Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 9: The Warren

To Eleukas, the Fangsparks’ warren was nothing short of a nightmare.

He’d lived his life under open air and warm sun, his world bounded by the salt breezes and endless horizon of Otari’s harbor and the rich green majesty of its forests. Venturing underground, where he was bent almost double and was perpetually conscious of the weight of untold tons of earth, felt to him like being buried alive.

It wasn’t even a peaceful grave. Gristleburst was right: the zombies buried in the walls were only the beginning. Wendlyn disarmed over a dozen traps, ranging from hidden spikes and springloaded blades to deadfalls and corrosive gas vials, as they made their way through the Fangsparks’ tunnels. Once she failed to notice a basket of venomous spiders in time, and the frenzied fist-sized arachnids dropped on their heads, although at least most of the spiders had already killed each other while trapped inside the basket.

They never saw any kobolds, at least not living ones. Twice the tunnel rose back toward the surface, broadening into communal cookfires and fishponds designed to catch enough rainwater and sunlight to sustain the kobolds’ food supply. Yet even here, at the former cornerstones of the Fangsparks’ shared lives, there was only disuse and decay. The warrens seemed to have been as thoroughly abandoned as the Gullcracker goblins’ territory, and it was hard not to think that the reason for their absence was the same.

“Maybe the foul ones did turn them all into zombies,” Wendlyn said when they stopped for a grim, cold meal amid the remains of a former vegetable garden. “Maybe the Fangsparks’ surrender only bought them so much time.”

“Fangsparks are still alive,” Gristleburst said, poking at a moldering scarecrow. Crudely carved and garishly painted, it depicted a hulking goblin with menacing red eyes and a fierce grin that had mostly been washed away by rain and time. “Traps still working. Zombies can’t do that work.”

“Then where are they?” Eleukas asked.

Gristleburst only shrugged. “Deeper.”

They ventured onward. The tunnel stopped surfacing and dove more steeply into the earth. It grew even rawer, with torn roots hanging from the walls and the scent of fresh-turned soil heavy in the air. Wider, better-made branches split off into other parts of the warren, but Gristleburst ignored them, remaining fixed on the path that led down and down again.

“Where are we going?” Eleukas pressed, but Gristleburst didn’t answer. It was as if the goblin had a lodestone that none of the rest of them could see, and it guided him ever deeper into the Fangsparks’ home.

If this was their home. Eleukas wasn’t so sure about that anymore. The tunnels changed as they ran deeper. Above, they’d been crude and primitive, but the logs that bolstered the burrows were sturdy and bore the patina of age. The ground had been beaten hard by the passage of clawed feet over years, or decades. Even the traps spoke of care and concern: this was ground that the Fangsparks meant to protect.

But in this newer, lower section of tunnel, the raw logs leaked rivulets of soil-stained sap. The ground was soft and pocked with claw marks. Over an hour had passed since Wendlyn had found the last trap, and she’d ceded the lead to Gristleburst, which meant she didn’t expect to find more.

It gave Eleukas the shivers. What had the kobolds been digging so intently toward? Why hadn’t they set any traps here, after they’d put so many inventively nasty surprises in the warren’s higher reaches?

Finally Lisavet threw up her hand to signal a stop. Eleukas peered around the cleric, seeing that she’d taken the signal from Wendlyn and Gristleburst, who had halted ahead of her.

Past the goblin, the tunnel just… vanished. A sullen, fiery glow washed up from the depths of some great and precipitous drop, but standing in the back of their little group, Eleukas couldn’t see where it was coming from. He shouldered his way forward, partly because he was curious, but mainly because he felt that if there was some threat ahead, then he should be the one to meet it. Gods knew he’d done little enough in the warrens so far.

“What’s going on?” he whispered to the others.

“Gristleburst says we’ve found the Fangsparks. Be careful, and be quiet. We don’t want them to spot us.” Wendlyn motioned for Eleukas to flatten himself on the ground. She bellied down alongside him, and together they peered over the edge.

Fifty feet below, in a vast cavern lit by hissing green alchemical torches, thirty or forty kobolds dug frantically to unearth enormous chunks of carved stone. They looked like tablets of some kind, their faces covered in foreign letters as long as Eleukas’s forearm. Excavated pieces had been set carefully aside in another part of the cavern, where other kobolds painstakingly brushed them clean under the watchful eye of a cowled figure in long, obscuring robes. Another robed figure oversaw a third, smaller team of kobolds, these evidently tasked with assembling the tablet pieces in their proper order. Large gaps remained in the puzzle, but Eleukas could see that they were at least two-thirds finished.

