Chapter 54: Gone

Chapter 54: Gone

Brother Verdinen was slow to rise every morning, even though it was a small sin in of itself not to get up at dawn and greet the sun god Siddrim when he graced the mortal realm with one more day of light and life. Normally he justified such bad behavior by telling himself that he was up far too late studying the scriptures, but today he had no such excuse. All he could say was that several days on the road had done him no favors, and several nights of sleeping on rocks had been far from restful. By the time he was dressed up and out of his tent to greet the dawn, the Templars and their squires were just finishing their dawn prayers, instantly banishing that fig leaf.

If he never took another trip on behalf of the church, it would suit him fine, he thought, chastising himself for failing to maintain his focus on dawn’s cleansing glory. The truth was that he was exhausted, and today was certainly going to be one of the longest he could remember.

When Brother Verdinen finally finished the slow ritual movements of his prayer dance, he went to the campfire looking forward to breaking his fast but found only squires that were helping their masters to put on their chain mail hauberks and breastplates. Brother Faerbar gave him a knowing look that seemed to go right through him and simply said, “After. No one is going to want to eat before we go inside. Nausea will foul your helmet.”L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Ñøv€l--B1n.

The priest-candidate tried to hide his annoyance because, however, he might outrank the veteran Templar on paper, it was never a good idea to get on the bad side of a well-liked veteran warrior. Paladins had their place - it just wasn’t in the halls of power.

“As you say,” Brother Verdinen agreed quickly, noting the way that Brother Faerbar’s squire kept giving the nearby palace fearful glances like he expected something to come rushing out of it in broad daylight. It seemed quite out of character for a paladin to pick a cowardly squire, but for now, he reserved judgment. After all, he could feel the fear too, however distantly and unlike this boy, he was a grown man.

When they finally set out, there was no one to bar their way, and the doors were not locked. The smell of death and putrefaction that came boiling out of the entrance hit him like a physical force, though, and he gagged, finally understanding what it was that the Paladin had meant with that knowing glance. He’d obviously checked the palace out before the rest of them had woken up, at least to this point. It was a dirty trick not to warn him more thoroughly, Brother Verdinen thought, but he was still grateful on some level that he hadn’t vomited.

“Open every curtain and every window squires,” Brother Faebar ordered grimly. “Everyone else spread out in groups of three on the ground floor only and look for the hole that the message spoke of. That is where we begin our search!”

As if to further illustrate his point, his sword began to grow dimly at that point as he invested lord Siddrim’s holy light into the ancient blade. It wasn’t a trick that everyone could do, but it was one of the few things that all the great Paladins throughout history had in common, and Verdinen felt pangs of jealousy as half of his men did the same. This was clearly a blessed group, loved by their creator, and he should be grateful for that, but as he watched the cadre splinter and drift off to explore the entrance hall, he couldn’t help but feel exposed. With every passing minute, the dark hall brightened, but that only made his feeling of dread worse, and eventually, the priest candidate was forced to return to the Paladin’s side simply to feel safe again.

“I don’t see a difference,” Brother Verdinen hissed back, snatching a torch from one of the nearby squires and looking from one rough-hewn tunnel to the next, looking for drops of blood or other clues that might point such things out but seeing nothing.

“It’s not in the seeing,” the Paladin whispered, taping his ear. “It’s in the hearing.”

For a moment, the priest-candidate looked at the three tunnels that were roughly ahead of him, letting his gaze drift back and forth as he tried to decide. All three passages looked the same: they were empty, dusty, cooked, and occasionally spattered with blood. It was true that there was the faint sound of water down the one that drifted off to the right, but as he moved the torch back and forth, he saw it flicker slightly when it moved in front of the leftmost tunnel, and his smile of superiority reasserted itself.

“It looks like this one goes back to the surface. Perhaps if we cleared it first, we could—-” Brother Verdinen started to say, trying to prove his worth to the veterans. But as he spoke, his words trailed off because the torch began to gyrate and sputter wildly.

“Get back,” the cowardly squire said, “something is coming!” The boy spoke at a normal volume, but the silence had smothered them all for so long that it might as well be a shout, and the idea that a lowly squire could command him to do anything, especially when the passage was clearly empty raised Verdinen’s hackles. He started to turn to rebuke the boy when something moved in the shadows.

No, it wasn’t moving in the shadows. It was the shadows. Almost faster than he could see, the dark, shimmering outline of a snake that was almost as big around as his whole body struck out from the wall of night that began where his torchlight ended, and with a mouth full of jagged obsidian teeth, it bit down on the right forearm holding the torch and yanked him forward hard enough that it pulled him completely off his feet and began to drag him down the tunnel almost as fast as he could run.

He shrieked as everything happened at once, but it was more in surprise and horror than pain. In truth was that the pain of being dragged across the rough stone floor was much worse than the pain of coming from his arm, which was almost numb.

Brother Verdinen forced himself to stop screaming, and for the first time in his life, it wasn’t for appearances either. It was so that he could focus on reciting the words to invoke Siddrim’s holy light.