Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon (22 page)

“And we’re doing ours,” said Kranxx. “There’s a good chance that the sewage tunnel exit is trapped, and we could use a walking test case to send in first to check things out.”

“That is exactly what I was thinking,” said Killeen, obviously pleased that someone understood that she had only the best intentions.

“Trapped?” Dougal glared at Kranxx. “And why didn’t you mention that before?”

Kranxx shrugged. “I didn’t want to complicate the matter with other issues. I figured you—and I mean the collective ‘you’ here—would have a hard enough time making the right choice about how to get to Ascalon City from here without having to sift through extraneous points of data.”

“Wolf’s breath!” said Gullik. “We’ve been wading through this river of sludge to reach a tunnel of traps?”

“Some of us have,” said Kranxx. “Others have remained nice and clean.”

“Maybe too clean,” said Ember. “You didn’t dirty your hands in that fight, did you?”

Kranxx cringed at the accusation. “I was trying to get a surprise for our foes out of my pack, but the rest of you made such quick work of them that I never had the chance.”

“Sure,” said Ember. “Lucky you.”

Kranxx bristled at her words. “The next time I pull something from my pack, just remember this: Close
your eyes.”

“By the time you pull something from your pack, we all will be dead,” muttered the charr.

Dougal returned to Killeen. “Just let the woman go.”

“Wynne,” Riona said in a voice thick and raw. “I know her. I mean, I knew her. Her name was Wynne. Her father was friends with my father when we were young. He ran the armorer’s shop.”

Dougal couldn’t look at the woman anymore. He had to turn away.

“She’s dead,” said Ember. “But she may still be of some use. That seems like a good way to honor her life.”

“Charr or not,” Dougal said, “that’s the coldest rationalization I’ve ever heard.”

“Bear’s blood!” said Gullik. “I’ve never heard a pack of warriors natter on so like a gaggle of old women squabbling over their weaving.”

The norn turned to Killeen. “Next time, show some more respect to those you kill. Every one of them was someone’s child once.”

“I wasn’t,” the sylvari said.

Gullik waved off her point. “You know what I mean.”

To Dougal, the norn said, “The deed is done. Rather than fight over that, let’s make some use of it. Or would you prefer one of us to wind up sharing that woman’s fate?”

Dougal groaned and looked at Wynne once more. Blood covered her from her head to her knees, to which she’d fallen after Ember had delivered the killing blow.
Her mangled face was recognizable, but only just.

“All right,” he said, shaking his head as he spoke. “Put her … it … in the front. Then we don’t have to look at her face.”

“What about the rest of them?” Riona said. “Do we just leave them like this? To be eaten by the rats?”

Dougal gave her a pained shrug. He shared her anguish, but he didn’t see what they could do to fix it. “We can’t burn them down here, and we can’t bury them in stone. Someone will come looking for them soon enough.” He grimaced. “We need to be as far away from here as we can be by then, if only so we aren’t forced to thin the Vanguard’s numbers even more.”

Killeen put the shambling, dead Wynne in the lead. The sylvari followed right after her, with Kranxx on her heels. Riona trailed after them, and Dougal remained in the back of the line of people who could fit onto the walkway. Trudging through the stream, Ember and then Gullik swept along behind the rest of them.

They made their way through the last section of the sewer, which seemed to wind on forever. Dougal kept peering into the darkness, hoping to see even the faintest glow of light.

The first clue he had that they were near the exit was the way the walls of the tunnel seemed to vibrate in a tone lower than his ears could hear. He could feel it in the air, though, and eventually through the soles of his boots.

The silent thrumming slowly grew in pitch and volume until it became a dull roar. This, Dougal knew,
must be the sound of the stream spilling out of the tunnel and tumbling down onto the mountainside beyond.

“We should be coming up on it soon,” Kranxx said. Dougal detected a hint of worry in the asura’s voice.

“You don’t know? Haven’t you been here before?” asked Riona.

“Of course not,” said Kranxx. “Don’t you know how dangerous this is? I’ve studied the maps many times, though.”

Dougal did not find that reassuring. He was about to say something about it when Wynne disappeared.

