by Jack Heckel
“Well, Avery, should I cast it?” Sam asked, and I realized everyone was waiting for me to decide the question.
I nodded. It was almost certainly the spell trying to help us; what it’s lack of subtlety meant for our chances of surviving were a worry I wouldn’t burden them with.
Sam gestured and threw a handful of sand down the hallway. The length of the passage suddenly lit up with traps. There were pits outlined in the floor, glowing trapdoors in the ceiling, loose stones vibrating in the walls.
Seamus made his way forward. “This is dwarf work. You ready, Rook?”
Rook’s eyes went wide, but he nodded and joined his compatriot at the front of the line. The two dwarfs held their poles out in front of them and began triggering every trap in the corridor.
Sam began narrating faster and faster, trying to describe how each of the pits full of snakes and spikes sprung open, how every one of the trapdoors full of boiling oil or falling rocks or burning acid dropped out the ceiling, and how every poisoned dart or spear or spinning axe blade popped out of the wall. In a hundred feet, we saw more devilry and cunning than I care to mention. It was obvious that the semi-lich had some serious privacy issues, even for someone who was partially undead.
Finally, when the last of the traps had been triggered, Sam took a long drink from his waterskin and said, “After an exhaustive effort, the group comes to a strange door with carven images of leering demonic faces surrounding it.”
“Got it,” said Ariella beside him. “This is one of the most dramatic mapmaking efforts I’ve ever attempted. Look at all the markings for traps.”
Everyone gathered around and started making appropriately impressed noises. For myself, I was staring at the demonic faces, which were staring back at me by the way. “What about this door,” I asked.
“My spell didn’t detect a trap, so it must be an innocent door,” Sam said confidently.
“But look at these creepy demons,” I said, pointing at one of the heads that was winking most suggestively at me. “They don’t look innocent.”
Rook looked up from Ariella’s map and frowned. The faces were now doing their best to look casual, but they kept breaking into silent giggles at the effort. “Laddie’s got a point, laddie. Just because your spell didn’t detect anything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious.”
Seamus started poking at the door with his pole. The demons didn’t like this at all and began making extremely rude faces at him. This only made Seamus mad, and he did everything he could short of tearing the door apart to find a trap. Finally, he nodded to Rook and Rook nodded back. “It’s safe,” they announced.
One of demons stuck out its tongue at them. With a muttered curse Seamus stepped into the room. We all followed.
“The group enters a thirty-foot-by-twenty-foot room,” Sam said, which was true enough. “There is a door opposite the one they entered,” he continued to narrate, which was also true.
I was examining the floor in detail, which I’d taken to doing ever since I saw that it was possible to have a pit with both snakes and spikes in it, when Sam said, “Suddenly, as the last party member steps inside, stone slabs fall into place, blocking the entrance and exit. There is the sound of rushing water and . . .”
I looked up. It was true. Water had started pouring from small holes in the ceiling and the walls. “In the name of the gods,” I shouted, interrupting him. “The room is filling up with water!”
Sam pursed his lips in irritation. “I was going to say that.”
“Let’s just hope the walls don’t start closing in!” said Luke.
“If you three are quite done,” said Rook with a wet tap of his foot. “Would one of you wizards like to use your unearthly powers to help us out?”
Sam shrugged. “Last night I memorized my trap spell, my sleep spell, and a spell that makes me light as a feather, and then I kind of fell asleep.”
The water had risen to the toes of our shoes.
“Your problem is that you procrastinate too much,” Ariella said with a shake of her finger.
“That’s not fair,” Sam said defensively. “I needed to trim my toenails and reorganize my backpack.”
“Third night in a row you’ve reorganized your backpack,” muttered Seamus.
“No one else has to read every night,” he whined.
“Great,” Rook groaned. “We’re goin’ to die because of your bad study habits.”
The water was at our ankles now. Everyone turned to look at me.
“I . . . um . . .” I said.
“That’s not very helpful,” Rook growled, which was true.
The truth was that I didn’t know exactly what to do, and I was slightly panicked at the thought of the room filling up with water. I know I’ve told you about the thing I have about snakes and impalement, but I also have this thing about drowning. In fact, if I’m being perfectly honest, I have a general horror of my own death no matter the form. The result in this case was to drive every good drying spell I knew for dealing with spills and the like straight from my mind.
“Wizards,” Ariella muttered with a roll of her eyes. She gestured, and the same freezing blast of air we’d felt when she stopped the polygons shot from her hands. The sound of running water turned into the crack and pop of ice forming.
“You did it!” Sam shouted with a whoop. “All the water in the room has turned to ice.”
It was true; the floor had been converted into a glittering mirror of frozen water and great icicles hung from the each of the holes in the ceiling.
“Of course I did it,” she said smugly. “I am a direct descendent of a frost fairy, as any of you would know had you bothered to read my background.”
“Yeah, great, lassie,” Rook said with a tug of his beard. “Now we just have to chip ourselves out.”
