Chapter Twenty-Four

Except for the pool's dim glow, illumination produced by reflected sunlight, no other light lit the cavern. To his right, some four or five yards from him, Tarn heard the slap of wet cloth against rock, and the splatter of dripping water. Even at this short distance darkness hid Torrocka from sight. In the humid, coal-black darkness of the cavern, Tarn freed the jar of its ballast. From his pouch he removed a waterproof, oiled wallet and held his flint and striker, saving them the inconvenience of waiting for the flint to dry. Hitting the flint rapidly with the striker mad sharp tapping sounds and produced strobing flashes that intermittently framed Torrocka vigorously thrashing his clothes against the craggy cavern wall. The torch beneath the piece of flint snapped to life.

Bathed in the ruddy-orange torchlight, Torrocka advised, "Ye would do well to do the same. When the salt water dries, it can be most unpleasant on the skin."

"Do ye remember how to find thy way to the sword room?" Tarn petitioned, shedding his soggy clothes.

"Down."

"Down?"

"Aye. Down."

Tarn grunted a non-committal reply and donned his damp furs. He handed the lit torch to Torrocka and placed the jar of oil under his right arm.

"Lead on," said Tarn, accompanying his words with an exaggerated courtly sweep of his free hand.

Belying his many years, Torrocka scrambled spryly up the chute he had descended more than a decade earlier. Atop the steep incline, he turned west, striding without hesitation into the dank darkness with Tarn close at his heels, frowning to himself at the cramped confines and tainted air. Torrocka looked over his shoulder to Tarn, who hunched his shoulders in apology and dropped a pace back. Without Torrocka, he'd be lost. Doomed to wander the tunnels until food and water ran out, unable to retrace his steps on the rock floors. Tight spaces bothered him more than the loftiest mountain peak, or the most precarious cliff face. An urge to run and keep running coursed through him. He craved wide open spaces. Lips pressed tightly together, Tarn forced himself to relax, to face his fear, to master the terror he felt building. There was no good reason to be afraid of closed spaces. He was not completely successful. His terror receded, waiting in the background for his vigilance to fail.

When the torch smoked and sputtered, on the verge of guttering out, Tarn replaced the oil. It was their sole method of keeping track of the time in the smothering, cavernous prison.

* * * * * * *

"It isn't too many days further, lad," Torrocka soothed, days later, amused at Tarn's irrational phobia of tight spaces, and impressed with his efforts to conquer it. Although the lad controlled his fear, it was evident to him that the terror still existed, held in check by Tarn's stubborn will. "By my reckoning—"

Torrocka stopped in mid-stride, straining to see through the darkness. Loud slithering and scraping sounds came from beyond the edge of the flickering torchlight. No earthly beast produced such coarse rasping. The low din of wet grating grew louder, but its owner remained invisible. Something of immense proportions and cumbersome weight dragged itself along the pebble- and dust-layered rock floor. The sounds they heard were the pebbles and rocks dragging across the floor, caught between flesh and rock. Something closed on them.

"Do ye fathom those sounds?" Tarn queried.

"No," began Torrocka, shaking his head. "The caverns are bereft of natural denizens."

Torrocka's emphasis on the word 'natural' sent a superstitious tremor through Tarn. They had not seen game in the tunnels, not even so much as a bat or a bug. Up until now, the pair had been alone. Thus, if whatever came toward them was not of the tunnels, it had to have been sent! Tarn placed the jar on the ground and accepted the torch from Torrocka. Steel whispered free. Holding the torch at arm's length, he proceeded cautiously along the narrow passageway. The slithering and scraping noises grew louder.

The tunnel curved gently to the right, funnelling the odd sounds and hiding its owner from view. Torchlight pushed the darkness back ten or twelve feet. Not far. When he rounded the elbow of the bend, a putrid wave of rotting flesh and decay, thick and heavy upon the stale air, assaulted his nostrils. His stomach lurched at the cloying odours. The scraping intensified, growing faster and louder.