The walkway in front of them had tilted under their weight. Pitching forward, it had thrown Wynne into the fast-moving waters. She floundered about at the surface for a moment, flapping her dead arms in some horrible mockery of an attempt to swim, and then disappeared beneath the surface.

Killeen screamed as she nearly toppled in after her undead servant. When the walkway tipped downward, she lost her balance and spun her arms in a vain attempt to recover it. Moving faster than Dougal had thought he could, Kranxx leaned forward, bending at the waist, and tapped Killeen on the shoulder with the hook attached to his back.

Killeen managed to snag the hook with her hand, but instead of the hook hauling her back, her weight pulled Kranxx forward, dragging him along to share her fate. However, this gave Dougal enough time to react, and he pushed past Riona to snag the asura by the top of his pack. For a moment he thought he might tumble in after the others, and the trap would manage
to kill all three of them at once. But he dug in his heels and leaned back hard, bringing their forward progress to a halt. With Riona’s help, he yanked both Kranxx and Killeen back to a solid part of the walkway, where they all collapsed in a heap.

“The bottom of the stream must drop off just ahead too,” said Ember. “I can feel the undertow from here.”

“Thanks for saying something before it became a problem,” Riona said as she struggled to catch her breath.

Dougal checked to make sure the others were all right, then knelt down to examine the floor and see what had happened. Kranxx stood next to him, giving him plenty of light to work with.

There was a hinge on the floor, almost impossible to see, especially by a lantern’s light. Dougal recognized the type of trap they’d triggered, and he cursed.

“Bear’s breath! What’s wrong now?” Gullik asked. “This filth is too cold to just stand here in it!”

“Lots of traps only work once,” Dougal said. “This one resets itself automatically. From this hinge here onward, the walkway is actually a ramp. A set of counterweights underneath it holds it up horizontally, right up until there’s enough weight on the end of the ramp. Then the ramp tips forward and dumps you right into the worst part of the sludge.”

“And then you die,” said Ember.

Dougal shook his head. “And then you find yourself trapped against the grating that covers the end of the tunnel, held up against it by the force of thousands of pounds of filthy water pressing you into it until you
drown.”

“And then you die,” said Killeen.

Dougal nodded. “And then you’re held there until your body rots enough for the water pressure to tear you into pieces so small that you flow out through the grate with the rest of Ebonhawke’s waste.”

Dougal pointed at Kranxx’s glowing light. “Can you put that out?”

Kranxx pulled a heavy sack from his pack and hooded the stone with it, blocking its glow. Dougal stared ahead into the darkness until his eyes adjusted to it.

“Yes,” he said, “I can see some light up ahead. I think we’re near the entrance.”

“Good,” said Riona. “Now we just need to figure out how to get there—without dying.”

Dougal glanced around, and his eyes fell on Gullik. He pointed at the norn’s axe and said, “Give me that.”

“You’re as mad as Raven,” said Gullik. “No warrior gives up his weapon until the fight is finished.”

“I’m going to use it to fight the trap.” Dougal put out his hands. “Trust me.”

Gullik screwed up his lips as he evaluated the man and the moment, then reversed his axe and handed it to Dougal by the handle. “I expect it back in one piece.”

Holding the weapon, Dougal realized just how heavy the thing was. He wasn’t sure he could swing it over his head. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

He set the axe down on the walkway, then lowered himself into the sludge. It was just as nasty as it had
been before. No matter how much he braced himself for the stench and the cold, it was horrible.

He took the axe and put it headfirst into the sludge before Gullik could stop him. Then he bent down deeper into the sludge until it came up to the tops of his shoulders. With a bit of wiggling, he managed to wedge the ax up under the ramp. He tested it for a moment, then let go. It was jammed in there hard enough that it stuck.

“I want my axe back,” Gullik said. “I haven’t lost a weapon since an icebrood I was fighting took my spear from me and used it as a toothpick.”

“I just need to release the grating,” said Dougal. “Then you can have it back.”

He climbed out of the muck again and then beckoned Kranxx to come with him. “I need your lamp,” he said, “and you’re light enough to not trigger the trap with me.” He looked past the aura. “The rest of you stay here. We’ll be right back.”

