Tales of Belrik - Rescued Again
Part 4 - Into the Caverns
Part 4 – Into the Caverns
Belrik worked his back across the courtyard to the same stretch of wall he had climbed over to enter the citadel. Using the same spot to exit a place as he had entered at was something he tried to avoid. It was always best to use a different way out. This night though, he wanted to be as far away from the eyes of the Forsaken Ones as he could be when he went back over the wall. That was all he needed to be doing. Running through the streets of the city trying to avoid getting killed or captured.
This time as he neared the section of the wall he wanted to use, there was a pair of guards standing a silent vigil a top the wall. He wondered briefly if he had been spotted or made some noise that alerted the sentries at some point. Belrik doubted that the alarm had been raised silently. The Forsaken Ones on the roof of the keep would have been all over him by now if that had happened. This was just Fate having a laugh at his expense. There were only a few hours of darkness left and he needed to be over that wall to make it back down to the city streets before it became to light out. There was another option at his disposal for getting out of the citadel. He didn’t relish taking that route. It was the cleanest, and the stink was damned near impossible to get out of his armor.
Belrik waited for a quarter of an hourglass in the shadows of the wall below the sentries. His run of bad luck continued. The sentries were replaced by another pair of guards, and these new guards would be much more alert than the previous two for another hour or so. That was an hour he didn’t have to waste sitting here.
Padding away silently he moved down the wall, staying in its shadows. He moved towards the gatehouse, its bulk looming up overhead. As much as he hated to, he had to slow his pace down here. There was a mess of guards in, on or around that gatehouse. It wouldn’t take much for them to come piling out of there if the alarm was raised.
The gatehouse was the barracks for most of the guards of the citadel. In its foundations the gatehouse also had some cramped cells. They were mostly forgotten now, as most prisoners were accommodated in the Pit. That place was far harder to get into and out of. It was one of the cells beneath the gatehouse he made his way towards.
This cell had a small opening for a window. The window was not visible from the courtyard because it had been bricked over after the Pit was opened to prisoners. The dwarf who had done the work had been paid by Belrik to add a little something to the brick work. It was coincidence that Belrik had freed the man from slavery.
Since then, the route hadn’t been used by Belrik. He was loathe to use up all his little secrets unless there was no other choice. Fate had played her hand tonight, he needed to skew the odds in his favor.
At the spot of the former window, Belrik knelt and felt for the spot he needed. His fingers found the brick and it depressed slightly under his touch. With his face close to the brick, he whispered.
“Leaf and root, branch and stem, will get you a flower.” He whispered. It was a pass phrase that only he knew. The wizard who had created the enchantment on the locking mechanism for him fell afoul of one of his own magical contraptions in an accident long ago.
When he finished speaking, the brick depressed a little more and the section of stone that had covered up the cell window swung open with only a low grinding noise. Belrik winced, but that inevitable. It had been waiting for a long time, so dirt was bound to have worked its way into the mechanism.
Once it was all the way open, he slid his way into the empty cell below. The wall slid back into place one he was past. Unless somebody had been able to sneak up on him at the last moment, he had been unobserved.
The cell was as empty has it had been for years. Damp, and cramped, it wouldn’t been any fun at all spend any amount of time in here. The cell was an arched room, the roof at its tallest was a good half a foot shorter than the average citizen of Crow’s Port. Belrik as short as he was, barely had room to stand up. It was just wider than a man’s shoulders, and half a man’s height in length. Any prisoner kept in here would be forced to sit all the time.
The iron door had long since been removed. Exiting the cell, he was in a chamber in the cellars of the gatehouse. The air was stale, it smelled of death and rot. There were eight identical cells on each wall. Belrik had no doubt that a prisoner or two had been forgotten down here while they lived. A set of stone stairs ended at a wall of brick where the door to the chamber of the prison cells had been closed off years ago.
What interested Belrik here was the long abandoned well that stood in a small antechamber off the cell room. In the days when this well had water, it was raised by bucket from the room above. The winch to do so was long gone out of that room and the hole had been covered over. The well had been forgotten about, much like the cells.
Berlik knew the passages beneath the citadel and city better than most. He knew that this well had gone dry because the water that fed the well had been diverted. He suspected some sort of cave in had been the cause of the diverted water, but he had never bothered investigating it. There was a labyrinthine series of tunnels and caverns that had been here long before the city was built. What he had seen of the tunnels in his explorations led him to believe that the creators of the network weren’t any species that now lived on Avellion, nor had he ever found any trace of them anywhere else in his wanderings. The tunnel he was seeking was accessible at this end through the well.
