by Mike Wild
“Makes sense—I’ve met a few muddy dead ends. But is it happening, Shen?”
“I’ve recorded some fresh cartography, for sure,” Shen shrugged, “but I put that down to lucky sweeps from the probes. If we’re talking actually new, well, let’s see.” He tapped again, occasionally cursing and slapping monitors as interference temporarily reduced the maps to graphical fuzz. “Okay, what I’m doing is overlaying representative samples of the daily feeds from the last three months to see what, if anything, sticks out, and—oh, that’s interesting …”
“What?”
“Something sticking out, strangely enough. Approximately two hundred extra yards of corridor on level 4, to be exact.”
“Going where?”
“Nowhere … at least not yet. Wait, there’s another one, running north, sou’-sou’-west. Incomplete, but another fifty yards and it’d cut a day off the route from Skeleton Square to The Rumbles. Hey—maybe we could get a mudpuddin to burrow through.”
“Stick to the point, Shen. Anything else?”
“It looks as if we may have a new chamber on 2. From its shape and size I’d say training ground or dormitory of some kind. Then a … a … hell, I don’t know what that is. And there’s one, no, two, no, four, of what look to be small storerooms to the east of level 1. Also a possible stairwell dropping to level 3. Shit, Trix, how have I missed all these?”
“It’s a big dungeon, Shen.”
“No—no, no, no, it has to be something more than that. Hold on a second—I’m going to run all the feeds in accelerated realtime.”
Trix leaned in to peer over his shoulder, tensing as Shen tensed. For with the overlays running one after another, as they’d come from the probes, the changes were not only more noticeable but mesmerising. All over the maps—especially their edges—countless chambers and corridors appeared and disappeared in a series of blooms, as if the dungeon was being bombed from above. But this was no bombing, and these not detonations—or at least that was what Trix inferred from Shen’s reaction. “Fuck me,” he said. “No wonder I didn’t spot them.”
“What’s happening?”
“They’re blinking in and out. In some feeds, gone the next, back, gone. I was obviously looking in the wrong places at the wrong times.” Shen fiddled with settings. “Hold on, I’m turning this up to eleven.”
The pair of them stared at the screen for a full minute, jaws slowly dropping. For at the speed they were now being seen, the new features in the dungeon no longer seemed to explode but lingered through persistence of vision. And that persistence changed the whole look of the map. Sharp offshoots of corridor at its edges not withstanding, it had become something almost organic, throbbing, pulsing, like a cell about to divide. Shen froze the images as they grew to their maximum size.
“The levels are flexing their muscles,” he said. “Pushing the bounds.”
“The bounds of what?”
“The dimensional membrane. The balloon’s getting bigger.”
“What—like it’s going to pop?”
Shen shook his head. “Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. What we’ve just watched is vastly accelerated, remember? But there’s pressure definitely being exerted on the anomaly.”
“The maelstrom?”
“Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way of locating a phenomenon like what you’ve described.” Shen turned to her. “But that isn’t to say it isn’t there.”
Trix stared at those parts of the map still resembling a badly handled Etch-A-Sketch. “It’s there,” she said, convinced now. “It’s there.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find it.”
Shen stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope, I’m not. And Ralph’s coming with me.”
“‘Ralph’s coming with me’,” Shen repeated, incredulous. “Is he carrying the picnic basket? Jesus, Trix, this isn’t—”
“A jaunt. I know. Which is why we’re going to need your help.”
“Oh, okay, yes, I’ll help,” Shen said quickly. “I’ll help by making a call for you. What was the number again—1-1-1-She’s-Off-Her-Fucking-Head?”
“I’m serious, Shen. Ian’s down there.”
The hitherto undisclosed information stopped Shen dead, as Trix expected it would. His mouth opened, closed, and as it did Trix told him the rest—including her suspicions as to why they had to work off the radar. Shen shook his head as if the news was all too much to take in. “Even if you could get to the bottom of this,” he said at last, “getting to the bottom could take weeks, months—even years. It’s impossible.”
