Once the entire team was up and through the trap door in the ceiling of the cistern, which took a while, it was heading on toward O3OO in the morning. All of us were starting to feel the time crunch. If we didn’t make our overwatch position to support the assault on the main gate, that attack was “going pear-shaped,” in Tanner’s words. The Rangers under Captain Knife Hand didn’t have the ammo or manpower to push through. But that wouldn’t stop them from trying.
The question was… how many more traps and enemies did we have to face down here?
The answer on the other side of the trap door in the ceiling was almost immediate. One by one, we came up the rope and hauled our gear up. I was one of the last because I’m not that important right now. Let’s face it, no one is interested in starting up a dialogue on relations with anything creepy or crawly we’re going to find down here. At least I was ahead of the Lost Boys in the pecking order.
As soon as I was through, I saw why the Rangers who’d gone before me were urging quiet and stealth as much as possible on the other side of the high trap door.
We had found the central well. The one spoken of by the Old Mother.
The express elevator to the penthouse suite.
Or at least, we stood to one side of it. We were in a long hall that ran along one edge of the well, continuing as far as we could see with our enhanced vision. Less a hall and more a gallery. Like some sacred space of prayer one might find in an old monastery. Or some once-princely castle that had fallen into despair and ruin. Now bare and spartan, cloaked in shadow and gloom. Haunted and forgotten.
The inner side of the hall opened directly onto the well. The vast and massive well. A virtual canyon of underground dead space. But not round. More like an inverted pyramid of emptiness sunk underground. And across that canyon we could see more halls or galleries over there, layered one on the next like some enormous belowground cityscape. Some sections had caved in and crashed down onto others within the crawling necropolis, revealing the insides of tombs over there. Far away and forever out of
reach. And far above, maybe six or seven stories up, loomed the dome described by the Old Mother. It was covered in paintings, like the Sistine Chapel or the Hagia Sophia. But the darkness was such that I, at least, couldn’t make out any details up there, even with the Hunters’ Fellowship.
It was all utterly fantastic, and bizarrely mesmerizing.
But none of this was the reason for our quiet and stealth. What had us cautious were the torches in the upper levels moving around the visible sides of the well. Many of them. Moving in masses. And it was here that the Moon Vision of the Hunters’ Fellowship came in handy. It focused on the light sources bobbing up and down among the upper levels, focused and zoomed in, using those torches as anchor points.
Orcs. And lots of them.
Far too many of them for us to fight. Kurtz was on that immediately.
He swore first. Then, “We cannot get into a fight down here. Clock’s burnin’ and we gotta make our time hack.” He looked around at everyone, making sure we were reading him clearly. “We’re gonna creep our way through as far as we can. We engage as a last resort. Repeat… only on a hard compromise situation.”
He looked at me.
“You. You got that… ring thing. Turns you invisible and all. Right?” I nodded.
“You comfortable using it?” I said I was.
He nodded. Then made our plan. We were going to move up, following this gallery we were in. If it was like the ones we could see on the other side, we’d have opportunities to climb up to higher levels via stairs and long sloping ramps. And there would be tombs to hide in set within the walls of the sides of the inverted pyramid that was the well. Maybe, if the enemy had managed to get down into these levels, then maybe a lot of the tombs’ nastier denizens had already been dealt with. Maybe.
In essence, Sergeant Kurtz was proposing a creep right through their lines and up into the library tower itself. Tanner would stay on point and I would follow close behind. If needed, I’d activate the ring while the team hid, and it would be up to me to find a route through the orc patrols ahead.
That made perfect sense if you just said it. Doing it sounded crazy. At
least it did to me.
It was clear, as we studied the orcs, that they were looking for something up there above us in the top levels of the tomb.
“Mighta heard gunfire below,” suggested Brumm, and then spat dip. We started out.
The first hour was solid. We made good time as we passed the gloomy remains of tombs set in the walls. Skulls and carved runes adorned these places like warnings not to enter them on penalty of death. Or sometimes we made our way through rooms full of ancient weapons and chests like dusty old soldiers standing at attention. Kennedy pointed out that there was probably treasure in those chests if it was anything like the game.
“Probably traps too,” someone muttered. “I thought wizards were supposed to be smart.”
“You mean high on I-N-T,” Kennedy responded. Intelligence.
“Anyway if I’m the wizard… then Soprano’s the thief.”
“I’m no thief,” Soprano protested from under his load of ammo for the two-forty. “Ain’t never been caught stealin’ nothin’.”
“The thief,” explained Kennedy patiently, “detects traps and disarms them. Like you did with the trap door.”
Soprano nodded at this, then agreed. “Then I’m the thief. Okay. Bene.” We bypassed our first swarm of orcs easily.
You could smell them from a long way off because they reeked. Real ripe. We faded into the ruins of a smaller tomb whose door had been pried open at some point in the past in order that it could be thoroughly looted. The Rangers stacked inside the tight tomb, weapons ready to do murder.
“If just one comes to investigate,” whispered Kurtz as they approached, “I’ll pull it inside and do it. Keep silent until I give the order to engage.”
Kurtz had his garrote out. Brumm was ready to support with a folding seven-inch karambit knife that he was holding ready near the door to the tomb’s darkness. His other gloved hand was free, ready to control Kurtz’s would-be victim once the strangling began.
But the orcs passed without incident. There had to be at least thirty of them in that troop. We waited, checked the route forward, and then continued on our route up through the levels.
