Jhurpess nodded. “Soldiers keep it in small shack at end of pier. Jhurpess smelled it.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” the orc snapped back, “that the pier's not gonna be the only thing to burn?”
“Jhurpess not worried. Squad has a few minutes before flames reach it; plenty of time to get on boat.”
“Boats burn too, you asshole!”
The bugbear's face fell. “Oh,” he said quietly.
Cræosh's sword hand twitched.
“As it happens,” Gork said acidly, stepping between the arguing pair, “the fire hasn't reached the fishing boat yet. Do you want to be angry because the boat could have caught fire, or because it did? Besides,” he added, pointing at Jhurpess, “do you really want to smell that much hair burning?”
With a final glare, Cræosh stomped away to board the vessel.
None of the squad had ever done any real sailing, but Gimmol remembered enough of what he'd read in the past to direct the others. After only a few false starts, the boat drifted steadily away from the pier. The current fought them every step of the way, and the wind was too limp to do much good, so Cræosh, Katim, Jhurpess, and Fezeill (having, to Cræosh's disgust, assumed the shape of an orc) set to rowing. Belrotha's help would have been welcomed, but the oars were situated belowdecks, and she just couldn't fit. Still, the four oarsmen—oarsgoblins—weren't precisely lacking in muscle, and the vessel moved steadily toward the River Krael.
They came this close to pulling it off. The soldiers, forming a bucket brigade and desperately struggling to quench the fire before it spread, might never have noticed the boat was missing. But it was not to be so easy. Perhaps the firelight reflected off something on the stolen vessel; perhaps a wayward creak reached their ears despite the crackling of the flame; perhaps someone had just happened to look the right way at the wrong time. Whatever the case, a barrage of shouts and pointing fingers aimed themselves at the boat.
“Well, that tears it,” Gork muttered as he looked back over the spindly railing. “Next time we just kill the bastards and be done with it!” Of course, most of the squad was belowdecks manning the oars, and Belrotha stood by the wheel, steering under Gimmol's direction, so there was no one there to hear him. He continued to curse anyway.
“Hey!” Gimmol called to him, not looking away from the dark waters. “We're coming up on the watchtower!”
“So?” Gork shouted back.
“So get to the damn prow of the ship and keep a lookout!” the gremlin ordered him. “We're not moving all that fast. The soldiers may have had time to get them a message!”
Grumbling, Gork shuffled to the front of the ship and cast his eyes upward.
Not much more than thirty feet tall, the tower stood only a few paces from the bend where the tributary met the Krael. Torchlight burned in the narrow windows, but the kobold had no way of knowing what activity, if any, was going on beyond them, nor could he see, even at this distance, what might be happening behind the crenellations on the roof.
“Looks clear so far,” he called to the gremlin, “but I can't tell—oh, dragonshit!” A sudden loud snap, audible even at their current distance, sounded from atop the tower, and something blotted out the glittering stars.
“Catapult!” Gork hurled himself, screaming, to the deck. Just beyond the stern, the water burst upward in a short-lived geyser, drenching everyone on deck.
“They're getting our range!” Gimmol cried, clinging desperately so as not to be hurled from his perch. Gork, for once, couldn't blame the gremlin for the panic he heard in Gimmol's voice, since he was right there with him.
“What the fuck's going on up there?” Cræosh's voice drifted faintly from below. The gremlin and the kobold both ignored him.
Belrotha craned her neck forward, staring thoughtfully (on a relative scale, of course) at the tower. Then, gently, she lowered Gimmol to the deck. “Can you handle wheel?” she asked.
The gremlin frowned. “I think so,” he said. “Especially if Gork helps.”
Belrotha snorted. “Gork not help with anything. Him selfish. Me be back soon.” And with that she plunged overboard, sending up another drenching spray not much smaller than that caused by the boulder.
“What the hell?” Gork shouted.
“Shut up and come help me with this damn wheel!”
They couldn't actually tell if Belrotha had swum to shore or sunk to the river bottom and walked, but she reappeared swiftly enough. She rose from the water at the far bank like some emerging monster—which, come to think of it, she was. Two strides brought her to the tower's side. She didn't even slow to open the door, just ducked her head beneath the stone frame and plowed straight through the wood.
