The Dungeoneers

by John David Anderson

  “Did you lock yourself out?” Colm asked.

  “That’s funny,” Finn said. “Almost as funny as watching you run in circles from Ravena Heartfall this morning. Granted, it was a poor pairing—there are few apprentices at this guild who could have bested her—but it showed me how lopsided our focus of instruction has been. After all, as good as a rogue’s wits and his picks are, they can’t get him out of every situation.”

  Finn led Colm back through the halls and out into the courtyard, finding a patch of grass out of sight of anyone. “All right then,” Finn began. “Pull that toothpick out of its sleeve and let’s see what we can do to keep pretty girls from beating you up again.”

  “At least they’re pretty,” Colm said, earning him a smile from the rogue.

  For the next three hours, Colm didn’t pick a single lock. Instead, Finn taught him the most basic elements of combat. It was all in slow motion, thankfully, Finn taking the time to correct every little move, standing behind Colm and moving along with him, hands on elbows, striking together. Scratch felt much more comfortable in his hand than the blunt steel stick he had been wielding that morning, and by the time they were finished, Colm was able to counter the majority of Finn’s slower strikes with ease.

  “You’re going easy on me,” Colm said as they sat down to rest afterward. Finn had a blushing peach and was carefully cutting pieces for them to share. Colm wondered who he had taken the peach from.

  “You’re just starting out,” Finn explained. “You’ll get better.”

  “And Master Thwodin?” Colm prodded. “Was he just starting out too?”

  Finn paused, then traced a pattern along the skin of the peach with the tip of his knife. He looked sideways at Colm. “Tye Thwodin is a gifted warrior. It’s only natural that he would best me in single combat.”

  “Oh,” Colm said. “Because it looked to me like you were letting him win.”

  Finn smiled wryly. “We show only what we want others to see, and see what others wish we hadn’t.”

  “Is that another rule?”

  “Just an observation,” the rogue said. He held the last of the peach to Colm, then wiped his hands on his cloak. “There is so much more I have to teach you, Colm Candorly, so much we still have to accomplish. I want you to be ready.”

  “For the trials, you mean,” Colm said.

  “For anything,” Finn replied. “Impossible to know what life has destined for you, what choices you will be forced to make. You need to be prepared, not just to fight for what’s yours, but to seize the opportunities when they present themselves. Unfortunately, we are all out of time for today. Be sure to practice what we went over. Maybe even corner that redheaded barbarian friend of yours and have her show you a thing or two. Poor Tyren’s ear looks worse than Master Velmoth’s ever did.”

  Colm stuffed Scratch back into its scabbard and grabbed his sack. As he turned back toward the castle, Finn stopped him, reaching into his gray cloak and removing a scroll, wound tight and tied with a white satin ribbon.

  “Nearly forgot. This arrived for you earlier this morning,” he said. “From Felhaven.”

  Colm took the rolled parchment and held it nervously. He started to open it, but Finn stopped him. “Certain things should be read in private, just in case they contain information that you wouldn’t want to share with others.”

  Colm felt his stomach sink. “Did something happen? Is my family all right?” What if Seysha’s illness had worsened and the medicine wasn’t enough? Or what if the magistrate had gone back on his word and punished his father in his place for stealing all that coin? Colm had only been gone a few short days, but there were so many things that could have gone wrong. Things that he was powerless to do anything about.

  “It’s addressed to Colm Candorly,” the rogue said, “not to Finn Argos. It’s none of my business.”

  But even as he said it, he smiled.

  By the time he made it back to his room, Colm already had the scroll unfurled. He shut the door and sat on the edge of his bed, holding the parchment between trembling fingers.

  Dear Colm,

  The girls all wanted to write separately, but we feared the bird couldn’t carry them all, so we all sat down and wrote this together. We hope that you are happy and, above all, safe. We want you to know that we miss you terribly, but that we understand and appreciate what you are doing. Your father says everything is cleared with the magistrate and that you are welcome to come home whenever you like. Rest assured we are all well, though lonely without you. Seysha is back to full health, and despite their entreaties, your father and I haven’t let any of the girls take over your room. We hope that you will return to us soon. Never forget how much we love you.

