I sent my fireball and swords on a random pattern, sweeping as far and wide as I could while not being able to see the edges of the room. It was easiest to time it. If they came back in the same amount of time it took to send them away, that meant I hadn’t hit a wall yet. If they came back faster, I’d been wasting time pressing against a wall.
It took me about ten minutes to really get a feel for the size of the room. Not too large. Less than fifty feet in every direction, probably square, with an abnormally short ceiling. I’d settled into skimming my swords mostly about half a foot from the ground, but occasionally they’d pause when they turned about and leap up to the ceiling instead. For all I knew the voice-stealer was clinging to the ceiling like one of the spiders.
It was fifteen minutes in—five minutes later—when I finally struck something. My first clue was the delay in my sword returning. Not by much, but I’d been getting it down to the second. There wasn’t much else to do while hiding behind the corner.
The second clue was far more dramatic, and would probably give me nightmares for the next three months. A tangle of limbs returned with the blade, one I saw from all angles and distances. One which touched every inch of my skin while I touched every inch of its in return. Another spider. Dead.
Claws and bristles ran along my back, over my face. My fingers explored past the little legs at the front of its mouth, past fangs, down past rubbery somethings and scraped over its hard teeth or throat or whatever the mess of mouthparts I was looking at and feeling was. Then down—
I ended both vision and touch to give myself a moment to think while I set my sword to blindly pushing the corpse out of range of my bubble.
It hadn’t made a sound when it had died.
Was that because its voice had been stolen, or because it couldn’t scream without stealing another’s voice? I still had my voice, so I was leaning toward the second option.
Or maybe spiders simply didn’t scream and they were pets of the voice-stealer. A whole nest of them maybe.
“Was the spider one of yours? Call off your copies of my spells and I’ll do the same.” I was being a bit hypocritical. I’d initiated the first attack after all, but there was no honour in blindly finishing a series of murders simply because I’d begun them.
“Call off your copies,” I replied. Not really me, of course, but the voice-stealer copying my voice. Still alive then. Rot and wither.
I returned my sense in time to feel their versions of my spells shoot through the open doorway and start blindly lunging after me much as I had against their spider.
Swordferno II
I reacted without thinking. I saw a trio of swords heading towards me and I wanted a wall of magical metal between me and them.
The fourteen blades, though weaker were enough to stop the three cold. The fireball slipped between the gaps like they weren’t there, but I was already up and moving.
Turning took time, which meant the fireball (which I could still see thanks to my ring. Handy, that) gained on me until it was touching the edges of my dancing green hair.
The back of my head started to feel a bit warm, but my hair was unharmed. So it was fireproof. I hadn’t been sure.
The fireballs and swords moved as fast as I had while recording them, which meant they should move slightly slower than I could while I was dedicating all my time to running and not carrying a heavy skip or swinging a sword. By the time I’d reached the first corner I’d pulled about two feet ahead of the fireball.
My brain must have worked better cool than hot, because once at the corner, instead of turning away back towards to Life’s orb room I decided to teleport into the room on the other side of the wall I’d been running along. The fireball couldn’t get me there.
True Teleport
***
The room was dark of course. I’d left my will-o’-wisps and the fireball behind. That had been the point. What I could see in my bubble vision showed the room to be empty of immediate hostiles. A moment later Will-o’-WispII confirmed it.
The room had two doors. One of stone, one of iron. It was of medium size, perhaps fifty by thirty feet. The wall to my right was somewhat collapsed. Both it and the wall directly across from me glittered slightly in the faint light of my Will-o’-Wisp. It almost looked like—my eyes widened.
“True silver,” I whispered, running my hand along the wall. Veins of the metal crawled through the stacked stone bricks of the wall like gold through bedrock. Whatever had been responsible for the right wall’s collapse may have even attracted the silver—if such a thing was possible—for the collapse had only served to reveal more of the starry metal glimmering beneath. A king’s ransom, if using true silver for such a base purpose would not irrevocably taint it. It was a miracle the presence of the dungeon alone hadn’t caused it to corrode.