“Think she can get upstairs before they can get off another shot?” Gork asked nervously.
Gimmol shrugged, practically hanging from the wheel with both hands. “It takes a while to load those things,” he said, “but not that long. I don't—”
They cringed as one at the sudden snapping sound from above. He and Gork tugged on the great wheel, struggling to turn, and Gimmol was convinced they were about to die horribly, or at least get very wet. Another missile streaked across the stars, and Gimmol clenched his teeth, bracing himself….
Although, now that it drew nearer, did that look a little small to be a catapult boulder? And…
“Is it screaming?” Gimmol asked hesitantly. Gork could only nod.
A wildly flailing human, clad in the black uniform of Kirol Syrreth, plummeted from the sky and spattered messily across the deck.
“Well, they've obviously got our range,” Gimmol said tonelessly, not trusting himself to speak further.
Again Gork nodded. The boat passed beyond the guard tower without further incident.
Belrotha rejoined them a few moments later, having jogged ahead and dived into the river. It was a matter of no small effort dragging her back aboard; Gork and Gimmol had eventually convinced the others that speed was no longer of quite so much essence, allowing Cræosh and Katim to come up and give the dripping ogre a hand.
“I’m almost positive we talked about the whole murder thing,” Cræosh said once they were done, staring at the uniform that was now glued to the deck by an assortment of various bodily fluids.
“Couldn't be helped,” Gimmol said happily, having reclaimed his spot on Belrotha's shoulder. “The guards were lobbing boulders at us. Damn near sank us, too. Belrotha, um, talked them out of it.”
The ogre beamed. “Me can be convincing,” she said quietly, as though letting them in on some long-kept secret. “Me find that most peoples very cooperative after me tear their friends’ arms off.”
“Yeah,” the orc said, “I can see how that might end a debate or two.” He sighed. “I don't suppose you thought to hide the evidence?”
Belrotha cocked her head to the side. “Too messy to hide,” she said slowly. “But at least them won't be able to tell how many dead soldiers up there.”
That may not have satisfied the orc, but it was enough to make him stop asking questions. He and Katim returned below, and the ship reached the River Krael just before dawn. At that point, the squad relaxed, taking shifts at the oars only in pairs and allowing the current to do most of the work. And slowly, the Sea of Tears drew near.
Cræosh, sprawled in a chair with his feet up on a crate and his head tilted back against the railing, chuckled as Gork staggered across the deck, lurched over to the opposite railing, and generously donated his most recent meal to the nearest hungry school of fish.
“You might want to do something about that,” the orc said critically, eyeing the kobold as he stumbled from the edge.
“Go to hell, Cræosh.”
“I’m just concerned is all, Shorty. I really don't think you're big enough to hold that much half-digested food. You may be missing some important organs.”
Gork glowered at him.
“Tell you what,” Cræosh said. “Why don't you head on downstairs and grab yourself a slice of
fish. It's bland; it might calm you down a bit.”
“Fish?” Gork squealed. “Fish?! We've eaten nothing but fish for a week!”
“Well, we've got a little yeti left. Seems Gimmol twiddled his fingers and cast some spell to preserve it when we weren't looking. A nice, greasy glob of yeti fat would slide down real smooth, don't you think?”
The kobold made a sort of gurgling sound and quickly dashed back to the railing.
He'd exaggerated just a tad, actually. It had only been a few days, not a full week, since they'd been vomited from the mouth of the Krael like one of Gork's meals and begun to cross the Sea of Tears. It felt, however, as though they'd been at sea for months. Not a single member of the squad was fond of fish, and half of them had been seasick at least once. Clothes were crusty with saltwater spray, and nostrils quivered with the unaccustomed scents of the ocean. It was something akin to a minor miracle that Cræosh had managed to let off enough steam by verbally abusing the kobold, rather than snapping and trying to tear someone limb from limb. Belrotha had taken to staring moodily out over the water. Even Gimmol had started snapping at anyone who spoke to him, and nobody dared set foot anywhere near Katim. From the instant the boat had reached the sea, the troll's ears had actually folded back along her head, and she'd planted herself in a single spot, unmoving, hands wrapped around the shaft of her axe. Everyone knew full well that it was as much as their lives were worth even to look at her cross-eyed.
