Anna scowled at him. “Nay, fool. Once this quest is done, it matters not to me whence you go. I would be glad to collect your share of the prize.”
“Worry about that later, Bob,” I said. “We can, uh, cross that bridge when we come to it.” I must have used that expression a hundred times in my life; how come it felt so stupid saying it about actually crossing a bridge?
We went over to the tower. The top was in ruins, but at the base the round wall looked relatively solid. I thought maybe there was something at the top, so I started up the spiral of stairs but five seconds later I stopped; the steps were covered with rubble, rubble that used to be the rest of the steps.
I came back down and shook my head. “We’re not getting up there.”
We searched everywhere for some sort of secret passageway or something. It reminded me of a puzzle game, and I had always sucked at puzzle games.
We left the castle proper and walked around it. The wall surrounding the castle grounds was in pretty bad shape, and when we walked behind the castle we saw the wall had a big hole knocked out of it. It was Elise who noticed the statue, framed by the hole, about thirty feet away.
“What’s that, I wonder.”
I knew right away it was important, and we all filed out through the hole, climbing over two feet of fallen stones. I walked fast to the statue and stopped in front of it, staring.
It reminded me of a gargoyle, but seriously grotesque and, like everything else, charred black. It was about the size of a man, crouched on a square pillar of burnt black stone.
“I know this is here for a reason. We just have to figure out why.” I ran my eyes over the scorched sculpture, over every unsettling detail. I forgot that this was just a game, feeling as though some ancient hand had carved out the evil shape a millennia ago. One of the thing’s front paws rested on the base, and the other was held out as if it wanted to shake hands. Or claw someone’s face off.
Then I noticed the thin line running between the raised leg or arm or whatever and the shoulder, like a joint. My eyes ran down over the body, over the clawed toes of the rear feet, then down to the base, and then I saw it. A slot.
A slot of a very familiar size. With a big grin I reached into my pouch and took out the big bronze coin. I dropped the coin into the slot. A second or two passed and then the gargoyle’s eyes glowed red under the sooty black.
My companions and I all exchanged nervous glances. We waited, but nothing happened. But I was pretty sure I knew what to do: I reached up and took the raised paw in my hand. As I suspected, it pivoted at the shoulder. I pulled down like I was playing slots.
With a grinding of stone, the base of the sculpture split open into two neat sections to reveal a big, beautiful sword.
“Jackpot.”
The sword was held in place by four stacks of gold coins. One for each of us. I pulled the sword from coins, a rich orange glow rippling over the blade, and the moment I did so the four of us jerked toward the castle.
We had each heard a very distinct sound, like a big stone falling. We looked at each other, then we each grabbed a stack of coins and raced back to the castle.
Our eyes darted around like hawks as we roved around the ruins. I went inside the tower.
“Guys . . .”
The three of them hurried over and stuck their heads in the entrance to the tower. Bob murmured, “I’m gonna go ahead and say this is what we’re looking for.”
At my feet a huge stone, which had formed a large section of the tower floor, was now gone. In the open space left by the stone’s absence were stairs.
The stairs led down into the darkness.
Chapter Forty-eight
“SO,” said Bob, stroking his beard as he looked down at the steps. “Who wants to go first?”
“Out of the way, wizard.” Anna pushed past him and began to descend. It seemed her desire to appear fearless and bold was stronger than her fear of the dark. I followed her and Bob was right behind me.
“I don’t want anything sneaking up behind me,” he whispered.
It wasn’t much of a whisper, since Elise said, “Oh, and I do?”
“Oh! Well, I—you’re a Level Eleven, after all.”
We crept carefully down the staircase, which followed the spiral of the tower above, our feet testing every step before committing. We sank lower into the depths, the light above us fading as we plunged further into the darkness.
Suddenly Anna swore, in Russian or whatever language she pretended not to speak, and we all froze.
“Take care—a great stone is underfoot.”
