CHAPTER 16

The last stone clicks into place. The puzzle took me longer that I thought it would. With some stones spinning in place, the others moving along the wall, and all the time guessing at the pattern I was supposed to be reconstructing, time dragged on until I glimpsed the solution.

I stare at the wall with the pattern remade, and the wall stares back at me with a huge yellow eye, painted almost all the way to the ceiling. In the center is an ink-black iris as big as my head. The central stone juts out a little, and, with not a little trepidation, I push it inside. It slides easily until something behind the wall clicks.

The stones begin to move, spinning and folding into each other and opening into a dark space. The passage is cramped, about as tall as my shoulder, and there isn’t a single light inside.

“You can step out,” I say. I put the torch down and pick up the reassuringly heavy hammer. Whatever is coming out of that darkness, I’m as ready for it as I could hope to be.

Nothing comes out of the passage. And then something does. I was expecting spindly spider legs, or glowing orbs of death, or maybe even something like the Digger. In fact, what happens is that a piece of darkness extends itself into the light, twisting like a snake on the floor until it comes fully into view. It’s…

A… blob?

“Hello, Malco,” it buzzes. A ripple courses through the inky surface of its body. Rue is dark as pitch and about as big as my hand. The unswollen one.

“Uh. Rue?”

“Yes, Malco?”

“Uh, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Malco.” Rue’s body bobs up and down in a polite curtsy. “Should we be getting out of here?”

“Right,” I say. “Soon, but not yet. I need to make sure we aren’t leaving anything useful behind. Just sit right there.”

I walk around Rue, keeping a cautious interval between us, and shine the torch into the open room. It’s much tighter than I imagined, and absent a ceiling. The sleek walls just continue upward, past the reach of my torch, until the darkness becomes too thick. That’s certainly one way to explain the long-rotted skeleton in the corner, far beyond help. It does look like it fell in from above, though. I decide to tentatively trust Rue.

“Did the body have any useful loot?”

“Archie,” Rue corrects me, “Had lots of stuff. That’s Archie’s ax.” Rue slithers into the room, snaking between my legs, and coalesces into a blob again before a tendril emerges from its body, pointing at a mound of rust with a handle sticking out of it. “You can see his nice armor, too. There used to be food, but the rats got to it.”

The armor in question, built solidly out of spikes, must once have been something a Godtouched would have been proud to wear. Now, it has joined the ax in the great rusty Beyond. Archie’s remains poke out of it, his bones broken, his jaw twisted out of shape. A darker spot under him speaks to the immense amount of blood he lost. The empty sockets are a solemn reminder of the danger I put myself in; how serious this game really is.

“Oh, and there’s the amulet.”

“Amulet?”

“Amulet,” Rue buzzes.

I bring the torch lower. There is an amulet. Golden, with an inlaid multi-faceted emerald, almost glowing among the bones. It’s the most delicate thing I’ve ever seen, and yet it doesn’t have a scratch after falling from a considerable height among a tangle of metal spikes. It’s probably worth as much as Reach, and also doesn’t seem to weigh a lot. I hesitate.

“Is it all right if I take it?” I ask Rue.

“I think Archie would have wanted you to have it,” Rue answers respectfully.

I shake my head. Strange little creature. But he – she? it? – is right. I need to get over things like grave-robbing if I’m going to survive this place.

Getting the amulet loose is a matter of dislodging a few fiddly bones, but in the end it comes off, an emerald in the middle of a beautifully carved pattern, dangling from a golden chain. Into the sack it goes.

“Ready to get out of here?” I ask Rue.

“Yes, Malco,” the little blob buzzes happily.

The blue light at the end of the larger room beckons, illuminating a large black door. It feels ominous yet somehow inviting, like a stranger’s house of a stormy night.

“Do you know what’s behind these doors, R—?” I turn to find Rue, his body extended, slowly snaking through the floor and vibrating all the while.

“No,” comes the answer. “I’ve heard people talking about it, but they never said what it was.”

“Wait, you heard people? What people?”

“Just people. Over the years,” Rue says, inching forward.

“You’ve spent years in that room?”

