, withered arms akimbo like scarecrows.

Gnarl grimaced, remembering what the warlock’s minion had said: How many times have I let mad suicides through this portal…

“Look-we’re almost at the old fortress!” Miriam said, pointing. “We’re a bow shot away from its outer walls.”

Gnarl nodded, gazing down on the spires, obelisks, and jagged-edged bulwarks of pocked and rusted iron rising starkly from the dull crimson plane. No shadows should exist in that place, with the light so eerily uniform-yet he spotted one, an inky stain at the base of a tower angling crookedly from the desert. As he watched, the shadow moved, detaching from the tower’s base to seep into the sand, vanishing. He suspected a phantom, perhaps a wailing ghost. But the trapped spirits of demons were said to wander these plains, too…

“You didn’t perchance have the good sense to bring any water with you, Gnarl?” Rorik asked, wiping rust-grit from his mouth.

“I had not planned to come here yet,” Gnarl answered ruefully. “I thought we’d spend an hour or two outfitting-but as you refused to come any other way, I was forced to bring you… suddenly.”

“No water.” Rorik looked at Miriam. “Miriam? Can’t I just crush him a little? Perhaps a few fingers? Or his nose?”

She shook her head. “He may need his fingers to do magic-and I rather like his nose. But what defenses have we, Gnarl, before we enter the old fortress? Surely the warlock gave you something.”

Gnarl licked his dry, dusty lips, tasting iron, and took from the pocket of his cloak the two attack spells the warlock had given him. “Only these.” One was an ivory tube no bigger than an index finger. The other, a glass ball about the size of a plum, was wrapped in purple silk. It seemed to mutter something as he held it in his hand. “Sernos said to use this one only in dire circumstances. Its name is Porphyros. This tube projects a spell that causes ghostly befuddlement-or some such thing, and can be used only once. It’s not a lot, I’m afraid. It’s all he could manage in his weakened state.”

Gnarl replaced the glass ball and the ivory tube, and drew his dagger to keep it ready. He frowned, seeing the dagger had turned a strange reddish hue. He tapped it experimentally with a finger and the blade crumbled into red dust, blowing into nothingness. It had rusted through.

“Whoa ho!” crowed Rorik. “There you see how the Plains of Rust treat unmagicked metalwork! I just hope these spells that the warlock has sent with you are of better quality. But perhaps he simply wanted you to die here, punkling. Could be that your family angered him in the distant past. Consider the special name Sernos has chosen for himself, after the manner of tieflings!”

“Ah… he did not reveal that name to me.”

“No? His name is Revenge, young fellow! Revenge!”

Gnarl remembered, then, the warlock’s cryptic remark: Time runs short… my name must be fulfilled soon.

Rorik turned to Miriam. “I came unprepared. What of you? Any magic in that quiver?”

She shrugged. “My arrowheads are of elven steel-they’ll resist the rust vapors. I have a healing gem, and one magic arrow that might apply-its arrowhead is treated with demonbane. I’ve carried it for two years and never had occasion to use it.”

“One magic arrow!” Rorik groaned. “Not enough. The place stinks of necrotic energy. Listen-the very wind is revolted by the spirits who flit through it!”

They listened, for a moment, to the keening of the wind-and its metallic soughing carried a note of horror.

“Still,” Miriam ventured, “we must try the fortress. Perhaps there’s water there…”

“Poisonous water, if any at all,” the dwarf grumbled. “No food, no water, few weapons. A fine mess. Come along, let’s get this over with-we’ll parch up here in the wind.”

They descended the far face of the dune, half stepping, half sliding down until they reached the flatter ground below.

Rorik stumped impatiently ahead, battlehammer in hand, and Gnarl murmured to Miriam, “You said you could have killed me with your arrows, but somehow you missed. How did that happen?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t trying too hard to aim.”

“Does that mean that you pity me-or you like me?”

She rolled her eyes. But he saw she was smiling. “Well-”

But up ahead of them, Rorik gave out a howl of dismay. He was sinking in the coating of rust particles as in quicksand. It was a sinkhole over the Bloody Fen. The sinkhole could be seen now that Rorik thrashed in it, up to his armpits in rusty muck.

Gnarl ran to him, knelt near the edge of the sinkhole, and reached one hand toward Rorik, the other to Miriam. “Take my hand, Miriam!” She braced herself, digging her bow into the rusty sand, and they clasped hands to wrists. The touch thrilled him, but he concentrated on pulling Rorik out. Miriam pulled Gnarl, and Gnarl pulled Rorik by the battlehammer’s head. Grunting, they dragged the dwarf out of the sinkhole.

Rorik got to his feet, swearing blackly as he brushed damp rust from his short legs. “Damn it to the reeking depths of the Ninth Hell!”

Gnarl noticed a juddering turmoil in the red scum on the sinkhole-a kind of corroded metal shark’s fin surfaced, wending back and forth. Then something reared up out of the sinkhole, a bestial face made of rust on a framework of necrotic energies, a gigantic feral visage, seven feet high with red-iron jaws like a bear trap, snapping at Rorik. The dwarf shouted in mingled fear and fury and swung his battlehammer-it struck deep, and the bestial face exploded into a sparkling cloud of rust particles, some of which the dwarf inhaled, sputtering as he backed away.

Rorik wiped his eyes, then looked in puzzlement at his battlehammer. “What’s wrong with my hammer?”

Gnarl saw that the hammer’s iron head was steaming, seething within itself-and then it buckled inward, crumbling into a streamer of red powder. The rust was blown away on the wind, leaving only the hardened oak handle.