Bob lit up the end of his staff and reached it past Anna and me. It illuminated a stone—a great stone, even—that had come to rest at the base of the steps.
“From the floor,” I muttered. Beyond the stone was a doorway. As we climbed over the stone one by one, I said, “How are we supposed to see down here? Won’t it eat up a lot of Magic?”
Anna’s voice echoed in front of me. “Our way is lit. . . .”
When I stepped through the doorway I saw what she meant: stone sconces jutted from the walls, about one every ten feet or so, and in each a weird blue-green flame burned, painting the scene with an eerie glow.
A long hallway awaited us, perhaps five feet in width and seven in height. We filed down the hallway, Anna in the lead, my hand tight on my sweet new sword.
It wasn’t one of those over-the-top video-game swords. It wasn’t ten feet long, it didn’t have saw blades jutting from one side or anything like that. The subtle pattern of folded steel ran over the three-foot blade, double-edged and razor-sharp, thick at the base and tapering to a deadly point. The guard and pommel were of sturdy iron inlaid with gold. The hilt was wrapped in soft leather, the weight of sword perfectly balanced in my hands.
Despite the creepy magic light, it was still very dark. Though we moved quietly, our every step reverberated against the stone. The air felt damp and smelled musty. It reminded me of the basement in my mom’s house, and I wondered if that had been modeled too, and if my drum kit was still down there.
Maybe it’s not too late, I thought. I have eternity to practice now; if I approached playing the drums like playing video games, working my way to the next level and getting better and better, maybe in a few years or decades or whatever I’d get good enough, and I could start a band. . . . I started thinking of band names, playing on the theme of being dead, but then my thoughts were interrupted by Bob’s terse whisper.
“Whatwasthat?”
The noise was a quiet but shrill screech, and I tensed up and readied my sword, but then relaxed as I saw the source of the sound.
“It’s just a bat.” I laughed as I watched the little creature flap toward us. “It’s not going to hurt us. It’s probably just for deco—ahh fuck! It bit me! It fucking bit me!”
I tore the thing from my neck and hurled it at the wall, then I smashed it to bits with the flat of my sword. “Fucker!”
As my breathing returned to normal, I distinctly heard laughter.
“Hey, shut up you guys. . . .”
“It’s just a bat,” Bob quoted with a snicker.
“You’re the one who freaked out when you heard it.” I checked my palm, but the thing hardly did any damage, other than psychological. I still had 467, close to my max of 500.
We reached the end of the hallway and turned left, our only option.
“So this game’s a dungeon crawler now?” I said, trying to sound lighthearted and probably failing. I had already been on edge just walking down the creepy hallway, but the bat incident shook me up. The tunnel took us right and then we all stopped.
A long stretch of hallway lay before us. There was a light on the wall next to us, but that’s it; the fall of light dropped quickly away until, about fifteen feet from where we stood, only blackness awaited.
I could see Anna’s jaw flex from a tight clenching of her teeth. Her knuckles were white on her bow. I wasn’t so thrilled about the prospect of going down th
at dark tunnel either. Especially when I heard the footsteps.
Not normal footsteps. Slow, awkward steps, like someone trying to walk with splints on both legs. And if I listened carefully, I could hear more steps in the distance.
We huddled in the space between the walls, the tension growing as we waited for whatever walked toward us to step into the light. Gradually it came into view, first as a deep outline, then dimly reflecting the low green light of the lamp with bones. That’s all it was, bones, except for a few patches of decaying skin and hair and the scimitar that flashed green as its bony arm lifted up.
“I got it,” I called, stepping in front of my comrades. “Save your magic.”
The skeleton swung its weapon, but my blade knocked it away easily and flashed orange as it sliced through its brittle ribcage. By the light of my sword’s magic I glimpsed another one behind the first. Plunging into the darkness, I blindly slashed down at the spot I hoped the next skeleton would be and was rewarded with a satisfying crunch as the orange glow of my sword showed me the skull splitting open like a coconut.
