“That even possible?” asked Gorm.
“I don’t know.” Jynn stepped around the machine. “Whatever is sealed in the prophetic vault could have been here for ages. Perhaps since the Sten. Whatever’s on the other side of— auugh!” A line of crimson light seared across the stone beneath Jynn’s feet. Smoldering graffiti spread across the ancient walkways as the sinister glow burned an arcane symbol over the face of the path.
Gorm shielded his eyes from the sudden glow. “What in the Pit is that?”
“A magical trigger!” Laruna pushed past Gorm as she rushed to the wizard’s side.
“A trap?” Heraldin had to shout to be heard over a sudden cacophony.
“Ain’t a trap!” Gorm hollered, but his words were lost amid the horrible, sibilant roar. His ears filled with a wet whispering, thick and sick and susurrant, as three shadows detached from the dark heights of the cavern and dove toward the heroes’ platform. “It’s an ambush!”
Chapter 23
The Alpine Gnurg is a master of ambush. Members of the monstrous species wait patiently in caves or crags for weeks at a time, nearly dormant until some unlucky or foolhardy creature stumbles over their dens. And though it is impossible to truly understand the mind of a hideous amalgam of titanic centipede and fleshy nightmare, it is easy to imagine something akin to anticipation flowing through their neuron clusters whenever their antennae detect the vibrations of approaching footsteps.
The specimen lurking on the southern slopes of Mount Andarun clacked its mouthparts and tensed its many appendages in just such a facsimile of eager glee. Something approached from the lower slopes—at a full run, judging by the vibrations—and it felt large.
It never occurred to the Alpine Gnurg that this might not be food. Ancient sorcery and subsequent evolution had collaborated to tune every part of the creature, from its multitude of powerful legs to its rock-shredding mandibles, for leaping out of deep tunnels and making alpine climbers wish that they’d taken up boating instead. Gnurgs that passed up opportunities to feed never passed on their genes; there weren’t enough wayward hikers and careless goats around to sustain a population of cautious apex predators. If it moved and it was on a mountain, an Alpine Gnurg was built to assume it was food.
And so it was when the entrance to its tunnel was eclipsed by a shaggy figure, the gnurg lunged immediately, and subsequently discovered how an invasive species could disrupt an isolated ecosystem like the crags at the top of a dungeon mountain. This was in part because magic and nature had also conspired to make Trolls into unstoppable killing machines, and in part because the gods had yet to dream up anything that could stop this particular Troll from getting into this particular mountain.
Natural selection quickly rendered its grisly verdict. Every battle has a tipping point, beyond which it’s not so much a struggle as a grim certainty playing out over the loser’s protest. Once the Troll punched through an eyehole and got a grip on the faceplate of the gnurg’s armor, the creature’s fate was sealed. The Alpine Gnurg’s final scream cut off with a grim crack.
The Troll hardly paused long enough to slick the ichor from his eyes. A moment later, he charged down the monster’s burrow at a full sprint, the wounds and gashes in his skin already closing. The smarter nightmares would stay out of its way. The more foolhardy ones would share their fates with the gnurg. Neither would give Thane much pause.
Nothing on Arth could stop him from getting to her.
“Bloody stubborn,” Gorm growled at the thing that had once been Dagnar Firdson, the Golden Dawn’s resident Dwarf. This observation was only half true; the desiccated husk of a Dwarf before him was the farthest thing from bloody that a corpse could be. It didn’t have a drop of fluid remaining in it. Dry heat radiated off the creature like a desert wind, and Gorm felt his own skin cracking under the withering glare of its empty eye sockets.
But the dead bastard was surely stubborn, as obstinate as a tectonic plate. Gorm punched his axe through his opponent’s face. Dagnar’s head exploded in a cathartic cloud of dehydrated flesh and brittle bone, run through with a web of wiry beard hair. Yet the grim particulate left gravity’s call unheeded. A buzzing noise filled Gorm’s ears as the cloud slowed to a stop in midair and, after pausing just long enough to mock the other laws of physics, coalesced into Dagnar’s face once more, grinning mirthlessly beneath his empty eyes. The thrumming in the air took on the stilted, irregular rhythm of laughter.
“What are these thrice-cursed things? They’re too tough to be zombies!” Gorm shouted to his party. Dagnar took a clumsy swing at him, and the berserker barely felt the blow in his shield. “And too weak to be revenants!”
A silver arrow burst through Dagnar’s chest, and he staggered back as his torso re-solidified.
“Too solid to be a ghost!” Kaitha called, taking aim again.
“Too ugly to be vampires,” Heraldin added. He parried an attack from the powdered shade of Rod Torkin. The dead man staggered back into the arc of Gaist’s mace and was pulverized from the shoulder up, if only momentarily. “And too crumbly,” the bard added.
Jynn stepped behind Gorm, back-to-back as Agatha of Chrate’s corpse advanced. “It’s a novel form of necromancy,” he said over his shoulder.
“You said necromancy can’t work here!” Gorm blocked another blow from Dagnar.
“I didn’t think it could!” the omnimancer insisted.
“Well, there are some things you need to be thrice-cursed certain of!” Gorm shouted, punching his axe through Dagnar’s skull again. “Can ye unweave the enchantment?”
“It’d be hard to, because most necromancy doesn’t work here!” Jynn’s voice had the shrill timbre of a man about to set aside rational thought for a moment, but any rant he was about to embark on was silenced by a sudden gout of flame. Agatha disappeared within the wall of fire, and a moment later a similar blast enveloped Dagnar.
“Fire does!” Laruna wore a smug grin as she waved from the center of another walkway.
“But only for a moment,” Gorm countered. Already Dagnar’s ashes were swirling back around the small stone—
The stone!
Gorm grabbed the small idol, carved in the shape of a three-eyed skull, and thrust it into the air. “The stones!” he shouted. “The stones are the source of their magic!”
“Aha! A powerful artifact!” said Jynn.
“Right!” said Heraldin. He turned back to the abomination in front of him, who was advancing on the bard with a cudgel. “Now, I just need to—”
Gaist’s fist erupted from Rod Torkin’s chest, clutching the stone. The weaponsmaster pulled the sorcerous heart from the corpse and, with a swift punch, sent Rod’s crumbing body plummeting over the edge of the walkway into the darkness below.
“That was way too smooth,” Heraldin said. “Like this wasn’t your first time punching into a man’s chest and ripping out his… well, whatever drives him.”
Gaist shrugged.
“Really? I’d assume the rib cage gets in the way,” said the bard.
Gaist flattened his hand and demonstrated a short, piercing jab by way of morbid illustration.
“That is both awesome and terrifying,” said Heraldin.
“All right.” Jynn held up Agatha’s stone. “Now what do we do?”
“You’re the wizard,” said Gorm. “I thought ye’d know.”
