Chapter 37 - Smoke and Flame

Walking shoulder to shoulder, the two of them made their way around the Larder as quietly as they could. Listening for the supposed creature Felina reported, only the sound their passage returned from the doorless openings around them. Cadryn supposed animals, at least, had to the good sense to avoid this place. Some of the rooms were mercifully empty, one contained remains that could only belong to some great sea creature, a wale or elder shark. Turning onto the backside of the square path, a new sound reverberated out to them from the gloom ahead.

Slosh. Slooosh. SLLlooooosh. Sloosh. Slosh.

So the noise went, as they stood in stillness, staring ahead, unable to discern the source. After a minute or so of listening, Mareth angled her staff to left side of the hallway.

“I think it’s coming from a room on that side,” she whispered.

“Agreed,” Cadryn said, slowly drawing his swords. The anticipation of combat sent a tremor through his hands. “It sounds big.”

Sliding forward, one foot at a time, Mareth took the lead. They passed a room on the right, and she stopped, looking down and picking up her foot. Thick strands of some kind of mucous or jelly glittered in the light. The trail, as wide as the doorway, led from that room to the next.

Peeking inside as he moved up, Cadryn could see a thick glass tank, one side fallen to the floor and shattered, only a thin half-circle of glass remained, and the rest gone where the slimy trail lead out of the room. The briny scent of the tidal flats flowed out of the room. The sound of sloshing resumed, grew louder, and he returned his attention to the hallway.

Mareth sidled by the next room, sparing it a glance, and edged her way along the right wall to get a better angle into a room on the left that’s doorway glittered with a fresh layer of ooze. It was too close, and fear seized at Cadryn’s heart, forcing his body to move quickly to her side. His feet suddenly loud on the wet stone floor, Mareth turned back with a finger to her lips.

The sloshing stopped.

They both turned to the door, the light seemed to die before making it more than a few feet inside. Then they caught movement, at the floor, and higher, points of light began reflecting from inside the room like tiny mirrors. Bigger objects emerged as shadows in the door.

Mareth issued a harsh command, and the sphere atop her staff flashed forward into the void. It slowed immediately, dimming into nothing with a loud hissing sputter, but it illuminated the shadows: broken masonry, shattered wood, bones, and then in the center of the mass, skulls. More than ten skulls, human and animal alike, their empty eye sockets glowing faintly with a wine-colored light. They all pressed forward into the doorway, leering as the light of Mareth’s orb died.

“Run!” Cadryn yelled, but Mareth was already grabbing his arm on her way past. Sprinting hard, neither of them could hear anything beside their own feet on the stones. Continuing around the circuit, they avoided the slick floors and managed to get back to the intersection without issue. They were both panting and wheezing by the time the smoky haze of the Fire Pits emerged from the void. The wet flopping slurp of the gelatinous monstrosity on their heels grew ever louder in their ears as they slowed to a jog.

“To the center of the room, keep it distracted!” Mareth commanded, and Cadryn sprang to comply.

As they split paths, he for the middle, Mareth along the edge of the room, the creature burst forth, now free of the confines of the narrower hallway. Lit by the arcane flames of the pits, Cadryn got his first good look at the thing: even spreading out across the floor, it was more than half again as tall as him, and wider than a horse and cart in all directions. The jellied mass seemed to roll over itself as it moved, upending chairs and unlit braziers as it flailed. A pseudopod moved along the wall and, as if tasting Mareth’s footprints, the mass began to move in pursuit.

“Hey!” Cadryn yelled, but it did not seem interested in his voice. He stomped a foot, but it only rippled a bit on the nearest side. Getting desperate and angry, Cadryn put away his sword, and ripping a rusty knife from the nearest table, hurled it into the thing.

It shook, twitching wildly, but stopped moving.

“Keep that up,” Mareth called out from halfway down the wall, she was doing something to the crystals. “I need more time.”

Cadryn was already leaping atop a table, and began to frantically hurly anything and everything he could pull free of it. A pot, two turning forks, and a stone mortar missing its pestle. It all went sailing into the monster.

The monster, for its part, did not take kindly to the barrage. Surging forward, it powered under the table Cadryn perched on and levered it up, then over. The air filled with the explosive cracking of wood and banded metal as the table top buckled against a nearby support pillar.

