The Dungeoneers

by Jeffery Russell

  “I know, boss. We even swept up Bili that one time so we could take him to 'is mum. We'll find him.”

  “What happened down there? With the floor?” Thud asked.

  “If there was a seam, I…well, I missed it,” Ginny said. “Some sort of retractable retaining pins around the circumference, maybe…”

  “Aye,” Thud said, waving his hand to cut her off. “Another trick we ain’t seen before.”

  “It’s my fault, sir,” Ginny shuffled her feet nervously. “First them hallways movin’ an’ now the floor droppin’. I missed ‘em both an’ now we’re scattered an’ lost ever’ which way.”

  Thud was silent, neither contradicting nor forgiving. Ginny stepped quietly away from him, out of his line of sight. He began rolling past events through his head, altering, discarding, revisiting. Ginny and Ruby were quiet, waiting. The only sound was the faint clicking noise that seemed to be coming from some distance all around them. It was like an entire army continuously cracking their knuckles

  After a long minute he sighed deeply and stood.

  “If you’se to blame, I’m even more so. Had me whole team an hour ago and now I’m down to jest you, me and a scribe along for the ride. Can’t think o’ too much we coulda done different. We jest got outplayed by Alaham and now we gotta try to live long enough to learn from it. Fault or not, pointin’ fingers ain’t gonna fix it.”

  He stroked his beard glancing around at the darkness. “Need to figure out our own situation ‘afore we can do anything ‘bout the others, though. Echoes make it sound like we’re in a damned big hole in the ground. Figger it’d be good ter know wot’s makin’ that clicky noise, too. Got any them costonflagrationater thingys in yer pack?”

  “Probably,” Ginny said. She slid her pack off and began rummaging through it. “Mungo likes to hide ‘em in my pack when he makes ‘em cause he doesn’t want to carry ‘em around in case they explode.” She produced a metal tin from her pack, opened it and pulled out a footlong paper tube. “Right about now’s when a crossbow’d come in mighty handy. This one ain’t mortar style.”

  “I can help with that,” Ruby said.

  Thud arched an eyebrow at her. “Got a crossbow under yer robe somewhere’s?”

  “No, just a trick I learned when we were in Akama,” she said. “Do you have a small knife?”

  Thud nodded and produced one from his belt.

  Ruby took it and sat down. She began carving out bits of wood from one end of her walking stick. “That was my first outing with you, traveling up the Marea river from Kalaim.”

  “Aye, we did that old temple ruin,” Ginny said. “Nasty snakey buggers in there.”

  “Our third night on the river we stayed in that Fae village,” Ruby said. “They did that initiation dance, remember?” The pile of wood shavings next to her was growing. She seemed to be carving a hollow into the head of the walking stick. “I learned this trick from one of the hunters there. They use it to throw spears. This will take a few minutes. Sit tight.”

  Thud and Ginny sat, nervously staring into the darkness, the clicking noise surrounding them.

  -15-

  Durham woke up cold, wet and in pain. A brief bit of splashing about informed him that we was laying in a large puddle of water, which explained the first two issues. The memory of the fall arrived a moment later explaining the third. All of his limbs seemed mobile, at least, though none of them seemed too happy about it. He was laying on his back, his backpack squashed underneath and leaving him in a reclining posture like a sideways parenthesis. It was also extremely dark. Ridiculously dark. The sort of dark that had a bit of enthusiasm about it regarding just how dark it was. Save over there, perhaps fifty yards away, a single dim torch flickered. It was set in a cave wall beside a dark opening.

  Durham flopped about a little bit atop the backpack, turtle-like, until managing to roll off of the side of it with enough momentum to maneuver himself onto all fours with the pack on top of him. He still wasn’t sure exactly what the pack had in it but, based on what it now weighed he had to assume that it was full of lead sponges. Another minute of wiggling and he managed to extricate his arms from the straps. He began fumbling with the buckles on it, searching by touch until he found one that released the top. He reached in, gingerly feeling around. Everything was moist and much of it sharp. He finally found a hard ball shape that he hoped was one of Mungo’s gryo-lanterns. One side of it was dented badly enough that he doubted it would be particularly good at rolling anymore. He tapped firmly on the side.

