by Max Anthony
Jera wasn’t sure she agreed, but as the diamonds weren’t hers it left her in no position to demand their destruction. Viddo’s logic sort of made sense anyway. At the very worst, he’d turn out to be wrong, they’d all be killed and raised from the dead in order to take part in the slaughter of a million people on the surface. She cut off that line of thought at once – she was an optimistic young lady and refused to get bogged down in the unpleasant possibilities.
They came to a door. It was one of the standard metal affairs of the type that had managed to survive the years without perishing. They’d passed many empty rooms since they’d left the catacombs, none of which had contained anything of interest. This was the first door they’d found.
“Here we are!” said Viddo, rubbing his hands together.
“You say that as if we should know what you mean,” said Rasmus.
“I think that this door will lead us into another part of the slug-dungeon. Once we escape from there, it’s not too far until we reach our destination.”
“What about if we continue along this corridor?” asked Rasmus.
“We might end up in vaguely the right place. However, there could be all manner of unknown perils to threaten our lives. At least in this dungeon we will have our years of experience to fall back on.”
“And there’s a much, much greater chance that we will find some loot worth having,” mused Rasmus.
“I can sense which way this conversation is headed,” said Jera. “You will talk for a while and gradually convince yourselves that we need to enter this dungeon for reasons that don’t involve treasure, when in reality you are both very keen to find as many locked chests as possible.”
“That’s unfair!” protested Viddo, struggling to hide a grin.
“You have somehow gained the wrong impression of our motives!” said Rasmus in mock dudgeon.
Jera laughed, the sound rich and pleasing to the ears. “Just stop wasting time you couple of scoundrels. Viddo, please open this door and we’ll see what’s beyond it.” She treated them both to a wink. “I have need of a new axe to replace this rusty old sword that is scarcely sharp enough to lop the tail off a giant rat.”
Viddo didn’t need to be asked twice and he set about the task of opening the door.
17
The lock of the door was more stubborn than Viddo had expected. He snapped his spoon in it, produced a second spoon and snapped that also. Muttering earthy imprecations under his breath, he unrolled his set of tools and sat cross-legged in front of the lock, with a look of concentration on his face. Meanwhile, Jera and Rasmus looked up and down the corridor with increasing concern in case a flood of grey-skinned undead happened upon them. No undead arrived and after a few minutes, Viddo disengaged the lock.
“A bit rusty, was it?” asked Rasmus.
“It was pristine as it happens. Whoever made it was very good – that’s one of the hardest mechanical locks I can remember coming across. If I find out the name of the gentleman who made it I shall be sure to burn his workshop to the ground, in order that other thieves do not have to contend with his excellent workmanship. Anyway, with a lock as good as that one, I could easily be given the impression that we aren’t meant to enter the dungeon through this door.”
It turned out that Viddo’s words were more prophetic than he could have imagined. Now that the lock had been opened, the door swung open quietly and smoothly. It was customary for dungeons to have a lobby area, wherein the eager party of would-be plunderers could stop to gather their thoughts before they found themselves dodging traps and powerful monsters. Consequently, the experienced pair that was Rasmus and Viddo weren’t expecting any trouble to assail them immediately. Even so, they were cautious and the wizard sent in his light to let them see what was ahead.
“What’s all this?” asked Viddo. Seeing nothing that would result in their immediate death, he ushered the other two inside and then closed the door behind them. It clicked as the locking mechanism dropped back into place.
“Cogs, chains, metal shafts,” said Rasmus, looking all around the room. “This seems a trifle strange.”
They’d entered a long, narrow room. If it hadn’t been filled with the items which Rasmus had just described there would have been plenty of space. As it was, things felt cramped, with smooth metal poles vanishing into small holes in the walls, linking to toothed wheels, which in turn connected to grooved stone posts.
“That shaft there connects with that gear there and then the linked chain drops down into the floor over here,” said Viddo, his thief’s mind working overtime.
“What is it for?” asked Jera. She’d not done much dungeon crawling and had little experience to call upon.
“I think I know,” said Rasmus, then launched into an explanation. “We’ve entered the workings of a dungeon. All of these gears and cogs will control the hidden trap doors and moving walls that will be activated by pulling levers or standing on pressure pads contained in the rooms we were meant to have entered. Except that Viddo has picked the lock of a door that was designed to keep the hoi-polloi from finding out what happens behind the scenes.”
“In all my years, I’ve never managed that before,” said Viddo. “And now I’m here, I don’t quite know what to do with myself.”
Jera came to the point. “Can we take advantage of our situation? Or are we just sightseeing?”
“I’m not sure,” said a rapidly deflating Viddo. “I can disable most of this stuff, but there again I don’t know if I’d end up blocking access to a hidden chest along with stopping all of the traps from working.”
“We’d probably best not touch anything in that case,” said Rasmus, also disappointed. He felt like a child who’d sneaked into the forbidden cellar, only to find that it contained an empty wine rack and three broken crates.
Viddo was reluctant to give up so easily on this hitherto unexploited opportunity and he examined some of the gears and cogs with more interest. They were made of stone or metal and looked almost polished, as if they’d been well-maintained or preserved by magical means. As he looked at these workings, his brain shuffled ideas and possibilities.
