Guild Wars_ Ghosts of Ascalon - Matt Forbeck [71]
With Kranxx’s light over his shoulder, Dougal crept forward until he could reach the grate and put his weight on it instead. It held as steady as the rocks in which it was anchored. He slipped his pouch of lock picks out of its pocket in his jacket and went to work. Because of the rust and filth, it took him another half-minute longer than it should have to force the lock to give, but it did.
The grate, however, was stuck.
Dougal smacked it with his hand, but that didn’t do a thing. Then he tried a shoulder, but that only bruised his arm. Standing up, he charged right at it.
It gave, suddenly and too well.
As the grate swung wide, Dougal lost his footing on the wobbly ramp and pitched forward. Kranxx reached for him with the hook but missed. Unable to recover his balance, Dougal did the only thing he could think of instead: he kicked off from the ramp and stretched out into the gaping maw of fog and shadow before him.
His fingers closed on the slimy, slippery bars of the grate as it swung away from him, and he clung to them for his life. He glanced down below his dangling feet and saw that he hung over a dizzying drop that deposited Ebonhawke’s sewage onto a cluster of jagged rocks. Despite himself, he shouted in terror, sure that he would not be able to maintain his tenuous grip on the treacherous grate.
“Hold on!” Riona said.
He could not turn to see what she and the others were doing, but he hoped it involved saving his life, and soon. A moment later he heard Kranxx’s voice saying, “What? Wait! No!”
Then the asura came sailing past Dougal’s head and straight over the grate. A rope attached to his waist drew taut, and someone on the other end of it held it fast so that Kranxx did not tumble to his death. Then that same someone yanked on the rope to bring Kranxx closer.
Once Kranxx had the grate in his grip, Dougal glanced back to see that both Ember and Gullik held the far end of the rope and were pulling hard. The grate swung shut with a satisfying clang, and the flowing sewage pushed the lower half of Dougal’s body hard up against it. He used this opportunity to find a foothold and then haul himself up out of the flowage.
“Thanks!” Dougal shouted backward.
“Hey! What about me?” Kranxx shouted from the other side of the grate.
“What can you see, Kranxx?” Dougal asked.
“That I’m about to die!”
“No, I mean down below you. Is there any way to get down from here?”
“Sure, lots!”
“That doesn’t involve dying.”
“That narrows it down quite a bit. Hold on!” Kranxx swung himself around on the end of the rope and craned his neck at all angles. “Hard to see through all the mist. Looks like a fairly sheer drop down about fifty feet or more.”
The asura rummaged around in his pack and produced another coil of rope. He tied one end securely to the grate and let the other end play out below him. Dougal worked his way over to where the lock stood. “Let out the rope,” he said to Gullik and Ember. “Slowly!”
They did, and the pressure from the flowing sewage pushed the grate open on its hinges again. Once the gap was wide enough, Dougal swung himself around to the other side of the grate and grabbed on to the rope.
“Why didn’t you get started down?” he asked Kranxx.
“Slide down on a filth-slick rope into a monster-infested wilderness?” The asura shook his head. “You go first.”
Dougal motioned for Ember and Gullik to let the rope play out until the grate swung back far enough that it no longer hung over the sewage-coated rocks below. Then he stuck out one leg and wrapped the rope around it. He checked Kranxx’s knot and found it solid, then lowered himself down.
The going was easy at first, until he got to the section of the rope that had dangled in the flowage. It was slick and nasty. Dougal had already been covered with so much filth that he didn’t care much about the stench, but he had