Word of Traitors: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 2 (50 page)

Midian squatted behind him, unmoving and apparently intent on something in his hand. The rope that should have been tied to his wrist seemed to pass completely through it. Ekhaas hissed and swept a foot across the ground where the gnome crouched.

And a glittering crystal disk no bigger than a coin bounced off the stone of the arch. Midian vanished. The rope was tied to a bar of the iron gate.

“Tiger, Wolf, and Rat, I thought we searched him!” Geth snarled. “Where is he?”

Ashi pointed. “There!”

The sun shone off a shock of pale hair, just visible above the long grass on the near side of the grazing horses. Midian moved with such stealth that the grass around him barely swayed. It was easy to guess where the Zil was going: his own secret way into the tomb. Maybe he was going to fetch the rod for them just as he’d said, but Geth doubted it.

“I could stop him,” said Chetiin.

“No.” Geth drew Wrath. “We’re in a race now. Ekhaas, Ashi, Aruget—go!”

“Wait. Let’s put honey in the trap.” Aruget grabbed Geth’s chin and turned his face toward him. He studied the shifter, then let him go. Hobgoblin features melted and reformed. Ears shrank and hair grew out. Small eyes become large and wide. In only moments, Geth stared at himself wearing Aruget’s armor. Aruget-Geth smiled and said in eerie mimicry of his growl, “Daavn will be more likely to chase a face he knows. Ko isn’t the only one who can imitate you.”

He jerked his head and he, Ashi, and Ekhaas stole out of the gate, moving along the low wall in the opposite direction to the way Midian had gone. They ran low and fast, heading for the nearest fold in the ridge. Geth realized he was holding his breath.

“Midian has seen them,” Chetiin said. Geth swung around to look for the gnome—just in time to see his arm swing as he hurled something back at the horses, then dropped into the grass.

“Down!” Chetiin said.

They pressed themselves against the ground. Geth kept his head up just enough to see the hurled object—an ordinary stone—hit one of the horses on the flank. The startled beast reared just a little and danced forward a few steps. The other horses reacted to it, raising their heads and looking around.

The movement was enough to draw the eye of one of the hobgoblin guards. He swung around.

Ekhaas, Ashi, and Aruget-Geth were caught in the open.
“Toh!”
cried the guard. Daavn, Makka, the hobgoblins and bugbears all swung to look as well.

Their friends froze for an instant, then dashed for the cover of the ridge. Geth saw Daavn’s eyes go wide—and Makka’s narrow with bloodlust. He grabbed Wrath so he could understand the words that were shouted.

“Get them!” Daavn ordered. “Kill them!”

The guards were in motion as soon as the command was ordered.

“They’re mine!”
roared Makka. He charged, swinging his fists and bashing hobgoblin guards aside, with Pradoor clinging to his shoulder and cackling like a mad thing. The other bugbears, picks and hammers still in their hands, stood still, obviously uncertain whom to obey. Daavn drew his sword and screamed at them to follow as he took off after Makka. The bugbears roared as Makka had and leaped to the pursuit. They didn’t bother descending the steep stairs cut up to the tomb but jumped from rock to rock across the face of the ridge.

The distraction had worked, although not just for them. Midian was up and running, stealth abandoned for speed. He looked to be heading for a particularly rough section of the ridge about two long arrowflights away from the gate. Geth waited a
heartbeat longer, until Daavn and his men were well away from the tomb, then pushed himself to his feet. “Go!” he said. “Tenquis, can you run?”

“You should have asked that before,” the tiefling snapped, but he was up already up and running nearly as quickly as Geth himself, if a little more unsteadily. Geth stayed close to him. Chetiin, faster than either of them, paused at the bottom of the stairs, then darted up ahead.

Tenquis was grimacing in pain by the time he reached the top, but he lurched over to the tomb door and ran his hands over the scarred surface. Geth felt a fresh burst of anger for Daavn and Tariic. The fine carving of Haruuc was nearly destroyed. Only his fierce, watchful face remained. Tenquis caught his look. “It can be repaired,” he said. “A good artificer or even a magewright with a little time can fix anything.”

