The Game of Fates (24 page)

After
a few moments, Trallik reached out and took Trikki’s hand in his own.

To
his utter surprise, she sat up and took the soggy long tunic that served as a
dress off over her head.

Turning
quickly away, Trallik’s scales were the deepest shade of red they’d ever been,
though the green phosphorescence hid both that and the fact that he was letting
off a lot more heat than normal.  It was only the strength of his upbringing
that had made him turn away, the same upbringing that told him females like
this were trouble.

Behind
him Trikki giggled as she wrung the water from her dress.

“You’re
never been with a female, have you?” she asked.

Trallik,
still turning away, shook his head slowly, not wanting to admit his naïveté to
the object of his affection.  From somewhere deep inside him, his mother’s
voice seemed to be telling him that this shouldn’t be happening.  The type of
young females that make good lifemates and mothers don’t do such things, the
voice seemed to be saying.  He ignored it.

After
a few moments, she had finished wringing the water from her long tunic and put
it back on, the sound of the belt fastening in place bringing Trallik relief. 

Coming
to sit next to him, Trikki looked up into his eyes, her own eyes a mix of
sadness and amusement, though for once he saw an honest sincerity in them.

“You
are a strange one, Trallik,” she said, “but I love you for it.  You kept your
head when we lost ours.  You got me out of there alive because you could see
past the riches.” 

“I
couldn’t save Klimer,” he said.

“He
was a nice kobold, I guess… but he wasn’t my cousin,” she admitted.

Trallik
looked at her in confusion.  “Who was he, then?”

“Just
another kobold slave Mushrat bought a few days before he bought you.  I wanted
to be sure of you.  A young female has to be careful, you know.”

Trallik
shook his head at her careful deception.  “So are you sure of me now?” he
asked.

Trikki
smiled a coy smile.  “You wouldn’t even take me when I offered myself to you,”
she paused, the intent of her action made plain.  “You’re a really good
person.  Any other male wouldn’t have resisted.”

“It’s
that in my gen, we don’t do those things until we’re mated,” Trallik explained
shyly.  “It’s in the Scrolls of Heritage,” he said almost apologetically.

Trikki
had never heard of these scrolls Trallik mentioned, but that didn’t deter her. 
“What does it take to be mated?” she asked. 

From
somewhere deep inside him, his mother’s voice seemed to be telling him to run,
not walk, away from this fast-mover.  He ignored the voice yet again.

Trallik’s
brow rose.  “Well, the pair stand in front of the lord of the gen, they promise
to give themselves to each other, then they exchange tokens of their love for
each other.  The lord of the gen then pronounces them lifemates.”

“I
thought you said you were exiled?” she said in her most unabashed voice, a coy
smile playing across her face as Trallik began to realize what exactly she was
suggesting.

Digging
into the pouch where he’d stuffed some stones and jewelry, Trallik dug out a
necklace with a particularly large diamond set in the middle of it.  Trikki had
begun digging into her sack as well.

“I
have a token of my love for you,” he said.

Holding
up a length of golden wire twisted into the shape of a snake ring, its eyes
shining with tiny, bright rubies, Trikki said, “I have mine for you as well.”

The
pair of genless kobolds knelt facing each other.

“I
give myself to you,” Trikki said, trying the ring on various fingers until
finding that the only digit it would fit was Trallik’s left index finger.  The
two of them giggled the whole time.

“I
give myself to you,” Trallik replied, unclasping the necklace and placing it
against the small scales of her bosom.  As he did the clasp up behind her neck,
she licked his ear, both of them laughing in the process.

“With
this, I, Trallik the Outcast, say that we are lifemates.”

Kneeling
and holding each other’s hands, Trikki asked, “So what now?” 

Trallik
was looking down to where the diamond on its long chain had finally come to
rest.  “That’s the end of the ceremony.”

Trikki
giggled.

Trallik’s
mother’s voice had nothing more to say.

The
time that the young lifemates spent in that underground grotto would be forever
frozen in Trallik’s mind and heart.  Long after the tremendously emotionally
impacting events of these weeks had become jumbled memories, the details of
them being lost to history, the memory of those many hours spent with her in
the twilight of phosphorescent light would remain sharp and clear.  To the end
of his mortal days, and forever after he had gone to join the ancestors in the
worlds beyond, the light of green phosphorescence would bring Trallik a sense of
exuberance, and other emotions that would be added over time.

For
now, Trikki was tired of the grotto.  It was too cold for her liking, there was
too much mud, and she wanted to see the sun again.  Trallik wanted to stay, for
this moment to last forever.  After all, they had been keeping each other warm
for some time, had found a dry spot of sand, there were fish in the pond, and
the water wasn’t so bad, once you got used to the taste of limestone.  She was
insistent, however. 

Trallik
was beginning to understand the different emotions that played across her
countenance.  Right now, standing before her, he could see that the same greed
he’d seen in her eyes back in the well was beginning to return.  She had been
looking through her bag of jewelry and even as he looked in her eyes he could
see that the possibilities it represented were spinning through her head at an
alarming rate.  Trallik was no longer the focus of her attention.

“Alright,
Trikki,” he nodded.  “Let’s go.  Do you know how to get out of here?”

Trikki’s
face lit up, the pouty frown disappearing.  “Uh-huh!  There’s a little river
not far from here.  Klimer and I found an old boat and moved it to the shore,
but we weren’t brave enough to get in and chance the stream.  But with you…”
she said, sidling up to him.  “I think that this is the same river that runs
out below Demon’s Bridge.  I think there’s an exit from the caves into the
southern valley.  From there the river goes to the caves of the outcasts below
the southern gens.”  Looking back up at him, she continued, “I want to go to
your gen, though, Trallik.  I don’t want to go back to my people.”

