City of Steel (Chaos Awakens Book 3) (30 page)

They moved quickly and within a minute they emerged into another underground passage.  Xandrith staggered as he stepped back into normal air.  He took in a huge lungful, realizing he’d been holding his breath the entire time he’d been in the wall.  Could he have taken a breath in there?  He wasn’t sure, but his body had assumed that was a bad risk.  He straightened himself up and gathered his resolve.  That had been terrifying, but he’d survived. 

His Unth guide was waiting patiently for Xandrith to recover from his ordeal, and the assassin was thankful for that.  He needed a moment.  He decided to fill the moment with some conversation. 

“Why are the Unth helping me do this?”  Xandrith asked, not really expecting any kind of answer. 

“Our Ranger believed you were telling the truth about your goal.  She also believed you were not an immediate threat to the Wellspring.  Your goal is aligned with our own.  If you achieve what you want to achieve, it will aid our defense here.  If you fail, it will have cost us very little.”  The Unth explained. 

That was a grim answer.  They had basically allowed Xandrith to do what he intended because it would help their cause if he succeeded, and if he and all of his friends died in the process the Unth wouldn’t have lost anything of value.  He’d become an expendable resource. 

“What will you do if we succeed?”  Xandrith asked, already sure he knew the answer.  He was curious to see what the Unth would say. 

“If you succeed, the troll army will likely break apart.  We will destroy those few that remain a threat.”  The Unth ignored the real intent of the question.  Xandrith guessed that he’d done so intentionally. 

“What will you do with Haley and me if we succeed?”  He pressed, this time leaving no room for interpretation in the question. 

The Unth met Xan’s eyes, but he didn’t respond.  His silence was damning in and of itself.  Xandrith could choose to believe that he didn’t know and therefore wasn’t talking, but it was much more likely that he knew exactly what the Unth intended to do.  The assassin grinned, remembering not to open his mouth to expose his teeth as he did so.  It was good to get into practice. 

“Fair enough.” Xan chuckled grimly. “Show me to the horde. I have work to do. I’m assuming you’ll be here to let me back in when I’m finished?”

“Return to this entrance.  We will know when you’ve arrived and we will send someone for you.”  True to Unth style, the man didn’t bother to explain exactly how they would know when Xandrith had gotten back, or how long he would have to wait. 

The assassin didn’t bother to hide the frustration as it settled heavily upon him.  Perhaps the anger would add to his troll disguise.  They seemed to be perpetually in a bad mood.  They must be acquainted with the Unth. 

The Unth gestured in the only direction that didn’t lead back towards the crystal wall.  “The exit opens on the side of a low hill with a heavy bed of rocks around it.  There is a boulder that sits right above the hole, and only a narrow opening allows access in and out of the cave.  The trolls have set up their camp all around the hill. They have stacks of supplies near the rocks. If you are careful you should be able to exit the cave without drawing attention.”

Xandrith nodded once.  “Alright, then I’ll be going.  Don’t wait for me.” 

“I had no intention of doing so.” His guide replied without a trace of sarcasm.

Xandrith just shook his head and walked away, out into the darkness of the cave ahead of him.  It might actually be a relief to be away from the Unth for a while.  The trolls at least had some emotions, even if those emotions were all negative and terrifying.  They even had a sense of humor.  It might have been a bit dark by Xan’s taste, well, by any human’s taste, but at least they laughed.  The Unth were so dour it was like someone had just killed all their puppies, and then fed them those puppies with a side of bitter greens, and then pissed in their pudding before throwing a handful of nails in their bedding.  The point was that they were not particularly cheery. 

He only walked for a few minutes before the cave began to grow increasingly narrow, and increasingly short. Before long Xandrith was crawling forward on his hands and knees, his giant sword dragging on the low ceiling as he progressed. He wasn’t sure how far he crawled like that before the tunnel took an abrupt upward slant, but he soon found himself climbing up a narrow channel towards a small beam of light shining down from above. The light brought with it a bitter cold breeze and the smell of thousands of trolls mixed with what should have been fresh air, but wasn’t. If one troll was unpleasant, the horde was something else entirely. The smell burned his nose and eyes and Xandrith made himself take a few minutes to adapt to the stench. It wasn’t easy, and even once he had the impulse to rub his eyes and suppress a gag.