“Not necessarily. Because that’s where you come in.”
“How so?”
“You can track us. Help us navigate.”
“No, Trix, I can’t. You know as well as I do there are no uplines below the upper levels, and no way to get a signal in or out. The anomaly jams everything. So unless you have a tin can and very long piece of string …”
“I might at that.”
Shen looked curiously at the cloth-bound bundle Trix took from a pocket. She pulled away the cloth to reveal two jagged shards of glass, one slightly larger than the other, in whose mottled, patchily silvered surfaces reflections of the room danced. “And these are what, exactly?”
“Magic mirrors.”
“Magic mirrors?”
“More accurately, magic mirror, singular. Ralph found a shattered cheval in some weird laboratory on level 3 a few years back. These are pieces of that.”
“And?”
Trix handed Shen one of the shards, held the other up to her face. “Look into it,” she said.
Shen shrugged but complied. His eyebrows rose. “I look like you.”
“That is me. And you look like you. Pluck that hair from your nose.”
Shen snatched the mirror down. “I hear you, too. In the mirror, I mean.”
“I know. Ralph and I had a chat last time I was in Beijing.”
“An acoustic trick, it has to be.”
“You think? When we had that chat, Ralph wasn’t in Beijing, Shen. He was here, in Diablo.”
Trix could almost hear the cogs in Shen’s head turning. “Two shards from the same whole … sharing the the same enchantment …”
“The old man reckons the mirror was some kind of communications device between agents of Bhaal.” She smiled. “Joke. But seriously—his guess is when the mirror was smashed, enough magic was retained to create a kind of closed loop, linking these two shar—”
“A singularity,” Shen interrupted. “A micro wormhole connecting the two. If that’s true, there’ll be an energy signature, and I’ll be able to track you.”
“Better than that, Shen—” Trix waved her mirror in his face “—you’ll be able to see what’s down there.”
That possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him yet. She’d already won him over, Trix knew, but now he was won over and excited. Still, his face clouded.
“Garrison’s locked the levels down. ’Trols inside and out. You’ll never make it past the penthouse levels, let alone deeper.”
“Maybe there’s a way.”
“Go on …”
“The minotaur came at us from a secret passage. I think it’s unexplored, and I think it could lead deep.”
“There’s been no report of any new passage.”
“That’s likely because it all but collapsed when the bastard came through.”
“Even so, it might not be a passage at all. The minotaur could just have got itself locked in a wizard’s cupboard for years. You know they’re a bit ‘duh’ like that.”
“No, Shen. I smelled the depths. I’m sure I did.”
“Well, okay, let’s see.”
They returned to the wiremap, and Trix’s fingers traced the route she and the boffins had taken, tapping the screen when she reached the nursery. Her finger circled the area of the secret passage, and Shen zoomed in. They were looking straight on, however, and lit
tle detail could be discerned.
“Can you rotate?”
Shen spun the image ninety degrees, so they were now looking at a profile of the wall which had disgorged the minotaur. It wasn’t very clear, but there did seem to be a kind of passage, as opposed to a single chamber or room, beyond it. Trix traced its length until it appeared to drop, though here the wireframe was a little crowded and confusing.
“Try flipping it.”
Shen complied. This time, the ninety-degree shift upended the wireframe so they were looking at the underside of level 2 through the skeleton of level 3. A jumble again, taking concentration to decipher, but there it was. A staggered line through those two levels—possibly going deeper still.
A stairway.
Trix clapped Shen on the shoulder.
“That’s it. That’s the way down.”
“That’s as may be, Trix. But aren’t you forgetting one thing? How the hell are you going to get onto the levels in the first place?”
“Yes, well, I was hoping you might be able to arrange a small diversion.”
“Jesus Christ, you don’t want much, do you?”
“You owe me one, remember?”
“Okay, okay. Bloody hell. What kind of diversion?”
“I’ll leave that to the man with the know-how.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Shen conceded. “But I’m going to need the key to the security mainframe.”
