CHAPTER 20

Beyond the moving room there is a narrow corridor illuminated by a azure light. It streams in through an opening at the end of the corridor, smooth and even. Between that and the weak light of the moving room, we have no trouble seeing each other while we wait for Rue. Wanting to be useful, the brave little blob volunteered to scout ahead.

“So you know what this is?” I ask Hilde.

“Yeah,” she says. She’s looking at the walls with a mix of wonder and practical curiosity. “I’ve heard them described. Elevators, they call them. Rooms that go up, down, sideways. Dwarven marvels of old. But this is the first one I’ve seen.” When she turns to me, I see the hint of tears in her eyes. “They’re beautiful.”

I glance at the rather dull boxy room. The voice has kept silent since our ascent, but no amount of chirpiness could make this seem much more interesting than a well-lit cupboard.

“And why won’t it work?”

Hilde shrugs. “With these things, who knows? Maybe whatever was powering it died down. Or was deactivated. Or maybe it’s one use. Or we have to wait. Or maybe we’re supposed to find more power for it. There are vaults full of mysterious things like this at the Holy Order’s headquarters.”

“And the thing that powers it is…”

“Search me. And how did Godtouched get it to work? Bastards.”

I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose. I still feel queasy from the trip in the elevator, and knowing I was so close to Rev make grit my teeth in frustration. I decide to switch subjects.

“Did you get bitten? I think those things might have been venomous.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Hilde says. “Dwarves are resistant to that sort of thing. Comes with being around toxic fumes a lot. And, uh… You bloodied your nose when you pinched it just now.”

I curse and wipe my face with my sleeve. Unfortunate that I can’t also wipe the worry from Hilde’s face. The stiches in my hand aren’t enough to hold the wounds closed anymore.

“Nothing I can do about it now,” I shrug.

“You could use the herbs.”

“They wouldn’t help,” I say. “They’re only good for recent wounds, to reknit flesh. This has been like this for a while, and I think the bone is broken, so…”

“You’re a little flushed.”

“It’s the running.”

Hilde cocks an eyebrow and crosses her arms.

“Did you get that when you killed the monster in your floor?”

“No,” I say bluntly. “This was before.”

“Right. Before. And that down below? Do you know Reva?”

“You know Rev?”

She shrugs.

“She introduced herself last night. She was asking about a girl, a…” a look of comprehension dawns on her face. “Oh. Same girl? Are you both…?”

“She’s my sister.”

Hilde’s suspended eyebrow rises closer to the messy bush of her long hair.

“So why aren’t you together?”

“I… uh…”

She cracks a smile. Her teeth are a perfect pearly white. They show up against her beard and bruises like the sun from behind dark clouds.

“I get it. You infiltrated the Challenge, didn’t you? That’s why you’re not wearing this stupid uniform.” She points down at her own attire with a little laugh. “They sat there’s always one. I was prepared to do the same if they didn’t take me, but it turns out they take everyone.”

“Well, with my hand…”

“Your hand? There’s stories of them going around abducting street urchins off the street. I think they would have taken you if you’d showed up with a hole in your chest.”

Hilde shakes her head, but then her smile dims.

“But people who just jump in… They don’t take too kindly to that, from what I hear. Because they tend to carry weapons in and such.” She eyes me suspiciously. “Did you do that? Is that how you managed to kill the monster?”

“I didn’t bring a thing,” I protest. It hadn’t even occurred to me that punishment might be waiting outside the dungeon. “All of this I found inside.” I pat the pockets in my backpack and hear something unexpected tinkle. I pull out the little red vial. It’s amazing that it’s survived this far.

But they’ll see I didn’t use it, right? Right?

“Are they watching us right now?” I ask.

“I would make for poor sport if they weren’t, don’t you think?” Hilde asks. “I don’t exactly know how, but apparently some Mages can see things from a distance and project that for audiences.

Crap. I remember Rev telling me they wouldn’t accept me on account of my hand. ‘They want a show’, she said. Somehow, it’s hard for me to imagine that for a Godtouched watching a cripple die impaled on a stick could be anything short of amusing.

A little ripple of sound interrupts us. It’s Rue, slithering back in from the rooms beyond. Well, slithering is the wrong term. Rue moves at something between a shuffle and a slide. He shifts like liquid given body.

“Any slimes?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what a slime looks like.”

“Hum. Like…” I hesitated. “You?”

The little dark shape of Rue’s body remains perfectly still while he thinks about my words. His silence speaks volumes.

“There’s no one like me in there,” he finally says. “It’s just furniture.”

“Furniture?”

