The Alchemist's Lair: Part 7

We were separated into several groups and placed into different holding cells. The Royal Treasure Hunters members, plus the professor, were placed in one room, while the soldiers were taken somewhere else – separated into two groups, as I was later to discover. I am not sure what the room we were placed in was used for originally. Like the main entrance, it had a metallic sliding door, except this time it was vertical. In the distant past, it could be opened and shut by a mere push of a button, but now it was dead and unusable. The bandits violently lifted it and, since it couldn’t be operated, they constructed a crude wooden door themselves, which they kept shut with a padlock.

We were, for all intents and purposes, resigned to the fact that our mission was to end in failure. The possibility remained we could return in the future, with a greater fighting force, provided the king was willing to finance it, but given our shameful display, keeping his trust seemed far from certain. With the benefit of hindsight, and knowledge of the king’s character, the consequences would probably be minimal if we were to sit quietly and wait for ransom to be paid, but our spirits were low after getting captured so effortlessly and we were quick to assume the worst, with Rhombus going so far as to magnanimously offer us jobs at his family’s estate after we all get kicked out of the Treasure hunters. And even if no one spelled it out, a tinge of doubt remained in our minds that the king could refuse to pay the ransom, leaving us to our fates.

Four times we were fed during our stay in prison, meagre meals of moldy bread, water, and some sort of dried meat which could barely be chewed, but how much time passed between them I cannot say. Our room was underground, and thus had no windows by which we could tell the time of day. We tried concocting several escape plans, but each of them seemed way too risky to attempt in practice. So, for now, we were biding our time.

As I was lying on the cell’s floor, in a lethargic half-sleep borne out of sheer boredom, I started to notice a commotion somewhere within the facility. The guard who kept watch over our cell had run off somewhere, his presence likely needed to deal with whatever problem had arisen. Commotion eventually escalated into gunfire – a quick explosion of violence at first, but it quickly became sporadic. This sudden exchange of fire roused us all, and we quickly got on our feet, waiting nervously for something to happen.

A silhouette appeared behind our cell door, took a look through the bars, and shot the padlock with a handgun. The door opened and, to our immense surprise and relief, Iocasta and Civet appeared in the frame.

It would be a while before I was told the entire story of how they came to rescue us, but here seems a natural point to briefly turn back the time and switch to their point of view. After Civet had finished with his scientific endeavors, his group followed the main body of our expedition at a brisk pace, intending to catch up with us as quickly as possible. They were within earshot when the bandits sprang their ambush, so they immediately halted, and Iocasta went ahead to check out the situation.

At the moment, there was nothing to be done to help, so she went back and reported to Civet and the two remaining soldiers. They followed us and the bandits at a safe distance until the valley where we were initially supposed to camp. From there, they went in a different direction from us, Iocasta leading the way, until they found a small, hard-to-spot cave. There she left the other three, explicitly forbidding them to light a fire, and left to scout.

Bandit tracks were fairly easy for an expert tracker like herself to follow. She returned around noon the next day, looking haggard and exhausted, but knowing exactly where the bandit hideout was located.

“They seem to be based out of this cave of sorts”, she reported to Civet and the soldiers, “except it has a strange metallic gate. It looks like they have no idea how to open it fully, so a single man can barely enter. They keep their hadrosaurs in a stable nearby”.

“Metallic gate?” Civet’s interest was piqued. “From your description, the place sounds High Borchian. Maybe it’s the very laboratory we are supposed to be looking for”.

“That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t help us get our friends out of bandits’ clutches”.

“Actually, it just might”, retorted Civet. “These underground facilities, or the few we know about at least, tend to have complex ventilation networks which have to surface somewhere. The shafts can be fairly tight; there’s no way someone like Clossar could infiltrate that way, for instance, but it shouldn’t be a problem for the two of us”.

And thus, after a quick brainstorming session, a plan was devised. After Iocasta had a few hours of well-deserved sleep, she went on another scouting trip and, following Civet’s instructions on what to look out for, discovered a ventilation system grate that could be reached without too much trouble.

The entire group moved until they were in the vicinity of the laboratory. From there, Civet and Iocasta went to infiltrate the vents. Julia and Andre had a different job. The plan was for them to wait another hour and a half, which their allies would use to get a general gist of the facility’s layout and try to determine where the locations of interest, such as weapon storage or holding cells, were. After that, the two soldiers were supposed to release the hadrosaurs from the stable and set the improvised building on fire, as a diversionary commotion that would drag a portion of the enemies outside and leaving Iocasta as much time to release and arm us as possible, as well as reducing the number of foes we would have to face on the way out.

The infiltration initially went smoothly, though not as silently as Iocasta had hoped. The vents made turns at strange and uncomfortable angles, as they weren’t designed with humans moving through them in mind, and the two infiltrators were at the receiving end of several comments to the tune of, “Looks like the rats are breeding again”. Thankfully, no one felt the urge to shoot at the supposed vent rats.

During their exploration of the unexpectedly massive facility, they discovered that most of our equipment was stashed in a small, cramped, lightly guarded room. They also found two of the holding cells and decided that the wisest course of action would be to release the prisoners closest to the weapons, then make a run for the supplies and free the rest of the captives. Unfortunately, they completely failed to discover the third holding cell, so half of the men had to spend the foreseeable future in a state of terrified helplessness, while the violence in the rest of the laboratory kept escalating.

Civet and Iocasta waited near the first cell until they heard someone shouting “fire!”, and then another minute for good measure. Then Iocasta jumped out of the vent, just around the corner of the target room. This process was far from silent by necessity, but she had accounted for that. She waited for the guard to investigate and, as soon as he popped around the corner, tackled him before he could sound an alarm or even comprehend what was going on. This stunned him for a moment – more than enough time for her to get swiftly around him, cover his mouth with one hand to stop him from screaming, and slit his throat.

After he stopped twitching, Iocasta rummaged through his pockets, sighing with relief upon finding a key in one of them. Opening the cell, she discovered Sergeant Nixon and eight of his men.

“Can’t say I expected you”, remarked the sergeant, “but since you’re here, I think I can assume you have a plan to get us out?”

The said plan was explained to them while they were being untied. “It’s risky. We’re bound to take more casualties”, commented Nixon. “It would’ve been more prudent to wait for ransom, I think, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t like this better. Lead the way”.

They made their way to the storage room without incident. Even the guard in front of it had left, presumably, to deal with the fire. Civet and Iocasta went inside, as there was no more space, and started handing equipment to the soldiers outside. It was then that the plan ran into a hitch, and what the two had hoped would be a quick escape turned into a prolonged battle.

Partway through the process of arming the soldiers, a group of bandits stumbled from behind the corner. Only around half of the men had any equipment whatsoever, and only a couple had the time to load their rifles, so they retreated, exchanging a few bullets with their surprised enemies. The bandits ran after them. The soldiers would soon get pinned down in a large room, where the two groups entered a stalemate, sporadically exchanging fire, bandits unable to advance and soldiers unable to break out without sustaining heavy casualties.

One silver lining at this moment was that, concerned with chasing Nixon’s men, the bandits failed to notice Iocasta and Civet in the dark storage room. They decided the best course of action at this point would be to release the rest of the captives and attempt to help the sergeant out, so they took some of the equipment and ran off. A minute later, Iocasta was shooting the padlock of our cell, and we return once again to events I was personally present for.