“Can’t you hack it?”
“No, Trix, the key. To the room they keep the mainframe in.”
“Oh. You won’t need a key. I’m good with locks, remember?”
“Not this one, you aren’t. The key’s chemically encoded. But there are four copies of it. I’m sure you could lay your hands on one of them.”
“Are you giving me a quest?”
“A necessity.”
“Fine. I’ll get your key. Who has copies?”
“One’s kept at DragonCorp HQ,” Shen said, tapping away. “Here at DOME, Garrison, of course. General Chang, of the PLA, currently inspecting level 5.” He paused. “The fourth is rotated … it’s currently in the hands of one … Yuri Dragomiloff.”
Trix slumped. “Now you have to be kidding me. Prince Adam?”
“He was a major in the Russian military, Trix.”
“One become a little too fond of his vodka ration. He pissed on a basilisk and got his dick turned to stone, for Christ’s sake.”
Shen smiled. “Maybe that’s something you can work with?”
Trix sighed, and worked with it. She knew Dragomiloff could be found anywhere there was alcohol, but there were a lot of ‘anywheres’ with alcohol in Diablo. It took two hours and eleven taverns before she struck lucky. Charlie Mops was a quarter the size of the Grimrock Café, but ten times as crowded. For obvious reasons. The cynical might have been tempted to call it a ‘theme’ pub, but it was just the way it was, the way its clientele liked it. Log fires crackled in grates, meat roasted on spits above, ale and wine slopped from tankards and goblets, and amidst the insults and raucous laughter, men and women gathered around tables playing card games not of this world. Trix recognised many of their faces—they were almost all professional hirelings, available to mercenary groups who might lack in a certain … talent: a good lockpicker, say, a healer, trap disabler, or someone with enough muscle to be a tank. Occasionally these talents would assemble and go down in their own groups, but that was dependent either on their having garnered enough cash from an earlier job or whether one of the completion backers to be found in Diablo had sufficient faith in them to fund their current ticket. That faith usually depended on what leads they had, and to that end Charlie Mops provided one wall of its premises as a quest-cum-notice board. Today as always it was covered in scraps of homemade maps, the rumoured locations of treasure chests, impassable gates, locked chambers and the like, as well as suggestions as to how to avoid certain traps, areas, or enemies. It was perhaps surprising that mercenaries, being such, were willing to share information—more so, incidentally, than was DragonCorp itself—but the fact was it was to all their benefits. Looking at them now, it was easy to mistake the carousing and laughter of the various groups for low intelligence, but the fact was each and every one was expert in their field, and they took their job very seriously indeed. No one wanted to die down there. What was the point in that?
Trix had worked with some of them herself, and she nodded to a number as she wove by their tables: the Challengers of the Unexplored; Hannah Rider Haggard and her group; Wizards of the Coast; and she got a high five from Gygax’s Guerillas, the oldest surviving mercenary group of all.
Not all the customers were pros. She had to fight her way through a group of drunks swinging their glasses and god-blessing Charlie Mops to reach the bar. Behind which loomed one Aloysius Shaughnessy. No, really. The ginger-haired, ginger-bearded barrel of a man was a walking stereotype, and he, too, liked it that way. He was wiping glasses as she approached. Each glass ended up dirtier than when he’d started. He nodded.
“Trix.”
“Hey, Al, how’s things?”
“Can’t complain, darlin’. Though I’ve a little problem with a plague of rats in my cellar. You wouldn’t be caring to sort this out for me, would you?”
“That’s funny, Al. Very funny.”
The big man leaned in. “Not as funny, in a peculiar sense, as what I’ve heard about me favourite keeper. Is it true what they say—that you’re on the lam?”
News travelled fast. “Let’s just say I’m engaged in a little extracurricular activity, shall we, Al?”
“We shall indeed, darlin’. And to that end?”
“I’m looking for Major Dragomiloff. You seen him?”
Al pointed a thumb to his left. “Been here since before I can remember.”
