CHAPTER 1.46 - INTO THE BARROW: VII
They stand for a moment, catching their breath and taking in the room. Hugo starts, nodding in Anuk’s direction. “Cult…” She immediately nods agreement, so he carries on. “…engaged in bullshit, cultish weirdness. Collecting blood in a bowl? Cult shit.” She seems satisfied with the outburst but is radiating distaste. Thae’s nodding slowly, obviously contemplating something but unwilling to clarify at this point. Fair enough, there’s enough strangeness down here to go around. Rian seems distracted, scanning and listening for threats beyond the northern door.
Hugo stares at the human, compelled to give voice to his concern. “Sure you don’t need a rest, big man?” He indicates the body, the bones. “We still need to haul these to the well.” Hugo’s gratified by Thae’s beaming smile in his peripheral vision. Rian looks at him, swivels his eyes to the half-elf. “Well, we’re doing better…” His expression takes on the discomfited look as though he might beg. Thae swoops in “We do seem to have the measure of these things.” Anuk nods, ghost of a smile as she says “Yeah. And each other’s backs.” He puts the hint of sarcasm down to Anuk just being herself but thrills at the steel of truth underneath. The other two nod seriously. It’s all coming together.
They hustle to gather up the detritus of the fight, pitch the remains into the quickly filling well. As the one in most need of rest, Rian is left on guard with their light source. Hugo’s certain he’ll spend the time straining for evidence that their position has been betrayed but is as happy as he can be with that. He remains concerned that the big man looks haggard despite Thae’s healing. Still, it’s true, he thinks, they are fighting like a team now, rather than a group of strangers. They form up, each falling into their positions, press through the door.
They find themselves in the longest corridor they have encountered down here, a cross of passages meeting at their centre. His head spins at the waste of this, the unnecessary labour pushing this deeply into the rock. The remainder of the place seems pushed together, large rooms but closely clustered. This speaks, to his mind, to status, to dominance. It awakes the hope in him that they’re nearly done, that this warren doesn’t extend infinitely, brimming with undeath. Each of the passages terminates in a door, less damaged by the place’s drying, remnants of lacquer protecting their surfaces. Speaks again to opulence, highlights the basic nature of the facilities behind them. Some of them had cushions, he thinks.
They opt to go left at the junction, Hugo’s mind pursuing some pattern beyond his reach. Thae pauses at the door, their collective breath held for the moment before opening. They emerge into a bedroom, much better appointed, much less destroyed. Against the west wall stand two beds, or rather one and a half. This white wall has again been bisected by a curtain of grey stone. This time, however, the transition isn’t clean. The beds are well-made, mattresses thicker. They’re apparently stuffed with antique, dehydrated feathers, and have been fitted perfectly to the wave of grey rock. But the further bed, the northern one, had an occupant. The being’s bones have been scattered, except for where they extrude from the wall.
Worse still, there’s evidence that the sleeper wasn’t originally bones. In idle speculation, now drowned under his revulsion, Hugo realises he had no idea of the scale of these people in life. In present form they were slim figures, but he had guessed that undeath, particularly in such a parched environment, sucked the flesh in. The bubbles in the stone, from which the sleeper’s arm bones emerge, are tightly shaped to flesh that long since turned to dust. He can see, wrist deep inside the stone through a neck-width hole, the prior inhabitant’s skull at an odd angle inside a hollow larger only by the width of the meat the figure used to wear. A sickening confirmation that they were lightly muscled in life.
He’s not claustrophobic by any stretch, wouldn’t have lasted as a halfling in a thief gang if he were. All the same, the image of being pinned there in a neck brace of stone, fitted into an airtight death mask? He feels certain that he is constructing and fuelling a future nightmare. Some senseless impulse congratulates himself on not focusing on the cracked, marrowless armbones sticking out of the rock, then spots his own pratfall. He tries to rally himself, vocalising “Oh, that’s not humerus at all” but it sounds strangled, sickened. His friends are taking in the same scene, leaving his ‘joke’ to dangle in silence.
Thankfully, there are no threats in the room as each of them pushes past the grim tableau. This chamber has obviously been less visited than the others, a table and pair of chairs having mostly survived in one corner, a wardrobe set behind the door. The only active destruction seems to have been to the pair of chests, one at the foot of each bed. These were quality, lacquered wood but bear claw marks across them, their contents rifled. And yet…in amongst some shreds of material, previously glossy like the sheets, several red stones are scattered. They look like, are rubies, small but perfectly formed. Eight in total that he can find. He shows them to the group, half-expecting Thae to berate him for disrespecting the dead, but instead receives appreciative, if distant, nods and smiles.
‘Fucking place,’ he thinks, ‘even takes the fun out of loot.’
The room diametrically opposite is a mirror of this one, and definitely the domicile of one of the robed characters. It lacks what Hugo can now think of only as the ‘intrusion’ of grey rock, is set out for single occupancy. The contents are equally shredded, but the superior quality of the furnishings has kept them relatively complete. They spend some time searching the room, Hugo trying to find evidence of the spiky-headed character from the story room. No joy there, although one of the robes in the wardrobe turns up an anomaly.
