When I dropped inside the apartment building, the pain in my leg flared. Not too badly, thank fortitude. Still, I sucked in my breath--and the interior of the air tasted faintly mineral. When I tentatively sniffed, I noticed a hint of ammonia. I guess I’d been expecting the stink of rot and decay, but obviously after centuries there wasn’t much left.
I paused there, my hatchets in my hands. The skystones of the street glowed faintly behind me, and some of that light seeped in through the windows. But not much. And after I stepped around a fallen wall, the rooms inside turned pitch black.
“You have five eyes?” I asked.
So I focused on my webtouch. And sure enough, I felt the walls to either side, the rubble at my feet. I took a few steps, keeping my senses receptive. Yeah. I could do this. I was Daredevil. I saw without seeing, I felt my surroundings like--
“Ow!” I blurted, when I stubbed my toe on a chunk of broken floor.
Well, not ‘stubbed.’ I hadn’t felt any pain through my boots, I’d just been surprised.
I snorted in amusement and took another few steps, trying to focus and relax at the same time. I sort of knew what she meant: that a passive alertness would serve me best. I’d already learned to use my webtouch, but mostly to detect large objects or fast motions. I wasn’t good at picking out subtle changes or the fine details, such as the trash on the floor of a pitch-black room.
I stepped, I focused, I relaxed. I almost wet myself when I walked into a dangling strand of dusty cobwebs. I didn’t, though, because I’m tough as nails. I relaxed, stepped, focused ... and detected a pile of insect-eaten wood that must’ve once been a table and chairs. I focused, and pinpointed a snarl of decayed fabric and clumped fur shoved beneath some tiles. A nest of those big-eyed ratlizards.
When I took another step, a dozen of them fled into a hole in the wall and chittered at me, stinking of ammonia.
“You stay there,” I told them. “And we’ll get along just fine.”
They chittered.
I continued onward, moving slowly and awkwardly in the dark, and eventually found a crumbling stone stairway that led upward for five steps before ending at a wall of rubble. So I searched for another way higher, and even turned to smoke to waft into nooks and crannies.
I found nothing.
Until I felt a tingling.
Treasure: A jade figurine with daevonci sigils.
My webtouch didn’t give me many details, but I rummaged around for a minute, then salvaged a figurine from a pile of trash. It was about the size of my thumb, and felt vaguely fish-like. I shifted it into my domain and headed back to the front window, only walking into two more cobwebs on the way.
I stepped onto the street where Tansy, Wren, and Usim waited. “No luck,” I said, rubbing the ache from my side.
“Not for you,” Tansy told me. “But the kid has an idea.”
“Not an idea,” Usim said, “so much as a question. Like, the Old City sunk super-slowly, right? Just a foot at a time. So for years and years people still came to the sinking bits. They came scavenging for stuff, or living here, or whatever. Which means they had reliable paths that led higher.”
“Makes sense to me,” I said, looking to Wren and Tansy for confirmation. “But how does that help us now?”
Usim scratched one of his orange horns. “Well, they would’ve come here the longest for the most valuable, hard-to-move stuff. Like, even after monsters started spawning, they would’ve kept a path open as long as possible for the good stuff. Driven by greed, I mean. So we need to find the location of the good stuff, and from there maybe we’ll find a way upward.”
“Oh. That makes sense. What counts as ‘good stuff’?”
Tansy grinned. “Diamonds and beads.”
“Those aren’t hard to move,” Usim told her.
“All the easily portable valuables would’ve been taken early,” Wren explained. “Survivors would’ve emptied the vaults. We should look for areas with high-quality metal scrap.”
“So, like ... blacksmith’s shops?” I asked.
“Breweries,” Usim said.
“Huh?” Wren said.
“The traguld brew liquor, or distill it I guess, in metal stills, and in the old days they used gold pipes. It’s non-reactive, and was considered worthless back then, so ...”
“So we look for breweries,” Tansy said.
Wren grunted. “First we look for the traguld quarter.”
“What does a traguld quarter look like?” I asked.
“Lower houses, narrower doors,” Usim told me.
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Where are you from?” Wren asked me. “That you don’t know that.”
“An island without many traguld,” I said. “One of the Mericas.”
