by Wight, Will
“But—” the lieutenant began, but Valin kept going.
“And no, I know what you’re going to say, those aren’t dragons. I’m looking for a real dragon. Strong, intelligent, flies, breathes fire…you know, a dragon. We’ll find one in a Territory one of these days, mark my words.”
Valin had seen plenty of dragon-like creatures, but nothing gave him the sense of majesty he had always pictured in the dragons of legend. Dragons should be more…magical, he guessed.
“I see,” the lieutenant said in a voice that said she didn’t see at all. Clearly, she had lost the thread of the conversation a while back.
“You’ve seen many Territories,” one of the other Travelers said, in a transparent attempt to change the subject. “But I haven’t seen you summon anything. What kind of Traveler are you?”
“I’m not a Traveler,” Valin said. “I don’t have bonds to any of the Territories. I just go from one to another, doing what I can. That’s probably why they call me the Wanderer.”
The three Travelers exchanged glances, but they had nothing to say.
***
The way back to the nearest Damascan base was tricky, and Valin was soon lost. Every half an hour or so—though it seemed completely unpredictable—the Labyrinth whirred and shifted. The hallways shuffled, the floor separating and sliding apart, new gaps opening in the walls. Once, a dead end transformed itself into a room full of whirling circular blades inches in front of Valin’s face.
The Tartarus Travelers took such things in stride, adjusting their course accordingly every time the maze shifted. They barely spoke about their route at all, following a mental map that they all evidently shared.
As they walked, they answered Valin’s questions.
There were very few permanent outposts in the Steel Labyrinth. None of them that were permanently manned. By order of the Overlord, no Damascan Travelers were allowed to sleep in their Territory; there had been disappearances, including a handful of tragic incidents in which the sleeping Travelers had been trapped in rooms with no exits. Sometimes, when they woke up, they were able to make Gates and escape. Other times, they would be skewered by traps while still unconscious.
Thus, the rule about sleeping in the maze.
The Tartarus Travelers understood these rules and seemed to accept them. Valin had been summoned for a more urgent reason.
“Something has been killing Travelers in our unit,” the lieutenant—whose name was Roshan—said, as she gently guided Valin away from a pit of gnashing mechanical traps. “They’re usually alone, and they fail to report in. When we find them next, it’s only their mangled bodies.”
“You think it’s Enosh?”
“We think one of them has disguised themselves as one of us,” Lieutenant Roshan said. “We think he or she is ambushing us when we’re alone, or else has summoned something to do it for them.”
She seemed more disgusted at the thought of a summoned killer. Was that because she was afraid of monsters from another Territory, or because she hated the idea of someone too cowardly to do their own killing? Valin had heard odd things about notions of honor in Tartarus.
“I’ll need to see the body. I can’t guarantee that I’ll find anything helpful, but I’ll do what I can.” He wasn’t rude enough to say it to her face, but he was certainly more likely to know something useful than any of these Tartarus soldiers. He had devices in his satchel that might come in handy.
“You’re more likely to find something than we are,” Roshan said, impressing him yet again. “We’re going to stop by and pick up some more weapons before we show you the scene, just in case…”
Her voice trailed off as the wall in front of them parted, revealing a man lying on his back in a small pool of blood.
Too small, Valin noted immediately. The corpse was partially curled around a circular chest wound as big around as a man’s head. Anything that caused a wound that size should have left a puddle of blood twice as deep.
To her credit, Lieutenant Roshan did not hesitate. She snapped orders to her two subordinates, and they quickly drew their swords and positioned themselves around the body, watching the corners of the room for movement. It was not a large room, perhaps five paces to a side, and the only visible entrance was the one through which they had come. But if Valin had learned anything from his short time in Tartarus, it was that the Labyrinth could open up a new door anytime and anywhere.
“I take it this isn’t the body you meant to show me,” Valin said.
“The Captain’s body is in a coffin,” Roshan said in a tight voice. “We left the blood where he was killed, in case we needed to examine it again. This is a totally different room.”
Valin dipped his fingertips in the blood: still warm. He gestured to the corpse. “Who was this?”
“He was meant to stay with the Captain’s coffin.”
“Alone?”
She nodded. “This is the fourth victim. The second one taken right under my nose.” Roshan stared straight at the wall, and Valin left her to her thoughts. He had nothing productive to say.
Besides, the body was more interesting.
He ran a finger along the edge of the wound, coming up with a thin layer of black grit. Ash, perhaps? If so, then they were most likely looking for a killer from Naraka, or maybe Endross.
He examined the body for another five minutes before he came up with another source of the black dust. Under the fingernails this time, as though the soldier had managed to scratch his attacker.
Valin scraped out a little of the dust and rubbed it between two fingers. Against his better judgment, he placed a little on his tongue.
He spat it out immediately. It didn’t taste foul; worse, it tasted like good topsoil. That narrowed his list of possibilities down to one. “Everybody who died was alone?” he asked, just to be sure.
“They were.”
“Then I’m afraid I can probably tell you what killed them,” Valin said. “And you’re not going to like it.”
All three Tartarus Travelers turned to face him.
“What?” Lieutenant Roshan demanded.
