Chapter 21 - Part 3

Amazingly, over a half-hour went by without incident. A great commotion was still occurring around the city, but none of it on their approach to the northern wall. Given that such was Orphan’s plan, Ois thought that meant the warforged was still alive.

Finally Delegado paused, and again they crouched behind some rubble. “Okay,” he said. “We’re close enough.” He clicked his tongue and extended his arm. Feather landed onto the half-orc’s arm, and Delegado cast his spell, conversing with the bird. Ois listened, impressed that Delegado had found his own magic. When they had been together in Aundair, the half-orc had known no magic, and he had been trying to train a snake from the Marches that she was very leery of. The half-orc finished his spell, and Feather launched himself into the sky, heading north. “He’s going to find Thomas,” Delegado explained.

“It’s very impressive to watch you do that,” she said.

“Oh?” he said. “Didn’t think I had the brains to figure out some spells?”

“I thought you had the brains,” she said, lifting Bartemain’s father again. “I didn’t know you had the subtlety.”

Delegado’s face grew sad, and he reached over and shifted his father’s corpse so that it lay better on Ois’ shoulder. “I wish he could have seen it.” He blinked. “He’s leaking dust.” The half-orc rummaged around in his pack.

Ois looked about. The commotion in the other areas of the city was dying down or coming closer. “We need to hurry, Delegado,” she said.

“Won’t take long,” he told her. He took out a bandage, one of the bandages he had gotten from the eyeless witch in Festering Holt. He carefully tightened it around his father’s head. “No reason to give them a trail, right?”

Delegado finished fiddling with the bandage, and then trotted down the street, clutching his bow. They crouched as they ran, moving low and sticking to building fronts, trying to keep from giving away too much of a profile.

Finally Delegado paused, peering ahead. They were about five thousand feet from the city wall, but the building ahead had collapsed centuries ago, and the street area beneath it was full of holes and unsafe angles. “You have any more of that oil?” he asked. “It’s a short duration.”

“I know,” she said. She set her mace down, fished the oil out, and then tossed it to him. He caught it and stuck it in his belt stash as she picked her mace up again. “That one is two minutes only, use it well.”

“Hunh,” he said. “You hear that?” His eyes tightened, then he grinned. “Orphan’s coming, but he has company.” The half-orc pulled the oil out and coated his bow.

“Your dragonmark?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said. “On three.” She felt something, a rumble in the city. “One.” Now she heard muffled noises coming from the holes by the collapsed building. “Two.” There was shouting now, and she heard many feet coming from the nearby streets. “Three,” Delegado said, stepping out from behind cover.

Orphan leaped out of one of the holes in the street, landing on a pile of masonry. The warforged was covered in scratches, cracks, and burns. Smoke wisped from the rags of what was his monk’s uniform, but he still had his belt and his sai. From down one street a crossbow twanged, but the bolt came nowhere near the warforged.

Delegado stepped, turned, and fired two arrows at once. The fiend with the crossbow shrieked as Delegado felled it.

“Orphan!” he yelled. “Go to the wall!” Ois was already running, carrying Bartemain over her shoulder. She knew Delegado’s plan without being told.

“Rakshasa is behind me!” Orphan said, flipping backwards.

On cue, a tiger-headed fiend in wizard’s robes fly out of the hole and cast a spell, peppering Orphan with magical darts that left pitted holes in the warforged’s frame. Another tiger, this one a lesser rakshasa, was climbing up behind its master. The snarls and threats of other horrible things could be heard in the remains of the sewer pipes as well, all waiting for their chance to maul and hurt.

Ois swung, and the lesser rakshasa, a tiger-man in scale mail with a hand and a-half sword, screamed as the mace hit him. The Eberron shard on the mace shattered, and the rakshasa disintegrated.

“Flame has blessed me!” Ois cried, running past the ashes that floated away from where the lesser rakshasa had been. The mace was shriveling now as well, apparently its form did not hold after the dragonshard was used, so she dropped it and drew her longsword.

“Wonderful,” Orphan said, flipping backwards over the other holes towards the wall. “Delegado, come on!”

The half-orc was not moving. Instead, he was grinning as he sighted his temporarily-blessed bow at the rakshasa wizard. “Say hello to my little friend!” the half-orc whooped as he fired three arrows from the massive bow into the floating rakshasa wizard. The rakshasa was caught off guard, and it howled in pain as the arrows sunk deeply into its body. Its next spell fizzled even as the tiger-thing was in mid-cast, the pain having broke its concentration.