She grunted again and started off through the underground city. Though with so many buildings collapsed and streets blocked, the ‘city’ was more like dozens of tunnel-streets branching in various unpredictable directions. Still, Wren seemed to think she could find Traguldtown. We passed a mile of sweating, sweet-smelling mushrooms before we diverted around a rocky avalanche where a roof had caved in. We froze at the sight of another wraith Pit, except it turned out to be a now-dry well. Er, maybe dry or maybe the hole opened into a lower level of the Old City.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
We didn’t poke around to find out, despite Tansy’s enthusiasm.
After an hour, we started to see skinny buildings with narrow windows and uneven walls. They looked knobby and angular. Or ... almost faceted.
“What are traguld?” I asked.
“Little folk,” Tansy told me. “Weak but smart. They forget nothing they don’t want to forget. Some of them know entire libraries of information.”
“They’re the best,” Usim said.
She elbowed him gently. “You’re kind of like a traguld, yourself.”
“One of my great great grandparents was traguld.”
“On his father’s side,” Wren said. “And that’s probably not true anyway.”
“Infenti can reproduce with traguld?” I asked. “I thought they spawned from rock or something?”
“Infenti can reproduce with anything,” Tansy told me. “Don’t leave one alone with your favorite longsword or you’ll find yourself raising a whole generation of butter knives.”
Usim made a face at her. “Traguld believe they’re descended from gemstones.”
“Like gems? Gems like ... gems?”
“Gemstones. Like rubies and emerald. Or maybe quartz. I think I mean quartz, but that’s more of a myth than a real belief.”
“Okay.” I glanced at the dimly-glowing walls of a faceted building. “So, uh, where do gems come from anyway?”
All three of them stopped and looked at me like they couldn’t believe I’d just asked that.
“What?” I said, backtracking quickly. “I mean, I know where they usually come from. Hell, I’ve got one. I’m gemmed, I’m mister gifted. I just mean, uh, where else do they come from? Like, do they come from anywhere else? Other than, y’know, the obvious?”
“Hoo boy,” Tansy said.
Wren just snorted and scanned the street ahead, where a mound of stone from a fallen building lay across the cobblestones. The debris formed a lumpy ramp that angled upward at a low angle, and almost reached the ceiling.
“Okay,” Usim said, hanging back to talk to me. “So normally, purple beads--the super-expensive ones--are combined to make a gem.”
I tried not to gape at him. How come none of the wagon servants had mentioned that when we’d talked about beads? You just collected enough money and you created a magical gem? It was that easy? You packed cash together, and done. Though that was a lot of cash, the equivalent of a million loaves of bread or something.
“Yeah, like ten or twelve of them?” I said, instead of gaping.
“Or twenty or thirty.” He rubbed his orange nose as we followed Wren up the rocky, uneven ramp to get a better view of our surroundings. “You can’t tell how many you need until a gem is formed. But sure, that’s where most gems come from. Or they’re, uh, harvested when the original gifted is killed. Then the gems, um, find new people to bond with.”
“Yeah, the killers.”
“Or anyone who’s there when the gifted dies, right. Often that’s family and friends, or members of the same squadron or team. Though usually they melt if someone tries to extract them. I mean, the gems melt, not the friends! They sort of fade away, but sometimes they remain and a new person becomes gifted. Or if they’re already gifted, they might become double gifted. Or triple or whatever.”
That rang a bell. “Except every time you take another gem, you run the risk that all your gems will break.”
“Correct,” he said. “It’s a coin-toss if your first one takes, too.”
As I thought about “100% chance of implementation,” I peered at the vine-packed ceiling, which was now only five or six feet overhead. That high on the ramp, I realized they weren’t vines, they were roots. Extremely vine-y roots. They were red-barked in the dim glow of the whitestone walls, and slick with moisture.
INTUIT: Dungeon rhizome also known as creeping rootstalk. Technically edible, if things turn pear-shaped. Not, like, literally pear-shaped. Metaphorically pear-shaped.
Okay, then. That was completely normal.
“So those are the obvious ways,” Usim continued, giving me the Dummies Guide to Gem Bonding. “More rarely, some powerful monsters are gemmed. So people take gems from them. It’s not common, but it happens all the time.”
I stopped thinking about the stupid messages in my head and gave him a look: what did that mean? No common but happens all the time.
He ignored my look. “Or even less frequently, a city spire occasionally grows a gem, or not grows exactly but ... grows. Like a crystal fruit. And rarest of all, that I’ve read, gems sometimes generate spontaneously inside someone.”
“That never happens,” Wren told him, glancing down at us from higher on the ramp, her red skin and pointed horns looking black in the dim light.
