Read Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon for Free Online

up!”
    “Right, right,” Clagg said, blithering as if to remind himself of the details of this most basic plan. “Cut therope and you haul me up. To safety.”
    “And Killeen too!”
    “She’s dead,” Clagg said. “She
must
be dead.”
    “No, I am
not
!” said Killeen weakly. “I just can’t find a way out of these straps!”
    “Cut her free!” Dougal said.
    “No!” Clagg said, his voice rising hysterically. “No time!”
    A crash came from the other side of the lower chamber, and Gyda screamed, this time in pain. Then Dougal heard her hammer start pounding again, even faster than before.
    “Cut Killeen free and I’ll haul you both up!” Dougal shook his fist with the rope in it at Clagg and snarled. “Do it now or I’ll toss the rope down and let you die with Gyda!”
    Clagg squeaked something inaudible, then set to work with a knife.
    “Thank you,” Dougal heard Killeen say to the asura.
    Gyda bellowed from the other side of the room. “By the Bear! How many times must I slay this damned thing?”
    Dougal peered deeper into the gloomy hole. The norn stood near the pillar, stooped with exhaustion, her body heaving to catch a breath, her warrior’s braid shredded, sweat and blood from a hundred small wounds pouring over her tattoos and fur. The fragmented tomb guardian continued to re-form, pulling replacement parts from the walls and floor. Gyda’s eyes met Dougal’s, and for the first time Dougal saw real fear in her face: the fear of someone who had realized she had picked anunwinnable fight.
    Gyda raised her hammer and pointed beyond Dougal and toward the tomb’s entrance. “Go,” she said, and turned back to the re-forming guardian, her hammer raised.
    “Ready!” Clagg tugged on the line. “Haul us up now! Please ?”
    Dougal backed up into the chamber leading into the crypt and set his feet against the top step. He began hauling on the rope as hard as he could, reeling it in an arm’s length at a time. Individually, the asura and the sylvari weren’t heavy, but together they added up to the weight of a good-sized man. Dougal let his fear of the beast below—and the knowledge that it would soon finish the wounded, exhausted norn—spur him on.
    Then Dougal heard something that sank his heart. The hammering had stopped.
    “Hurry!” Clagg screeched. “It’s coming!”
    Now Dougal heard the rough clacking of dozens of bones smacking rhythmically on the stone floor in the chamber below, coming closer with each beat. Dougal tried to brace himself when he heard Killeen scream, and the rope yanked him up the top step and back into the chamber, toward the gaping hole. He strained against it, knocking several bones over the threshold before him. He watched them skitter into the hole as he came closer and closer to following them down.
    As his feet reached the edge of the hole, Dougal held on to the rope with one hand and snagged the door frame with the other. The strain threatened to rip his arms from their sockets, but he somehow managedto hold on, and planting his feet against the bottom of the frame, gripped the rope with both hands. Staring down the length of the rope, he spied Clagg and Killeen hanging from its far end. Clagg had knotted a loop under Killeen’s arms, and now he clung to her shoulders with a grip so desperate, his gray fingers had turned white.
    Just below them, the blood-spattered, mostly shattered tomb guardian had snagged the sylvari’s leg with a composite arm fashioned from dozens of people’s limbs. Still reassembling itself, the creature swung a wild punch at Killeen and Clagg with its other arm, but the partially formed limb fell to pieces even as it swung. A wave of bone dust buffeted the two trapped adventurers.
    “Help!” Clagg wailed. “Damn you, Dougal! Save us!”
    The tomb guardian brought its already re-forming arm back again, stronger this time. Dougal looked around for an option, a tool, anything within reach, that could be used to distract,