T Lain - City of Fire

Placing the amulet on a stone before him, he chanted the magic words. They weren’t easy for the gnoll to speak clearly, as they were in a language even more foreign than the soft-skins’ common speech. There was much hissing involved, and the sibilants made his jaws ache from forming the words.

Grawltak’s perseverance paid off, however, and the amulet glowed. An image formed in its clear, flat face then tilted ninety degrees and rose up above the stone. A face—his mistress’s unarmored face, glowing in various shades of red—hovered above the magic talisman.

“What is it?” the red face asked. The lips moved but the words made sounds at a different speed. Grawltak looked into the red, glowing eyes and reflexively turned his head.

“Mistress… it is Grawltak. I have succeeded.”

The eyes narrowed, focusing on him.

“Bring light,” she said. “I can barely see you, gnoll.”

Grawltak cursed and shouted for a torch. Kark came forward and lit one. He held it off to one side, illuminating his leader’s canine features.

“You have the half-orc? Finally?” The voice sounded impatient, but also pleased.

“No,” Grawltak started, then hurried on as the image’s eyes widened. “But we have this!”

He held up the oilskin packet. The flaming sigil gleamed in the torchlight.

“Open it!” demanded the red face of his mistress.

Hurrying to obey, Grawltak nearly dropped the packet and its contents to the ground. He fumbled it open and held it out to the face.

“Take everything out, fool! I cannot see!”

His claws moving as deftly as they could, Grawltak pulled papers and a few small coins out of the packet. Something was wrong… he stuck his snout into the packet, but saw nothing else. This couldn’t be all his mistress desired.

“Open the papers! Show me!”

The sinking feeling in the pit of Grawltak’s stomach started growing. His mistress hadn’t said exactly what should be in the packet, but… papers and a few meager coins? Very carefully, one by one, he opened the folded sheets and showed them to the face. He couldn’t read them himself, but none looked much different from any other.

His mistress made him go through each and every page but Grawltak didn’t need the darkening of the flame-face to tell him he’d somehow made a terrible error. Her voice grew more and more angry as he revealed each page more and more reluctantly.

When he picked up the small coins to show her, she shrieked at him, “Enough! You’ve been tricked, you idiot! Where is the half-orc?”

Grawltak didn’t know what to say. The truth wouldn’t do at all, he knew, but lying to the mistress…

Kark broke in, “We are on his trail, Mistress. He is not far. He is wounded. I have his scent, but I am old and slow. Grawltak did not want to delay reporting to you. We will catch him soon.”

Staring at Kark, the red face considered the older gnoll.

“Grawltak is a fool, then, old one,” she said. “Capture him,” she ordered, her eyes turning back to the pack-master. “Do not fail me this time, gnoll! I’ll string your intestines along the ground and make your pack eat them for dinner.” It was no idle threat, Grawltak knew. “And I’ll make sure this old one is the first to dine.”

Both gnolls nodded eagerly, their ears cocked forward.

“Where are you?” she asked.

Grawltak told her.

“Catch the half-orc. Do not kill him if you can avoid it, but I will join you soon, with the shamans. I should be with you in no more than a day.”

The gnoll shuddered. It had taken them more than five days of hard traveling to reach their current position. If she could get to them in a day…

“Mistress,” Grawltak ventured carefully, “we do not know where the half-orc might lead us. We should, as Kark says, catch him soon, but—”

“Do not worry, Grawltak,” the red face smiled cruelly. “I can find you, wherever you are. Never, forget that. Now, go!”

The face held their gaze for another second, then winked out. The amulet’s glow faded.

Turning his head toward Kark, Grawltak started making the sign of thanks gnolls showed only to their leaders. Kark did not let him dip his head.

“You are my captain, pack-master. I live to serve.”

With that, the older gnoll stood up and went to get the younger ones back in order.

Grawltak wondered at this one small spark of good fortune in a conflagration of disaster.

The night passed uneventfully in the canyon. When Krusk and Regdar woke, Alhandra was tending the horses and Naull sat reading her book. She looked at Krusk as the half-orc hopped up and stretched his muscle-bound, ugly limbs.

“I was cold all night,” she said dryly.

“How long before we find the gate?” Regdar asked Alhandra as he strapped on pieces of his armor.

Alhandra shrugged, then looked over at Krusk. The half-orc drew out the packet, and with only a little hesitation, he tossed it to her. The paladin opened it and started looking through the papers.

“I can’t read any of this,” she said.

Regdar shook his head. He couldn’t, either.

Naull stepped over to the pair. Krusk prowled around the campsite, as if looking for signs of danger.

“Doesn’t Krusk know how far we have to go?” she asked.

“I suppose,” the paladin answered. “Captain… Tahrain? He made Krusk repeat the directions to him when they fled the city. He has a wonderful memory, I guess.”

They looked at the half-orc. He crouched in the sunlight near the middle of the canyon, looking up at the sky and blinking furiously.

“Let me see… Hey, it’s in Draconic!” Naull said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised; the most common name of the City of Fire, Secrustia Nar, is draconic, too.”

“You read Draconic, though, right?” Regdar asked hopefully.

“Of course. Most wizards write in draconic. It’s a very old language, and hasn’t changed much for centuries. Dragons aren’t much for change,” she added dryly.

“No, they just get bigger and nastier,” Regdar added.

Naull flipped through the pages carefully. Someone had obviously copied them from the original, but the paper was still very old and stiff. She wondered, considering the legends of Secrustia Nar’s age, how many times the descendents of the City of Fire’s refugees had duplicated the contents of the packet, all the while preserving its secrets. She shook her head in amazement.

“It’s tricky,” she said at last. “It’s in a sort of code. The first part is clear enough. There’s a tunnel somewhere in this canyon, on the western side. The tunnel leads to another rift, or something like it. Beyond that, we’re supposed to see signs that lead us toward the gate. That’s where the code gets tricky.”

“How?” Alhandra asked.

“Well, as near as I can tell, the code’s arranged so that we’ll find clues to solving it as we go, but it would be almost impossible to solve the next part of the code without actually following the path. Whoever made this didn’t want you to be able to just decipher the code and jump to the end.”

“Nasty,” Regdar said.

“Why so much concealment?”

Naull answered, “Not everybody is as nice and trusting as we are.” The paladin looked up sharply, but Naull smiled, taking a little of the sting out of her words. “Whoever did this wanted to make sure that if outsiders—people who didn’t know the dangers of the trail—found it, they’d have to go through those dangers before reaching the gate. Since we don’t have any of the original inhabitants of Secrustia Nar on hand, we’re going to have to run the gauntlet.”

“Oh, that’s just fabulous,” Regdar said. “Any idea what’s in this gauntlet?”

“Well… not really,” Naull replied. “I mean, I think it can’t be all that bad. From the descriptions I can make out, it seems this was just a guarded trade passage, not a series of death traps. You wouldn’t want to kill off visiting merchants just because they forgot the password.”