by Mike Wild
The answer came as his face turned briefly to the camera. The juddering of the recording and Trix’s shock meant it took her a second to take in what she saw—to separate the face’s features from the hood it wore, to process the scars, the older physiognomy, to strip all that away to reveal the face she knew—had known—beneath. And when she had, she gnawed her hand and crouched in front of the TV. She stroked the screen, tracing the outlines of the face. Because the face she was looking at was no phantasm from a dream. It was her brother.
“Ian …” she said. “Jesus, Ralph, that’s Ian.”
“Keep watching, Patricia.”
“He’s alive …”
“Keep watching.”
Trix did. How could she not? Watched as Ian cranked the upline to ops and let the phone dangle. Watched as he stared down at her admonishingly, shaking his head. Then she found herself possessed of a rage unlike any she’d known—a rage born of the fact her own brother could do this to her, let her believe all these years that he was dead, be with her once more, and not be with her now. If not for the tape, she’d never have known he’d been there, other than as a phantasm. How dare he? How fucking dare he! You bastard, you bastard, you bastard! She would likely have punched the screen through had Ralph not laid a hand on her shoulder. Punched Ralph, too, were it not for Ralph’s insistence: “Watch.”
The image had disappeared for a few seconds in a wash of blurry colour, but as it returned Ian was kneeling once more. Holding her hand. For a moment she felt a renewed surge of affection but then noticed he wasn’t holding her hand but examining it, wiping away slicked blood to check her fingers, and now he dropped that hand and picked up her other. Trix saw the glint of the ring, as did Ian. And he snatched it from her eagerly. Yanked it from her finger, like an opportunistic thief come upon a mugging victim. Trix felt as violated as one. She squirmed. She was still coming to terms with what she’d seen when Ian rose, gave a last, somewhat furtive, glance around, and returned to the corridor whence he came. The video played on, but Ian was gone. Again.
Trix fell onto her backside, stunned. Ralph squatted beside her, sighed.
“No one else has seen this,” he said. “No one else remembered it was there. It was easy enough for me to ‘obtain’ once I heard Garrison was putting you in the frame—” he looked at the TV and smiled “—so to speak.”
“Garrison,” Trix repeated. Her suspicion that the Dungeonmaster knew about the ring because he—for whatever reason—had the ring no longer held water, but the fact he didn’t have it yet still knew about it somehow made things worse. And that was without Ian in the equation. “Christ, Ralph, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” the old man said slowly, “but it does make me wonder what other aspects of your dream have a basis in reality.”
“You think the dungeon really could be growing? The thing I saw down there—that maelstrom—exists?”
“It certainly merits investigation.”
“Oh, after this, believe you me it’s going to get investigated.”
“You’re going back down, aren’t you?”
“I’d like to see anyone try and stop me.”
“Patricia …”
“I know, I know. You’re going to say don’t make this about Ian.”
“Actually …”
“I was at his fucking memorial service. So were you.”
The old man held her shoulders. “Consider this. Your brother has been MIA for years. No one—no one, Patricia—survives the levels that long. There are questions to be asked—Why hasn’t he returned? Where has he been? What has he encountered? Last, but not least—has he made any friends down there?”
“You’re not suggesting—?”
“That he’s involved with your mysterious visitor? I can’t say. But remember—if you find Ian, Ian may not want to be found.”
Trix tensed, nodded. “I know. It’s possible he’s involved in all this somehow. But I won’t condemn him until I know how.”
The old man took a second to consider things, then made a decision. Puff, still on Trix’s shoulder, watched curiously as he swept a pile of books from, then pulled a blanket off, a chest-sized object in the corner of the room. Dust from the blanket made Puff sneeze and fart fire. Trix shifted him onto the back of Ralph’s chair then turned to the chest, eyebrows rising. She hadn’t expected to see the chest again.
“Baldur’s Crate?”
Ralph nodded.
They’d called it that because of what it contained—magical artefacts from the old army days, before DragonCorp, when everything was new and strange. Everything within should have been handed over to the company when it took over the site—this was one of its conditions for funding—and up until now Trix had thought Ralph had complied like the rest of them. But clearly not. Because as he lifted the lid, the chest was still full to the brim.
“Ralph,” Trix said, with a smile, “you have been a naughty boy.”
“My dear, at my age, one is never naughty; one is merely absent-minded.” He shrugged. “It is a fact I surrendered some artefacts; more than enough, actually—but you’d be amazed how many ‘unique’ items pop up as duplicates, while others I, erm, signed off as spent.”
Spent. Boffin-speak for an artefact drained of magic. Because while some were permanently imbued with whatever capabilities they possessed, others had only a limited amount of power or number of charges—half an hour of fortification, say, or six fireballs; more if you struck lucky. Such artefacts came in very handy in the field, but you had to keep your eye on them, as when they were done, they were done. Trix had once wielded a blizzard staff in a face-off against a raiding party of goblins, confident she had the little bastards in her sights and could blow them away with one blast, when all that had emerged from the business end of what could now only be described as a stick was a wet plop and a snowflake. After that encounter, she’d learned to measure what was left of a magical artefact’s usefulness from the fading of its telltale shimmer or glow. A lot of the artefacts in Baldur’s Crate shone bright.
