Book of Kings

Chapter 28

Soon, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
Funny, isn't it?

It opened into a large cave with a bit of light coming in from the little holes of the very high ceiling. I saw the sun, the great disc of the gods in the sky.
Just like Herve said there were multiple old corpses and cadavers and a lot of earth lying on the ground almost in a heap. It felt like they would turn into dust if I looked at them wrong but still I took a closer look.
White flakes were all over and around them.
One corpse was much further away in the cave than where the rest landed.
I went over to it.
Two arrows were sticking in its back and there were also a lot of small white flakes sprinkled all over it, I guess it's salt.
Wilmot must have shot it but it's missing its head, where did it go?
I looked around and in a corner there it was lying, somebody must have kicked or thrown it over there. There was something weird about it. Going over there I gave it a lift up. There was much more salt on it than the body.
Kind of gross.

As a human, I'm, of course, an expert on human things. I easily deduced that it was severed from its neck by something rather sharp.
Anyone could have come to that conclusion and there were only two people who could have done that.
Well, one person could have done that recently, if it was.
I don't know if a miner cut off that corpse's head weeks ago.
I just think that it was Wil. Lope didn't have a sword, I have Rudges' sword and there was no one else here for some time.
I took my sword and went back to the corpses.
"Sorry," I apologized to the long-dead person in front of me.
I cut the hand of it lightly, it was very easy and I almost cut it off completely. The results looked very similar to the cut on the head.
"So it was a sword," I said out loud.
At the moment this is my working theory.
Or could animal bites cut this cleanly? Or if Wil and Lope were really here, where are they now?
There must be an exit or more passages nearby.

With a turn of the head, I found it in an instant. This cave wasn't very big.
They don't look man-made, natural tunnels under the surfaces weren't that strange, right?
There must be a lot of them.
But what did I understand about underground geography, for all I know trolls or giant worms could have tunneled under the earth in these places hundreds of years before I was born.

There's just one path to choose on the opposite side of where I came from, there wasn't any other choice so I went on again.
And after a while I saw why Lope and Wil didn't come back for so long, the tunnels were a twisting maze, a dark one at that. I had to choose where to go, and gods know if they were the correct choice.
In the dark I yelled around, "can anyone hear me?" Multiple times in the hope that someone would answer and hearing my own echo calling through the air provided some entertainment.

I stopped and heard a faint noise, just a slight buzzing in the ear for anyone else but in this situation, it could mean that I found my teammates.

"LOPE! WILMOT!" I screamed at the top of my lungs and waited for a response.
The noise I heard was definitely someone shouting. I couldn't make out the words but in rhythm, we called out to each other.

I saw a light. It wasn't like the one at the end of a tunnel I saw earlier. It was the light of a lantern and now I could hear clearly, "who's out there," in an alarmed fashion.
It was Lope but where was Wil?
"It's me! Pike, remember?" I said.
I waved at him but stopped. He can't see me in the darkness I'm shrouded in.
"Pike? Gods, I'm glad to see... hear you!" He said running over to me, "how come you're out?" He said surprised. "Did someone help you out? Yule knows we would need some right now."
"Sorry, no person or god involved. Got out all by myself," I said proudly, smirking.
He looked downcast as I said it.
"How come you aren't outside yet and where's Wil?"
"I don't know. After we split from you, we went on to the cave where the haunt was, were you also there?"
"Yeah, quite the number you did on it," I confirmed.
"When we saw it, Wilmot shot it twice but it didn't go down. He then cut off its head but still, it wasn't completely dead yet. We sprinkled salt all over it and finally it was completely dead. We did so on the other corpses too."
"I noticed. And yet you're still stuck in here?"
"Yeah, unfortunate, isn't it? We carefully made our way into this tunnel, and I could have sworn that Wilmot was right behind me but when I looked back he vanished. I don't know how I lost him. Still, I'm looking for him and the way out."
"Didn't do that good of a job on both of those."
"Because this is a fucking labyrinth," he kicked the wall in anger.
"Have you seen any of the fabled wolf-cats Herve was talking about?" I asked curiously.
"No, strange, isn't it? Maybe they were scared off by the collapse of the tunnels."
"If they were, that must mean there's some way out, right? If wolves can, then so can we," I hope that raised his spirit.
"And even if we meet them, we can take them head-on. I see you got a weapon, that's Rudge's sword, how did you get it?"
"The first thing I tried to do after I freed myself was to dig out and after a lot of digging, getting this sword was the only result. I even cut myself on this damn thing," I tried showing him the nasty cut on my finger but couldn't find it anymore. It seems a lot of that was happening.
After a lot of fudging around, I said, "doesn't matter, you know what a cut looks like."