“Damn trolls.”  He whispered to himself as he climbed the last few feet towards the exit.  The gap he had to squeeze through was indeed very narrow.  There was no way he was going to get through it with his sword still strapped to his back.  He peeked out the opening to be certain that no eyes were watching, and then he pushed his sword out onto the ground in front of him.  He left it there for a moment, hoping that if anyone had seen it appear there would be an immediate response and he could retreat.  Nothing happened. 

He took a deep breath, sucking in his stomach as much as he could, and then he pulled himself up through the hole.  Even without the sword it was a tight fit.  His knives caught on the rocks and he had to manually move them so that he could slide through, all the while the fear of discovery was clutching tightly at him, making every second stretch on for hours, and every sound he made echo like the call of a cities warning horn.  Finally he pulled himself all the way free of the hole and picked up his sword.  It took him a moment to resituate himself and to straighten his cloak, but once he was done and safely free of the cave, his confidence returned.  He was in his element.  He was disguised, and he just needed to blend in and listen. 

The area he was in was entirely surrounded by wooden boxes of supplies.  They were stacked tall in surprisingly organized piles, and he actually had to do some maneuvering to get himself out from behind them all.  The trolls had done a great job of hiding the Unth’s little escape hole.  Xandrith took mental stock of the entire area, memorizing exactly where his boulder was and what boxes he would need to maneuver around to get back to his way out.  He might need to leave in a rush, and the route was already difficult without him being unable to find it in a hurry.  With his immediate situation well in hand, Xandrith moved out into the horde. 

The trolls were everywhere.  None of them even looked in Xan’s direction as he stepped out from the crates and into the organized chaos of the war camp.  The assassin had been among armies before.  He knew the ins and outs of how their camps worked, and this one was familiar for all that it was alien.  There was a tension of violence that radiated from all the men and women warriors, and there were members of both sexes represented in the combatants.  Troll women were not unlike their men in that they varied greatly from one individual to the next.  The characteristics that marked them as female were what one would expect, breasts, smaller horns, slighter builds than the men, but none of these things made them seem weak by any standard.

Some of the warriors gambled with dice, some were maintaining equipment and running errands.  Those ones could have been members of any army that Xandrith had ever seen.  Others were fighting, and Xan had seen that amidst human armies as well, but never to the level that these monsters battled.  Two large males were throwing each other around as other, smaller trolls watched and cheered them on.  Black blood poured onto the ground as one troll ripped the other open, spilling blood and guts to the ground to the joyous uproar of those nearby.  No one seemed distressed about the fighting, the blood, or the injuries.  This was troll social behavior. 

A few feet away just beyond the combat circle, a massive female troll was rutting with a male who she’d pinned to the ground by the neck. The male looked terrified, but he was still performing admirably. Other males were nearby, obviously excited by what they were witnessing.

All of this Xandrith spotted in his first few moments out into the horde.  The enormity of the task he’d just undertaken struck him at that moment.  He had to navigate this mess of violence and horror and find some very particular information without being killed.  He thought of the male pinned to the ground by the female and added ‘and raped’ to the end of that thought. 

Xandrith pushed his way out into the mass of trolls, listening for any information that might be of use.  The trolls spoke a common human tongue, but they had a heavy accent that made some of what they said difficult to understand. Parts of the language were entirely foreign, but Xan did his best to decipher what he heard without looking like he was listening too closely to anything in particular.  He could only guess that being caught eavesdropping would be taken badly. 

“The last troop called to the front was slaughtered to the last troll.”  Xandrith overheard one troll talking over a spit of roasting meat to another group of trolls.  “At least we haven’t had a shortage of meat yet.”  The creature laughed and his fellows joined it.  Xandrith’s stomach recoiled in horror.  He’d have to remember not to eat while he was here, not that he thought that would be a problem. 