Perhaps the warlocks hadn’t dared touch it. Or hadn’t been able to. It might explain why the room was otherwise empty, though not how the metal had appeared in the first place. True silver wasn’t known for simply appearing. If only I had the time to study it, or the tools to extract it.
Alas.
I took a moment to assess my situation. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but I’d lost Swordferno II. On the plus side, or perhaps because of the loss, the voice-stealer hadn’t stolen the Swordferno II spell for itself as well. Maybe it needed line of sight? I could attack from the other side of a wall, no problem. Happy too even. There had been a small ten by twenty room near the door to the voice-stealer’s room I could teleport into if I was able to get close enough.
*scuttle scuttle*
Or maybe I didn’t need to.
The fireball which had been pursuing me had simply been pressing itself into the corner where I’d vanished which was exactly what I’d wanted. But a pair of spiders had joined it, and they were...
I could only guess. Examining the wall? Looking for a way through. Trying to use a teleport spell to get across.
I started breathing as shallow as I could manage. They couldn’t teleport where they couldn’t sense. As long as I was very silent I wouldn’t have any spiders teleport onto my face. I’d just feel like they already had. My ring certainly had its drawbacks.
Was there a way I could see what they were seeing using my ring? Spiders sensed vibrations in their webs, maybe they could sense more than that. Was it just a finer sense of touch than I was capable of understanding? No that couldn’t be right. I’d seen the warmth of my own hearth beating in my chest just fine. So maybe it was too similar or maybe... ah.
My bubble took on a haze much like black stones on a hot summer day. Waves radiated out from every surface, uniform, except where they bounced off and bunched up. The spider’s scuttling legs stirred the waves, made them undulated wildly, and resonate in my bones.
It was a feeling halfway between touch and hearing. It extended outward from the source like a sound might, but tapered off far more quickly than sound. And I could see the air currents, the little puffs of the spiders’ passage. My own stirring of the air was stopped by the wall between us, which was as welcome as spring come early. If the spiders didn’t have ears I might not even need to stay quiet.
Not that I was going to test it.
I wanted to return my blades from Swordferno II and crush the pair, but I wasn’t sure it would work. They would sense the blades moving. It was a wonder I’d managed to get the second spider at all with my swords. My odds were far better eliminating them before they could react.
Fireball
Fireball III
I felt, physically felt, their eyes explode. My hands ran along their organs as they ruptured. My fingers traced the web of cracks which erupted along their armour. They didn’t have any bones, it turned out. Just the armour like an external skeleton.
Both died without making a sound. No more fireballs were summoned nor swords brought to bear. The voice-stealer’s fireball in the corner stopped moving. So the spiders had been the voice-stealer. Or the voice-stealer was trying to fool me into believing that. I wasn’t going to be lulled into a sense of security that easy.
I crept down the wall back towards the spiders’ low roofed lair. No more spiders, nor conniving voice-stealers presented themselves on the opposite side of the wall. I couldn’t see all the way across the corridor, but unless they knew the nature of my ring they should have little reason to press themselves against the far side.
The room was shorter than the corridor itself, and the wall directly in front of me at the far end was thicker than my ring could penetrate. My choice was now to teleport across and hope their were no more spiders, or turn back and try the doors.
Turning back to try the doors was also hoping there was no more spiders to hunt me down, and that they could take me when I slept, and I at least had a clear path back to the ogres’ well if I returned to the corridor. When I thought about it that way, it became pretty obvious which path to take.
Clothes Hanger
Safe Teleport II
I reappeared in a crouch with my lancegay at the ready. My cutlass wouldn’t stand a chance against their magic swords, but I had hopes that a gift from the dead king might prevail where mundane weapons wouldn’t.
Nothing immediately leapt out to tear my face off, which I took as a good sign.
My ring found nothing in my immediate vicinity, so I cautiously called through the broken doorway, “Hello?”
Nothing replied except the faint sound little girls’ laughing. I shuddered. At least the spiders’ creepiness probably served some purpose. Luring people to their death or some form of rudimentary communication. Who needed laughing walls?
