Chapter Two – Heart of Stone, House of Pain

Peregrine climbed her way up the cliff face from which the waterfall cascaded, the first to ascend, making her way with the speed and grace of a mountain goat.  She picked a path to the top using slender ledges and narrow cracks.  The crew, sailors all, and used to climbing aloft in the rigging in storm tossed seas, could not match the sword-maiden, born as she was in the wild hill country where such climbs were but second nature to her people.

Securing a rope that she had taken aloft with her around a stout tree, she tossed the rest of it back down below, and one by one the others swung their way up to join her.  Turning her gaze to the way ahead, Peregrine saw that it was much as it had been along the route they had already followed, of a shallow stream flowing through thickly crowded foliage, lost in the darkening green of an entwining canopy above.  The stream arrowed onwards, straight towards the shrouded peak that rose at the heart of the island, its steep slopes verdant with jungle growth.

Once more they set forth, deeper into the jungle and the island, splashing along the stream.  No more than perhaps a hundred yards in, Peregrine brought them to a halt, holding up a hand to stop the others.

“Problems?” Vaspari asked, wiping away sweat that dripped from his brow with the back of his hand.  The stifling heat saw them all drenched.

“There lurks something within the trees, over yonder,” Peregrine replied, speaking quietly to him.  She pointed off into the entangled growth that crowded in about them.  Off in the direction that she indicated they could make out a lurking shadow of unspecified description.  With a silent, wolf-like gait, Peregrine stalked through the jungle towards it, followed shortly thereafter by a number of the others,

The shadow emerged from among the trees as she closed in on it, a statue of black stone, half fallen, and beyond it could be spotted shattered pillars and tumbled masonry, overgrown by vines and much abraded by the ages so that their exact nature and form could no longer be easily discernible.  The statue itself had been reduced to little more than a misshapen lump of stone that retained only a vague resemblance to a human form, if that had even been its initial countenance.

About the whole were draped snaking vines, tangled like so many coils of rope, all laden with delicate white flowers.  A heavy, all too sweet scent hung in the air, emanating from them.

“Stop!” Blade warned abruptly, his rapier slithering free from its scabbard.  Using the blade of the rapier, he shifted aside one of the thick strands of vine.  “Tis the Blood Vine,” he announced.  Those nearby shifted back with great alacrity, for none there wished to be touched by so virulent a plant, one whose lightest featherings could leave such a devilish rash that a man would claw his own skin to bloody lesions in an effort to seek relief.

“This place is of little import,” Blade went on, sheathing his rapier once more.  “Mad Dog made no mention of this.”

“He may not have even been aware of it,” Vaspari rumbled.  “If it twere not for Peregrine’s sharp eyes, we would not have seen it for ourselves.”

They returned to the stream, continuing along it, the water flowing and gurgling about them.  In time they came to a most unusual formation, a naturally formed bridge of rock, beneath which the stream flowed.  The tunnel that led through the rock was long, the far end but a faint glimmer of light.  Atop it grew thick undergrowth, and trees that towered high into the air.  They entered into the tunnel that the stream had carved out over vast ages.

“There,” Peregrine said.  Upon the wall of the tunnel, just within the entrance, another of Mad Dog’s skull markings could be seen to have been carved, mostly concealed beneath a coating of slime and moss and dripping water.

“Mad Dog’s Heat of Stone, I should not wonder,” Blade opinioned as he peered down the length of the naturally formed tunnel, at vines dangling from the ceiling, whilst the echo of dripping water reverberated around.

“Progress, at least,” Vaspari rumbled.  “What is his next infernal rhyme as to where to proceed to next?”

“Once he had reached the entrance of the Heart of Stone,” Blade replied after a moment of thought, “He spoke of entering the House of the Sun, which led the way to the House of Pain.”

“I do not much recognise the reference to the House of Pain,” Vaspari noted, “And fear just what that may entail, but the House of the Sun, as any good sailor knows, is the west, where the sun retires each evening.”