Nonetheless, they'd survived those past few days, and they survived the ones that followed. Nobody was even permanently maimed.
The end of the journey was, by a wide margin, the easiest stretch. The isle of Dendrakis boasted a startling number of fishing villages, pockmarks blemishing the otherwise pristine coastline. They were—or this one was, at any rate—astonishingly, even frighteningly normal. Although it thrived in the shadow of the Iron Keep, the people there were friendly, even helpful. The fishermen scrambled to clear one of the town's only piers, and aided the goblins in tying up when it became obvious that nobody in the Demon Squad had the slightest idea of how to go about it. Cræosh, uncomfortably aware of their proximity to the Iron Keep, offered to pay a fair price for berthing; the villagers, in turn, accepted only half that amount.
It was, all told, more than a little disturbing. Cræosh and Gork both came near to spraining something, trying to keep watch behind them as the village disappeared into the distance.
The “main road,” which was also the only road, was a pebble-coated path that meandered across the rocky terrain toward the mountains in the northwest. They came across no one once they departed the village, and in fact, they spotted no life at all: no wild goats climbing the rocky hills, no lizards scuttling through the scrub, no birds circling overhead. Thunder rolled perpetually from a bank of clouds that hovered low above the mountain peaks, but it—along with their own footsteps and occasional nervous voices—was all that broke the oppressive silence.
Another gradual turn over the path, around the edges of another hill of stone, and even the footsteps and the voices went silent.
They stood immobile, intimidated (even if some would never admit it) by the alien lines of the Iron Keep. Their eyes were drawn, all unwillingly, to the tips of the twisted spires, and then nearly blinded by the lightning that seemed deliberately drawn to those towers from the clouds above.
And still they saw no sign of life. No guards walked the battlements, nor peered from behind the ferrous crenellations. No footsteps echoed from the keep's outer halls; no torchlight flickered in the arrow slits. The Iron Keep looked as dead as its lord and master.
They finally psyched themselves up to approach, halting only at the massive gate: a solid slab of metal that smugly barred the only entrance to the keep. It was pretty much featureless—a notable sight amid the intricate runes filigreed into the rest of the iron—marred only by a single handle. This protruded from the precise center of the door, far too high and far too large for use by anyone even remotely human-sized.
“What do you think?” Fezeill asked, casting a glance at Gimmol. “Magic?”
The gremlin's scowl might have been more convincing had his lip not been quivering.
Cræosh finally shrugged. “We'd better knock, I suppose,” he muttered glumly. Then, realizing that if they started arguing about who was to actually do it they'd be there until next autumn, he raised a hand to take care of it himself.
Barely had the orc's knuckles brushed the dull metal when the door opened, sliding upward with a muffled clanking of chains. And there before them was the first of the Iron Keep's halls. Here, the interior walls were made of a dark-hued stone, rather than the iron filigree common to the upper floors, and that fact imparted just the tiniest hint of normality, enough to convince the squad to step inside. The corridors were lofty enough that even Belrotha could stand comfortably, though Gimmol couldn't stay on her shoulder and had to walk on his own.
No one appeared to greet them, but they couldn't doubt which way to go. It was a simple enough system, really: So long as they were headed the right way, the corridors remained empty. If they made a wrong turn, they found themselves face-to-face with one of the Charnel King's rotting sentinels. Those walking corpses made no threatening moves, unless one counted the fact that they moved at all. Their presence alone, standing at attention in the hall's center, sword or axe or halberd in hand, was all the impetus the Demon Squad needed to try a different route. Slowly, the goblins made their way into the upper levels, drawing ever nearer the godlike king who held their lives in his long-dead hands.
“Now this,” Gork muttered, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the filigreed-metal floor, “I don't like.”
