Chapter 3. The Tomb
n the rump. His ears went flat against his head and he let out a hateful bray. Christopher had a set of cloth saddlebags draped over his hindquarters, just a few days away from being called threadbare.
"You're not even joking," said Bruno, staring aghast at the donkey. "You really expect us to carry all of our stuff on a single donkey."
"Actually," started Jeremiah, reaching into the saddlebags, "due to budget constraints, everyone gets to help." He pulled out four large, empty backpacks. Each was in a similar state to the saddlebags.
"We have our own packs," said Allison.
"Not big enough,” said Jeremiah. “Everyone has to help carry food, supplies, and treasure on the way back. Hopefully.”
"Is he friendly?" Delilah asked, circling the donkey. Christopher snapped his teeth at her the moment she was close enough.
"Very no," said Jeremiah.
"Jay, what the hell," said Bruno, taking his backpack.
"Hey, you guys gave me a budget, and I stuck to it. At the very least, you each get a walking stick I found in the woods, free of charge.” He presented them with four long thin sticks, mostly stripped of branch fragments.
“What are all these marks?” asked Bruno. His finger traced a swirling pattern burned into the leather of the backpack.
“That was my attempt at a Lightness rune,” said Jeremiah, “it would have made the backpacks and anything inside weigh a tenth as much.”
“Would have?” asked Allison.
Jeremiah squirmed. He really would have preferred they had not noticed the rune. “Yes. It’s, uh, nonfunctional. What it basically says is, ‘Lightness And Pause’.”
“But in crazy magic god language?” asked Bruno
“In crazy magic god language, yes,” said Jeremiah.
“Why ‘Pause’?” asked Delilah.
“To place a limiter on the magical effect,” said Jeremiah, “so it just becomes lighter but doesn’t fly away or set on fire from magical energy with nowhere to go.”
“Looks like it didn’t work,” said Bruno. He scratched some of the scorched leather, then picked out the black from under his fingernail.
“Everything about it didn’t work, I know,” said Jeremiah. “I don’t know why. I mean, I have some guesses as to why. Somehow the enchantment isn’t targeting the backpack, or maybe the Pause is too abrupt? Yeah, I think the Pause is the problem. I bet it’s lighter, but only infinitesimally so…I mean it would be lighter if it had worked. So I guess there’s a problem of specificity? Or I wrote it wrong? I think I need to-”
“Didn’t we used to have a carriage? A nice one?” interrupted Allison.
“Long since sold,” said Delilah.
“Hey, if you guys wanted better provisions you wouldn’t have budgeted so much to Bruno,” said Jay. He was grateful to move on from his failed rune.
“You don’t skimp on a dungeon delve,” said Bruno, “especially not one with traps. Rather eat dry biscuits for a week than get killed by poison darts.”
“Funny you should say that,” said Jeremiah.
“Betrayer!” came a shout from right beside them. Jeremiah jumped away, his ears ringing. An old dwarven woman, bedraggled and flea-bitten, had crept up to Jeremiah and shouted nearly in his face. “You buried that poor girl. She was to lift us up! You and your evil buried a girl alive. Do you think of her Necromancer?! Think of dirt filling her lungs?”
Jeremiah, still reeling, didn’t have a response. Delilah stepped between him and the woman, taking the full brunt of the finger wagging and cursing.
“Ma’am, I understand your frustration, but I promise that woman was only going to bring ruin to this city. No one was going to be lifted up,” said Delilah..
“Says the fancy half-elf, stepping out from her summer home, no doubt!” the dwarven woman looked Delilah up and down with disdain, eyes lingering on the slight points of Delilah’s ears.
Bruno stepped in then, putting an arm around the woman’s shoulders and turning her away. They walk a few steps together while he spoke softly. “Now, Domma Tooka, that’s no way to behave. To a stranger in the street no less. Where’s ser Tooka? Young Miska and Molly? They been going to school?”
The woman’s face was a mask of rage, but as she stared up at Bruno it cracked to unfathomable sorrow and she burst into tears, leaning into him. Bruno wrapped her in a hug as she wailed in Dwarvish. Jeremiah saw Bruno stiffen as she spoke. Bruno looked up and gestured for everyone to move on without him. Jeremiah, Allison, and Delilah started toward the gates of Dramir, pulling Christopher behind them.
“You okay?” Delilah asked Jeremiah.
“Yeah,” he said automatically. “ Dirt filling her lungs,” repeated over and over again in his head.
Bruno caught up with them at the gate. Jeremiah wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw the shine of tear tracks on Bruno’s cheeks.
Tear tracks in blood, trapped in a closet, torn to pieces
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Jeremiah shook his head. The image had come back all at once out of nowhere.
“Friend of yours?” Allison asked Bruno.
Bruno’s face was hard as stone. “We didn’t bury nearly enough of this place.”
For the next several days, they walked, camped, and walked some more. Just as city and farmland gave way to forest, so did the forest slowly give way to hills and rocks. A lone mountain appeared on the horizon, its peak a frequent stop for scouts to take the lay of the land. The tomb they sought was around the other side, slightly off the well-traveled path. As they approached, cold air and a slate gray sky lent the landscape an austere and barren beauty.
The climb itself wasn’t arduous, even after they left the main scouts’ path, but soon a ferocious wind picked up, one that sliced through the cheap winter coats they had procured for the journey. Flecks of frost sparkled on the bare rocks like scattered diamonds. The stones leached heat from their hands and as the sun begun to set, even the brief respites from the wind were little comfort.
