CHAPTER 32

We recover the torch from its precarious position atop a piece of rubble, incandescent end pointing up and illuminating a bubble of dust around itself. I’m wondering if these torches really last forever, with no need for rags or fuel, and even if I were to take the handle away it would keep blazing merrily.

Distractions I can’t afford.

Every step is taken carefully and silently. It doesn’t escape our attention that there are no corpses left on the ground, but we don’t know if that means the flying creature is back or if there is something else on the loose here.

At the base, we hesitate. The pillars make for ideal markers, but to go down we need to find stairs or a place where the debris from above broke through the ceiling. That will take us to the second floor, where Hilde thinks she can direct us to the passage down to the first floor, where we’ll find the Golden Door and hopefully Rev.

The slimes have grown already. The apple-sized ones have met with their neighbors and joined together, and most of the ones we run into are the size of full waterskins. Waterskins. Left behind on the fourth floor. My throat is painfully dry.

The slimes follow us a while, pointlessly, losing distance with every step until they’re too far to sense us and they abandon the chase. There are always others further ahead, prodding nooks and corners for food or other slimes.

Hilde finds a little grotto created when a single wide platform fell against one of the outside walls, creating a slanted cave that nothing has yet come to occupy. We agree to a breather, shallow as it must be. The dust is still everywhere, but in our makeshift hovel we have at least the illusion of safety from above, from the flying snake we sometimes hear, or think we hear, flapping leathery wings above us.

Sitting down, I check my hand. The bleeding has stopped, thankfully, but all the dust and grime spells a new infection, which I’m afraid will just pick up where the last one left off. Already I’m feeling sluggish and overwarm, but how much of that is the dusty cavern and how much of it is rot making its way inside me I can’t tell. I dab at the blood and cover the wound as best I can with the cleanest fabric I can find, which isn’t saying much.

I yawn, wondering when was the last time I slept, how long has it been since I passed through the portal. Hilde picks up on it. Not long after, she speaks up:

“You, hum… You think your sister will be happy to see you? I mean— that’s stupid, of course she will. Just, you know. Given the circumstances?” she gestures to herself.

“Yeah. You don’t need to worry. I’ll talk to her and she’ll help us with Essa and the rest.”

Hilde nods slowly.

“You two get along?”

“We’re friendly,” I say, shrugging. “We always led very different lives. Reva is a people person. Always out of the house, always getting into trouble, always coming out unscathed.”

“And you’re not like that?”

“I used to. But then Katha came along, and everyone hated her. The kids my age were the worst. So when I became friends with her they started picking on me too, and that was that for my social life.”

Hilde nods thoughtfully. She has a length of fabric tied around the lower part of her face to keep the dust out, which makes remarkably little difference when it comes to figuring out her expressions.

“Katha was the girl you were searching for,” she says. Not a question. “You keep asking people for the blonde girl. Any luck?”

I shake my head. Katha’s absence from the dungeon is a conundrum I haven’t solved yet.

“Rev didn’t see her. And if you were all together before the Challenge there was no way she would have missed her. There was no way anyone would have missed her, whether they knew her or not.”

“Pretty, is she?”

I hesitate. How to describe Katha to someone who’s never seen her?

“Not exactly. I mean, I think she’s beautiful,” I flounder. “But not pretty. If you know what I mean.”

“She’s distinctive,” Hilde says, nodding. “Gimlets in her eyes, displacing the air when she moves, you always know where she is in a crowd just from the way she moves.”

“Yes. Yes! Hilde, that’s… How did you…?”

“There was a young dwarf,” she says with a little smile. “He was quiet, reserved, even distant, but of such intensity… He played the harp so beautifully the smiths would stop their hammering to catch the echoes.”

For a moment she seems lost in contemplation, upturning a little inside pocket in the great and ancient coat of memory. Then she smiles again.

“But that was a long time ago, before I joined the Order.”

