“Pass on to Farseeth and Erathi that we're certain the goings-on in Baedorn aren't Pandemonium-related,” the Inferi said quickly, already feeling his hold on his temporary world start to slip away. “We're in the Shalewarrens searching out the real culprit because I think he may be related to the man grave robbing at Gendelheim.”
Kvasir nodded in acknowledgment but Drystan was far too close to consciousness now to hear his reply. All he could see was the revenant's mouth moving as he rapidly faded away into the nothingness that was starting to consume the entire fabrication where Drystan had placed himself. Arathron similarly faded away, though he could still hear his friend's voice within his mind. He dearly hoped the revenant or his partner remembered to deliver the message; he did not need Farseeth angry at him for not bothering to check in on top of the list of reasons she already had after chatting with the Inquisitor General back in Baedorn.
The dreamscape faded into the black nothingness behind his eyelids and when he woke he found he had been shoved aside, laying face-down on the stone several feet away from where he knew he was supposed to be sitting. Somewhere ahead of him he heard the sounds of Tiernan clashing with something and in a brief moment of panic he thought it may have been Akkali come back to take revenge on the Inquisitor for the insult.
Instead he saw that it was a renewed assault of homunculi as Arathron had warned. Three of them, and none seemed as old and decaying as the ones that had come crawling up out of the mine shaft earlier. They were all much more bulky than their predecessors, built with limbs taken from several men of different skin colors which had been attached to torsos and legs of people similar in stature to himself. Neither of the two attacking Tiernan had heads, which, if not for the stitched-up stumps of their necks, he would have found rather amusing. The third, hanging several feet behind them with glassy but observant eyes, had a woman's head fixed between its obviously male shoulders. In life she must have been fairly wealthy for her flesh was well-preserved using some sort of embalming technique, probably the reason why her head had been used... or re-used, as it were.
He pushed himself up to stand and drew his edged sword from its sheath at his back. Tiernan glared over his shoulder as he delivered a powerful kick to the sternum of the homunculus assailing him and forced it to retreat a few steps. “About bloody time!”
“Sorry,” said Drystan hurriedly, coming up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “Did you catch which way they came from?”
“How many ways do you think there can be to escape a stone tunnel a hundred feet below ground,” hissed Tiernan through clenched teeth. “Honestly, Drys, you're just feigning stupidity at this point.”
Behind him Arathron warned that Akkali was approaching. He pressed Tiernan to the side just as the Enkiri doffed her traveling roll at their feet and darted between them, fists and feet encased in wavering amber magic that flowed forth from the markings concealed beneath her gray overcoat. She completely bypassed the first two constructs by weaving between them like a striking serpent and took off after the third, which had turned entirely around and began fleeing the scene the moment it caught sight of her. Within seconds the two had disappeared around a bend in the passage a dozen feet ahead.
Drystan signaled he was going after the leftmost construct and lunged forward, catching it just above the kneecap with his blade. Unable to feel pain, the homunculus instead locked its hands together and brought a sledgehammer-like blow down onto the flat of his back, crushing the air out of him and sending him face-first back into the stone. He rolled to the side to avoid having his skull stomped and pulled a longknife from his belt, reaching up and severing the tendons at the back of the construct's bare feet. The homunculus wavered, then stumbled forward just far enough for him to reach its elbows and haul it entirely to the ground and hack its head off with a few well-placed blows.
Beside him Tiernan had coaxed his foe further down the tunnel and had severed its left arm by seizing upon the fact its limbs were only held fast by medical threads. With a second well-placed but slightly clumsy blow he hammered the edge of his blade down and to the side of the creature's stitched-on hip, splitting flesh and sutures so that the limb hung half-attached to its accompanying torso. With a swift kick to the knee he knocked the left leg entirely free and left the homunculus to flail about with only two functional limbs.
Reaching back to pick up the pack Akkali had dropped along with the fading lantern they had brought, he sheathed his sword and took off after her without asking Tiernan if he was up to following along. The Inquisitor kept his broadsword out and trailing behind him in a reverse-handed grip, though he was clearly displeased with having to use the thing. The man never had been overly fond of being in the thick of a fight, but there wasn't exactly a lot of clearance in the tunnel for him to draw his longbow which he kept securely in his left hand. With Drystan in the lead they sprinted down the sloping tunnel, seeing nor hearing anything from Akkali.
There is a branch somewhere close, said Arathron. She took it and is putting quite a bit of distance between us.
A few seconds later Drystan sighted the branch Arathron had been expecting not because the lantern had an overabundance of light to shine ahead of them but because Akkali had literally put her fist through the stone to leave them a sign of the direction she had gone in. There was a round hole at the height of her shoulder which she had hammered into the rock of the tunnel branch she had continued down. Tiernan caught sight of it and stared momentarily before shaking off his surprise and caught up with him as they both chased after the Enkiri.
The tunnel wall widened rapidly and the air dropped in temperature, becoming a noticeable almost winter-like temperature. He could make out the glimmer of Akkali's magical barriers a hundred or so meters ahead of them, fists and feet flying about in such rapid succession that it looked like a blur of light from a distance. As they closed the gap he was stunned to see that the homunculus was actually keeping up with the Enkiri's flurry of blows. In the years he had known her only Tiernan had come close to matching her odd yet surprisingly graceful martial arts skills; the homunculus was easily operating at the speed the Inquisitor had when fighting with her in the alley.
