Tallah

Vermen stank. Their stench filled the narrow tunnel and masked the burnt hair and meat smell of the three guards Tallah had just smeared across the walls.

In the enclosed space of the cavern, they sat clustered around smoking fires or lay in their own filth and droppings. The rank odour escaping into the wider network of passages made her eyes water beneath her mask.

She counted two scores of the creatures. There could have been maybe twice that. Well-armed and well fed by the looks of things. All shapes and sizes had gathered to this nest. Some were heads taller than she was. Some barely reached her knees. All filthy and disgusting, true affronts to anything decent.

Two wargged humans were leashed to a pole. A group of the vermen were gathered around them, poking, and prodding the two into frothing fury until they ended fighting one another to the jeers and snarls of their handlers.

There was a shaman by the largest fire, all dressed up in stained robes and bone fetishes. It looked to be painstakingly instructing two of the others to do… something. She couldn’t make it out for the distance even if she lifted the mask for a better look.

Realisation dawned when one of the largest vermen raised a spear. A body was tied to it, limbless and naked, vaguely female. For a moment Tallah hoped it was a corpse.

Corpses don’t scream when set to cook on a spit above the fire. The girl made a horrible noise as they began rotating her over the flames.

Tallah wove a firefly and sent it out towards the wretch. It floated as a mote of dust on the soft draft until near enough to the flame. A flick of her fingers sped it up, to impact soundlessly against the girl’s exposed shoulder. A snap of her fingers and the firefly burst inside the chest cavity, pulping the heart. The vermen hissed in confusion as the screams cut out with a gurgle. They’d been tormenting the poor thing for quite some time by the looks of things.

“There’s one above the fire,” Sil whispered in her ear, finally caught up. “See him? In the smoke?”

She did.

One more human—male, by the looks of things—hung in a cage above the lick of the fire, slowly rotating in the up-draft of hot air, clear sight of him obstructed by the smoke. Malnourished to the bone, it was a miracle he was even still breathing.

“Alive? Are you sure?”

“Seems to be.” Sil’s eyes glowed a faint lime green as she studied the scene. “There’s a heartbeat but I can’t say more from here.” She let out a soft squeak as she stepped into the offal of one of the dead verman guards.

The wretched man screamed in his cage, jerked his limbs in the throes of some fit, and then was still, head wedged between the bars.

“That’s the sound I heard.” Sil snapped her fingers. “I told you I heard screaming. Ha!”

More vermen dropped whatever they’d been doing to gather around the fire and study the limp corpse roasting there, its cooking stench finally enough to overpower their musk.

Disgusting beasts, barely worth the time to kill. She scrunched up her nose at the prospect of dirtying her hands on these blight-carriers.

But after so long exploring the tunnels with no result in sight, this seemed as likely a path forward as any other. And it afforded her a rare chance to work out some frustration.

How many days already beneath the mountain? She’d asked Bianca to stop keeping count as it served to annoy her. Sil would likely complain soon enough, denied late-Wither sun and fresh air for so long on this insane quest. And she’d be right to be upset. A couple more galleries explored to no result and even Tallah would accept they’d failed.

“Don’t kill the one in the cage. I need him alive.” Sil pointed to the prisoner, as if there was any confused as to whom she meant.

“Do you need him in one piece?” Tallah donned her silver mask and had another glance around the cave for any hidden cantrip enchantments. Nothing.

“Human-shaped, preferably. Just make sure he’s alive when you’re done. I’ll only need him for a couple of heartbeats.”

“Right. Stay put. Make sure none of them get out. Shouldn’t take long.”

Vermen hadn’t come to check on their missing guards. Intelligent enough to gather in a horde, not enough to ensure safety, even if this nest looked to be better organised than most. No females in sight so the young were kept somewhere else. Weapons on racks. Food stacked in sacks and crates. This was a small army, and she could bet some wild honey that it wasn’t the shaman thinking for them.

No matter. It wasn’t the first oddity they’d found since coming down into the Valen-Drack passage. If she spent time wondering on each, she’d never get anything done.

As she stepped out of the tunnel mouth and saw Sil’s weave in the air, barriers blocking the exits they could see, the wretch in the cage looked up at her. It wasn’t an errant glance. He’d turned his head towards her and raised his hands in a decrepit gesture of warding.

Is he warding me off? That’s precious. She would’ve winked at him if not for the mask. She settled for a smile.

The vermen bristled at her approach, with dozens of beady black eyes turning in stupid silence to regard the intruder. Her heels clicked on the filth-encrusted stone floor, no effort made for stealth.