  At the bottom they had all scrawled their names, including Elmira, though hers was more of a smudge.

  Everyone, Colm noticed, but Celia. Colm felt a pang in his gut. Maybe she was mad at him for not coming home. She felt betrayed, and probably a little bit jealous. Here he was having an adventure without her, abandoning her. He guessed he couldn’t blame her for being angry.

  Colm flipped the parchment over. There, on the back, was another message, this one hastily written in half-smeared ink.

  I miss you. Be careful.

  Come home soon.

  Celia

  And beneath the message, fastened with a bit of wax, was her hairpin. The long silver one no thicker than a sewing needle, with the emblem of the butterfly molded to its head, handed down from one great-grandmother on Mina Candorly’s side. Each of the girls had a treasure—something special that they could call their own, that they wouldn’t be forced to share with the others. Colm knew because he had stolen quite a few of them, out of revenge for various pranks they had pulled on him. This hairpin was Celia’s.

  Now it was his.

  Come home soon.

  It was a trap. He knew he couldn’t keep it forever. She knew he knew. It meant he would have to come home, eventually, just to give it back.

  Colm placed the parchment beneath his pillow after reading it three more times, then tucked the hairpin into his bag for luck. With the trials not far away, and whatever challenges awaited him after that, he figured he would need it.

  His thoughts were still on Celia when he was startled by a knock on the door. It wasn’t Quinn. Quinn would just barge right in. Colm opened it to reveal Lena standing in the hall, hands on her hips.

  “A little bird whispered that there’s a rogue with a sword on his hip and no clue how to use it.”

  A little bird. With eight fingers and a penchant for whispering things, Colm thought.

  “I suppose you’re here to teach me,” he said.

  “If you’re going to learn,” she said smugly, “you might as well learn from the best.”

  Colm looked at the pillow and the treasure he had stowed underneath. Come home soon, they said. Understandable. He missed them too.

  But he wasn’t going home empty-handed.

  11

  ALL OUT OF ORDER

  Master Fimbly hadn’t lied about the menu. When he had shown them the kitchen that first day, the old man had said that it was where the magic happened. The real magic, Colm decided, was that they all managed to eat the same thing day in and day out without jumping out of the castle’s highest tower.

  Outside of the menu, however, life at Thwodin’s Legion was anything but dull. Master Fimbly had exhausted his supply of horrifying anecdotes about dungeoneers who had lost life or limb and was introducing some success stories—parties returning with limbs not only intact, but hefting huge sacks of gold. Master Bloodclaw was proving to be an expert in all things monstrous (takes one to know one) and had introduced Colm and the others to the carrion wyrm, the choke beetle, and the screeching harpy—which shattered the glass windows the moment Herren let her out of her box.

  There were other forms of instruction as well: Colm learned how to identify medicinal herbs with Master Merribell and how to throw an ax with Master Stormbow,
though he only managed to stick it in a tree once. There was even a quick overview of wilderness cuisine presented by Fungus himself, though that only amounted to a list of things you could put in a stew and things you couldn’t. (Squirrel innards were, unfortunately, a “could.”) After the first two weeks, Colm knew more about dungeoneering than he had ever cared to know about cobbling shoes.

  He especially looked forward to his afternoons with Finn. The rogue had quickly expanded the breadth of Colm’s training, teaching him more than just picking locks, though they still spent most of their time standing before that closet door. There were further lessons in swordplay and subterfuge. He taught Colm how to write and decipher several kinds of code and how to blend in with his surroundings. They spent an afternoon learning how to shadow someone, keeping to the corners and out of sight. That particular afternoon had culminated in Colm successfully stalking Lena for nearly thirty minutes, until she finally caught on and tackled him, threatening to beat his face in until she realized who he was. Even when she did, she still kept him pinned to the ground for a moment longer than necessary.