“Shine the light on that thing's head,” Tiernan said quickly, sheathing his sword and drawing an arrow from the quiver on his right hip. With practiced alacrity he drew the string back all the way to his chin as Drystan tried to make the lantern cooperate and loose a beam of light somewhere near the homunculus' skull.
A beat passed, and then another. The instant Akkali ducked low and made a strike for the construct's legs Tiernan loosed his arrow and it hissed through the air, sinking into the head of the creature somewhere near what should have been its ear. He drew another arrow and followed the Enkiri's movements, waiting until she maneuvered the thing around so it faced them, then rolled out of the way as he fired the steel-tipped missile into its eye socket.
Drystan was forced to look away from the display and set the lantern down as two more fresh homunculi joined the fray from Tiernan's right side. He un-shuttered the light entirely, bathing the stone in a soft yellow glow and dimly illuminating the far walls of the small cavern they had come to. He pulled his sword from its sheath and headed at the two newcomers, watching as one reeled backwards with an arrow from the Inquisitor's bow pierced its gaping mouth and exploded from the back of its head. Leaving that one for his friend he tackled the other with his shoulder, sending it sprawling.
The two new constructs both had preserved heads and they both were decidedly more intelligent than the ones they had fought in the mine shaft only a minute before. He brought his sword down towards the head of the homunculus he had tossed to the ground and it caught his strike on its forearm, leading to a severed hand but buying it enough time to right itself and hammer him square in the chest with its bloodless stump. Drystan tried to strike its head off a second time and succeeded only in severing the handless arm at the elbow.
A barbed arrowhead whistled past his ear and sunk into the nose of the homunculus and it staggered back. The Inferi capitalized on its shock and brought his sword across, splitting the creature from hip to shoulder before reversing his grip and hacking off the string-attached head and kicking the corpse away. He reeled around on the second homunculus, this one with an arrow in its eye and two in its neck, and ground his teeth together as he drove the point of his sword through its jaw and out the other side.
Akkali charged in from across the cave and kicked the last homunculus in the chest, driving it into the ground with a blow that sounded as though it snapped every still-intact rib the thing had. With a second merciless stomp she crushed the creature's skull beneath her boot, then ran over and did much the same to the head Drystan had severed from the other one. Surprisingly she had enough presence of mind to pull Tiernan's arrows out before she reduced each to a shattered lump of reanimated flesh and bone.
As the magic enveloping her arms and legs wicked away she returned Tiernan's arrows to him and motioned for Drystan to hand her back her pack, which he did quickly before re-sheathing his own sword. She shouldered her things and went back to the lantern, then let out a disgruntled growl.
“We're almost out of oil.” She glanced back at the Inferi. “Able to get a lead on where we're going?”
“They're not of Pandemonium,” replied Drystan, ignoring the quizzical look he was getting from Tiernan. “We're on our own.”
“Shit.” Akkali sat down on the ground and began to fiddle with the lamp, attempting to see if it was just the wick or indeed a lack of oil, then abandoned the fading contraption and began hunting around in the dying light for some sort of stone she could hex to glow. “Drys find me a decent sized rock so we can keep moving.”
As though he had been expecting her to request such an object Tiernan walked over and held out a jagged hunk of limestone the size of his palm. Straightening up at his approach she eyed him questioningly. “Where'd you find it?”
“Picked it up on the way here from where you somehow put your fist through the wall,” he replied with what passed for one of his smug grins. Tiernan wasn't all that skilled in being deliberately cocky, however, so to Akkali it must have looked like he had gotten something stuck in his teeth. Judging by the slightly disgusted expression on her face he guessed correctly. “I doubted we'd have enough lamp oil to keep up our search anyway but I figured you'd be able to help us out with that.”
“Did you now.” The Enkiri plucked the stone out of palm and pressed it tightly between her own. Cool blue light emerged from the markings lining the backs of her hands and wrapped around the stone, piercing through it with tendrils of magic. After a moment the light died and she tossed the rock underhanded back at Tiernan, who snatched it deftly from the sky and seemed slightly impressed with the fact that it now spilled forth a pale and ghostly light that was about twice as bright as their dying lamp.
The Inquisitor shook the glowing rock at her. “Why couldn't you have just done this in the first place?”
“We had a lantern. Now we do not.” She walked past the severely maimed construct that she had been chasing and refused to utter another word.
Drystan furrowed his brow as he followed along after her, trying to figure out exactly how much magic she had been using. Her mood was becoming decidedly more cold and her manner significantly more abrupt; usually that was a good indicator of exactly how much pain she was in. Knowing that if he brought it up anywhere within earshot of Tiernan she would likely kill the man he wasn't about to speak openly about it, but he made note of it and Arathron silently agreed to keep an eye on her.
Not too far behind him Tiernan held up the glowing chunk of limestone and they continued on deeper into the Shalewarrens, heading down the only direction that the homunculi could have come from.