I hopped back into the light. I had seen two more coming and I waited, not fearfully but eagerly, a brutal smile on my face. The leather wrapped around the hilt of my new sword felt as soft and touchable as the inside of a woman’s thigh. Despite the weight of the blade, when the next skeleton stepped out of the shadows the steel felt as light as aluminum as it sliced through the air and severed the thing’s spine.
I turned back to the others. “Come! I’ll hack my way through these walking bones!”
The three kept pace behind me as I stepped boldly into the shadows, swinging my sword left and right, slicing through one walking dead thing while the sword’s magic showed me the next. Once or twice a wicked-looking scimitar struck me, but my magic armor reduced the damage to mere scratches on my bare torso.
“Damn!” I spat as we stepped into the light of a green flame, into an empty hallway.
“What’s wrong?” asked Elise.
“I want more!” My heart was pumping, the joy of battle coursing through my veins. At that moment I felt as immersed in the game as Anna.
I led the way down the green-tinted tunnel, my steps broad and quick, throwing aside caution and fear. I wanted action.
Even when a spider with a body the size of a beanbag chair and a leg span that overfilled the hallway, furry and black and with eyes the size of saucers, I didn’t stop moving. Even as it jumped at me, I didn’t shit my loincloth but instead brought my blade down to meet its ugly face, slicing right down the middle of two giant fangs.
A mess of nasty-smelling yellow blood splattered the walls and floor. We minced over the body, Bob and Elise lifting their robes to avoid dragging the hems in the slimy gore.
“Is there no end to these confounded tunnels?” Though Bob complained, he complained in character, and I knew that, tired as he might have been of walking, he was enjoying himself. “I hunger.”
“Ten thousand pieces of gold can bring you feast upon feast,” I reminded him.
“Aye,” agreed Anna. “But the glory shall be even sweeter than gold!” For once, Anna didn’t sound out of place in the conversation.
“What be this?” I asked, coming to a halt. There was an opening in the wall to our right, but it was blocked with a thick iron grate. I strained my level-ten muscles to try and lift it, but to no avail. “For all my strength, it cannot be moved.”
“Let us move on,” suggested Elise.
I thought it could be important, but I also remembered many a game in which just such a grate had been strictly for scenery, so I moved on down the tunnel, walking down until the hallway ended and opened on the right to yet another hallway. We went around this corner, not that there was any choice.
Despite the smell of damp, I no longer thought about the basement or my drum kit or anything but the thrill of creeping through a monster-filled dungeon. I didn’t even think about the old role-playing games I used to play sometimes when my friends and I wanted something more sociable than video games. In this world, dice were for gambling away your gold in seedy taverns, and the difference between surviving an encounter with a terrifying creature or being killed hung by the thread of your own wits.
I was Karl, sneaking down this very real tunnel with two very real magic-users and a very real archer whose body, when I had taken it with great passion, felt very, very real.
The thrill that went down my spine when I heard the grating metallic sound of the metal grate was also very real.
Chapter Forty-nine
I stopped and did a sharp pivot back, my ears alert and my eyes straining into the shadows.
The corner we had turned was about forty feet from the grate that I knew had just opened. My eyes stayed locked on that corner, and the four of us waited with tension in our breaths and in our weapon hands for whatever was about to come. But a full minute passed and no monster came into view. I heard nothing.
Elise whispered, “I’ll take a look,” and tiptoed slowly toward the edge of the wall. She leaned her head around the corner, then leaned a little further, and then she jumped back with a piercing shriek.
She sprinted back to us, her beautiful face painted white with fear, her scream still echoing through the tunnel, and she darted behind me and clutched my shoulders with shaking hands.
“A—” she began, but her voice broke into a panicked gasp for air. “A snake!”
I turned back to her in disbelief. “Just a snake?”
But clearly it was not just a snake to her. “I’m . . . afraid of snakes. I hate snakes. I hate them!”
I cloaked my voice in the bravery fitting of a tenth-level warrior, flashing an easy smile. “Fear not. For I shall rid this dungeon of that snake!”
I turned back to the opening into the other corridor and jumped when I saw the giant head already darting around the corner, poison-green and huge, surely two feet in any direction. Anna loosed an arrow in an instant and it stuck into the slithering thing’s eye but it kept coming. I pushed Elise back a few yards and jumped into position to face the snake with a pounding heart. Bob sent a beam of red magic that seared across the floor like a laser, but the snake slithered around it and came at us with a stretched-open jaw and fangs like giant hypodermic needles, venom dripping deadly from each awful point.
There was no time for Anna to ready another arrow, no time for Bob to raise up a magic attack, it was up to me, and I had no time to even raise my sword and so I stabbed out at the roof of the snake’s white mouth and yanked my hand from the hilt before the deadly jaws closed down on my arm. For a second I thought I’d made a huge mistake, for now I was weaponless and the snake still hurled toward us, but then the big head dropped to the ground with a thud and I saw the point of my sword sticking out from the top of the scaly head.
I looked at Anna, then at Bob, and then turned back to see Elise crouched against the wall twenty feet away. I checked my palm to make sure I had killed the snake and then, with two fingers in the big nostrils and a boot on its lower lip, I pried open the thing’s jaw and pulled out my sword.
The three of us escorted Elise away from the snake’s body. I had my arm around her shoulder, and she kept her head close against me.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m an Eleven, and here I am running away from a—damn it I hate snakes!”
“It’s okay. We all have our fears.” Even though I had felt fearless only a few minutes ago, I had to admit the snake did freak me out.
The dungeon had already played on the most instinctive, ingrained fears of humans: snakes, spiders, skeletons. The designers knew what they were doing, but when I thought of the effect the snake had on Elise it kind of pissed me off, scaring the poor girl like that. I laughed to myself a little at the idea of calling a level-eleven Enchantress a poor girl.
So Elise was afraid of snakes. Bob was afraid of heights. Anna, though she would never in a million years admit it, was
afraid of the dark. What was I afraid of?
Oh sure, the snake was scary enough, and crossing the bridge had been scary, and stepping down into this dungeon had certainly given me a chill. But was there anything that terrified me to the core? I couldn’t think of anything at the moment, and I really hoped the devs couldn’t either.
Elise shook free from my arm and straightened herself. It reminded me that Ace Singleton certainly had a fear of rejection. Karl had not been crippled with fear at being shot down by Elise, but both Karl and Ace would be disappointed as hell if I didn’t eventually end up scoring with her.
We kept following the subterranean hallway toward the unknown. Bob said “I wonder what’s next. . . .”
“Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than that fucking snake.” I don’t think I’d ever heard Elise drop the F-bomb. It seemed really out of character for her, which reminded me that she and Bob had both slipped out of game character.
That won’t do, I thought. We need to get psyched up. “Archer. What say you? Be you ready for whatever awaits?”
“Aye, warrior. I fear naught!” She held up the bow in her hands, her amber eyes intense.
Elise turned and smiled at me. She got the message. “After that foul serpent, the worst is surely behind us. Let us make haste and earn that mountain of gold!”
Bob stroked his long white beard, his eyes bright under the bushy white brows. “The four of us shall not fail no matter what fiend we face!”
Though we had walked for miles that day, our pace now increased, our steps eager and confident. I felt like I could hack down the very walls with my new sword. We strode down a long stretch of dark hallway, and as we neared the end we saw the green fire cast its unsettling light on a great door.
The door filled the entire width and height of the tunnel. It appeared to be solid iron, was covered with studs, and had no sign of a handle. The four of us stood there, each one undoubtedly wondering how to open it, but we needn’t have worried about that: it opened by itself.
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