“Oh, right,” Cræosh said. “As opposed to the rest of this trip, which has been a damn picnic.”
“I don't know,” the kobold said, glancing uneasily at the black iron walls. “This is different.”
Cræosh snorted, mostly to cover up the fact that he agreed wholeheartedly with the nervous thief. It wasn't even so much the dead guards that bothered him; after running into the first eight or ten, one eventually grew numb to the whole experience (except, perhaps, the stench, to which there was no growing accustomed). No, it wasn't the presence of the dead but the absence of the living that was starting to utterly unnerve the already-jumpy orc.
“Doesn't anyone actually live in this damn place?!” Gimmol finally shouted, startling the rest of the squad halfway out of their skins. Obviously, Cræosh wasn't the only one disturbed.
Katim spun like a top, lashing out. Gimmol found himself lifted off his feet and slammed into the nearest wall. “Don't ever do that…again!” the troll snapped, her talons digging into the gremlin's leather armor. “Never!”
Belrotha's gaze fixed on the troll and she growled softly, one hand rising to the monster sword that protruded over her back. The others backed slowly away.
“Twenty silver on the ogre,” Gork whispered to Cræosh.
Maybe I should take him up on that. I'd win either way….
“Oh, really.” The voice—a thick blend of amusement, disdain, and a bored arrogance—sluiced from the shadows of a nearby stairway. “I hardly think King Morthûl would have let you get this far if he didn't wish to speak with you. So he's not bloody well about to let you butcher one another, is he?”
Everyone in the hallway now faced the darkened stair; the ogre, the troll, and the gremlin shoulder to shoulder. (Well, shoulder to hip.) “Who are you?” Cræosh asked, half-drawing his sword. “Show yourself!”
“Spare me the clumsy theatrics, orc. I’m in no mood for jokes.”
Katim advanced, putting herself between the orc and their unseen host before Cræosh could say something (read: anything) that would make the situation worse.
“You'll have to forgive…the orc,” she said, wondering just how many times she was going to have to apologize for his behavior. “He doesn't mean…to offend.” She paused. “Actually, he does mean…to offend, but that's because he
's…too stupid to know better. I am T’chakatimlamitilnog, of the House—”
“Of Ru, yes I know. I know you all.” Slowly, ignoring his own previous condemnation of theatrics, the figure slid into the light. He was tall for a human, and gaunt to the point of deformity. He wore breeches that were far tighter than his physique warranted, and his coat and cloak were foppishly ruffled and excessively bright. He was, overall, a man impossible to take seriously. Unless you knew who he was.
Katim and Cræosh knew. Katim held up both hands, palms outward—the gesture means something along the lines of, “I hold no weapons and will not try to kill you at the moment” and is the closest thing trolls have to a formal greeting—and even Cræosh had the grace to bow his head.
“My name is Vigo Havarren. If you'll follow me, I'll take you to see King Morthûl.”
Their guide remained silent and aloof as he led them through the labyrinthine passages of the Iron Keep and finally made his excuses as they approached a single black door at the end of a long black hallway. (Cræosh was, by this point, getting mighty sick of the color black.)
“He waits through there,” Havarren said, gesturing casually. “I'll not be joining you. It's you he wishes to see, and I spend enough time in his presence that I think I can tolerate being apart from him a little longer. I trust that whatever knowledge you bring is worth his while. Our lord is not a patient man; wasting his time is unwise.” And with that rather melodramatic pronouncement, the skinny wizard moved to leave.
“Wait!” Cræosh called after him.
Havarren froze. “Wait, what?” he asked dangerously.
Cræosh nearly choked on it, but he wasn't that stubborn. “Wait, please.”
The mage smiled. “Of course. What is it?”
“He knew we were coming, didn't he?”
Havarren's smile widened. “He became aware of your journey the moment your keel hit the waters of the Sea of Tears. He found it most curious that his own Demon Squad felt the need to sneak across the kingdom in a leaky fishing boat, so he ordered his forces to allow you to land, rather than to sink you outright, and to avoid disturbing or distracting you on your way through these halls. He's most anxious to hear your tale. Now, if you'll excuse me…”