I retrieved my magic swords which I’d abandoned in their shield formation (for all the good it had done stopping the spiders from heading down the corridor) and sent them to trigger the trap in the doorway while I absconded back around the corner.
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Oswic of Blackbridge, Starcaller of the Dawn, Flee-er of Spiders, Croucher of Corners, Master of Hiding, that was me.
It turned out that their was no trap to disarm. Not exactly. Instead, the floor directly beneath the door wasn’t entire solid. My swords slowly sank through its surface, much like the slowstone wall, before breaking free into a large open shaft.
Only once the swords had entered the shaft did my ring reveal it in full. Before, neither my vision nor my touch had sensed anything wrong. It was only once my swords stirred the dead air in the shaft that my spider-sense revealed it to me. It was about ten feet deep, and as I’d noticed before, filled with balls of some sort at the bottom.
It was easy to dismiss my ring as fallible, but given that my spider-sense worked fine, it seemed far more likely to be the case that the pit had been enchanted somehow to ward off natural senses.
Stranger than the trap itself was its location. It extended from wall to wall and was ten feet across in length. How was I supposed to navigate this space? The whole point of this endeavour was to avoid teleporting in the long run.
Perhaps it was like quicksand and if I moved slowly enough the structure would hold? I slowly pressed the flat of one of my blades into the stone, but it sank through as it were water.
Now that I was thinking about it, wasn’t slow the opposite of what made quicksand solid. You were supposed to slowly extract yourself, because fast movement made it solid on the way out. That was it.
I slapped the sword into the stone and this time was rewarded with the blade bouncing off. Perfect.
I crawled up to the hole and began slapping the stone with my hand with varying frequency. It took very little force to keep the stone solid, but if I stopped for an instant I began to sink through the stone, and then it was a nightmare to slowly pull back up. In theory, I could slowly stroll across the gap, but if I stopped to say, open a door, I’d fall for the trap.
No wonder I’d not run into any warlocks since being trapped down here. If I was a warlock I’d never visit the dungeons even if I had a map of every trap, door, and danger. It would be too much work.
I pushed myself to my feet and grabbed a sword in each gloved hand. It wouldn’t work for flying—the swords needed to dance after all—but for this short distance they would hopefully stay together long enough to put me more in the weight category of a normal warlock. With my lungs and body alone I wouldn’t doubt I was approaching 300lbs. Throw in my armour and weapons and no warlock who could walk under his own strength would be crossing this path. And that was without my bindle and rope.
I ran across the gap.
I was pretty confident I didn’t have to, but it was the rational man who died by his own hand. And I wasn’t that confident.
I was forced to stop on the rug I’d sensed on the other side of the door because the ceiling almost immediately became a wall hanging from the ceiling. Baubles and jewellery scattered as my feet kicked them aside in my haste to be as far from the pit as possible. My ring sense was one thing, but again, I wasn’t going to have my last words be “That should have worked.”
When I didn’t immediately plunge through the rug I took a moment to collect myself.
If I crouched and looked under the wall I could see the room was relatively small, with two exits on the far side of the room. It was quite a busy room, what with the two spider corpses, plinth and rob in the opposite corner, bits of broken glass, the small stream running through its centre, the large statue of a bird on the other side, and the pile of treasure I was standing in. Where the stream cut through the wall on both sides it even had carved a channel large enough for me to squeeze through, bringing the total exits and entrances in the room up to five.
My ring didn’t reach far enough to reveal whether any more spiders or voice-stealers were hiding in the tunnels.
“Hello?” I called.
Why not? It had worked before.
No one answered.
I began crab walking in a crouch away from my rug of safety and under the ceiling to the right of the pit.
My ankle pressed into the tripwire before I noticed it. I stopped just before it broke. My ring could notice this trap, but my focus had been preoccupied with ignoring the mangled spider corpse and the burnt spider corpse both vying for my attention, so naturally they were all I could focus on.