They hissed and swarmed like the rats they were, clubs and swords raised high. Some, two brain cells richer than the rest, cocked crossbows and took aim.

Her fireflies flitted out in a storm. With a finger snap she launched them outward to bury into fur, scraps of armour, eyeballs even. The imbeciles didn’t even flinch to avoid her volley.

With another snap they detonated. Five vermen burst apart like overripe fruit, the concussive bangs of detonation echoing in the cavern. They fell in bits and showered her in offal and blood. Bugger! She’d been too close, allowed them one too many steps.

Twin fireballs turned the beasts with crossbows into burnt-out grease stains on the wall. Air burned out of them in screeches of agony.

The wargged humans rushed her, their chains loosed. Poor wretches. A few days earlier and they might have been spared. As they were, she cut them down with heat lances, turned them into smoking effigies that screamed more than any human should rightly be able to.

Some of the screaming came from the imprisoned human above the fire. His cage swayed in the shock wave of her explosions, but she hadn’t hit the thing. Why was he screaming?

A fresh wreath of fireflies turned the next line of vermen into splattered gore.

The rest was simple cleanup. The shaman had tried to raise a staff and channel some crude effect. Laughable. A fireball burned the meat off its bones and turned the staff to ashes.

One died clawing against Sil’s barrier after discarding its weapon to try and make a run for it. She blasted out its spine and left it squealing in the muck.

The foodstuffs caught fire, the smoke tasting acrid. A hand gesture signalled Sil to drop the barriers so some of it could rush out through the tunnels. Whatever filtered out through the rock gaps above would be visible for miles around the mountain if anyone had a care to look.

Ash rose on the sudden up-draft of hot air. It stuck to her clothes like fine powder and made her sneeze, the worst the rats had managed against her. She did feel better though.

One final firefly drifted up to the cage and blasted the chain apart. The awful bone gibbet crashed down to the scattered embers beneath, right atop the charred corpse. The man inside screamed himself into keening cries, ran out of air, loudly inhaled, and screamed some more. She considered killing him for the quiet while she paced through the room, stamping out any growling survivor.

“Blood of the Goddess, what thistle got in your knickers?” Sil asked as she picked her way over the gore-strewn room. “I get you’re frustrated but this is just deranged.”

Tallah spat black ash and cleansed her mouth with water from the canteen. “The man’s alive. Shush.”

All the vermen lay dead or still smouldering. No other traps that she could see. Maybe some guards farther out in the tunnels had escaped her purge, but it mattered very little.

She dragged the cage from the fire, heedless of how the bugger inside squealed. One of his legs was bent at an odd angle, bone pushing outwards against leather-like skin. “Touch him and we can move on. There’s another tunnel on the other side of the cave. We may as well keep going.”

“Get him out of there. I don’t want to touch that thing. Those are human bones.”

Tallah sighed and bent to the task, ripping apart the wreckage to extract the sorry sod. Not a man at all but a boy, at most twenty Summers if she were any judge. Patchy stubble covered his cheeks, white as snow, wherever he wasn’t blistered or covered in sores. Starved right down to skin and bone.

How’d that happen?

A vague weave hung on him, like a poorly made enchantment. Was he blessed? She turned him over for better inspection.

“Ah, here it is.”

He had one of Anatol’s idiotic blessings tattooed on the back of his neck. Slow death through divine regeneration. One had to be either inexperienced, or an utter imbecile to have that thing tattooed. Likely wouldn’t have lasted much longer even without her intervention.

At some point he’d began laughing. Sounded like a toothless saw blade trying to cut ironwood.

“All yours, your prissiness.” Tallah kicked him over, so he’d be looking up at them. “Be quick about it.”

“Yes, yes, I don’t want to be in here any more than you do. See if there’s anything worth picking up. Food’s running low.”

“I’m not eating anything from here.”

Even without it being disgusting on a conceptual level, the whole place stank of rot, rat dropping, and who knew what other kinds of filth. How a creature could live like this and still be somewhat intelligent was beyond her.

Sil knelt next to the man and placed the tips of her fingers on his forehead. “I’d ask for your consent, but I feel you’re not in the best state of mind to give it. My apologies. I require touching this mind.”

Lightning cracked and the cave exploded in red light. In a heartbeat, Sil was blasted from her feet. She impacted against the far wall, almost ten meters away, with a wet crunch and the sickening sound of bones snapping.

Tallah’s feet moved before the rest of her had time to react. With heart thundering in her throat, she found the healer in a pile, one arm bent awkwardly beneath her, blood dripping by the corner of her mouth.

She trained a fireball on the still laughing man—

“N-No,” Sil croaked from the floor, choking. “Don’t…”