“Will you look at this!” Rorik snarled. “I’ve had this hammer for-” He broke off, shivering, blinking rapidly. His eyes glazed over and his mouth opened wide with a demonic howl. A harsh, sibilant voice issued from his mouth. “This one shall replace me in the red pit!” And Rorik began to walk toward the sinkhole, as if determined to plunge into it.

“No!” Miriam cried out. “Stop him!” She jumped toward Rorik and tried to pull him back. He struck at her shoulder with his hammer handle, knocking her sprawling.

Gnarl drew his ivory tube-it was in fact the hollow finger bone of a wizard-and he stepped between Rorik and the hidden pit. Face twisted, the possessed dwarf raised the hammer’s handle to strike at him-but Gnarl blew hard through the tube, directing it at Rorik’s head. A jet of brilliant green mist issued from the ivory tube and formed a ghostly cobra in the air. The green, transparent cobra struck at Rorik’s forehead-sinking fangs into his skull without drawing blood, striking only the possessing spirit. The fiend was driven out, showing itself as a visible shriek emitting from the dwarf’s mouth, and it rushed at Gnarl.

Gnarl ducked, warding the apparition off with the ivory tube. The ghost cobra still had hold of the spirit-it whirled overhead once, then dived down into the pit. Gnarl glimpsed the dark spirit’s horrified ectoplasmic face as it was pulled down in a whirlpool whipped up by the ghost snake, both apparitions vanishing into the red murk with a final sucking sound. Rorik squatted on the scarlet sand, gasping, rubbing his eyes. Then he shook himself and stood, stretching. “Thought I was going to drown in that stuff,” he muttered. “Couldn’t control myself.”

“Rorik,” Miriam said, as Gnarl helped her up, “you might consider thanking Gnarl for saving your life.”

“Bah!” Rorik snorted, glaring at Gnarl. “Rubbish! I would not have been here to sink in sinkholes if not for his theft, his deception-his foolish truck with tiefling warlocks!”

“He has a point,” Gnarl allowed. “Miriam, are you hurt?”

“Nothing broken. Rorik, if we are to proceed, let’s use what’s left of that hammer to prod the ground, find the way through.”

Using the hammer handle, they soon found a hidden shore, curving along the edge of the fen under the ferrous crust. They kept to the shoreline and at last found themselves standing on solid ground within the rusty spines and the leaning, red-crusted towers of the old fortress.

Gnarl decided he’d better keep them moving. He looked around for the landmark the warlock had described. “There’s supposed to be an entrance under the tower that leans farthest toward the horizon,” Gnarl said. “There it is!”

The half-fallen tower was like a great corroded sword two hundred feet high, thrusting up diagonally from the metallic sands at a sharp angle, pointing to their left. Gnarl led the way, almost excited about the quest again, wondering if he could really be close to triggering the creation of Glorysade.

Then he saw a crescent-shaped opening at the base of the swordlike tower. “There! Look, Miriam!” His destiny seemed to call to him-and he ran toward it, dimly aware of the others shouting for him to be more cautious. He stopped at the entrance. It was dim, but not truly dark within. Rusty sand had blown through the entrance, covering the floor. A muted reek of decay and alien musk wafted from somewhere inside.

There was no turning back. He stepped through the entrance, feeling a drumlike hollowness under the thin, rusty floor beneath his feet, before his upper arms were grabbed from above. He felt himself dragged upward, into the air. He looked up and felt ice where his heart should be. A vrock! His uncle had told him of these winged, vulturelike demons-and had given him nightmares with the telling. Now he was living the nightmare as he shouted and writhed in the vrock’s grasp. With his arms pinioned, he could not reach a weapon.

The vrock’s body was humanoid but with a raptor’s claws for feet, a vulturine head, and silvery eyes glittering with intelligence under stubby horns. The creature had a twenty-foot wingspan and a lean, muscular body far more powerful than Gnarl’s own. It squeaked at him. “Ceeeease to struuuuugle! I will lift you to my aerie and tear you to pieeeeces at my leisure-be pleeeeeased to feed your betters!” Gnarl struggled in its grip as it lifted him into the dimly lit interior of the high, narrowing, rusted shaft. He recoiled from the reeking tongue that issued from its snapping, fang-lined beak to taste his face.

“They like to eat the face first,” his uncle had said matter-of-factly.

“But why wait to rend, to tear,” the creature creaked as it flapped its great wings to lift him higher. “I shall pull you apart and watch as you feeeeel it all!”

And then he heard Miriam shout from beneath, “Stop moving, you fool! I can’t get a shot!”

He made himself go limp. The yellow beak gaped to encompass his face-and then an arrow swished from below, buried itself in the base of the vrock’s long neck. It squealed, the shrieking so close his ears ached with it, and his face was sprayed with rancid spittle. Black blood spurted about the fletch of the arrow-and more spurted about the second and third arrows shot from below, each shaft burying itself deeply. But something else issued from the beast, like motes into the air. Gnarl’s mind clouded, his limbs suddenly heavy from the spores, his thoughts veering wildly.

Thrashing in the air, the vrock squeezed him brutally, vindictive in its death throes, so he could hardly breathe-and then it gasped and its grip relaxed. He was slipping free, falling, plummeting toward the dusty floor of the chamber. He seemed to fall in slow motion.

He lost sight of the expiring demon as he crashed through the rust-eaten iron of the floor and into the subchamber beneath.