by Mike Wild
Trix sighed. “Not sure that’s the teleportal, Yuri.”
She peered ahead. They’d arrived in a dark chamber, illuminated only by the light from the teleportal itself. It was enough to pick out indistinct shapes around and ahead of them, but nothing more than that. Ralph began to conjure a globe of light, but Trix stayed his hand. If any of those shapes were alive—if anything here was alive—she didn’t want the three of them in the spotlight.
“Shen,” she whispered into the wormglass, “where are we?”
Shen sounded a little subdued as he responded. “It took me a second to locate you,” he said, “but that was because I was looking in the wrong place. Down instead of up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re on level 1, Trix.”
“What?”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re right back where you started.”
X
The Dungeon Less Travelled
Trix refused to believe that they’d gone to all that trouble for nothing. She was convinced, in fact, that Shen’s data was wrong—that somehow the teleportal had thrown his instruments out of kilter. Shen, of course, protested and provided further information to back his assertion. Pinpointed their location exactly.
They were on level 1, all right, smack bang between Serpent’s Slide and the Dark Chapel. There was only one small problem. There was nothing between Serpent’s Slide and the Dark Chapel. Between them, they physically knew every inch of level 1, and had there been a secret or hidden or even magical entrance to an area between the two, they’d have found it long ago.
Where they were was impossible.
Trix decided to throw caution to the wind and struck a flare. She gasped at what it illuminated. She wasn’t the only one. Their first impression was that they’d materialised in the middle of an extradimensional version of Stonehenge, but after a moment’s reflection they realised that what they were surrounded by were not standing stones but other teleportals. Thirteen of them, including their own, in a perfect circle. Unlike their own, the others appeared deactivated.
Ralph wandered among them, running his hand over the arches with a degree of reverence. “This would explain why there is no way in here,” he said. “It must be some kind of interchange … for want of a better phrase, a rapid transit system between various areas of the dungeon.” He paused, deep in thought. “And, of course, between levels.”
“Professor Arthur, are you thinking what I am thinking?”
“Yes, Urine.” The old man realised what he’d said and shook his head. “I am so sorry, my dear Yuri. I am a little distracted. Yes, that by deciphering and cross-referencing the runes on each teleportal, I could, perhaps, determine their destinations. Perhaps even determine our ultimate dest—”
“This one,” Trix said. “We use this one.”
“Patricia? Do you know something we do not?”
“Not me,” Trix said. She pointed at the teleportal next to her. “But somebody does.” She drew three vertical lines and a horizontal one in the air.
Ralph moved to the arch. Examined the scratches Trix had pointed out. “That could be anything. An afterthought on the rune design. A scratch from a tool.”
“You know that’s not the case. He’s guiding us, Ralph.”
“So far,” Yuri said, “through a cavernful of ghouls and a chessboard gone mad.” He looked at Ralph, hurt. “Is my pissing really that bad?”
Trix ignored him. “Maybe because it’s the quickest and safest route to where we need to go. Maybe because it’s the only safe way.”
“Safe, being, I assume, a relative term?”
“Yes, dammit! But maybe saving us weeks of struggle.”
“Or hastening our end.”
“All right, Ralph, all right,” Trix demanded, turning in a circle, “you tell me which of these twelve portals we take. Look at them, how old they are—how long since they’ve been used? What might have changed on their other side?”
“Patricia …”
“You tell me which doesn’t lead to solid rock, or a bottomless pit, or a lake of fucking acid …”
“Patricia …”
“We have to do, this, Ralph. Commit ourselves to following Ian’s route, or not. And we have to do it now, before those ghouls come through the portal.”
“Patricia, I agree.”
“What?”
“Given the variables of the other eleven, our best odds are the fifty-fifty offered by your brother’s portal. But first we need to ‘turn it on’, yes?”
That took the wind out of Trix’s sails somewhat. “Oh. Right. Yes.”
