Lore of the Underlings: Episode 5 ~ Into the Pit

Lore of the Underlings: Episode 5 ~ Into the Pit

  Tales of tongues unknown

  Translated by John Klobucher

  (he wrote it too, but don’t tell anyone and spoil the fun)

  Copyright 2013 John Klobucher

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  Cover art by John Klobucher

  Table of Contents

  Episode 5 ~ Into the Pit

  About the Author

  Episode 5 ~ Into the Pit

  Morio stirred with a sinking feeling that things had just gone south on him.

  He had to shake himself awake. He was waist-deep in muck. Totally stuck. Sunk in some new kind of darkness.

  Even his voice didn’t seem to work. “Hut huh hevil hust hahened?” Then he remembered the old rolled-up map and managed to yank it from his mouth. “What the devil just happened?”

  It was all the toll of that very last pull. With it the wall had opened up and the floor fell away to dump him out — out into a sucking wind that pulled him down and in.

  “Man!” called John Cap, “what hell hole is this? It stinks to high heaven in here!”

  Morio’s head spun this way then that. He searched in vain for the source of the voice. “Yes, much worse than where we were. Especially as we’re swimming in it… But where have you gone to my friend?”

  “Over here.”

  He found the young man to his back about a dozen spits away. He too was half dipped in this pit but close to the edge of a narrow ledge just under the mouth that spewed them out. He was trying to bury his nose in his sleeve to defend against the evil smell.

  Vaam let out a little warm laughter at the mess they were in. “Are you boys done making mud pies down there?” She still stood up in the crooked room on the platform that spared her from their fall. They looked so very small to her now, as if a thousand leagues below.

  Morio craned his neck to respond and shouted to cover the distance between them. “This is no time to tempt us with pie, Miss Vaam, whilst we’ve nary a real bite of one in sight. Though I’d give my right arm to meet a fair pieman anywhere but here!” Then he waved his arms wide. “Wherever here is…”

  All three took a look around.

  One half cavern, the other man-made, this chamber dwarfed both of the first two combined. By all signs its space had been carved from the hillside and dug out deep down to the bowels of hell — or an underground realm near as foul. Sunlight fell though more like a dream, poured through the underside of a stream that ran across the mossy roof high above their heads. That cold water bent the beams to its will and left the warm shine a ghost of itself, a shadow of the sun.

  The chamber’s illumination came from another source. Two of its great walls the ages made, sculpted in minerals dripped by time, painted in soils of every brown. Those walls were aglow with oilweed, which cast a gold on everything and bound the lowly ground in fog of smoldering fat and comforting smoke. A smothering blanket of precious muddle.

  Mr. Yoop gazed up from the middle of it and marveled at the sight. Though he spoke his friends seemed not to hear. Vaam was busy descending a ramp made by the fallen floor. John Cap was busy watching her. She stopped to study a mountain of bones piled up on the ledge where she landed. There were more just like it ringing the room along with strange vessels of every description.

  Morio, meanwhile, continued to talk wrapping up a lecture on oilweed and its proper harvesting… “It must be picked quite carefully to keep intact its web of roots, all tendrils and runners and tiny shoots that burst into flame when exposed to the air. That’s why you see them burning here, right there where they poke out from the wall. So seldom do these underworld dwellers show themselves above the ground. Well, but for a very rare flower of flame…” He slipped into a whispered voice. “Omen of evils to come, they say… A portent of plagues, flying snakes, and toothaches.” He picked up his normal volume again. “Anyway, as I was saying… The fresh-farmed plants must be rolled and packed by well-practiced hands and then spun the same day. Spooled on special spinning wheels made of something that does not burn. In this land I’ve heard they use malaphant bone. And tusks for stacking the damp spun oil to dry when it is done.”

  Morio turned to his sinking friend who struggled to no avail. “So that’s how people make torchsticks and such!” he hailed with a cheeky smile.

  Having had droned on for so long, the bugger forgot he was stuck in a pit. But now it was like he had ants in his pants or maybe a bumbler under his bonnet. He copied John Cap and wriggled about, working to worm his way out.

  Yet nowhere did he get.

  No mere mud puddle or piggly sty, it swallowed them more the more that they tried. Both men were up to their armpits in it, wallowing away.

  Vaam stepped off of the stony ledge aiming to rescue them. Somehow she did not sink in. She was making a beeline for Morio when…

  Abruptly with a mighty boom the first chamber’s great storied door burst open, causing each stranger to twist back and look. They saw from its yawn a flood of sunlight fill the middle room. For a moment it beamed happy hopes and dreams… until a black-clad figure came to cast his shadow in the stream.

  Death sounds much sweeter the second time

  It’s drummed into a stranger’s hide…

  Morio recognized the voice. “Why, it’s my old pal from the field! Hi-ho and cheers dear chum!” He waved the hand that held the map then added a crisp salute at the end.

  And a wink as well.

  Syar-ull only howled back.

  “Oh… um… that’s dear SIR chum! So tell me, how have you been?”

  In silence the black Guard reached for the wall with his heavy gauntlet. He took hold of its darkest implement and headed down the ramp.

  Meanwhile behind the warrior someone else peered through the door. Someone whose clothes had been tattered and torn and half of whose pants were in shreds on the floor. It was one of the plainsmen they passed before, in the initial chamber. He was sporting a red, pom-size bump on the head and shook a bloody fist at them. Then they heard an angry voice or two and the plainsman vanished from view.

  “Apparently he was just saying hello,” mused a puzzled Morio.

  The master Guard paused to glare at him and plot his position in the room. He seemed to cipher something… a cold eye marking each figure now. Satisfied, he resumed with footfalls hard upon the wood.

  Strung up to re-strum a song of screams

  The timeless music of my dreams…

  At the bottom of the ramp he turned, sharply right to skirt the pit, marching along the shore of it on the unsure ledge. An odd catwalk it was, but he proved to be every bit nimble enough. As he followed its curve he passed the spot where the younger man thrashed about, futilely grasping at the air. Syar-ull paid no mind to him — as if he wasn’t even there. He had his heart set on someone more plump.

  He stopped at the point that was closest his quarry, although that was still some good distance away. A pummel stone’s throw across the muck. A stare afar into the mire. And there he seemed to arrest time itself to savor the rounder man’s floundering end. For once and for all and once again…

  “Leave it to you, fair mister sir, to come and save our bacon!” Morio all but blew him a kiss.

  The pikesman let a short, sharp whistle out from the mouthpiece of his mask.

  Two lesser Guard men came running and quick with rolls of woven sweetgrass. Syar-ull pointed. His men deployed them. A narrow green carpet across the pit.

  Make me the instrument of revenge

  Funeral dirge, march, requiem…

  The dark Guard held high his device, unfolding its finger-like blad
es to slice… shining up six long and tapered stalks, which had been hollowed out to let… letting loose a tangle of leeching tubers… saber-toothed suckers… All set. He signaled to the henchmen.

  Call for your pipers

  Play it again!

  With that he stepped out on the mat hell-bent to get things straight. His helpers followed just behind in single file five paces back.

  But Vaam had watched their every twitch and matched their movement toe for toe. She closed in on her all-but-uncle, gliding over the mud below.

  The Guard’s assistants were bewildered by this girl who nearly flew.

  “She moves like an angel made in heaven.”

  “Or witchy woman from you-know-where.”

  “What is it that keeps her from sinking there?”

  “Nothing of this world…”

  “That’s just what I’m thinking.”

  In the blink of an eye she stood between her friend and the would-be reaper, grimmer than she remembered him.

  “Move aside! This one has