He thought it funny how the men who built the original castle never bothered to investigate all the nooks, crannies and dark holes in the ruins they were building atop of. It was like the first settlers of Crow’s Port had an aversion to investigating the dark corners of the hills they settled on and it had been passed on to their descendants. Belrik on the other hand was the curious sort. He had to check out everything he could see. It was true that curiosity had gotten into an assortment of trouble over the years. Though to Belrik trouble and fun were the same thing.
Belrik lowered himself into the well and began the decent to the tunnel. Climbing was natural to him as walking and always had been as far back as he could remember. The elves of the region that he came from were known for their ability to climb almost anything. The wall of this well was child’s play compared to the places he learned to climb.
Down into that dark hole he went. He moved a little bit closer to the tunnel with each placement of his feet. The air here was heavier than it had been outside, it was far staler. Climbing here worked up more of a sweat than it did when he climbed over the wall into the courtyard. He paused more often to try and keep his breathing in check and to listen. Even though he was able to see into that darkness, his ears were a far more valuable asset down here. Sound travelled further in the underground tunnels and seemed louder. At times it was difficult to tell which direction a sound was coming from as it echoed through the caverns.
At long last he was hanging on the wall nest to the tunnel he had climbed down looking for. Not hearing any sounds that alerted him to trouble, Belrik pulled himself into the opening. There was still no movement in the air. Unmoving air underground develops a distinct odor. Earth, rock, and the detritus of the insects that live and die down there combine to make a smell that is musty and damp. His sense of smell would be the second-best sense he would have down here.
Belrik crouched in the irregularly shaped tunnel. To his eyes, the rock around him was black with the tunnel itself being a dark shade of grey. After a long pause to listen he started to move. He set off at a leisurely pace, going to fast would create too much noise and he would not have time to react to sounds or smells. On the other hand, if he moved to slow, he would never get to where he needed to go. Valestrie was being held in the Pit, and that was across the city. There was no straight path to where she was being held and getting there would take the rest of the night and most of the day tomorrow. She had already been there long enough.
The walls and floor of this tunnel were smooth as water once flowed through here in the distant past, but the tunnel narrowed and widen constantly. More than once, he had to squeeze himself through a thin gap between the walls. Each gap he moved slowly as he pushed himself through. As slow as he moved, Belrik still cursed himself for the noise he made as his leather scraped over the stone, or with the grunts of the effort he need to exert to get through. After getting through each narrow spot, he stopped and listened before moving on.
He waited for the inevitable attack by a hungry underground dweller. Whether it was an insect larger than him, or a Forsaken One or some other creature that lived down here. He had seen centipedes longer than he was tall down here. Ending up as some underground dweller’s snack was not high on his list of things to accomplish before dying.
The sound of rock grinding against rock brought Belrik to a halt. It was the first sounds he had heard since coming below ground. When he first heard it, he thought of a cave-in, but the sound continued on far too long. The sound also sounded wrong to be a collapse which he believed would start as a sound of small rocks falling before rising to a torrent of sound then fading away to silence once more.
This sound varied in both volume and rate. Belrik couldn’t be sure with all the echoes, but it sounded as if there several sets of rocks grinding together. It sounded like the rocks were having a conversation. He slowly moved forward, inching his way along the tunnel seeking the source of the sounds. It took several minutes but he got there.
The tunnel he was travelling along widened out into a chamber of sorts. It was probably thirty paces wide at its widest point. Its ceiling was twenty paces or so off the floor of the passage. On one side of the chamber a large pile of stone moved. A large central rock was surrounded by smaller rocks that moved and rotated about the central stone like some sort of appendage. The outer rocks moved over the surface of the inner stone like the grindstones and wheels in a flour mill. Another one of the stone piles, a bit smaller than the first one moved into Belrik’s view a bit further down the tunnel.
Both piles of stones stopped moving except for a rock on top which turned in place on both. Sometimes sound only came from one of the piles while this happened. Belrik was fascinated, there were legends of stones being inhabited by a sort of earth spirit, by he never thought he would ever get to see something like this. Vardkin the legends called those spirits, although since the Time of the Re-Alignment a century and a half ago it was impossible to put any truth to any of the old legends.
“COME FORTH SOFT SKIN. THE STONES SPEAK TO US OF YOUR PRESENCE.”
The voice was like an avalanche. Belrik was stunned, he couldn’t believe he had just heard the stones speak to him. Grinding noises came from the smaller of the two rock things as it moved beside the larger one. Not sure what else to do since they seemed to know of his approach, Belrik stepped into view.