The bugbears had taken their tools with them, but Tenquis reached into one of the pockets of his vest and pulled out the heavy steel pry bar Geth had watched him slide into it. He threw it to Geth. “When I tell you, work that in about there”—he pointed to the seam between the door and the frame where a bugbear’s pick had already broken a hole—“and get ready to heave.”

“That’s not going to work. I told you, the pivots are broken.”

“And I told you an artificer can fix anything.” He pulled more objects out of his pockets: a couple of tiny flasks, a stick of bright red chalk, and several roughly polished stones. The flasks and the stones he set to the side. Taking the chalk in one hand, he spread the fingers of the other wide and touched them lightly to the door on the side where the pivots had been. His face took on a distant expression and, after a moment, he started to trace out stange lines on the door with the chalk.

Geth looked to Chetiin. The goblin crouched on the edge of the space before the tomb, watching the ridge where Ekhaas and the others—and their pursuers—had disappeared among the age-carved rocks. Shouts and cries, the scrape and clatter of metal against rock came back over the ridge. Their friends were doing their job, keeping Daavn and his men busy. Geth still felt fear for them in his gut.

“Have you seen them?” he asked.

“Glimpses,” said Chetiin just as Ekhaas’s voice rose in a song that ended in a crash and a short, swiftly silenced scream. Geth’s hands tightened on the shaft of the pry bar.

“Geth, I’m ready,” Tenquis said.

Both Geth and Chetiin turned around. Tenquis was dusting shimmering powders from the tiny flasks over the chalk-marked door and onto his hands. He nodded at the broken spot he had pointed out before and Geth quickly set the end of the pry bar into it. When he was ready, he nodded back to Tenquis. The tiefling took a deep breath. “As soon as you feel the door shift, work the bar with everything you’ve got,” he said. “We only have one chance at this.”

He picked up two of the stones, a near match in color and grain for the stone of the door, and held them against his palms with two fingers of each hand. He spread his other fingers and, stretching his arms, pressed them against the door at the top and bottom of his chalked lines. His eyes closed and his face tightened in concentration. His lips moved in a rapid, nearly inaudible whisper.

There was a clash of blades from the ridge and another sharp scream. Chetiin turned to look. Geth kept his eyes on Tenquis and his grip steady on the pry bar. He could feel sweat forming on his palms.

Tenquis’s teeth clenched. His whispers slid between them.

Stone creaked.

Through the steel bar, Geth felt a distinct vibration as the door shivered and rose by the tiniest fraction. He threw his weight against the bar, hauling at it. For an instant, steel grated against stone, then the tip of the bar caught again and held. Geth strained, his muscles cracking and popping.

The door moved.

Geth groaned at the weight of it. He ground his teeth together until they hurt and heaved harder on the bar. The thickness of stone that stood out from the frame grew slowly. A finger’s width. A finger’s length. Two fingers’ lengths. A dagger’s length.

Darkness appeared. Chetiin seized a loose rock and shoved it into the gap. Geth drew back the pry bar and thrust it into the darkness before the stone could crack. The heavy steel squealed as it took the weight of the door. Geth drew a breath and shifted, letting the ancient heritage of his blood give new energy to his
muscles before he stepped around, worked his fingers into the thin gap and pulled. Tenquis moved with him, hands resting steady on the stone, whispers rising.

The gap grew. Geth could have slipped through sideways. “Enough!” he gasped at Tenquis.

“All the way or it will swing closed on us,” said the artificer, and even those few words interrupting his whispers brought new creaking from the unseen pivots. Geth groaned again and kept pulling. Step by step, back until the mouth of the tomb gaped wide. He waited for a shout from Daavn or one of his men as they caught a glimpse of what was happening and realized they’d been tricked. None came.

“Almost there!” said Tenquis—and pulled his hands away from the door, getting out from behind it. There was a crunch and a grinding sound as the magic that had held the shattered pivots together faltered. For an instant, Geth felt the unbearable weight of the door against his arms. He pulled with all his strength, trying to hold in the straining cry that threatened to escape him.

