Dark Obligations: Book One of the Phantom Badgers (9 page)

Durek, Bridget, and Trellan were coming up the hallway as Kroh finished washing the last of the blood from his beard at the fountain where they had found the packs. Combing his fingers through the wet locks to insure no clots remained, the Waybrother scowled at his fellow Badgers. “Took you long enough.”

“Where’s
Arian?” Durek wasn’t in a mood to bicker.

Kroh
pointed with his chin as he expertly redid the braids in his beard. “We ran into a
ree
of Felher scouts whipping a slave to death. None got away.”

“What’s a
ree
?” Trellan asked, spearing a half-eaten chunk of meat on the point of his sabre and eyeing it critically.

“Felher unit, a section of between five and a dozen,”
Bridget explained. “Why were they doing that, Kroh?”

“From the looks of it they were sitting here taking a meal break, six rats and a pack-slave, when the slave runs for it, or at least runs. They catch her going down that hall and she slices one of them with a home-made knife, cut ‘em pretty good. They drag her into a work-area, wire her to a pillar, cut off her clothes, and start making bets on how many strokes she can take before she cuts her hands off. Big fun.”

“Kroh, Trellan, gather up the bags and bring them into the work area; Bridget, lets take a look at the Felher.” Durek led the advocate down the hall.

The Navian flipped the meat off his weapon and sheathed it. “I w
ouldn’t bet silver on it, but I would guess that the chop wasn’t from something with four legs.”

“You’re probably right,”
Kroh nodded as he heaved the pack onto one shoulder and reached for one of the bags. “The Felher don’t believe in letting meat go to waste, no matter where it comes from.”

“It’s no use,” Arian stepped back from the work bench on which they had laid the woman. “She’s lost too much blood on top of a poor diet; she’s at least ten pounds lighter than she should be. We might as well keep her drugged until she fades away, which ought to be in a few minutes.”

“Someday we’ll learn how to do more than just make the wounds heal themselves,”
Bridget nodded, plunging her bloody hands into a bowl of water. “It was the damage to her wrists that let her bleed so freely; the bones in her left were already partially sawed through.”

“Any
thing you can tell us about her?” Durek asked, absently heaving a captured javelin across the room.

“Human slave, been one most or all her life from the symbols burned into her shoulders,”
Arian shrugged. “Possibly some Direthrell blood, but it’s hard to say. Twenty, twenty-two years old and her body was already giving out from too much work on bad food.”

“Damn fool place to make an escape attempt,”
Kroh grunted, looking up from the contents of a Felher’s belt pouch. “She would never have made it out.”

“I don’t think she was planning an escape,”
Arian shook his head. “Her hair is soaking wet, and there are the beginnings of bruises on her buttocks. I think they had bent her over the lip of the fountain’s basin out there, with her head underwater, and were giving her a few strokes of a javelin’s shaft.”

“Why would th
ey do that to their pack bearer?” Bridget grimaced at the thought.

The monk shrugged. “Perhaps for some infraction of their rules, or simply to see her struggle to carry a hundred pound pack wit
h bruised buttocks, who can say? The Felher dearly love to watch their victims suffer slowly and over an extended period of time. In any case, I would say she broke free and fled, cutting the first Felher who caught her.”

“They
were from the Black Thunder
Weehoc
given the tattoos and scars,” Durek observed. “Kroh, what were they carrying?”

“Not hardly any loot, that’s unusual.” The Waybrother tossed the last belt pouch aside. “The warriors were carrying weapons and
those greasy bags, while the slave’s pack held rations, bedding, and spare missile weapons. What loot they had was pretty basic: a coil of copper wire, which they mostly used up on the slave, a few hinges, a moss-basket and bracket, that sort of thing. I figure they were scouting, not looting, and just grabbed what they came across.”

