“They must have gone into one of those arches and found another moving hallway,” Ginny said. “Might be all of the arches are like that. Most likely thing is that we're in a big cave or some such with the movin' bits built inside so they got space to move about in. If we can find a way to break through a wall somwhere's...”
“Gryngo's back there, unfortunately,” Thud said, waving his hand vaguely in a manner indicating he had no idea whatsoever which direction Gryngo might be in. “No 'splosives in these packs we got; too dangerous to tote around. Some small picks though.”
He knelt down and drew another chalk line across the threshold, adding a 2 at each end.
“Dunno if this'll end up helpin' in any way,” he muttered. He stood and brushed chalk dust from his hands. “All right, leave one lantern here as a marker. Everyone grab hands and let's step through all at once.”
Ruby's hand felt dry and papery, Thud's like lunchmeat. Durham braced himself and then, with a nod from Ginny, they all stepped forward.
The dungeon moved.
Miss Cluck stood in the now empty hallway, alone in the pool of lantern light. She blinked once or twice at the dark, empty room and came to the conclusion that she had no compelling interests located within. She pecked aimlessly at the number 2 on the floor, the small pool of light around her an island in darkness.
-14-
Nibbly and Dadger Ben stood silently gazing at the archway, the narrow ledge and the dark emptiness beyond.
“Right as I came out,” Dadger said. “Whole damned thing dropped right behind me. Voop! Gone.”
Nibbly rubbed at his beard about where he believed his chin would be.
“Well…” he began.
“Hmmm…” he continued a few moments later.
“Methinks you’re in charge,” Dadger said. “All the team leaders is in there cept’n you.”
Nibbly nodded slowly. “Go fetch Cardamon and Gryngo. Maybe Giblets too, if he seems coherent enough.” He wasn’t entirely sure if they’d be able to help but it would serve to remove his audience for a minute while he stood there not knowing what to do. Leading the looting team hadn’t really prepared him for anything that involved anything other than looting. Hopefully the three dwarves he’d asked for would be enough to form a good argument amongst themselves about what should be done so that he’d have a few ideas other than the nonexistent ones he already had.
The trio arrived a minute later, Dadger bobbing about behind them, trying to peer over their shoulders.
“Whole hall dropped, eh?” Cardamon asked. “Kind of a pit trap, mebbe. Instead of a hole in the floor, drop the whole hall. What’s in there?”
“Ain’t looked yet,” Nibbly answered. “Didn’t want to stick my head in until you’d had a chance to look at it lest something lop it off.”
“Pfffrt,” Giblets said, stepping forward onto the ledge. He extended his lantern into the dark.
“'S' a bell cave,” Giblets said in his rapid-fire mumble. “See't'wall behin' us, curvin' in up, out down, round'e'sides. Big bell we're in, wot? Reckon dere's a stactite runnin' right o'wn'e'middle, there, eh?”
He cupped his hands around his mouth. “OI!” His voice echoed back.
“Hunnert yards 'cross' giv'er'tek, mebbe half that up and a long ways down.” He dropped his lantern into the hole and watched it fall. There was a distant clang a long moment later.
“Hallway down there, fi’ty feets. Rope down, easy.” He turned and strolled back up the hall, punching Dadger in the shoulder as he passed. “Look there, wot? Hey!”
“Ow,” Dadger said.
“Well, there’s that,” Nibbly said. “Gryngo?”
Gryngo shrugged. “I could blow it up if’n yer want but might not be a good idea if they’re still in there.”
“Noted,” Nibbly said, hoping he sounded authoritative. The discussion he’d been hoping for was failing to materialize though the rope idea seemed pretty good. “Dadger, go get Leery.” Dadger nodded and scurried away.
Leery arrived a few minutes later. Her hair and beard were braided back and her cheeks trimmed to little more than a five o’calendar shadow. Her pale knobbly legs stuck out from the brown shorts she wore, shockingly exposed. At least she’d combed her leg hair.
“Whaddaya reckon?” Nibbly asked.
