Night guild 2, p.29
Night Guild 2, page 29
But with his three friends all convinced that they should go on, Ronan decided to keep his doubts to himself. They ate a hurried meal of dried meat, dried fruit, and some hard traveler’s bread, then got on their way again.
There was no way of telling the passage of time down here, but Ronan reckoned they must have been going for most of the day and it must be getting into the late afternoon outside when they first heard the sound of water.
They stopped, looking at each other.
“That sounds like an underground river,” Eric said. “You get them in the glacier caves of my homeland, but I never expected to come across one here.”
“These mountains are full of them,” Tanya said. “It’s one of the reasons the bandits are able to thrive here. They make their bases on the shores of the underground rivers, and it gives them somewhere to get fresh water for cooking, drinking, and cleaning, as well as sometimes offering them an escape route in case of emergencies.”
“An escape route?” Eric asked.
“The rivers often lead out into the open,” Tanya explained. “The bandits keep small boats by the riverside, and if their base is breached by another bandit clan and they have to escape they can jump on the boats and quickly find themselves outside of the mountain tunnels.”
“So,” Ronan asked, “the chances are that we’re approaching the end of our mission?”
“If there’s an opening on an underground river up ahead, I’d say it’s very likely,” Tanya answered. “We should go carefully, but it’s possible that we still have quite a way to go. Sound travels strangely underground, and we may be hearing an echo of water which is still quite far away.”
Ronan nodded. “Let’s go carefully. These bandits are numerous and fierce, and they are likely to defend their home base vigorously.”
They slowed their pace, walking four abreast down the broadening tunnel. After another hour, the sound of the water became so loud that they struggled to hear anything else.
They stopped for a moment, taking the time to establish a clear mind link between the four of them before going on.
Eric, Diana, keep watch to the right and left, Ronan told his companions through the mind link. Tanya, watch our backs. I’ll go ahead and look out for what we’re walking into. Stealth fields up, everyone. This is a job for assassins.
They all put their stealth fields up, and Ronan was impressed with how strong Tanya’s field was. Even with his assassin’s eyes, he could not immediately see her. As he had directed, she brought up the rear, keeping her eyes peeled for threats coming from behind. Eric was on the left, and Diana on the right, and they were both looking out for threats coming up the corridor in their direction.
Ronan put on a bit of speed, jogging ahead of his friends. There was light coming from up ahead, a strange light, which he could not quite place. He blinked, trying to understand what this light—which seemed both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time—could be.
Then he came round the corner and he realized what it was. It was a mixture of firelight coming from flaming torches fixed in sconces on the walls around a wide cave, and daylight which poured into the cave down a long shaft in the ceiling.
The cave was high ceilinged and broad, with a sandy floor and walls of damp, mossy rock. Ronan was peering out into it from a wide entrance about halfway up the wall. From the entrance through which Ronan was looking, a walkway of rough steps hewed from the very rock of the cave wall descended to the floor. On his left, as Tanya had predicted, a wooden landing stage had been built out into a wide bend of a swift flowing river. Here, many little boats had been tied up securely to the wooden landing.
But it was not the river, nor the boats or the flaming torches that caught Ronan’s attention. Instead, his gaze was riveted by the carnage that was spread out across the cave floor. An enormous fight had taken place, and the bodies of dead bandits were scattered all over the sandy cave floor. Blood stained the sand and splattered the walls, and there could be no doubt that a terrible confrontation had taken place, and that the bandits had come off worse.
For now, there was no sign of movement, but on the side of the cave opposite the river, Ronan saw three tall doorways looming black into the brightly lit cave. There was a feeling of present threat in the space, and Ronan felt sure that it was only a matter of time before fresh enemies spilled from the doorways.
Come forward, he said to his friends through their mind link. There has been a battle here, but there are no enemies present now.
He glanced over his shoulder to see his friends hurrying forward. When they reached him, all four companions descended the narrow stairs to the cave floor.
Here, away from the strange distorting effect of the long passage, the sound of the river was less loud, and they found that they could converse with their normal voices, not having to rely on the telepathic mind link.
“Let’s explore quickly,” Ronan said. “There’s no sign of any enemies just now, but I don’t like the look of those doorways. Let’s find out what happened here so that we can plan our next step.”
The story of what had happened in the cave was easy to read. Against one of the side walls, they found the broken remains of some thick, crudely made cord. It had been looped about as if it had been used to tie the hands and feet of a seated figure, and indeed, the impression of where a body had lain in the dust was clear to see.
“Look at the length of the figure who has been sitting here,” Eric said. “It was a tall man, taller than any of these bandits.”
“And he was bound,” Ronan said, pointing to the broken pieces of rope, “but somehow he burned through the ropes and got free.”
“Remember the burning sword of Mala that the ghost of the other Crimson Knight had back at the grotto?” Diana said. “I’ll bet that these knights have some power from Mala that acts in a similar way to our power of the shadow blade. This knight had waited until all attention was off him, then he summoned his red blade and cut his bonds.”