You try strapping a spider the size of your head to your face and then pay attention to every little bit of wire in your immediate vicinity.
Thankfully my foot hadn’t broken the wire, and I was able to very slowly move it back—
The wire snapped.
And that was it. It had been a literal wire for tripping, nothing more. I’d simply been more strain than it was meant to take. I spent a good five minutes searching the area with all my available senses including the wolf-vision to be sure. All the while my heart beat a golden iconograph of itself into my lungs.
The trap had been a blessing. A warning: Keep an eye out for traps.
And sure enough, a few (much slower) steps later, I found the mechanisms for a third inside the body of the bird statue. The spiders must have been collecting traps like flies.
The bird statue, now that I was close enough to see the whole thing from top to bottom, wasn’t a bird statue at all. It was closer to a siren. The body of the statue was a cross between a cock and a raven, but the head was that of a woman with wild hair up in a crown about her.
I had no idea what it was supposed to be, or if it was entirely fictional. The important thing, was it the body and wings were stuffed with hinges and gears, levers and teeth. It reminded me of that first wall I’d run across on the first floor of the dungeon. Or the dark Magus’s teleportation room. I had no idea what all of the parts were meant to do, or how to set it off. Best to give it a wide berth.
The tunnel was empty for both the extent of my light and ring, though it did appear to widen out near the far end into another room whose contents I could only guess at. I’d investigate it after checking the tunnel on the other side.
I splashed down the stream towards the far corner of the room, on the logic that it would be harder to place traps underwater. My assumption was correct. The stream had no traps whatsoever. The tunnel entrance near the far end, however, was flanked by one on either side. Probably.
I didn’t actually know what the Orcneas rune carved into the wall did, but I was pretty sure the orb which glowed brighter than my fireballs under the wolf vision was bad news. It looked harmless to my normal eyes. Just a sphere of grey metal trapped between two large metal semi-spheres held wide with a metal bar. Almost a child’s idea of a mouse trap with a bit of metal for bait.
I wasn’t going to take it.
The tunnel on this side of the room narrowed and sunk as it continued forward until the stream nearly met the ceiling. It ended in a grill which rose only an inch above the water before reaching the ceiling, possibly connected to the puddle I’d noticed in the orb room. I’d have gone closer to confirm my guess, but I didn’t want to risk bumping the orb and having my arm melt off.
It turned out upstream was a bust as well. The tunnel became too narrow near the middle. Even if I’d stripped down to nothing and turned sideways I wouldn’t have fit by several inches. On the plus side that meant nothing ogre or toad-dragon sized was going to surprise me slipping through the cracks while I studied the rug’s treasures.
I’d been wanting to look at them since my toe had kicked a golden gauntlet halfway to the base of the metal orb’s plinth. Before that. Since the time my ring had first spied them from the opposite side of the door.
I rubbed my hands together and permitted myself a small cackle of glee. I was turning into a regular magpie (not literally. It was still important to point these things out). Who wouldn’t, when thunderbolts and magic rings could be buried in every monster’s midden?
“Wheck-a wheck-a wheck-a,” I gave my best magpie cry. It wasn’t very good. I was the caller of the dawn, not magpies. I glanced up at the bird flying high above me. Seemed to do alright with albatross at least.
I crouched over my treasures. The goblet first. It was wood or something like, leafed in gold with jewels set around the base of the cup. Somewhat useful if I wanted to drink from the stream, but not enough so it was worth carrying. I poured some water from my waterskin into the goblet and sipped from it just in case, but no hidden powers were revealed to me.
The rest of the jewellery—crowns, brooches, and necklaces—were a bust, even if they must have been worth a modest fortune all together.
Next was a strange set of golden gauntlets. They were clearly made for a woman. They had been wrought into the shape of a young noblewoman’s hands, complete with long golden nails and delicate gold lace filigree trailing at the wrists. They were too small for me, but I did my best, removing my gloves and forcing them over the tips of my fingers.
The sun rose, but I was pretty sure the gloves weren’t responsible.
