CHAPTER 29

This passage doesn’t curve or bend like the others, but shoots straight like a bolt to a narrow flight of stairs. That’s where I find the rope. It’s only a small length, and it’s still twisted and knotted in places. Makeshift handcuffs.

“Hilde?” I call up the steps. There’s light at the top, blue and serene.

“Maybe she was eaten,” Rue buzzes, sliding up the curve of my neck and onto my shoulder again. “It’s very common, being eaten.”

“There’s the rope.”

“Why didn’t you go down to level three, Malco?”

“I said I wanted to find Hilde—”

“I thought you wanted to find your sister and your friend.”

“I… I can find all of them, all right? There’s the rope for proof,” I say, kicking the handcuffs.

“If you say so, Malco.”

I don’t answer.

The steps lead to an antechamber. Between me and the exit there’s a pool of water with a walkway running through it. The water flows in from a spout, and from the pool streams the steady blue light. There are globules in the depths, like tiny blue stars scattered across the depths of the pool.

The whole room feels like a special sort of trap. Different enough that I can’t make ends or tails of it, except I doubt bolts will shoot out of the walls if I stand on the wrong bit of ground. The question seems to be: do I want to walk, or do I want to swim?

I dip the rope in the water, which results in nothing but wet rope. After mulling it over, I touch the wet end with the tip of a finger, but again, nothing happens. I dip my hand – the hurt one – in the water and get a moist hand back.

Indecision mounting, I step on the walkway and determinately walk across it, daring traps to spring. The walkway is as narrow as a plank of wood, but it doesn’t test your balance as much as it tests your ability to put one foot in front of the other until you reach the end. Nothing happens.

The passage opens up into a second room. This one is dominated by a large oval table. Four people are sitting around it, I realize with a start, lit by candles and slumped back in their chairs or fallen forward onto the table. They’re skeletal, long dead. And between them I see Hilde.

She’s lying on the center of the table, eyes open wide. Her guard is standing to attention on one side of the room, dagger clutched in a white knuckled grip. I rush to her side, wary of the dagger, but they’re both unresponsive, staring blankly. Before I can haul her off the table I notice something spinning in the air right above her eyes. A sapphire.

I look at Hilde and I look at the stone. Biting my tongue and ignoring Rue’s satisfied buzzing, I climb on top of the table, reach for the blue gem.

There is a little cough.

I jump, grabbing a goblet off the table and bringing my arm back.

It’s the guard boy. He’s looking at me with a curious, easy glance, no longer stiff. The opposite, in fact, as comfortable in his clothes as I’ve ever seen anyone be. His muscled arms cross and he smiles.

“I wouldn’t,” he says, with a meaningful nod to the stone. I glance at it, but don’t move. The goblet stays up, which seems to amuse him.

“Finally someone else makes it here,” he says. “I was beginning to fear my experiment was going to be an utter failure, and then you wasted all that time admiring my pool.” He shakes his head. “You’re the suspicious type, aren’t you? That might be what got you so far.

“What did you do to her?” I ask.

“They tried, you see,” he gestures to Hilde with the dagger. “But not well enough.”

“What did you to her?” I repeat, raising the goblet up.

The boy raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to brain someone with that? I don’t think a gold cup will do much more than bend. What’s more,” he adds, touching his own chest. “This strapping young lad isn’t to blame. He failed the test too, poor thing.”

“You’re not him, are you?” the boy, older than me, looks far too much at ease. “Who are you?”

“Perceptive!” the boy says, and bows. “Lysander. A pleasure to meet you. I have to say, I’m so glad that our little infiltrate made it this far, Malco. Anyone that causes Valkas embarrassment has a special place in my heart.”

“Valkas? You work for him?”

The boy rolls his eyes and puffs, offended. “Heavens, no. Have you met him? Uptight prick that he is, he’s just lucky that he’s been here since the beginning. Did you know it was he who came up with the whole Black Sword idiocy? No, Malco, I’m as anti Valkas as can be and happy in that position.”

“Careful,” I say, with a bite to my words that I can’t help. Now that the boy doesn’t seem to be about to attack, I’m embarrassed at having been caught reaching for the stone instead of helping Hilde. “They might hear you.”

Lysander smiles a thin, condescending smile.