“Can we stop?” Delilah yelled over the gale. “It’s too cold, and we still don’t know where the tomb is.”
“If we find the entrance we can shelter in it,” said Bruno, shivering.
“Allison?” Delilah asked, looking for a decision to be made.
“We need to keep searching,” said Allison. “I can feel weather coming in, and we don’t have the equipment to handle a proper storm.”
They split up and began combing the mountainside. Alison’s contact had only given them the near useless direction of ‘somewhere in the middle’. Jeremiah crawled over rocks and peeked under boulders. Moisture clinging to stone was painfully cold to the touch and dampened his clothing on contact.
“Found it!” Bruno called from further up the mountain. They converged on him to see a cave entrance settled deep into a crevasse.
“Bruno, scout it out,” said Allison. Jeremiah’s relief was suddenly tempered by the reminder that someone had died here recently, to a trap of all things.
While the others huddled together for warmth, Bruno stepped away and shed his coat. Delilah quickly snatched it up. They watched him creep along the crevasse in only his blacks and begin a slow and methodical search of the cave. He touched the ground and walls, blew into hairline cracks, and touched the roof of the cave mouth with his magic bow. Jeremiah wasn’t sure how he could withstand the cold totally exposed like that. He huddled closer to Allison and Delilah as he watched.
Finally, Bruno turned and called back to them. “Entrance is clear,” he said. “Better still, there’s a warm air current here.”
At his proclamation, the others bustled and stumbled past each other in their mad dash to get inside. Sure enough, the moment they stepped inside the temperature jumped. It was heavenly.
“Move around and warm up,” said Allison. “I’ll get the gear bags.”
Soon they had established a nearly-comfortable camp in the tunnel. Armor and weapons of various sorts lay in neat piles. Delilah had her own area for a small mountain of bottles, boxes, bags, vials, pots, tins, flasks, syringes, and poultices. Jeremiah made himself useful by helping Allison strap her enchanted armor into place, then carefully wrapped Delilah in the tangle of leather strips that offered both protection and storage for her supplies. He smirked at her transformation from slender half-elf to brown cocoon with a head sticking out.
Then it was time to don his own gear. He was the proud owner of a full set of studded leather armor, a leather cap, short spear, and round wooden shield. He hadn’t worn it outside of practice with Allison, but he liked how safe it made him feel.
“How do I look?” he asked the others.
“Like a damn town guard,” said Bruno, “Al, come on. Are you sure about…this?” Bruno gestured towards Jeremiah and the armor suddenly felt like a costume a clown would wear.
“He’ll be fine,” said Allison. She was adjusting her weapons and spared barely a glance in Bruno’s direction.
Bruno gave a disgusted grunt and went back to inspecting his gear. But that grunt, that single sound, was enough to call everything Jeremiah felt into question.
“What am I doing here?” he thought. “Bruno’s right, I can’t help. Without necromancy, I’m just a liability…and there’s nothing stopping me. I could just be a necromancer again.”
The option was suddenly there, beckoning and simple. He’d be the party mage, able to reinforce their numbers with fearless undead minions, or at least able to spray acid or fill the halls with poisonous gas.
The fantasy consumed him for a moment. He’d make short work of the dungeon, and they’d return to Dramir with plenty of treasure to pay their legal fees. His friends would agree to keep his change of heart a secret, only revealing his power when they were adventuring. He was tempted to decide right then and there, the words to announce his choice to his friends already forming in his mind.
Then, for some reason, he glanced towards Allison and found her already looking at him. Her stoic gaze reminded him of her promise, and reminded him why he made it. The man in the closet, just another enemy brutally killed by Jeremiah’s minions but somehow so much more. The allies who were struck down by Jeremiah’s horde when he’d made a careless mistake during a chaotic battle. Vivica, swallowed up by the earth into the arms of the reaching undead—no, he didn’t want that power, that responsibility. It was too much.
Jeremiah tamped down his shame and doubt as hard as he could. He was an enchanter now, and even if he wasn’t very good at it, he could still help in other ways. He just had to find them.
“Are we ready?” Bruno heaved his pack onto his shoulders. It was bulging against its straps. His magic bow was slung across his back and short blades were secured all across his body. Throwing swords, Bruno had called them.
“Packed a bit extra, Bruno?” asked Jeremiah.
“A lot extra,” said Bruno. “We’re going to be dealing with traps, and traps are a pain in the ass, especially in old places like this, where mechanisms and triggers will be degraded. Maybe you’re lucky and it just breaks. Or maybe you’re unlucky and it goes off because you disturbed the air for the first time in generations, and that was just enough a release the rotten tripwire.”
“Is that what happened the time you took that spear fusillade right in the chest?” asked Delilah wryly.
“No, that was carelessness and stupidity,” said Bruno. “Luckily it was me that set it off and that got out of the worst of it, as opposed to you, who would have probably tried to argue with it.”
“Formation,” said Allison. They gathered at the entrance to the tomb. “Eyes on, everyone.” Bruno squeezed two drops of Delilah’s Night Eyes formula into his eyes, then handed the vial to Allison and headed into the dungeon.
Delilah took the drops after Allison and tipped Jeremiah’s head back to administer them. “Are you okay?” she asked, softly enough the others wouldn’t hear.
Trust Delilah to know when he was feeling off. “Yeah, I’m good. Just a little nervous.” Jeremiah winced and blinked away the excess liquid. His vision swam for a minute before the shadows of the cave revealed their secrets, albeit only in black and white. Then they followed Allison into the dark.