Curse of the Crystals

Chapter 6: The Lion's Den - part 1

Their anticipation vanished the moment they realized the inside of the building was entirely empty. In fact, Maiara could only conclude that it was too empty. Not only did it not explain the horrible smell, it was generally unlikely for a building this big to remain unused. After confirming there was nobody around, Bullock gave Maiara a signal to enter.

Maiara spoke up as she walked towards the middle of the building. "The entrance to the sewers should be somewhere, but it seems to be hidden. Assuming the smell comes from there, the entrance is wherever this horrible stench is the strongest."

The guards and Bullock soon set out on their task of locating the entrance, until one of them noticed a few loose boards in a wall. Upon removing them, a staircase going down was revealed.

"An actual staircase, rather than just a ladder... That suggest they travelled up and down frequently." Maiara wanted to approach the staircase after saying it, but Qadir stopped her.

"Miss Aina, I believe we should approach this with care."

"You're right." Although Maiara didn't like to admit it, she had been careless. Just how careless she had been was proven when one of the guards carefully walked down the stairs. Only four steps down, one of the planks snapped in half and almost made the guard tumble down, if it wasn't for sergeant Bullock managing to grab a hold of him.

Bullock turned around to inform Qadir and Maiara. "They've sabotaged the place, the planks broke off in a way that suggest it's been tampered with."

As they proceeded to walk down the stairs, two more steps gave in. Maiara didn't quite understand the logic of tampering with the steps. "How would a few tempered steps keep anyone from entering?"

Bullock answered. "They won't, it's to shake off pursuers. If you're trying to run from someone, you can quickly run up or down those stairs, for as long as you know exactly where the broken steps are. Someone that doesn't know that these broken steps are there will step on them and fall, giving you more than enough time to get away. It's a trick that is often used by the street gangs in these parts, against rival gangs and against us guards."

"So the disease might be related to a street gang?"

"I doubt it, the tactics are the same, but I don't think any of the street gangs has anything to gain from doing this, nor do I think that they are organized enough for someone to consider hiring them. Either this was left by a previous group, or the current one uses the same tricks."

Although Bullock's words made sense, Maiara decided to abstain from excluding the option altogether. They soon arrived at the bottom of the steps, where a narrow hallway curved around into a pitch-black room. As two of the guards lid up their torches, Maiara tried her best to keep her breathing superficial to avoid smelling too much. The air in here was truly repugnant.

Upon entering the torch-lit room, they instantly noticed they were in the right place. Many cages filled with dead, unconscious and living rats were stacked against the wall. Maiara's stomach turned inside out upon seeing something even worse. It was a cage filled with Forest Elves, some of which were clearly rotting away already, while others seemed to have passed away only recently. The guards were equally shocked, but they soon recovered enough to break open the lock to check for survivors. They had no luck. All of them were dead.

Trying to pull herself together, Maiara tried her best to estimate the amount of days they had been dead for. "This one has been dead for at least three months, while this one seems to have died less than a week ago." She didn't have the kind of coroners knowledge to get better estimates, nor did she desire to go in closer to the corpses to investigate further.

All of a sudden, one of the guards yelled at her. "Watch out!" As Maiara turned around, she could see him hack his sword at something, but the little bit of torchlight that lit the room didn't quite reveal what it was. It was only after the guard suddenly fell down to the ground, his torch dropping along with him, that Maiara could see the perpetrator. A rat. It had scurried towards them after coming out of hiding. If they weren't careful, they'd suffer the same fate as Sergeant Millard and his group had suffered when investigating the rat's nest. Luckily enough, they were prepared. Fighting something as small as a rat was very different from the normal guard duties, so Bullock and his men, and even her steward Qadir, had gone through some emergency training to fight these smaller targets. For someone like Qadir, this merely meant training his precision to the point where he could strike a rat. For most others, it meant exchanging their weapons for larger, often blunt weapons, which were much likelier to hit a rat. It also included utilising leg-armour, which made it more difficult to get bitten. Although the original attack had come as a surprise, they quickly took an offensive stance. As the rat seemed to settled upon picking Qadir as its next victim, its fate was settled. The Desert Elf easily sliced through the rat before it even had a chance to get close to him.