  “Hello? You alive in there?”

  After a moment there was a bit of sputtering followed by a few tiny coughs. A dim light flickered to life. The pixie inside looked bedraggled and miserable, her wings limp and soggy. She glared at him and shook herself, a tiny spatter of water misting against Durham’s face. A final contemptuous snort and then her light grew until it became strong enough to provide some meager illumination. Durham glanced around first, figuring that having at least a slight notion of where he was could help determine if he should be fleeing in terror or not. He was on a natural stone surface, smoothed by erosion. He could make out the wall of the cave a dozen feet away, surface runneled with limestone ridges.

  Nothing seemed to be about to leap out at him so he turned his attention back to the pack and began fishing through it.

  Broken chalk, rope, some iron spikes. A waterproof package of hard bread that had been reduced to powder and crumbs. Flint and a cube of shaved wood pressed with wax. Quite a few other small bits and pieces the nature of which he wasn’t quite sure of. There was a sodden blanket toward the bottom which seemed to be the primary source of weight. He tugged it free and tried to twist some of the water out of it with limited success. He settled for draping it over the top of the pack in hopes it would dry a bit but was felt he was being overly optimistic in that regard. He tugged the pack back on and held the lantern up over his head, looking about.

  The space he was in seemed far larger than what his lantern had any hope of illuminating. He could still hear the clicking noises coming from somewhere far above him. Quite a lot of clicking noises. Whatever was making them was well beyond his light but he was certain that whatever it was was unpleasant and that finding somewhere else to be was a good priority to have. He made his way to the wall of the cave, figuring that, as it and the torch were his only landmarks, it was his best bet. He began following it toward the lone torch, picking his way carefully over the uneven floor. It had seen much less work than the passages above and large piles of stone debris made the footing treacherous. The torch was ensconced beside an opening cut into the wall. He cautiously extended the lantern through. Beyond was the worked stone of the dungeon. The opening seemed to have been cut through as a ‘back door’ of sorts. He wasn’t sure how far his fall had been, but figured it was enough that he was at least a level deeper down in the dungeon, perhaps two. More than that and he figured that he’d be a bit more broken. The dungeon, however, hazardous as it certainly was, likely offered a better chance of finding the surface again, if not a better chance of living to see it. Something, after all, had to have lit the torch.

  Through the arch was a small antechamber with an iron-bound wooden door. He started to step in then froze, memories of the traps above springing to mind. He wasn’t really certain what exactly Ginny and Mungo had spent all of their effort looking for. He recalled them mentioning seams and triggers. He felt he could possibly spot a seam but the only trigger he was familiar with was on a crossbow and he felt it unlikely that there would necessarily be a resemblance. He poked his head through the arch, holding the lantern up. The room was bare, the corners showing a build up of muddy silt that told him that the cave, on occasion at least, had enough water in it to encroach on the dungeon. There were certainly seams between the worked stones but none of them seemed continuous. The stones were all interlocked in the usual manner. He took his pack off and dropped it down on the floor in front of him. Many different deadly things fai
led to happen to it. He nudged it forward with his foot and stepped in to replace it. It was a slow way to cross the room but eventually he nudged the pack up against the door without anything unexpected having happened during the process. He carefully examined the door. No visible wires. Nothing that looked like something anyone would call a trigger. He fished around in the backpack and found a long thin metal rod. He inserted it between the door and the jam, sliding it carefully around the edge of the door. It hit obstructions about where he expected the hinges would be and another where the latch was. Feeling slightly silly, having taken ten minutes to walk five feet across an empty room he took a deep breath, grabbed the door latch and pulled.

  It was locked.