“That was very absent-minded of you.”
“Yes, well. I think I always knew a day like this would come. Bound to be complications when you open a can of wyrms, eh? What can you use?”
Trix searched. Plucked an item she herself had brought back from the levels. A chameleon cloak, whose cloth shifted and shimmered in her hands, it altered their physical appearance from young to old, thin to fat, morphed them into those of lizard, goblin, or orc before she willed them back to their own form. It could morph all of her once she was wearing it properly, though thankfully it could be made to camouflage itself so that while she was wearing it she didn’t look a complete tool. It would certainly come in handy to avoid the ’trols and do what she needed these next few hours, and after that, down on the levels, it would come in pretty handy for missile deflection, too.
She dug deeper, and despite recent experience with such accessories, plucked a couple of rings from deep in the chest. The first’s lime-green glow marked it as a ring of speed. Trix slipped it on, waved her hand before her face, nodded at the resultant blur. The second ring—checked for compatibility with the first by drawing it close to see if it repelled like a magnet—had a subtle sunset hue and was more heavily runed—this rarer piece would grant her a degree of resistance to magic. Both would save her having to lug a considerable number of potions, because with no idea how far down she’d be going, she’d need to travel light.
But she wasn’t quite done. Denied access to her locker, she’d have to choose new weapons and armour, and need to make both count. Unfettered from DragonCorp restrictions on what she could and could not use, she’d already decided to eschew gear from DOME in favour of items with a couple of buffs of their own. She chose first a lightweight cuirass with a barkskin enchantment, but as this began charring and crinkling in the presence of one or the other of the rings, she discarded it in favour of a long, spider-hide coat. Ralph’s tests had shown that the web
strands with which it was interwoven would soak a percentage of melee damage when hit. It looked nifty, too. Not that the same could be said for what she then strapped over its sleeves—a ‘unique’ item, the Bloodletter Bracers carried swirling whirlpools of red beneath their buffed surface and were said to literally open old wounds on the bodies of opponents who struck them. They, combined with the agility boost she found in a pair of soft leather rogue’s boots she pulled on, pretty much racked up the max magical tolerance on the gear side of things.
The only thing left to sort was her weapons. And in this, Trix was something of a traditionalist. She’d always wielded knife, staff, and crossbow, and she was going to wield knife, staff, and crossbow now. The only difference being, the knife was infused with Charm, the staff with Stun and Knockdown, and the crossbow—well, okay, the crossbow was more an arbalest, but it had a self-winding windlass and, once loaded with one’s bolt of choice, didn’t need to be loaded again. So stuff tradition, because that was pretty damn cool.
Trix sighed. Apart from a couple more items she stuffed in her pockets, that’d do. She was ready for anything. Apart from what happened next. Because as she rose from Baldur’s Crate, Ralph was shrugging himself into a voluminous grey robe. Under it, she spied a bandolier whose many loops he’d filled with rolled-up scrolls. She glanced at the scroll rack, now half empty.
“Urm?” she said.
The old man slipped a vicious-looking poignard into a scabbard slung at his waist. “Do you have a problem, Patricia?”
“Are you thinking of going somewhere, Ralph?”
“Yes,” the old man said. “I intend accompanying you on your little jaunt.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s … Jesus, because it’s not a jaunt, old man.”
“Exactly why I’m joining you. Sometimes old men are the best men, the kind of men you need. Sometimes street urchins have no idea what they might need.”
Trix absorbed the riposte but remained adamant. “No,” she said.
“You would deny me a chance to finally use my scrolls?”
“No …”
“So, that means yes?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No!” Trix shouted, then paused. She knew there was no way she’d win this. Knew she’d lost when Puff lifted off Ralph’s chair and, without crashing into a thing, settled supportively on Ralph’s shoulder.
Goddamnit.
“So help me, old man … if you die down there …”
“Patricia, I promise you, I am not going to die.”
“Okay, fine!” Trix shouted. “But you’d better damn well make sure you’re tooled up, too. What the hell does that robe of yours do, for instance?”
“This old thing? It is imbued with the finest magic of all. It keeps me warm, young lady. It keeps me warm.”
VI
Map Updated
Trix wound her way through the packed streets to the second person in Diablo she needed to see. She was alone other than for Puff perching on her shoulder, who, thanks to the residual effects of the chameleon cloak she was using, looked for the moment more parrot than bat. Trix herself had tried for a Bohemian look that would let her blend in with the Diablo crowd, and the fact she’d turned out a bit ‘pirate’ was, she considered, no bad thing. As for Ralph, he’d volunteered to sort out with Manny over at the Dragon’s Egg—Purveyors of Practicalities—the supplies, equipment and other gear, ropes and the like, they’d likely need for an extended trip into the depths. Weight restrictions meant they’d opted for two weeks’ food and water, and after that, if needs be, they’d forage from the levels themselves. It wasn’t a particularly unusual shopping list, but as theirs was an unscheduled trip, there was a possibility it might cause a blip on the radar, and Manny could be trusted to be discreet.
