by Mike Wild
More spiders came—amongst them the mother of them all, the queen. The size of her, that of a house, gave them both pause. Ralph was in the exit passage now, and they turned to join him. They found themselves at an advantage in the smaller space, able to take out their predators almost one by one, but then Mama herself slammed into the opening, picking off her own in a frenzied attempt to reach them. She started to force herself through, maw agape, poison fangs dripping and snapping, but she’d gotten herself into a tight squeeze, and it gave them the chance to gain some distance. They made it through the passage and stumbled back out into the dungeon proper with their pursuer, although still determined, some tens of yards behind.
All they had now was a dragon in front of them. Or, to be more precise, a dragon below them. For their emergency diversion through the spider cave had brought them full circle, out onto a ledge above the impassable object they’d met earlier. Ralph had been right—it was no dragon, despite its belching of fire. Instead, they looked down on a strange metal contraption, part furnace, part bellows, what they had taken for eyes and mouth nothing more than exhausts and vents. It had clearly been designed, however, to be as lethal as a dragon, a now-visible pressure plate (across which the skull had bounced earlier) being the trigger to unleash its deadly fire.
“Fascinating,” Ralph said. “The first sign of a controlling design we have come across down here. Beyond such things as ventilation, that is. An object specifically and singularly sited to fatally impede progress.”
“But whose progress, Professor?”
“Certainly not ours, Major Dragomiloff, for this has been here since long before we were born. The ‘whose’, therefore, is the thousand-gold-piece question. Along with the ‘why.’”
“Questions I suggest we debate later,” Trix said. “Because this ledge is about to get a little crowded.”
They turned their attention back to the passage. The spider queen was almost through, her great bulk compressed by the narrow thoroughfare but being pulled sideways by front legs already liberated and clamping onto the outer edges of the rock for leverage. Her head, having freed itself, angled at forty-five degrees, eyes reflecting their waiting forms over and over, fangs dripping, mandibles clacking in hungry expectation. She spat a great puddle of poison, which landed with a splat. It was easy to dodge, but she wouldn’t be—when, very soon, her body made it through, she’d come at them like a cork out of a bottle.
Trix, Ralph, and Yuri knew they couldn’t drop down from the ledge, as they favoured incineration less than tackling the arachnid behemoth, but there was another way. Across the chamber, beyond the dragon contraption, was a second ledge, identical to their own. It would mean a running jump and momentary contact with the red-hot furnace as they used it as a stepping stone, but they had no choice. They moved to the rear of the ledge and propelled themselves forward.
They were just kicking off from the furnace, the soles of their boots hissing, when the queen broke out. The skittering of her legs across the ledge was fleeting, and then they knew she, too, was leaping. Leaping for them. The three of them acted instinctively and as one, twisting their bodies around in midair, where they unleashed all the crossbow bolts, throwing axes, and offensive magic they had, aimed not at the spider but the furnace beneath. Their barrage ruptured the ancient machine instantly, and the airborne queen was engulfed in a shrivelling release of steam. She barely had time to screech before the plates on the furnace buckled and Trix, Ralph, and Yuri found themselves slamming into the far wall of the opposite ledge as the whole machine exploded with a fiery boom.
“Ow,” Trix groaned, a few seconds later. She raised her eyes to a chunk of furnace embedded in the wall just above her head. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Well,” Ralph said, “that was certainly an exhilarating piece of teamwork.”
“Russia von … hamsters nil,” Yuri crowed.
They picked themselves up, wiped off chunks of spider queen, and stamped out burning remnants of furnace. Then, by mutual agreement, sat down again; all but collapsed, in fact. Their day was done, and here, on this ledge, was as safe a place to set camp as anywhere.
“We’ll keep watch in two-hour shifts. I’ll take the first. Yuri, second? Good. Keep your weapons near.”
