Song of the Saurials - Kate Novak [66]
"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 din 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