“Alright. 
Well, let’s get going then.”

Trallik
looked back with longing one last time as they climbed through a hole in one
wall of the grotto into the chamber beyond.

Only
a couple of chambers over from the grotto the pair came to the sandy shore of
the stream.  Sitting to wash the mud off of themselves from the mudflat they’d
had to crawl through, Trallik looked over at the boat.  It had to be ancient. 
It was well constructed, being built from planks with oars set in brackets, but
it had the look of something that had thinned and been made fragile with the
passing of many decades, perhaps centuries.

Standing,
Trallik walked through the sand to examine the boat further.  There were a
number of small bundles in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in various cloths
and skins.  Opening a couple of them, he found they were mostly full of
rations, clothes, and various tools and other goods.

“You’ve
been planning this for a while, haven’t you?” he remarked.

Trikki
looked up at him innocently.  “The orcs didn’t miss this stuff.  They’re very
careless with their things.  It only took a few weeks to gather this stuff.”

Trallik
wondered if, perhaps, she would have loved him the same if he hadn’t been her
ticket to freedom, as he now saw that he was.  It was as if his arrival and her
desire to escape had coincided perfectly.  He only hoped that her love for him
would last once they were back in the relative safety of the Kale Gen.

They
were lifemates!  Trallik shook his head.  The doubts that had begun to
percolate into his mind were completely unfounded.  After all, he had wanted
her just as much as she seemed to want him.  They had made a vow and were
life
mates. 
That, alone, was all that mattered.  Breathing deeply, Trallik got back to the
task at hand.

Looking
at the bottom and sides of the boat, he could see that the planks were mostly
intact.  A couple of the planks had loosened somewhat, but someone had lathered
them with tar giving them some chance of staying together, the tar-stained bowl
and stick that had been used to mend the boat laying off to one side.

“Well,
I think it will work alright.  I’m not skilled with such things, but it can’t
be all that hard.  I think we each take an oar, point the boat down the river,
then go.”

Loading
their stuff into the boat, Trallik pushed the boat into the stream then jumped
in.  It wasn’t long before Trallik figured out that he and Trikki had no idea
how to make the oars work.  So, instead of leaving them in their brackets, he
pulled the oars out and, sitting in the bow of the boat, he used one of them to
push the boat away from the walls of the channel it seemed to be following and
tried to keep it straight it in its journey as it floated gently down the
river.

The
spring runoff had begun in earnest, and it wasn’t long before the swollen
stream began moving faster, the roof above them beginning to press down on them
as they went down a slight slide.  Trikki put her arms around Trallik from
behind.  She was talking in excited, fearful tones, but Trallik wasn’t
listening.  He was too busy trying to keep the boat from slamming into the
jagged rock walls to hear her above the churning of the water around them.

Suddenly,
the ceiling of the passage lowered down almost to the waterline.  Ducking to
the floor of the boat, and knocking Trikki down in the process, Trallik braced
himself.  Within moments a jarring crash split the bow of the vessel and the
boat was stuck between the rock of the ceiling and the water that pushed the
boat upwards.  The ice-cold water of the spring runoff began to flow into the
boat with alarming speed.

Trikki
was panicking, screaming in part from fear, and in part from the extreme cold
of the water.  Trallik yelled for her to help him push.  Placing his hands and
feet against the ceiling, he pushed down with all his might.  Ice water was
flowing in around them.  Trallik continued pushing, hoping that this little dip
was it, that he wasn’t simply pushing them to their deaths.

After
several moments the water had almost completely flooded the little boat. 
Trallik could see that it was a lost cause.  At that moment the boat began to
slide down.  It was a chute!  Grabbing hold of Trikki, who in turn had a death
grip on her bag of jewelry, Trallik took a deep breath.  The current pulled the
pair down the chute along with it, both of them holding to each other in the
freezing water as they plunged downward within the shell of the ancient
rowboat.

Completely
submerged in the freezing water, the pair held onto each other as they rolled
downward, buffeted by the boat that had carried them this far.  Suddenly, the
boat wedged itself between two large rocks, creating something of a barrier to
the massive stream, the flow of water slackening for one precious moment.  In
that moment, Trallik and Trikki shot out of the chute, flying through the
falling water into a pool at the bottom of the flow.  The pair floundered
around in the bottom of the pool for a moment, Trikki not wanting to release
her death grip on her bag, and Trallik doing everything in his power to drag
the both of them up to the surface in the freezing darkness.

Suddenly,
just above Trallik the hull of their boat sliced through the water.  Grabbing
hold of it, the still somewhat buoyant wood dragged the pair to the surface
along with it.  Trallik and Trikki coughed and choked as their heads finally
popped out of the water.  Seeing that Trikki was almost spent, the coolness of
her figure showing dull gray in the darkness, Trallik tried to guide the boat
to the edge.  Once within just a step or two’s distance of the shore, he let go
of the boat and dragged his almost comatose companion to the shore.

Trikki
lay on the sand coughing and vomiting for some time, dry-heaving until her
aching stomach and burning lungs had released all that was in them.  Trallik
had fared much better.  He sat next to her, rubbing her arm and digging up the
sand where she had vomited, throwing it back into the stream, not wanting the
sight and smell of it to induce more vomiting.  Not long after, Trikki had
curled up in a ball and fell into a fitful sleep, her wet bag of jewelry held
firmly to her bosom.

Looking
around the chamber, Trallik began to forage for something, anything to keep her
warm.  He wandered a couple of chambers away, climbing up and around a high
outcropping of rock to find where the wind seemed to be going.  As his head
lifted above the shelf onto the platform of rock that served as something of a
balcony to the chamber beyond, he could see several large, bright forms lying
about on the floor, probably twenty of them.  Though the wind was against him,
he could still smell the slightest hint of orc.