“Then he went through these bandits like a hot knife through butter,” Eric added, with a trace of admiration for the fighting skill of the knight. “Look how clearly the trail is laid out between here and the landing stage.”
He was right. From the place where he had lain to the wooden landing stage at the river, the knight had cut a bloody swathe through the gathered bandits. There was a clear path through the middle, with the bodies of the bandits piled sometimes as many as three deep on either side of the path the knight had walked. Crumpled against the wall, still clutching the remains of his magic staff, lay the body of the shaman.
“He’s gone on some kind of berserker rampage,” Ronan said. “He even killed the mage. I wonder if he had some kind of potion to give him a short burst of incredible fighting skill.”
“And look here,” Diana said, crouching to examine one of the bodies. “I was right about him using some kind of fire blade. The wounds on these bandits have been cauterized even as they were made. The blade must have been incredibly hot to do that.”
They followed the trail to the landing stage, and here they clearly saw the tracks of the Crimson Knight in the soft mud that was created in the sand by the spray from the river.
“He’s been here,” Ronan said, crouching to look at the footprints.
“And here’s where he cut the rope of one of the boats and escaped down river,” Tanya said, holding up a burnt piece of rope that hung limp in the water from a wooden bollard.
They looked at each other, and the same thought was in all of their minds. There was no way that the Crimson Knight would have left here without the dragon egg. He must have taken it away downriver when he escaped.
“I think our way is clear now,” Tanya said. “The knight went this way, and he took out the dragon egg that we were hunting with him.”
“There’s only one route for us to take,” Ronan declared. “We go downriver. We’ll hunt this knight on the water, and follow him the whole way down to the Temple of the Silent if we have to. That’s one dragon egg that the Silent Brotherhood won’t get to have their way with. Let’s get on the water.”
Chapter 19
They moved to the biggest of the boats that was tied up to the landing stage and climbed in. As Eric was casting off the line that tied the boat to the landing stage, however, he heard a loud, muffled roaring noise from the direction of the threatening doorways.
“Some kind of monsters are coming!” Diana warned as she began to draw shadow together in her hands.
Ronan crouched in the boat, gathering shadow to himself and looking for the enemy. As Eric finished untying the knots that held the boat in place, three enormous figures burst out of the dark doorways, surrounded by a host of smaller figures.
The biggest ones were easily twice the height of a normal person, and they were dressed from head to foot in iron plate, so that their bodies could not be seen. Huge hands were wrapped in thick gauntlets of leather. The creatures, whatever they were, were each armed with stone clubs as big as small trees.
“What in the name of all the gods are they?” Diana cried out. “I’ve never seen anything like them before!”
“Let’s not stay to find out!” Ronan replied as a hail of arrows filled the air from the small bandit soldiers clustered around the huge, iron-clad monstrosities.
Eric and Tanya pushed the boat away from the landing stage and it immediately caught the current. Ronan and Diana joined their minds and their shadow mastery, using their combined strength to throw up a thick shadow shield that blocked the flying arrows.
The assassins were in a new realm now, hybridizing their own Night Guild powers with the instincts of trained battle warriors.
The boat had a set of small oars, and as Ronan and Diana staved off the arrows, Eric and Tanya grabbed the oars and steered the little boat away from the landing stage.
The bandits moved horribly fast, surging around the behemoths and reaching the landing stage. Several of them flung themselves from the wooden landing toward the boat, while several others leapt into other boats and began to unhitch the boats from the landing.
The ones that had jumped did not make it. The current was strong and swift, and carried the boat away quickly. The bandits splashed into the fast moving water and immediately began to try to swim back to shore. The other boats that had launched suddenly found themselves occupied in rescuing their drowning comrades rather than giving chase. Ronan and his friends picked their heads as their boat rushed toward the low ceilinged stone tunnel through which the river flowed away from the cave.
The sound of the river echoing in the tunnel was deafening, and the four friends were plunged into darkness. Their night vision was good, and so they could see the outlines of the tunnel’s roof and walls as the roaring river carried them through. The tunnel twisted and turned, and Eric and Tanya were hard put to it to keep the little craft from smashing into the walls as the river wound crazily through the stone passage.
Suddenly, the friends rounded a corner and saw bright daylight at the end of the tunnel. A moment later, they shot out of a hole in the cliff face, blinking their eyes as the sunlight blinded them. They caught air for a moment, then crashed into a wide, slow-moving section of the Round River.
Looking back, they saw that the tunnel they’d come through exited the mountain through a narrow gap some five feet above the main flow of the river. Behind and beyond the outlet, the Round River flowed slowly and serenely between high cliffs on either side. The water was a deep, muddy brown with the silt carried down from the mountains.
“We want to get off the water as soon as we can,” Ronan said once they’d all had a chance to catch their breath. “The river will carry us away from Ghennet and back south if we let it.”