The script etched into those broad stone tablets was like nothing he’d ever seen. The enormous letters alternated abruptly between harsh angular lines and sweeping curlicues, one wrapped around the other like vines climbing over hewn stone. Shadows pooled deep in the chiseled runes, voidlike in the cavern’s eerie green light.

Something about the absolute emptiness of that darkness pulled at Eleukas’s memory. It reminded him of the void-faced horror he’d glimpsed in the woods near Giant’s Wheel, back when this had all started, and it rekindled some of the mute, shuddering terror he’d felt then.

These things were connected. Eleukas felt it in his bones. The nightmare besieging Otari had its roots here, in the strangling script on those broken tablets.

With an effort, he looked away from the tablets to focus again on the kobolds and their cowled overseers.

Sores and sagging blotches plagued most of the kobolds. Many had stained or withered fingers, and their scales were grayish, cracked, and peeling. They stumbled unsteadily through their work, their eyes unfocused and jaws slightly slack. Eleukas couldn’t tell whether they were sick or poisoned, but it was clear that something was badly wrong with them.

The cowled figures were harder to read. Judging from their height and movements, they were human, or close to it, but that was all he could tell. Dark shrouds covered them from head to foot, obscuring everything but their fingertips, and the shadowless green glow of the alchemical torches cast them in a flat, distorting light. Eleukas couldn’t even determine what color the robes were. Gray, brown, blue – all looked plain black in that light.

He pulled back. Wendlyn withdrew alongside him, and they moved away from the ledge so that Lisavet could look into the cavern while the rest of them conferred.

“We can’t attack from here,” Eleukas whispered. “We have to find a way to get down there. But that’s it. Those tablets. There’s something about them… they feel the same as that faceless thing I saw in the woods.”

“You hear the whispers through the mask,” Gristleburst said. The goblin pursed his lips, miming a soundless whistle. “Feels foul, smells foul. Like secrets you don’t want to know. The voice of their god.”

“We have to stop them,” Lisavet murmured, having left the ledge to join them. The cleric’s eyes were bright with tears. “What they’ve done to those kobolds—what they’d do to Otari–”

“Two ways down,” Gristleburst told them. “First, can climb from here. Steep, difficult. Might get spotted. But they don’t use this tunnel anymore. Used it for a while, when first they found this place, then when they dug deeper, made new tunnel lower down instead of hauling dirt up this high. So maybe they don’t think to check this one anymore. Then we can sneak down, and probably we don’t get attacked from above.

“Other choice is to go back up tunnel, find new branch, come down through lower tunnel. Less climbing, more walking. Might be Fangsparks guarding that way. Then more fighting, no surprise.”

Eleukas glanced at the others. “I’m ready to climb if you are.” Years in the logging camps had taught him how to handle ropes, and although the beams in this tunnel weren’t as solidly secured as he would have liked, he was still reasonably confident that he could find a secure place to anchor their climb.

Wendlyn crept back to peer over the edge again, studying the figures below. After a few minutes she returned to the others, wiping dirt from her elbows. “I don’t see any sentinels. They don’t seem to be keeping watch at all. The kobolds are so sick and beaten down, I’m not sure they even have the capability to pay attention to anything but their drudgery anymore. And those heavy hoods keep the others half-blind and -deaf. I haven’t seen a single one so much as twitch its cowl back. So maybe we can sneak down.”

“I’ll set the ropes,” Eleukas said, glad to be of use. While Wendlyn kept an eye on the Fangsparks and their minders, he tied off two ropes on opposing beams, reasoning that one might hold them even if the other gave way. When he was satisfied that they were as sound as he could make them, he turned back to his friends. “All right. It’s ready. Everyone’s sure?”

“’Sure’ is a strong word,” Wendlyn replied, but she grabbed the ropes and shinnied down, quick as a squirrel.

Gristleburst rearranged his bombs again, looping several of them around his skinny wrists in a pair of dangling bracelets that he could drop at will, and then descended. Lisavet hesitated the longest, swallowing as she tried not to look at how far she could fall, and then lunged over the edge with grim determination, choking the ropes in a death grip.

Eleukas cast one last glance down to the cavern. The Fangsparks were still stumbling miserably through their work. Their cowled overseers were still shrouded in green-lit secrecy. No one looked up; no one cried out at the intruders.

Their very indifference alarmed him. Hadn’t they heard Gristleburst’s blaststicks? Didn’t they know their traps had been sprung? Why weren’t they on guard?

Every fiber of Eleukas’s being cried out that this was a trap.

But even if it was, it didn’t matter. They’d already put their heads in.

He took hold of the ropes and dropped off the ledge.

Eleukas was fifteen feet from the tunnel’s mouth, dangling helplessly in midair, when the first horn sounded. Its bellow echoed around the cavern, shivering in the green alchemical light. As one, the kobolds and cowled figures looked up.

They were caught.