She stood on the ledge, studying the cave for a minute then began pointing
“I can leap over there, grab on and shimmy round that ledge there, drop down and grab that lichen and then backflip over to that rock knob below. Then hand over hand around the side, jump across that bit there, slide right down to that dip then grapple across and drop right down on the top safe and sound.”
“Yeh, well we’ll tie a rope around you just the same,” Nibbly said. He’d watched Thud perform the routine with Leery at least a dozen times.
They attached the rope to the clip on her belt and tied the other around around a clamp, hammered securely into the wall. Leery edged herself out on the ledge and then leapt for her first handhold. She missed it completely, bounced face first off of the wall and dropped like a rock. There was a loud “Glurnk!” from below as the rope went taut. Nibbly looked down. She dangled at the end of the rope, swinging slowly back and forth.
“You almost had it that time!” he called.
“My fingers slipped!”
“All right, we’re lowerin’ ya down.”
A moment later and she stood atop the hallway below. She stomped up and down on it. “Hello in there!” she shouted, and then, “Anyone hear me?” and then, “AHHHH!” as the hallway began ascending back up through the cave.
The sudden acceleration knocked her flat. Nibbly braced himself, waited, and then yanked as hard as he could on the rope. Leery came bouncing back into the room, tumbling end over end as the hallway arrived just behind her, slotting back into place as if it had never been gone.
There was no sign of anyone within.
“Braces, quick!” Nibbly yelled.
Cardamon ran forward with iron bands and began bolting them across the joining seam. Nibbly helped Leery untangle her arms and limbs then helped her to her feet. She wobbled a bit but seemed intact. Nibbly had figured out long ago that Leery’s value to the team was her pathological lack of self-preservation accompanied by seeming indestructibility rather than her questionable acrobatic skill. Dwarves excelled at somersaults but that was both the beginning and the end of the dwarven acrobatic legacy.
“There was another room down there,” Leery said. “I saw it when the hall started coming back up. Looks like that hall dropped them down and they moved on.”
“That gives us a target at least,” Nibbly said.
Cardamon stepped back from the hall entry. “Secured,” he said. He’d affixed the iron bands across the trap’s seam on all four sides of the hall. “This end ain’t goin’ nowheres less’n something hits it really, really hard. Also, there’s a number 1 chalked on the floor here.”
Nibbly went and looked but Cardamon had pretty much summed up the extent of the information that the ‘1’ offered.
“Guessin’ one o’ us did that,” Cardamon said. “Can’t figger skellingtons going around chalkin’ things.”
“All right then,” Nibbly said. “Time for us to launch a rescue mission.”
ᴥᴥᴥ
Mungo stood in the middle of a hallway, stroking his cat fur beard. Gong was technically in charge but the situation they were in was going to require thinking to get out of. Gong was no slouch in the thinking department but he was no Mungo. He stood clustered with Goin and Clink a few yards away, all three of them watching Mungo expectantly in the silent acknowledgment that he was their way out. They’d moved through several halls and several rooms, all identical, sometimes they’d felt the lurch of movement, sometimes they didn’t.
Mungo looked up at the corners where the walls met the ceiling. He idly calculated the quadrilateral binomial hypotenuse vectors, even while knowing that it wouldn’t lead to anything. He stuck hi
s hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. There was a piece of lint in one of his pockets. He could think of forty seven potential uses for the lint, forty eight if it were cotton, but none of them seemed overly applicable at the moment. He stuck the lint in his beard, use number seventeen. The beard was key to his dwarf disguise and he made sure to maintain it well. He wasn’t quite sure the beard was enough on its own, however. Maybe he needed to get a hat as well.
He studied the floor, silently calculating the total volume of empty space constituted by the seams between the stones then estimated the weight of each stone followed by the amount of quarry hours and number of wagons required to transport it. He licked his lips to determine air speed and direction then spent a few seconds spitting out cat hair.
“Clink,” he finally said. “Might I briefly appropriate your eyeball? The glass one, not the biological one.”