“He’s not…?”

“Here?” Hilde shakes her head. “No, no. Last I knew he was still back home. Married now, I think.”

“Oh.”

We return to a silence bathed in Rue’s humming and gaze at the persistent torch. The slapping of wings outside, momentary and slight, brings us out of our bought time and into the present. We eye each other in similar nervousness, and then the wings flap again, a string of movement growing distant, disappearing. Hilde sighs.

“We need a plan, Malco,” she says. “We can’t just wander around outside dodging slimes and this thing and gods know what else.”

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“I know,” I say. “I’m thinking.”

And coming up empty.

There’s no doubt there are passages that lead to the underside. Archie the cadaver fell down one. Wyl, as I understood it, made use of them, and maybe that’s how she escaped the destruction. But the landscape we’re in now is very different from the one that stood in its place less than an hour ago. Rooms were turned inside out, their furniture smashed to bits, the layout is only discernible by a broken and faint ringed shape, a road leading to itself. The ring, where I first saw Wyl, in the exact place where I would later rescue Hilde from Essa’s punishment…

“I think there might be a way,” I say. “It’s risky.”

*

Just finding the place we want takes us the better part of another hour of moving silently and freezing at any hint of sound. Searching for the moving room chute, we come across more destruction, more bodies. Some I recognize as the faces standing at attention when Essa issued commands. Another one, a tall, slim, handsome boy, I remember seeing in the line up outside the portal. And one is Dako. He wasn’t crushed, but bitten and left fallen with eyes vacant and all three arms reaching towards a large boulder. Would I find Verra if I searched under it? I force myself to go on, to ignore Wyl’s words of blame.

We waste more time going around the remains of a trap that intermittently spews fire onto the path we’re taking. Everything is ruins, everywhere is destruction. The horizon is nothing but broken stone rising in mountains, obscuring more devastation.

But finally, we arrive. The chute stands only half as high as the Silver Door pillar, its edges like broken teeth. As soon as it’s in sight, Hilde runs forward, ignoring my calls and curses. Climbing over a piece of rubble, she looks around herself, and then into the chute.

“It’s not destroyed,” she says, smiling down at me in relief. “The elevator is all right. The platform is down there, just the rocks are blocking it. Gods, but I’m relieved. Can you imagine losing this piece of dwarven engineering to—"

“Can you tell the direction of the pit room?” I interrupt quickly.

Hilde points immediately. “That’s the ring, so the pit must be between us and it.”

It’s bad news. The floor there is littered with an especially thick mass of fallen boulders, cracked masonry, tons and tons of hard rock.

I walk around and over it, taking care to test for support before I step. I can use my hand a little, as long as I don’t try to grasp anything, but the pain leads me to trust my feet to push me up the incline. At the top, holding the torch aloft, I shine light down into each crevasse, searching for a passage, an opportunity. Instead, I find a boot print in the dust.

My own?

But it isn’t. The ridges are wrong, the size too. I pass the torch in a wide arc, and find more prints, different among themselves. The feet are turned in all directions, tracing a strange and incomprehensible track of the rubble until I manage to piece it together.

“They were here,” I say out loud. “Essa’s people. Probably searching for the same thing we are.”

“And did they find it?” Hilde asks from below.

I can’t tell. Either they did or they didn’t and moved on. They had more people and could explore each crevasse, eventually selecting the one that went deepest.

“Rue,” I say. “Think you can go down a few of these?”

He buzzes affirmatively, flowing down my arm and onto the debris and from there slithering into the cracks and passages. After watching him disappear I go back to my own search. Hilde joins me a moment later.

We each find passages that extend down a little. We go down them, resting our hands on the walls and our feet on unsteady ground. Each time a broken wall threatens to crumble further we stop, breath caught in our chests, and wait until the structure proves it won’t suddenly cascade down onto our heads. As luck would have it, we don’t die crushed, and no boulder tumbles down to trap us in the darkness, but we also fail to find a suitable way down.