The next dodge happened midway up a set of titanic stairs. We were
nearing the uppermost levels and the dome above. Now that we were getting close, the torches the orcs had left burning and our augmented vision showed me more of the fantastic dome above and the images that had been left to adorn its surface.
Twelve grim figures were featured. They looked less like time-lost special operators and more like Ringwraiths straight from the Lord of the Rings movies. They wore shadowy armor and dark cloaks. Their faces were lightless voids that felt wrong to look at. The only thing you could see in them, those voids now that you got close, were burning red eyes that stared down into the vast well below. At first I thought the red eyes must’ve been a fantastically vibrant pigment of paint used long ago with some technique that gave the glaring eyes a menacing, dismissive contempt for the viewer. But as my enhanced vision zoomed in, I could see that they were no mere tricks of paint and lighting. They were fantastically huge gems. Set in the dome sculpted above. Bigger than anything I’d ever seen before. And probably worth an untold fortune.
“Look at those,” Tanner said halfway up the dusty gray stairs we were climbing along the edge of the well. We were near a fabulous giant bowl that was set in the railing and must have once served as some immense brazier to light the way for funerary processions bringing more heroes down into the dark of the tomb to sleep forever.
But somehow, even as I thought that, my mind told me that wasn’t right. That wasn’t what this place was.
There were no heroes down here. This wasn’t that kind of place.
This is where, some voice in my mind whispered, evil goes to wait for its next chance.
Chance at what? I wondered.
I was sure I didn’t want to know the answer.
And then we heard the orcs coming toward the top of the stairs just above. Singing their marching songs. Yeah. I didn’t mention that part, but the orcs had a kind of cadence of grunting and shouting and some words they sang as they moved. It was low, and harsh, and ominous.
The closest I can come to comparing it to something is that it was kind of like a demonic mumble rap. The orc troopers making the baseline thumps and thuds and other noises while one caller, their marching sergeant, did a
kind of spoken-word poetry of violence, mayhem, and murder. Or at least that seemed to be the gist from the few words I could catch in Turkic and Arabic.
But like I said this orc swarm was coming straight at us from the top of the stairs, and there was no place the main body of our team could get to for a fade before the enemy topped the stairs, looked down, and saw a bunch of Rangers with murder in their hearts.
My mind saw an immediate firefight. Soprano and Rico were already down on the steps setting up the two-forty. Thor had his sniper rifle leveled on the big cold brazier. The other snipers were slinking into the shadows and getting ready to fire. Brumm was farther down with the SAW covering our backtrail.
But it would be loud, and there were at least ten other mobs of orcs all across the levels below and above us. There was no getting around that, or what would happen once we revealed our presence, and stealth was no longer an option.
We’d be surrounded and out of ammo in pretty short order. We would not reach our support position. The attack would fail.
I slipped the ring on. I’d had it ready. I ran by Tanner and said, “Keep down!” as I picked up a clay funeral urn.
I haven’t mentioned that either. But there are ancient and dusty urns of all shapes and sizes everywhere, on every level. There’s so many of them you don’t see them after a while. And where there aren’t urns there are grotesque candle holders that verge on the obscene. Scenes of rape and pillage. Twisting demons and snakes. Dragons. So I grabbed one medium- sized urn and ran to the top of the steps as fast as I could. Straight at the marching orcs who were about to spot us. One-handed, I chucked the urn off into the darkness to the left. Into a dark vaulted hall that intersected our own. I was almost on top of the lead orcs as I did it. I was face to face with a platoon of wild-eyed and snarling orcs who couldn’t see me. Or so I hoped. Fangs. Darkly glittering malevolent eyes. Weapons. Spears. Short swords. Axes. Armor made of leather. Spikes. Scars and strange white tattoos. Horrific bad breath.
The urn crashed in the darkness of the hall off to our left. My left. Their right. And they stopped. Their war leader gave some shout. Instantly the orcs were spreading out, weapons ready to do instant violence.
“I’m here,” whispered Autumn in my mind. She had come up to just below the level of the top stair. Almost invisible in her cloak and hidden behind a statue of a snarling minotaur with a giant battle axe at the top of the stairs. Golden coins and dead candles lay all around the base of the statue.
“I’ll trick them now,” she whispered.
I could hear her voice, and the voices of others, other Shadow Elves sounding like the Lost Boys, far off to the left and down that dark and shadowy hall filled with silent tombs. A moment later arrows came whistling out of the darkness and whipped past orcish heads. The orcs snarled and roared at the attack, bellowing war cries and pounding their thick chests.
Their war captain called out, “Eifrit!”
Which in Arabic is a diminutive form of a genie. Efreeti.
“It is their word for us,” Autumn whispered in my mind. “It means little demons.”
I watched as now the orcs, convinced elves were attacking from their right, organized loosely and charged the dark hall, shouting battle cries and giving war whoops. Their trumpeters blaring out Uroo Uroo to sound the alarm and call to battle across the great necropolis that was this tomb.
All around us other horns answered the urgent call. They were coming. The orc hordes were coming. But for the moment, the orcs who’d almost discovered us were off chasing rabbits. Shadow Elf rabbits. Which meant we had a moment to move forward and get ahead of what was about to happen.
Just a moment…
“It’s clear,” I told Tanner breathlessly, feeling my heart hammer in my chest as fear or adrenaline coursed through my body. “Have to move now.”
Hand signals, and the team was up and moving. Hustling forward and interfacing with Kurtz for a bare-bones sitrep. Just a few more levels and we’d reach the dome. If we got lucky. And according to the Old Mother, the fortress was just above that dome.
We were close.
