by K. J. Coble
“Guess you have the lead,” Strayden said from above and behind her.
She smirked over her shoulder at him. “Always.”
“Aye,” he growled without hesitation.
Asyra started down, the torch angled before her and her free hand going instinctively to the grip of the short sword sheathed at her hip. The Xyxian was hissing something to Stradyen she couldn’t make out over footfalls and echoes. The Vothan’s growl silenced whatever complaint it had been. Armor and gear creaked behind her. The shivering glare of more torches above brightened her descent.
At first, Asyra thought the walls to either side featureless. But as their descent continued, her eyes picked out faint details and she realized a dense, ages-old curtain of cobweb and filth had coated them. Torch light caught a flicker of something, a ruby glint behind this film. She slowed, paused, and switched the torch to her left hand, drew the sword with her right.
“What’s going on?” Strayden pressed.
“Ssh!”
Carefully, she dragged the point of her blade across the cobwebs, the steel parting their veil with hardly any effort. Dust puffed away. Webbing collapsed into clouds that settled upon her leathers. Beyond, the torch revealed the weird hieroglyphs of Xyxia’s common lettering—pre-modern to be certain, but not the hateful wizard scratchings she knew all too well.
“Pictures?” Strayden asked, leaning over her shoulder.
There were paintings between lines of script. Asyra saw the source of the ruby reflection, now, tiny jewels fixed into the imagery with great care. She couldn’t find it in herself to admire the craftsmanship, though. The jewels had been placed to represent the bulbous eyes of spider-like creatures, seething across the scene by the dozens. They glittering out at onlookers in clusters of eight, shimmers that seemed to see, left the flesh itching with their mute gaze. Human figures in archaic dress struggled across the illustration against these with strangely-bladed weapons and spears. Blood spewed in vivid crimson. They weren’t winning.
The source of the spidery tide seemed to be a structure looming in the background—a dome, backgrounded by pyramids.
Asyra’s breath froze in her chest.
“It’s a warning,” Xass Kham said from behind Strayden, reading over his shoulder.
Asyra looked up at him. “One we’re currently not heeding.”
“What the hells is the hold up?” Vidar’s voice echoed down the stairwell, made all three of them jump.
“Maybe we’re sight-seeing,” Strayden snarled back up at him, raw fear making it almost a roar. “Now, shut up!” An aggrieved, half-hearted apology echoed down to them. Strayden collected himself, still sweating, though now clearly not from exertion. He blinked once and looked at Asyra, said in a more controlled tone, “He’s right. Press on.”
Asyra resumed her descent down the stairs, which plunged deep into the earth. She marveled at the engineering, at the back-breaking work that must’ve been needed to delve so far. More, she wondered at the reason. The dusty dark cooled around them and the ceiling above became oppressive, a terrible, crushing presence that only grew in weight. It effected the Vothans, muting their usual grumbling and careless racket. Even the torches seemed to struggle, the further they went, guttering against darkness that, but for their intrusion, would be absolute.
It was a relief when the stairs ended and the way leveled into a short corridor. Asyra paused here, played her torchlight about, eyed walls, floor. More cobwebs sheathed the stonework, but these had fallen aside a bit here to provide a glimpse of more of the spider-infested scenes. She grimaced and stepped cautiously ahead, feeling the floor for instability. All she encountered was the dust, shifting under her soles.
The corridor ended at a t-section. Asyra reached it and held up her sword for Strayden and the others to pause. Sheathing the weapon, she leaned hesitantly out into the next passage, torch held ahead of her. Its quivering light illuminated a fresh corridor leading off to her right into the dark. She turned to the left, expecting similar, and instead found—
“Shit.”
Asyra nearly jumped from her skin. Only ten feet to the left, the passage ended in a wall taken up almost entirely by a huge face, carved from the stone.
“What?” Strayden rasped from behind her.
She swallowed once, chuckled at herself. She’d gotten soft in the espionage gig; her normal burglar’s cool was slipping. “It’s nothing,” she whispered back hoarsely. “Send the Xyxian up.”
