Tales Of Adventure #2

The Necromancer’s Lair-3

Then the light flicked out, leaving them both in blackness.

At first, Gareth thought he was blind. The light, as bright as it was, had overcome him completely; he had turned away too slowly, and he was doomed to live out the rest of his life in darkness, begging passersby for whatever coins or scraps they deigned to share with him.

It was almost enough to make him open a vein with the dagger in his hand.

After a minute or so, however, he realized he could see. Ever so slightly. There was a light, extremely faint, streaming in from somewhere, off to his right, he thought. It was difficult to tell, because the light was so dim he almost thought he was imagining it, at first.

Once, when Gareth was young, he had locked himself inside a padded chest while playing hide and seek. He had almost died of suffocation before his parents finally found him, but while he waited, he experienced near total silence. The padding of the chest blocked the outside noise so well he could not hear anything. After a short while, he began imagining he heard things: dogs barking, laughter, whispers...the sort of faint whispers that would drive a man mad if he listened to them for too long.

The light he experienced now reminded him of that day, and he felt a cold shiver of fear run down his spine. Swallowing to repress the bile he knew would try to come up if he let it, he pushed himself to his feet.

"Hatherle," Gareth said, trying hard to not let his sudden fear show in his tone. "Are you still there?"

There was silence for a long moment, then a discontented snort announced the man servant's presence. "Here, my Lord. That was...most instructive." Hatherle normally was extremely pleased to learn something, remnants of his old profession, no doubt. Not this time. He sounded positively chagrined.

Not that Gareth felt much better. Sheathing his dagger, he peered around, trying to get his bearings, and failed.

Then, all at once, he realized he still felt grainy wood in his left hand - the torch. He had not extinguished it; why was it not shining?

Gingerly, Gareth raised his right hand to the end of the torch, where the flame should have been. He felt no heat, even when he closed his hand around it. The top of the torch crumbled, ash falling away where the fuel and underlying wood had burned, but aside from that he would never have been able to tell the thing had ever been lit, as cool as it was.

"What the..."

"It would seem," Hatherle said, "that our query is a bit more clever than you gave him credit for." There was a brief pause before he added, "My Lord." Clearly he was re-thinking his pledge of service. Or he was just annoyed because he did not see this turn of events coming. Gareth would not give odds either way.

"Wonderful." Gareth tossed the torch, useless now, to the ground, then crouched back down and felt around until he found his axe.

Feeling a bit better with the weapon's solid weight in his right hand, he stood back up and shrugged his shield off his back, then slipped it onto his left forearm.

What was making that light? Gareth turned his head left and right, but no matter which way he looked, it was all the same. Just darkness illuminated by the faintest hint of light, just enough to remind him he was not blind. He could find no source, see no details.

But there had to be something there.

He rolled his shoulders and straightened - he found himself hunching over without realizing it, an instinctual response to the oppressing gloom no doubt. "Hatherle, grab the back of my belt."

He did not wait for the other man to respond. He just stepped forward, trusting in Hatherle's seemingly instinctive need to obey. Gareth felt a reassuring tug on his belt as he moved forward; Hatherle had grabbed on before it was too late.

One direction was as good as another, so he continued forward in as straight a line as he could manage. It would be very easy to get turned around with no visual reference, but there was nothing else to it. And he had always been good at walking along logs, even with his eyes closed. Sooner or later, if he kept straight enough, he had to run into something.

Sure enough, he did exactly that. One moment he was walking slowly forward. The next, he found himself falling, his outstretched foot having come down on nothing but thin air. The cry of chagrin behind him, and the desperate tugging at the back of his belt, told him that Hatherle, too, had fallen, but he had only enough time to throw his axe aside - it would not do to land on it and impale himself - before he struck ground. Hard.

A heartbeat later, Hatherle landed atop him.

Gareth's breath left his lungs in a rush, and the momentary lack of breath clouded his other pains for a time. Finally, when he was able to inhale again, he took stock.

He hurt all over; he had landed flat on his belly, spreading the impact all over his body. A small mercy, that. Had he landed any other way, he would likely be nursing one or more broken bones. But after a short consideration, Gareth decided he would have bruises pretty much everywhere. But he was functional. If that was the right word for it.

"Get off me," he said, his voice harsher than he intended it between his aches and difficulty breathing.

It was only after Hatherle rolled off and Gareth forced himself up onto his hands and knees that he realized he could see again. Or rather, that the light was bright enough that he could make out his surroundings without difficulty.

He almost wished he could not.

He and Hatherle sat in a small room, maybe ten feet on a side. Although room was probably a misnomer. All around him were steel bars, beyond which he could make out little of the chamber beyond. The floor was rock, as was the ceiling. And how did that work exactly? He could see no hint of the hole he fell through, though it must have been there.

