CHAPTER 35

Bricks rasp and grate together and the image of the flame is complete. Its center, the bright yellow bricks, swing outward an inch, and I push them the rest of the way, spilling sand onto the space beyond and emerging with the torch raised high. The corridor is broader than all I’ve seen so far and very well illuminated. Smokeless braziers, not torches, blaze at intervals in the center of the corridor, casting long shadows and raising the temperature to an uncomfortable degree. Soon, I can feel sweat running down my face, dragging the dust down with it and gathering at the curve of my lips, making me taste salt.

The first level. The drake’s domain. I peer cautiously in both directions, uncertain of what to expect. Drakes are flying, fire-breathing monsters, right? Or is that just dragons? Are they the same? Are drakes young dragons?

Dragons are extinct. I force the thought into my head before it manages to conjure up a whole host of reptilian monstrosities waiting for me at each end of the corridor, just out of view. Dragons are gone the way of demons and fairies, their extinction the last act of the gods before they left this ailing plane. What remains are inferior stock: flying snakes, fire-breathing lizards, gold-enamored reptiles. True dragons, titans of death and destruction, are an echo of the past, alive only in minstrels’ tales. Whatever’s waiting for me isn’t a dragon: it will be huge, deadly, likely unstoppable, but not a dragon.

Somehow, this thought fails to cheer me up.

I pick a direction at random and walk on. My steps are muffled by the sand, which is everywhere on this level and lets me travel quickly, with less fear. Walking eases the incessant pain in my hand. The more I walk the easier I can convince myself that this pain is just a part of me, that it’s nothing worth paying attention to, that I have more important things to worry about. All true.

Something else that catches my attention is the lack of wooden doors in this corridor, which in the second and fourth floors meant both traps and loot. I search for any passage which could lead to the stairwell Hilde would have walked down, to no avail. There are rooms connected to the outside wall of the hallway, but they’re all empty. Some have tables, discarded sacks, places where gear was left for Challengers to find and later claimed. But no passages, no stairs. The smooth sameness of the walls is marred only by depictions of oversized men and women in armor fighting many kinds of beasts and monsters. Some of them, the victors, have crowns on their heads. No: floating over their heads.

In front of one of these, I stop and raise the torch. The figure depicted is a human man wearing leather armor. He’s holding a black sword, and at his feet lies the dead body of some squat, hairy creature. The crown above his head doesn’t have the same level of detail as the rest of the drawing; it’s barely more than three triangles painted yellow. Looking over the drawing, I find the top edge of peeking over the sand. I can just make it out. Valkas.

I hesitate, looking both sides, reminding myself that there’s little time to waste. Still, I can’t help it. Kneeling, I drag the sand away with my good arm. It doesn’t take me long to uncover the complete sentence:

Valkas the Shadow attains level one.

I look back up to the figure’s face and see the resemblance. With only a few lines the drawing captured the leader of the Black Sword Guild’s easy confidence, the sense that the victory he achieved wasn’t so much the result of a challenge but something unavoidable. Only his first level, there were many more to come, but already he had the world at his feet.

So the crowns represent levels.

On tiptoe, the torch reaches just where I need it to. It’s petty, it wastes time on top of all of the one I’ve misused already, and yet I can’t resist resting the flaming torchhead on the mural until the paint flakes and the drawing blackens, until Valkas’ whole face is a burnt and cracked field and the triangles above his head seem to crown only void.

Hope Lysander enjoyed that.

Some of the other depictions are now easier to associate with the Godtouched that visited Reach from time to time. I see early incarnations of the warriors and adventurers I used to gawk at, with representatives from every species under the sun. One I identify at a glance: the sorceress that projected the Black Sword’s symbol over Reach. Her eyes are clear, though, instead of dark, and there’s no sign of the veins that framed them when I last saw her. Laede is her name, written at the bottom of her image. Or at least that was her when she gained her first level.

I pass some I don’t recognize, and most of them are nameless to me, bringing only vague memories of knights dressed in dark and gleaming armor or elementalists whose steps freeze the ground they walk on. If any of them are Lysander, I’m unable to find out. I don’t stop to check the names. Their crowns, their victorious expressions and their myriad first levels get to me; the fact that they chose to celebrate their achievements in this place of death, where they will never be seen by anyone they didn’t send here, seems like the red-hot cherry on top of the sadistic cake of the dungeon.

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And just like that, the mural is cut by a wide passage on the inside wall. It leads to another corridor, another ring concentric with the one I’ve been traversing. Thinking that it’s at the center that I’ll find my quarry, drake and door and Rev and Essa, I walk inside.

The mural continues here, but I’m no longer paying attention to the Black Sword army. This corridor holds different marks. Blood has splattered onto sand and found its way up walls, ruining the imposing armor of the heroes. This part of the dungeon is at least familiar: I can tell from the slots on the ceiling where something terrible will come from if I, presumably, step on the wrong place. And with the sand everywhere, it’s impossible to know which spot is safe and which will get you killed.