The door shifted one last time, then ground to a stop, striking the side of the tomb with a gentle tap. Geth’s arms and shoulders felt heavy and numb. His legs trembled, but he limped around to the front of the tomb and the doorway.

Chetiin was already standing in the shadows, poised at the top of a dark staircase. Tenquis pulled a stone that glimmered pale as moonlight from his pocket. Geth drew Wrath. He could feel the presence of the Rod of Kings pulsing in the sword.

They stepped down into Haruuc’s tomb together, moving away from sun and into shadow. The cold stench of cave damp and slow decay rose to meet them. Tenquis’s moonstone—shedding just enough light for shifter or
dar
or tiefling eyes to see—revealed walls that changed from worked stone to rough, natural rock as they descended. The stairs became rougher, too, hacked out of the floor of a steep passage wide enough for two broad-shouldered men to walk side by side. The words that the hobgoblin priests had spoken at Haruuc’s funeral came back to Geth.

Traditions tell that the People were born in caverns and lived there before we emerged to fight beneath the sun and the sky. When we pass through the gates of death, we return to caverns, the womb and the grave
.

The steep passage grew taller. Glints of light shone ahead, reflections of the moonstone, and they emerged into a cave perhaps twice as big as Geth’s quarters in Khaar Mbar’ost and far taller, heaped with gold and treasures.

Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat’kor sat on his throne in the midst of this tribute, both eye sockets empty now as they stared at the stone sky.

Geth stopped at the bottom of the passage and looked on the remains of the father of Darguun, haste brushed aside by a curious sense of awe. He’d watched the corpse being carried down into the tomb, had walked with it through Rhukaan Draal. Haruuc was as dead now as he’d been then, yet somehow there was a particular solemn majesty about him. It wasn’t so much the wealth that surrounded him as it was the unnatural stillness of something dead, alone in the unchanging solitude of one of Eberron’s small secret places. Geth felt like an intruder. He lowered Wrath and bent his head in a nod of respect.

Tenquis must have felt it too. He bowed low, a flourishing gesture that was distinctly tiefling. Chetiin, however, didn’t move at all for a long, long moment and it took all that time for Geth to realize that this would be the first chance he’d had to see Haruuc up close since Midian had attacked him.

When the goblin finally moved, he walked directly up to Haruuc’s seated corpse, knelt down, and opened a small chest that rested by Haruuc’s feet. From inside it, he took the ugly, crystal-set dagger named Witness—the dagger that had been stolen from him, the dagger that had killed Haruuc. He pressed the flat of the blade to his heart as he looked up at the lhesh and Geth heard him murmur, “You will be avenged, my friend.” He slid the dagger into an empty sheath on his right forearm, then turned back to Geth and Tenquis. “Find the rod,” he said.

Geth raised Wrath again and swung it around the cave. Awareness of the Rod of Kings prickled across his senses. To the left and across the cavern—the sword pointed directly at a pile of rolled carpets. Geth had to admit that it was a good hiding place. If by chance the tomb was pilfered while the rod was within, the fine but bulky carpets would almost certainly be ignored in favor of gold and gems. “There!” said Geth. He stepped toward the carpets.

Something flickered in the very corner of his vision, high up among the shadows of one wall of the cavern. Something pale, quickly obscured by the movement of something dark that gave a soft
snap
.

He threw himself back with a curse at the same moment a crossbow bolt hissed through the space where he’d been. It sank deep into the wood of a treasure chest. Shadows leaped across the cavern wall as Tenquis raised the moonstone. Its pale light revealed Midian, perched in the mouth of narrow crack, already sighting along the stock of a small hand crossbow once more. The gnome gave a crooked grin and winked at Geth before he squeezed the trigger.

T
he rocks of the ridge made a challenging hunting ground. Makka’s initial charge carried him to the arm of the ridge behind which Ekhaas, Ashi, and Geth had sought shelter, but his quarry had already vanished into the rough gray folds. At the point where a shallow gully broke the slope he paused and tested the air with flaring nostrils. They hadn’t lingered—they were moving higher. He crouched. “Get off, Pradoor,” he said. “Wait here.”