“Thankfully, your little rant gave me the time to work out how to do it.” The old man strode back to the first portal, asking Yuri’s assistance for a leg up, and used a knife to prise a spindle-shaped crystal from the top of the arch, before hopping back down. Trix’s indignation that Ralph had once again managed to get the last word turned to slight panic as the shape of a ghoul began to leap through the teleportal behind him, claws already slashing. But then the energy field dissipated, and with it went the ghoul, vanishing from striking distance like so many leaves on the wind. The bastards were able to recover from many things, but not that.
Ralph was completely oblivious to his close call. This time he asked Trix to give him a lift. The crystal slotted into place, and the teleportal came to life.
“Shall we?” Ralph said.
They went—into chaos. The entire corridor in which they appeared was shaking, earthquake-level shaking, and they staggered as they tried to dodge chunks of ceiling clattering down around them. They took cover in a buttressed section, and just in time, watching in dismay as the corridor collapsed behind them. The teleportal was buried. There was no going back.
“Shen,” Trix said into the wormglass, “where the hell have we ended up?” No reply came. Trix shook her crossbow, and Yuri smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are shaking a magic mirror, English. I do not think there are working parts in a magic mirror.”
“Well, there should be. Shen? Shen!”
“Here, Trix,” his voice came back. But it sounded much more distant than it had before, like a bad overseas telephone cable muted by deep ocean. “Took me a while to find you. You’re way over to the edge of the map. Level nineteen.”
Trix felt the corridor swoop in around her. “Say again. What? Level what?”
“N-n-n-nineteen.”
“Jesus wept. Are you sure?”
“To be honest, no. Could be level seventeen or eighteen, or twenty or twenty-one. Your signal’s jumping around a bit.”
“You’re telling me. We’ve got a quake here. Any idea what’s going on?”
“Oh, yeah. When I say you’re on the edge of the map, I mean the edge. And I think the dungeon’s trying to push the envelope around you.”
Trix felt a strange mix of vindication and chill. “You mean we were right? It is trying to grow?”
“Sure looks that way from here. I’d get the hell out of there if I were you. Move inward. The signal at that depth isn’t great, but I’ll do what I can to guide you.”
The three of them followed Shen’s directions, dodging more falls until one came down right in front of them and put paid to further progress. They backtracked, took another corridor, but came to a blockage of a different kind. Different in that it wasn’t so much blockage as no-go area.
They sniffed something strange about the corridor as soon as they turned into it, felt a warmth not present in other areas of the dungeon. It didn’t take long for them to notice the streaks of oily black soot on the walls, the wisps of smoke circulating in the air. They’d have turned back there and then, but Shen couldn’t find another route. The streaks got thicker the farther they went, on the walls, floor, and ceiling, until they were no longer streaks but a coating, the corridor as black as the inside of a chimney, soft and crunchy underfoot. The smoke grew thicker, too, acrid and cloying, but de
spite it their nostrils wrinkled at the smell they’d picked up from the very first. It was the smell of death—of burned meat, bone, cloth, and hair. Only a few feet on they came across the first body—the first source of the smoke. An ogrot, it lay facedown on its fleshy front, but its rear had been totally seared away. It looked like a crustless skeleton pie.
There were more bodies, every few feet; ogrots, again, a few goblins, rodents of unusual size. Their remains, too, were smoking, and increasingly identifiable only by their skeletal structure. The trio moved carefully by them, and by the time they came to the last, every organ and muscle or tendon within the blackened skeletons—grotesquely still standing, welded into position by incredible heat—had been totally incinerated. From their stances—turning in panic, arms held forward in defence or up in alarm—this had happened in an instant.
“They must have been fleeing the quake,” Ralph said. “Ran into something unexpected.”
The unexpected lay in a chamber, just up ahead. At its heart, blocking the way through, was a huge, dark, semi-prone mass. A soft rumble came from it, like a snore, and what appeared to be two eyes and a half-closed maw, close to the floor, gave off a dull red glow. Slow drifts of steam rose at diagonals from an orifice between.