“A Strugle.”
The room fell into a long stretch of silence.
“The monster from the children’s rhyme? ‘Good little girls, they must obey, or else the Strugle will take them away’? The Strugle is real?”
One of the male Travelers coughed to cover up a laugh.
Valin knelt and began rummaging through his pack, wishing that he had packed the stone amulet he had once unearthed in Ornheim. It had been designed specifically to block the attack of a Strugle.
“Strugles are native to Ornheim, though based on the way it hunts, some naturalists believe that it originated in Asphodel.” He had a dagger here that could heat itself red-hot but never lose its shape; no, if he got close enough to use a dagger, the Strugle would simply eviscerate him. “It locks on to feelings of loneliness, uncertainty, isolation, and it uses them to identify its prey. Its favorite tactic is the ambush; some people believe that it feeds on the fear and surprise of its victims as much as their flesh and blood.”
The frozen horn he had picked up in Helgard, perhaps? Maybe it could banish the Strugle back to the Territory from whence it came…but no, blowing the horn in Tartarus was too risky. It might banish whole rooms from the Labyrinth around them, leaving them to fall right through the floor.
“Tartarus Travelers would normally be a good match for a Strugle,” Valin continued. “You summon quickly, you’re usually armored, and you’re rarely alone. It’s hard for a Strugle to target someone like that. But that’s when you’re outside your Territory. If you’re here, and you don’t know what you’re facing, you’re little better off than an ordinary person.”
These days, it almost never occurred to Valin that he, too, could be considered an ordinary person. He had certainly never thought of himself as ordinary.
“How do we catch it?” one of the men said.
“We don’t,” Lieutenant Roshan
responded, reluctance heavy in her voice. “We tell everyone we can about it. We let the Overlord know what we’re up against. We prepare, and we hit it together.”
“Lieutenant…” the man began, but he let the statement hang.
Valin thought he saw the problem. He wasn’t the most familiar with Tartarus Travelers, but they had a reputation for their prickly sense of honor. He didn’t fully understand it—honor seemed like an unnecessary set of arbitrary rules, to him—but he could at least accept it.
“Is there some reason you might want to catch this thing yourself?” Valin asked. He kept rummaging around in his satchel; surely something in his collection would come in handy.
“As I said, two victims now have died under my protection,” the Lieutenant said. “Including my commanding officer. The Overlord has yet to send a replacement for him, but when he does, I have no doubt that I will be at least demoted. Capturing or killing the beast myself would go a long way toward restoring my honor, but that won’t happen.”
“Why not?”
She met his gaze levelly. “Because it’s not about me. It’s about saving lives. The smart move is to regroup, report, and form a plan of attack.”
“Aha!” Valin said. At last, he had found something worth looking for. It was a plain gold medallion, unmarked, that would give you a vague sense of danger. He had received it as a gift from a Tartarus Traveler, actually, who had found it in a locked chest deep in the heart of the Labyrinth. Valin was convinced that the medallion was unfinished—there had to be some way of improving it, even if no one else would try—but it would be perfect against an ambush predator like the Strugle.
“Fortunately for you,” Valin said, “I rarely do the smart thing.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized how they sounded, but he plunged ahead anyway. “I’ve hunted Strugle before, in teams and alone. You can evade them, you can trap them, and you can kill them. All you need is bait.”
Roshan shook her head. “I told you, I won’t—”
“Let me put this to you another way, Lieutenant,” Valin said. “I’m going to find a Strugle. With your help, I’m much more likely to survive. And if I die, it will be because you abandoned me.”
Without another word, Valin set off down the steel-plated hallway. Deianira would have backed these Travelers into the same corner, he was sure, but she would have felt badly about it. Valin didn’t. He would have been perfectly happy to hunt the creature alone, but if she followed, perhaps Roshan would get a little bit of the credit.
Only seconds later, three more sets of footsteps followed him.
***
Several hours after Valin’s conversation with Roshan, he knelt on a metal ledge, looking down into a cavernous steel bowl. Blindfolded, Lieutenant Roshan crouched at the center of the bowl. His golden medallion hung around her neck.
They needed bait for the Strugle, and at first Valin intended to use himself. He found a likely spot to set up a trap—a room with lots of the dark tunnel entrances that Strugles preferred, close to where it had carried out its earlier killings. When he started tying the blindfold around his own eyes, Roshan had stopped him.
You’ve fought these things before, she’d said. Are you afraid of them?
Well…no.
That settles that, then. They’re attracted to fear. I’ve never seen one of these things before, I’ve only seen what they can do to my men. I’m terrified.
And somehow, Valin found himself prepared to carry out an ambush, while Roshan sat out there waiting for one.
He had faith in their chances of attracting a Strugle. The hunter was obviously very active, considering its recent body count, and the conditions were perfect. As long as Roshan was genuinely shaken, they had a good trap.
Assuming that they could kill the creature once they caught it.
Strugles may have originated in Asphodel, but they were adapted to life in Ornheim. Their hides were covered in thick, stony plates that would turn any blade short of a pickaxe. For the two Strugles Valin had killed before, he had lured one into an ambush of fireball-wielding Naraka Travelers, and crushed the other beneath a giant boulder.