“Good day, my Lords of the Earth,” Belrik said with his usual panache. “You have truly blessed me this day by allowing me to present myself before you.”
“HMMM. USELESSS WORDS. YOU ARE NOT A DARK STALKER. WHY ARE YOU HERE?” Stone grated on stone as the large one loomed over him. He suspected there was some anger behind those words, but the voice was alien he wasn’t certain.
“I am unsure of what a ‘Dark Stalker’ is, but I am here because I am on my way to the place the humans called the Pit.”
No sooner had those words come out of his mouth when he found himself pressed up against the wall of the passage, several feet off the ground. Smaller rocks that had aligned to form arm like appendages pushed against him, squeezing him.
“YOU ARE A SERVANT OF THE DARK STALKERS?”
If a pile of rocks could yell, Belrik was certain this pile had just yelled into his face. That didn’t matter. These things could form arms to manipulate other things. Nobody would believe this story not that he ever cared whether his stories were believed.
“Again, I am not sure what you mean by ‘Dark Stalker’, but the people at the Pit have my mate, I am going to free her. Well, we aren’t officially mated, although that doesn’t matter. She was kidnapped on her way to see me, so I am going to sneak in there and get her out of there,” the words came out of Belrik in a tumult. Not that he was scared, he couldn’t recall ever being scared. He was just excited.
“Are you Vardkin? Why are you this close to the surface, especially with a city on the surface above us?” He blurted out the next thoughts as they occurred to him.
“THE DARK STALKERS HAVE YOUR MATE?” The rock thing asked him. “YOU WILL SLAY THEM TO FREE YOUR MATE?”
Belrik realized that the people he knew as the Forsaken Ones, these Vardkin called the Dark Stalkers. Getting into any kind of a fight in the Pit with either guards or Forsaken Ones was not in his plans, but he didn’t think voicing that would be a good idea.
“Getting Valestrie out of there is my goal, if I have to kill all everyone that gets in my way then so be it,” he shrugged his shoulders as much as he could being pinned in place a rock with arms.
“DO NOT SPEAK UNTRUTHS TO ME.”
“There are too many of them for me to fight, even with the help of my mate when I release her. If I can get her out without a fight that will be even better. I am expecting a fight though and have no problems killing anyone who gets in my way.”
That was the truth. He half expected to not get away at all. There were too many unknowns ahead of him to have any certainty of surviving.
“YOU HAVE FOUGHT THOSE ABOMINATIONS BEFORE?”
“Yes. Several times. The first time I rescued she who would become my mate from one of their dark altars.” His words were tinged with a bit of pride. That had been one of his wilder escapades and yet somehow, he came out richer in more ways than one.
“HMMM.” The Vardkin put him back on the ground, which Belrik to be a good sign.
“You bear a grudge against these Dark Stalkers?” he asked, not sure if he would get an answer.
“THEY TAKE OUR SPIRITS. THEY SLAY US DOING SO. THEY SEEK MAGIC THEY CAN NOT USE.”
“Are you trying to find a way to attack them?” Belrik asked.
“THE CLANS ARE READY. WE HAVE MANY TRAPS READIED FOR THEM. UNTIL WE SAW YOU WERE DIFFERENT YOU CAME CLOSE TO ENDING.”
It wasn’t hard for Belrik to decipher what was meant by being ended.
“Will me rescuing my mate affect your plans?” Belrik asked, the start of a devious idea forming in his head.
“NO. YOU WILL WANT TO AVOID BEING ENDED BY THE DARK STALKERS.”
“Will it help your plans if I rescue my mate and return this way? I can bring many Dark Stalkers for you to slaughter,” the half-elf didn’t know if they could see him smile. He knew that smile was wider than the largest cavern he had ever been in though.
Grinding noises came from all around him. It seemed that there had been far more than two of the Vardkin, and there was some sort of discussion happening among the rock beings.
“WE WILL WAIT UNTIL YOU PASS BEFORE BEGINNING THE ENDING OF OUR FOES.”
The two Vardkin that were visible to Belrik moved to the walls and went still. They blended into the rock walls of the cavern, and with the blink of an eye he could no longer tell where they had been. There could have been several dozen Vardkin around him and he would never know until they moved.
Taking a deep breath, he set off again. He was close to the point in this part of his scheme to free Valestrie where he would have to slow down and take care. Soon, he would be nearing the outer layers of the defenses surrounding the Forsaken Ones outpost. That’s when the real fun would begin.