“Noooooooo …” Trix said. “It can’t be.”
“Are you thinking what I am thinking, English?”
“Begins with a ‘d’ and ends with an ‘n’?”
“Damson,” Ralph said. “Dustbin. Doorman.”
“Not quite what we had in mind.”
“Darwin. Dodecahedron. Doberman.”
“I think you’re missing the point, Ralph,” Trix said. She tried prompting him. “Dungeons and …?”
“Dandelions. Dolphins. Oh, I know—delusions.”
Trix sighed. “Are you trying to tell us something?”
“Yes, Patricia. Namely, that I find it exceedingly unlikely that what you see in that chamber is a dragon.”
“Why the hell not? Just because we haven’t come across one before doesn’t mean we won’t. We’re nineteen levels deep, remember?”
“And what did it do to be here in this little room nineteen levels deep—squeeze itself in with a shoehorn?”
“Perhaps,” Yuri said. “The ways of dragons are many and mysterious.”
“No,” Ralph said. “There is something strange he—”
As he spoke, there was another quake. Strong enough, this time, for its effects to be felt where they were standing. Strong enough to collapse the skeletons around them. The black bones hit the floor in a loud clatter, and one of the skulls bounced into the chamber. There was a clank. The plumes of steam thickened. The eyes and maw opened. Their glow reddened, turned orange, then white.
“Perhaps we should debate this later.”
“No argument here.”
They ran back the way they’d come. There was a roar, and a jet of flame filled the air behind them, billowing, roiling, and closing on them by the second. Trix heard the back of her spider-hide coat combust and, unable to make the turn in the corridor, threw herself desperately forward and down. Yuri and Ralph landed either side of her with an oof and a thud, the old man muttering rapidly to summon a small rainstorm to douse them while the conflagration lasted. The fire receded after a few seconds, and they rolled and stood, patting their smoking clothes down.
“Shen?” Trix coughed. “Can you find us another way out of here?”
“I see nothing, Trix.”
“There must be something.”
Shen obliged with a search, found something, though from its footprint on his map, he wasn’t at all sure it was an exit or not. It seemed not to be part of the natural structure of the dungeon. Shen guided them to it, and Trix became certain it wasn’t.
A tumbled mound of stonework signalled a collapse in the corridor wall. The collapse wasn’t recent—not a result of the quakes—as was evident from the thick curtain of cobweb that almost hid it from view. It billowed slightly, stirred by a soft breeze. Beyond they could just make out natural rock—a cave, or at the very least, a passage of some kind. Shen couldn’t be precise about where it went, but it showed on his map as a kind of smear with a bulbous central area between two more distinct sections of corridor. Approximately a kilometre in length, if they followed it to its end, he reckoned, they’d be back on track, back in the dungeon proper. Trix didn’t like it—in her experience sometimes the most dangerous things in the dungeon were hidden between its walls, things old enough to have existed from before its genesis and resilient enough to have survived the many years since. The cobweb left little doubt what kind of things awaited here.
“First dragons and now hamsters,” Yuri growled. “I hate hamsters.”
“He hates spiders,” Trix said, smiling at Ralph. “He’s in denial.”
Nevertheless, Yuri insisted on going first. He set about tearing at the cobweb, but its accumulation was dense, clogging the passage for yards ahead, and even his bulk struggled to disentangle itself from its grip. Trix and Ralph worked to free him, she with her Zippo burning away strategic strands, Ralph’s hands fizzing with power that shrivelled the mass as a whole. After that, it became a joint effort, but even so it was slow going, and it took them the best part of an hour to reach the main body of the cave.
Things were easier therein, though the floor of the cave was laid with strands which, though appearing diaphonous, snagged their feet and caused them to drag. They attempted to swat them away, but they were as sticky as glue.
“This reminds me of something,” Yuri said. “I am not sure what.”
“It’s part of a spiderweb, Yuri.”