“West it is then,” Peregrine said.  She strode back out of the entrance of the tunnel and climbed up the bank of the stream, plunging headlong into the jungle.  Vines and undergrowth grew thick about, and these she took to with her cutlass, butchering her way westwards, forced to hack a path through the long grass, the fronds and branches of the verdant viridian that closed in so tight about them that all trace of what lay beyond the next few steps was shrouded from sight.

The work on carving a path was tiring and limbs grew heavy with fatigue the further on they pressed, while the heat suffocated them like a blanket, each breath drawing in hot air.  Sweat flowed freely and a myriad of insects buzzed around, plaguing them with their noise and bites.  Loud cries echoed through the canopy of the trees, from birds and creatures unseen.

Into the depths of the jungle they cut their way, and were it not for the sun above to guide them, all sense of direction would have been lost.

“This is most problematic,” Blade noted, brushing by a branch half severed by a blow from Peregrine’s cutlass.  “We could pass within but a stone’s throw of Mad Dog’s House of Pain, and yet not lay an eye upon it, or indeed, upon anything else until we reach the shore again on the far side of the island.”

Peregrine halted in mid stroke, gazing intently around her.  “That can be solved,” she replied, handing her cutlass, the edge blunted by much use, to Blade.  Seeking out the tallest of the nearby trees, she shimmied up it with the speed of a frolicking monkey, disappearing into the canopy above.  From her vantage point she could spy out the island, across the waves of the jungle growth, to the shimmering seas beyond.

Only a short moment after clambering above, her voice hailed back down.  “There is something ahead of us, or thereabouts.  I can not make out precise what it is, but there appears to be a clearing in the midst of the jungle, perhaps two hundred paces away.”

Peregrine came swinging back down out of the tree to rejoin the others.  Reclaiming her cutlass, she once more led the way towards the clearing she had spotted, clearing a path through the jungle.  Fresh vigour had been lent to their limbs upon the realisation that their destination might be close at hand, and with it the treasure they had come far to claim.

The soft, fertile soil that they have been treading upon gave way, of a sudden, to a hard surface. Peregrine knelt down, hammering at it with the hilt of her cutlass. The ringing sound of metal upon stone came by way of response.

“Worked stone,” she announced after a closer inspection. “This is not mere rock. It has been built by hands.”

Stepping out from the jungle into the clearing Peregrine had espied from aloft in the tree, the corsairs found themselves in a courtyard laid down with pavers of black stone. Around it were strung columns, wavering all askance, no two at the same angle. Their design was of a type hitherto unknown to any there, alien in their twisted form, one that almost hurt the eyes to gaze upon such was the ill-nature of their shape. Upon each column the images of hanging skeletons were carved, though they were not those of humans, for they were far too long and thin for that; their skulls likewise were of similar shape, deformed out of human proportions.

Seated in the centre of the courtyard rose a black stone altar, set with four wicked spikes, one at each corner. Radiating outwards from the altar across the courtyard were channels, for the flow of blood spilt upon the altar.

A low murmur rose from the corsairs as they gazed upon the site, and many of them made warding signs against evil, for, in the stillness of the air and the stifling heat, there hung a tangible feel of oppression, even a lingering malice, one that had seeped into the very fabric of the stones around them, and against which none, not even the bravest, were inured.

“There is an ill aspect about this place,” Vaspari noted in low, growling tones, fingering the hilt of his sword with nervous energy. Peregrine stalked like a wolf with its hackles raised and fangs bared, her sharp amber eyes searching for the danger felt but that remained unseen. She paced the courtyard, alert and tense.

“Well did Mad Dog name this place the House of Pain,” Blade stated. “I have not seen the likes of it before with my own eyes, yet I have heard it spoken of, and it was a place of torments, where Zoacana necromancers and priests plied their vile arts. Their victims, be they those of their own kind or primitive humans, were stretched out across the altars like the one here, whereupon their hands and feet were driven down onto the spikes. Lying there helpless, the priests cut them and bled them dry.”