“Yeah. Tables and armors and that.”

“I… you mean armoires?”

Rue bobs up and down in a blobby shrug and then slithers back the way he came, leading us.

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“Malco,” Hilde tugs on my sleeve with a little urgency. “I have been meaning to ask: you understand this Rue thing?”

I furrow my brow.

“He’s not a thing, he’s—”

“Yes, yes,” she hisses. “But you understand him?”

“Of course I do.”

“Because I don’t,” Hilde finishes.

“What do you mean you don’t—"

Before I can finish, I’m brought back to my meeting with The Digger. How did Rev describe the sounds it made? However it was, they weren’t intelligible to her. Like it was speaking in a different language.

“I think it might be related to a Gift,” I say slowly. “It’s the only explanation.”

“Strange Gift,” she mutters. “I hope that’s what it is.”

She doesn’t expand on her cryptic meaning, and instead walks ahead after Rue.

It would be a strange Gift.

Some say Gifts are remnants from better days, when levels abounded and everyone had an Archetype. Some say they’re intimations from the gods, leading people down certain paths. People like Rev, whose Gift shines every time she picks up a weapon, take that notion to heart. But Gifts are so varied that the most likely outcome is that they never get to shine through. Dala used to tell me the story of someone from her village who discovered at eighty-two he had a Gift for playing the bagpipes. And what of desert-dwellers who were Gifted to become the best crab-hunters of a generation?

Of all the things to be good at, talking to a blob had to be mine. But it would be better than never knowing.

The hallway separating the moving room and the next one is quite long. From here, all we can see is a bright rectangle at the end. We walk along cautiously, watching for any holes in the walls and making sure to prod the more suspicious-looking flagstones. But there is nothing. Nothing until I begin to see bits and pieces of wood strewn about the corridor.

The rectangle opens up into a large cubic room. It’s lit from all around, with the floor, walls and ceiling glowing with a purplish sheen. This corridor ends about halfway up the wall, with a sheer drop to the floor. As we approach to look down, a chair flies past. It seems to be a theme.

Broken furniture floats everywhere in the room, turning slowly in the air. There are tables, chairs, beds, armoires and anything else that would be used to stuff a wealthy house, but they’re all bent and cracked, swirling in place and making it hard to see into the room.

As we gawp, following the gently trailing trappings, a person floats by just inches in front of us. It’s very clearly a Challenger dressed in the Black Sword uniform, a boy with long hair, his eyes alight with the same purple light as the floor and walls. He’s very clearly dead. If the eyes weren’t clue enough, the bruises all over his face and the blood drifting alongside him might be.

Hilde covers her mouth. The body flies by, bumps into a table, and is hidden by the jumble of furniture.

But others come slowly into view, all bearing the same marks. A whole group of four died here. How did it happen? What’s the trap?

“Is this dwarven too?” I ask. “Do you know what it is?”

“No,” Hilde answers firmly.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because it serves no purpose,” she says. “Whatever this is, it wouldn’t connect levels in a mountain city nor would it bring dwarves up from the depths of the mines. Dwarves make. Godtouched kill.”

Fair enough.

“I’m thinking we don’t want to touch the floor,” I say. “There’s another corridor on the other side. If we can ride the furniture all the way there…”

“And you think those guys didn’t think of that? That they just held hands and stepped together into the room?”

“Well, if you have another idea…”

“I have an idea,” Rue says suddenly.

He extends one of his tendrils. The wispy, liquid darkness slides into the room with ease. As soon as it passes the doorway, there’s a shimmer in the air. Rue’s tendril begins to glow a light purple.

“It feels light,” he buzzes. “Floaty.”

“So it’s the not those tiles that make you float?” Hilde asks.

“No,” I say. “It’s the room. But that makes it easier. We just… Fly over to the corridor and…”

As we watch the masses floating through the room, the cluster of furniture the body touched disassembles into a loose mass. A chair twirls very gracefully until it finally touches one of the walls. The stone it touches suddenly flares up, and with a burst of light sends the chair cannonballing through the room, hitting everything in its way with tremendous force. Other bits of furniture are dislodged and hit the walls themselves, sending the room into a frenzy. Just like that, the peaceful, floaty room becomes a murderous whirlwind.

We see one of the bodies careening through the air at high speed and smash against one half of a long table with a sickening crack. Bits and pieces of furniture fly out into the corridor, forcing us to cover our heads and step back.

It takes a while for the din of broken wood to diminish, for the calm to return. However, now that we know what to look for, the activity never truly ceases.