  And there was more than one afternoon already spent on the delicate art of finding and disarming traps. These sessions were often held outdoors or down in a special section of Renny’s dungeon. And they almost always ended with Colm nursing fresh bruises.

  “It is the rogue’s responsibility to do all the disarming, even if it means you are dis-armed in the process,” Finn told him.

  Or deboned, disfigured, or decapitated. It was the main hazard of the occupation, Finn explained as they walked along the rows of flowers: that for every hundred doors you open, only one will be trapped, but you can be sure that’s where the treasure is.

  “Take this,” Finn said, handing Colm a leatherbound book small enough to fit in the pocket of his cloak. The Rogue’s Encyclopedia, Volume Two: Traps and Contraptions. Colm asked about Volume One. It seemed, once again, that Finn was getting ahead of himself.

  “Volume One is remedial stuff. Hardly worth the time of innately gifted individuals such as ourselves. But this book is a lifesaver. In time you will come to memorize every word.”

  Colm flipped through the three-hundred-some pages. He hoped Finn was exaggerating.

  “For now, you should know that most traps fall into a few major categories. You have your droppers—things falling on you. Your fallers—you falling in things. Your slicers. Your scorchers. Your snatchers. Your drowners. Your crushers. Your poisoners, and worst of all, your too-short good-byes.”

  “Too-short good-byes?” Colm echoed.

  Finn snapped his fingers. “You’ll barely have time to wave farewell to your fellow party members before you are decorating the dungeon walls with your brains. But the most common kind of trap is the faller—usually into a pit. Often filled with something.”

  “Water?” Colm guessed hopefully.

  Finn shrugged. “If it’s boiling. More likely spikes. Snakes. Giant rats. Acidic slime. Molten lava . . . It’s really best not to test it. And that requires an ever-watchful eye.”

  Then Finn gave Colm a little nudge, and he felt the ground give out beneath him, grass and dirt collapsing as he slid to the bottom of a hole barely as high as himself. There was nothing at the bottom but dirt, but Colm’s pride was immediately bruised. The rogue crouched at the edge of the pit and smiled.

  “If you had looked closely, you would have seen the grass thatched together, would have noted the bits of loose dirt along the edge. Of course, skilled trap makers won’t leave such clues. Their work is almost seamless.”

  “Is Master Bloodclaw a skilled trap maker?” Colm asked, brushing himself off and thinking of the looming trials.

  “He’s a goblin. They make the best traps of all,” Finn replied. “Of course, they say the mad sorcerer Azanab once conjured a never-ending pit and then accidentally tripped over his own robes and fell into it. That was over a hundred years ago, and he is presumably still falling.”

  Colm took Finn’s extended hand and scrabbled up the edge. “And your point is . . .”

  “At least you can crawl back out.”

  Though Colm actually couldn’t. Not without a little help.

  Colm’s days belonged to Finn Argos and the other masters of the guild, but his evenings were spent with his party, the four of them lounging in the archives, listening to Quinn expound on some bit of arcane knowledge he’d discovered (never once stuttering) or soaking their feet in the steaming water of the hot springs, listening to a lecture from Serene on the importance of communing with nature (“Can’t you hear the grass whispering?”).

  Every night, for an hourglass of time at least, Lena would drag Colm to one of the practice rooms for a friendly duel, two words that Colm didn’t think mixed in her vocabulary. The other two would follow along and cheer Colm on, figuring Lena didn’t need the encouragement. She never let him win, of course, but she did say he was at least losing more gracefully.

  “So did you hear?” Lena said as she removed her gauntlets after their latest bout, offering that suggestive smile of hers that Colm had learned meant she was going to say something that only she would think was good news. “Master Thwodin has announced there will be a special prize for whichever party completes the next trial the fastest.”

  “Chests full of gold?” Colm wondered.

  “A pet dragon?” Serene said.

  “Something besides stew for dinner?” Quinn pondered.

  “I thought you liked the stew,” Colm questioned.

  “I do,” Quinn answered. “I just could go for a nice roasted pheasant every now and then.”