The face had been fashioned with remarkable detail that even time hadn’t dimmed, Asyra saw as she held the torch out to the left and examined closer. The features stretched into what looked like a silent scream—or perhaps ferocious laughter—the craftsmanship so precise it picked out wrinkling flesh and squinting eyes. Those eyes shimmered as the huge gems affixed within the sockets caught her torchlight. Now we’re getting somewhere. But the main feature was the mouth, gaping wide, yet filled with shadow, despite the torch light.
“We have to keep moving,” Kham hissed as he sidled up beside her.
She turned to him and pointed around the corner. “Patah, I presume?”
The Xyxian blinked at her in confusion and then leaned out into the passage. Dusky features paled and he pulled back. “I...I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I thought you had knowledge,” Strayden said with a mocking edge, nudged him from behind. “Your destiny, and all that.”
“I know of a chamber beneath the Dome,” Kham snapped back at him. He met Asyra’s stare and her torchlight caught beads of sweat sprouting across his brow. “And I know what’s in it. My research told of none of the rest of this.” He shot a venomous glance over his shoulder at Strayden. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Research...” the Vothan grumbled.
“We must press on,” Kham insisted to Asyra.
She ground her teeth and turned to scan the corridor again. Unlike the walls before, these truly appeared featureless, only the howling face as adornment. Gingerly, she stepped into the hallway. The floor felt solid enough, but different somehow. She couldn’t describe it. Stepping fully into the space, she flexed her calves, her weight, tested the solidity again. Still nothing. She let it go as nerves and turned again to the face.
The eyes were a pair of the largest diamonds she’d ever seen, with just the faintest impurity to their facets, a hint of crimson that gave the illusion of an inner fire. She licked her lips, couldn’t help the surge of avarice that rushed up from her guts. Just one of those would make any problem she ever had go away. Her skin prickled. She had to fight off the urge to reach out and touch.
But she could see the obviousness of the set-up. Working one loose would require prying it out from the lovingly-carved eyelids, bulging in their mock fury. And she could only guess what that work might unleash in a place that’d already tried to kill them once.
“Gruzh’s sweaty beard,” Strayden swore softly from behind her.
She turned to him. He’d joined her in the corridor, was staring at the face. Behind him, Kham lingered by the intersection, but Durrak and Aelren had moved a few steps the other way, playing their torches about. They both looked back towards the face at their captain’s words. Both’s eyes shined as they beheld the jewels.
“Don’t touch it,” Asyra commanded. She crouched low, held the torch before the face’s gaping max. Still the light could barely pierce the darkness within it. A chute or pipe seemed to run into the wall from the carving, deep and out of sight. She raised her voice to be heard by the whole party. “Don’t anyone touch any part of it.”
“You can’t be serious,” Strayden began in protest. “Look at—”
“Like meat left out for the wolves, right?” she cut him off.
He opened his mouth to retort, but reddened with realization of her logic and clamped it back shut, growling behind pinched lips.
“We need to keep going,” Kham again insisted.
“There’s another door,�
�� Durrak called from further down the hall. He gestured that way with his torch. “Looks like it branches off.”
Asyra sprang back to her feet and moved by Strayden, Aelren, and the Xyxian, joined Durrak, adding her torchlight to his. He was right. The long hallway seemed to run ahead into a dead end, but another doorway opened off to the right before that. The layout didn’t seem to make sense. Why not just a turn in the hall? Why waste time building the corridor into a dead end? But the way seemed clear.
She stepped by Durrak, started down the hall.
A crack like stone splitting—or like blocks glued together by pressure and time popping loose—rippled through the corridor. The floor wobbled beneath Asyra and she flung out her arms to steady herself. Durrak slapped a hand on her shoulder, both help and to right himself. She looked at the Nuburran, could see her own surprise and rush of fear reflected in his eyes. Somewhere, far above them, something shuddered loose, something rushed and roared. The stonework around them thrummed with its approach, but it felt as though it came from all around.
