Chapter 18 - Part 10

Delegado growled fiercely as he shook his mind free of the fear that the hunched demonling was trying to magically summon. Gripping his longsword in both hands, he took the demon’s arm off, then stabbed it in the face. Despite its tough resistance to unblessed weapons, he managed to kill it.

Next to him Thomas was retching, trying to rid his lungs of the foul cloud that another demonlings had summoned. The half-daelkyr couldn’t even hold his axe properly. The stormstalk was not helping at all, the hunched demonlings were completely ignoring the electrical bolts.

“Get back, get clear air!” Delegado yelled, his voice only slightly muffled by the alchemically treated scarf over his face. He’d carried the scarf for almost a year, never thinking he’d need it, but he was glad to have it. The vile cloud still stung his eyes, but he was functional. He jerked Thomas backward down the tunnel, and the daelkyr half-blood sucked in big lungfuls of air.

Two of the hunched demonlings fired crossbows tipped with some metal that Delegado had never seen before, but they missed in all the melee. Delegado cut one superficially, and then he heard Thomas snarl.

The dalekyr half-blood went into a rage that would have done the finest orc hunter in the Marches proud. Blood pumping and adrenalin flowing, his massive greataxe cut through demon flesh with enough impact to slice all the way through one demonling to hit another. Delegado took out the thing’s throat while it reeled from Thomas’ awesome blow.

Delegado and Thomas fought until their foes broke and ran. Twelve of the squat fiendish bodies lay as corpses, while five had broken and fled. Delegado wanted to go after them, to keep them from alerting others, but Thomas was exhausted. The aftereffects of rage in combat didn’t allow for a prolonged chase.

“Sit, get your wind back,” Delegado said, popping a seal on a curing potion. It went down his throat reflexively, and instantly the cuts and bruises on his body began to fade. He winced at the taste, however. House Jorasco potions were like sweet, clear water. Druid-made curing potions always tasted like chalk and tree bark.

“Are we getting close?” Thomas asked.

“Closer than ever before,” Delegado said. He concentrated, and his dragonmark tingled, growing in heat before cooling off. “Orphan’s still down there, or at least he still has his kama. I think we’re finally hitting the last round of guards, though. Those hunched things were the ones who killed that sniffer.”

“Good,” Thomas said, getting up and stretching. “The sooner we get Orphan and get out of here the better.”

“What’s this,” Delegado muttered, poking at the remains of some cloth wrapping that one of the demonlings had been carrying.

“It’s the nineteenth, you know,” Thomas was saying. “Eighteen days ago I thought it would be over. I thought my dreams driving me to Pienna would end.”

“Huh,” was all Delegado said. He pushed aside the cloth and was shocked to see six smoothed and polished Khyber dragonshards arranged in a bowl of dark porcelain. What in the Fury’s eyeteeth is this about?

“How long have we been down here?” Thomas asked himself. His symbiont danced in the air, looking like a schoolchild eager to answer a question.

“Five days and change, quit worrying about it,” Delegado said, looking over the other bodies. There was nothing else of note, just the bowl.

“Should have been at Festering Holt by now,” Thomas continued. “Maybe there’s peace there, finally, maybe. But we’re fighting endless days without sun down here. Fighting endless foes.”

“Take a look at this,” Delegado said, picking up the bowl after making sure that it wasn’t trapped.

“What?” Thomas asked, jerking out of his melancholy. He looked a bit guilty for some reason.

“These demonlings were bringing up an offering,” Delegado said. “There must be a mining operation down there.”

“An offering to who?” the half-daelkyr asked.

“Someone that they feel a need to impress,” Delegado noted. “These are high quality stones. Even one of them would justify a three-month Tharashk prospecting expedition.”

Thomas frowned, then took out a scroll and cast it. Once it was done, the scroll crumbled, and Thomas took a small glass eye out from his pouch. A long minute passed, then the daelkyr half-blood looked troubled. “Something is coming,” he said, gesturing to a side tunnel. “Something unafraid to walk alone.”

“What did you just do?” Delegado asked. He followed Thomas into the side tunnel and they pressed themselves against the wall around a bend.

“That scroll had an extra-range clairvoyance on it,” Thomas said. “I memorized that last leveled area that we went through, where the three tunnels met. Something came through. Something hooded. Now hush!” Thomas quickly cast one more scroll, something with a pictogram of an owl on the back of it.

In other circumstances Delegado would have bristled, but this was a land where one lived only by hushing. Delegado was long used to using cover to hide in the wild, and a minor enchantment in his mithril shirt aided that, but fiends had sharp ears as well as sharp eyes. The half-orc strained to listen for footsteps even as he and Thomas remained still and silent.

The footsteps came. They were soft ones, but sure. As the footsteps came closer Delegado felt a mental probing, not too different than he had felt when he encountered the Riedran pirates. The half-orc forced his mind to be quiet, silent, unnoticed. A quick glance at Thomas showed the half-daelkyr doing the same thing. The symbiont was hiding behind Thomas, plainly terrified.

The footfalls were near, and then they stopped by the corpses that Delegado and Thomas had left. There was a soft chanting, and then a deep, powerful voice demanded something in the terrible language of the fiends. Delegado was shocked to hear an answer in the same language, albeit in a weak, monotone voice. The bounty hunter peeked around the tunnel curve.

A tall figure in a robe with a deep hood was making a demon corpse talk through some spell. Delegado could make out little of the creature in the dark robe, although he could see runes at the hem of the robe with silvery tracings. The half-orc frowned. He had seen something similar, long ago. The robe prevented its wearer from leaving any tracks, even a scent for bloodhounds. In the civilized lands of Khorvaire it was either incredibly expensive or incredibly illegal. Delegado had only caught the fugitive wearing it because Feather had spotted the quarry from the air. This robe meant that Delegado’s hunch about whoever was behind this wanting it hidden was right.

The figure in the robe finished interrogating the corpse and let the spell go. Delegado got a glimpse of a hand with stripes of fur clutch the robe as the thing went deeper into the tunnels, straight down the path that led to wherever Iron Orphan was.

Delegado waited, forcing himself to slowly count to a hundred, then turned back to Thomas. “I think I just saw the local clan-chief,” he said.

“I had a feeling,” Thomas told him. “We don’t have any more bless weapon oils or scrolls, do we?”

Delegado shook his head. “You have any bless weapon scrolls by any chance?” Thomas answer was a negative shake of the head. “Happy joy. Listen, that thing is a spellcaster with some expensive gear, we have to think carefully about this. We have to use those invisibility scrolls.”

“We only have two,” Thomas reminded him.

“We’ve only got one skin,” Delegado pointed out. The symbiont looked at him. “Don’t you start,” Delegado told the stormstalk.

“Did you get any clue about what it was?” Thomas said.

“Stripes of fur on one hand,” the half-orc shrugged.

“Orange and black fur?” Thomas asked. There was real fear in Thomas’ voice.

“Orc nightsight doesn’t have color perception,” Delegado said, a bit defensively. “I thought your darkvision was the same.”

“Yeah, yeah it is,” Thomas said. “Delegado, do you know what a rakshasa is?”

“No.” Delegado didn’t like admitting that, but blustering wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

“The worst Kyhber has to offer,” Thomas said. “The only force in the world below that the daelkyr fear. They call themselves the Lords of Dust.”

Delegado’s mouth twisted. “Okay, yeah, I’ve heard that term. We still need to go get Orphan.”

Thomas wordlessly drank a pair of potions and Delegado did the same. Two scrolls later they were running down the tunnels with invisibility spells in place, trying not to bump into each other.