  He leaned his forehead against it in frustration. What was that Thud had said about there being no locks in dungeons? Alaham must have missed that discussion. How would the dwarves have done it? One of them would come trotting up with picks or an axe, maybe explosives. He assumed that there was some sort of lockpick in the pack but the door had no keyhole, at least that he could see, which ruled out managing to lockpick it through sheer dumb luck. You’re a guard, idiot, his brain informed him. How would a guard open it? He gave a snort of laughter, took a step back and kicked the door in.

  It flew open in a crash of splinters followed by a resounding thud as it rebounded against the wall. He caught it on the backswing, pushed it open and peered in.

  He blinked.

  He considered the results for a moment then he blinked again, in hopes of greater success.

  The room beyond was a well appointed parlor. A thick red rug covered the floor. Tables and chairs with curly wooden legs were scattered about amongst cushion adorned couches. Gilded lamps hung from the walls, casting a warm golden light through the room. The air smelled of mothballs and seemed thick and still. A thick layer of dust lay over everything. He stepped in, immediately reprimanding himself for not looking for seams and triggers but nothing instantly killed him so it seemed that, for the moment, luck was on his side.

  There was a plate of cookies on one of the tables alongside a teapot and a teacup. A book lay open on the chair beside it. The book was dusty but the cookies looked fresh and the teapot was not only dust-free but still emitting a wisp of steam. Durham crouched, drawing the mace from his belt. He could see no one in the room but it gave every sign that someone had been there recently and was about to come back. Factoring in the room’s locale told him that it was probably someone whom he wouldn’t get along with. He moved cautiously over to the chair. He tried to imagine if the sort of mind existed that would leave poison cookies and tea in a dungeon parlor on the off chance an adventurer would wander by. It seemed, to him, unlikely. He picked up one of the cookies and sniffed at it then took a very small bite. It was still warm and tasted of honey. He wiped the inside of the empty teacup and poured himself a cup of tea. A bowl beside it turned out to contain sugar and another held cream. He added a bit of the sugar but decided to forego the cream as he couldn’t think of a reasonable way for there to be fresh cream in a dungeon. It seemed unlikely that they kept a cow down here anywhere and he didn’t want to dwell on what sort of creature might be serving as a substitute. He couldn’t imagine where the fresh cookies and tea had come from either but they seemed a safer prospect than the mystery cream.

  He sipped at the tea then examined the book. It was about a thousand pages long and was written in a language he didn’t recognize. There was an illustration that Durham decided not to dwell on after the briefest of glances. The spine made little crackly noises when he tried to close it. The binding was a deep red leather.

  There was a door on the far side of the room, which Durham felt no particular hurry to get to. A trail led through the dust from the doorway to the table where the tea and cookies were. What would the dwarves do here? He contemplated the notion for a moment, picturing the dwarves stripping the room down to the bare stone and carting it off to their wagons. Yes, that’s exactly what they would be doing. It didn’t help him much in his current situation, however. Any answers he was going to find to the mysterious tea and biscuits were going to be beyond the door. Any exit out of the dungeon was going to be beyond that door as well. If he answered the tea and biscuit question along the way then all the better. He set the cup back next to the pot, readied his mace and went to the door. Just as he reached it the handle turned and the door began to open.

  Durham quickly dodged behind the door as it swung open into the room. He crouched, trying not to breath, wondering if his leap for safety had made enough noise to be heard. He heard a faint noise from the other side of the door as someone entered the room. He gripped the mace tightly but whomever it was didn’t seem to have an interest in looking behind the door. After a moment he peeked around the edge.

  It was a skeleton. It moved slowly across the room with a curiously stilted gait as if someone or something had to pull each limb through every motion. It clattered its way to the table Durham had just left and began gathering up the tea and cookies.

