The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [69]
Immediately Keverel and Lucan began treating wounds. Biri-Daar and Lucan himself were scored by the tentacles’ barbs. “A walking font of disease, the otyugh,” Keverel said, disgust plain on his face. The worst wound was on Biri-Daar’s hip and thigh, where one of the otyughs had bitten partially through her armor. The punctures left were deep and already blackening around the edges. Fever was beginning to shine in her eyes.
Lucan found a packet of dried herbs in his satchel and ground them between his fingers. He pressed a small amount into each puncture, Biri-Daar hissing as he did so. “That will hold the infection off. Or should. Let’s get healing, holy man,” he said.
“Until we get out of this rot, no healing will take hold,” Keverel said.
“Light,” Paelias said. A stone in his hand blazed up brilliantly, illuminating the dimensions of the room. It was high-ceilinged, with holes in the ceiling that must have been rubbish outfalls. “Back to the chute from the stairwell,” he said. “Perhaps we can climb it.”
But it was too high from the floor. Paelias played his light around, noting every cranny and shadowed corner in the spiral room. “Why this shape?” he wondered aloud. “The floor slopes down as well. It’s—”
“There’s probably a drain at the bottom. Long ago, when this keep was still in the ground, its builder found a way to let the garbage rot and drain into an underground river. It’s the same thing they do at Crow Fork Market, no?” Lucan thought for a moment. “If we could get out that drain, we might be able to scale the side of the Keep.”
“Are we dam-builders now?” Kithri asked. “We’d have to hold all this back to get through this drain. If it’s there. And if it’s in a place that would let us get to the outside of the Keep and climb up.”
“You mean down,” Lucan said.
“If only I worshiped a god,” Kithri said. “Then I would be able to plead for you to be struck dead.”
Since there was no way up, they decided to go down. First they had to find pieces of debris large enough that they might be able to build some kind of barrier, a coffer dam of sorts they could use to expose the drain.
If there was a drain.
And they had to work fast because the miasma of the rubbish pit was very near to overcoming all of them, most threateningly Biri-Daar. She moved sluggishly, the pollution in her blood barely held at bay by Lucan’s herbs and Keverel’s healing magics. “There’s only so much we can do down here,” Keverel said. “We need to get out soon or that fever’s going to …” He trailed off.
“So much for your god’s favor,” Kithri said.
Keverel looked at her and held her gaze until she looked away. “Blasphemy isn’t getting us anywhere either.”
“How is it that we’re wading around in rotted potato peels when no living human has eaten a meal in this castle in … what? Hundreds of years?” Remy looked around in consternation.
“I don’t think time passes here the way it does outside,” Keverel answered. “These old vegetables might have been peeled and discarded a thousand years ago.”
“Next time I go adventuring, I’m staying above ground.”
“We are above ground, remember? And at least it’s not a sewer,” Lucan joked. They found several pieces of wood all together near the mouth of the trap chute and started working them loose to take farther down near the drain. Then Paelias stopped.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
They listened. From the chute came a whispering, scraping sound. Then a whistle.
They looked at each other. Bad enough, ran the thought through every mind. Bad enough that we should be trapped down here; now something comes down into the trap to finish us?
Then they heard a voice. “Hsst! Is that Biri-Daar the mighty dragonborn paladin down there?” After a silence, the voice came again. “Come now! I heard you speaking to each other. I threw a rope down. Climb up or starve. It’s your choice, but make