“Now, there’s a surprise. Thanks, Al.”
“Sure. Don’t forget my plague of rats, now.”
Trix shoved her way through the crowd towards the man she wanted to see. He was holding court in the corner of the tavern, surrounded as usual by women of a certain taste. The taste in this case was for a muscular Russian with flowing blond locks garbed in nothing but furry boots, crossed bandoliers, and a crotch-hugging codpiece. Together with the jagged, two-handed sword and axes he had strapped to his back, this was the reason almost everyone in DOME—including himself—referred to Yuri Dragomiloff as Prince Adam.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Sure. I can wait while the ladies learn the truth about your constant hard-on.” She looked at the women. “What? He hasn’t told you it might snap off?”
The women looked down at Yuri’s codpiece, pouting disappointedly. Their fingers trailed off his flesh, and then the women themselves trailed away. Prince Adam bunched fists and growled in frustration. Then he slugged deeply from his vodka and wiped lips that curled into a lascivious smile.
“You seem a little flushed, English. Perhaps you are in heat. At last given in to your passion for me, yes?”
“Flushed from hauling my arse around town looking for you, actually, you drunken sod.”
“Drunk, bah! Yuri Ivanovich Dragomiloff drinks horses under the table. And their carts!” He swayed slightly. “What is it you want?”
“Business.”
“Business, you say?” He pronounced it bizzyness. “What kind of business could you want with Prince Adam that does not involve you being naked in my beeeg soft bed?”
“I’m organising a crawl.”
“So, why come to me—just clear it with Citadel.”
“I would, only—” Trix whispered “—I don’t want them to know about it.”
Dragomiloff’s eyebrows rose. His semi-sozzled brain took a second to process what she was saying. Then he guided her towards a booth and signalled Aloysius.
“Another triple, tovarish, and for my English friend—”
“Icewind Ale.”
“Coming up.”
Trix sq
ueezed in one side of the table. God only knew how the Russian managed to do the same on the other. There was no doubt he was one of the most muscular men she’d known, though it was a mistake to think of him as a walking action figure, the image he liked to portray. There was more to Prince Adam … to Yuri than that. Or at least there was when he wasn’t on the sauce. Back in the military days, she’d been seconded to his command a number of times, been there when he’d acquired some of his numerous scars, on more than one occasion saving others from getting scars of their own. It was why she lived with his foibles—including his habit of wearing his ludicrous ‘armour’ not only here, for the ladies, but on the levels themselves. Out of all the keepers, he was the one who took ‘going native’ to the extreme, and surprisingly he was one of the longest surviving. The man had an instinct for survival that transcended the need for armour, and the melee skills to match. Any monster intelligent enough to find his appearance amusing didn’t find it amusing for long.
“You don’t want them to know about it?” he said, after taking a slug of his drink. “Are you fucking insane, English?”
“Oh, come on, Yuri—we both sometimes dropped off the radar back when.”
“A clandestine exploration of a secret chamber here or there, yes, maybe. The dip of a cautious toe into the next level to see what kind of pain-in-the-fucking-arse monsters awaited us, for sure. But that was then, this is now. DragonCorp. It is biting the hand that feeds you. It is inviting that hand to chop off both of your own. Or—” Yuri made two shooting gestures with his finger—“phut! phut! Two silenced bullets in the brain when you least expect them. No, tovarish, you must forget this insane plan.”
“I’m not going to steal from DragonCorp, Yuri. This is something different.”
Yuri took a slug. “Different how?”
Trix told him. Told him who was involved. Told him what she needed.
“Here,” he said, sliding the chemical key onto the table, “take it.”
“What—just like that?”
“Just like that,” Yuri said. Then immediately placed his hand over the key. “With one small condition.”
“I knew it. No, Dragomiloff, I’m not shagging you.”
“No shagging, English. I am worried for you. It sounds to me as if you are more in danger of the ‘Phut! Phut!’ than ever. As Russian soldier, it is my duty to protect you.”