We retreat finally, gasping for water, sitting down defeated and demoralized.

A buzz. Rue has settled at the top of particularly large bit of debris and is signaling. We rush up, tripping, to where he’s waiting. Rue confirms he’s found a path. Emanating triumph, he leads the way by making himself thin as a garden snake and disappearing inside a crack as wide as my wrist.

“Rue,” I sigh. “We can’t fit there.”

His response comes late and modulated; the buzz affected by the closeness of the walls around him.

“Hrmm,” he buzzes, uncertain. “The footprints continue inside.”

“Rue says people went in,” I translate. “Perhaps there’s another entrance…”

“No,” Hilde says. “This stone was dislodged to cover the entrance.”

“How do you know?”

“Not wanting to prove right every dwarven stereotype,” she says, her mouth curled into a humorless grin. “You can’t grow up inside a mountain without learning a thing or two about digging.”

She points down to the debris we’re standing on, where a line gouged out of the ground leads directly to the piece of rubble covering the crevasse.

“Was it the monster?” I ask. “Maybe while pursuing them it…”

Hilde interrupts me with a vehement shake of the head.

“No, this was carefully done.” Hilde gives me a look. “To hide their tracks, perhaps.”

“Or to stop people from following,” I suggest.

Would Essa be so callous as to leave everyone behind to die? The image of her slicing Hilde’s side flashes in my mind. Yes, I ask. Yes, she would. But how could Reva let her?

But Hilde is shaking her head again.

“Unlikely,” she says. “It’s not that heavy. Anyone determined could find a way to push it off. Hm…” she lapses into silence, scratching her beard absent mindedly.

“Really?” I ask, doubtful. The rubble looks solid, firmly lodged, and on uneven ground. I’d be hard pressed to find a good position for my feet, let alone lift it. “I don’t want to sound defeatist,” I say, and I raise my injured hand up. “But I’m not sure I can be of much help.”

Hilde looks up at me, dragged out of her thoughts, frowns, then waves me away from the rubble and steps down to where it rests on the incline. She bends low to the ground, muttering to herself all the while.

“Do you need any help?” I ask, feeling useless. “I could ask Rue to check if…”

Hilde reaches down and pulls out a hand-sized rock which she throws over her shoulder. Then another, and a third. Only then does she look up at me.

“Get ready.”

Before I can ask what I should get ready for, she pulls another rock from its spot and takes a smart step sideways. Immediately, the heavy piece of rubble drags, and then slides a good few feet until it meets resistance further down. A narrow passage into the crevasse is left open, a mouth cracked in a fiendish little laugh.

“Hilde,” I say. “That was—”

Just then we hear the slow, heavy flap of many leathery wings. I hop into the hole followed by Hilde, and we scramble down, hands against the dusty confines of the tunnel, sliding, dragging, falling, always down, until there’s enough debris between us and the flying beast above and we can breathe again.

I shine the torch down. We’re at the lip of a short fall onto a narrow walkway bordering a much taller, deadlier fall. A short length of rope, tied around a heavy section of loose wall, hangs down to the level of the walkway.

I try again. “Hilde, that was—"

“Wait,” she interrupts. “That stone was heavy. Heavier than it looked.”

“Yeah, that’s why—”

“No one inside could have pulled it to cover the entrance as it did. They must have had help.”

In the dancing light of the torch, I frown.

“What do you mean?”

She looks at me somberly, eyes glinting in the light.

“They left someone up there. That’s why it was so easy to move: someone was planning on coming back through it.”

“Why would they do that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But maybe to search for the key they knew we had. No better time to take them from us than when we’re crushed under a few tons of rubble.”

I let the thought sink in. Someone up above, hunting us in the dark, checking the corpses to find their treasures and maybe a way out.

Let them search.

“Come on,” I say. And jump down, holding on to the rope.