“I wouldn’t worry, Malco. They’re watching something far more spectacular. Something that’s supposed to signal the dungeon’s endgame.” He stops, and the boy seems lost, his eyes vacant. But a moment later the spark returns and Lysander focuses on me again. “But we have time still. Even if they were watching…”

Lysander shrugs, apparently unconcerned about how the most powerful Godtouched in the surrounding lands would respond to such an insult.

A strange feeling down my arm, like liquid running. It’s Rue, moving between my skin and my sleeve, intent. He escapes at the wrist, flopping onto the floor, and makes a beeline for Lysander. I move to grab him, but Rue has never been this agitated; no longer a funny blob but a liquid snake, twisting on the ground and roping itself around the boy’s boot. He buzzes incomprehensibly, making strange and meaningless noises.

With a puzzled smile on his face, Lysander lifts the boot to give Rue a better look. He doesn’t look remotely worried about being attacked by a slime.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“A funny little pet you found,” he says, a question dangling in his tone. “But where did you…?”

“You’re not really here, are you?

“No,” Lysander answers without hesitation. “I’m not. But I’m connected to this room, and had this ingenious idea to… Well, that would be revealing too much.” He flashes another bright and unconcerned smile. “We should move on to your riddle. Really, it’s best if I just leave you to it.”

Whatever Lysander is, it abandons the boy’s body in the next second. He’s left slumped and slumbering, dagger held in lax fingers. Rue disentangles himself from his boot, looking confused.

“I am Mother Rat,” says a voice behind me.

I nearly bite my tongue off before slowly turning to face the source.

It’s one of the dead. The bones click and clack as the skeleton sits upright, focusing two empty eyeholes on me. “Skinwalker and shapechanger, terror of the Red Harbor.”

“I am Duzin, King in the Deep,” intones the one to its left, making me jump again. This one is squat like a dwarf, and wisps of beard still cling to the ruin of his face. “Waker of ancients, digger of secrets.”

“I am Grun,” says the third skeleton. This one is larger, the bones thicker, the skull shaped slightly different from a human’s. “Warmaster. Hordeleader. Kingdombreaker.”

“I am Obrein, Lord of Shadows,” says the final skeleton. I startle at the name. Obrein, the dark lord the Black Sword Guild fought and defeated? “Lord of Death.”

Silence returns to the room. This time it comes to stay.

“Is this it?” I ask aloud. “What kind of riddle is this?”

No answer. Frustrated, I look down at Rue. He looks uncomfortable. Ashamed.

“I don’t know what happened,” he buzzes. “I just felt so… Hungry, suddenly, as if the kid had become the most appetizing thing in the world. And then I went back to normal. What do you think it means?”

“Sorry,” I say with a shrug. “One riddle at a time.”

“Yes. All right,” Rue says. “Any ideas about that one?”

I shake my head. Even the question is nebulous at best.

Jumping down from the table, I walk around the room to take in its contents. The skeletons, the table, the candles… They give nothing up. There’s a discrete side door, but it’s locked tight. The skeletons feel like the thing to focus on. What had they said? Terror of Red Harbor, waker of ancients, warmaster, lord of death. Clear as mud.

I’ve heard of Dark lord Obrein, the Undying King, or course. Everyone has. Before the Godtouched, he was the big man in charge. People speak openly about his reign of horror: the killings, the abominations, the necromancy. His sigil would glow bright on flags ahead of his army and shine emblazoned on the coats of his agents; everyone in Red Harbor and surrounding land lived under his rule until the Black Sword took matters into their own hands.

But the rest… I focus on those skeletons. The big boned one wears thick plated armor, too heavy by far. A skull has been painted in red at the front. The warmaster. Could he have been… Obrein’s warmaster? He had armies, after all, vast legions made up of walking corpses, monsters, human servants, orcs…

Oh.

That’s what Grun is, I realize. A long-dead orc. So we have an orc, a dwarf… Obrein was human, I think.

I move on to the one called Mother Rat followed by four pairs of eye sockets. The skeleton is lithe and unadorned except by a mantle made of many skins and furs threaded together. The furs mesh and combine to make a chessboard of patterns and textures, colors and sizes, and envelop the skeleton completely. The skeleton inside looks removed, timid, even, unaccustomed to such brazen and direct observation. The corpse could have belonged to a human, an elf, or some of the varied races I’d spotted in Black Sword City, just living their lives.

Orc, elf, dwarf, human…

I huff, frustrated, leaning on the table. Hilde’s body rock a little.

“Why did you climb up there?” I mutter to myself.