“What the...?”
Asyra turned to see Aelren pivoting back to the carved face, now looking demonic with only scatters of torchlight illuminating it. Dust puffed from the mouth. Then, a trickle of sand began to pour from the curl of its lip, pooled like drool beneath it, by one of his boots. The trickle became a stream. The rushing sound grew in Asyra’s ears.
A scream lodged in her throat. “Get ba—”
Another crack shook the hall and the floor wobbled once more, this time shifting beneath her. Durrak went down, hit the floor with a huff of blown-out wind, dropped his torch. It fluttered for a moment, then began rolling.
Asyra experienced a moment of disorientation, her balance gone. A panicked slice of her mind screamed, cave in! But a look at her feet showed the real cause: the floor was tilting beneath them, sharply. Dust shaken loose purled by her ankles. She flung out a hand for stability and felt the wall sliding beneath her palm. A frantic look about confirmed what her other senses told her. Durrak’s torch kept rolling, down the rapidly-sharpening incline of the floor, rolling until it dropped out of sight, down some shadowed chute that yawned open as the trap tipped its victims towards doom.
The rush from above became a roar. The carved face belched a torrent of sand. It struck Aelren at the shins and knocked him halfway off his feet. He giggled for a moment at the ridiculousness of it. But mirth dissolved into a shout of concern to the others, and then a scramble of panic as the stuff kept coming, gushing over him.
Gushing down the floor that was rapidly tipping into a death-slide.
Asyra started to scramble back up the hall, even as the tilt sharpened, but the coat of fine dust on the floor served as a perfect lubricant, turned the stone under her feet as slippery as glass. She fell onto hands and knees, regained her feet in time for sand cascade down around her, slipped again. The air hazed with stirred dust, burned in her lungs. A glance up showed her Strayden and the others dragging themselves back to the first hall. But she had slid even further down, away from them.
Her torch fluttered and went out. She cast it aside, lurched for the wall to her left before she fell again. Grooves had been worked into the sides to facilitate the tilt of the floor-trap, some mechanism of great complexity she would’ve marveled at were she not about to become its next victim. She got her fingers into one of these, arrested her downward motion. Sand was pelting her, scouring her. She pulled herself up, got a grip with her other hand, pulled again. A quick look showed her the doorway to the second hall, just above her now.
All she had to do was climb.
With a howl, Durrak, who’d staggered halfway back the way they’d come, went down again and slid towards her like an avalanche. She saw the whites of his eyes, the terror, saw him fling his hands out in reflex. She tensed, clenching her grips as tightly as possible.
Durrak crashed into her hard enough to drive out a scream of pain. It went on as his massive weight dragged on her. For a moment he kept going, kept sliding as the sand torrented down into his face. His fingers clenched like iron bands around her left calf. Joints popped with the strain. She had an instant of white-lighting terror, wondered if the choice would be between dying or kicking him off to survive.
But his free hand shot out of the sand-flood, slapped onto the wall, and found a grip in one of the grooves. He emerged, wheezing from the torrent and pulled himself out enough to release her and grab on with both hands. That release felt like a rush of life, allowed Asyra breath again and freedom from the ripping pain of moments before. Sobbing for air, herself, she fumbled for and found another imperfection in the wall, gripped, and pulled herself up another body-length.
With a boom felt through stone, the descent of the floor ceased, left it at a forty-five-degree angle. The sand kept coming, pouring on into the dark chute below, on into a doom Asyra couldn’t bear to imagine, so close to it she’d been. She wondered how long it’d go on. More, she wondered how the mechanism’s designers had intended it be reset. Perhaps they hadn’t.
“You all right?” Strayden’s voice carried over the ongoing whoosh.
Asyra got a hand up to the entry to the hall and pulled. With a burst of energy and a blast of expelled breath, she hoisted herself over the edge and dangling for a moment, arms, shoulders, and chin over the top. She couldn’t go another inch, had to wait for the trembling in her muscles to stop and the fire in her lungs to cool.