“This leads to here. Definitely a gas trap,” he muttered. “And this goes over there. A pressure pad, I suspect.”
Rasmus was well-used to these moments in which his friend would get distracted in the pursuit of his desire to outwit whoever it was that had gone to the trouble to assemble a complicated trap. He stood quietly to one side and gave the thief’s activities only slight attention – he’d learned that no matter how hard he studied, the arts of high-level thievery were a mystery to him. Jera had yet to realise this and watched Viddo most carefully, as if all would become clear to her.
After a few minutes, Viddo produced his roll of thief’s tools and extracted the hammer and several of the metal pins. There was the muffled clink of metal on metal, heavily muted by a piece of thick cloth which the thief used for the purposes of sound deadening. He stepped back, as if to admire his handiwork.
“There!” he said, as if this single word automatically conveyed the exact details of everything he’d done.
Rasmus and Jera stared at him blankly. “And?” asked the wizard, when it became apparent that Viddo wasn’t going to expand.
“I think I’ve blocked off a couple of traps and jammed a sliding panel. I’m not sure what a few of these metal shafts do, so I’ve left them well alone. I’m sure they are trap-related, but I don’t want to get it wrong and release dozens of powerful creatures by mistake.”
“How do we get out of here?” asked Jera. “Do we need to find the main entrance somewhere else?”
“I have a feeling that we’ll find a hidden door somewhere along the length of this room we’re in now,” replied Viddo. Having finished with the mechanisms of the traps, he turned his attention to searching for a door. As it happened, there were only a few places that a door could be housed, given the quantity of machinery already in the room. It was also poorly hidden, whic
h wasn’t surprising, given that whoever had put this room here obviously wasn’t expecting any unwanted visitors.
“There’s a passage here,” said Viddo. The trio looked at the small hatch he’d opened in the wall. The opening was square and a little under three feet to a side – more of a crawlspace than a proper corridor.
Viddo went into it first, thankful that he had kneepads built in to his trousers. Jera followed, thankful that her chain leggings had a thick lining of leather to protect her knees from the unfinished stone floor. Rasmus went in last, cursing as his robes fouled his legs and provided almost no protection against bruising.
To the wizard’s relief, the passage was not as long as it might have been. It branched twice, with Viddo choosing his route without apparent thought. Soon, the thief brought them to a halt and made it clear that they should be as quiet as possible from here on. After this warning, Rasmus cleared his throat without realising he’d done so and Jera accidentally knocked the edge of her shield on the floor. It was rather difficult to travel quietly in confined spaces whilst one was clad in metal.
“You two stay here, I’ll go on ahead,” mouthed Viddo. He was no more upset at the noise than Rasmus would have been at the inability of thieves and warriors to cast spells, but what he planned to do next required the element of surprise.
Off he crawled, much faster than he had up until now and without making even the tiniest of rustlings. Viddo knew that he’d prevented at least one sprung door from opening and his thief’s instincts told him that he should have a look at what was behind that door. He was intrigued by the existence of the crawlspace, though when it came down to it, it should not have been a surprise to find that there was some maintenance access needed to keep such a place running. Many dungeons were in fact areas where evil creatures had naturally decided to gather and hoard their treasure, but there were others which had been designed by cunning minds that evidently had nothing better to do with their time. This dungeon was clearly one of the latter.
All was silent ahead of him. He listened quietly, but not a whisper reached his ears. It was as if there were nothing at all to be found down here. Or, he thought, there was something with a never-ending patience lurking in wait for a party of unlucky adventurers to bumble past. The passage turned left, the grey stone rough beneath Viddo’s fingers. Then, a smell reached his nostrils – sweet and cloying, it was a smell he knew well.
Ten feet ahead, Viddo saw a pair of feet, the toes pointing directly away from him. The skin on the attached legs was shrivelled and sagging, paler than the colour of anything living. In front of these feet was another pair of feet, also facing in the opposite direction. There were signs that they were clothed in rags, since a faded material hung down into sight. Viddo crept closer. Just ahead, the ceiling of the passage increased in height and the nearer he came to these unknown figures, the more he could see of them.
Wights, he thought. These were moderately powerful undead that resembled an ordinary rotting zombie. Indeed, they would often mingle with their weaker brethren as if they enjoyed the element of surprise or simply found the conversation to their liking. What gave the wights away was their cold, blue eyes, behind which was a certain amount of intelligence. When their claws raked over living flesh, these creatures could drain some of the life force from their foes. It had happened to Viddo once, leaving him weak and shaking. He didn’t like the idea of suffering several such strikes.
On this day, the tables were turned on the concealed undead. They stared ahead, as they had done for tens or perhaps hundreds of years, waiting for the hidden doorway in front of them to be triggered. Behind them, a dark shape rose, making no sound, nor even the slightest disturbance in the air. Had there been any light at all, rather than a total absence of it, a gleam might have been noticed as a long sword was lifted.