“And they have
been out here long enough to get bored and torture their slave to death. Interesting. It could be that they’re gearing up to establish a presence in
Gradrek Heleth
.” Durek stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Anyway, I’m going back to the main body, Arian, you come with. The rest of you follow once the girl dies. Move her body someplace the Felher won’t find her if they go looking for their scouts; it’s the least we can do for her.”

“
More’n the rats would have done: she would have been dinner if we hadn’t stepped in. I hate Felher, killed four today, dozens before this, I have.” Kroh booted a Felher’s head across the room. “Not bad, here, I bet I can do the other one even further.”

“Five pence says you can’t,” Trellan cha
llenged, eyeing the distance. “A shilling says you can’t hit the first head with the second.”

Bridget
sighed and returned to watching over the dying woman.

The Badgers crossed the third
cidhe
to a point near the ramp they planned to take to the fourth ‘level’ before stopping to make their ‘night’ camp, setting up in a kitchen that had served a meeting hall. The
komad
were unloaded, the coal-fired braziers set up in the long-unused ovens to provide the raiders with hot food and boiling water, and the Badgers made themselves as comfortable as possible.

Seeing that Starr had littl
e interest in household chores the Waybrother made her a pallet and got her out of her battle gear before tending to their meal. Slices of sausage and cheese were placed between biscuits and heated over the coals, the resulting grease drippings softening the crackers enough for safe eating. Like most of the others, Kroh used his ration of boiling water to make equal amounts of oatmeal and tea, mixing in bits of trail biscuit into the former, the crackers having been pulverized while wrapped in a clean kerchief. The Waybrother was the only Badger who could crush them with his bare hands; all the others had to beat them apart with the pommel of a dagger or similar tool.

Hurrying to Starr, the plates and mugs carefully cradled in his arms, the Waybrother set out their meal. “Here we are, piping hot and not half bad.” When the miserable little
Threll did not respond he reached over and picked her bodily up, setting her against the wall and placing a mug of tea in one hand and a greasy biscuit-sausage-cheese concoction in the other. “Eat, little one, you’ll need your strength. Tomorrow things will seem better, the first trip into the underlands always weighs upon your spirits.”

The wan Lanthrell drank some tea and took and experimental bite of the mess in her right hand. Slowly she ate it and a bowl of oatmeal, washing it down with two mugs of tea while
Kroh waded through his own meal.

“Don’t let this wear you down,”
Kroh advised her through a mouthful of cheese. “I bet there’s places in your forest where you can’t see the sun for all the trees and whatnot; no different from here, really.”

“Nothing like this,” she whispered into her mug. “So deep, and so much stone, nothing alive.”

“There’s plenty of plants and stuff, mushrooms, that sort of thing, we’re just not going through those areas,” Kroh carefully brushed crumbs from his beard. “And I’ll bet there’s not been another Lanthrell this far into
Gradrek Heleth
.”

This perked the diminu
tive Badger’s interest. “Really? None, you think?”

“Not that I ever heard of, and for a fact
there’s many a Dwarven city which has never had a Threll set foot in it, much less a hostile place such as this one.”

“Really,” Starr digested this information, a spark of life coming back to her eyes; there was a large quantity of competitive spirit within her little frame, and no small amount of racial pride as well. She finished her meal in a contemplative mood, rolling into her blankets afterward with a calmer look about her.

Janna had exempted her from the guard roster in the hopes that undisturbed sleep would help her adjust to the environment. Kroh still had a couple hours to go until his watch came up, and deciding not to bother going to sleep until after he was relieved, he fished a small wooden case out of his gear and went in search of a candle. The nearest had been lit by Arian; the monk was sitting between two confectionery ovens whose doors had been pillaged sometime in the past, poring over the Dwarven maps of
Gradrek Heleth
.

“Learning anything?” the Waybrother asked as he seated himself against one of the brick ovens and opened the case.

“A little; these maps are fascinating. Durek tells me there are at least three true maps to a Dwarven hold, or rather, to each
cidhe
: the ordinary layout, the defensive works, and the secret passages and rooms.”

