The Dungeoneers

by John David Anderson

  The goblin looked around the room for an answer. Serene timidly raised her hand.

  “Because they like the dark?”

  The goblin took a deep breath, then threw the gold coin at Serene, just missing her. The coin clattered across the floor and landed next to her. “We build dungeons to hide from people like you. My ancestors used to live on the surface in large, sprawling villages, till your ancestors forced us into caves and tunnels, sent us into mountains and the thick hearts of dark forests. And even then you followed us.”

  “But Master Fimbly said—” Serene began.

  “I know what that old coot said, something about stealing goats and burning cows and the bonds of brotherhood or some ballyhoo, but make no mistake. Your kind started it. Waited for us to do all the dirty work, mining the mountains and caves for metals and gems, then came and snatched it out from under our noses. So we had to get creative. We started designing ways to keep you out. We added locks to our doors. We added traps to the locks. We put traps on the traps. Then, when all else failed, we hired help.”

  The goblin got on his knees and crawled under a table, pulling out a metal box and pushing it toward the center of the room. From his chair, Colm could see that the box contained a clay jar of some kind, nearly twice as big as his head.

  “Gather around, now. Come on. Don’t be shy. You there, pickpocket.” He pointed to Colm. “Give me a hand with this thing.” As everyone else formed a circle, Colm helped the goblin lift the jar out of the chest. He noticed the lid was sealed tight, but he could feel the weight of it shifting. There was something heavy inside. And it was moving.

  “Now spread out a little bit, give us some space,” Herren Bloodclaw said, motioning for Colm to set the jar on its side. Colm stepped back between Lena and Quinn as the goblin straddled his mysterious treasure, his yellow-clawed fingers grasping at the lid.

  “Whatever you do, don’t panic. Some of you are green as a lily and will likely not have seen anything quite like this before, but you are in no real danger.” He started to twist the lid, then stopped, looking back at the class. “Not mortal danger, anyways.”

  Herren Bloodclaw twisted and pulled, popping the seal, and then leaped aside. Colm instinctively took another step back, as did everyone else, including Lena. They all watched the mouth of the jar.

  Nothing happened.

  The goblin stood behind it, arms crossed, waiting.

  Colm angled to get a better look inside, but the opening was too narrow to see anything.

  “There’s nothing in there,” the boy named Dagnor said, taking a step forward and then kneeling down, pressing his face into the hole. Herren Bloodclaw shook his head.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good—” Serene started to say, but it was too late. A handful of green slime shot out of the opening, latching onto the boy’s cheek like a leech. Dagnor screamed and staggered to his feet, spinning wildly and grabbing the goo with both hands, flinging it against the wall, where it hit with a slurping, sucking sound. The boy brought one hand to his face and drew his sword with the other, holding it in front of him, ready to strike. Colm watched in horror as the rest of what was in the jar slowly slithered out.

  “Jellus ooziferos, also known as a slime. Sometimes called ogre’s jelly, dragon snot, vile pudding, or simply a bloblin. It comes in over a dozen known varieties, each with varying chemical properties and resistances, some of them quite nasty. This one is known as the common green and is the least dangerous of its kind.” The goblin grinned mischievously.

  The pool of slime inched over the lid of its jar with a sickening shlurp. It didn’t appear to have eyes or a nose or any sensory organ of any kind, yet it seemed to feel its way around regardless. As it moved, it spread and then contracted, leaving a gluey trail behind it.

  “The green slime is not lethal,” Herren Bloodclaw said. “It is, however, toxic to the touch and will cause a man’s skin to blister or break into boils on contact.” He pointed to Dagnor. Colm noticed that the boy’s left cheek had turned a sickly shade of yellow and that several large, round pustules had started bubbling up from the skin. The goblin was no longer the owner of the ugliest face in the room.

  Dagnor raised his hand to his cheek, a look of anger on his face. Then he shouted, raised his sword, and attacked the blob in a flurry, hacking away at it with ferocious strokes. Everyone instinctively stepped back even farther, including Master Bloodclaw, as the slime was split into a half dozen pieces and those same pieces split again. Colm noticed that Lena was the only one in the room with a weapon who wasn’t cupping its hilt, as if she knew something Dagnor didn’t. The boy stopped to catch his breath, standing over his vanquished foe, now diced into a dozen quivering chunks.