The boys—including Shen, so impossibly far away—said their goodnights, and Trix settled back with a fag. Her first all day. If nothing else, the dungeon’s dangers helped her cut down, which was good because she’d forgotten to buy another pack. She drew deep, and the smoke, though welcome, tasted strange—earthy. Opposite her, Yuri was already snoring, and she thought Ralph was mumbling in his sleep until she saw him trying to memorise a spell off one of his scrolls. She remembered him telling her once that it was difficult to keep more than four or five spells in his head at one time, because even thinking of them sparked a potential clash of neurons and synapses, as if they actually acted physically on the electricity in the brain. Sometimes he quite literally had to force himself to forget one spell before he could learn another. She wondered which he was learning now.
Her own synapses started to stir. Images and experiences from the day, from her vision, from eight weeks before, all jumbling together. They even seemed to have their own soundtrack until she realised that, in the stillness of these depths, the sounds she was hearing were real. Dungeon sounds, distant rattles and clanks, wails and roars. From somewhere what sounded like a clashing of metal. Of swords. She wondered where Ian was in all of this and where, and how far beneath, the maelstrom lay. She wondered what the next day would bring.
Eventually, Yuri took over, then Ralph, and she lay there in a half doze. Now the heat from the dead furnace had dissipated, it was cold—bloody cold. She found herself staring at Yuri. At rest, stripped of his bluster and machismo, with his fringe of blond hair falling over his eyes, he looked like a big kid. She wanted to hug him for his help so far. The idea, actually, wasn’t such a bad one—it would warm both of them. She nudged her sleeping bag in closer, heard a grunt of acquiescence, and settled in beside him to sleep.
XI
Behold, Er …
“Come on, big boy,” Trix shouted. “Come on, you know you can do it. That’s the way. Oh, yes.”
Ralph listened to Trix and Yuri going at it and shook his head. They just couldn’t help themselves, could they? Not only doing it out in the open, but being not even remotely quiet about it. There was just no subtlety to these two. It wasn’t the way things were done in the old days. Oh, dear me, no. He was surprised that every creature for levels around hadn’t come out to watch.
“Just a little more, big boy … don’t stop now … yes, YES, feels good, doesn’t it? Keep going, we’re almost there!”
Ralph was still shaking his head as Trix came hurtling around the corner of the corridor some fifty yards in front of him, Yuri pounding by her side. The thing that came around the corner in pursuit of them neither hurtled nor pounded—it swept angrily through the air. The ‘big boy’ Trix had been coaxing so enthusiastically was a multi-tentacled floating eyeball with teeth, of the species DOME had classified as popeye. It was larger than any they’d encountered on the higher levels—five-foot diameter as opposed to two or three—and whereas the smaller version’s tentacles unleashed rainbow bolts of energy that left a nasty laceration or sting, the bolts from this bruiser were of a different class entirely. Trix and Yuri could only count themselves lucky it was something of a shit shot, because those bolts that struck the walls and floors around them blew away chunks of stone and left smoking craters the size of fists. Even so, the misses were near enough to make them hop in their tracks as the corridor was assailed around them. It was their own fault, Ralph thought—they had insisted on this stupid plan, not he.
Still, he supposed it was necessary. Getting rid of the thing, that was, not the way they were going about it. The popeye had dogged them since they’d first arrived on this level, not an immediate physical presence per se, but certainly an ominous one. The problem with p
opeyes was they were generally used as spies in the sky—remote viewers for a master elsewhere—and this one was clearly watching them. It was small but additional evidence of a controlling influence down here, and Ralph mused on exactly who or what that might be.
“Ralph? Ralph! Will you pay attention, please!”