Valin had heard great things about the superiority of Tartarus Steel blades, but if they could pierce the hide of an Ornheim predator like a Strugle, he would buy one of those weapons for himself. Maybe Deianira could get him one.
He waited in silence as two hours stretched into three. It wouldn’t have surprised him to spend an entire night waiting patiently for the Strugle to arrive, but obviously it had instructions to strike early and often.
At the edge of the metal bowl, a flicker of movement caught Valin’s attention.
He stared into the shadows, trying to figure out whether his eyes were tricking him. Then the darkness shifted again, and a brown-black lump slid into view.
It looked like a starving man strapped with stone armor. Slatted ribs pressed against thin, flaky skin underneath heavy blocks of granite. Its arms tapered to black spearpoints at the end; he couldn’t see anything like hands or claws.
As he recalled, the face was the worst. Its mouth was a circular, sucking vortex full of teeth, its eyes huge moons of milky white. It was a face bred for inspiring nightmares in children.
Luckily—or perhaps not—Valin had seen far worse.
Quietly, he signaled the other two Travelers, gesturing down toward the creature. Roshan couldn’t see his gestures from behind her blindfold, but it seemed she sensed something. She froze as soon as the Strugle emerged from the shadows, slowly turning her head to face the monster.
The Traveler nearest to Valin reached over, lifting the lid of a long silver treasure chest. He had insisted on picking it up from a Damascan armory before they set this ambush.
Across the room, on the opposite side of the great steel bowl, the other male Tartarus Traveler raised one hand in front of him.
A spinning blade the size of a cartwheel erupted into the air out of the silver chest, so big that it seemed like it couldn’t possibly have fit inside. Almost soundlessly, it whirred into the air and spun into the Traveler’s waiting hand.
The closer soldier reached into the chest with one hand. When he pulled it out, the hand was covered by a gleaming silver gauntlet.
So quietly that Valin almost couldn’t believe it, more pieces of armor flew from the chest and assembled themselves on the Traveler’s waiting body. In only a few seconds, and with less sound than a clattering teacup, the soldier of Tartarus was covered by a suit of polished steel.
Unaware, the Strugle crept closer toward Lieutenant Roshan. It scuttled like a crab, though it only had four limbs, inching sideways and lurching forward as though nervous.
Right now, the medallion she wore should be warning her of the Strugle’s approach. She would be ready to attack when the time came.
Valin placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. The three Travelers would attack first. With any luck, they would finish it off before he managed to climb down. If not, he stayed in reserve. Everything had lined up exactly as they had planned.
Then, with a grinding squeal of shifting gears, the Labyrinth changed.
The bowl slid back, bringing the Strugle and Lieutenant Roshan away from the rest of the room. Valin’s ledge raised even higher, and the room widened, separating him from his allied Traveler on the other side.
Great, Valin thought. Now it’s going to take me forever to climb down.
It actually took him another second to realize the real problem: now, even the two Tartarus Travelers were too far away. The Strugle would get the first strike.
“Go now!” Valin hissed to the Traveler next to him. “I’ll catch up!”
But the man didn’t leave. He reached into the chest and pulled out one of the strangest swords Valin had ever seen. It was long, clearly meant to be used with both hands, and slightly curved. The sheath still covered its blade, but Valin knew that it would only be sharp along the outside edge.
The Traveler leaned back, poised to
throw the sheathed sword like a javelin.
“Lieutenant!” he bellowed, and launched the sword like a ballista.
It shot straight for Lieutenant Roshan, who did not turn toward the sound of her subordinate’s voice, as Valin had expected she would. Instead, she turned to face the Strugle and tore her blindfold off.
For a split second, as the curved sword flew through the air, she stared into the Strugle’s horrific milky eyes.
And then, without looking, she reached up and caught her sword in her left hand.
In one smooth motion, she pulled the sword from its sheath and swept its edge toward her opponent.
Valin didn’t watch how it turned out; he started to scramble down the side of his steel cliff. The landscape was made up almost entirely of interlocking steel plates, and he cut himself more than once, but he knew he would need to get down there as fast as possible.
The Strugle’s preferred method of attack was ambush, terrifying the victim into paralysis before impaling them on its spear-like arms and draining them of blood. But if it was confronted, it would not run away and seek other prey, as would many predators. Instead, it hunched into an almost turtle-like defensive stance, using its stony armored plates to defend itself as it continued to force its victim into a corner. Only when it had no other options would it finally flee.
In this situation, the Strugle running was probably a worst-case scenario. It would be free to hunt on its own, and there was no realistic chance of tracking it down a second time before it killed again. That meant they had to kill it before it either devoured Lieutenant Roshan or decided that it had to run.
Why did the room have to shift? Valin wondered. Why then, at that exact time? If the bowl had stayed in place, the Travelers could have killed the creature instantly, at range.
If the Steel Labyrinth was self-aware, it had a sick sense of humor.
On the far side of the room, the Traveler with the bladed disc hurled it toward the Strugle. Closer to Valin, the man covered in armor leaped down from the ledge, landing easily on the ground twenty feet below.