  “There are, as I said, lots of different varieties,” the goblin continued over the sound of Dagnor’s grunting. “But all slimes have three things in common. First off, they are notoriously slow, which makes them easy to avoid. They also feel absolutely no pain, so far as we can tell. And finally,” he said, pointing to the various puddles of goo that were now crawling back toward each other, inching along the stone floor, “they are all fully capable of reassembling themselves.”

  Colm watched, fascinated, as the slime fused all its parts back together, including the one that Dagnor had thrown against the wall, regaining its original size. Dagnor dropped his slimy sword in disbelief.

  “For that reason, blades and arrows are quite useless against it. However, each slime is highly susceptible to a certain element that can be reproduced through either chemical or magical means. The common green, for example, is particularly vulnerable to fire. Mister Frostfoot, if you don’t mind?” The goblin pointed to the blob, which was very slowly inching its way toward the outer ring of trainees.

  “Me?” Quinn pointed. “I really d-d-don’t think that’s a g-g-good—”

  “Stop your stammering, boy, and give us some flames. You certainly didn’t have any trouble scorching me a couple days back.”

  “B-b-but Master Velmoth said . . .”

  “That cantankerous old rat put you on his leash already? Bah.” The goblin turned to a boy with a purple cloak that clashed considerably with his orange hair. “Mister Tobbs . . . you’re not Velmoth’s lapdog yet, are you?” The boy shook his head. “Good. Then toast this jelly before it makes Dagnor any uglier, will you?”

  The boy took a step forward and rolled up his sleeves. Beside Colm, Serene gave a little whimper. Colm looked at the seeping gelatinous mass wobbling on the floor, the same one that had just attacked poor Dagnor, leaving one side of his face a weepy mess. Tobbs clasped his hands together and began chanting under his breath, and a jet of flame burst forth, orange to match his hair, slamming straight into the creature. The slime writhed for a moment, then began to melt, forming a slick green smudge on the floor. Dagnor, the right side of his face now fully erupted in a rolling sea of boils, said, “Good riddance.” Lena noted that it smelled a little like Fungus’s kitchen. Colm just stared at the puddle.

  “Well, now,” Master Bloodclaw announced, rubbing his hooked nose. “That’s probably enough hands-on experience for one day. Miss Johaggen, if you would please escort your overzealous companion to Master Merribell to have his face tended to, I’m sure she has some kind of ointment that will clear that up nicely. The rest of you gather your things and be careful of the floor. I’d hate for one of you to slip and hurt yourself.

  “All except for you, Mr. Frostfoot.”

  Quinn pointed to himself.

  “Yes. You haven’t proven yourself to be much of a spellcaster today, I’m afraid, so let’s see how you handle a mop.”

  “That was . . . so wrong,” Quinn said when he finally joined the others out in the hall. His entire body was shaking.

  “I don’t know,” Lena countered. “At least Master Bloodclaw let us get our hands dirty. Or your hands, anyways,” she added. She still sounded disappointed. Colm saw the look in her eyes. He had only known Lena Proudmore a day, yet he already k
new what she was thinking.

  “How badly did you want to take a swing at it?” he asked.

  Lena bounced on her toes. “So badly,” she said. “Good thing I didn’t, though.” She turned to Serene. “Let me guess. You wanted to rescue it, didn’t you?”

  “What? No! Of course not.”

  They all looked at her.

  “Well. Maybe a little. It was kind of cute, the way it just inched along like that.”

  “That’s because you didn’t have to mop it up,” Quinn remarked. “Or what was left of it.”

  Finn was waiting for them out in the hall when they made it to their last training session of the morning. The room was the same as the others, except, Colm noted, there was no tower of books on the desk and no mysterious chest underneath it. As they took their seats—Colm making it a point to sit next to Lena again—the girl named Johaggen with the long woven hair returned, assuring her own companions that Dagnor would be okay.

