CHAPTER 15

I’m not walking anymore. I’m falling. Or floating. I’m struck by the curious feeling of having to push past a stuck door; I feel resistance, a stretching as two forces battle each other, pushing and pulling me in opposite directions. It forces my eyes shut. And then the bubble bursts, the door gives in, I tumble into the other side…

I fall on flagstones and roll to a stop against a stone wall. All of the pain I can feel seems to be centered around a fiery core in my left hand. I clench my jaw and pound the ground with my right, fighting past it. I don’t have time, I tell myself. Rev and Katha don’t know I’m coming. They won’t wait. I have to move.

The air in the arena was filled with the sounds of excitement, with the smell of hundreds packed together and cheering, then with the panicked movements of escape. It’s eerie how quiet it is now. I crack my eyes open and find this new place is a dank and humid room. There are wooden doors along its walls, closed tight. Between them, at regular intervals, torches cast a flickering light. I wonder who lit these torches. At the very end of the room, there’s a black door, and a mysterious blue light issuing from a pedestal to its side.

Standing on wobbly legs, I hear my ragged breathing echo in the room. Behind me, there’s nothing. A bare wall. The portal winked out.

I’m alone. Alone and undecided. I realize that I have no weapons. Where did everyone go?

I feel a spot of wetness on my side and touch my pocket with a sudden feeling of dread. But no, the vial is intact, and clearly more resilient that I expected it to be. The wetness is running from my hand. A stitch has come loose.

I need to get moving. Even a hasty decision is better than no decision at all. The torches come loose, which is a blessing. If nothing else, it’s a long piece of wood on fire. I’m sure that if I whack something with it, it will at least smart.

Well, something my-sized, that is. I shine the torch into the shadows in the room with trepidation. Who knows what sort of monsters the Godtouched put here?

But the room is empty and placid. Nothing moves in the cool half-light, though… I turn my head. There’s a sound I can’t quite place. A low vibration, the strum of a lute, only monotonous and continuous. It’s coming from the wall to my right. I place my ear against the cold and humid stone: something is humming on the other side. A mechanism of some kind?

I slowly walk away from the wall before steadying myself. Ignoring the hum, I try instead the first of the two doors to the left. It resists my push, but it doesn’t seem locked. More like it has rusty hinges, or maybe something is propped up on the other side. I push harder, straining, and slowly, with a thin grinding sound, it opens up a crack. I stop to look inside, and see a table laden with shapes. By torchlight and from the thin gap between jamb and door, I can’t really tell what they are, but I think I see a hammer. Weapons?

“All right,” I whisper to myself. “Off to a good start.”

I lean back for a final, powerful push, and then notice something odd. There’s a thin string connecting the door to the wall. It’s pulled taut. It will certainly snap off if I push the door hard enough. I hold back.

Don’t trust them! Medrein’s words echo in my mind. Could this be a trap already? But then… I look at the piece of string on the verge of snapping. It’s right above my head. What sort of trap might it activate? Will it drop a heavy rock on me? The ceiling looks safe enough. Cut me in half? I guess it could, but I can see nowhere a blade could swing from. Immolate me? I frown. I suppose magic can do anything, but could such a powerful spell be held back by string?

I take a step back. Grabbing my torch as far away from the flame as I can, I lean forward and place it under the string.

The flames lick along the door and blacken the wood before I can get it in place. It doesn’t take a moment before it burns through. Whisps of cordage float away like lightning bugs, but nothing else changes. There isn’t a shuffle nor a whisper. Rocks, blades, and magic fire all fail to materialize. I uncoil. I realize I’m holding my breath.

Paranoid. The eerie silence and Medrein have got me afraid of my own shadow. The worst is I’ve wasted enough precious time. I have to think of Katha and Rev.

The next push breaks through the resisting hinges. The door opens enough that I’m confident I can shimmy through and for the torch to reveal more shapes on the table. I identify a hammer, a length of rope, the half-hidden blade of a knife, and a number of small sacks.

I go in sideways, good arm in front holding the torch, mangled rleft hand back behind me. I feel a little resistance, but for once my small frame proves advantageous. I step into the room.

The first thing I notice is that the room is much larger than it seemed. Downwards, that is. Because right in front of the door, cut at an angle so that it can’t be spotted from the outside, there is a pit. I hold the torch up and see the hole for what it is: sharp, jagged poles stick out from the darkness, eager for a body to fall inside.

The door hinges aren’t rusty at all, I realize in a daze. They’ve been hammered out of shape, so that the door requires hard pushes to open. Half the room is a reward, half a pit, invisible from the outside. And the string… I look up and find that it’s just a string, stuck to the wall with some resinous substance.

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I ponder what would have happened if I’d decided to give the door an extra push and feel my mouth dry out. It’s pure luck that I didn’t die after opening a single door.

The items on the table beckon. I set myself to the task of looking them over. Indeed, there’s a hammer, and thick metal spikes besides. The length of rope is sturdy and well made. There’s a long wooden stick leaning against a wall, a woodsman’s knife on the table. A shield is resting on the floor. The sacks are four in number, and though they all contain the same things – dried meat and a full waterskin –, each sack contains an extra, special item. One holds three rolls of bandages and an assortment of dried herbs. Another a little bag with pointy metal pyramids that prick my fingers when I hold them. A third a small blank book and a nub of charcoal. The last one contains a length of reinforced wood, heavy in my hand. I turn it over and realize one end has been filled with lead. A hit from this would do more than just smart.

