Chapter 8 - Part 3

The half-orc gaped. Half of the hill was missing. Great crosspieces of wood, beams of all sizes, some as thick as he was, some a thin latticework, held up the roof and stuck into the walls. A stone column in the center of the vast area bore the brunt of the weight, and showed the greatest age, but much of the hollowed-out area was new.

So the monks have been doing more than praying over the last many years, Delegado thought. He was no dwarf, but he could tell that this excavation had been fairly constant for longer than he was alive. Tunnels snaked in all directions, most going down, but some going up. By far the main objective seemed to be to hollow out the hill, but for what purpose Delegado could not tell. He spotted freshly turned earth, and recently dropped shovels.

His skin crawled. Someone was watching him. And that dim glow came from several hanging lamps filled with fireflies. His sharp ears picked up footsteps high above in the beams and latticework.

Two ways to play this, and I am not interested in the long way, Delegado realized. He bet that with the low level of light, some of which he now realized also came from minute cracks in the ceiling to ventilate the place, it wasn’t easy to spot him, but it was possible. His darkvision worked perfectly of course, but beyond sixty feet the details all blurred together. And there was more than sixty feet of dead space between him and the best hiding places amongst the crossbeams, some of which were a good forty feet off the ground. If they had crossbows, and were well trained at meditating on targets in low light…

The first bolt slammed into the rock wall behind him, the steep tip raising sparks. He fired blind into the general space that the bolt had come from, and sprinted behind the central pillar.

“Hey!” he called, pulling out another acid arrow. “Hey! I’m not your enemy!”

“And yet Edmen is dead,” came a call. It was not from the area that the bolt had come from. The voice was passive, almost in a monotone, but it was not friendly.

“Edmen attacked me!” Delegado said.

“For which you put an arrow into his back,” came another call. This voice had more emotion, and was from the general area of the crossbow shot. “Some threat he was to you then.”

“I wasn’t waiting for him to come back with more weapons after I cut his stick in half!” Delegado stated. “I tried not to fight him, he would have none of it!”

“Well, we can trust a deserter’s word for the events, can’t we,” said a third voice, this one a young woman’s.

“I have nothing to do with the war above,” the half-orc told them. “I’m with House Tharashk! I’m here looking for a man named Xavier, a man from Thrane!” He peeked around the column, seeing three sets of footprints and three shovels.

“We don’t care,” came the crossbowman’s reply. A bolt shot towards where Delegado’s head had been, but the half-orc was already gone.

“We should,” said the more calm first voice. “But there is no one here by that name. You had best leave this place, Tharask agent, there is nothing for you here.”

“He cannot be allowed to leave,” said the young woman. “He will lead someone to us, if he has not already.”

“That was his reason for killing Edmen,” said the calm voice. Delegado thought it was a man, but it was hard to tell. “We are not him, he is not us, let him go.”

“Xavier, from Thrane, about thirty-five years of age, human, with brown eyes and tan skin!” Delegado persisted. “He’s probably using another name! He has thick black eyebrows, and he favors a shaved head!”

Delegado heard words of magic, and he scrunched up, trying to avoid whatever was coming. Instead of a loud flash or bang, and web of film seemed to cover his head and eyes. It was a spell designed to put him to sleep, but the caster was not that powerful a wizard. He shook it off, irritated at the woman.

“He is asleep now,” she said. He heard her soft footfalls as she came out of her hiding place. “I will use my knife.”

“No!” called the first voice, no longer so passive.

“It will be quick!” she said, walking closer. Delegado tensed.

“He could still be awake!” warned the crossbowman. The woman’s feet stopped moving.

Now or never. Delegado whipped around the pillar and fired two shots at a woman in peasant’s clothing. The first one was the acid arrow, which went for her midsection. Astonishingly she swatted it aside, and it burned against a thick timber. The second arrow was too close on the heels of the first one, however. It took her in the face, and went through a weak point in human nose cartilage that Delegado had first learned to exploit years ago. The woman’s end was grisly.

A crossbow fired again, and the bolt clipped the half-orc in the shoulder. The chain shirt barely deflected it, due more to the angle of shot than the strength of his mithril. As it was it left a deep bruise, but it did not throw off Delegado’s return series of shots. The first arrow detonated with enchanted fire, and the half-orc put two more shots after that into the screaming man before he collapsed. The corpse continued to burn, licking at the timbers around them, but not catching. The wood was dry, but it was also permeated with dust, so it wasn’t very flammable.