"Bugger me," he breathed.

He looked around again. Whether it was because the light grew more bright or because his eyes were becoming more accustomed to it, he found he could see the chamber housing his cell a bit better. It was made of stone, chiseled blocks that fit together tightly enough that he wondered whether the builders had bothered with mortar, and was empty save for their cell.

And his axe, lying about five feet beyond the bars of the cell, off to the right.

"Bugger me," he said again, more emphatically.

"Not even if you paid me, my Lord," said Hatherle as he pushed himself to his feet. He took a moment to brush himself off, smoothing his clothing at the same time, as he looked around. "Well," he said, "this is rather...discouraging."

He had a way with words, Hatherle did.

It was difficult to tell how much time passed with no external reference. But regardless, they remained stuck in that small cell for far too long.

At first, Gareth plotted ways to escape. They could team up to bend a bar out of shape and then Hatherle, the thinner of the two, could slip out and figure out how to free Gareth. Hatherle could stand on Gareth's shoulders and work the stone where it encased the bars with Gareth's dagger. Given enough time and effort, he would surely be able to remove enough stone that Gareth could knock a couple bars out.

In truth, Gareth was surprised Hatherle went along with those ideas, oaths or no. Regardless, it did not work. Nothing worked.

And so they sat idly, letting time pass by as they steadily grew more thirsty and hungry, and as fatigue began to set in. Those sensations, and the urgings of nature, were the only way to measure time's passage. It must surely have been a day, maybe more, before their captor revealed himself.

All at once, the seemingly unbroken wall of the chamber housing their cell became...broken. A portion of the wall swung open, like a door. Except before it swung open there was no indication of hinges or any break in the stone at all. In fact, the "door" bisected several of the stones that made up the walls of the chamber.

A rush of air accompanied the door's opening, bringing with it a sickly-sweet odor that Gareth could not quite place. It was familiar, but...off, somehow. His contemplation of the odor was short-lived though, his attention being taken by the man who stepped delicately into the chamber.

Delicate summed the man up perfectly. Hatherle was slender. This fellow made him look like a hulking slab of muscle. Gareth was not entirely certain how he managed to support his own weight, let alone the weight of the black robes he wore. They were cowled, the robes, though he wore the hood thrown back, and were cinched around his waist by a length of red-brown cloth of some sort. The man's features were sharp, almost skeletal, which was fitting in a way, but far from weak. His dark eyes peered at Gareth and Hatherle intensely from beneath narrow black brows that matched the short-cut black hair atop his head.

The Necromancer, Gareth presumed. Of course, the shambling figures of two reanimated dead men that accompanied him on either side as he strode into the room would have given that away even if he did not look the part.

"Welcome, friends," said the Necromancer. His voice was surprising: deep and strong, belonging to a much more substantial man. And cultured. Gareth had encountered Lords who spoke with less precision and elegance than this man. No simple power-hungry lunatic, this one.

"Glad to be here," Gareth replied, trying to keep his tone steady despite the shiver crawling up his spine.

The Necromancer smirked slightly. "I've no doubt." He stopped his approach about ten feet from the cell. The walking corpses halted as well as he crossed his arms over his chest. "You are the first to stumble upon my back door," he said. "The others all tried a more...direct route." He made a vague gesture toward the corpse on the left. Gareth followed the gesture with his gaze and found his bowels turning to liquid. He knew that man.

Man. Hard to call him that now. But Ranulf had been powerful, jolly, and loyal once. To see him standing there, barely recognizable from the decay of his flesh even as the Necromancer's ghastly art kept him from his rest, nearly unmanned Gareth. He had not known Ranulf had sought to challenge the Necromancer; he had simply stopped coming to the pub one day. Gareth assumed he had just moved on, or found a different watering hole. Though why he would not have at least said goodbye to those he had become friendly with stung a bit. Apparently Gareth had been wrong, and that error filled him with fear.

If such a mighty man as Ranulf could not defeat the Necromancer, what chance did he have? Especially considering the circumstances.

He kept his mouth shut. Better to let the Necromancer speak. Perhaps he would give something away.

"What did you hope to accomplish?" The Necromancer's tone was conversational, though tainted with a hint of derision.

Gareth shrugged and spread his hands. "Do you really need to ask?"

Amusement flashed through the Necromancer's eyes, and he shook his head. "No, I suppose not. I am, after all, the great menace. The threat to all humanity." He took on an ironic, almost mocking tone as he emphasized those last words. There was a moment of silence as the Necromancer just looked at Gareth. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Does it never occur to any of you that I might have a good reason for my studies?"