Dark Obligations: Book One of the Phantom Badgers (15 page)

“I know it looks bad,”
Durek patted her shoulder nervously. “But that slab is fixed in place, you couldn’t shift it with a six-foot pry bar, so you don’t have to worry about it slipping. Once through the opening it should be easy enough crawling. Just remember what we’ve told you about rock-crawling, and you’ll do fine.”

“
And remember what I told you about the spiders,” Kroh added.

The thought of creeping through that tight point and crawling into the dark confines of the mountain’s bowels gave her goose
-bumps like bee strings: Threll like close confinement the way cats like cold rain. But in the end racial pride sent her forward: she was the only Threll in the Company, and any failure on her part not only embarrassed herself but also reflected on her people as a whole. As a child she had always been a spunky sort, never one to turn down a dare or refuse a challenge, and old habits die hard.

Once through the bottleneck she paused an
d straightened her clothes; she had left armor, helm, buckler, sword, bow, and quiver behind as too bulky for the tight quarters encountered in rock-crawling, dressing in undertunic, leggings, and soft boots, with rags tied around her knees and elbows to protect them from the grinding contact with the stone. She had moved her belt around so her dagger rode in the small of her back, reachable with either hand; with her left, dominant, hand she drew her boot dagger and crept forward along the narrow crack, the bun of her hair saving her head as she regularly bumped it against the low ceiling. Moving slowly, eyes and ears straining, she crept along the narrow fault, careful to keep an eye on the vein of reddish rock the Dwarves had advised her to follow, the small clumps of peton moss allowing her night-keen eyes to see for at least a dozen feet in most places.

At each intersection or side-passage she stopped and marked her path with yellow paint, then noted the divergence on a crude map. It was tedious work, as here were hundreds of off-shoots and side-cracks, but the Dwarves had been adamant about this: always mark, always map; speed was secondary to your ability to find your way back. After marking and mapping, she examined the walls for the marks of others, and frequently found them, arrows, pointers, and symbols drawn in paint, tar, or other substances. Both Dwarves had found them in their earlier explorations and said that they were not unusual: the Felher and their minions had occupied the
raith
for years during the siege and would have used these crevices for storage points. Other races and raiders would have explored them for lost loot and in the hopes of finding veins of ore exposed by the cracking and shifting.

One mark interested her more than most: here and there she found an arrow scratched into the stone;
Durek had found the same marking elsewhere and had theorized that it had been made by a Threll, basing this deduction on the fact that the marks had been dug into the stone with a metal tool, an action which would make unwanted noise and thus indicated that the maker was no underground dweller, and because he felt that only a Threll would bother to mark the fletching and barbed arrowhead on a pointer-arrow. It intrigued her to think that another Lanthrell had passed this way, and helped ease the crushing sense of loneliness the stone-crawling created within her.

Yard by crawled yard she followed the rusty vein through the stone, expending one pot of paint and digging out another, becoming covered in
age-old dust, smears of clay, and splashes of muddy slime from sweating rock. Two hours passed in which she moved a quarter-mile in terms of a straight line distance, and twice that in actual ground crawled. She had had to double back several times when one branch or another of the red rock led her astray, but always she managed to find a new line of the strange course rock and move on. Once she found the bones of an Orc in an alcove, his rusting
renac
(a heavy cleaver-like sword) lying nearby. She took his belt buckle made from twisted gold wire from the remains as a souvenir and moved on, doubly alert.

At the two hour mark she took a rest break in a
n intersection after marking and mapping the two branches; clay coating on all the walls concealed the red vein, so she planned to take the left hand route for no better reason than the scratched-arrow marking indicated that whoever was making that particular sign had gone that way. First, however, she rolled to a sitting position and massaged her knees and thighs, her dagger lying ready at her side. She had seen no sign of rock Titans, but that did not mean the giant spiders were not about.