“Maybe? I asked people to help, but no one ever did answer. But it’s all right. At least I had Archie.”

Archie shoots him a broken smile. His only smile.

I reach my hand down to the ground and Rue regards it eyelessly, buzzing in a vaguely interrogatory tone.

“Come on,” I say. “If we’re getting out of here, I can’t have you following behind like that.”

With a happy hum, Rue snakes onto my hand, cold body pressing against my skin. The feeling is not one I’ve experienced before, like holding water that refuses to flow through my fingers. I place Rue on my shoulder, where the fabric of my shirt becomes a slight buffer against the strangeness.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Now,” I say. “The first door had a bunch of useful gear. Before we go into that black door, I want to see what’s behind this one, see if it’s something we can use. Is that all right?”

“Yes, Malco.”

With Rue this close to my ear, I realize that the humming doesn’t appear simply to shape words. It’s a constant thing, rising and falling, the blobby body in permanent activity as he… Wait, he?

“Rue, can I ask you something?” I ask tentatively.

“Yes, Malco.”

“Are you a boy? A girl?”

Rue stays silent for a while. The humming picks up, growing more intense and high-pitched, a buzz of quick internal activity. Rue is thinking.

Thinking really hard. I wonder if the species even differentiates, if they even reproduce, and how. This question doesn’t even make sense. They have no sexual organs, no—

“I’m a boy, Malco,” Rue says, interrupting my thoughts.

“Oh. You’re sure? You were thinking for a long time there.”

“I am sure,” he buzzes firmly. “I had to focus because it’s a background thing. Not a front-of-mind thing.”

What?

“Uh, all right. Works for me. Wanna try the room with me?”

With Rue buzzing happily and remains on my shoulder, which I take as an enthusiastic yes. After discarding my rope backpack so as not to risk all the useful gear it contains, I approach the door with some wariness. After giving the lock a once-over I press my hand against the surface, hoping that the trap, if there is one, doesn’t just drop a huge rock on me and call it a day.

To my surprise, this door swings open with the smallest push. I scramble to catch it before it can hit the far wall, and in doing so step into the room. A soft click, with Rue’s suddenly quicker hum for accompaniment, signals my mistake. I don’t think, don’t stop, but lean in and let myself fall forward. There’s whistle, a snap, and the torch is wrenched from my fingers. I let it go.

Mouth dry, heart pounding, I wait for a follow up. When Rue’s hum falls from alarm to his normal, contented vibrating I pop an eye open. This room is a small, dismal cube, illuminated only by the torch hissing and sputtering behind me. As I turn, I see that a bolt, short and sturdy, protrudes from the wooden handle. It split the torch where it hit, just below the fiery head.

“Ah,” Rue hums. “Bolts. Any extra holes in you, Malco?”

“Just the usual ones. You all right?”

“I’m all right, Malco,” Rue says, and then repeats, “You all right?” He seems very amused by the sentence.

I get up and check the trap in all its clumsy glory. It’s painfully simple, there’s nothing to it: a hole in wall in front of the door shoots a bolt at whoever steps on the loose flagstone at the entrance.

“You didn’t know it was bolts, did you?” I ask him.

“No, Malco. I would have told you if I knew. Sometimes I heard people say bolts, sometimes they said ‘ceiling blades!’ like they were really excited, sometimes they didn’t say anything at all. They gurgled a little and were silent.”

Silence descends.

“Malco?”

“Any other things they said that you can remember?” I ask carefully.

“Yes!” Rue’s hum picks up, goes up and down the scale like he’s looking for the correct tone, and then he blares: “What is that? What is that? Oh gods oh no I’m gonna die I’m gonna die oh gods why,” the hum becomes frantic, panicked, “oh mother oh no please please pl—"

“Got it, yes, thank you!”

Rue’s pulse-raising cacophony subsides until it’s nothing more than his his usual background hum.

“Did that help?”

“Very much. Now shush,” I say. “I need to concentrate.”

Enough fumbling, I think, closing my eyes. Remember Medrein’s words: this place was made to kill people. It’s not fair. It’s not elegant. Focus.

