by Mike Wild
Ralph helped, too. As the cloud from the collapse began to subside, he used a scroll of blizzard and treated Garrison’s men to the howling gale and brisk white flurries of a no-doubt unexpected snowstorm.
“Nice,” Trix said.
They ran. Ran without guidance from Shen. Ran without pause to light their way. Ran into the unknown. Such action went against every rule of the levels, was as potentially lethal as walking off a cliff, but what could they do? Another second back there and the fate of the minotaurs would have been their fate, too. Even as it was, Garrison’s men had already battled their way to the exit, and phrutts of rapid fire could again be heard, bullets whizzing and ricocheting in the dark, only inches behind them.
Trix, Yuri, and Ralph survived totally on instinct, their combined experience of years allowing them to glean maximum information from minimum input—the glow of a fleetingly passed crystal warning them to the dangers for a few yards ahead; the ‘give’ of the floor beneath their feet alerting them to the presence of traps that might be triggered if they didn’t keep moving quickly enough; the space around them—a possible corridor, a possible room, and thus which way to turn—hinted at by the feel of the air alone. And all the time, things launched themselves at them from the dark, squealing or grunting or hissing things that were swiftly and efficiently silenced by bolt, staff, or blade. Garrison’s men had experience, but not such a wealth, and it was gratifying to hear a couple of human screams in their wake.
Finally, they felt as if they’d put enough distance—enough dangers—between them and their pursuers, and they paused for breath. Though there were likely sconces to be lit, they didn’t light them. Trix didn’t strike up a flare, and Ralph didn’t conjure a globe. In this much darkness, the illumination from either would travel far, and they didn’t want to attract anything else until they’d gathered their wits. They were truly in unknown territory now.
Trix swivelled the wormglass.
“Shen, we could do with some lay of the land down here.”
“… orry … Trix … arely … receivi … you …”
“Shen?”
“… ome … kind … o … inter …”
“Interference? Is that what you’re saying?”
“… es … ossibly … agical …”
“Possibly magical?”
“… owerful … agical … ield …”
Yuri and Ralph tensed and gripped their weapons, stared into the dark, but saw nothing. Wait—now that their eyes had grown accustomed to it, there was something. A faint, blue glow, like that of a crystal, though somehow more fluid, from some yards down the corridor.
“Okay, Shen,” Trix said. “Leave it to us.”
They moved towards the glow cautiously. Entered a chamber. For a moment, Trix thought they had somehow turned a long way back on themselves and were back where they’d started. For the chamber they’d entered was an almost exact duplicate of the nursery, complete with plant growth and central fountain. Only two things differed—where above the plants had been in a state of semi-decay, here they remained wholly fresh and green, and where the fountain was all but empty, here it was filled. The gentle rustling of the plants and slow ripple of the fountain feed combined to create a strange haven of tranquility after the battle they’d just endured.
The three turned about, looking up and around. Their hair stirred, and the air seemed rich in something like ozone, but with a distinct whiff of magic about it. It was odd—here they were, god knew how far below ground, in a dungeon in a dimension not their own, and they felt as if they could have been walking by a lake in some country idyll. Their aches and pains seemed not to matter any more. The place made them feel refreshed simply by standing in it.
But as with everything in the levels, caution was advised. Trix walked to the fountain, examining it without touching, not its outer surface and certainly not the water within. The ‘water’ looked harmless and smelled harmless, but while it had seemingly nurtured the plants, there was nothing to say these particular plants weren’t nurtured by acid.
But the water, without being disturbed, seemed to move anyway, with a sway to its surface as subtle as that of their hair. There was a faint sparkle to it, as if it were effervesced with tiny stars. It seemed somehow alive. Trix found herself entranced by it, leaning over to peer into its meagre depths, studying a strangely symbolled mosaic of tiles at its bottom, and a droplet of minotaur blood from her recent splattering splashed gently into the water. The water fizzed about the droplet, and then the droplet was gone.
“Ralph,” she said. “Come over here.”
The old man joined her, and Trix flicked another droplet of blood into the water. The water fizzed, and the blood again vanished. Ralph’s eyebrows rose. Very tentatively, he placed a fingertip in the water and, after it didn’t dissolve, swirled it around. A light trail followed his movement. A glowing white in the blue.
“I think this may possibly be water with something other than a slight rejuvenative effect.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That here we may have instant potions. A health fountain. Let’s see …”
Ralph pulled back his robe to bare his shoulder, and Trix saw it was running with blood.
“Christ, Ralph, you’re hit.”
“Mainly flesh wound, though maybe some chipped bone.” He sank his palm into the fountain and gave the wound a generous splash, holding his hand over it. He sighed, waited a second, pulled his hand away. His wound was closing.
“Good god,” Trix said.
“Wash yourself,” Ralph responded. “It’s better than harmless.”
Trix did, getting rid of the minotaur gore. Her skin tingled, and she felt the remains of a scar fade away. “Yuri,” she said, “you have to try this.”
“In a moment, English,” the Russian replied. Trix sighed as she saw he was over in the corner of the chamber, pissing again.
“Is there something wrong with you?”
