“Here,” Anathta said, crouching and gesturing at the uneven rock-floor. “The dires are only using this side – even the big ones are avoiding the left side of the tunnel.”
“I mean, traps, I get it,” Ibbalat replied, “but what in Celestium are you actually pointing at?”
“There’s a thousand things,” she demurred, smiling and standing again.
“There – fur.” Phanar nodded to the spot as he spoke. “And there – weight depressions. Stone smoothed under a great weight. Bits of nail chipping over here…”
“Fine, fine, I get it.” The mage followed along behind Anathta, who was now leading the group once more. Kani went next, then Phanar. Redgate had volunteered for ‘rearguard’ and floated along at the back, wearing his red robes again.
As Phanar had suspected when he’d looked at the animal tracks, Ord Ylon did not keep only wolves for his pets. The wolves likely saw the most use because of their intelligence, their versatility… their diminutiveness.
When they ran into the dire serpent, a red thing with black and yellow bands, it had to be ten times the weight of one of the wolves. It was difficult to get a grasp of its size until they were done killing it, listening to its death-hiss, the potion mercilessly translating its piteous rasping for its ‘master’.
The slaying itself was the easiest, the smoothest part of Phanar’s life since they first set sail for Mund from Tirremuir. It had been months since the four of them had fought together, the longest gap between periods of action in their whole adventuring careers. He hadn’t realised it until they were engaged in combat, but a tiny part of his soul had been doubting them, their potency. It was as though the warrior inside him had been sleeping, an invisible presence whose very existence was brought into question with every unblooded moment that passed. When the awful slithering sound started to vibrate the air and Anathta looked back at them, giving them the look that said she was ready to kill, ready to die – that was what the warrior within had been waiting for. In the next instant they were unslinging weapons and evading a throbbing, thrashing whip two feet in diameter, hurtling and coiling at them with a speed and strength that could only be born of the dragon’s magic.
Anathta scuttled up to the ceiling like a beetle, aiming a ranged shot at its eyes with her crossbow, and when the snake batted its hooded head in irritation and tried to rise up, crush her against the stone, she shifted her hand- and footholds, moving clear. She took the opportunity to drop down and settle herself astride its back, then within seconds she was sliding down its length, scoring through its membranous scales with one of her favourite daggers.
The relatively-thin tail-tip was dangerously fast, scales forming almost feathered-looking patterns, a nest of black-hued blades – it came buzzing down at Phanar’s head, rapidly swinging from one side to the other, like the wings of a hovering hummingbird. The pick-end of his warhammer glowed a fierce radiant blue, and as the warrior rolled beneath the attack he wedged it deep and wrenched; a strip of the tail-tip longer than he was tall came tearing away as he flipped to his feet once more.
As it opened its fanged maw wide enough to fit a full grown wild bull sideways, emitting a crackling noise that could have been laughter or screaming, it thrust its head towards the seemingly-defenceless Ibbalat. His spell came to fruition when it was ten feet from him, specks of ground-up diamond drifting from the mage’s hands; the snake smashed its lower jaw into the stony wall that came rising up out of the tunnel-floor in front of it.
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When Kani stepped forward, the strike of her hammer into the side of the thing’s head didn’t look heavy – she barely dealt it a glancing blow – but as the attack connected she cried, “Maiden’s Light!” and a stream of yellow-amber light billowed like smoke around the serpent’s face.
The fight lasted all of fifty seconds. A minute, being generous.
And through it all, Redgate floated at the rear, watching. Phanar felt the sorcerer’s gaze moving between them, like a tongue of cold shadow falling upon each of them in turn.
He felt the sorcerer’s gaze, and no longer cared.
As they came upon intersections, Kani’s sight led them unerringly onwards. Twenty minutes and several more encounters later, Anathta doubled back to inform them that the fourth large chamber they’d run into, dead ahead, contained a clutch of giant spiders – more than ten of the things, each bigger than she’d ever seen before.
“Time for one of my Ibbalat Specials, then.” The mage stepped forward. “Let’s see… Fireball, Limit-Lifter, how do you go…”
A calm voice was raised behind him, still displaying no outward irritation:
“Might I intercede?”
Phanar turned to look at the arch-sorcerer, and nodded, keeping his expression neutral.
As Redgate drifted past, the warrior caught the offended look Ibbalat shot him behind the archmage’s back. He swiftly shot a glare in response:
Conserve resources!
They followed the crimson-shrouded spectre, and watched from the tunnel opening as he moved through the spider-chamber.
The thick, gelatinous webs stretching wall to wall and floor to ceiling didn’t impede him but he waved a hand anyway; flames leapt up and consumed them in his wake, allowing the adventurers to trail after him. Several spiders came at the sorcerer and were caught in the air, trapped by invisible webs of incomprehensible strength and pulled apart, as if done so effortlessly, by the very air itself. His magic bound them all, and relieved from them the burden of continued existence.
That was how it looked – as though they simply fell apart in his vicinity. It was almost tranquil, the silence that accompanied their deaths. Almost tranquil in its unthinkable horror.
But most tried to run, hide, flee on their huge, desperate legs. Those ones Redgate caused to erupt in flames, the sorcery working on every last one of them – even the younger, cat-sized ones Anathta hadn’t spotted, secreted in the corners. These deaths were less tranquil – louder, smellier.
How Redgate so consistently ruined everything he touched, Phanar could not guess. Somehow the eradication of even these horrible entities, these monstrous arachnids, felt so unethical, when it came at the sorcerer’s hands. The warrior wondered why it was he thought it would’ve been cleaner to just let Ibbalat Special them – he couldn’t actually isolate the core of the difference in his mind.
When it was over they picked their way through the chamber, avoiding the strewn-about body-parts as well as they could manage.
“I thought you wanted to rest,” Ibbalat called, somehow making it sound respectful, awed.
Redgate turned back to them, and chuckled lightly. “My boy, that was merely yawning. Though, I must admit, I am having more fun now. Shall we continue?”
The champion helped Anathta up into the only other exit from the chamber, a narrow crevasse on the far side. Ibbalat clambered up the slimy rocks without much hassle, and Phanar climbed half-way before offering Kani his hand.
She didn’t look at him. Wouldn’t meet his eyes. The cleric found her own grip on the stones, pulled herself up without his assistance, and he watched her attempts in silence, waiting patiently until she made it.
Breathing heavily, she squeezed into the gap and headed after the mage. Phanar followed, now in the rearguard.
Now Redgate was leading.
* * *