I breathe in and out, then shine the light around the room again, this time paying attention to every nook and cranny. The first thing that becomes apparent is a little alcove in the wall, like one where you would place a figure of a god or heroic figure. But instead of a god, I can see the contours of a wooden box. The loot I need? Aside from that, there is precious little to see, or so it seems until I carefully lay my head down on the ground. Details jump out: a few of the flagstones are raised a little in relation to the rest, seemingly at random. In line with each of those, there’s a discrete hole in one of the walls and at various heights. Not so random. As soon as you see it, the trap becomes less threatening. With a glance, I find a way across the unraised, safe flagstones that would get me to the box.

Time constraints would have me in and out the room and away to press forward. But if I’m to pass this challenge, to find Katha and Rev, I’ll need supplies. Supplies which, if I had a Godtouched’s simple, devious mind, I might place exclusively in the middle of heavily trapped rooms. Therefore: a box, and a heavily trapped room. I frown and look at the safe path I’d found. It will lead me past some of the holes in the wall, even if not directly on top of the raised flagstones.

A few possibilities present themselves. I could trust the pattern of the trap as its solution. It would be a simple, straightforward test, with a clear lesson: pay attention. It’s the sort of thing one would expect from an honest challenge.

I grin.

Ignoring the path, I lower myself to the ground, spreading my weight on the stones until I feel the one I’d pressed on click back up. Then I scoot forward like a worm, little, inch-large movements bringing me closer to the box.

As I expected, the flagstones move, raised and unraised ones, pressing down a little when I rest on them – though never to the point of clicking. I shake my head at the brain that devised this trap. A mental image of this person begins to form in my mind.

A direct test, I reason, would make this a Challenge, capital C. But the Godtouched trapmaker wouldn’t have been happy with a straightforward test followed by a reward, oh no. He would do the utmost for his trap to appear so, and then make a different, secondary test that punished you for coming to your earlier conclusions. The raised flagstones fulfill the same goal as the piece of string in the previous room: make you think you won before the game even starts. But unless every Challenger can think themselves into a complete bastard’s perspective like I can, I don’t see another solution to this trap that doesn’t involve losing an ally and learning from your mistakes.

Fortunately, I’m short on allies.

Despite the shifting and moving of stones, I manage to keep the trap from activating. I slide my way right in front of the alcove, which is a couple of feet above my head. I gingerly test the floor and find it safe enough to stand on.

The alcove is little more than a depression in the stone with a flat bottom. The box is as big as my palm, made of smooth, clear wood, unornamented. I reach for it, and then hesitate, before crouching back under the alcove, dislodging the bolt from my torch, and using to blindly drag the box from its resting place and into my waiting lap.

No trap activates. Nothing.

I shake the box a little. Something clacks inside. The locking mechanism is simple enough: it appears that all I must do is twitch a little metal piece aside and the box will swing open.

Yeah, right.

I stuff the box in my pocket and worm my way back to the entrance. Outside in the corridor, I place the box on the floor and, from a distance, use the sharp end of the bolt to press the metal opener. Like clockwork, a thin needle spears out of the box, right where my hand would be. It’s not very big, but I wager that it wouldn’t need to be. I know from experience with Dala’s lessons that some common poisons only need the slightest foothold inside a body to disable it. I don’t want to think of what uncommon poisons might be capable of. More disheartening is the fact that my earlier guess was right: Godtouched are bastards; paranoia is key to survive this place.

Inside the box, there are two black-on-white dice. I regard them suspiciously. All that trouble just for gambling implemens? I pick them up, shake them, and give them a throw. They clack inside the box and come up snake eyes.

Just my luck.

“Nice going, Malco,” Rue buzzes.

“You know what these are?”

“Yes. They’re dice. They make clickety-clack and then people get happy or sad, depending.”

Since nothing else happens, I stuff the dice in a pocket in my makeshift backpack. The box, seemingly more useful, goes into a different one, with the spiky pyramids.

“Right. Perfect. Let’s hope these turn out to be happy dice, then. Ready to get out of here, Rue?”

He buzzes a joyful, musical note that starts from my shoulder and reverberates through my body in a pleasant wave. We move on.