“I’d settle for not ending up a corpse,” Olive cracked.
“Never settle for anything, Olive girl. You’re too good for that,” the bard insisted, releasing her hair.
The compliment was lost on the halfling, who had begun to notice a forced sound to the bard’s cheery tone. She could hear him wheezing, and he had to use his good hand to shift the injured one.
Olive pulled out one of her light cotton tunics from her sack, bunched it up, and poured what was left of her whiskey on it. She reached over and wrapped the wet cloth around the bard’s swollen hand, then handed Finder her water jar. “When the bandage gets warm, pour some more water on it,” she instructed. “Try drinking the water, too. It might help.”
Finder nodded. He struggled to take a deep breath before he said, “You’ll find the potions in the mahogany wardrobe. They’ll be alphabetized. Look for the one labeled ‘neutralize poison.’ Also, bring the spellbook on the marble-topped desk and the sack of gems in the hidden compartment under the worktable bench.” The bard drew in another wheezy breath before continuing. “The door will lock behind you when you close it. You only need the music key from the tunnel side. You can unlock it from the workshop side by tracing your finger over the treble cleft carved into the doorframe.”
Olive nodded.
“You’d better take this,” the bard said, twisting one of the plain gold rings on his injured hand. “It’s a ring of protection.”
“You’ll never get that off,” Olive said, flinching instinctively. “Better forget it.”
“No,” Finder replied. He hummed a high B-flat, and the ring expanded until he could pull it off his swollen finger. He slipped it on Olive’s tiny fifth finger, and the ring shrank magically until it fit snugly.
“I’ll be back soon,” Olive promised, rising to her feet and shouldering her backpack.
Finder nodded, too tired to reply.
Olive drew the bolt, opened the door to the underground tunnels, and crept down the staircase. When she reached the first cave-in, she pulled a flint and a fresh torch out of her sack, but she debated mentally with herself before lighting the torch. She couldn’t hide in the shadows if she carried a torch, but a torch would at least keep her from bumping into any orcs in the dark. If only she could see in the dark like the orcs could. “Why did I just inherit Grandmother Rose’s singing voice? Why couldn’t I get her nightvision, too?” she muttered.
With several strikes of the flint, she had the torch blazing. She began crawling through the first cave-in tunnel. It was more difficult crawling with a torch in one hand, and the knowledge that she was crawling toward orcs didn’t compel her to move any faster.
She tried concentrating on how heroic the deed would sound when she told it later, but she couldn’t help thinking that the entire ugly situation could have been avoided. It was all Finder’s fault. “If you’d left the tower when I asked, we wouldn’t have lost the finder’s stone to Kyre,” she muttered as she crawled. “If you’d only accepted Giogi’s offer to stay in Immersea, we wouldn’t have had to dig and crawl through dirt for four hours like moles. And if you hadn’t been such a show-off with the locks, we wouldn’t have been discovered by the orcs, we’d have probably made it into your lab, I wouldn’t be covered with orc blood, and you wouldn’t be dying from a poison needle trap.”
Olive reached the other side of the first cave-in tunnel and slid down to the floor. She sighed. She’d gotten what she had to say out of her system. It hardly mattered that she hadn’t said it to Finder’s face. It wasn’t as if he would pay any attention to her anyway. She padded silently down the stone passageways.
After wriggling through the second cave-in tunnel, Olive proceeded more cautiously toward the third and last cave-in. She considered putting her torch out before going through it. No, she thought, it’s better to see what I’m afraid of than to be afraid of what I don’t see. She crawled up the mound of dirt and stone and into the tiny tunnel. About halfway through, where Finder had collapsed the first time they had come through, Olive found the bard’s dagger. As she slipped it into her pack, she imagined how she might wrap it and give it to him as a birthday present.
You’ll have to get out of here alive with a neutralize poison potion first, she chided herself, or Finder may not make it to his next birthday. She emerged through the other side of the tunnel.
She paused several minutes, peering into the darkness beyond the iron gate, looking for the telltale red gleam of orc eyes. When her head began to hurt from the strain of not blinking, Olive decided it was time to get going. She slid as quietly as possible down the pile of dirt and padded up to the iron gate.
Without touching the gate or the lock, the halfling examined them for several minutes before she discovered a string between the gate and a hole in the wall nearby. Olive presumed that the string went all the way to the orc warren, where it triggered some sort of silent alarm. At any rate, the string was very well concealed. If she hadn’t been certain that it was there, she might not have looked hard enough to find it. She checked for a second string, but didn’t find one. Apparently the orcs weren’t as paranoid as she was. Fortunately the alarm string was near the floor, so she could work on it comfortably. She wedged her torch in the grate, put her pack down, and pulled out the equipment she would need. She used a bit of putty to hold the string taut against the bottom bar of the iron grate. With a pair of scissors, she clipped the string where it was connected to the door.
It took her only a few seconds to unlock the door. Then she spritzed the hinges of the gate with oil and pushed the gate open a foot.
“So far, so good,” she whispered, picking up her torch and pack and slipping through the gap. She pushed the gate nearly, but not quite, closed. Then she tiptoed down the corridor.
When she reached the gap in the wall that led to the tunnel the orcs had come from, Olive dashed across the open space, then pressed herself against the wall on the other side and waited a minute.
She listened carefully, but she heard neither voices nor footfalls. Finder must have been right about the orcs relying on their alarm, she thought as she crept down to the second iron grate.
The second lock was a masterful piece of workmanship, of fairly recent design. It definitely was not the kind she’d expect to see in an orc warren. The orcs’ friend who possessed the disintegrate spell must have installed it, Olive decided. After setting her pack down again and disengaging the alarm, the halfling examined the other mechanisms with more care.
The needle trap was especially nasty. It refilled and retriggered itself automatically. Olive pulled out an especially long pick. Holding it awkwardly from a position above the lock, with her hand safely out of the way, she twisted it in the keyhole and watched the trap spring. It was a very long, very sharp needle. Olive sprang it several more times, but the reserve of poison didn’t show any signs of running low. Judging from its effect on Finder, Olive suspected it was too potent a poison to risk receiving even a trace dose.
Olive turned and looked behind her, just to be sure there weren’t any orcs watching her work. Assured that she was still alone in the hallway, she wedged her torch in the iron grate and turned her attention back to the trap.
She drew out Finder’s dagger. It was heavy, just right for bending needles. It took her three tries, but she managed to bring the blade down on the needle after it sprang out and before it retracted. It bent, but the force of the spring connected to it pulled it back into the mechanism. Once inside the retriggering box, however, the needle was jammed tight and couldn’t spring out again. Olive sniffed once with pride, then spat on Finder’s blade a few times and wiped it off on her cloak so as not to risk leaving any poison on it.