Thoughtfully she fingered the small copper amulet that hung under her filthy under
-tunic on a chain carved from iron-hard
iocor
wood; it was supposed to be enchanted in such a manner as to protect her from the effects of poison, but to date the only thing that seemed to bear out the claim was that the small, coin-sized medallion was still bright and ruddy copper instead of having gone green after months spent under Starr’s armor. In theory, the charm should render her safe from the spider’s worst weapon, venom, although the creature could simply fang her to death if she wasn’t careful.

The amulet had been given to her by the enigmatic mixed-blood Threll Elonia Starshine, who claimed to be the bastard daughter of the fabled (and enslaved) Star and a Direthrell officer, thus making her a cousin
of Starr’s. Certainly Elonia was bold and deadly enough to warrant her claims of escaping from the Direthrell, and she knew things that only Star would have known. Elonia had secretly contacted Starr while the younger Threll was serving in the
Lana Erhant
, swearing her cousin to deepest secrecy on the matter. She had met with Starr a score of times, often revealing the planned routes and arrival times of Direthrell raiding parties, information Starr slipped to her superiors, who then set ambushes for their hated foes, ambushes which never failed to reap a thick harvest. After several months of this Elonia called upon Starr to help her abduct, kill, and dispose of the body of a Direthrell officer; thereafter her cousin disappeared for the better part of a decade.

Elonia had contacted Starr again not long before the younger Threll planned to leave the Forest to seek adventure; Elonia said that she was no longer in a position to spy upon the Direthrell, but had asked Starr for a favor: would her cousin go north of the Ward and enlist in the ranks of a mercenary company known as the Phantom Badgers? Elonia herself planned to join the f
ollowing spring, but wanted to ensure that she would have someone in place who could brief her on the ins and outs of the unit. Starr had readily agreed, planning to stay with the unit for only a few months, but the unexpected blood-debt to Kroh had altered her plans, not that she regretted joining. The Badgers were exposing her to more excitement than she would have found on her own, of that she was certain.

Of Elonia she was less certain; obviously the older mixed-blood Threll was no follower of the Void or some covert agent of the Direthrell, the heaped corpses of Direbreed and Dark Threll in the ambushes proved that, but what game Starshine was about was clearly not over. How her cousin had gotten into a position to know Direthrell movements, how she had escaped from her dark masters, where she had gone for the years between the first series of contacts and the second, all were mysteries. Against her best wishes Starr had found herself smitten with hero-worship for the taller, robust Threll who dared so much, who wanted no fame or even acknowledgement of her accomplishments, merely working against the race whose blood she shared. Starr wondered if she would ever know more of Elonia than she did at this point.

Sighing, she picked up her dagger and prepared to move on; she longed to head back to the bottleneck and the waiting Dwarves, but knew that she had accomplished nothing towards her goal. There was nothing to do but press on and hope that she found what she was looking for very soon.

The way she followed was opening up, which raised her hopes an equal measure: the more room around her, the better she liked it, although the footing was made rather unsteady by regular cracks and buckled slabs of stone. Twenty yards in the passage was high enough that she could climb to her feet and move at a nearly erect walk, the experience gained in the last few hours keeping her head
from hitting the stone ceiling.

In keeping with what she had been told she moved at an irregular pace, five steps and pause, then four, then two, then five; it was in one such abrupt pause that her Forest-sharpened ears caught a bare whisper of sound too regular to be dirt falling or a
n odd air-flow through a tight place. Twice more she heard it at a sudden pause, as if something was creeping up on her, trying to match its movement to hers. It seemed to be coming from ahead; never taking her eyes from the shaft before her she reached up with her right hand to the steel hair-ring that restrained her long tresses into a practical bun. Thumbing a hidden catch, she twisted and pulled; the main body of the ring remained in her hair holding the bun in place, while she ended up holding a slightly curved metal bar in her hand with a wickedly point steel spike thrusting out from between her second and third fingers. This hidden spike-dagger was another gift from Elonia, and a much-appreciated one at this point.