“Your peaceful words do not match your murderous actions, orc,” came the passive voice. Delegado looked up, realizing the general direction it was coming from. “Tharashk or no, you would be wise to leave this place. When we meet, I will not have mercy.”

“Like they weren’t trying to kill me?” Delegado asked. “You have real selective morals, I see! Like all religious nuts you’re a hypocrite, aren’t you?”

There was no response. The half-orc put his bow back and drew his sword, heading into the latticework. His sharp senses, trained in the deadliest parts of his native swamps, searched about for a clue as to the whereabouts of his last opponent. He briefly considered using his dragonmark again to find Xavier, but he decided instead to deal with the matter at hand. There were too many unknowns, and if enough thick rock was between him and Thrane’s spy chief, he might get a false reading.

He heard a footfall, a soft one, but above him, and accompanied by a slight creak of wood.

Delegado stepped to the side as something fell, and he swung two-handed at the falling figure. Less than a second later he saw it was a sack filled with glowing rocks, and he repositioned himself as the monk landed behind him.

He caught a glimpse, very briefly, of an inhuman form free-falling from the highest crossbeam, touching the latticework briefly as he fell. Then it was before him, landing smoothly and jumping up like a striking cobra. It was wood and stone and metal, with slightly glowing eyes and three-fingered mechanical hands.

Before he could utter an appropriate profanity, the warforged monk was under his guard, slipping past his sword, and hugging him in a tight wrestling pin. Delegado tore one arm free, and hooked his foot behind the warforged’s ankle, trying to trip him. The machine was a step ahead of him, and a shift in weight brought them down together in the dust.

Delegado struggled against the warforged, each trying to get leverage on the other as they wrestled across the cave floor. Delegado had the edge in terms of sheer brute strength, but the warforged was unusually lithe and quick for his kind, and it had obviously practiced this type of fighting a great deal. Back and forth they went, each trying to get into a position to crush the other. The warforged fared better than he did, head-butting him cruelly, and taking advantage of Delegado’s softer physical structure. The half-orc still had his sword in hand, and he had an advantage in that the warforged had to avoid it.

The bounty hunter finally got leverage and threw the warforged off of him. The machine rolled quickly to his feet and ducked behind a pillar.

“I have heard that orcs are strong,” came the warforged’s voice. Delegado tracked it, judging the thing’s position.

“You heard right,” he said. He sheathed his sword and took out his bow, along with one very special arrow. Given to him by a Sharn artificer who worked for Tharashk, it was adamantine tipped, had special bane enchantments against constructs, and would explode with a rusting spell when it hit. The Xavier contract came with an almost guarantee of interference from warforged, as the job was in the middle of hotly contested territory, and Tharashk had wanted him to be prepared. The warforged was very, very good at being quiet, but Delegado was even better at hearing.

The half-orc stepped away from the glowing rocks, and away from any other shafts of light or trapped fireflies. The dark was his friend, not the warforged’s.

Two seconds before the first packet hit near him, Delegado realized that there was only one way to go if one wished to avoid all of the light sources. When the packet exploded, blowing a blinding, itching, vile dust everywhere, he wanted to heave even worse than he did when he was on the airship. He gagged and retched loudly, causing two more packets of the stuff to land near him, and more of the sickening, blinding, itchy stuff filled his mouth and nose and eyes.

A stone and metal fist slammed into his head, and Delegado reeled in pain. “I did not think a member of the fabled House of Finding would walk into my trap.” Another fist caught him in his stomach, only adding to his breathing and retching problems. “I guess what I have heard about the intelligence of orcs is true as well.” Delegado would have told the warforged what he thought of that, but the machine’s leg hammered his arm, causing him to drop his bow. “I was told to save this dust for an invasion of soldiers above, but you did as much damage as anyone can do.” The warforged put him in a full headlock, and Delegado was unable to do anything about it, incapacitated by the dust as he was. “Four good members of the Balanced Palm are now dead.” A great pressure grew on Delegado’s throat, and the half-orc felt himself slipping into unconsciousness.