He walked further into the troll camp, avoiding large groups whenever possible, and sticking to the least densely occupied pockets of space.  He tried to walk as though he had some purpose, and no one seemed to notice his progress.  For a time Xandrith progressed without hearing a single useful piece of information, but then something interesting caught his ear. 

“…general’s meeting with Krotek and the human knights.” the troll chewed over the last two words as though he found them distasteful. “Later tonight. They say there are new orders coming down the chain.” A very large, dark green skinned troll was talking to a female creature almost as large as he was but with yellow tinged flesh.

“Maybe they’ve come up with a way to stop us from grinding the mud-grunts into that shiny wall.” The female chuckled. “I’ll miss watching them die. They’re an amusingly pathetic bunch.”

The male answered her laugh with one of his own. “Whatever the new plan might be, I hope it works. I’m tired of sitting back here waiting. I want to get inside those walls and rip those strange little humans apart with my hands. I want to feel their insides between my fingers, and rub their thin blood against my skin.”

The female reached out the upper set of her four arms and stroked the male’s chest.  “I’d like to see that.”  She said, her voice deepening.  Her second set of arms reached behind her back and began unlacing the heavy leather wrapping around her torso.  Xandrith looked away before that scene could go any further towards damaging his already broken mind.

Whoever General Krotek was, he was meeting with some humans.  That was an important bit of information.  The humans might be bonesteel blade wielders.  One of them might be the woman who’d taken the knife, and the other people might be important allies if Xandrith could get Haley to free them from their curse the way she’d freed Crow and herself.  He doubted they were serving the troll cause willingly.  What human would willingly serve a race bent on their destruction?

That wasn’t all the information Xandrith was looking for, but it was without a doubt important. He needed to try and discover where this meeting between Krotek and the humans was going to take place. Finding a general would get him closer to finding the head of the horde, and he had no doubt that the god-thing would be at the head of the army.  He left the two grunting trolls to their sport and moved on. 

He was focused so intently on listening to the conversations going on around him, that he didn’t even notice he’d caught someone’s attention until a powerful hand grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. 

“I’m talking to you, runt!”  A barking troll voice yelled in his face.  The troll was head and shoulders taller than Xan with skin a similar shade of red to the one he’d died his skin.  “I said, you’re going to give me that sword of yours.  It belongs with someone who can actually lift it.”  He reached for Xan’s troll blade and Xandrith stepped deftly back out of grabbing range. 

The larger troll’s eyes narrowed.  “Give it here and I won’t use it to cut off both your arms.”  His voice was a growl.  Xandrith needed to respond, but talking might give him away.  He could try to fake the accent, but he doubted he could do it convincingly for any length of time. 

“Mine.”  He said, growling on the word fiercely and placing his hand on the hilt of the giant sword. 

The other’s eyes lit up with a terrible glee and Xandrith realized in that moment that he’d done exactly what the troll had wanted him to do.  This wasn’t about the sword at all.  The sword the Unth had provided him wasn’t a bad weapon, but it wasn’t worth fighting over either.  This troll had picked a fight with him because he was smaller and looked easy to win a fight with.  He was here to kill Xandrith to soothe his own lust for blood and to make himself look more powerful to the others of his brigade.  A crowd was already starting to gather around. 

“I guess I’ll just have to take it from your corpse.”  The troll licked his lips as he drew a wicked looking mace from where it hung at his hip.  The weapon was crude steel with several protruding, twisted spikes rising from its surface.  Again, like the sword, it looked like a mean weapon.  The trolls designed everything to look as angry as they were inside.  Xandrith drew his sword and the crowd around them began to cheer and jeer in expectancy.  The assassin could hear the call for bets taken in rations and rights to loot and slaughter once the walls were down.  Death was hanging above like a dark cloud, and the trolls were thriving in its shadow. 

The troll with the mace advanced on Xandrith immediately.  He had a confident stride that told Xandrith he didn’t consider loss a possibility.  The first swing of the mace swept well wide of its mark, which was Xan’s head.  Xandrith barely had to move out of the way.  The troll was toying with him for the joy of the spectators.  A terrible laugh began to rise up in Xan’s throat.  It exploded from between his lips as he easily ducked a third attack, and then a fourth.