  A skeletal butler? Durham supposed it made a certain kind of sense. If you had an army of mindless slaves, why not command one to bring you snacks? No one had used the room in a long time and it occurred to Durham that the skeleton had probably been faithfully serving tea to no one, day after day, year after year. Were there other skeletons somewhere, making the tea and baking the cookies? His stomach gave a twist, reminding him that he’d eaten one of those cookies. Had it been mixed and shaped by long bony brown fingers? He blanched at the thought and felt the cookie leap its way back up his throat. Through sheer force of will he scrunched his face up, clenched his teeth and forced it back down, feeling that vomiting on the rug would likely draw the skeletal servant’s attention. He needn’t have bothered. Mouth full of honey flavored bile and face twisted into a grimace he looked back up to find the skeleton standing and staring at him with its dark and hollow eye pits. It had the teapot in one hand and the plate of cookies in the other. Its jaw hinged open as if to scream, producing a chilling hissing sound that was more of a memory of a sound than something he could actually hear. Durham had just long enough to wonder how it was making the noise before it flung the teapot at him.

  Teapots are not generally known for their aerodynamic qualities, hence the proclivity for their use during breaks between fighting rather than as an actual weapon of war. Durham easily dodged it and it shattered on the wall behind him, dousing him in hot tea. The plate came spinning after, shedding cookies along the way. Contrary to teapots, plates bear a striking resemblance to certain weapons of war and the plate demonstrated this by carving through the air straight into Durham’s forehead. It clanked loudly against the front of his helmet, the inside of his head giving a flash of light with the impact and sent him staggering back against the wall where he slipped in the tea and sat down firmly on shards of broken teapot as cookies pelted down around him.

  The skeleton came sprinting across the room at him with terrifying speed, running in a strange half-crouch motion, its hissing scream grating down his spine like fingernails on slate. He grabbed at the open door next to him and pulled it towards himself just in time for the skeleton to crash into it with a sound like a bag of antlers. Durham braced against the wall and kicked the door as hard as he could. It slammed shut with a hollow boom, knocking the skeleton in a backward stagger to hit the back of a couch and go tumbling over it. Durham scrambled to his feet and charged. He could see it struggling up on the other side of the couch. He dove headlong over the couch, bringing the mace down on its brown skull with his full flying weight behind it. The impact pulverized the back of the skull, slamming it down to the floor with a crunch. The skeleton’s bones instantly came apart, collapsing into an unruly loose pile which Durham promptly landed on, the air whooshing out of him, the bones breaking beneath him and poking into him.

  He rolled to the side, gasping for breath but still alive. Blood was trickling into his eyes from his forehead but the helmet seemed to have tak
en most of the hit and the cut was shallow. His head throbbed, however, and he didn’t expect that to go away any time soon. He dislodged a few pieces of broken rib from the front of his armor. They hadn’t pierced through but he anticipated a few bruises. Burning pain from his rear, however, told him that he hadn’t gotten quite so lucky with the broken teapot. He stood gingerly and felt around behind himself. He’d taken at least one fairly deep jab back there and his hand came away wet with blood.

  He stood for a minute, contemplating his medical options and came up mostly blank. He limped his way back to where he’d left his backpack, feeling the blood trickling down his leg. There were long linen strips in it, sopping wet but serviceable as bandages. He couldn’t think of a way to secure one in place however without wrapping it completely around himself which seemed like it would be both awkward and immobilizing. He retrieved a pair of iron spikes and a wooden mallet instead. He pulled his backpack into the room and closed the remnants of the door to the cave then used the mallet to pound the spike into a crack between the flagstones to secure the door shut. The mallet thumped loudly with each hit but not quite as piercingly as a metal hammer would have. He went back to the door that the skeleton had come through and repeated the process. He hadn’t got a look at what lay beyond the door yet but was pretty certain that he didn’t want to find out at the moment.

  With both doors spiked shut he went back to the couch and eyed the skeleton suspiciously. It gave no sign of movement. He remembered Thud telling him that the skull was all that had to be broken and he had certainly achieved that. Having made himself as safe as he could manage, he dropped his trousers, peeling and cutting them away from where they were sticking to the wound. It was time to do some creative bandaging.

  ᴥᴥᴥ

  Chickens are true creatures of zen-they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheer unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason.