Gerald waited and did his best to remain still lest the wires give way as the rat fired its crossbow. There was a dull thud as the bolt dug into the ceiling high above them, and the rats scrambled up the thin rope with incredible speed. As they neared the top of the pit, they faded from view, rendered invisible by their magic.
“Hey!” one of the guards shouted. Gerald struggled to make out his face as the guard leaned over the edge of the pit. “He’s not dead! And what is this? Is this a rope?” The guard snarled. “Why do we have to watch the damn spike pit? Those bastards at the furnace have got it easy. They don’t even have to worry about cleaning up. Never mind. We’ll have to kill him ourselves. Someone get me a spear.” The guard looked away. “Come on – ah!”
The guard dropped to his knees, clutching his throat, and Gerald winced and turned away as screams of pain and panic rang out. He’d seen what the rats could do in a fight, and it never ceased to amaze him how brutally efficient they could be. In seemingly no time at all, one of the rats scampered back down the rope to him.
The guards had been dealt with, but there was a small – or not so small – problem.
“I don’t think you can carry me out.” Gerald pursed his lips. The rats were far stronger than normal rats, but they seemed to use their heightened strength in bursts rather than over longer periods of time. He doubted that their rope could hold him either. Think. He had to think. He nodded to himself. The rats had already done their part. Now, he needed to do his. They’d used a rope, so he’d use one too. Yes, he had just the thing. He summoned a thin rope made of some faintly glowing material. It was something he’d picked up during his time as a bureaucrat at an outpost in the mountains. The rope was designed to glow to help people see if they had to climb at night or needed rescue. More importantly, it was extremely light and extremely strong. But how could he secure it?
The rat offered a suggestion, and Gerald threw the rope up toward the top of the pit. It took him a couple of tries, but the rats at the top managed to grab the rope. Nodding at the rat on his chest, Gerald summoned something else. People had always called him silly for storing all of his stationery away – usually the same people who “borrowed” everyone else’s stationery and never returned it – but the powerful glue that bureaucrats often used to repair damaged furniture in a bid to save money would definitely come in handy here. The rat grabbed the container of glue and climbed up the rope.
A minute or two passed as the four rats worked to glue the rope solidly to the floor near the pit. They signalled to him when they were done, and Gerald braced himself. He hoped this worked because he wasn’t sure if the metal wires would support his weight if he fell again. But despite his misgivings, the rope held. It wasn’t long – it wasn’t short either since he wasn’t very good at climbing ropes – before he hauled himself out of the pit. As he wiped the sweat off his brow, he looked around and immediately wished he hadn’t. Guards were scattered across the room in various states of, well, death. He shuddered. The rats could be absolutely ruthless when someone tried to harm a person under their protection. He waited until he’d gotten his breath back and then stood. He didn’t have to ask where they would be going. There was only one door.
“We’re taking the door, right?”
The rat that seemed to be the leader, a large rodent with brown fur, nodded and gave a quiet squeak. The others made sounds of agreement.
“You can sense the other rats? That’s handy. We should try to meet up with them then.” Gerald dusted off his cloak. It was covered in a thin layer of ash, soot, and dust from all the explosions he’d run through on his way to the tower. “The teleportation magic probably scattered all of us. One of the guards mentioned something about a furnace.” He gulped. He was glad he hadn’t ended up there. He wasn’t sure the rats could have gotten them out of a furnace. “If we can meet up with the others, we should be okay.” There was definitely something to be said for safety in numbers, especially when those numbers included a young dragon, a pyromaniac elf, a legendary swordsman, an ancient vampire, and a Grand Necromancer and his apprentice.
The door was locked, but it didn’t take long for the rats to find the key on one of the guards. Gerald eased the door open. Uh oh. There was a guard right there –
“Hey!” the guard growled. “Who –”
The guard dropped, brought down by a handful of well-placed needles. Gerald threw himself to the ground as another guard lunged at him with a sword. More needles flew, and the second guard dropped too. But there were more guards. He scrambled to his feet as the rats turned invisible and moved forward to intercept the guards. They took care of four of the guards in short order, but one of the guards managed to make it through. He raised his sword, and electricity crackled around it. He must have been a mage too. Gerald did the only thing he could think of – he summoned something with his magic and threw it. It was another octopus. The octopus clamped onto the man’s face, and the rats finished him off.
The leader of the rats eyed the octopus as it vanished, recalled by Gerald’s magic. The rat chuckled.
“Yes,” Gerald said. “I do need to find something better to throw at people than octopi, but I keep thinking about the calamari we had. Wait… that was a giant squid.” He gulped and summoned something else with his magic. It was a frying pan. “Ah, yes. This might be better.” He peered about furtively. “We should keep moving. Who knows how many more guards they have?”
Gerald followed the rats as they scampered down the corridor. Only one of them was visible. The other three had chosen to remain hidden. But for some reason, they didn’t run into more guards. However, he did notice a few changes. The rough stone of the corridor had given way to a different substance. It was still stone, but it wasn’t a kind he was familiar with. It was also incredibly smooth, almost as if it had been exposed to running water for a long time. He summoned a pair of boots he’d used when he was stationed up in the mountains and put them on. His other boots hadn’t gripped onto the smooth stone well enough. Yet if it were tough for him, it would have been even tougher for the guards. If he recalled correctly, their boots had been a lot like the ones he’d changed out of.
His concern grew the longer that they went without running into guards because the only reason to not have guards in a place like this was because they had something scarier than guards wandering around. He stopped when he noticed a small puddle of goo at an intersection. He was about to bend down and touch it when one of the rats poked him in the leg.
“Okay.” Gerald drew back. “I won’t touch it.” He used his magic to get a stick and poked the puddle gingerly. There was a faint bubbling sound and then a hiss – and the end of the stick melted. The melting continued upward, and Gerald dropped the stick and stumbled back. “Acid?” He shivered. If he’d touched that – he swallowed thickly and reached down to pat the rat that had warned him. “Thanks.”
What was a puddle of acid doing in the middle of a corridor in a top-secret magical facility that, for reasons that were almost certainly terrifying, didn’t seem to have any guards? He got the answer to his question not long after when something rounded the corridor ahead of them. In the gleaming light cast by the magical crystals and torches that lit the corridor, it was impossible to miss. It was a semi-transparent blob, which appeared to be made of the same acid as the puddle. If it were made into a sphere, it would be about a yard and a half in diameter. It rolled down the corridor and then rotated to face him. Gerald took a step back. The blob rolled forward. He took another step back. The blob rolled forward again.
Sweat broke out across his brow. He’d read about blobs like this. They weren’t supposed to be very intelligent, but they followed orders without question. It didn’t take a genius to guess what sort of orders this blob had. The changes in the corridor all made sense now. The blob would have melted normal stone. The corridor therefore had to be made of something that the blob wouldn’t simply melt through. If only Timmy had been there. The necromancer’s earth m
agic would have been perfect for this situation. But Gerald wasn’t Timmy, and the blob was rolling toward him again. There was something distinctly menacing about how it slowly but surely quickened its pace.
One of the rats pulled out a grenade. He must have been one of the demolition rats.
“No!” Gerald yelped. “If you use a grenade, the blob might explode.” The rat gave him a distinctly unimpressed look as if to ask what was wrong with that. It was then that Gerald noticed that the rat had donned a protective suit of some kind, as had the others. Where had the rats even gotten those? Gerald wracked his mind. Did he have a suit like that? Yes, but he wasn’t sure it would stand up to acid, and now wasn’t the best time to test it. “The acid will get all over me. I’ll melt.” The rat grumbled and put its grenade away in favour of a sword that it pointed at the blob. “Yes, I know a sword won’t kill a blob made out of acid.” Which was undoubtedly why they had chosen to use a blob like this to guard this area. Anyone caught unprepared would be dead before they had a chance to come up with a plan. He would also bet a month of his pay that this wasn’t the only blob around. There were bound to be more of them.
Gerald was about to go into full-blown panic – the blob was closing in on them – when he heard footsteps, and they weren’t human footsteps. No, those footsteps belonged to an animal with four legs, and they were coming from the opposite end of the corridor, behind the blob. The blob quivered and turned to face the new threat. It was Spot and some of the other rats.
“Watch out?” Gerald shouted to Spot. “It’s made of acid!”
The dragon eyed the blob with a distinct lack of mind-numbing terror. So?
Spot drew his head back, and Gerald quickly darted around a nearby corner with the rats. Black fire filled the corridor, and Gerald stumbled away from the intersection. When the flames receded, there was no sign of the blob. The dragon padded down the corridor and stopped to poke at a small puddle of acid. Gerald watched in disbelief as the acid smoked and bubbled on Spot’s scales before dissolving without leaving so much as a mark. Spot huffed, and Gerald got the sense that Spot was disappointed that there was nothing left to eat. But why hadn’t the acid hurt him? Oh. Right. Spot was part corruption dragon. Dragon scales were incredibly durable, and corruption dragons were supposed to be largely immune to things like poison and acid on account of their magical disposition.
“I am so glad to see you.” Gerald wrapped his arm around Spot. The dragon licked his face and sniffed him before nudging him away with his head.
Mother? Others?
“I don’t know where they are, but the rats can sense each other. I think that’s how you found us.” Gerald summoned one of the treats that he knew Spot liked and tossed it to him. The dragon devoured it with a happy cry. “There are rats with the others, so we should be able to find them.”
* * *
Avraniel was not pleased about being teleported into some dinky room. She scowled. Those idiots would probably blame this on her. Sure, she might not have helped by triggering the trap, but they should be blaming whatever imperial bastard had set the trap up in the first place. Besides, how was it her fault? They hadn’t yelled at her to stop until after she’d already set off the trap. Honestly, the whole point of warning someone was to warn them before they did the wrong thing. Never mind. She could argue with them later. First things first, she had to get out of this room. Then she had to find some jerk to interrogate, so she could find out where she was.
Sections of the wall opened, and the elf rolled her eyes. Was this one of those idiotic traps where someone got teleported into a pit full of spikes or something? If it was, she could just melt the spikes. Or maybe it would be venomous snakes. The idiot actually had a pit of venomous zombie snakes in the castle. She couldn’t understand why he kept it around, but both he and the twerp had insisted it was critical to the wellbeing of the castle. Oh well. Necromancers were weird.
There was a whoosh, and flames belched out of the holes in the wall. Avraniel laughed. Were they seriously going to try to kill her with fire? Did they have no idea whom they were dealing with? This was insulting. Her eyes narrowed. She’d show them what fire was, and then she’d find the others, kick the crap out of whoever was responsible for this, maybe even feed them to Spot, and then find the treasury and steal everything with Gerald’s help. She patted the demolition rat that had hitched a ride with her through the teleportation trap on the head.
“Stay in my pocket. It’s about to get hot.”
* * *
The guards of the furnace had seen a great many things over the years. The furnace was one of Lord Merton’s favourite tricks. He would teleport some unsuspecting foe into the chamber, which they would promptly flood with fire. Confused and disoriented, Lord Merton’s enemies didn’t stand a chance. No one had ever survived the furnace, and the guards definitely liked it more than the spike pit since it was far easier to clean up afterward. All they needed was a broom and a dustpan.
One thing the guards had never seen before was the furnace exploding. An angry elf wreathed in flames stomped her way out. Her eyes were pools of molten gold that gleamed almost like mirrors. Her cloak was a shimmering garment of orange, yellow, and red. As the flames around her turned white-hot, the elf’s gaze came to rest on the guard with the most ornate armour.
“Since I don’t know my way around, I’m going to give you losers a choice. If you tell me where I am and how to find the person in charge of this area and the treasury, I’m only going to knock all of you unconscious. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to roast the lot of you. Slowly.”
The guard took a little over a minute to blurt out as much as he knew.
* * *
Avraniel scowled. All of the corridors in this stupid place looked so damn similar. And what was this place? It was like some kind of dumb dungeon or something if the décor was anything to go by. It was even drearier than the parts of the castle the idiot hadn’t renovated yet.
The rat in her pocket squeaked, and the elf’s scowl deepened.
“What do you mean I’m going the wrong way? I’ve been following the directions that lame guard gave us.”
The rat hopped up onto her shoulder and gave her a weak smile.
“Oh? You think my sense of direction isn’t great outside the forest? You’re really asking for it, you know that? Fine. If you think you can do a better job, why don’t you tell me which way to go?”
Five minutes later, they were standing in front of a pair of extremely large and ridiculously ornate doors that looked an awful lot like the doors the guard had described when telling her how to reach the person in charge of this area. Avraniel’s eye twitched at the smug grin on the rat’s face.
“You got lucky.” The rat chortled. “Yeah, yeah. Turn invisible or something. We don’t know what’s in there, and the twerp will throw a fit if something happens to you.”
Not to mention, Avraniel would feel a tiny bit bad if one of the rats that followed her happened to get stabbed or something. She drew one of her daggers and channelled her fire into it. The blade glowed, and she swiped it across the doors before giving them a stout kick reinforced with her magic. The resulting explosion blew the doors off their hinges, and she strode into a large hall, which was lit by dozens of torches scattered along the walls and on the pillars that supported the roof far, far above her. Her eyes narrowed as she took note of the tunnel on the opposite end of the hall. The guard had said she needed to go through it, but he’d also mentioned something about a labyrinth. It was fine. She could handle some idiotic maze.
She made her way across the hall and ignored the mangled bodies chained to the walls and pillars. Whoever ran this place was a dumb bastard. If she were going to kill someone, then she’d simply kill them. Torturing people for the sake of it was stupid and creepy. Now, if she were going to torture someone, it would be to get something from them – like the location of all their treasure.
As she entered the labyrinth, s
he paused. What sort of weirdo had built this place? It was like something out of an old legend. There were even signs written in blood on the walls urging her to give in to despair and kill herself before the nightmarish horrors within devoured her. What kind of advice was that? She took a step forward and ducked under a crossbow bolt before blasting a swinging blade of some kind. Were these supposed to be traps? Pathetic. The twerp would have been able to handle these. A few moments later, a pit opened up beneath her, and she used a burst of fire pointed downward to get out of it and continue. She’d barely landed on the other side of the pit before a golem lunged at her. She caved its head in with one fiery fist and used its twitching metal corpse to block a wave of poison darts that came from a slit in the wall nearby before using the golem as a makeshift club to bash some strange dog monster thing over the head as it roared and rushed down the corridor toward her. The dog monster – it was as large as a horse and had three heads – whined pitifully, and Avraniel sighed. She was getting soft.
“Fine, I’ll stop whacking you over the head, so stop being so pathetic.” She yanked the dog’s central head toward her. “But if you try to mess with me, I will end you. It will not be quick, and it will be hideously painful. Are we clear?” The dog gulped and nodded. “Good. Then you can come with me. Spot needs more friends who aren’t also people, and I’ve never seen a three-headed dog before.”
She continued through the labyrinth for another five minutes before she’d had enough. “Stupid, dumb maze built by a stupid, dumb bastard for some stupid, dumb reason.” She pointed at the dog. “You, close your eyes. This is taking too damn long. I don’t know where the end of this labyrinth is, but I know how to reach it.” She turned to face the wall closest to her. “When in doubt, make your own path.”
Her magic carved through the wall like it was made of cheese.
After ten minutes – and many, many melted walls later – Avraniel finally reached the end of the labyrinth. At least, she hoped it was the end. If it wasn’t, she might really lose her temper and blow the whole tower up. She kicked out a section of the melting wall and stepped into another large hall, one similar to the one she’d passed through before entering the maze. However, there was a large minotaur standing in this one. The beast turned to her with a low bellow. It was at least ten feet tall, and the club it carried was roughly the same size.
Two Necromancers, a Dragon, and a Vampire (The Unconventional Heroes Series Book 3) Page 42