“Asyra?” Strayden called. “Durrak?”
“Do we look all right?” the Nuburran shrieked from where he hung on the wall, just beginning to paw for a higher grip.
“Rope,” Asyra gasped as she dragged herself the last stretch over the top and into the corridor. A quick look that way showed her only darkness. Need another torch. But first— “Throw me some rope!”
A scuffle ensued at the other hall. Strayden reappeared and by the poor, fluttering light of his group’s torches, she saw him swinging loops of rope. With a grunt, he threw down the trapped corridor, but poor light and poorer balance made it a poor cast, the lengths of hemp uncoiling as they flew and clattering off the walls. Cursing, Strayden drew it back to him. Moments of hissing sand and Durrak’s labored breathing passed as the Vothan wound it again. He called out to her for readiness. At her nod of ascent, he threw again. This time, she caught.
“Now, just hold on at your end,” she called.
With a wheeze, Durrak slapped his hand over the edge of the hallway floor and pulled. Asyra knelt to offer him her hand but he shook his head, winced, and dragged himself the rest of the way. His dark features creased with pain and exhaustion as he sagged against a wall, skin whitened by a patina of dust. Runnels of sweat were already carving trails through it.
“I think...” he gasped. “I think I’m going to need a new vocation.”
Asyra chortled and clapped him on the shoulder. Leaving him to his recovery, she unshouldered her small backpack, undid its ties, and fished about inside. Metal clanked and she nodded to herself, withdrew a rag-wrapped packed. Unrolling it revealed her climbing tools; small hammer and iron pitons.
She looked at Durrak. “Torch?”
Still wheezing, he nodded and shifted his weight to untangle his own pack. He had to extricate himself from shield and axe to get at it, crushing weights that had nearly dragged him to his death. He picked an unlit brand from the flaps and tossed it to her. She wasted a few minutes, fumbling to light it with her own flints. With it smoking to life, she stood, gathering her tools into her belt and stepping back to the trapped hall.
“I’m coming to you,” she called back to the others.
“What?”
Asyra had to grin at Strayden’s squawk of confusion; he just wasn’t the most imaginative creature—none of them were. Looping the rope’s slack around her left shoulder, she clenched the torch in her teeth—prayed it didn’t burn down too fast—and with her right hand felt around the side, along the trapped corridor’s wall. The light was terrible, the a
ngle worse, but her fingertips found what she sought: a crease between the stone blocks that formed these halls.
She turned and cast part of the slack back to Durrak. “Hold on to that,” she mumbled around the torch in her teeth.
He growled something but complied, pulled it tight as he seemed to understand her intent.
Turning back into the hall, Asyra located the groove again, fished out a piton, jabbed it in between the slabs, and left it there to reach for the hammer. Aiming carefully, she struck it once, smiled as iron rang and the point sank in. Ping-ping-pong, she hammered it the rest of the way home, checked it, and unshouldered the loop of rope, draped it over the eyelet at the end of the iron. Taking the torch from her mouth so she’d be clear, she called out, “Draw it tight!”
“I get what you’re doing, lady,” Strayden grumped back. But he did it.
She looked at Durrak. “You’re good? I’m doing this.”
He nodded back, still too winded to bother speaking.
Tugging on the rope one more time to test the strength of the piton—and her human anchors on either side—she clenched the torch in her teeth again and swung out into the hall. Dangling from the rope tensed horizontally before her, she put her feet up for extra balance and side-scuttled to her right, past the piton, until the rope began to bow out without an anchor. At this point, she halted and pulled out another piton, found a crease, and repeated the process of bashing it home. Testing the grip and the tightness of the rope, she moved on.
With the sand continuing its endless hiss down the chute below her, she spider-walked her way back to the others, leaving an almost literal strand of web behind her. After the first couple anchors, she moved quickly, with building confidence. By the time she reached the other hall and Strayden, she was almost casual and could nearly forget how close they’d come to disaster.