The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [68]
“Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed down into the darkness. An answering roar told them she was alive. Paelias was reaching down for Lucan when he looked up, said, “If the fall didn’t kill her, it won’t kill me either,” and let go.
“Pelor,” Remy whispered. The others were shouting down into the hole. He heard Lucan’s answering voice, Biri-Daar still roaring. He heard the clash and ring of steel, and a throaty inhuman rumble like no voiced sound Remy could remember.
The next thing he knew he was jumping in himself, tearing free of Paelias’s grasp and holding out his gloved hands to keep track of the walls as he fell. His mouth opened and a barbarian’s yell came out. It felt good. Whatever creature was down there, it would know that Remy of Avankil was coming.
He hit the ground in a rubbish heap. Rotting garbage and discarded bits of clay, glass, wood—everything that might conceivably have been thrown away during the years of the Keep’s normal existence—splattered away from him as he sank waist-deep in the slippery muck at the bottom. There was shouting, and that gurgling rumble, echoing all around him. Light flared as if Biri-Daar was using her dragonbreath just around the bend … but what bend? Remy couldn’t tell where the walls were. He pulled one of his feet free, feeling it hang up on something hard; as he shifted his weight, looking around for Lucan and Biri-Daar, he realized that his foot was stuck beneath a long bone. “Out of the way!” someone shouted from above. Remy slogged off to his right as Paelias and Kithri hurtled out of the darkness into the filth side by side. They too fought their way off to one side as Keverel scarped down the chute and landed awkwardly on his back, nearly disappearing into the refuse before Remy and Paelias caught him and steadied him so he could get upright.
“Lucan!” Remy called. “Biri-Daar!”
Light flared again, and Remy started to understand that the room they were in curled in on itself. He put one hand on the inside wall of the curve and followed it. Ten steps later he was in sight of Biri-Daar and Lucan. And the three incredible creatures that menaced them.
They were low to the ground and reptilian at first, their skin slick and oily, their legs splayed and jointed like an alligator’s. But they were larger than any alligator Remy had ever seen, and their mouths were nearly circular, gaping large enough to swallow a halfling whole. From their shoulders sprouted tentacles with clusters of serrated barbs at their tips, and—most incredible of all—a tail-stalk with a vertical row of three reddish eyes, faintly luminescent, curled over the beasts’ backs, wavering back and forth to take in the newcomers.
“Otyugh,” Keverel said from just behind him. “If we can see three, there are probably more.” He and Paelias pivoted to form a rear guard as Remy and Kithri surged forward. One of the otyughs was wounded, its tentacles both amputated and great rents showing around its jaws. Taking advantage of their brief moment of surprise, Remy slashed its eyestalk off. The spurt of blood smelled even worse than the rotted slush underfoot. Tears filled Remy’s eyes; he blinked them away and struck again as Biri-Daar hit the otyugh from her side with a reversed blow that tore huge gashes along the hollow of its jaw. In a fountain of stinking blood, the creature fell, wallowing in its death throes.
Fresh yells from behind him told Remy that Keverel and Paelias were encountering more of the otyughs. He closed in on the second facing Lucan and Biri-Daar; the third, mortally wounded by Lucan’s flickering blade, waved its tentacles feebly as it died. In the uncertain light Remy could see that both Biri-Daar and Lucan were wounded. Infection would be almost certain given the environment. He hoped that Lucan’s ranger lore would keep both of them from blood poisoning.
Over his