Arc 9: Chapter 12: The Well |
Our journey did not remain a peaceful stroll through the empty ruins of primeval empires for long.
Not far from the ambulatory, the dead attacked the group. They were ghouls like Pazé, but older and more beastly, pale things that shone in the dark and fought with raking claws and mouths stretched impossibly wide. Their howls shattered the quiet of the Tombs, an almost elemental thing all to itself.
Tej and Pazé were experienced fighters, and cut through the undead packs with an economical focus. Narahn, though inexperienced, was no wilting flower and acquitted himself well. I helped him much as I could without revealing myself and risking the presence I felt lurking deeper in these depths noticing me, guiding his hand and distracting the ghouls with phantoms. His tattoos proved their worth here, for the dead balked at the alchemist’s golden limbs. Silver was more effective against their kind, but these had been demon-touched.
“I think we’re getting near a den,” Tej said once the group caught its breath, wiping away the filth splattered across his cheek. “There might be an old crypt ahead. The corpse-eaters draw power from old remains.”
Pazé, who wore jewelry made of bone-fragments and stolen teeth for that very reason, nodded. “I wouldn’t mind raiding their hoards. It would make me stronger.”
Tej nodded slowly, scratching at his cheek in his usual nervous tic. Narahn, however, protested once he’d caught his breath.
“We have a mission,” he gasped, then paused to wipe sweat from his brow with the back of one tattooed hand. “We don’t have time to raid dungeons.”
“You haven’t been on one of these runs before, doc.” Tej spoke in a lazy drawl. “We tombdelvers don’t just get paid in coin up there.” He waved a hand toward the ceiling above our heads. “We’re risking death and worse down here, and money only gets you idle comforts in this city. But the treasures buried down here in the dark… those are worth the effort.”
Narahn started to argue further, but I headed him off. “Let them, or they will betray you. It is their way.”
“You fight well for a learned man,” Tej told the physik in approval when the group pitched camp to rest later.
“Yes,” Pazé agreed, watching Urizen’s apprentice with intent, as she had through much of our journey. “You would make a fine delver.”
Narahn nodded absently, beyond embarrassment then after the horrors he’d witnessed. He was cleaning and inspecting his new sword, a leaf-shaped implement shorter and lighter than the one he’d brought with him, with bronze decorative on the hilt. It stank of arcane power, and I suspected it would strengthen him.
“Pazé wants you,” I told him when the twins turned to bickering over their loot.
He started. “But… She’s—”
“The dead are not beyond lust. You should indulge her. She would make a strong ally, and you will need those. Once you have done this deed, the city will not ignore you any longer.”
I could tell he was disgusted at the prospect. Pazé had shown him just how monstrous she could be during our journey, and even then the grinning ruin of her fleshless jaws was visible through the fabric of her mask.
“I can grant you protection from any disease she might carry,” I kindly offered.
“I’m only here to protect my wards,” he said angrily. “I’m not interested in becoming your pawn in whatever power games you’re playing, and once this is done I’ll part ways with these villains and wash my hands of this.”
I left him be after that, seeing that he did not share Didikas’s and Fell’s taste in unorthodox lovers. It disappointed me for some reason.
“I think we’re close,” Tej said as the trio packed up their things and prepared to move out from the ghoul crypts. “I only know this region from notes I’ve traded with other delvers, but all the rumors say the Well lies near here.”
“What can we expect?” Narahn asked.
“A guard,” Tej told him. “And a lift that will take us even further down.”
Tej’s words would proved prophetic. Beyond that small ghoul kingdom, we found a deep shaft in the buried ruins with a winding staircase that spun down near a hundred meters, with no guard rails to protect the mortals from tumbling down to their deaths. It led nowhere at the bottom, held no side passages or connected chambers. There was a just a lonely, dusty room, and at its center lay a hole and a wooden lift.
It was such a strange thing, to see wood and rope in that deep place of stone and dust. How it had not rotted away long before I had no clue, though it looked more than halfway there. A creature so ancient and bent I could not distinguish gender or humanity guarded the lift. It might have been dead, only the glint of its eyes watched us as we approached. It said nothing. No threats or questions, no exchange of words.
Tej stepped forward to cut the thing down, but Narahn stopped him. “Wait,” the alchemist said. “I don’t think it’s hostile.”
The ancient watchman simply waited. After a moment’s hesitation, Narahn stepped onto the lift. It wasn’t big enough for the whole group.
“We’ll come down after?” Tej lied.
Narahn just smiled and shook his head. “You were only paid to get me this far. I’ll take it from here. I have… a plan.”
His eyes strayed in my general direction, where I lurked in shadow-shape behind the twins. Pazé’s head drifted towards me as well, and her black eyes narrowed.