Oh, yes, he thought. He’d almost forgotten that he had a small role to play in this harebrained scheme. He tossed the stone he held in his palm some ten yards in front of him, where lay the pressure plate they’d found earlier. Trix watched the stone arc through the air in slow motion, as did Yuri, because both had to time their next move just so. They were now three feet away from the plate, then two, then one, and as the stone landed with a clack, none. Trix had already chugged an agility potion, and she launched herself up and over, somersaulting in midair across the approximate ten-foot length of the pad to land safely on the other side. Yuri adopted a more traditional approach, using his sword to pole-vault the gap. The popeye was no more than a couple of feet behind them, timewise half a second, and as it entered their vacated airspace the trap that had been triggered by the impact of the stone did what such traps do. Both walls of that ten-foot length of corridor slammed together in a reverberating clash of stone. There was a splurge of viscous goo from a flue in the trap’s middle, and Trix stood there cursing, looking as if she’d been mugged by a sneeze.
Yuri sniggered. Trix sniggered. Ralph sniggered. And Ralph never sniggered. It was when the snigger began to turn into an uncontrollable belly laugh that he slipped on his breather and signalled the others do the same.
It was that gas again.
They’d first noticed it on the level above—the twenty-first—on the ninth day of their crawl. Ian’s last ‘III’ had led them on a somewhat perilous route through a trap-filled catacomb, an abandoned forge that seemed to have been devoted to making nothing but heavy chains. They had had to avoid a large lizard encampment by inching along a pencil-thin ridge between two deafeningly roaring cataracts. It was on the latter they’d encountered the toxic gases rising from somewhere on the level below. Soon after, their judgment and coordination had started to go, which made for an interesting trip along the ridge. The dangerous thing was, they didn’t care—not even enough to put on their breathers. The gas acting like a narcotic, their behaviour became ever more erratic, nowhere better exemplified than when Yuri posed on the lip of a rock bridge that subsequently took them high over the lizard encampment, dropped his pants, and boomed loudly, “None shall piss!” The attention that had garnered from the lizards had sobered them some, and they’d quickly exited, stage left. But search as they had, they hadn’t managed to find the source of the gas—nor even of the waterfall, such were the vagaries of the dungeon—when they’d at last reached this level. Yet something was pumping the shit out. Every time they’d thought themselves clear, they’d hit another patch and come under its influence once more. Their breath labouring behind their masks, already short on oxygen, they regarded each other with troubled expressions—they couldn’t afford more shenanigans like the one in which they’d just indulged, because sooner or later it was going to get them killed. The best thing was to find a way off the level as soon as they could, whether it was marked by Ian or not. They’d just have to pick up his trail later.
Thankfully, Shen had become quite adept at pinpointing their whereabouts by now and steered them in the right direction. The nearest descent was some way off, but even had it been right next to them, Ralph would not have taken the stairs—not after he spotted what he spotted.
It sat in a small chamber, atop a mound of bones, skewed, as if dropped from above, lit by a shaft of otherworldly light. A treasure chest. Not just any treasure chest, but a majestic—so far as DOME’s grading of such things went. There were three such gradings—simple and ornate were good for common artefacts and rarer magical items, respectively, but the majestics—the big, hulking, golden majestics, always trapped, were in a different league. Of all the artefacts Trix had found for DragonCorp, it had been those from the majestics she’d been tempted to keep. You never knew what you’d find—the items were always unique.
“Ralph,” Trix said, with some regret, seeing the old man’s face, “we don’t have time for this.”
“We must make time, Patricia. Who knows what the contents might be?”
“The breathers, Ralph. We can’t afford interruptions or any trouble.”
The old man produced a lockpick with a flourish. “It will be no trouble.”
“Professor,” Yuri pointed out, “the majestic is sitting on a pile of bones. The whole chamber is full of bones. Does this not give you cause for concern?”
“Bollocks to the bones,” Ralph said, uncharacteristically.
Trix and Yuri exchanged concerned glances. The gas. But it was too late. Ralph was already striding into the chamber. Trix sighed and raced after him.
“All right, all right, but if anyone’s going to open the damned thing, it’s me.”
Ralph bowed to Trix’s superior expertise. She clambered up the hill of bones, part of it collapsing with a hollow clatter, and knelt before the chest. She flexed her fingers and blew out a breath. Then she started seeking out the traps.