She crouched in the darkness, waiting, the footing too unsure
to risk backing up the way she had come, and being in no hurry to initiate the fight she knew was coming. The sound might just be cave rats or her imagination, but she didn’t think so: Starr believed that it was a rock Titan creeping up to jumping distance, so she waited, planning her defense.

The black and gray body hurtled through the air at her with dizzying speed, its coloration rendering it almost invisible in the poor light. But for her planning she would likely have panicked and flailed madly at the hairy and oddly light body that crashed into her; instead she thrust the spike dagger’s needle point into what she perceived as the creature’s center of mass, sinking the three inch s
pike deep into the course fur. The impact of leap meeting impalement sent the two of them tumbling, locked in a thrashing mass of spider legs and Threll limbs. Muscles howling, Starr pushed up and away with her spike dagger while she thrust again and again with the slightly curved dagger in her left hand. She had been lucky: the spike dagger was embedded in the horror that served the Titan spider as its face; by expending every bit of strength she possessed (strength much enhanced by fear) she was able to hold the clicking black mandibles clear of her flesh while she strove to bury her blade into the creature’s side, only to have it knocked out again and again by a thrashing spider leg before she could get it in deep enough.

As her arm weakened and the mandibles eased closer, a thrust finally crippled a leg and she planted the tip of her dagger in the creature’s side, swiftly rocking it in to the full limit of the blade, twisting the sturdy crystal from side to side with all her might. The spider screeched, a high thin wail that seemed to echo in her sinuses and inner ears, ripping itself free from her
grasp even as it eviscerated itself on the curved blade of her dagger.

She staggered to her feet, gasping for breath with lungs that seemed hot enough to burn
through her skin, eyes locked on the spider’s dying convulsions. “Six or seven,” she muttered woodenly as she drew her belt dagger to replace the weapon knocked from her grasp by the Titan’s dying throes. “He didn’t even bother to keep count.” Kroh had told her how to fight spiders, that the quickest way to kill them was to get a blade through their tough outer hide and deep into the tender organs inside, or as he had put it, ‘they’re held together on the outside; get a blade in, scramble their guts and it’s over.’

He ha
d also explained how to hold off the mandibles, the spider’s attack habits, and other useful data, including the fact that Titans often hunted in mated pairs, that where one was, there were often two, but that had slipped her mind until she caught the flashing movement out of the corner of her eye. Lanthrell are graceful and nimble by nature and upbringing, and Starr was quicker than most and charged with adrenaline was well: she darted to the side as the spider leapt so that the creature missed, although it hooked her with three legs and sent her tumbling as it passed.

Rolling to her knees with desperate haste as the spider scrambled to reverse itself and attack, she repeated her punching stop-thrust, this first blow being too hasty, planting her spike-tipped fist squarely into the slimy hole that served the Titan as a mouth, the mandibles clamping onto her forearm like the jaws of a bear trap, wringing out a screech of her own. Howling, she swept the curved tip of her dagger across the beast’s face with all her strength, slicing apart three of the creature’s five eyes as she desperately tried to jerk her arm free. The wildly thrashing spider desperately tried to backpedal, unable to bring its claw-tipped legs to bear on its heavier foe while the little Badger slashed madly at the maddened beast, rupturing its remaining eyes and ripping away great tufts of fur without inflicting any great harm.

The pain in her arm finally cleared the panic, and throwing her weight forward to partially immobilize the Titan, she reversed her dagger and slammed the point into the creature’s back, rocking the blade in deep. After what seemed an eternity, the spider quit thrashing and working its mandibles and lay still; Starr, however, did not cease rocking and twisting her blade for nearly a minute more, finally jerking her slimy hand free of her foe and scrambling backwards, giving a small shriek when she bumped into the corpse of her first foe, now lying on its back with all but the two crippled legs curled over its chest.