by Terry Brooks
“For the love of Maribor, open the door or we’ll all die!” Wilmer cried.
Royce turned to Hadrian and in a low voice asked, “What would you do?”
Hadrian looked at the chest, which supported one of the few remaining undisturbed candles; most of the rest had been snuffed out by the rising water. Then he glanced at the giant steel door and finally at the lever and the chain leading to the ceiling where the keystone held everything in place. “I think Wilmer is right.”
“The door it is,” Royce said.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Hadrian shook his head. “I mean he was right about not opening the chest. Only a greedy person would do that, and I’m starting to think the jester set this whole thing up to make a deliberate point. So the answer won’t be greed.”
“Right—so we open the door,” Royce waded a step forward, through waist-deep water, reaching for his tools.
“No, not the door. Only a coward would choose that door.”
“You aren’t planning to fight that thing out there, are you? Because I don’t think you’re up to it.”
“No, that’s not what I’m suggesting.”
“So, what are you suggesting? And I would appreciate it if you hurried the explanation. We’re running out of time,” Royce said.
Wilmer and Myra nodded their agreement as they waded closer to hear Hadrian over the frothy roar.
“Think about it. The dwarf stole the treasure, and then tore the map into eight parts. He had the pieces delivered to the nobles who he’d been forced to entertain for years. I suspect dwarves know a lot about greed. I’ll bet most of those nobles, and their descendants, hunted and killed each other over the centuries while collecting the pieces. Just like Myra did. But we’ve been through this place. It would have taken a legion of dwarves to make. Consider what kind of mastermind created it. Do you think the jester was just some clown?”
“No time for questions, just tell us, okay?”
“I think you were right, Myra. The dwarf was special—a noble or king perhaps. Maybe he had been hauled to the imperial court to be humiliated by a bunch of greedy cowards—and this—all this is his revenge. The right choice isn’t the chest or the door.”
Royce’s eyes tracked from the chest, to the door, and finally to the chain that led to the lever, which by then had disappeared below the water’s surface.
Royce smiled. “Only a fool would pull the lever.”
“Exactly.”
Royce moved to where the chain disappeared. Hadrian joined his friend, which was easy since he was floating.
“Wait!” Myra shouted. She was looking up and swam deeper into the shadows of the room. Between the rising water and the growing dark, Hadrian lost sight of her. “There’s a key hanging from the ceiling right above the chest now! Look! The banging must have made it slip down.”
“There’s one above the door too!” Wilmer shouted, swimming away and disappearing into the growing darkness as another candle hissed out.
Royce ignored them and started to reach down.
“Wait,” Hadrian told him, then shouted. “Come back! We’re pulling the lever!”
Hadrian noticed the water rising frighteningly fast. Did one of them do something to cause that? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t see them. Wilmer would be at the door by then all the way on the far side. Myra was likely in the center of the room, just a few dozen feet away, but the water had already snuffed out almost all of the candles. When it reached the ceiling, and the last one went out, they would never find their way back. Even if they knew how to swim, it would be impossible with only a single breath of air. Still he waited while the water level consumed chain links, ticking out the seconds.
“Can you hear me?” Hadrian yelled.
“They aren’t coming,” Royce said, looking impatient as the two bobbed closer to the ceiling.
“Do it!” Hadrian shouted.
“You sure?”
“No, but do it anyway.”
“Good enough for me.”
Royce disappeared below the surface.
The chain stretched taut. The keystone was yanked free and fell into the froth. Hadrian braced himself for the ceiling’s collapse, but none of the other stones moved.
“It’s an exit!” Royce shouted the moment his head broke the surface. “Take a breath and swim!”
“Broken leg. Bad arm. And I can’t see in the dark the way you can. Maybe you should just—”
“Shut up and hold your breath.”
The water rose, and the last candle was snuffed out as the room topped off. Hadrian had seen no sign of Myra or Wilmer.
He struggled to find the hole in the darkness, his fingers fumbling over rough stone. Grabbing him from behind, Royce shoved Hadrian into the opening where their heads broke the surface. With the room below filled, the water had nowhere else to go and surged up the narrow shaft, bubbling, frothing like a fountain and lifting the two up with it.
“Did you see them?” Hadrian asked. “Did you see Myra or Wilmer?”
From somewhere above, a white light shone enough for Hadrian to see Royce’s face. He was grimacing. “The door and the chest were both open.”
“And? Did they get out?”
“In a way, I suppose. Wilmer’s head was smiling at least.”
“What about Myra?”
“You don’t want to know.”
They spilled out into another chamber, where the water filled a basin that formed a small pool. When the water rose high enough to reach the chiseled edge, it stopped.
The light came from the full moon overhead. They were in a beautiful domed chamber with a crystal roof that allowed the moonlight to illuminate the interior. The space was circular and in the center was the unmistakable shape of a stone coffin. On the far side, Hadrian saw a door, which lacked any sort of latch, lever, or knob. In the very center was a tiny keyhole.
The chamber, vast, flat, and sparsely adorned, possessed an unexpected atmosphere of tranquility. Unlike any room they had visited since descending into the jester’s cave, this space felt safe, even hallowed.