“Whatever happens,” Tanya said, looking upward. “We’ll need to wait until we get somewhere where the river is close to the bank, and that might not happen for a while. I fear that we might lose some days before we can get back off the river. We can’t get up those cliffs.”
Ronan grinned. “Can’t we?” he said. “I think we might have a trick or two up our sleeves that you don’t know about yet.”
“What, can you fly?” Tanya said, looking doubtfully at the cliff on their right. “That’s seventy feet up at least.”
In answer, Ronan reached to his belt and pulled out his grappling hook and the long line. “It’s a long throw,” he said, “but I think I can do it. Eric, Diana, what do you think?”
“I think we should do it now,” Eric said. “These cliffs are only going to get higher the further south we go.”
The three assassins stood and, in tandem, began to whirl their grappling hooks around their heads. When Ronan gave the order, they all flung their hooks up toward the top of the cliff.
It was a practiced move, and they all had the strength and technique required for a long throw, but Ronan was impressed at how much easier it was to throw the hook than he’d expected. Another effect of the Fighter Guild strength that he had been granted through the merging of their powers.
The three hooks caught fast at the top of the cliff, and they used the ropes to drag themselves toward the cliff-face. When the boat bumped up against the rocks, Eric turned to Tanya. “Put your arms around my neck,” he said. “I have the strength to carry us both up the rope.”
Tanya did so, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Then, with a surge upward, Eric leapt from the boat and began to swarm up the cliff, with Ronan and Diana following.
The bandit boat caught the river current again and slowly began to roll away downstream on the brown water.
Ronan caught a glimpse of Tanya’s wide eyes as Eric swarmed up the wall with her on his back. She might have been granted the powers of the Night Guild in the course of the joining, but the experience of climbing fast up a sheer cliff above deep water was new to her, and tolerance for such an experience was not something that could be taught all at once.
For his own part, Ronan clambered up swiftly, keeping an eye out for any sign of pursuit, or of any observer watching them from above. There was none.
They reached the top of the cliff and clambered over into a thick covering of fern and brush. Working swiftly, they gathered up their grappling hooks and ropes and lay still in the brush, watching.
A few moments later, they saw what they had been looking for. With screeches of anger and excitement, three bandit boats packed with the thin-faced, goblin-like people fired like darts from a blowpipe out of the exit tunnel. The boats landed on the water, and the bandits stood up and looked about them, jabbering in their strange language to one another.
It took them only a few moments to establish that Ronan and his friends were not on the water anymore. With howls of anger, they set off in pursuit downriver, paddling their boats with ferocious energy downstream and waving their curved scimitars in the air as they did so.
A few minutes later, they had rounded the bend and were out of sight.
“It won’t take them long to discover our boat going at that pace,” Tanya said. Her voice was a little hoarse, but it seemed that she had recovered from the fright of the climb quickly for all that.
“Let’s make a move then,” Ronan said. “We still need to figure out where we are.”
“I’ve a feeling that we’ve come a good distance,” Diana said as they stood and made their way stealthily out of the little gully in which they had been lying. She pointed up at the sun. “We’re on the correct side of the river for our mission at least,” she said. “We’re heading north now. Let’s go.”
The river behind them flowed round in a great curve, and so they headed north away from it. They were in a broken, overgrown country with large boulders sticking out of the grass at regular intervals. The ground was thick and tussocky, but they made good progress all the same. After an hour or so, the late afternoon sun dipped behind the mountains and it became gloomy.
Ronan was just considering suggesting a stop and a rest when they crested a rise. They had been climbing steadily since they’d left the river, but now they stepped up over the ridge and suddenly the whole country was laid out before them.
They had indeed come a long way in the tunnels. Below them, lying in a wide, flat, open space ringed around by mountains, was the land of Ghennet.
Diana made a sound in her throat and reached out to steady herself on Ronan’s arm.
“It’s home,” she said in a choking voice. “Even after everything that’s happened, it’s still home.”
The Round River ran right through the middle of the land, gleaming in the evening like a ribbon of liquid silver among the green fields and woods of the land. They were still high above the land, and they could see the whole country laid out before them like a model on a table. There was the river, and along it at various points were cities and towns, hazy with the smoke of wildfires in the evening light.
Around the cities, a patchwork of farm fields stretched out in every direction, giving way to woods and low hills toward the outer edges of the country. Off in the distance, the last of the sun gleamed on blue mountains far to the north.
And in the middle of the vast plain, so far away that it was still only a speck of white gleaming out of the gathering shadow, lay their objective. Diana pointed to it.
“You see that speck of white over there?” She asked quietly. “That’s it. That’s the Temple of the Silent Brotherhood, and the land around it is where I grew up.”
Eric shaded his eyes. “It looks to be many days’ walk from here,” he said doubtfully.
“Not so far as you might think,” Diana said. “On foot, at a steady pace, it might take three days to walk from the border to the temple. But we can get passage on one of the many barges that carry goods upriver from the border towns.”
