Song of the Saurials - Kate Novak [88]
Curious, he thought, it's too late in the year for violets to be in bloom.
The ranger wasn't familiar enough with Dragonbait to know that was the smell of the saurial's fear.
Dragonbait watched over the campsite with his yellow reptilian eyes, but all he could see was the vision of Alias forming a circle in the air with her forefinger. The motion was not one from the thieves' sign language she had taught him. It was a saurial symbol-the symbol for death.
12
The Beholder
The orcs escorting Finder and Olive herded the pair of adventurers through naturally carved tunnels for what seemed to the halfling to be miles. Olive had to jog to keep up with Finder and ahead of the orcs, and she stumbled frequently on the rough, uneven ground. Her wounded shoulder was throbbing, and every jar sent a stabbing pain down her arm and across her back.
Finally they reached a series of passages that looked like circular bores through the rock, as smooth as polished marble. Although these were far easier to move through, to Olive they were more unsettling, since they indicated the work of the beholder's disintegrating eye.
Thinking of the beholder, as Olive could not help but do, and listening to the cadence of the orcs' boots as they trudged behind the prisoners brought to the halfling's mind the adventurer's rhyme:
One eye to lift and one eye to sleep,
One to charm man and one for beast.
One eye to wound and one eye to slow,
One to bring fear and one to make stone.
One eye makes dust and one eye brings death, But the last eye kills wizards more than all of the rest.
The last eye of a beholder, Olive knew, disrupted magic. Without it, Xaran would be evenly matched with any powerful mage, but with it, not even wizards stood a chance against the the creature. Without the ability to cast spells, a mage was about as useful as a bard with laryngitis. Fortunately there was nothing wrong with Finder's voice, and they were relying on his glib tongue, not his magical abilities, to deal with the beholder. He'd better be at his glibbest, too. Olive thought. Beholders aren't stupid.
Finder stepped in front of the halfling and stopped suddenly, bringing Olive up short and startling her out of her reverie. "Pocket the light for a while,"
Finder whispered.
Olive did as the bard asked. There was a dim glow up ahead. Olive peered around Finder's hip and saw that they had arrived at the main entrance of the orc warren's common cave.
The common cave of an orcish community was always the largest and most central in the warren, and when another creature, such as a beholder, assumed leadership of an orc tribe, it often made the common cave its own quarters. Despite the cave's great size and desirable location, it was still part of an orc warren, and since orcs lacked any sense of style or gracious living, it looked like a pretty miserable place to live.
Numerous low charcoal fires burned within, but since the ceiling was only seven feet high at most and sloped downward at the edges, the dim red light from the fires didn't penetrate very far, making the cave seem much smaller. Water seeped down from the surface, dripped from the ceiling and walls, and hissed onto the fires' hot coals, sending up clouds of water vapor and noxious gases. The smell of rancid fat dripping from rotting animal carcasses onto the coals masked the odor of the orcs with an even more unpleasant smell. All in all, Olive thought, it was a pretty homey place for a creature from hell.
Orcs swarmed into the common room to get a look at the intruders who demanded an audience with their master. Only the largest and toughest-looking males carried well-maintained weaponry and wore anything resembling armor. Most of the rest had at least an axe. The females wore daggers, and even the young played with sharpened sticks. For every face Olive was able to discern in the dim light, she saw two more pairs of red eyes glowing in the darkness of the passages adjacent to the common room.
Unable to imagine even someone as talented as Finder able to defeat these vicious creatures,