I pick the outer ring, for now, even though I have an inkling that I’ll have to chance the trapped corridor at some point if I ever want to reach the center of this level.

Walking, pushing my tired feet down onto the sand, the heat making me dizzy, accentuating my thirst, my attention wanes. I hear voices and confuse them with dreams and half-memories; sometimes they sound like Dala, sometimes Katha, sometimes, for some reason, Bago, my bully and competitor, the sole reason, alongside a few lessons with Rev, that I’m half-decent with a staff. I wonder how Bago is doing these last few days and that leads me to wonder if I’ll be remembered as a hero or some sort of mush-brained idiot. Somehow, I hope for the second. Don’t give anyone else any ideas.

There’s a bark; an exclamation that travels down the corridor and brings me out of my reverie. It doesn’t sound like Bago at all, and through that small shock I realize that these are real voices, people talking carelessly just ahead. And they’re coming my way.

For a second, I panic. Essa? I don’t want to see Essa without Rev, and I know I’m not hearing her voice. But there’s nowhere to hide: the hallway is brightly lit, devoid of features, and I’m too far from any of the rooms of supplies I spied before. The only spots of darkness are under the braziers, where sand has been piled up to support the large metal bowls, and the space just under them is as dark as coal. Before I’m aware of it, I’m moving there. The sand is very hot here; I bite my tongue and cover myself in it, draw my legs up and let the sand rush over my body, my head, until only my face remains above it, the whole process made more difficult for the pain streaming from my hand as it’s buried. I ignore its protests and settle down to wait.

The steps draw near, crunching sand. The accompanying voices are unusually loud, inflated with bravado.

“…with one of the other keys. We don’t even have to search for them, we can just wait by the door,” says one.

“If we hadn’t let the dwarf get away…” says another, petulant.

“You didn’t volunteer to charge into the slimes, as I recall,” says a third in an angry, slightly strained voice. “As I recall, in fact, you were right at the back of the queue.”

“I told you,” the second speaker says. “People got in the way. I tried, if I’d managed, I would’ve done a damn better job than you did. If Essa…”

“No more talk about Essa,” cuts a fourth. His voice is strange, strained and echo-y. And that’s it. The rest mumble a bit, but then retreat into silence.

Mutineers?

They pass my hiding place by. Third voice walks in front. He’s a tall kid with short shorn hair and a domineering posture. When he turns back to look at the rest of the group, I can see why his voice is strained: the entire left side of his face, eye included, shines in the firelight in the exact way skin doesn’t. It’s metal, I realize, his face has turned to steel. Dako and Verra’s mutations come to mind. This one, I’m sure, suffered the same fate.

His companions follow him into view, all bear scars, wounds, and heavy-duty weapons which they hold in eager hands. The last one to appear, long-haired and with the hint of a mustache sprouting from his upper lip, seems the most nervous. He turns his head to stare at corners, twitches his fingers to play a quick tune on the haft of his shortbow. I watch him look around, ignoring the idle talk, and then stop, eyes fixed on the ground.

“That torch wasn’t there before,” he says quickly.

Oh, crap. I forgot the torch; dropped it to dig and just forgot…

The others stop ahead.

“It was,” Metalface says assuredly. “Didn’t you have a torch, Seef?”

“Me?!” says a mousy kid bearing a belt of many-sized knives. He was voice number two, the petulant one. He sounds offended. “I never did. And if I did, I left it upstairs, not here.”

Shortbow picks it up. He’s scant feet away from me. If he lowers the torch below the lip of the brazier there’s no chance he’ll fail to spot me.

“Wait,” the remaining one says, a girl of about fifteen, her hair burnt at the tips and her right arm bandaged. She carries a long polearm with a broad blade, made for slicing. “Essa had a torch. Did she have it just now?”

The others look at each other and shrug.

“Whatever,” the girl says, rolling her eyes in an exaggerated fashion. “Bring it.”

And with that, she turns to keep moving, followed by Metalface and Seef. Shortbow lingers, looking around suspiciously into the curve of the hallway, but as the voices of his friends draw away he curses and runs after.

Long after the voices wane and then grow too distant to make out, I wait in my sand cocoon, cooking slowly, until I’m absolutely certain that there’s no one waiting for me. Only then do I pick myself up, sand streaming in rivulets from my clothes and skin, a torch lighter but comparatively richer.

I know now that Essa may be alone with Rev, or at least severely diminished. There weren’t many left in their group when I spotted them in front of the Silver Door, and that was before the giant flying snake struck. With hunters staying behind on the third floor and these four just now departing, only a few people remain. Which means now is the time to get my sister back.