“Ballstones,” Yuri grumbled. It may not have been medically accurate, but it painted the picture. “That fucking basilisk has a lot to answer for.”
“Maybe you should have a dip in the fou—” Trix began, but then stopped. There were sounds of movement from the corridor they’d left behind. Human movement.
Without a sound—other than a zipping of fly—they moved off, put distance between themselves and Garrison’s men once more. And found light—there were lit torches ahead. Unfortunately, what they lit presented them with a dilemma. Three stairwells in a fan formation, leading down, each to an utterly unknown destination.
“Which one?” Yuri asked Trix.
“The middle one.”
“You seem strangely confident.”
“Oh, I am,” Trix said. Because she’d spotted what Yuri and Ralph hadn’t. A carving—and fairly recent one at that—in the wall at the top of the central stairway. Three vertical slashes with a horizontal one through their middle. At least, that was one way of looking at it. Trix looked at it another way.
Two letters. An ‘I’ overlaid on an ‘H’.
Ian Hunter.
“I do not understand, English.”
Trix sighed. “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” she said. “It was our favourite book as kids. Well, after The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. In it, Professor Lidenbrock replicates Arne Saknussemm’s expedition of three hundred years earlier by following marks such as these.”
“There was an Ian Hunter on Arne Saknussemm’s expedition? That is quite the coincidence.”
Trix stared at him.
“Joke, English.”
“Aren’t we rather missing the point?” Ralph interjected. “It being, why Ian would leave such marks? He hardly seemed keen to make his presence known.”
“No, but he knows me. Knows that if I get the slightest whiff of something, I’ll follow it up.”
“I suppose,” Yuri rumbled softly, “this could explain the deliberate sabotage of the passage earlier. He could be trying to
lead you in a particular direction.”
“Or into a particular trap.”
“Yes, thanks for the repeated vote of confidence in my brother, Ralph,” Trix snapped, then regretted it. “I’m sorry. Look, we have to choose one of these sets of stairs, and quickly, so why not this one? If it is a trap, at least we’re forewarned.”
Yuri shrugged. “Sounds reasonable.”
Ralph looked as if he still had his doubts, but he capitulated. They took the middle stairway.
As soon as they did, the entrance boomed shut behind them.
IX
Up But Not Out
Despite Ralph’s harumph of ‘I told you so’, it wasn’t a trap. Not as such. The whole of the top landing of the stairwell was a pressure plate, and after the threesome had stepped beyond it, onto the first actual step down, the entrance boomed open again. Back on, boomed shut. Off, boom. On, boom. The logic of it escaped them for a second, but then they realised—it was to stop things ascending from the level below. Exactly what those things might be and why that level should be isolated in this way remained to be seen. First, they had another problem to solve. During the last ‘off’ boom they’d spotted Garrison’s men—drawn by the noise—heading straight for them. Ralph moved back onto the pressure plate.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll keep it closed.”
“And be cut down as soon as you move? Or are you going to stay there forever, sending out for pizza? Yuri?”
The Russian was already on the case, examining the edges of the pressure plate. He found what he was looking for, took a knife from his backpack, and prised it into a particular spot. He grunted as he twisted the knife and snapped the handle cleanly from the blade. The knife was jammed in the plate and the plate jammed in the down position. An old keeper trick.
Trix gestured theatrically for Ralph to take the lead.
“Shen, you back with us?”
“Reporting for duty.”
“Glad to hear it. Listen, we just took the middle stairway of three available choices. Tell me I’ve made the right one.”
“Yep. Looks like you’re on the way to level 7, Trix.”
“The other two stairways?”
“Same level, different ingress points.”
“Damn. Then we’ve still got hostiles.”
“Minotaurs?”
“Master teams.”
“Garrison’s following? Christ, it looks like you really are onto something. But don’t sweat it. The level’s a bit of a labyrinth, and both sets of stairs enter over a kilometre away. Keep moving and his people won’t be intercepting you anytime soon.”
“Shen, you just earned your pay for the day.”
“Thanks. Keep in touch.”
“Will do.”
Another hundred metres descent brought them to level 7. None of them had any preconceived notions about what they might find there, but possibly the very last thing expected was one of Trix’s boffins. The Faze must have shifted him down here. The poor bastard was huddled near the base of the stairwell, where presumably he’d thought himself one step closer to home before being stymied by the self-blocking exit. With no idea where he was, he’d settled in to wait for help that would never come. His makeshift shelter of a tattered standard bearing unknown livery and what looked to be a couple of goblin shields may have made him feel a mite safer, but it hadn’t stopped him starving to death. Trix sighed at the sight of the shrivelled, partly mummified corpse inside its torn and bloodied biohazard suit.
Some of the blood was blue.
Oh, Christ, she thought. Ghouls. She hated ghouls. It was almost impossible to put them down. Other undead, fine—shatter a skeleton, you had the makings of a hanging basket; hack off a zombie’s legs and do the crossword while it caught up—but ghouls … you could slice at ’em, you could at least try to dice ’em, but the leaping, flailing fuckers absorbed most major wounds and still kept coming. Because their bodies regenerated. And fast.