Four tentacles appeared on the periphery of the torchlight. Shaped like palm leaves, the wide tips of the tentacles tensed and quivered as they drew the massive bulk of the creature over the tunnel floor. When the gelatinous body attached to the tentacles came into sight, a single unblinking eye stared at him. Beneath the eye rested a mammoth oval mouth, ringed with hundreds of pointed teeth from which bits of dead flesh hung in tattered ribbons. The slobbering maw opened and closed. Saliva pooled on the ground. The creature drew closer. Adapted to wet and muddy, marshy land, it laboured to move on dry land.

"Is there another way to the Chamber?" called Tarn over his shoulder, never taking his eyes off the garish beast.

"No lad. Not that I know."

"Then we go straight."

Although the bulk of the creature nearly filled the width of the passageway, its boneless mass was no higher than his waist. Now that Tarn had a closer view, he surmised the thing was suited to boggy marshes where it might grab unsuspecting animals that came to quench their thirst. If that was so, what was it doing in a cavern where prey was non-existent? He put his questions to the side and cautiously closed on the stench-producing flesh.

Its tentacles rose menacingly. Tarn stood less than four paces away when one of the arms, rife with suckers, streaked toward him. He jumped back, swinging at the limb.

The slash, a defensive reflex, cut deeply into the wide tip. A high-pitched keening echoed through the corridor. Foul-smelling blood splattered his face and chest. The attacking tentacle withdrew and waived back and forth with the other three. They swung in agitated, jerky motions.

Erratic. Angry.

He lamented having left his spears behind. Suppressing a gagging urge to sicken and retreat, he advanced determinedly with his sword held high in one hand, and the torch low in the other, edging his way toward the unblinking eye—attempting to lure a strike at his torch. The glassy orb tracked his movements intelligently as if it waited for the appropriate opportunity to catch its meal. It ignored the torch, focussing instead on the man.

Two tentacles swooped down. He blocked one with the torch, and swung savagely at the other, cutting cleanly through the narrow arm below the tip. The thing screamed, deafening Tarn with the high-pitched wail that hurt his ears. The tentacle whose tip he had severed hung back, close to its gelatinous body, as the other three attacked.

A slimy arm coiled around his torch arm and constricted. A powerful chop severed the narrow appendage. While he fended off the third arm, the fourth coiled itself around his waist and contracted. Tarn's feet left the ground. A moment later he was swung into the wall. Jarred from his hand, the torch bounced off the tunnel floor in a brief cloud of orange-red sparks. Ere he brought his blade down on the arm around his waist, another wound itself around his sword arm and contracted, squeezing him. Small bone hooks, one in the centre of each sucker, pierced his clothes and flesh.

The marsh dweller smashed him into the granite wall, nearly rendering him unconscious as if it sought to soften its meal like the kingfisher that beats its prey against a tree limb before dining. Tarn hung limply in its grasp, fighting the persuasive tug of unconsciousness, will himself to maintain a tight grip on his sword. Grotesque sucking noises filled his ears. It lowered him toward its gaping maw.

Tarn shook his head to clear it, banishing the groggy darkness and kicked out at the toothy orifice. He planted his mighty thews on either side of its maw and strained backwards, labouring to straighten his legs until his knees locked tight. Although he thwarted the thing's attempts to cram him into its slobbering mouth, he could not maintain this stalemate forever. As the gelatinous creature's cavernous orifice opened and closed, striving to dislodge Tarn's feet, the single eye stared at him hungrily. With a mighty heave of his left arm, Tarn brought his sword in close enough to allow him to switch the blade to his free hand. He drove the sword downward, toward the staring eye.

It jerked him away at the moment his sword threatened to plunge into the unblinking orb, but not before several inches of cold steel opened a shallow furrow. An anguished wail erupted out of its mouth. It flung him away as if it clutched a burning brand. Careening into the wall at a steep angle, he part-slid, part-rolled several paces to a bruised and battered stop.