Anuk discovers it, the rest hearing her sharp intake of breath. Instincts battered by this place respond with hands flying to weapons when the girl turns to face them. A pristine leather pouch dangles from her outstretched finger. Dangles from vibrant red string that should have become dust ages past. The woman looks pleased but suspicious, the two warriors observing the strange item with frowns until Hugo muses “Oh, that’ll be magic then.”
Anuk and he become quite excited, for Hugo the prospect of some additional clues to this place’s strangeness. And protected from the passage of time by the container’s magic? No dice, however. The pouch seems empty to their investigations, although Anuk provides entertainment as her forearm disappears too far into the small bag. Entertains most of them, at least. Rian looks discomfited, pained almost, as the girl appears amputee for a moment. He feels a shade of the big man’s uncertainty, he supposes, adding the belt pouch to the gems for later investigation. During peacetime.
They return to the intersection, approach the northern door. This is almost complete and is covered in a dark lacquer or varnish. Dusty, crumbling wood shows under claw marks at the door’s edges, speaking to them of one of the long-tongued creatures scrabbling to open it. A wave of tension runs through them as Thae prepares to enter.
They emerge into a sparse but richly decorated room. The wall on the right is dominated by the largest bed they have seen down here, the room itself subtly but definitely larger than the previous two. Again, a wardrobe and chest are present, these again larger and more richly constructed. To their left, in the far corner of the room, a small table and pair of chairs lean awkwardly, scattered more than damaged.
The primary focus of the otherwise empty room, however, stands directly across from them. A statue, formed from a single piece of white stone (although not, Hugo notes, from the virgin stone of the room. This is a separate piece. It stands 8’ tall, scraping the ceiling, a representation of one of the long-skulled beings, berobed with spikes projecting from its skull. The creature is captured in solemn pose, arms crossed across the chest, hands flat to the thing’s pectorals. The conjoined fingers are depicted, as is a subtle double-nostril, almost a figure of eight which he had mistaken for damage or decay to the things they had fought.
The carving on the figure is far superior to the story room, but utterly unrealistic. The figure is bulky, bulging muscles artfully carved under folds of robe fabric seeming sheerer than silk. The carving reminds Hugo of Rian working at Bertak’s anvil. No matter how the creatures had looked in life, he cannot believe it was this. Anuk’s read of the place as a cult enclave gains weight in the face of this slobbering depiction of the prophet, or whatever title the leader craved. Something is missing, however; some logic, some information to cohere the bizarreness of this warren. This is the last room, absent of exits, or of horn-headed creatures.
Their confused conversation is cut off as scraping, scrabbling noises ring out from behind the blank wall to the statue’s right, obviously triggered by their voices. Hugo is already stretching around the back of the ridiculous statue as his friends take up position around the patch of noisy wall. With their attention honed by the frantic digging, claws on hard stone, his friends find the subtle edges of a slab portal. It’s fitted as artfully as the statue’s features are carved, no expense spared for the master. Rian and Thae take up position at either side while Anuk lurks in the room’s doorway, fingers raised to fire.
Hugo’s fingers barely register a seam in the statue as a small panel indents under his lightest touch. The grunt of warning he projects is formless as the wall shudders then bursts open, another of the creatures leaping through, tongue writhing as if tasting them on the air. The thing gives the driest version of a scream as it leaps. Or, rather, attempts to.
It has no chance. The segment of shifting wall is narrow, and Rian is using his pike to fend off and bar the thing’s progress while Anuk and Thae bathe it with magical harm. Hugo is swift to recover from the surprise at finding the pressure panel but still only scrambles to his allies in time to watch the ghastly being collapse under the assault. A distinct lack of bulging muscles on the monster, nor spikes on its brow. A part of him is disappointed, no part truly surprised.
Thae’s steely core seems to have manifested in him. He reasons it has been hammered into place by the sheer hatred these unnatural monsters exhibit for warmth, life. He watches the thing perish, again, through a mammalian relief, a sense of the world being somehow…more right in its absence. His friends, for his read of them, just seem businesslike. The abomination was there, wanted them dead, was snuffed without remorse. They may simply lack Hugo’s overthinking of it.
His attention, grateful for the relief, slips past the returned corpse, into the cube of space behind. The secret room is sparse, the most minimal evidence of a chest having once existed there. Every surface bears gouges, rents that he cannot unsee from the creature’s talons trying hopelessly for purchase. Endlessly seeking for some kind of escape. As his stomach lurches, at the contemplation of such imprisonment over ages, his brain grabs at other details. He sees teeth among the detritus, then lumps of thicker bones, enough of each to clearly show the creature didn’t start in here alone. His skin prickles at the thought, of every bone cracked as he visualises that tongue hunting out marrow.
Thae, all business around the undead, strides into the secret room, bends to grab and display a dented, abused spiked crown. Where Hugo might have expected another faked artefact like the sacrificial bowl, this has every appearance of solid silver. Thae’s eyes alight on something else amongst the shrapnel, the half-elf bends to reach out for…
Hugo, eyes darting, manages a “Thae!” as Anuk, ever happy with brutal directness shouts “STOP!” over his attempt. The priest jumps, freezes mid-motion, fingers extended toward a small, irregularly shaped black stone. He feels a little bad for his friend, forgets too easily the shape of Thae’s past life. But the object looked too close to something he was struggling to place. No wonder, he thinks, as he looks up into Anuk’s frozen mask of horror, that the woman who sketched it got there faster.