Conversely, their one weakness was that they were slow. On the uptake, that was. Whatever perversion of nature had made them what they were, it had left them with senses dulled; generally, they were tortured, inward-looking, and self-absorbed—unless disturbed. It was possible to pass within ten feet of one and not be noticed at all. And that was really the only way to get by a ghoul.
It seemed the boffin had learned that. Ralph handed Trix a homemade map of the level that he’d found amongst the boffin’s remains. “Our deceased friend was clever enough to keep track of them, I’ll give him that.”
Trix looked at the map. As Shen had said, a bit of a labyrinth indeed. On it, the boffin had done what he could to chronicle the locations of the ghouls and safe routes through them, blue-ink circles and arrows with triple exclamation marks he’d committed to paper while he still had the energy to do so. A ring of ink and a roughly drawn set of stairs marked what had become his final resting place and their current location.
“This way,” Trix said. Down a corridor she expected to be longer than it actually was. Because, while to scale, the boffin’s map hadn’t made clear certain details. Like the fact the corridor became an open walkway.
“Oh my god,” Trix said.
Ralph gave the shortened version. “Oh my.”
“Sheet,” said Yuri.
Their reaction wasn’t to the vast cavern before them—though that more than merited the same—but the way across it. It was a labyrinth, all right, but only of a sort. They were not in one; they were on one. The walkway the corridor had become was the beginning of a labyrinthine tangle of narrow and precipitous routes either miraculously formed or deliberately hewn from the rock of the cavern itself. There was room for the three of them to walk abreast, for sure, but with only inches to spare, and then the chasms between were wide and deep. They peered down—maybe a hundred metres to rough rock on which lay broken a good number of skeletal forms. There were doubtless more.
Nice.
“At least we can see where we’re going,” Trix said. “That’s got to count for something, right?”
Ralph and Yuri looked about as convinced as she. Because while they could indeed see where they were going—a clear exit on the cavern’s far side—the getting there was going to prove problematic. The snake-like weaving of the pathways was interrupted here and there by stone plateaus on which lurked nests of ghouls, their dark, straggly forms occasionally wandering from the others, though never too far. Their movements matched perfectly those on the boffin’s map, and it was possible to see the safe routes he’d marked. They’d have worked, too, had it not been for Garrison’s people.
Yes, they were back. Emerging from their own stairwells far to the left and right, still the size of ants, but already causing chaos. Trix, Yuri, and Ralph took no gratification from the fact the master team’s kill-everything approach proved less successful here than with the minotaurs, no satisfaction seeing the ghouls with their almost instantly healing wounds leap and bound towards their assailants, fangs and claws bared, because they knew it could only have a knock-on effect that would seriously ruin their day. Sure enough, as Garrison’s people scattered, taking different walkways to fire on the ghouls from afar, they encroached upon other plateaus, disturbed the nests there, and suddenly the whole cavern was coming alive. It was no longer time for stealth; it was time to run.
Run they did, choosing the twists and turns of the labyrinthine walkways on the hoof, switchbacking when a route safe the moment before suddenly came alive or another cleared itself as the ghouls did what the humans could not and leapt between walkways to intercept those of Garrison’s people who thought themselves safe by flanking them. The ghouls frequently bounded across Trix, Ralph and Yuri’s path, dangerously close, and the trio’s boots scraped and skidded turn after turn, junction after junction, until they were almost tripping over themselves in their madcap dash to stay out of engagement. Showers of scree rained from the pathways’ edges, chunks of rock broke away to crash into the drops between. Debris wasn’t the only thi
ng that fell therein, as the screams from a couple of Garrison’s people testified. What ghouls fell did so in absolute silence.
There was a long way to go. The twists and turns sometimes made it one step forward, two steps back, and, what was worse, where the cavern’s size had so far kept them out of range of the master team’s guns, the firefight had now moved to the heart of the cavern, and was difficult to avoid. Trix, Yuri and Ralph had, therefore, to adopt new tactics, pausing occasionally mid dash to take down any prospective threat in swift, preemptive strikes. Each time they halted, Trix and Ralph handled the ranged damage, she crouching and unleashing her crossbow to wing and send spinning those of Garrison’s people who had them in their sights, while Ralph stood over her, muttering rapidly before despatching thunderbooms or a slap from the gods to flip arse over tit those she’d missed. Yuri, meanwhile, took charge of the melee department, swinging his sword in an arc to send those ghouls who developed any interest in them staggering back in a spray of blue blood. The ghouls’ wounds started to heal instantly, of course, but Yuri booted them over the edge before they could regain their equilibrium.
It was in this manner they made their way to the exit, bursts of flight interspersed with brief exchanges, leaving their enemies behind. Trix was sidetracked only once, making a manic dash as she saw two of Garrison’s people go down in a single swipe from a ghoul’s claws—the bloodspray was dramatically red this time. Her intention was to grab their weapons, but these clattered and skittered into the void even as she dived to catch them, and she cursed. There were consolation prizes, though—two small, circular discs, one of which she tossed to Yuri, who caught it neatly, as they dedicated themselves once more to getting the hell out of there.