Riding out the motion, he was able to drive off the surface, skip across the adjacent table, and go sprawling onto a third. Pain lanced through his shoulder as Cadryn’s motion halted against a bolted-down grinder with a shriek of twisting metal. A violent hissing filled the air and a cloud of acrid smoke washed over the area as the wood of the table he had been on began to dissolve into the creature’s thrashing mass.

Mareth, done on one side of the room, sprinted across to the other side and began repeating her spell’s incantation. She would need a bit more time to end this fight from the look of it, which left Cadryn little choice. Seizing the grinder with both hands, he pulled with his legs and back, screaming with the effort. Rusted bolts chirped, then sheared free as he fell back against the tabletop.

“Come get me you stinking pile a refuse,” he growled, hurling the grinder with all his might. Cadryn smiled as it slammed into what he assumed was the creatures face. The hunk of metal sank deep, crushing one of the human skulls within. A muted wave of light flashing out from the broken bones reflected around the inside of the mass of jelly, leaving it rigid and still.

“Hah!” Cadryn roared, triumphantly.

The monster shook then, vibrating violently, and in the chaotic light of the Fire Pits, Cadryn barely registered the blur of objects it ejected from the depths of its body. The table around him shook with the impact of utensils, and sparks flew from the nearby pillar as metal careened off it. He felt something collide with his leg, and saw it flash towards his face: a cleaver.

But no impact came.

Opening his eyes and lowering the hand he had raised, far too slowly for it to have mattered, Cadryn found something surprising: the edge of the blade, hovering a hand’s breath from his nose. Staring past it, he saw the reason, a tendril of shadows pouring out of the cut in his pants where the cleaver impacted. Releasing the blade, the shadows withdrew into the rent.

Blinking away his own surprise, Cadryn saw the jelly mass moving forward to claim him for a meal. Pushing up to his feet against the pillar, he looked around for Mareth, saw her now behind the thing at the last of the crystal fire pits.

“I hope you’re about done over there,” he yelled, slipping around the pillar and dashing to the next as the grinding of debris grew loud behind him.

“I am,” she replied calmly. “Get to cover, and be ready to finish it off.”

Cadryn obeyed, rushing against a smaller table and pushing it over as he rolled across it. In spite of the danger, he couldn’t help but look around the edge to see what Mareth was doing. Sadly, the undulating mass of the creature barreling down on him blocked any sight of her, then the room flashed over with the red glow of a cloudless sunset.

From the crystals below the great cauldrons flowed streams of fire, deep red and shot through with black smoke. The streams combined into two rivers of flame, one from each side of chamber that crashed downward onto the monster from above. Its soft body shuddered and split, burning and splattering with loud, thick, pops. Sizzling goo splashed down onto the tables and floors all around as the fire continued to saw and cut into the thing, hewing it apart as the waves of fire died out. A thick, stinging fog filled the air and Cadryn had to shield his watering eyes against it as he stood and backed away from the now burning pile of oily refuse.

“Destroy the rest of the skulls!” Mareth cried out over the hissing of the flames.

Against the animal urge to flee the place, Cadryn moved forward, seeking the skulls. He found them easily enough: they were still moving, smaller tendrils of ooze trying to pull them away from the flames. Grabbing a well-worn tenderizer from the scattering of tools on the floor, he set to work, smashing. On the far side, he met up with Mareth as she finished smashing in an antlered deer skull with her staff.

“I think that’s the last of them,” she breathed, leaning heavily on the staff.

“Either way, you’ve done enough for one night,” Cadryn replied, slipping his shoulder under her other arm. He ignore the searing of her forearm against his back, simply grateful they both made it through. She smelled like charcoal and ash, much better than the room. Their eyes met, the flames dancing within their gaze.

“We both did enough,” she said softly, and nuzzled against him. “The day shift can clean this shit up.”

“Agreed.”

*****

After reporting their success to Captain Vaast, they were both given the remainder of the night off. Mareth excused herself to record the incantations she had improvised during the fight. Cadryn decided to take a nice long bath, made longer by thoughts of Mareth, before crawling, sore and tired, into his sleeping alcove.

As he drifted off, running the night back through his mind, an image stuck: the traveler he had let in just before Mareth came to get him for their mission. The way she half-smirked, her face turning away from his . . .

“That was Dracy, Gods damn her,” Cadryn muttered angrily. She had been gone when they went back to check in with Bahsa after the fight. Oh well, that was a problem for another night.