“Surely no mere spikes could restrain them,” Peregrine said.

“There was more to it than that,” Blade announced gravely. “Black sorcery was at play, weighing down limbs so that they felt as lead, unable to be raised as the life blood flowed out of them.”

Peregrine grunted, unconvinced. For one of her iron resolve, such a thing seemed implausible.

“The blood flowed down those channels,” Blade continued on, pointing to the grooves running across the courtyard, “To where it was then collected for use in heathen rites.”

“Collected how?” Vaspari inquired. Eager as he was to depart from the place, a morbid curiosity bade him to ask. “It would appear as if it would simply flow out into the jungle.”

“From the way these things were built,” Blade began to explain, eyes half lidded in their normal languid manner, “The blood most likely drained into collection chambers that were carved out beneath the ground. Mad Dog did speak of descending into the Heart of Torment, which is a good as a description as any I have heart for it.” Blade set off tracking one of the channels that ran through the black stone courtyard towards the jungle. He halted just short of where the trees commenced. “Here,” he announced.

Where he stood, the channel ended at a hole drilled through the middle of one of the broad, black flagstones. There the blood drained from the channel, falling into an unseen opening below. Vaspari prodded at it with a boot when he had joined Blade.

“The question now is how to reach the chamber,” Vaspari said, focusing his single eye on the drain, his brow furrowed in thought. “One would guess that there is an entrance hereabouts.”

“From Mad Dog’s clues in his rhyme, it is not in the immediate vicinity.”

“There is a quicker way,” Peregrine told them. For one whose thoughts were direct and to the point, a result of her heritage far from the convoluted ideas that graced civilised lands, the alternative came easy. The sophistry, the subtlety, the deviousness of the sophisticated was not her way.

“How?” Blade inquired, his somnolent expression for a moment sparking with interest.

Fianna tapped at the flagstones with her bare foot. “We go through here. We know that there is a hole already, so why exhaust time searching for the other way in when we can simply utilise what is already at hand?”

Vasapri laughed in response and clapped his hands together. “Most ingenious,” he stated, waving the rest of his crew across to where he stood. Giving orders to them, he set them to work on a flagstone, endeavouring to lever it up. A number of sailors utilised pikes of fine Khordosa steel in an effort to lift the heavy stone up, jamming them in the gaps between the stones and hauling away. The pikes were recent acquisitions, taken from a Khordosan merchant galley that had fallen to the corsairs, their prized steel an unexpected and valued part of the haul.

A great deal of effort and straining went into the work, though the flagstone could not resist the exertion of the crew and finally it was heaved aside, revealing the raw stone of the ground beneath, in which a narrow opening could be seen, leading into the stygian chambers below.

Peregrine knelt down on hands and knees to peer through the opening. Scarcely seen in the scant luminance that seeped in through, she could make out a large stone jar, and just barely, the floor of the chamber upon which it sat.

“We are going to have to widen the opening if we are to squeeze through,” Vaspari rumbled. More than any other present, he would require it expanded to accommodate his not inconsiderable girth.

Hammers were brought forward to widen the hole, carried by a number of the corsairs should they have been needed in the search for the treasure. Chips of stone flaked free as they pounded away, falling down to clatter into the stone jar below, which sat empty, or so it sounded by their fall.

The progress was slow, taking much back breaking effort before at last it was judged wide enough for them to enter the hidden chamber. Peregrine was first to go after having sheathed her cutlass, lowering her body through the opening before swinging clear of the stone jar and releasing, to fall to the ground with barely a hint of a sound. The steely scrape of cold iron being drawn echoed back up to the waiting corsairs as Peregrine readied herself. She stretched forth her senses to detect any lurking dangers that may have been waiting, cutlass held steady before her.

On to Chapter Three – Into the Heart of Torment