Clink arched his eyebrows then shrugged and pulled his glass eye out. It made a little schloop noise. “Yeah, if ye’d asked for my good one I’d probably have to turn you down.” He held the eyeball out.
Mungo took it and placed it gently on the floor in the precise horizontal and lateral center of the hallway. He studied it for a moment then reached out and gave it a poke with his finger. It rolled a few inches then stopped. He picked it back up, went further down the hall and repeated the poke and roll. And then a third time, still further down. He retrieved the eye and trotted back to the trio of dwarves, handing Clink his eye back. Clink scrutinized it carefully with his remaining eye, wiped it on his sleeve and then popped it in his mouth and rolled it around. Mungo could hear it click against his teeth and mentally charted the route that it was taking through Clink’s mouth. Clink retrieved it and poked it back into its socket then winced.
“Ah! Always burns somethin’ fierce when I do that.”
“Then don’t do that,” Mungo murmered, more to himself than to Clink. He was staring down the hall, preoccupied with calculations. “Salts in your mouth,” he added. “Membranous tissue. Bad mix.” He scurried down the hall a few yards, stopped and thought for a moment, then retreated back a step.
“Goin, could you come stand right here?”
Goin nodded and plodded over. Mungo adjusted his position a few times before he was happy.
“And Clink, stand right here,” he said, demonstrating. Clink did so. Mungo fished his chalk out of his pack and carefully drew an X on the floor. He then went and stood further down the hall.
“All right, Gong, whenever you’re ready I want you to go to that X and jump up and down on it four times.”
“Four times, eh?” Gong said. He walked over to the X.
“Well, three and a half would suffice but it would require you to jump to the X from elsewhere then up and down on it three times and, as four times in the same spot will achieve the same result with less complication to the instructions I choose to go with the simpler option.”
“Naturally,” Gong said. “You know, I’m not exactly known for me jumpin’ skills.”
“That’s quite all right,” Mungo said. “We’re more interested in your landing skills which I suspect that you will achieve admirably.”
“Fair ‘nuff,” Gong said. He jumped.
An immensity of dwarf such as Gong, launching himself into the air, is a sight few have the opportunity to witness. Parts of him still seemed to be going up as the rest of him came down, and then those same bits went down as he propelled himself back up. His plate mail creaked and the floor trembled slightly with each impact.
As he hit the floor for the fourth time, the hallway moved.
“Eureka!” Mungo yelled. It was a word that wasn’t actually a word but which he’d mathematically proved to exist in a parallel realm and he quite liked the sound of it when it came to needing something to yell in moments of cerebral triumph.
Goin squinted at the walls suspiciously. “Wot just happened?”
“We counterbalanced the hallway and forced the mechanism to trip.”
“Ah,” Goin said. “Well that’s good then, right?”
“It means that we can manipulate the parts of the labyrinth we occupy. Most labyrinths follow a larger design. If we explore a bit more I can ascertain the underlying pattern and deduce much of the rest of the labyrinth.”
“Meaning we’ll know how to solve it?”
“Precisely.” Mungo grinned and cracked his knuckles. “And as the corridors can be manipulated we can maneuver them to provide a direct route through for the rest of the team. Logically, such a route exists as it is implausible that the designer of an adaptable labyrinth wouldn’t provide themselves with a path through it for their own convenience.”
“Makes sense,” Gong said. “Wouldn’t want to have to do a maze in the middle of the night when you’re just trying to get to the jakes.”
Mungo’s eyebrows knotted together. “I don’t believe that liches micturate.”
“I don’t reckon I want to think about that enough to form an opinion,” Clink said. “If exploring is what we need to do let’s get to it.”
“All right,” Mungo yelled. “Dungeon protocol!” He attempted to bark the order and succeeded, albeit with more of a chihuahua result than intended.
Clink and Gong took up position side by side. Mungo clambered onto Gong’s shoulders.
“You expecting many traps in here?” Gong asked.
“No,” Mungo said. “But like Thud says, there’s no such thing in a dungeon as being overly cautious. Forward, ho!”
“I ain’t a horse,” Gong said. “Yell that again and I’ll forward-ho you into the wall.”