“What?” she said.
“What?” Ralph responded.
“No traps. It isn’t even locked.”
“Then clearly, English, someone must have beat us to it.”
The chest shifted into the hollow left by some of the collapsed bones. Trix grunted as she was shoved aside.
“Nope. This thing’s heavy.”
Ralph and Yuri clambered up to join her. Stared at the lid of the chest. All three lifted it together. Gasped together. They’d all opened majestics before, but none filled quite such as this. Trix was able to plunge her arm into the mass of gold coins and see it disappear almost up to the shoulder. She let the coins rain down from her palm and off her arm, as utterly beguiled as the others. No matter that this was coin from another world, it was solid gold—the chest, something out of a fairy tale. Yuri plunged his own arm in, scooped a handful.
“This is … wait a minute, what is this?”
“Yuri?”
“This coin, English. It has my face on it. And this. And this. All of the coins have my face on them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I am never more serious.”
“Give me that. Let me look.” Trix took one of the coins and examined it. “It doesn’t have your face on it, Yuri.”
“Are you blind, English?”
“It has my face on it.”
Ralph raised an eyebrow and also examined a number of the coins. The long-haired, rather hollow-cheeked individual who stared back reminded him that he had been spending too long a time with his scrolls. And possibly too long down in this dungeon.
“This,” he said, “is very curious.”
They passed the coins from hand to hand, watching as the image morphed into their own likeness each time, then back again. They deliberately dropped one in mid handover, and the coin froze into the semblance of what disturbingly could have been Yuri and Trix’s offspring. They pulled faces at each other.
“This has to be the gas at work, right?”
Ralph shook his head. “So far as I know, it hasn’t produced any hallucinatory effects. No, this is something else. Some kind of enchantment.”
“What kind of enchantment?”
“To conceal something, possibly. To provide such a distraction that we fail to see what truly lies within. And should greed prevail—should the chest be lightened of its hoard—this results.” Ralph indicated the hill of bones.
“Caused by?”
“Let’s hope we don’t find out.” Ralph took a deep breath. “Let’s see what our friend here is trying to hide, shall we?”
He plunged both hands into the mass of coins, his brow furrowing as he dug around and found nothing. Again, he tried, like a determined punter with a lucky dip at a fair. Trix could almost
feel his concentration strengthening. Finally, he smiled and drew from a streaming mass of coins a book. No, not just a book, a tome, a thick volume bound in blue leather etched with faintly pulsing symbols, unlike any she’d ever seen. The coins seemed to resist its extraction, sucking like mud, but Ralph persisted and at last clutched it to his chest.
“A grimoire,” he said with something bordering on reverence. He snapped open a shimmering clasp, then the covers, and his face was bathed in a reflected glow. “A complete grimoire.”
“That’s good, is it?”
“Good?” Ralph repeated. “Patricia, it is unprecedented.”
“What is unprecedented, Professor Arthur?” asked a voice.
Ralph stiffened. As did Trix and Yuri. Because the voice had come from behind them, from the chamber door, and was one all three recognised. Not Dungeonmaster Garrison but the next worst thing: his toady, Don Combo. They turned, but not before Ralph mumbled a spell that, with a brush of his hand, turned the grimoire invisible. Combo, flanked by the rest of his master team, assault rifles levelled, smiled.
“Aren’t you a little out of your depth, Hunter?”
“Oh, very good. How long did it take you to think that one up, moron?”
Combo took the question literally. Combo would. “As long as I’ve been chasing you. Which is too long.”
“So what happens now?”
“The old fart answers my question. What is unprecedented?”
Ralph returned the smile. “The amount of gold in the chest behind us, of course.”
“Gold?”
“More gold than you’ve ever seen.”
Combo’s people looked at each other, licking their lips. Combo himself could clearly barely restrain himself. That much gold certainly beat a gorgon’s head. “Get down from there,” he said. As Trix, Yuri, and Ralph complied, he sent two of his people scrambling up.