“True,”
Kroh nodded absently, selecting a green cylinder from the case in his lap.

“What is that?” the monk asked.

“It’s called a cigar.” Using a tiny pair of clippers with oddly-shaped jaws, the Dwarf nipped off one end of the cigar, and then employed a small, punch-like device to open a shallow hole in the other end. “Made from leaves of the tabba plant.”

Arian
watched while Kroh put the cigar’s punctured end in his mouth, and picked up the candle to carefully puff the cut end to light. “I’ve heard about Dwarves smoking plant leaves, but I thought you used a pipe.”

“Some do;
Durek does, for example, but cigars are fairly new. You take a quantity of the inner leaf that is either chopped up or cut in thin, narrow strips, and bind them together using part of a mid-range leaf; then you wrap the whole thing in an outer leaf and there it is. Cut off one end to light, poke a hole in the other so you can draw the smoke through the length of the cigar, and you’re in business.”

“I see, but this leads to the next
question: why smoke the things?”

“One drawback of living underground is
that no matter what we do the air never circulates as well as it does outside; also, the air tends to be wetter, and the peton moss and mushrooms we raise for food put little seeds in the air which you can’t even see unless you have this device with mirrors and ground-glass plates. Anyway, they combine to give you breathing problems, coughing, sneezing, headaches, that sort of thing. Of course, Healers can cure it with their Arts, but that’s a heavy drain on mystic power, so they were always looking for a natural cure. They found out that the tabba plant dries the lungs and restores the air pockets in them, makes things in your lungs flush out somehow. First they used teas, which taste bad enough to use to interrogate prisoners, and poultices, which were wasteful. Then they started curing the leaves and burning them in jugs and having patients breathe the smoke, which worked fine and led to pipes. Now they have cigars, too. The Healers say Dwarves live longer now that we know about the uses for the tabba bushes.”

“So d
o most Dwarves smoke the leaves?”

“No, not usually, the stuff in the air only affects a certain number of Dwarves, and some only occasionally. Only the really badly affec
ted have to use tabba regularly, while others just take it as they need it, either the tea or apply this gummy paste the Healers develop, and a lot sprinkle it in their food like a herb seasoning. Me, I have it bad, I would get attacks where I couldn’t breathe at all, but the tabba has kept it under control all my life. I never liked a pipe or the gummy paste, so I used to put wads of cured leaves in my mouth and work them around, but it makes a mess, so when I heard about cigars I took them up right away. I don’t need it as much since I live above ground most of the time, but the short breath never completely goes away, and anyway, I’ve developed a taste for them over the years.”

“Are they addictive
?”

“No more than a particular
food is; it’s not like
pulvas
or the other substances cultists use to create dreams, there is no effect from tabba other than the healing effects and the taste. Like I said, I have to smoke it occasionally to keep my breathing from getting short, more often in the spring and where things are real wet, but for the most part I smoke because I like the taste. Durek’s the same way, smokes his pipe because he grew up doing it, it reminds him of home.”

“Very interesting; my Healing abilities are lopsided: enchantments only for the most part, having never been taught much of the non-magical medical lore beyond the basics for battle care. I had heard
that the Dwarves had a herbal remedy for shortness of breath, especially the sort which comes in attacks which strangles, but I didn’t know that it was tied to the smoking.”

“Works like a charm:
I’ve never had an attack when I’ve kept up with my consumption, haven't had one since I was a child, in fact.”

“Is the tabba hard to come by
?”

“Used to be, centuries ago, I’m told, especially since we can’t grow in underground, but they plant a lot of it in the Border Realms
now and in some places we’ve set up surface outposts to cultivate it ourselves. It grows best in mountain foothills, a real hardy bush that’s good for the soil, I’m told. Curing the leaves is the trick, though: that’s where you get the real flavor. Pipe smokers often mix in herbs and different cures of tabba to make different tastes, and cigars are made with different types of leaves. Would you like to try it?”