by Max Anthony
At first, the footing was excellent, but soon it became increasingly difficult to walk normally. The perspective from above had made everything seem gentle. Now that they were close, it was much steeper than it appeared and they had to walk in a crablike fashion to stop themselves careening down the slope at an uncontrolled speed.
At the bottom of the valley, there was no more grass, though rocks there were in plenty. The ravine angled away from the road which was now a mile or two behind them and entirely hidden from sight.
“I suppose this valley would be easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it,” said Rasmus as they set off to explore.
The floor of the ravine was fifty yards wide and there were sheer walls of rough, yellowy stone, which stretched well over a hundred yards upwards. The footing would have been treacherous for those unfortunate enough to be fully armoured, but both members of the party were able to proceed with little sensation of encumbrance. Viddo did have a few pieces of leather armour which were exceptionally lightweight, and he had a tremendous agility that meant he rarely had to look at his footing, even when the ground was at its most uneven.
“No sign of any caves that I can see,” said Rasmus. “However, this looks exactly like the place that Jiffrin described.”
“How come no one had found this place before?” wondered Viddo. “It’s not like we’re a million miles from the road and Jiffrin said that his daughter was most excited that she was going to be the first to explore.”
“Who’s to say that our destination was unknown? If it were me who found it, I’d certainly not tell anyone. I’d like to get in first - ahead of the crowds, so to speak. If I were a mere prestidigitator looking to learn my trade, I wouldn’t want a load of bored archmagi and master thieves pillaging my low-level dungeon before I could empty it of copper coins.”
“Indeed – it would be most unsporting if such a thing were to happen. Not that I have any intentions of doing anything apart from looking at the spoils while we search for this young lady Jera.”
“Of course. We are here to oversee and nothing more. To remind ourselves what it was like when we were young men.”
It was dark in the ravine, since the high sides blocked out the early advance of the morning sun. Rasmus stumbled once or twice in the semi-darkness, before he gave in to temptation and cast a spell of light to illuminate his way. They proceeded for half a mile, with the rocky walls becoming higher and the ravine itself becoming narrower. They both saw it at the same time - a dark opening on the right-hand wall of the gorge.
“A cave,” said Rasmus, wishing he could learn how to prevent his mouth from speaking the obvious.
They looked at what they’d found. It was definitely a cave – little more than five feet in height and only three feet wide. The way the dim light fell across the entrance, it was easy to imagine that it was only a shadow amongst the rocks.
“I’m not surprised it went unnoticed,” said the thief. “And we don’t even know if there’s anything in there. It might be ten feet deep for all we know.”
Viddo was not a man for hesitation, so he crossed over and peered inside. “Not much to be seen,” he said. “It goes downwards and then turns to the left after twenty feet or so. Shall we go inside?”
He didn’t wait for an answer and entered the mouth of the cave, immediately becoming lost from view. Rasmus was used to his friend’s impetuous nature, which he also shared at least in part. He followed into the cave. Inside, it was narrow and winding. It twisted this way and that, leading ever downwards, though not at such an acute angle that either of them suffered for it.
“I always feel a sense of thrill in such places,” said Viddo over his shoulder. In the confines of the passage, his voice sounded muffled, which seemed to be a standard thing when one was exploring potentially dangerous places underground.
Their most recent adventure had been defined by a vast series of long corridors, linking rooms and other passageways across mile upon mile of lost history. Secretly, the pair of them dreaded that this new cave would require two hours of walking before it arrived anywhere. In the end, they were spared an interminably long trek and the cave soon deposited them into a roughly-hewn room.
“This definitely isn’t natural,” said Viddo. “I think we’re in the right place, especially when you consider the presence of that door over there.”
They looked about, to see if there was anything that might hint at possible danger. The room was thirty feet to a side and with a high ceiling. The floor was uneven, but even the most untrained of eyes could see the marks that tools had made in the surface to level it out. The door which Viddo had spotted was directly away from them and made of plain wood. The thief immediately walked over to it.
“Definitely low-level stuff,” he said, rummaging in his pocket for something to open it with. He withdrew a piece of metal, inserted it into the clumsy lock and twisted. There was a loud click as the lock was disengaged.
“Not another spoon,” said Rasmus. “I thought you’d snapped your last one.”
“You are quite correct.”
“I bet you stole it from the Five Hounds, didn’t you?” asked Rasmus accusingly.
“The proprietor was a crook,” said Viddo. “I caught him trying to short change me at least three times when I was drunk. I think a couple of his spoons is fair recompense for the dishonesty I suffered.”
Rasmus didn’t belabour the point. If Viddo wanted to steal a couple of cheap spoons from a tavern, then he could have it on his own conscience. In the world of adventuring, thieves were an excellent addition to almost any party and as long as they kept their wandering hands to themselves, no one bothered to lecture them about their tiny misdemeanours. Except for the occasional priest type, some of whom might have a bee in their bonnet about theft.
With his pilfered spoon tucked away again, Viddo opened the door without hesitation and without bothering to listen out for what perils might lie behind it. He was confident that this was the entrance to a low-level area and that there’d be little for him to concern himself about on the other side. He was correct, though others had clearly met their match here.
