Killeen's sincerity nearly deflated Dougal's anger. When he spoke again, he struggled to keep his words measured and his tone even. "Killeen," he said, "could you please let that woman rest in peace?"
"Why? Don't you think she'll make a good- Oh!" The sylvari clapped a hand to her forehead. When she pulled it away, regret twisted her face into a rueful frown. "I'm so sorry! I didn't even think about how that might offend you."
"It's all right," Dougal finally said. "Just let her go."
"No!" said Kranxx. He raced forward, peering up at the walking corpse from below. "Don't do that. She's perfect just the way she is."
"Dougal's right," said Riona, who looked just as distressed as Dougal felt. "This is beyond the pale. The guardswoman was just trying to do her job."
"And we're doing ours," said Kranxx. "There's a good chance that the sewage tunnel exit is trapped, and we could use a walking test case to send in first to check things out."
"That is exactly what I was thinking," said Killeen, obviously pleased that someone understood that she had only the best intentions.
"Trapped?" Dougal glared at Kranxx. "And why didn't you mention that before?"
Kranxx shrugged. "I didn't want to complicate the matter with other issues. I figured you-and I mean the collective 'you' here-would have a hard enough time making the right choice about how to get to Ascalon City from here without having to sift through extraneous points of data."
"Wolf's breath!" said Gullik. "We've been wading through this river of sludge to reach a tunnel of traps?"
"Some of us have," said Kranxx. "Others have remained nice and clean."
"Maybe too clean," said Ember. "You didn't dirty your hands in that fight, did you?"
Kranxx cringed at the accusation. "I was trying to get a surprise for our foes out of my pack, but the rest of you made such quick work of them that I never had the chance."
"Sure," said Ember. "Lucky you."
Kranxx bristled at her words. "The next time I pull something from my pack, just remember this: Close your eyes."
"By the time you pull something from your pack, we all will be dead," muttered the charr.
Dougal returned to Killeen. "Just let the woman go."
"Wynne," Riona said in a voice thick and raw. "I know her. I mean, I knew her. Her name was Wynne. Her father was friends with my father when we were young. He ran the armorer's shop."
Dougal couldn't look at the woman anymore. He had to turn away.
"She's dead," said Ember. "But she may still be of some use. That seems like a good way to honor her life."
"Charr or not," Dougal said, "that's the coldest rationalization I've ever heard."
"Bear's blood!" said Gullik. "I've never heard a pack of warriors natter on so like a gaggle of old women squabbling over their weaving."
The norn turned to Killeen. "Next time, show some more respect to those you kill. Every one of them was someone's child once."
"I wasn't," the sylvari said.
Gullik waved off her point. "You know what I mean."
To Dougal, the norn said, "The deed is done. Rather than fight over that, let's make some use of it. Or would you prefer one of us to wind up sharing that woman's fate?"
Dougal groaned and looked at Wynne once more. Blood covered her from her head to her knees, to which she'd fallen after Ember had delivered the killing blow. Her mangled face was recognizable, but only just.
"All right," he said, shaking his head as he spoke. "Put her… it… in the front. Then we don't have to look at her face."
"What about the rest of them?" Riona said. "Do we just leave them like this? To be eaten by the rats?"
Dougal gave her a pained shrug. He shared her anguish, but he didn't see what they could do to fix it. "We can't burn them down here, and we can't bury them in stone. Someone will come looking for them soon enough." He grimaced. "We need to be as far away from here as we can be by then, if only so we aren't forced to thin the Vanguard's numbers even more."
Killeen put the shambling, dead Wynne in the lead. The sylvari followed right after her, with Kranxx on her heels. Riona trailed after them, and Dougal remained in the back of the line of people who could fit onto the walkway. Trudging through the stream, Ember and then Gullik swept along behind the rest of them.
They made their way through the last section of the sewer, which seemed to wind on forever. Dougal kept peering into the darkness, hoping to see even the faintest glow of light.
The first clue he had that they were near the exit was the way the walls of the tunnel seemed to vibrate in a tone lower than his ears could hear. He could feel it in the air, though, and eventually through the soles of his boots.
The silent thrumming slowly grew in pitch and volume until it became a dull roar. This, Dougal knew, must be the sound of the stream spilling out of the tunnel and tumbling down onto the mountainside beyond.
"We should be coming up on it soon," Kranxx said. Dougal detected a hint of worry in the asura's voice.
"You don't know? Haven't you been here before?" asked Riona.
"Of course not," said Kranxx. "Don't you know how dangerous this is? I've studied the maps many times, though."
Dougal did not find that reassuring. He was about to say something about it when Wynne disappeared.
The walkway in front of them had tilted under their weight. Pitching forward, it had thrown Wynne into the fast-moving waters. She floundered about at the surface for a moment, flapping her dead arms in some horrible mockery of an attempt to swim, and then disappeared beneath the surface.
Killeen screamed as she nearly toppled in after her undead servant. When the walkway tipped downward, she lost her balance and spun her arms in a vain attempt to recover it. Moving faster than Dougal had thought he could, Kranxx leaned forward, bending at the waist, and tapped Killeen on the shoulder with the hook attached to his back.
Killeen managed to snag the hook with her hand, but instead of the hook hauling her back, her weight pulled Kranxx forward, dragging him along to share her fate. However, this gave Dougal enough time to react, and he pushed past Riona to snag the asura by the top of his pack. For a moment he thought he might tumble in after the others, and the trap would manage to kill all three of them at once. But he dug in his heels and leaned back hard, bringing their forward progress to a halt. With Riona's help, he yanked both Kranxx and Killeen back to a solid part of the walkway, where they all collapsed in a heap.
"The bottom of the stream must drop off just ahead too," said Ember. "I can feel the undertow from here."
"Thanks for saying something before it became a problem," Riona said as she struggled to catch her breath.
Dougal checked to make sure the others were all right, then knelt down to examine the floor and see what had happened. Kranxx stood next to him, giving him plenty of light to work with.
There was a hinge on the floor, almost impossible to see, especially by a lantern's light. Dougal recognized the type of trap they'd triggered, and he cursed.
"Bear's breath! What's wrong now?" Gullik asked. "This filth is too cold to just stand here in it!"
"Lots of traps only work once," Dougal said. "This one resets itself automatically. From this hinge here onward, the walkway is actually a ramp. A set of counterweights underneath it holds it up horizontally, right up until there's enough weight on the end of the ramp. Then the ramp tips forward and dumps you right into the worst part of the sludge."
"And then you die," said Ember.
Dougal shook his head. "And then you find yourself trapped against the grating that covers the end of the tunnel, held up against it by the force of thousands of pounds of filthy water pressing you into it until you drown."
"And then you die," said Killeen.
Dougal nodded. "And then you're held there until your body rots enough for the water pressure to tear you into pieces so small that you flow out through the grate with the rest of Ebonhawke's waste."