  “I’m glad,” Colm said from across his table, but the girl just gave him a dismissive look, as if he had been the one who’d tried to suck the boy’s face off. He began to wonder if he was automatically limited to having only three good friends in this place, if that was just the way it had to be. He knew everyone had their group—whoever they were matched up with at the start—but did that mean that the groups themselves couldn’t get along? Obviously Tyren’s group didn’t think so. Maybe none of them did.

  “All right, adventurers, take your seats.” Finn sighed. “Welcome to Basic Survival. Here we will cover a cornucopia of skills that you will need to be a successful dungeoneer. For as we all know, the history of dungeoneering is the history of survival.”

  Colm felt the impulse to raise his hand and ask how that fit in with revenge and armed robbery, but he resisted. After all, if it came down to following the advice of an ancient, hard-of-hearing has-been, a bitter, excommunicated goblin, or Finn Argos, Colm knew whom he would side with.

  “As many of you know, this topic is often covered by Master Wolfe, but as is frequently the case, Master Wolfe is away at the moment, so I will be training you in his stead. . . . Yes, Mister Tobbs?”

  The mageling who had vanquished the slime put down his hand. “Is it true Master Wolfe once escaped an enchanted tower fifty stories tall by killing a giant spider and then weaving a rope out of its silk?”

  Finn nodded slowly. “That is the story, yes, though no one was actually there to confirm it. Now, the purpose of our meeting is . . . Yes, Miss Golen?”

  “Is it true that Master Wolfe once survived being stranded in a snowstorm by killing a bear with his bare hands, skinning it with his teeth, and then using its hide as a tent?” the girl with the braided hair asked.

  Finn sighed. “I think that might be a slight exaggeration. I’m fairly certain he had a dagger with him at the time, which would have made both killing and skinning the bear considerably easier. However, this story, though embellished, does yield interesting implica—Yes, Miss Proudmore?”

  Lena lowered her spastically waving hand and leaned across her desk. “I heard that Master Wolfe once slew a dozen dragon hatchlings with a sword he’d whittled from an orc’s leg bone.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard that too,” Finn said, clearly exasperated. “And were he here, I’m sure Master Wolfe could regale you with that and a hundred other fantastic tales of how he narrowly escaped death, killing giants with a piece of tree bark and snaring goblins using nets made out of his own plucked chest hairs. But since he is not here, you will have to make do with me.”

  “Can you even do that?” Quinn whispered to Colm. “Make a net out of chest hair?”

  “I don’t think so,” Colm said. He didn’t have any chest hair yet to say for certain.

  “Now,” Finn said with a huff of impatience, “if there are no more questions—” Four trainees raised their hands. “Not including any about Master Wolfe.” The same four lowered them again. “Then who here can tell me what the key to surviving any dungeon is?”

  Colm quickly ran through the list of rules Finn had already taught him. Stay behind the big guy. Give the mage some space. Don’t steal from your friends. Most of it seemed practical enough, but none of it screamed most-important-rule-ever.

  Lena raised her hand. “Kill it before it kills you?” she offered.

  Finn scrunched his nose. “A good policy, provided you are certain it is going to kill you, but there are numerous ways to die in a dungeon, and many of them don’t come at the hands of anything you can stab with a sword. Yes, Mr. Frostfoot?”

  “Enunciate,” he said, clear as a bell.

  Colm chuckled. Even Finn smiled. “I can see where that might be good counsel for some, but I doubt Miss Proudmore’s battle cry requires careful elocution.” He looked around the room for another response. Colm thought about two nights ago and the four of them in the dungeon and the only time they were really in any danger. He raised his hand.

  “Watch your step?” he said.

  Finn nodded, eyes bright and beaming. “Master Fimbly told you about the four brothers, did he? Did you know that the first dungeon ever built was nothing more than a cave with a hole in the middle of it, covered with tree branches? That’s how an ogre chose to protect his treasure. So simple, and yet no fewer than seven adventurers perished trying to get at that ogre’s gold. The treasure was ultimately snagged by the blind bard Bartholomew Plink, who walked around the hole simply because he had to keep his hand against the wall of the cave to get there.