The room beyond the door was large and square, with a flat floor and walls. Doors led away from each side. There were signs of conflict, with two dead bodies upon the floor, and a scattering of bones near to them. These bones looked to be the constituent parts of some minor undead, which had subsequently been vanquished, though too late for the two adventurers who had perished.
“This poor wizard died to these skeletons,” said Rasmus, looking mournful. He remembered how hard it was for neophyte wizards to establish themselves. Often, those who set out on the road of magic were bookish and weedy, prone to being swiftly killed by even the weakest of a dungeon’s denizens. The wizard in this room wore shabby clothing, made even shabbier by the sword hole in the chest area, and the copious amounts of dried blood in the vicinity.
“Not just a wizard, but a thief also!” said Viddo, wondering if there was a message here for the two of them. Budding thieves were also quite easy prey until they’d learned how to dodge and hide effectively. The one here would never have the chance, since he’d been downed by an axe, no doubted wielded in an exceptionally clumsy manner by the skeleton that was now in pieces on the floor.
The dead thief was a young woman and they felt a sudden alarm that it might be Jera, in spite of the fact that Jiffrin’s daughter hadn’t trained in that profession. Viddo knelt down next to the body, feeling a surprising relief that the corpse didn’t match the description of the woman they sought.
“I don’t think it’s Jera,” he announced, noticing that Rasmus was also relieved.
“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” said the wizard. “This young man and woman have lived their entire lives until they reached their early twenties. They set off on life’s journey with hope in their hearts, only to perish to the weakest of opponents in the first room of what I assume is their first dungeon.”
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��Without luck, you might as well hurl yourself on your own sword. As these unfortunates discovered, your life is destined to be short if every single attacker manages to plunge their weapon into your vital organs.”
“Do you think that these two were part of the party that Jera was with?” asked Rasmus. “I don’t recall Jiffrin being too knowledgeable on the details of her companions.”
“They have been dead for less than a week. It may have been that Jera and her friends took some time to locate the cave that we stumbled upon almost immediately. If that is the case, these could indeed be her companions.”
“It seems a trifle unsporting to have merely abandoned the bodies here where they fell,” said the wizard.
“And equally, it would have been a shame to come all this way and abandon everything just because two people died. If they’d fled immediately, they’d have made the deaths of their colleagues somewhat pointless.”
“I suppose,” said Rasmus. “I am already starting to have a bad feeling about this. If the others in the party had continued and had a successful mission, you’d have expected them to bring the bodies of their friends out with them.”
“I agree,” Viddo replied. He didn’t need to say that if the others had remained below ground for several days, chance favoured them also being dead. He left the bodies and looked at the three exit doors in turn.
“Any clues?” asked Rasmus.
“All of the doors are unlocked. They could have gone through any of them.”
“In that case, we shall proceed through that far door over there,” said Rasmus, taking the initiative. He traversed the floor, marvelling again at how much more light-footed he felt in his recently-appropriated boots of speed. Viddo still got there first and by the time the wizard reached the door, the former had already twisted the metal handle and was looking to see what was on the other side.
3
“Here we go again,” said Viddo, exhaling noisily.
“What is it?” asked Rasmus.
“Another passageway. More featureless grey rock. The same old stuff we just got away from.”
Rasmus peered along the corridor. It was eight feet square and vanished into the gloom beyond the range of his light spell. Viddo had excellent vision in the dark, but since he’d not volunteered any information, Rasmus assumed that there was nothing to be seen further along.
“Should we go this way, or check out those other doors?” asked Rasmus. He already knew the answer and headed to the second of the exit doors, while Viddo made his way to the third. Behind one door was another passageway, leading off into blackness. The other door hid a smaller corridor, which ended at a further door a few dozen feet away. This route appealed to them most, with its promise of more instant gratification and they set off along it.
“Look – a pit!” said Viddo, pointing at a darker area on the floor. “And someone’s triggered the hidden trapdoor on top of it.”
The pit was squarely in the middle of the corridor, though there was room to squeeze past it if you knew it was there. They stopped at the edge and looked down. Sure enough, there was a body at the bottom, eight feet below.
“A priest, do you think?” asked Rasmus.
“I wouldn’t like to guess. His neck’s at a fairly unusual angle, that’s for sure.”
“Whoever it is that’s come down here to explore, they appear to have been woefully unprepared for even the most basic of creatures and traps,” the wizard commented. “And they all seem to be entirely lacking in good fortune. This pit is hardly deep at all. At worst, I might have expected to have broken a leg, but this poor fellow must have executed an almost perfect flip in the air in order that he could land head-first and thereby break his neck.”
Trapdoors and pits were commonly used to catch out the unwary. No adventurer would last for very long if they couldn’t spot them, or at the very least survive a fall into one. In the more dangerous areas of a dungeon, the pits would generally be deeper and have spikes at the bottom. It wasn’t unknown for hideous beasts to live in them either, ready to pounce on anyone who fell and survived.