As, Trix knew, could Shen-Li. She was waiting for him when his shift ended. Her controller showed no surprise as she shrugged off her cloak, morphing back to her usual self, and stepped from the lengthening dusk shadows angling from the piles of electrical junk surrounding his prefab, nor said a word when she helped roll his wheelchair up the ramp to the inside. But he did smile.
“Had a feeling you’d still be around,” he said, once they were behind closed doors. “I heard what happened.”
“Shen, you don’t know the half of it.”
“What’s going on, Trix?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Oh?”
Trix frowned. “Maybe you’d better fire up your gear.”
Shen nodded, leaned forward, and drew back a curtain dividing his living and sleeping area from that part of the prefab he really called home. Despite being as crammed as Ralph’s ‘study’, it couldn’t really have been more of a polar opposite in terms of content. Against one wall sat Shen’s potions lab—where he made the best quicksilver in town—but it was the other three quarters of the room in which Trix was interested now. She watched as Shen parked himself in the midst of as much electrical junk as there was outside. Not that Shen regarded any of the multiple towers, monitors, recording devices, analytical instruments, and so on that cluttered the area as junk, but it would certainly qualify as such anywhere else in the world. Shen swore his equipment was more resistant to the anomaly’s interference, but Trix suspected even if he had access to cutting-edge machines he’d stick with what he knew. With what he trusted. Because Shen no longer trusted things easily. His current sideline of providing potions to boost faculties on the levels had sprung from an earlier enterprise of providing recreational drugs to the good people of Guangzhou, but an equally enterprising partner had sold out his recipes to one of the city’s tongs who had promptly permanently hobbled Shen to dissuade him from further distribution. He’d fled here, as far into the wilderness as he could get, and would have gone farther to get away, into the levels themselves, had he been able. Thus it was, Shen shared Ralph’s fascination with the other side of the anomaly, though his means of exploring it was and always would be virtual.
This explained the junk outside—while DragonCorp had made repeated requests that it be moved, Shen left it where it was, because removing it meant revealing the web of cabling it hid, cabling that a few yards out disappeared into the sand to link up with DragonCorp’s own heavily insulated cables in the desert. Shen had been tapping them for years, accessing the data from the deep-level probes dumped every hour to the corporation mainframes in Beijing. It was jigsaw work—sometimes outages corrupted the data, and sometimes Shen had to shut down the feed mid load to avoid detection—but over time he’d managed to build up quite the picture of what the levels contained.
Trix waited while the machines stirred to life, aged hard drives chugging like badly plumbed cisterns, until on each of Shen’s monitors appeared a wireframe map of the levels as best as they’d been probed so far. Which was to say to as unknown a percentage as they’d always been. The maps, each from different viewpoints, rotated lazily, and depending from which angle captured showed either an impenetrable scrawl or slightly more decipherable view of the massive labyrinth of passages, chambers, and shafts that lurked right beneath them, and a world away. Thankfully, Shen could zoom to any given area to reduce the noise and provide something actually useful, but only for the uppermost levels of the many visible on screen—the penthouse floors, as he described them. There had been some progress since the early days in mapping deeper—for one thing, in that time the probes had been sunk an extra five hundred feet—but the details they provided, hints of wall here, passage or chamber there, and then only on the peripheries of the maps, were sketchy at best. Shen had used some of the data with rare firsthand records of a few individuals who’d accidentally found themselves, through unexpected happenstance, below level 5, and extrapolated some theoretical thoroughfares and junctions, but, without any true points of reference, theoretical was a
ll they remained. As for the rest of the wireframe, with each lower level the layout became less clear, the twists and turns more obscure, until it was an amorphous Etch-A-Sketch of the truly unknown.
“It might help,” Shen said slowly, “if you told me just what it is you’re looking for.”
“That’s the thing,” Trix replied. “I don’t really know.” She hesitated before continuing, because if anyone was capable of confirming or denying what she’d dreamt, it was Shen. She wasn’t sure which she’d be more comfortable with—having the possibility confirmed or blown out of the water. “The levels,” she said, finally. “Could they be growing?”
“Growing?”
“Adding more corridors. More rooms.”
Shen’s eyebrows rose. “What makes you say that?”
Trix related her visions once more. Told Shen about the secret passage in the nursery that had appeared out of nowhere. Also—this a recent realisation—the number of new areas people seemed to have been discovering recently.
Shen let out a breath, tapped keys. “Strictly speaking,” he said, “the levels wouldn’t actually be growing—at least, I don’t think so—not from their perspective, anyway. What they’d really be doing is expanding into our reality, and any new ‘real estate’, as it were, would always have been there, simply inaccessible until now. A corridor that previously ended in the clay substratum beneath the desert, for example.”