Flailing wildly, blindly groping one minute in pain, while at another to discover the whereabouts of the pain-giver, sorry that its reflexes had denied its immediate revenge, the thing flung itself from side to side. Tarn crawled to his feet, discerning with satisfaction the blood welling out of the black eye. After waiting for the creature to calm from its initial pain, he took four careful steps forward, closing the distance between them.

When he came within reach of the blinded, gelatinous mutation, he hacked off another slimy arm. As soon as his sword scythed through flesh, a second tentacle streaked toward the point of contact. Tarn side-stepped the arm and chopped off two more pieces of flesh. Without its long appendages, its threat to Tarn lessened. The teeth-ringed mouth opened and closed in agony, like a beached fish gasping for an elusive breath. Its severed tentacles sprayed erratic streams of blood the consistency of ichor.

Braving the last tentacle, and the shorter appendages, he positioned himself in front of its gaping maw. The stench forced him to take short and shallow breaths. Tarn drove his sword point down through the area behind its eye, burying the blade up to the crossguard. He grabbed the leather-wrapped hilt with both hands and wrenched it toward him, cutting a long furrow from the back of the eye to the ridge of its gums, ending its life. A balloon of malodorous body gas mushroomed out of the thing and turned his stomach inside out.

Once he had finished retching, Tarn withdrew his sword and stepped back, arms hung limply at his sides. Other than the small wounds inflicted by the bone hooks, the remainder of the blood covering him was not his.

"Well done lad, but ye could use a bath," Torrocka noted, eyeing the blood and gore clinging to his furs.

"How much farther?" he asked, wiping his brow with an untainted portion of his sleeve, and spat on the floor to remove the sour taste in his mouth..

"Not more than a few days I should think," approximated Torrocka and retrieved the fallen torch.

"Good," Tarn muttered and poured a liberal amount of water on his face to remove the stench of the thing's body fluids. They carried more water than they had used.

Senses alert to other dangers, Tarn followed Torrocka in silence. A short time later they came upon a set of bones garbed in a robe similar in design to the one Torrocka wore. The remains belonged to Demmok, Torrocka's predecessor. Tarn used the tattered cloth robe to wipe the remainder of blood from himself. To one from Asgard, the body's spirit had long ago ascended the heavens. The flesh itself was of no importance once the spirit had departed.

When Torrocka started to object, Tarn interrupted, "He is long dead. Had he been alive, surely a man of his caste would not object to helping a fellow man in need?"

Torrocka let out a "Hrrumph" and walked off down the tunnel.

Half a day later they dowsed the torch and slept. Tarn woke from his sleep well-rested, but no matter what he ate, or how often he rinsed his mouth with clean water, the cloying stench of the marsh creature clung to him. Coupled with the pendant, his northern-inherited recuperative powers left him feeling refreshed, but impatient to reach the Sword Chamber and leave the closed-in area of the passageways. They consumed a meal and journeyed to locate the Sword Chamber.

Two days of steady, uninterrupted travel, found them standing in front of an ornately-carved, stone archway and -door. The mortar between the bricks was cracked and had flaked to the ground. Although several of the mason stones that made up the arch showed minor damage, none had fallen free and the massive door appeared sturdy, having weathered the earthquake extraordinarily well. Boldly chiselled into the tapestry of the lintel above the door was written, 'The Chamber of Kalen.'

Engraved into the granite surface of the stone portal, a great, two-handed broadsword measured five feet from pommel to tip. The detail was such that Tarn easily read the symbol on the base of the stone sword. He compared the sculpted symbol to the design on the pendant. They were identical.

Torrocka stepped to the door and blew the dust from the stone recess. Turning to Tarn, he said, "Set the pendant into the sword and push firmly."

Tarn took the pendant from his neck, removed the leather string from the pendant, and set it into the receptacle at the base of the stone blade and pushed. The pendant sunk in a few inches. From somewhere above and inside the wall, a thudding sound vibrated the door, shaking dirt and dust-free. Following the audible click, the stone portal swung open on rusty hinges, grating across the floor to come to a stop before it hit the wall. Torrocka shot a half-grin at Tarn's gaping mouth and strode into the chamber.