“Yes, sorry,” Mungo said. “Quite right. Proceed in your own good time, sir.”
ᴥᴥᴥ
“Vertical,” Ginny said. “I watched it that time. Up 'n' down like ellyvaters.”
Ruby had her journal out and was silently scribbling away at it, her brow furrowed. Durham frowned at the six archways spaced around the room. Beyond each lay seemingly identical hallways.
“There's no guarantee any of these are the right way, is there?” he asked. “These could just keep moving us around in circles, never leading out.”
“Likely functions like a sort of combination lock,” Ginny said. “Know the exact order of doors to take and it'll get you through. Bugger one up, however, and yeah, all bets is off. Probably a way to reset it from within but that’s just gonna be another code, as it were. Stumblin' onto it by happenstance is some slim odds.”
“Well, I never been much for rules,” Thud said. “Durham, come on over here and get me up on yer shoulders.”
Durham crossed to the middle of the room and knelt, letting Thud climb aboard. The dwarf was far heavier than he had expected but, fortunately, less moist. Thud stood and maneuvered himself so that he was standing with one foot on each of Durham's shoulders. It occurred to Durham that he could look up and answer a number of questions that he'd had about Dwarven kilts but made the snap decision that there were things man was not meant to know. Or, at least, things that this particular man didn't want to know.
Thud had procured a small pick from his pack and began tapping at the ceiling with it.
“Mortar's old an' crumbly,” he said. “We'll be through here in no time!”
“No time” turned out to be rather longer than it sounded. Durham's shoulders quickly went numb and then began radiating alarm messages down his spine. He tried to shift a little.
“Quit yer wrigglin', lad,” Thud said. “An' watch yer head. First stone coming down!” Durham glanced up in alarm and instantly regretted it, though he no longer had any unanswered kilt questions. Their chins weren't the only place that dwarves grew luxuriant beards. Thud dropped the ceiling stone he'd loosened and it crashed to the floor.
“Reckon two more o' them and it'll be big enough,” he said.
Durham was close to whimpering out loud by the time the third stone dropped. Thud pulled himself up through the hole and the sudden relief gave Durham th
e happiest moment he'd had in weeks.
“Dark as a nostril up here,” Thud's voice floated down from above. “Big space, lotsa echo. I kin hear some sort of clicking noise but nothin’ seems ter be jumpin on me. Climb on up.”
They could hear the clicking noise from below as well. It wasn’t loud but it gave the impression of coming from many sources.
Ginny helped Ruby climb onto Durham's shoulders and then Thud pulled her up through the ceiling. She seemed to have the weight of a bird in comparison to Thud. Ginny was next, her kilt giving Durham a lesson in comparative Dwarven anatomy that he suspected would be the source of more than one unpleasant dream in the future. She scrambled clear of the hole and then reappeared, along with Thud, extending their hands down to try and pull Durham up.
He reached up to grab hold and, as he did so, the floor beneath him opened and he found himself falling, Ginny and Thud's surprised faces rapidly receding until they were lost in the darkness.
ᴥᴥᴥ
“Well, don't that bugger all,” Thud said. His voice hissed through clenched teeth. “That lich bastard always got another trick up his sleeve.” He leaned over the hole and cupped his hands around his mouth. “OI!” His voice echoed in the pit below. The echoes died out and only silence answered. He slumped to the ground looking defeated.
“If anythin' happens to that lad, then...then...”
“Surely you've had losses before,” Ruby said. She rested a wrinkled hand on his shoulder.
“Aye, but not many and never an observer. I put me dwarves in jeopardy 'cuz that's our jobs, ain't it? Him, though, he weren't even s'posed to be here. He's s'posed to be back safe at home, searchin' sheeps 'n' sech.” Thud wiped at his eyes and Ginny handed him a grubby hanky.
“We don't know yet what happened to him, boss. Might be he's ok down there somewhere.”
“Well, we ain't leavin' him behind one way or the other,” Thud said. “We may have lost team members before but I ain't never, ever, left one behind.”
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