“Let’s try it,” she said.
As they approached the plug door, Pitch withdrew a set of lockpicks from a hidden pocket in her dark gray uniform. “It seems a simple enough lock,” she said, as she peered at it. “That is good. Lockpicking is not my strength.”
“Nor mine,” the elf said.
“I think I can manage this one, though,” she said. She withdrew a pair of wires and inserted them into the keyhole. “No traps, either,” Pitch commented after a moment.
Cael placed his ear against the stone. “I don’t hear anything beyond the door,” he said hopefully, then asked, “So how did Varia, Hoag, and Mancred fail the test and yet live?”
Pitch gnawed on her lower lip as she concentrated on the work at hand. She answered distractedly, with many a lengthy pause between words, “They failed… because they didn’t make a choice at all. Rather than open the door to let possible death rush in… they chose to fail and return to the Guild… and continue living.”
He stood back from the wall and watched his companion toil at the lock, then glanced once more around the room. “This seems too easy,” he commented. His eyes fell on the darkened entrance to the chamber, and a thought crossed his mind. “Wait,” he said.
“Too late.” With a loud click, a roughly circular section of the stone wall began to tum, like the lid of a jar. As it turned, it retreated into the wall. It made no noise at all, and it seemed impossible that something so large and obviously heavy could move without sound, but it took on a dreamlike quality. The two thieves felt as though they also had fallen into a spell. Pitch tapped her sword against the floor just to make sure she had not gone deaf. The steel rang sharply against the stone, and the silence was broken. They looked at each other and grinned, waiting for the door to roll aside.
Beyond the door no gold gleamed, no jewels sparkled. Only more darkness lay within, darkness that suddenly moved, shaking the floor like an earthquake.
Cael shoved his companion aside just as the behemoth burst into chamber. With its huge reptilian head lowered to present a pair of scimitarlike horns, the thing hurtled into the elf. Cael twisted a hairsbreadth to allow the horn to pass under his arm, but as the horn slid past, the lowered head slammed into his chest, lifting him into the air and flinging him across the room. He landed in a roll, stopping himself just before he bashed his head against the wall. The dull ache in his side told of multiple broken ribs, but at the moment, it seemed a small price to pay. He looked round for his staff and found it lying against the wall a few feet away. Then, hearing an angry curse and the ring of steel, he looked up to find a scene from hell playing out before his eyes.
Pitch was battling for her life. The thing was huge, monstrous, a great lizardlike creature with a serpentine body and twelve short muscular legs supporting its length. Each leg ended in claws that dug and gouged the floor as the beast tried to sink its teeth into the dark-eyed female thief. Only the fine edge of her sword kept those massive jaws at bay, but she could not hold out long against those snapping fangs. The creature’s head was like that of a crocodile, only many times larger, and it had the cunning eyes of a dragon. It bore a pair of horns sweeping back over its long supple neck. The entire forty-foot length of its body was covered in hard blue scales that resisted the thief’s sword blows better than any armor forged by man or dwarf.
No thought of flight entered Cael’s mind. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his ribs, he caught up his staff and rushed at the monster. The creature spun to meet him. Its spined tail swept Pitch from her feet.
Now the elf fought desperately for his own life. He skipped backward, fending off each lunge with a ringing, hand-numbing blow of his staff. The creature was as agile as a hunting cat, its strikes as quick as a viper’s, its jaws clashed like a bear trap, sending hot spittle flying everywhere in its eagerness to feed, and only a six-foot-long pole of hard mountain ash, fiendishly wielded, prevented it from biting the life from the troublesome elf.
Still, a staff was no weapon for battling such a monster, and Cael was quickly running out of space to retreat. Pitch rushed in with her sword, emitting what sounded like a Knight’s battle cry as she drove her blade between two scales of the creature’s thick hide. With a terrific roar that seemed likely to bring the roof down on their heads, the beast switched around. Cael leaped back, avoiding the sweep of its thrashing tail.
Pitch retreated a few steps, her sword on guard, but the creature didn’t advance. Instead, it curled back its neck, sucking in air through its wide nostrils. Cael felt the hair along his arms stand on end, the air crackling and hissing. Suddenly, the great beast’s head shot forward, its jaws gaping. A flash of light illuminated the chamber like an explosion, thunder shook the floor, and a blue bolt of lightning erupted from its mouth. It struck the female thief full in the chest, blasting her across the chamber like a toy swatted by a cat. She slammed into the wall and slumped to the ground, black smoke curling around her.
With a primal howl, the elf swung his staff, swatting the monster squarely. Faster than imaginable, it switched ends again. Cael swung again, this time hitting it across the snout. So mighty was the blow that his staff broke in two, one splintered end bounding across the floor. The beast blinked, the only sign that it even felt his best blow, but that thousandth of a heartbeat’s hesitation bought the elf the time he needed to dive aside when the jaws came chomping down upon the space he had just vacated.
He rolled a dozen yards, scrambled to his feet, and dived aside again as wicked teeth bit the air behind him. A blinding flash of pain tore open his back. He stumbled. The tail swept his legs from beneath him. The beast was upon him, its great reeking belly crushing him down against the stone. The coils of its serpentine body looped around and began to squeeze as its claws dug“ into his flesh. With each breath, he felt his ribs crushed tighter. He couldn’t breath, couldn’t even cry out. Dark splotches appeared in his vision. He searched for help, any help, but Pitch lay against the wall, her eyes glazed, her chest a miserable charred hole. He saw no more.
Chapter Seventeen
He vaguely remembered the scales dragging over his flesh, tearing new wounds to match the score already adding their blood to the stains on the floor. His first thought was one of amazement-that he still breathed, albeit painfully. Amazed that he hadn’t woken in the belly of the beast, amazed that he wasn’t reduced to small bloody chunks.
His next sensation was one of horror and revulsion, as he heard the sickening sound of rending and tearing, the crunching of bones, the splatter of gore, the slurping and catlike purring. He wondered if it wasn’t his own flesh being eaten, and this thought brought him painfully to consciousness.
Still he didn’t move. He opened his eyes a crack and peered through the slits, taking in his situation. The creature was no longer atop him. He was lying on his back, staring up at the glowing magical globe floating at the apex of the dome-roofed chamber. Strangely, the globe’s light was tinted red, as though it were stained by blood.
He turned his head very slowly, so as to not attract the creature’s attention, and looked toward the sickening noises of feeding, noticing as he did so that everything was tinted with that same blood red light. The creature faced away from him, reveling in its meal, and as he watched, it lifted its head and made a loud gulping sound. A leg vanished down its throat, forcing the elf to stifle a cry and turn away.
When he finally managed to look back, the beast was still absorbed in its feeding. The great reptilian head tugged and jerked as it tore apart poor Pitch’s body and gulped down the pieces. Cael quickly realized that when it was done with her, it would turn to him. The exit lay on the opposite side of the chamber. His staff was broken in two pieces, and even whole it had not been much use except to stave off the inevitable.