“Get over the wall!” Delegado yelled to Ois and Orphan. The rakshasa was trying to fly away from the blessed longbow, but the half-orc’s weapon had the range factor. “I’ll catch up when I’m done!” Five more arrows flew, and the rakshasa fell dead, its brain and heart pierced. Once a lord of this place, it was now a corpse.

By then Orphan was scampering up a ladder, ignoring the hidden bells within it that would have alerted every fiend in the area if the general uproar had not. Between those converging from the surface streets and those still trying to get out of the tunnel, the area was going to be very densely populated soon. Halfway up he realized that Ois was struggling under her burden, and he went back and helped her climb while holding the body.

“Who is this?” Orphan asked. “The prisoner?”

“Yes,” Ois said, shoving Bartemain upwards. “Changed somehow. He was Delegado’s father and he spoke of a cloud over a jewel.” She did not think it was possible for a warforged to look startled, but Orphan did. Nonetheless he quickly hauled Bartemain’s body to the top of the wall and then jumped off, no doubt doing his trick of a slow fall. Ois had seen monks sworn to the Silver Flame do the same thing.

Ois turned around to see Delegado firing in a blur, slowly working his way towards her. His bow brought down lesser fiends flying overhead, and bulkier things that tried rushing down the street. He had a look in his eyes that scared her. He did not seem to care if he died.

“Del!” she called, rushing towards him, hacking at scaly hands that reached through rent places in the ground, trying to grab her feet and his. She grabbed his shoulder. “Come on, we have to go!”

“I’m coming,” he said, firing two arrows at once into a hole in the ground. A terrible cry of pain came from below. “Just a few more. Just kill a few more.”

“Del!” she screamed.

“Did you see what they did to my father?” he howled at her. He sighted and took an incredible shot between two spires, sending an arrow into the eye socket of a harpy with a fiendish aspect to her. The creature fell, her wings no longer keeping her aloft.

“If we don’t get outside the wall soon you’ll never bring your father’s body back to your village!” she said, tugging at him.

He went, if reluctantly. A hunched thing tried to shatter her mind, not knowing that she was immune to fear, and she decapitated it. A wriggling insect thing teleported into the air next to her, but she eviscerated it before it could attack. Somehow they made it to the ladder. She made Delegado go up first, smiting a drooling half-ape, half-lobster thing. He sent down a rain of arrows from atop the wall that gave her cover to ascend the ladder.

When she got atop the wall, she saw Thomas in the distance charging on his horse and leading Delegado’s to where Orphan was waving his arms below. Delegado had affixed his grappling hook, and tossed the silk rope to the ground below. His face was made of stone as he whirled and dropped another flying thing with three arrows. “Get down there,” he told her.

She nodded, and she took out the potion gave her. After drinking it, she sheathed her sword then rushed forward and grabbed him.

“Hey!” he yelled, caught off guard as she stepped off the wall. The magic in the potion held true, and they floated to the ground gently.

“I don’t want you to make some stupid stand up there,” she said. “That bless weapon oil won’t last forever, and you’re running low on arrows.”

“If you would have told me you were going to do this I wouldn’t have needed to leave behind a really good rope and hook,” he told her angrily. “And I have no intention of making a stupid stand, not when the rest of you need me to get you through the storm.”

They landed, and saw that Orphan had tied Bartemain’s corpse onto the back of Delegado’s horse.

“What in Khyber is this?” yelled Thomas, his face turning red. He was staring at her with anger and pain in his inhuman eyes.

Ois realized that she had forgotten to change back.

“That’s Flamebearer,” Orphan said. “Also known as Ois Silva. She is –”

“I know what she is!” Thomas snapped. “She’s a changeling! They can’t be trusted!”

“Thomas, she was hiding from me,” Delegado said, mounting up. Feather flew down and landed on the half-orc’s shoulder. “Now we have an entire city of demons behind us, so let’s deal with this later! We have to get to the storm!”

“You can summon your own horse, liar,” Thomas snapped at her with anger. He wheeled his mount and charged after Delegado. Orphan ran after them both, and soon overtook them.

Ois frowned, and summoned her steed. As always it appeared in a glowing nimbus of silvery light, tossing its magnificent head. She grabbed the saddle horn and mounted quickly, riding after the others as the cries of the demons ascending the wall reached a fever pitch.