This was also true. The water had frozen around our ankles, encasing all of our feet in ice. The next half hour was spent chipping at our feet and then at the stone slab blocking the door, while Ariella told us all about her various fairy descendants. The relief, both at being free from the room and from Ariella, was palpable. Everyone rushed into the corridor beyond.
We were all so relieved that Sam even forgot to narrate the next forty to fifty feet of our exploration. It was the strange silence that made me realize that there had been no traps. The background music had become soft and mysterious.
“Has anyone noticed that there haven’t been any traps lately?” I asked.
“Or descriptions?” Ariella said as she glanced up from the sketch of the corridor she was making in her map.
Sam looked around with a guilty start. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize for the lack of traps, laddie,” Rook said, and slapped him on the back. “I know it’s not as excitin’ to describe, but this is good also.”
Sam and I stared at Rook like he’d just said that he wouldn’t mind having the Dark Queen around for tea, which would have made more sense.
“At least, I think it’s nice,” he said defensively when he saw our expressions.
We kept staring.
“If you two like traps so much you can have them,” Rook muttered into his beard.
“Door!” cried Seamus from the front of the line.
Unlike the last door, this one was utterly without ornamentation. The fact that it was such a plain, ordinary-looking door, the kind of door that let onto a broom closet or a tax preparer’s office, made it creepier. Although part of that for me could have been that the music was getting more and more ominous.
I mentioned my feelings about the door, but needn’t have. Everyone felt it. Seamus, Rook, and Ariella all took turns examining it for traps. There either were none, or the mechanism was one of those “devilishly clever” ones that the guide map Seamus purchased had warned us about. In the end, we could find nothing and, cringing against the coming acid or spike or poison or whatever, Seamus turned the handle and shoved the door open with his pole.
Behind t
he door was a square room, maybe thirty feet to a side that was whitewashed floor to ceiling and entirely featureless except for an open archway directly opposite our own through which a hallway beckoned.
We all gazed at the empty room, each of us experiencing a sense of dread. Mine being heightened when there was a crash of cymbals and the background music went silent. After spending my time in Trelari with some kind of music playing softly in my head, the silence made what I saw even more unnerving.
Rook, Seamus, and Ariella all stepped away from the door and looked back at me.
“Who . . . who should go first?” Ariella asked.
When no one said anything, Luke stepped forward. “I’ll do it,” he declared. “I’ve walked across plenty of rooms back home even plainer than this one.”
I saw the fear in his eyes and remembered all the other men in red tunics that had died for my quest. I couldn’t let him do this. I held out a hand. “Luke, you don’t have to—”
He shook his head. “This is my destiny.”
Throwing out his chest, he stepped inside. As soon as his foot touched the floor the room began to shake and emit an evil-sounding hum. Now, I don’t know how best to describe an evil-sounding hum, but if you had heard it you would also know that it did not have our best interests at heart.
Shaking, he pulled his foot back. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“I don’t either, laddie,” Rook said. “That hummin’ is downright sinister.”
We all nodded our agreement. It was obvious that this was the worst trap yet. We decided that what was needed was study. We would examine the room further to find out what gruesome fate awaited us inside. Sam and I both tried to sense any magical residue, but we found nothing. If it was mechanical, neither of the dwarfs could find any sign of trigger plates, trip wires, or other malicious mechanisms. Ariella suggested throwing something in and so we threw things—gold, string, sand, food, a ten-foot pole, Seamus’s entire pack—through the door. Nothing happened, except that the floor of the room became less featureless as the pile of junk grew larger.
How long we spent staring into the room and discussing every feature of its featurelessness I don’t know. How many plans we proposed and discarded, and the absurdity to which we reached in plotting our stratagems I hesitate to describe. We made any number of different attempts to cross the room. Luke stepped in another three times. Ariella put a foot in once. Sam scampered in on his hands and knees with a rope tied around his waist. Whenever a person entered, no matter how they entered, the room shook and hummed.
I don’t know what happened to me, but at some point I lost my patience. If this room did lead to a horrible end, then how could I ask anyone else to suffer it for me? This whole affair had gone terribly wrong, and it was all my fault. I was the Dark Lord. Without warning, I bolted across the room.
Unfortunately, I should have been looking at where I was going, because halfway across I tripped on the pile of debris we’d created and stumbled forward uncontrollably, my arms windmilling as I tried to catch my balance. As I lurched toward the opposite door, the room quaked like the walls would collapse and the humming grew so violent it sounded like thunder. And then I was through the archway.
I lay panting on the floor of the hallway as the room fell silent behind me. “I made it,” I gasped.
“Look at that!” Rook cried with an odd mix of wonderment and disgust. “Nothing happened!”
I stood up and looked back across the room. “What do you mean, nothing happened?”
“It didn’t do anything,” Seamus said.
Rook, looking madder than I’d ever seen him before, stalked across the room, with the rest of the group in tow. The humming grew louder and the room shook, but nothing happened. I went back in and helped them gather our things, and we left.
“Hell,” said Luke as we gathered outside, and that about summed it up.