Royce and Hadrian glanced at each other, then back at the center of the pool they had just climbed out of. They waited. The surface remained undisturbed except for a single candle that floated, listing to one side. Beyond that, not even a bubble. It could have been a mirror. Slowly they got up. Royce lent Hadrian an arm, and together they made their way out of the pool.
“Look.” Royce pointed out magnificent carvings in the stone walls surrounding the chamber. “This joker just had all kinds of time, didn’t he?”
Hadrian was still looking back at the water.
“If either of them had been at the lever while we were at the door or chest, they wouldn’t have hesitated,” Royce said. “Myra would’ve jumped at the chance to rid herself of us, ensuring she got all the treasure, and Wilmer didn’t have the courage to wait.”
As much as Hadrian wanted to deny it, Royce was right. They had made their choices.
With his partner’s help, they moved to the coffin. Etchings similar to those Royce had pointed out adorned its side. Some of the markings appeared to be writing, but not in a language Hadrian could read. “Pretty,” he said, wiping off the dust.
Together they lifted the lid.
Inside lay a small body, wrapped and decayed. At his head was a multicolored hat with bells, at his feet, a silver box. Royce carefully removed the little container, took a step away, and set it down beneath a shaft of moonlight. The box had no lock, just a simple clasp and hinge. Tilting the lid back, they found the interior lined with fine blue velvet. Inside rested a small stone tablet and a key. Carved into the stone were four sentences that Hadrian could read.
Cowardice and greed will drown one’s soul.
The greatest treasure a person can possess is freedom.
I stole mine by playing the fool.
Now, so have you.
Royce took the key and, with Hadrian in tow, placed it in the lock. A sing
le click echoed. The door swung open, revealing a mountain trail and a starry night.
Hadrian looked behind them.
“What?” Royce asked.
“We should put the box back.”
“Why?”
Hadrian shrugged. “Just seems right. After all we went through with the jester. I feel we owe it to him.”
Royce shook his head. “The little monster tormented us for days—tried to kill us—came damn close.”
“He just wanted justice, or to put it in your language, revenge.”
“That’s fine, only we never did anything to him. We weren’t even after the treasure. It was just a job.”
“Maybe that’s why we got out.”
Royce sighed. “Give me the damn thing.” He replaced the box, closed the coffin, and rejoined Hadrian, who waited leaning against the door. Outside, the night air was sweet with the scent of pine.
Hadrian gave Royce a surprised look when he returned.
“What?”
“I didn’t expect you’d really put it back,” Hadrian admitted, as he wrapped an arm around his friend and the two stepped out, letting the door close behind them.
Royce shrugged. “I owed you.”
“Owed me? For what?”
Royce pulled his hood up, covering his features as the two limped out into a lovely summer’s night. “I would have picked the chest.”
Like all stories, this one happened for several reasons, not just one. It was, as they taught me in high school social studies, overdetermined.
So for example, this story happened because I read George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, and I liked the character Strong Belwas. I liked him so much I decided to steal him and give him a new name (“Vile Father”) and use him in a story of my own. It also happened because I had recently become a father again, and my own father was ill, and I was dealing with a lot of father-related issues, and I liked the idea of somebody having a big fight with a guy named Vile Father.
This story happened because I was coming to the end of the Magicians trilogy, and before it was over I wanted a chance to write a bit more in the vein of what might loosely be called epic fantasy, à la Fritz Lieber. I wanted to show Fillory in full flood, in the late-afternoon sunlight of a great age of adventure. Also, I wanted to display a little more of the biodiversity of Fillory, hence a mixed army that includes, among other things, manticores and hippogriffs and fairies and giants.
It happened because I wanted to write a scene from Eliot’s point of view, and more importantly, I wanted to show Eliot displaying the seriousness of purpose that I knew he was capable of. I wanted him to put his life on the line, and even more seriously, his dignity, because there was something even more important to him than that.
Most of all—and there’s nothing more important than this—I wanted to write this story because I thought it represented the playing out of tensions and forces that were already implicit in the world of Fillory, in a manner consistent with the logic that governs things in that world.
In other words, it happened because that’s what would have happened.
— Lev Grossman
THE DUEL
Lev Grossman
The Lorian champion was a squat fellow, practically as wide as he was tall, and apparently of some slightly different ethnic background than most of his compatriots. The Lorians were Vikings, basically, Thor types: tall, long blond hair, big chins, big chests, big beards. But this character came in at about five foot six, Eliot would have said, with a shaved head and a fat round Buddha face like a soup dumpling and a significant admixture of some Asiatic DNA.
He was stripped to the waist even though it was about forty degrees out, and his latte-colored skin was oiled all over. Or maybe he was just really sweaty.
The champion had a gut hanging over his waistband, but he was still a pretty scary-looking mofo. He had a huge saddle of muscle across his upper back, and his biceps were like thighs, practically, and there must have been some muscle in there, just by volume, even if they did look kind of chubby. And his gut wasn’t a flabby gut, exactly; even his fat looked hard. His weapon was weird-looking enough—it was a pole with a big curvy cross of sharp metal on the end—that you just knew he could do something really outstandingly dangerous with it.