I display the items on the table. Arranged like so, they seem like a strange puzzle. Why four bags? Are more people expected to pass this way? And if so, wouldn’t the Godtouched assume the first of us would take all the more useful items from each? Will I be hurting someone else’s chances by doing so?

That line of enquiry isn’t very helpful, however. I need to make decisions. The only thing I know for sure is that I won’t be able to carry everything with me, not with my hand in its present condition.

I tie the four sacks together with the rope, making a sort of multi-pocket backpack I can carry around my neck with minimum fuss. I divide the food among two of them, and stash one of the waterskins along with it. In the third sack I put the bandages and the herbs, which I recognize for their healing properties. In the fourth, I put the knife, the hammer, the iron spikes, the club, and the little sharp hook-like pyramids. I have an inkling of what those are for. I decide to leave the long piece of wood, three waterskins, the shield, and the booklet.

Even then, when I lift my makeshift backpack, I nearly keel over. The thought of having to dodge a trap while carrying all this gear crosses my mind, and I sigh and start over.

Later, much lighter, I look at the items I’m leaving behind. Most of the iron spikes, the club, and a third of the rations have joined the other items. Enough for someone else to gear up if they need to, I think, in order to make myself feel better.

When I leave the room, stepping quickly around the pit, there is a shuffling noise. I start, but the corridor is empty. Still, I crouch and hold.

Silence. Then…

“Hello?”

My heart nearly jumps out of my mouth. I have to bite my tongue to stop from crying out. There is no one in the room.

“W-who’s there?” I stammer.

“You could have said hello, you know?” The voice sounds accusatory, vaguely male, but also strange in a way I have never heard before, monotone and distorted.

“What do you want?”

They think on this for a long time.

“Out of here,” the answer comes eventually.

“I mean, what do you want from me?”

“Hum… out of here?”

The sounds are coming from the humming wall. In fact, I realize with a little trepidation, the sounds are the hum in the wall, which shifts, rises and falls to build sounds and words. What sort of trap is this? What’s the deception, where’s the switch?

“What do I have to do with that?” I ask, to gain time.

“Don’t… don’t be mean.”

What?

“Would you like to be left in a dank room for… for… for a really long time?” the voice demands, buzzing with a childish twang.

“But how do I know I can trust you?” I prod.

“Because I’m very trustworthy,” they reply.

The conversation feels for all the world like arguing with a snot-nosed kid, but that just makes me grow warier as I imagine the unholy abominations that could be hiding behind that voice, trying to lull me into security. At the same time, the glimpse of opportunity propels me forward: if this is an amiable dungeon denizen, maybe they have important information that they might be willing to share.

“All right, well, the fact is that I don’t know how to get you out of there,” I say. “You’re behind a wall.”

“Archie said it’s a puzzle,” the voice buzzes back.

“Who’s Archie?”

“My friend,” they answer guardedly, like it’s something they don’t like admitting to.

A friend. Right. But as I think it, I’m already looking at the wall with renewed attention. A puzzle? When I have an inkling of what to look for, finding it becomes trivial. A few of the stones have patterns on them, colors disparate from the grey of their surroundings.

“Can I ask your friend to speak to me?”

“Of course!”

“Hum…” I struggle, tracing my fingers along a painted bit of stone. “Archie, are you there?”

I try pressing the rock down, but it won’t budge. Except… Yes! The stone turns on a hidden axis. I look at the rest of them. If they all move… Just rebuild the pattern. Easy. It’s then that I notice that, beyond the ever-present hum, there was no answer to my question.

“Archie?”

Silence. I take a step back from the wall, hefting the torch in my hand. Did doing that activate the trap?

“Isn’t Archie going to answer?”

“Oh, he can’t,” the same voice says, chirpy.

“Why not?”

“He’s dead,” they answer, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Dead,” I say carefully.

“I… Uh…” the voice hesitates like a child caught stealing sweets who now has to come up with a convincing story as for why the jar is smashed on the floor and their mouth is stained and sticky.

“Look,” the voice buzzes urgently. “It’s not my fault. He was the one that fell. And he nearly dropped on my head, too. I’m not sure if he was dead before that happened, but he’s dead now.”

Sure. Why not. I pinch the bridge of my nose, thinking, trying to come up with a solution where I come out on top, but I can’t even press my fingers together properly without a stab of pain in my arm. It all depends on what’s hiding behind the wall and whether I can handle it in a fight, which, given the state of my hand, seems unlikely.

“Are you going to let me out?” the voice asks in a quieter hum. It sounds fearful.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“You can’t make the sounds.”

“Funny name.”

There is a pause. It carries an amount of contempt that I wouldn’t think possible for silence to communicate.

“You know, it’s not nice to make fun of people’s names.”

“You’re right,” I say. “We’ll try again. I’m Malco.”

“You can call me… Ugh, Rue, I suppose. Your kind can manage Rue, can’t you?”

“My kind?”

“Walks on two legs, has two more above to swing around and a big ball on top. That’s you, no? Archie is like that.”

“You mean you’re not like that?”

A thin, fluttering hum, rising and falling quickly. I realize Rue is laughing.

“No! I’m normal.”

“All right,” I say. “I’m going to get you out. Don’t try to eat me.”

As I start moving the stones on the wall, the hum beyond it rises in joy. I reason that this can’t be a monster trying to lure me into its lair to eat my innards. If it were, and these were its normal methods, it would have starved to death years ago.

The argument doesn’t completely satisfy because, then again, I am trying to get it out. Maybe I’m just the most gullible idiot to ever visit the Challenge.

Guess we’ll see.