  “Um. Hello? Pet dra-gon?”

  “You can’t even talk to bears. What makes you think you can talk to dragons?” Lena prodded.

  Serene looked hurt. “I could if it was a baby dragon. Anything is cute when it’s little.”

  “I have a younger sister who proves otherwise,” Colm said.

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s ours,” Lena said emphatically. “I mean, we have just as good a chance at winning as any other party here, right?” She looked at the other three in turn.

  “Of course we do,” Colm said, with more confidence than he actually felt. Finn had been coaching him on how to be a more convincing liar.

  “I don’t know,” Quinn countered. “There are groups here that have been around a lot longer than we have.”

  “Then we will just have to spend even more time training together,” Lena said.

  The other three let out a groan, but it was just to give her a hard time. Truth was, Colm couldn’t think of anywhere else he’d rather be.

  By the end of the week, the trials were all anyone could talk about. There were wagers about who would win Tye Thwodin’s coveted prize. Colm heard the names of several groups mentioned as having a chance, but by far one was whispered more than any others: Tyren Troge’s. Not because of Tyren, who many considered to be far more boast than blade, or his flunkies Minx and Vala. By all accounts, Ravena Heartfall was the dungeoneer to beat. The other three would just be tagging along to hold doors open.

  Of course, there were also bets concerning who wouldn’t make it through the goblin’s dungeon at all—those who would have to be rescued, carried out unconscious or worse. Colm heard his name mentioned more than once. It didn’t help that the masters were making almost as big a deal of it as the trainees. A day after Finn introduced Colm to the joy of swinging scythe traps, Master Fimbly spent half a morning lecturing them about the importance of the upcoming trials.

  “The whole point is to see if you can put the knowledge you’ve gained to practical use. After all, if you can’t actually make it through a dungeon and score some coin, what use are you to us?” It was Fimbly speaking, but it sounded like something Tye Thwodin might say.

  “WILL THERE BE MONSTERS?” Lena shouted.

  “I cannot divulge what manner of difficulties you will face,” Fimbly continued. “But I can tell you that the trials are designed to develop each of
your talents, individually and as a—”

  “BUT THERE WILL BE MONSTERS,” she interrupted again.

  “As I said, I am not at liberty to discuss the nature of your impediments or aid you in any way—it would be entirely unfair to the other parties—but rest assured it wouldn’t be much of a challenge if there wasn’t something standing in your way. Now, if you would please—”

  “AND IF THERE ARE MONSTERS, WILL WE GET A CHANCE TO SLAY THEM, I MEAN, FOR REAL THIS TIME?”

  Fimbly sighed. “You are permitted to do what is necessary in order to survive the dungeon and accomplish your task, though if you have learned anything from me in the past week, it is that fighting is only one of the many keys to survival, and that oftentimes . . . yes?”

  “ARE WE ALLOWED TO BRING AS MANY WEAPONS AS WE WANT?”

  “And just how many weapons would you intend to carry, Miss Proudmore?”

  Lena actually stopped to count on her fingers.“SEVEN,” she announced.

  “Seven?” Quinn said.

  “So barbaric.” Serene sighed, which brought an instant smile to Lena’s face. Colm thought of Master Wolfe, a blade in each hand. Anywhere and Anytime. If Colm were to have two more swords, he might call them In Broad Daylight and Only When Necessary.

  “You will each be outfitted appropriately for your particular challenge,” the old man said. “Though I would remind you that good friends are the best weapons of all.”

  “Provided they’re not dull,” Dagnor remarked. After more than a week, his face was finally boil-free.

  “I’m sorry,” Lena said, turning in her seat. “Did you say something, blob lover?”

  Dagnor sat up straighter. “I said maybe seven isn’t such a great idea. It only increases your chances of pricking your finger and slipping into a coma.” He pretended to accidentally cut his thumb and swoon out of his chair in dramatic fashion. The other members of his party started laughing. The trials were bringing out the competitive spirit in everyone.