“Nyet, nyet, nyet, the hamsters, they are up to something.”
“Like what?”
“Perhaps making some evil hamster quilt.”
“And how many legs do these hamsters have, Yuri?”
“It depends how many hamsters there are.”
Trix shook her head; she couldn’t argue with that. Instead, she concentrated on avoiding the increasing spread of the web as they moved farther into the cave. It was all but everywhere now, draped from roof to floor, slung between outcrops, covering rocks and clusters of eggs in great white shrouds. But it wasn’t about what was below, it was about what was above, and the eye couldn’t help but be drawn upwards, where the main body of the web hung heavy with its makers. They were at rest, thank god—who could know how long they’d been at rest!—barely distinguishable grey shapes straining the gossamer like dark fruits in hessian sacking. Their dormant state made their presence no less palpable. Trix had encountered only one nest before now, and that a small one, and the worst thing about it was that you never actually saw the spiders until it was too late. Instead, the expectation of them grew with every tread you made, and reminders that they were there lay all around in the form of the detritus of their kills. It was so now—bones and abandoned possessions crunching underfoot, ancient cocoons swinging in the breeze—of which the merest brush, like that of the strands of the web itself, would send an ever-growing tremor throughout the whole of the web that would bring its makers scuttering from their sleep.
Negotiating a spider nest was, in short, about keeping your nerve, controlling your fear.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, they worked their way through. Twisting, ducking, stepping under and over strands of webbing, slipping between them with infinite care. The smallest movement was considered, each exhalation measured, every footfall weighed and judged before it was made. They’d have described it as walking on eggshells, except, of course, that that was the very last thing they wanted to do. All the time, they watched—watched above, watched below, watched one another’s backs, for it was all too easy for the hilt of a sword or the hem of a robe or the slightest twitch of imbalance to catch on something and undo every inch of progess they’d made. But nothing did. Eventually, miraculously, they came within sight of the other side of the cave.
And then they saw the cocoon. It was different from the othe
rs, in that it still had an occupant, though a start had been made on the meat therein—half his skin and a leg gone, at least. Trix had a vision of the spiders rationing out their meals from the meagre supply this capture offered. The poor bastard—or what remained of him—had leaked body fluids sufficient to make his blood- and bile-stained wrap of webbing semi-translucent, and through it his face was visible. Trix couldn’t believe it, but it was another of the boffins. And he was still alive. Just.
Oh, Christ.
There was nothing they could do for him, that much was obvious, and had they been able, they’d have ended his misery there and then. But his cocoon was as inextricably linked to the web as its every other part, and the slightest motion—even a deft slitting of his throat—would send out minute vibrations that would mean an end for them all. They had no choice. They had to ignore him. Leave him behind.
The boffin’s eyes opened. He saw them. His eyes widened.
No, Trix thought. Don’t. But he did. Too far gone to realise he was too far gone, he saw in them hope, hope for a rescue, for an end to his suffering. No longer able to speak, instead he began struggling against the confines of his cocoon. The consequences were instant—where a moment before the web had been still, it was suddenly a flurry of activity; roughly a dozen spiders, each the size of a small car, dropped silently and determinedly all around them on thick gossamer strands.
“Run,” Ralph said. “Run now.”
The old man had already taken the lead, ripping a scroll from his bandolier, reading it on the go. He punched the higher level spell—firestream—towards the exit of the cave, letting it tear through the webbing strung there. Behind him, Trix and Yuri were doing their damnedest to ensure they’d all reach it alive, tackling with bladed staff and axe any spiders that launched themselves at them or scuttered hungrily along the wall, waiting to pounce when their brethren fell. They were relentless in their attack, but Trix and Yuri were equally relentless in their defence, slicing and chopping, tripping and slashing, upturning the spiders to plunge their weapons into vulnerable abdomens, sending great spurts of green to splatter everything around. It was in the midst of all this that Trix heard something she’d likely never hear again—a roaring Russian battle cry of “Die, Hamster, Die!”