We all look at each other. Or me and Hilde do, and Rue seems to direct his eyeless attention to us.

“Fine,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I’ll go.”

I let Hilde undo the knots that I used to tie the rope into a backpack. We leave the knots around the leather sacks with our supplies, and then tie a loop of rope around each of our waists. At least that was something we knew the other group hadn’t done. Maybe it would be the answer.

“All right,” I say. “The most important thing is not to touch the walls. Just like you’re playing the floor is nails, right?

“You mean lava,” Hilde says.

“I don’t know what that is. Just imagine the floor and the walls are nails, and if you touch them, you lose.

“Right. The floor is lava.”

“Hilde, focus. Be ready to pull me in if something goes wrong. And let’s be quick. I don’t want to be here when another piece of furniture touches the walls.”

I approach the edge of the room and take a deep breath before extending a hand inside. It’s… Hmm. It’s like… Like not being tied to the earth anymore.

Curiosity overtakes caution. I take a step, then let myself fall forward.

The room feels like being underwater, but somehow lighter. It’s easier to move here than outside. Quicker. And of course, I don’t walk into the room. I lean in, push, and then…

I’m flying. Or swimming through the air. I grab a bench for balance and to steady myself. My legs give a slight push and I spin through the air until I’m looking at Hilde upside down. Perched on her shoulder, Rue looks just like himself from any direction.

“Your eyes,” Hilde says. “They’re purple.”

A grin plasters itself on my face.

“You have to try this.”

Hilde hesitates before hopping in, not too far behind so as not to draw the rope taut and inadvertently throw one of us in a random direction. Immediately I see what she means when her eyes also light up.

“Oh, blasted…” Hilde spins around, tangling herself on the rope until I catch her by the foot. Rue has roped himself around her arm and doesn’t look about to let go.

“Steady. Grab hold of something heavier than yourself. It stops you moving.”

“It’s not the moving I’m worried about,” Hilde says through clenched teeth. “It’s all this damn spinning. And stop squeezing so tight!” she snaps at Rue.

I turn her the right way up and pull her down to the bench.

“Don’t fight it so hard,” I say. “We’re good. It’s not even that dangerous. The room is huge, and if we stick to the middle we’ll be fine.”

To demonstrate, I gently push off it and float to a large armoire missing a door.

A sudden sting of pain on my cheek makes me wince. My fingers come back with spots of blood. I look around, and another spot of hurt sprouts on the back of my hand. There’s a thin speck of wood sticking up from it, a little bigger than a splinter. Just as I watch, another bit of wood, courses through the air, smacks against my hand, and careens off into the room. Only then do I notice that all over the room little flares on the floor, ceiling and walls are ceaseless. They mark the places where small bits of broken furniture touch the walls. The big pieces cause huge, visible sparks of light, but the small ones only give off a little burst before being blasted through the room, which means a ceaseless swarm of wood splinters zipping through at high speeds.

Hilde drifts up beside me and holds on to the armoire with a death grip. Her nose is bleeding from a cut.

“Keep your eyes almost closed,” I say, pointing out the splinters to her. “The last thing we need is to go blind in here.”

As much as I enjoy the feeling of drifting, it become painfully obvious that staying in the room isn’t an option. The splinters pile up, and just the speed of the blunter bits is enough to hurt. We drift across it, pushing against the heaviest bits of furniture we can find and upsetting the contents of the room the very least we can.

Hilde is the first to drift into the opposite passageway. She passes the boundary of the room, stumbles, and nearly falls. I can see the relief that courses across her face as soon as she finds herself on hard ground.

“All right,” she says. “Now just hold on and I’ll pull you in.”

I let go of the wooden throne I was holding and let myself be pulled. I’m looking around the room, drifting peacefully, when I see it.

“Hilde, wait,” I say. “There’s another…”

I bump against something soft. I turn, and see the bruised, beaten face of a goblin wearing the Black Sword uniform. The green of his skin is now mostly red. His purple eyes are glassy and dead. In my scramble to get away from the body I ignore Hilde’s warning. The body hits the wall, which immediately flashes purple and bright.

The goblin’s remains are thrown so hard against a bed that they break. Blood coats the walls of the room before being thrown back in a flurry of flashes, painting the furniture red. And then the bed, a large, slow, ponderous beast, gives the wall the barest of touches.

The room explodes into rage. I curl into a ball and mercifully manage to miss the bigger items. Hilde’s desperate heaving on the rope takes me away from the trajectory of a spinning dinner plate and into the corridor where I stumble and fall. Hilde jumps on top of me, covering both our heads as the world dissolves into noise.