Tej scratched at his cheek. “We’ll wait an hour, but if you don’t come back up before long…”
He shrugged, and his meaning went without saying. If the twins were not around to lead their ward back up, then he would not find his way through the labyrinth to the surface again.
But I remembered the way, and if Narahn felt concern he hid it well. He glanced to the sentinel, and the crooked thing let out a wheezing groan as it stood and began to work the lever to lower the healer from the Nails down into the deepest darkness beneath Rot Voraag.
Only I went with him. It was a long way down. The ropes creaked ominously as they stretched, rusted pulleys squealed, and the platform swayed beneath the man’s weight. The noise only became more intense as it took us lower, echoing off the close walls of the shaft.
When we were well out of earshot of the twins, Narahn spoke in a louder voice than he’d used to whisper to me during our previous conversations. “Do you have some plan besides just throwing me at this creature? I might have slain a few ghouls today, but I’m no Ban Sain.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
I smiled at the reference. Ban Sain was a barbarian hero from the southern plains of Agharra, where Narahn had been born. “The one below will be powerful and dangerous, but not mighty in battle like you might be thinking. She will use illusions and spells, but I can protect you from those. Simply get close and strike her, and use what I taught you.”
I had coached him during the previous days of preparation on how to channel his Spark. He had a minor talent, but with my influence had managed to expand it into the ability to wield his soul, if crudely. Channeled through the formulaic marks etched into his skin with sanctified gold, it would form a potent fire against any demon or undead. He had used it during his fight with the ghouls, with difficulty at first and then with instinctive ease. Those fights proved a valuable experience, in the end.
The ropes groaned. Metal screeched. Lower and lower. This was only ceremony, intended to impress and terrify the hag’s visitors. It would feel, to a mortal who had not experienced it, like they descended down into Hell. I was hardly impressed, but it had an ill effect on Narahn, and sweat beaded on his temples. He grit his teeth and forced himself to be still, but his muscles clenched and unclenched in a nervous rhythm. I found myself admiring how his fear made the bright marks on them stand out against his dark skin.
No distractions, I reminded myself. This was not the time and place, or indeed the person, though that just made me more interested. I’d half encouraged him to partner with Pazé earlier because I had wanted to watch. Voyeurism was hardly a novel fetish for one of my kind, and given my nature as a spirit it could be just as nourishing to my lusts as direct participation. That same nature made other passions — fear, agony, and despair chiefly amongst them — just as enticing.
To my disappointment, Narahn mastered his fear. He closed his eyes, and a perplexing calm came over him. I found myself drifting toward the edge of the platform, far from him as I could in the narrow shaft, as an atmosphere of steady resolve settled on the man. He may as well have started chanting holy mantras at me.
A small eternity later, the platform struck solid stone and came to a sudden, jarring stop. The chasm into which we’d been lowered was vast, a great hollow beneath the desert. I could make out dark waters far below, and witch-lights that floated here and there to brush against cracked masonry. Ancient statues guarded walkways over which no living soul had tread in many centuries, perhaps many millennia. It looked very different from much of the ruins above, an entirely different ecosystem, though the architecture seemed similar to that one chamber Narahn had speculated to be Antrissan.
A city buried beneath the one above. This was the true Well. Perhaps it was even the true Rot Voraag, which the Exalted was trying to unearth a fragment at a time even as he built his own empire over it.
Narahn opened his eyes and lifted his torch, his sword held in a sure grip in his other hand. He looked so different then, and I felt a shudder of trepidation. Just what had I started to create? He looked a hero in truth, a warrior carrying fire in one hand and death in the other, his flesh warded with holy gold.
Moments after my nascent hero stepped off the lift, it began to complain again and rise back up. Narahn glanced back once, but did not balk. He began to navigate the winding platforms and edgeless walkways that crisscrossed the cavern like the links in a massive spiderweb. The ceiling of the great cavern dripped, so it rained in some places, and everywhere there were signs of mineral buildup. Where it grew on the statues, it made them look like drowned souls being eaten by barnacles.
I moved alongside the young alchemist, his shadow in every sense. He cast me across the bridges and tumbled walls of the Well, and somewhere deeper within, another presence watched us in turn.
Our winding path eventually took us to the bottom of the ruins, where it sank into water. The lake extended far out, but there were many islands breaking its surface, little more than drowned pieces of the architecture collapsed into mounds of rubble. The water was dark and deep, its surface covered in a greasy film. It smelled of mildew and old rot. The foggy gloom of the cavern yawned overhead, broken only by the scattered banks of soul mist that swirled down in a slow whirlpool toward the Well’s bottom.
Narahn gagged and held a hand up to his face. The water was befouled, a bounteous reservoir that could have breathed life into the dry desolation above were it not ruined by the demon’s presence. He took a step back from the lake’s edge. I saw what he had a moment later. There were bodies in the water, many of them rotted near to sludge, bloated and eaten. They floated across the lake by the score, and the eerie fog in the air clung tightly to them, marking their positions as surely as if they glowed.
