Scourge Thirty-Nine - Salt

“I feel like I should be wearing a fedora,” I say. “Like, a wide-brimmed one.”

“What are you talking about?” Esme asks with a glance over her shoulder. She’s holding up one of the lamps, not that she should need it, with the miner’s helmet sitting pretty on her head.

“Ah, nevermind,” I say. I turn my head back and glance up to the ceiling. I’m still not used to the weight of the helmet, or the way it pulls my hair sometimes. The darkness above recedes, though not by much. The lights on our helmets aren’t much better than small candles.

Esme and Bianca both had oil lanterns, though the amount of oil we found for them in the little shed isn’t much. Split both ways and we might have enough light from those to last us a few hours.

“Wait,” Esme says.

I stop, and so do the others, there’s a scuffle as our feet shift on the stone floor. I tsk, and the monsters accompanying us stop as well. The wolfpack numbers six in all. Not the strongest, but they have good eyes, better ears, and incredible noses. I’m hoping that they’ll cover the senses that my friends and I lack.

“What is it?” Felix whispers over to Esme.

The tunnel isn’t a place for loud voices.

Esme points to a wall, and I finally notice a section of it which is polished and smooth. There’s a set of words written into it, but I don’t recognize any of the letters. “Instructions,” Esme says.

“To find the vault?” I ask.

“And to avoid the traps on the way there,” she confirms.

“Wait, traps?” Felix asks. “I wasn’t told about traps.”

“Of course there are traps,” Esme says, as if it should be obvious. “This is a vault. It’s a secure location, but we can’t always keep it safe.”

“You could guard it,” I say.

Esme shakes her head. “The libraries are guarded, and they all have the same information as the vaults do. More, even, since they’re updated more often. But vaults are kept safe because no one knows where they are, and because they have traps, so if someone does stumble onto one... well.”

I nod. It makes sense, I guess.

“What does the sign say?” Bianca asks.

Esme adjusts her glasses and squints at the sign. “Uh. We need to take the next passage to the right. There’s a trap, but if we stay in the middle path, we’ll be fine. I think that means we need to walk down the middle of the corridor.”

“You think,” I say.

“Yes,” Esme replies.

I whistle, and then gesture the wolves ahead of us. If there’s a trap, they can put their paws in it first.

We continue on into the old mineshaft, past abandoned wheelbarrows and other mining equipment that’s been left to rot. Then, finally, we find a passage running off to the right. It looks like just another mineshaft, though I can tell that the dust on the ground here’s been disturbed a little.

I imagine that the rest of the tunnel is all normal mine stuff. Just a maze for anyone to get lost in.

We start down the tunnel, all of us keeping to the middle with the wolves at our head until the wolves start to growl.

The sound is spooky, a deep resonating tone that echoes and reinforces itself as it carries through the passage. We soon see what’s got them so riled up.

The corridor ends in a pit, though it’s a pit with a stone bridge down the middle, just wide enough that two of us could walk down it shoulder-to-shoulder.

Along both sides were holes that dropped down a good three metres, with evenly-spaced spikes at the bottom. Some of those were occupied by still-moving bodies.

“Zombies?” Felix asks as she drops to one knee next to the pit. She takes off her hat and lowers it into the hole to better illuminate the bottom. There’s no mistaking the not-quite-dead things down there. The green-tinted skin, the bored eyes, and the big gaping wounds that haven’t killed them are all sure signs.

“I count seven,” Bianca says. “Maybe more. There are a few body parts that might be extras.”

“Hey, Esme, are there supposed to be undead in here?” I ask.

“No,” Esme says. “Look, on the sides. The floors are down. They triggered the pitfall traps.”

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She’s right, there are two shutter doors on the sides that I imagine can be lifted up to look just like the normal floor. I’m guessing they’re weight-activated to let go and drop anyone standing on them into the spikes below.

“Altum uses undead,” Bianca says. “I’m aware that it’s stating the obvious, but it’s very possible that this is a sign that some of his people have been here.”

“We should move on,” Esme says with a bit more urgency.

We walk down the middle path, with zombies on either side of us moaning and growling at our passing. My wolf-friends growl right back. Once we’re away from the first trap, we arrive at a T-junction. There’s another sign on the wall right in front of us.

“Left. But let me go first, I’ll show you where to step.” Esme says.

We go left and find more undead, or the remains of them. The room is a mess of rotting body parts scattered across the ground, a lot of them run-through by what look like spring-loaded spikes coming from the floor.

Esme tsks. “They just forced their way through this one,” she says. Lowering her lamp, she points to the floor which is covered in coloured tiles. “All the green ones are traps, some of the red too, some of the blue, none of the black.”

“Not many black tiles,” Felix says.

“So you’ll have to trust me,” Esme says, “and only step where I step.”

It takes some doing, but I convince the wolves to follow me very closely as I do what Esme does. Each and every tile has a hole in its middle, and I can’t help but feel nervous whenever I cross over one. But Esme knows what she’s doing, and we make it across without getting skewered.

There’s another plaque waiting for us. “This next segment’s just a maze. But don’t worry, I know how to get us through.”

Esme’s indignant huff when we reach the corridor almost sets me to giggling. There’s a long length of rope with a stone holding it in place in the middle of the corridor. It leads into a tight passage with offshoots on either end, and eventually turns into one of those.

“That’s cheating,” she mutters before stomping after the cord. There are equations and numbers written above every new entrance in the maze, but we just follow the rope on the ground. Some of the side-passages obviously hide other traps, and some of those have gone off, at least judging by the undead bodies within them.

“I’m guessing they just kept sending more dead through the maze with the rope, and eventually one of them got lucky,” Felix says.

“That seems like it’s exactly what they did,” Esme says. She’s clearly not pleased.

After five minutes of navigating the twists and turns of the maze, only pausing for Esme to double check every passage we take, we arrive at the end of it, and onto the vault door.

In my mind, I was expecting a huge doorway, maybe all covered in gears and pistons and other elaborate machinery.

What we find instead is a big metal door, but not a terribly impressive one. It’s also flat on its face on the ground, the hinges and lock looking like they were cut through. “Water magic,” Bianca says. “Very strong water magic, to cut through metal like that.”

“Yeah,” Esme mutters unhappily. She stomps over the door and into the vault with a clang of angry feet. “No more traps girls. Semper wouldn’t have those in the vaults themselves.”

I step up behind her and stretch my head back. There are huge racks of books and boxes, rows and rows of them, with what must be thousands of books and files all neatly held within. The rows continue on into the darkness where our feeble lights can’t reach.

“Wow,” I say.

The wolves start growling again.

“Were you sure about the no-traps thing?” Felix asks. I see her starting to take a stance with her staff, and I prepare myself for a fight as well, magic and repressed emotions kindling my core.

“Not traps left by Archivists,” Esme says. She glares into the dark, and I start to notice eyes glaring back. “But Altum? Yeah, he seems like enough of a jerk to leave something behind to greet the first Archivists who return.”

Zombies and ghouls and other nasties start to crawl out of the dark.

“Guess it’s a good thing I brought the doggies after all.”

***