They stepped around the pit. In other circumstances, Viddo might have been tempted to rifle the clothing of the dead adventurer to see if there was anything worth having. It only took a single glance at this man’s ill-kempt garb to realise that he didn’t have a copper to his name, and that he’d died long before he could plunder any of the imagined riches of this place.
The end door was unlocked and soon swung open to reveal another room of similar dimensions to the first. The floor was strewn with rubbish of a nondescript nature – a few old wooden crates, planks, and an upturned chair. There was a musty smell in the room, like something had rotted in here a long time ago. A practised eye could tell that things had been recently disturbed and the reason why soon became apparent. There was a body on the floor, though this time it wasn’t that of an adventurer. This body was that of a human, but had a grey-green tinge to the flesh. It had been hacked into pieces and one of its arms was ten feet away. A severed leg was off to one side, the yellowing bone visible, but no sign of blood.
“A single zombie,” said Viddo, nudging the torso with his boot. The undead had been thoroughly destroyed and showed no indication that it might rise in order to trouble them. Not that it would have lasted for more than two seconds in the face of such seasoned men as these.
“Whoever killed it seems to have done so without suffering further casualties of their own,” Rasmus commented. “Zombies can be tough as old boots when you’re inexperienced.”
Viddo bent over and stuck his hand within the rags of the creature. “And you can tell that the people who killed it were inexperienced, since they were evidently too squeamish to have searched through its clothing. See, I have located these four copper coins within the folds of its trousers. A veritable bounty left unclaimed.” As he said these last words, he dropped the coins carelessly onto the ground. Copper and silver wasn’t such a prize to Viddo or Rasmus.
“It looks like the zombie’s killers spent some time rummaging through all of this rubbish for treasure,” said Rasmus. “But they overlooked the motherlode.”
There was only a single exit from this room – a square passageway in the opposite wall to the door. They entered it, leaving the zombie room behind. Though Viddo pretended nonchalance, Rasmus could tell that the thief was watching the walls and floor carefully for traps. It was unlikely that they’d stumble across anything fatal, but Viddo would never live it down if he triggered something without realising it. He’d learned his trade in areas like this, but had long since moved on to greater challenges.
After a time, the passageway turned sharply left. Then it went right and then it split into two. Viddo turned right and they proceeded for a time. After a hundred yards or so, they noticed that the floor was becoming increasingly littered with black objects. They were pellet shaped and about the size of two fingers combined. Rasmus flicked at one with his foot, just as his brain told him what it was.
“Rat droppings,” he said in disgust, stooping to check if his boots had been soiled. They had not, since they appeared to possess an enchantment that kept them sparklingly clean, whatever he trod in.
“Lots of rat droppings,” said Viddo, pointing up ahead, where the floor was covered in them. They advanced along the droppings-festooned floor, until it became almost impossible to put their feet down without stepping on one. The droppings were firm underfoot, yet still unpleasant beneath their soles. The smell wasn’t overpowering, but since they knew what the odour was, they were reluctant to breathe it in.
“Some of these have already been stood on,” Rasmus announced. “A few of them have been flattened by boots unknown.”
The unwelcome sight of rat droppings was soon joined by the equally unwelcome sight of blood. It was smeared across the floor and the walls, having faded to brown with the passing of time, though the metallic tang of it remained in the closeness of the corridor. Both men were aware that giant rats w
ere cannibals. If the blood was that of their own or that of fallen adventurers, the bodies would have been dragged away to be consumed elsewhere. A few matted patches of fur mixed in with the droppings suggested that at least some of the rats had been killed in what was presumably an encounter with a party of foraging adventurers.
The corridor ended and a room began. This chamber was smaller than the others, at twenty feet to a side. Against two of the walls, there were head-high piles comprised of leaves, sticks, hair and other things of an indistinct nature.
“Nests,” whispered Viddo. “Big nests.”
“Why are you whispering?” asked Rasmus in a loud voice. “If any rats remain, they will have certainly sniffed us out and seen the light of my spell. Look over there, rustling!” he ended.
Sure enough, one of the two nests shook and wobbled as if there were something inside. The nose of an exceptionally large rodent poked out, whiskers at the end quivering. There was a loud squeak and the nose slumped, as if the owner had just that moment received a crossbow quarrel in the neck. Viddo lowered his weapon in order to slot in a second bolt.
“I assume that was one of your mundane twenty-coppers-a-dozen bolts?” asked Rasmus.
“Of course. I wouldn’t waste one of the good ones on a mere rat,” said Viddo. He had a case which contained a modest quantity of highly-magical bolts, which could stop most things in their tracks when fired out of his highly magical thief’s hand crossbow of rapid loading.
There was more rustling, as if something within the nest were jerking as it pulled a heavy object. The snout of the rat which Viddo had just killed vanished back into the dirty mound, doubtless intended as a meal for whatever had done the pulling. The thought of it made Rasmus feel faintly queasy.
“There doesn’t seem to be an exit out of here,” he said.
“It’s behind that second nest. The larger one,” said Viddo. “You can just make out the top of a low doorway. Besides, we’re going to have to look for the eaten remains of the young lady we seek.”