“That’s not what Father says.”
“Who do you believe about gems? Me, who has one, or him, who doesn’t?”
“Him,” Usim said. “He reads.”
“Ha!” Tansy said, from lower down.
Wren tsked. “I read!”
“You read military reports.”
“Yeah, and they’ve never mentioned any convincing evidence of spontaneous genera--” She raised her hand for us to stop. “Ssh!”
Usim froze and I stepped in front of him then also froze. Behind me and lower on the ramp, Tansy spun to face behind us, which surprised me. Like, clearly whatever had spooked Wren was in front of us, but Tansy didn’t even peek in that direction. She spun and prepared for us get hit from behind. It was so out of character that I just knew that Hollis must’ve trained her so thoroughly that it had become second nature.
When Wren gestured to me, I crept to crouch beside her. The gentle upward incline of the ramp ended five feet in front of us, where a slope led more sharply down ten or fifteen feet to a wooden walkway. Like a narrow boardwalk that stretched to the left and right, following the outside lip of the valley. Because that’s what spread out in front of us. Maybe a valley or maybe a crater, because it was roughly circular.
Fifteen or twenty crude stone huts stood in a crude ring at the lowest point of the valley, and a few dozen kobolds were among them. Five or six were grinding chunks of material on a flat stone beside a trickling stream. Another group was pounding leather or hide. Others were dragging a carcass toward a firepit with burning embers and low flames. A handful were just lounging around watching as four or five little ones chased each other near a pile of bones.
When I looked more closely, I spotted a bunch of odd-looking boulders in a rough circle around the village: sentries.
So I caught Wren’s eye, then jerked my head in the direction we’d come from and looked quizzical. Like, should we retreat?
She gestured with one clawed finger to our right.
The rough plank walkway curved around the edge of the crater ... then joined with what looked like the steeple of an ancient church. It was a pointy narrow tower, mostly destroyed. Split almost exactly in half lengthwise, which made most of the interior visible from our side. The edges facing us curled inward slightly, blocking small sections to either side, but I saw the important part clearly: broken segments of a spiral staircase rose upward toward what looked like a hole in the ceiling.
A hole in the ceiling. The path upward?
“Sweet garigrass,” Tansy whispered behind us. “That’s the lighthouse! An old watchtower, split down the middle, they call it the lighthouse. I’ve heard stories about that. It’s the way out.”
Wren and I shared a relieved look: finally. Finally an exit. Finally a path to safety. Well, for us, at least. For me and Tansy and Usim. Not for Wren, though, considering she planned to surrender to the viceroy when she reached the surface. But she didn’t care about herself, she only cared about Usim.
So yeah, we shared a relieved look for about two seconds before she remembered that she hated me. Which made me grin. I mean, I hated her, too, for being a violent prick who’d invaded an innocent island, but it was nothing personal.
I ignored her, and leaned close enough to Wren to whisper into her ear: “What order?”
“Me first,” she whispered back. “I’m lighter than you. Then Usim. Then you, and the ollie last.”
I figured that a commander knew more about that kind of thing than I did, so I just pointed behind myself at Usim, then crooked my finger. When he slipped beside me, he gasped at the sight of the kobold crater. I murmured an explanation. He nodded while still staring in wide-eyed alarm or fascination at the village.
We moved slowly. Three minutes passed before Wren even set foot on the walkway. She took a step, watching the nearest kobold sentries. There was no motion from the boulder-looking monsters, no reaction.
She took another step, then gestures. Usim joined her. They moved onward. After another minute, all four of us were creeping toward the bisected tower--the lighthouse. Our feet scuffed quietly on the planks, but no louder than the trickle of the stream. The air smelled of woodsmoke and roasting meat, and my mouth watered. A dozen well-cooked kebabs were waiting for me in my domain, but the scent still made me want to join the little rock-heads for a hot meal and some campfire songs.
Wren glided silently forward. Usim moved slightly less-silently forward. I moved fairly quietly forward, and Tansy did her best. Not that noise mattered that much. In addition to the babbling stream there was the noise of kobolds growling and yipping to each other, and the scrape-scrape-scrape of them at the grindstone.
None of them noticed us as we snuck halfway to the lighthouse.
Or so I thought.
Then, in a single moment, three kobolds rose from concealment just downslope of us. My webtouch twanged wildly as they yanked one cords connecting to struts beneath the planks we were standing on. The walkway unhinged from the rock wall and we tumbled downhill toward the village.