"Give me the lantern," I demanded, "you had your chance to lead for a long time, and finding you in the dark should be a testament to my skill, right?"
He shrugged his shoulders, "can't hurt if you walk in front."

Through random luck or divine intervention, we found an exit out of the tunnels after what felt like another hour but it was much too high to get out. I couldn't even reach the ledge with my height when jumping and I had an impressive vertical jump.
"Climb on my shoulders," I said to Lope.
I hoisted him and was amazed by my own strength, he was much lighter than the monster deer I carried to the city.
It feels like I'm lifting a baby.

"How does it look?" I asked throwing the sword up to him, with one hand he skillfully caught it by the handle.
"Nice catch," I gave him small applause.
"There another ledge here but we could both climb it up alone," he offered a hand to lift me up, and I gladly took it.

Looking around it looked like we're on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. With deep breathes I enjoyed the fresh air and lifted my arms to bathe in the rays of the sun, "praise the sun."
It was a beautiful summer day with a clear blue sky.
Though the comfort of being outside was cut short by Lope, "we still don't know where we are or where Wilmot is."
"Can't you just enjoy the moment for a second? You've been stuck underground in dark and crampy places for hours."
Why were the people I meet always such worrywarts?
"We can enjoy that we got out when we get back to the village."

We searched the area, and I spotted a familiar sight.
I squinted my eyes and I pointed it out, "there he is!"
Wilmot was sitting upright leaning on a tree on the unkempt grass quite a distance away from the exit. A big animal was lying next to him.
But as we got closer, the happiness of finding another member of our party rapidly fell off.

As we rushed over, we saw that he was covered in blood, his neck was gruesome, torn apart, most likely by the animal that was next to him. The animal itself was exactly as I had imagined the wolf-cats would look like. It was bigger than the average dog and had an arrow sticking in its side.

Lope leaned over him, speechless. He held his lifeless body in his arms and began sobbing.
I noticed that his quiver just only had three arrows in it. I knew that the average quiver could hold around ten arrows so if he had ten to begin with then shoot the haunt twice and guessing he killed that animal in one shot, shouldn't he have seven left?
There were no arrows around his corpse. Did he miss multiple times?

I dragged Lope up.
He was a blubbering mess, "snap out of it and ready yourself."
"What for?" He asked sniffling.
"Wolves hunt in packs and if these things are similar to them then there are more here."

I stabbed Rudges' sword into the ground and took Wilmot's bow and grabbed the arrows that were left and drew one into the bow. I had no experience with bow shooting but it was better than nothing.

Horrible howling began around us, and it turned into something that reminded me of a group of people coughing.
"That's a weird sound for an animal to make," I thought.
It sounded neither like a cat nor a wolf.
I couldn't see them yet but from the sound, I think there are at least four around here somewhere.

Lope held his shield up and was ready to bludgeon anything that came to close.
Back to back, we scanned our surroundings and after a period of silence one of the beasts' attack.
Another arrow sticking out of its side, so it was clearly hurt but not that much for it to think to retreat.
I shot the arrow at it but missed it. I must give praise to Wilmot, shooting something that moves was much harder than I thought it would be.
I let go of the bow and drew the sword.
With an open jaw ready to bite my face off it jumped at me. Thrusting the sword forwards I stabbed it in its open mouth. It turned limp in an instant and I was showered with blood and other fluids I couldn't describe.
Looking back and I saw that Lope blocked the jump of another animal. I took the bow again, and this time successfully hit it point-blank. I nocked another arrow again.
Two more ran up and again, each of them had an arrow sticking out of their sides. I missed the third shot with the bow. This really wasn't my thing.
I didn't pick up the sword fast enough, and one of them bit my left arm ferociously. I screamed in pain and punched its head hard with my right but still, it wouldn't relent. I grabbed the sword and slashed its body open.
In the meanwhile, Lope bashed the last one multiple times until it wasn't moving anymore.

Surrounded by dead cat-wolves I screamed triumphantly out of breath and in pain, "this is my territory now!"