There was a crunch and a grunt. Viddo drove his longsword into the back of the first wight, not stopping even when the creature fell forward a pace. Pushing with all of his might, the thief thrust the blade all the way through until it came out of the undead’s chest. The creature in front had no time to turn, though its brain had just started to wonder if something might be amiss. Continuing its journey, Viddo’s sword slid into this second wight’s spine, penetrating far enough to cut and rupture the organs within.
“Double backstab!” said Viddo happily. Such things were the stuff of legends back at the Thieves’ Guild.
He pulled at the sword, drawing the blade out from the pair of creatures he’d just destroyed. There was little room for them to fall with any decorum and they ended up half-propped against the walls, legs splayed. Viddo was a man who preferred certainty over guesswork, so he meted out some extra punishment on the already-dead bodies, just to be absolutely certain that they wouldn’t catch him with a sneaky one when he wasn’t looking.
With the immediate undead threat neutralised, Viddo was ready to return in order that he could bring his companions this way. Before he did so, he spared a few seconds to see if there was anything of value worth pilfering. To his pleasant surprise, he found nine gold coins on the first of the bodies, whilst the other had a tiny platinum stud in the single one of its ear lobes that hadn’t completely decayed.
A few minutes later, the trio clustered in the tight space wherein the wights had previously been hiding.
“Urgh it smells a bit in here,” said Jera. She wasn’t queasy, but hadn’t had quite so much exposure to the scent of decaying flesh as her fellows.
As Jera hurried back along the crawlspace to put some distance between herself and the unsubtle perfume of rotting undead, Viddo searched for the mechanism he knew would release the door to this cubby. It wasn’t well concealed and didn’t need to be. With a poke and a twist of his little finger, the thief undid a hidden catch, which caused a section of the wall ahead of them to slide back into a recess in the wall to the left, making a rumbling, grating noise as it did so.
“There we go. Let’s have a look at what’s through here,” he muttered to himself, stepping outside into the room. Rasmus followed, bringing his light spell with him and Jera scrambled to catch up, making a play of holding her nose against the odour.
The room they had entered was twenty feet square, with a stone-tiled floor and unadorned walls. There were three exit doors, all made of what appeared to be iron. It was otherwise featureless, apart from a lever sticking out of one wall.
“Oooh! A lever!” said Jera, showing the neophyte’s attraction towards a device which would almost always trigger a trap. She was halfway across to it, with one arm raised to a pulling height when she noticed Viddo and Rasmus staring at her, shaking their heads in mock despair.
“What is it?” she asked, sidling slowly away from the lever.
“Levers almost always set off a trap,” said Viddo.
“You will soon learn this,” lectured Rasmus.
“Though this particular lever should no longer function,” continued Viddo, “since I have disabled it from the other side.” With that, he walked over and gave it a mighty yank downwards, as if to show precisely how disabled the trap was. There was a shuddering and scraping sound from the far wall.
“Balls!” exclaimed Viddo, wheeling around to see what was coming. “More sodding wights,” he said, as three of the creatures lurched out of another, almost identical hidden doorway. It was quite apparent that Viddo hadn’t been entirely successful in his efforts to disable the traps in here.
Jera was prepared, as any good fighter would have been. She dashed across to the first of the cadavers and struck it with her shield, knocking it onto its heels. The other two spread out to her sides. Although they lurched, the action was designed to deceive and the wights moved with rather more agility than a standard zombie.
“Don’t let them hit you!” warned Rasmus. “Nasty creatures, these!”
“I have no intention of letting their rotting nails pierce my flesh!” exclaimed Jera. “Get back here, you stinking piece of shit!” she bellowed at the t
hird wight, which showed signs that it might decide to attack Rasmus or Viddo instead. To drive the command home, she stuck her blade into its shoulder and was pleased to note that these creatures didn’t seem to be immune to her sword. A clawed hand flailed over her head, and she ducked, noting as she did so that the business end of a crossbow bolt had just entered the creature’s left eye. It fell back, hissing.
The fight didn’t last long. Five of these undead would likely have caused great damage to a low-level party of adventurers and perhaps wounded one or two members of a mid-level party. Since two of the wights had been sneakily backstabbed to death, the remaining three provided little in the way of serious opposition to the stalwarts of the underground world known as Rasmus and Viddo. Jera hadn’t seen anything like as much action as that duo, but she was rapidly gaining in experience and the wights hardly came close to landing one of their life-draining attacks on her skin.
“Another six gold coins,” said Viddo, having rummaged through soiled rags of their vanquished foes. “This one,” he said, pointing at the third wight in an accusing fashion, “carried only one copper coin.” He kicked it in the ribs to show his disdain for its poverty.
“Let us forget this once-concealed mob of wights and make our way on to the next chamber in this dungeon,” said Rasmus.
“It’s a skank of wights,” corrected Viddo.
“Enough with your fixation on collective nouns and get yourself to that door,” said Rasmus, pointing randomly at one of the exits.
Viddo chuckled to himself and went through his checking-and-unlocking routine on the portal indicated by the wizard. The thief knew which direction they needed to go and two of the exits from here were likely to take them that way. As with most locks, the resistance of this one proved little obstacle for the nimble fingers of Viddo Furtive. He swung it open by means of the metal hoop which had been helpfully attached to the door’s surface for just this purpose.