Somehow we all knew that the semi-lich had been watching us the whole time, and as he’d told us he would be, he’d been laughing. I stared back into the white featureless room and hated it. “We are going to find this semi-lich and teach him we are not to be trifled with,” I vowed to the others, and then I slammed the door shut.
There was a sudden hissing sound and the entire corridor began filling with a noxious green cloud. My lips went numb.
“Gas trap!” gasped Sam, and began fiddling in his pouch before folding in half and slumping to the floor.
A little further down the hall I saw through the haze Ariella begin a complicated series of gestures. “Antidotious Univer—” she began to say and then she also collapsed.
At the far end of the corridor the dwarfs and Luke were battering at a door. I watched as they each dropped one after the other. Rook was the last. He looked back down the hall at me, shrugged, and then slumped slowly to the floor
I took a deep breath and held it. My Mysterium constitution would allow me to hold out longer than the others, but I needed to act fast. I fixed the spell pattern for purification in my mind and I held it there. I threw my arms wide searching for power to energize the spell. Wherever we were, magic was scarce. It was like trying to find water in a desert.
The effort was enormous, and already my lungs were beginning to burn and my legs to shake. There simply wasn’t enough magical energy to create a spell field. The pattern flickered. I focused all my concentration on trying to stabilize it, but it was fading. In desperation I poured all the energy I had into it, draining my own reality to feed it, but it was too late. My lungs were bursting for air. I found myself on my knees, my head spinning. Reflexively my mouth opened and I gulped in the gas.
The last thing I saw was the door at the end of the hall open. A tall, deathly white figure stepped through. He was laughing hideously. I had failed everyone. Again.
Chapter 27
THE SEMI-LICH
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Those were the first sounds I heard as I started to wake, and I was glad to hear them because not long ago I hadn’t thought I’d be hearing anything ever again.
Drip. Drip. Drop.
The second time around the sound wasn’t nearly as pleasant; this was less about the sound and more about the fact that the last drip, or rather drop, had landed with a cold splash directly in the middle of my forehead. Also at this point, my brain registered that my wrists and ankles were burning with pain. Instinctively I tried to move my arms and legs, but they were held fast by something hard, cold, and metal.
Drop. Drip. Drop.
I opened my eyes as two more drops hit my forehead. The normal course of action would have been to look and see why I couldn’t move, or what was dripping on my head, or whether the rest of the company was with me, but the sight that greeted me made me forget about my companions, the sound, the water, the fact that I seemed to be chained spread-eagle to a wall.
I was in an enormous circular chamber that vaulted upward in a series of tiered rings. Countless candles illuminated the room, some in odd iron brackets like grasping hands that stuck out at random from the walls, some in man-high candelabras standing here and there about the room, and some in great ringed chandeliers that hung down from the heights. The candles did not give off a warm natural light, but burned a deep red so that it looked like the air was filled with dancing drops of blood. Directly across from where I was chained, a set of wide steps rose to a dais on which coins and jewels and strings of pearls and ancient armor and weapons were piled in heaping mounds, and which reflected the crimson light with obscene decadence. Before this glittering backdrop stood a high-backed throne of black wood and red velvet, and on this throne sat the semi-lich.
He wore a robe made of a dark material richly embroidered in gold. Two gloved hands adorned with numerous rings rested on the arms of the throne. A pointed crown set with glowing rubies rested on his head, but beyond this I could say little. His face was hidden by the shadows and I could see nothing of his features save a vague pale outline. It was so bizarrely theat
rical that I almost laughed, but another drop came at that moment and spoiled my mood.
The semi-lich laughed. “You are finally awake, Avery. Excellent!” His speech was an odd mixture of deeply resonant vowels and hissing consonants. Somehow it suited him. “I am the semi-lich Aldric. I have enjoyed watching you traverse my maze of death.”
He gestured casually at an ornate stand to his right on which stood a gilt framed mirror. The shining face of the glass clouded, and wavering images of the entry hall and the flooding chamber and the humming room flashed one after the other.
“Your solution to my water trap was particularly engaging. I don’t think I have ever been more amused than I was watching you chip your ankles out of the ice.” He laughed again, a dry, uncomfortable sound.
“I’m glad you got your money’s worth,” I said with way more defiance than I felt. And looking left and right to confirm that the others were there, which they were, I said, “Since we’ve served our purpose, why don’t you let me and my friends go?”
He dismissed the notion with a wave of one of his ringed hands. “Not a chance. I have a hideously evil reputation to uphold and letting people go would set a bad precedent. Besides, I will enjoy slowly torturing you all to death.”
Drop. Drop. Drop.
“Ugh!” I said with disgust. “Well, if the dripping water is part of your program of torture you’re off to a great start.”
“No, no,” he said bitterly, “that’s a plumbing issue. The drain from my water trap room keeps backing up into the main line. If I ever get my hands on the contractor who installed it, I will teach him the meaning of the words back pressure. I told him repeatedly to put in a backflow preventer or at least an air gap and a check valve. Did he listen to me?”
“No?” I answered, at a loss as to what he was talking about, but happy that we now seemed to be discussing someone else’s torture and death, and not my own.