A second later I’ve jumped onto the table and am looking at each skeleton from above. Their skulls follow me the whole way. They look like four people with pressing and private business who gathered to see it resolved. And now a madman has jumped onto their table and interrupted negotiations.

Rue has also made his way atop the table and wanders among the candles and cups.

I pull Hilde off the table with a little less grace than she deserves, but find that there’s nothing under her. Well, she failed the test, didn’t she? Why would climbing on the table feel like the right path to an answer, then?

Under the table there’s nothing more than dead legs, wooden or skeletal.

“He looks just like Archie,” Rue hums.

“Who does?”

“This one.” He means Obrein. “He’s in better shape, though. Shame about the eyes.”

“I don’t think he had eyes,” I say. “He was famous for being one of the few post-humous kings, and that usually takes a toll on the organs.”

“Not that,” Rue buzzes, annoyed. “I know how corpses work. I mean the scars. They look magic.”

Fumbling under the table, trying to check if there’s anything written on the underside of the wood, I’m in the middle of muttering that I wish magic would strike me down when a thought occurs to me.

“What about the hit to the chest?”

Obrein had been impaled to his throne. That had been the whole point of the Black Sword Guild taking over: they’d gotten rid of the previous ruler in the most obvious, public way, right in the Dark Lord’s throne room with his own sword through the chest. Valkas had been the man to do it.

“What hit to the chest?” asks Rue.

I scramble from under the table, banging my head on the underside in the process. Obrein is wearing a rich tunic in garish colors, completely pristine and without a single mark or nick. The eyeholes, however, just like Rue said, seem in worse condition than you’d expect from even a walking, talking, reigning corpse. Black scars in the shape of lightning depart from the right eyehole and spread through a quarter of the skull. When I stand in front of it, looking through the hole, I can see blue filtering in from the other side. It strikes me that it’s at this height that Hilde would have observed Obrein.

“His skull was obliterated by magic,” I say.

“Yes,” Rue buzzes. “That’s what I said.”

“But don’t you see? That changes the story. Valkas didn’t kill him with a sword, he was… Magicked.”

I turn. Mother Rat is staring at me through lifeless sockets.

Terror of Red Harbor, I think, Black Sword City was Red Harbor before the Guild took over. So she was an enemy of theirs?

I yank the skin mantle open and find a mesh of scars etched deep into the bone. Years of battles, of being wounded, of having those wounds reform and leave behind signs of their passing. But no single distinctive wound. There was no Mother Rat that I remembered from stories, but there was a Rat King. Old Garram used to tell the story to scare the little kiddies. It ended when Valkas, riding into the Rat King’s catacombs on a black stallion, decapitated him with a single swoop of his blade. I’d always wondered how he’d managed to get a horse into a catacomb.

Mother Rat’s skull is firmly set upon her neck.

The next skeleton, the dwarf’s, was clearly pummeled to death. I couldn’t tell if before or after death, but I did know no one could survive with their skull caved in like that. Or if they did survive, it wouldn’t be a good life.

The orc bears as many cuts and nicks as Mother Rat, but a single wound speaks louder than the rest: a perfectly round hole on the side of his big, bulky armor, which melted a little around it. If a sword did this, it wouldn’t have been black, but glowing red from the heat it produced.

I sit down on the table. The skeletons remain impassive, unresponsive, dignified.

“Hum,” I say out loud. “None of these people were killed by a sword. Well, maybe Mother Rat, who knows, but she wasn’t decapitated. And no one else. Definitely not Obrein.” I stop and frown. “In fact, how would you kill a walking skeleton with a sword? Not the most practical of weapons when you consider—”

“Very good, Challenger,” says the boy. He’s moving again, possessed of Lysander’s easy smile. “You have showed your cunning and your ability to look past the obvious. But you have yet to utter the essential. What do you see?”

“Obrein—”

“Challenger,” Lysander interrupts. His voice is deep, clipped with a certain terseness. “To pass this test you must see beyond a single corpse. Tell me what these bodies tell you.

There’s only one story the group of skeletons can tell. It’s a dangerous story to utter here, in this place of all places. Lysander, hiding behind the boy’s face, seems eager. He leans forward, waiting for my answer.

“The legend of the Black Sword Guild is a lie,” I say.

Lysander’s smile grows into a dangerous display of teeth.

“Challenger,” he says. “You have passed the test.”

With a flash of his hand, a blue object trails through the air. I catch it, its cold hardness pressed against my hand. It’s a sapphire, large as a robin’s egg.