The Lorian army went nuts for him when he stepped forward. They bashed their swords into their shields and looked at each other as if to say: yes, he may look a little funny, but our fellow is definitely going to kill the other fellows’ fellow, so three cheers for him, by Crom or whoever it is we worship! It almost made you like them, the Lorians. They had a multicultural side to them that Eliot wouldn’t have expected.
But there was no chance that their champion was actually going to kill the Fillorian champion, Eliot’s champion. Because Eliot’s champion was Eliot.
There had been some debate, when the idea was first mooted, about whether it made sense to send the High King of Fillory into single combat with the hand-picked designated hitter of the Lorian military. But it rapidly became clear that Eliot was serious about it, and when the High King was serious about something, people had learned to shut up about it pretty quick. Partly because the High King didn’t tend to change his mind, so you might as well skip the whole futile-protest stage, but mostly because people had figured out by now that the High King knew what he was doing.
High King Eliot stepped forward from the front rank of his army, that, predictably but gratifyingly, also went nuts. He smiled—the smile was twisted, but the happiness was the real stuff. The sound of the king’s regiment of the Fillorian army going nuts was unlike anything else in the known universe. You had men and women shouting and banging their weapons together, good enough, but then you had a whole orchestra of nonhuman sounds going on around it.
At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz.
Then you had bats squeaking, birds squawking, bears roaring, wolves howling, and anything with a horse-head whinnying: pegasi, unicorns, regular talking horses. Griffins and hippogriffs squawked too, but lower—baritone squawking, a horrible noise. Minotaurs bellowed. Stuff with humans’ heads yelled. Of all the mythical creatures of Fillory, they were the only ones who still creeped Eliot out. The satyrs and dryads and such were cool, but there were a couple of manticores and sphinxes that were just uncanny as hell.
And so on down the line till you got to the bass notes and the subsonics, which were provided by the giants grunting and stomping their feet. It was silly really: it only just occurred to Eliot that he could have just picked a giant as his champion, and then this thing would have been over in about ten seconds flat, pun intended. But that wouldn’t have sent the same message.
At first, when Eliot had gotten the news that the Lorians were invading, it had seemed grimly exciting. Rally the banners, Fillory’s at war! Antique formulas and protocols were invoked. A lot of serious-looking non-ceremonial armor and weapons and flags and tack had come up out of storage and been polished and sharpened and oiled. They brought up with them a lot of dust and a thrilling smell of great deeds and legendary times. An epic smell.
The invasion wasn’t a complete surprise. The Lorians were always up to some kind of bad behavior in the books. Kidnapping princes, forcing talking horses to plough fields, trying to get everybody to believe in their slate of quasi-Norse gods. But it had been centuries since they actually invaded. They were usually too busy fighting among themselves to get organized enough to come down across the Northern Barrier range in any significant numbers.
Moreover, the peaks of the Northern Barrier range were supposed to be enchanted to keep the Lorians out. Eliot wasn’t sure what had happened to that; when this was all over he’d have to remember to figure out exactly why those spells had gone pear-shaped. For now here they were, in force, and it was a tricky business, because while Eliot
was determined to repel the invaders, he also found that he was very reluctant to kill any of them.
Eliot was familiar with the literature on the subject, or at any rate with the movies of the literature on the subject, or at any rate with relatively short sections of one of the movies. As far as he had gleaned, in Tolkien the hordes of orcs and goblins and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else were all so evil that you were free to commit genocide on them without any complicated moral ramifications. They didn’t have wives and kids and backstories. But the Lorians weren’t like that. They looked human enough that killing them would be basically murder, and that wasn’t going to happen. Some of them were even kind of hot. And anyway those Tolkien books were fiction, and Eliot, as High King of Fillory, didn’t deal in fiction. He was in the messy business of writing facts.
So he was going to roll them back, but with minimum casualties. It was tricky. There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.
It was also tricky because the Lorians didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff. Death was inevitable, and they seemed to think dying in battle took some of the sting out of it. They were one hundred percent Klingon about it. Which, whatever, Eliot wasn’t about to impose his twenty-first-century American worldview on them. But he didn’t have to go over to theirs either.
Fortunately the Fillorians had an advantage, which was that they had every possible advantage. They totally outmatched the Lorians in every stat you could name. The Lorians were a bunch of guys with swords. The Fillorians were every beast in the Monster Manual, led by a clique of wizard kings and queens, and Eliot was very sorry, but you knew that when you invaded us.
It was late spring when the Lorians came pouring—they didn’t really march, they weren’t that organized—through Grudge Gap and onto Fillorian soil. Some rode big shaggy horses. They didn’t wear matching outfits, but they all seemed to have chosen from the same menu: steel caps, mail shirts or leather armor, round shields, long tunics, bare legs, UGG-type leather boots with fluffy interiors. In their hands or over their shoulders they carried straight double-edged swords of varying lengths, modest-sized but vicious-looking war axes, countless spears and bows. They were met by a nightmare.