Dougal worked his way forward along the ramp on his hands and knees, waiting for the axe’s handle to snap or to feel the telltale tipping sensation that meant his life would soon end. As he drew closer to the end of the ramp, he saw the outside.

The sewer exited the mountainside beneath a rocky overhang, which was why they could not see any daylight sooner. Even so, the light seemed muted, and Dougal guessed that the valley beyond the grate was probably still deep in shadow. The end of the sewer was sealed with an iron grate that had been coated with rust and slime over the past two centuries. The water surged
through the grate, forming a cascade of muck that disappeared in fog below. The grate swung outward, but there was a lock on the grate that functioned only from this side, and it looked serviceable enough.

With Kranxx’s light over his shoulder, Dougal crept forward until he could reach the grate and put his weight on it instead. It held as steady as the rocks in which it was anchored. He slipped his pouch of lock picks out of its pocket in his jacket and went to work. Because of the rust and filth, it took him another half-minute longer than it should have to force the lock to give, but it did.

The grate, however, was stuck.

Dougal smacked it with his hand, but that didn’t do a thing. Then he tried a shoulder, but that only bruised his arm. Standing up, he charged right at it.

It gave, suddenly and too well.

As the grate swung wide, Dougal lost his footing on the wobbly ramp and pitched forward. Kranxx reached for him with the hook but missed. Unable to recover his balance, Dougal did the only thing he could think of instead: he kicked off from the ramp and stretched out into the gaping maw of fog and shadow before him.

His fingers closed on the slimy, slippery bars of the grate as it swung away from him, and he clung to them for his life. He glanced down below his dangling feet and saw that he hung over a dizzying drop that
deposited Ebonhawke’s sewage onto a cluster of jagged rocks. Despite himself, he shouted in terror, sure that he would not be able to maintain his tenuous grip on the treacherous grate.

“Hold on!” Riona said.

He could not turn to see what she and the others were doing, but he hoped it involved saving his life, and soon. A moment later he heard Kranxx’s voice saying, “What? Wait! No!”

Then the asura came sailing past Dougal’s head and straight over the grate. A rope attached to his waist drew taut, and someone on the other end of it held it fast so that Kranxx did not tumble to his death. Then that same someone yanked on the rope to bring Kranxx closer.

Once Kranxx had the grate in his grip, Dougal glanced back to see that both Ember and Gullik held the far end of the rope and were pulling hard. The grate swung shut with a satisfying clang, and the flowing sewage pushed the lower half of Dougal’s body hard up against it. He used this opportunity to find a foothold and then haul himself up out of the flowage.

“Thanks!” Dougal shouted backward.

“Hey! What about me?” Kranxx shouted from the other side of the grate.

“What can you see, Kranxx?” Dougal asked.

“That I’m about to die!”

“No, I mean down below you. Is there any way to get down from here?”

“Sure, lots!”

“That doesn’t involve dying.”

“That narrows it down quite a bit. Hold on!” Kranxx swung himself around on the end of the rope and craned his neck at all angles. “Hard to see through all the mist. Looks like a fairly sheer drop down about fifty feet or more.”

The asura rummaged around in his pack and produced another coil of rope. He tied one end securely to the grate and let the other end play out below him. Dougal worked his way over to where the lock stood. “Let out the rope,” he said to Gullik and Ember. “Slowly!”

They did, and the pressure from the flowing sewage pushed the grate open on its hinges again. Once the gap was wide enough, Dougal swung himself around to the other side of the grate and grabbed on to the rope.

“Why didn’t you get started down?” he asked Kranxx.

“Slide down on a filth-slick rope into a monster-infested wilderness?” The asura shook his head. “You go first.”

Dougal motioned for Ember and Gullik to let the rope play out until the grate swung back far enough that it no longer hung over the sewage-coated rocks below. Then he stuck out one leg and wrapped the rope around it. He checked Kranxx’s knot and found it solid, then lowered himself down.

The going was easy at first, until he got to the section of the rope that had dangled in the flowage. It was slick and nasty. Dougal had already been covered with so much filth that he didn’t care much about the stench, but he had to hold on with all his might to keep from
sliding down too fast. This soon proved impossible. No matter how he tried to clamp his hands on the rope, it was too slippery, and down he went in a barely controlled slide.