A voice echoed from the corpse fog. “Oh, don’t be frightened dearie, the water’s fine!”
Sinister laughter in the dark. “Show yourself!” Narahn snarled. I would have rolled my eyes at the cliché had I been corporeal, but now wasn't the time to coach him on his heroic etiquette.
“I’m afraid I am rather shy. What is such a handsome fellow doing in my home, hm? Come to ask a boon of me? Want a pretty lass’s heart? No? Maybe mummy is sick and you want a cure? Nice boy like you always has a lady at his back.”
I whispered into his ear. “She is trying to unnerve you, but she is afraid. Don’t let her distract you.”
The Old Woman in the Well suddenly let out a screech that tore through the cavern. “Got a lass at your back, Jack! I see her clinging to your shoulder, whispering sweet nothings in your ear!”
“What do I do?” Narahn hissed.
“Flatter her,” I told him. “The Old Witches are weak to it.”
He thought for a moment, then let his sword lower. “I have come for your help, Witch of the Well. I’ve heard… I’ve been told that you are very powerful, that even the Exalted fears you.”
Something moved in the water. It drifted between the corpses, like the humped back of a big fish swimming between the drowned carcasses. There was only a glimpse of it before it vanished and the voice came again.
“I’m thinking this Jack doesn’t speak his own words, but you’ve got my ear. What can this poor old grandmother do for you?”
Narahn’s fist clinched and unclenched around the hilt of his sword. The flame of his torch sputtered, though the air was still. “The city above… The people suffer. Good people and bad, innocents and wicked men… They’re all suffering, and I want to help them. There’s so much pain. I’m sick of it.”
I felt a strange sense of connection to those words. Something told me that he meant them, though he used them now in deception.
“All souls suffer. What do you expect me to do about it?”
“This suffering has a root.” Narahn took a step forward, dangerously close to the water’s edge. “The Exalted lets it happen. He made this place the way it is, all for his own power. I want… I want to kill him.”
A long pause. The hag’s voice grew quieter, lost some of that wheedling edge. “What is your name, boy?”
“Do not give it to her,” I warned him.
He thought for a moment, then took inspiration from an offhand comment of my own. “Goldhand.”
A strange, warbling purr rolled over the lake. “What makes you believe I can help you bring down the king on the clay throne, Goldhand?”
“I know you’re his enemy,” Narahn said.
The Old Woman in the Well sent a low chuckle over the water. “I am everyone’s enemy, boy. Ask that shadow behind you what I mean.”
I boiled with frustration. My ploy hadn’t fooled her.
No matter. We were here, and I had my chance.
“Show yourself,” Narahn repeated with growing tension. “Let’s talk face to face.”
The creature in the water laughed again, this time the sound unmistakably sultry. “Oh, you want to see my face, do you?”
The corpses in the water shivered, and those with intact heads began to chitter with laughter in tune with the foul presence in the darkness. That eldritch sight had an effect on the alchemist, caused him to balk.
"On guard!" I whispered into Narahn's ear. "She means to-"
When the hag attacked, it happened suddenly and with monstrous ferocity. She came out of the water to Narahn’s left, emerging in an eruption of reeking, filthy lake spray. She was enormous as any ogre, though I only got a glimpse of slime-matted white hair and bulbous limbs. She wielded a harpoon like a whale hunter, fashioned of bone, its barbed tip covered in corpse grime. Even a nick would be fatal to a living human like my drafted champion.
He might have died there, but my phantom hand took his by the wrist — I was careful not to touch his tattoos even with my incorporeal body — and jerked it up. The hag could see that hidden light just as I could, and as it caught her she flinched and fouled her strike, her harpoon missing Narahn by inches and biting a chunk of damp stone.
“Defend yourself, fool!” I hissed into Narahn’s ear. He hardly needed the encouragement, though the spray of lake water had drenched and blinded him for the moment. With a shout that mixed as much terror as battle fury, he swept out with his tomb blade in a reckless, blind cut, and I could not take credit for what happened next.
It was mere chance. Or perhaps fate. Perhaps the will of the gods moved Golden Narahn’s hand.
The sword cut deeply into the hag’s wrist, almost severing it from the arm. Again she roared, this time in pain, and struck the alchemist with a vicious backhand that hurled him against a crumbled block of masonry. He fell to the ground in a daze, losing his sword and covering his head with his arms, expecting more blows.
But the hag, injured and terrified of he who’d caused it, fled back into the water. And I, a predator by nature and sensing my prey flee, gave chase. I detached from Narahn, the camouflage his mortal essence provided no longer of any use or interest to me.
I went into the water and chased her.