  “From that hole in the ground, the art and science of dungeon making has evolved, from the humble simplicity of the Straight Hall of Singular Death to the majesty of the Lich Lord’s Labyrinth of Lost Souls, a nearly impenetrable maze crawling with all manner of traps and beasts that managed to exist unmolested for two hundred years.”

  Colm had never heard of either of these, but everyone around him seemed to be nodding in appreciation. Serene was even taking notes, scribbling them all over a cloth-bound book that she’d brought seemingly for that purpose.

  “And yet half of all dungeon-related deaths could be prevented if people would only keep their eyes open and look where they are going.”

  “Keep your eyes open,” Serene whispered as she wrote.

  “And what,” Finn continued, “is the single most important asset you need to have when tackling a dungeon?”

  “A sword. Der,” Lena said.

  “A positive attitude?” Serene suggested.

  “Food,” Quinn offered.

  To each of these, Finn Argos shook his head. The others threw out more suggestions.

  “My spell book?”

  “Some heavy rope.”

  “A torch. No . . . wait . . . lots of torches.”

  A good pair of shoes, Colm thought to himself, but that was just his father talking. He considered all the items in his bag: the lockpicks, the dagger, the sunstone. All useful, but was any of them really more important than the other? Were any of them more valuable than Scratch or even the cloak on his back? Finn continued to shake his head, continued to let them guess, his smile fading.

  “A sword and a crossbow . . .”

  “A map. Definitely a map.”

  “. . . with poison-tipped bolts . . .”

  “A potion of invisibility? No. Invulnerability. Wait, is there such a thing?”

  “I’m still thinking food. . . .”

  Colm racked his brain. He knew they were missing the point. He could tell by the look on Finn’s face. Finally it came to him. Of course. What was the one thing you absolutely needed more than anything else? He raised his hand. “A way out,” he said.

  Behind him, Lena cursed as if she had been about to say the same thing and he’d beaten her to it. Colm waited for the smile to return, but Finn just shook his head again.

  “No, I’m afraid. The answer is each other.” It was the first time Colm had ever seen the rogue look disappointed—in him, at least. “You will need each other if you are to stand any ch
ance of surviving a dungeon. And until you realize that, none of you has any business setting foot in one.”

  Colm felt Finn’s eyes on him and looked away. Beside him, Lena leaned over. “I thought your answer was better.” He looked at her and smiled.

  “Though I’d still rather just have my sword,” she added.

  Colm chanced to look back at Finn, who had moved on and was outlining the various survival skills they would learn over the next several weeks, including, believe it or not, the identification of various edible berries, roots, grasses, and mosses. Serene clapped her hands in anticipation. Quinn said he knew it would come back to food eventually.

  Colm just shut his mouth and leaned back in his seat, feeling uneasy again. Over the course of the entire morning, he felt like he had learned only one thing for sure.

  That he knew almost nothing.

  9

  THE RANGER’S RETURN

  After Finn let them go, Quinn sat in front of his four bowls of stew, a dense, dark broth with chunks of pink meat congealed by means of gluey fat to overcooked beets. Colm and Serene both took one look at lunch and declared themselves not hungry. Even Lena said she had to pass. Maybe it was the slime. Or maybe it was the sketches of all those doomed dungeoneers. Or maybe it was Finn’s description of exactly what an acid trap would do to you if you triggered it. Something had squelched their appetites, leaving a feast for Quinn. That boy’s stomach will be the subject of bards’ songs someday, Colm thought.

  “That was depressing,” Serene concluded as they discussed everything they’d done that morning. “It’s like they’re trying to spook us. Like they want us to quit before we even get started.”

  Lena wasn’t convinced.

  “Believe me. If they wanted us to quit, the goblin would have unleashed something more menacing than a pile of green goo,” she said. Colm agreed. Though it certainly had done a number on Dagnor’s face, a little fire and a mop had been all that was required to vanquish it. Hardly the stuff of legends.