I hoped they weren’t. My hands were already starting to cramp and I hadn’t even managed to pull them all the way up. I couldn’t even move them enough to free myself. I ended up having to place the gauntlet between my leg, pinch with my thighs, and then tug my fingers free. I tried the gauntlets on again to be thorough, but when the sun failed to rise for a second time I thankfully discarded them in lieu of a veil of heavy gold chain.
It was becoming clear the treasures had belonged to a woman with a singular set off tastes. She must have weighed more than I did when she was fully dressed.
The veil did nothing but make my neck sore, so I returned it to the rug as well.
I didn’t have a proper way to test the glass eye nor the blowpipe without darts. I dutifully held the eye to my eye and blew on the pipe anyway which only led to me wanting to meet this one-eyed assassin princess.
Beneath the blowpipe I found a... thunder in the morning. Now I really wanted to meet her.
It might have been possible to call it a breastplate in the most literally sense. A large one, though not one which would fit me easily, speaking politely. It ended roughly beneath said breasts with a net of fine gold chain which would have nicely framed her navel on either side for anyone looking to stab her in the guts. Probably quite fetching outside of combat.
The breastplate covered a jeweled—there was no way I was trying the breastplate on. The tuttensack had been pushing my limits to a breaking point when I had been far more desperate— covered a turban of red silk with a large gem in its centre. It might have fit a man with less hair, but I had to perch it atop my head like a sparrow on top of an ostrich’s egg. The princess might have been well endowed, and wealthy too, but she didn’t seem to have gathered any magical items into her wardrobe.
This wasn’t surprising. Magical items were exceedingly rare. It was only the presence of the warlocks which had given me the hope and good fortune of finding any at all.
An olive-green wig paired with the hat. It would have been embarrassingly impractical to try on if my own hair wasn’t already both longer and more unnatural in colour.
Nothing.
A small bottle of perfume smelled wonderfully of oranges and daffodils, but otherwise had no obvious benefit.
A wide jewelled belt fitted for hips rather than waist and a sheathed letter opener were next; neither of use.
I used the small box of toothpicks to get a piece of fish out of my teeth then opened the next box to find a pack of shot. I found the handcannon beneath a large, multi-hinged makeup kit, which promptly fell apart when I tried to move it.
The handcannon was of a far more practical make than the rest of the treasures. I didn’t need to test the handcannon to know I was keeping it, so I looped the loaded and capped gun through my belt and put two boxes of shot into my pouch. There were nearly a score more boxes, but I only had room in my pouch for the two. I could always come back later.
Once I secured my gun I dug through the scattered makeup kit for a pencil, and used it to apply two dark lines under my eyes. Nothing happened, but if I was suddenly faced with a sunny battlefield, I’d be ready. That said, should my wax ever run out I could do with the pencil. There was nine of them of various colours which I managed to thread through the empty spaces of my pouch.
The princess’s outfit was completed (was there a naked princess streaking through the dungeon somewhere?) by pair of high heeled shoes. They were gold, of course. I’d not seen the style before, too delicate for a horse rider or a butcher, though I’d heard the Delta people wore something similar as a status item.
Given that the heel was nearly the width of my hand, she must have been very high status indeed. Probably necessitated eunuchs to support her as she walked. Or perhaps they were only for sitting. I sat to try them on. An ordinary man might been in danger of breaking the delicate things, with my lungs, I’d crush them.
Or so I thought. Once I actually had them in my hand they felt surprisingly sturdy. I tried leaning on them, and to my delight I found they didn’t so much as wobble. I put more pressure on them and they still stood rock solid. I suppose they would need to be quite strong to hold the rest of the princess’s outfit.
It also turned out that they were far too small for me. I managed to fit three of my toes in the things, but even that was pushing it. A lesser shoe might have expanded to allow a fourth, but I had a feeling my foot would break before they did.
I leaned on the dead king’s spear as I rocked into a crouch. The shoes held. Any wobbling I felt was on the part of my legs, not the heels.
Strong, perhaps magically strong, but not useful outside of that. I kicked them off and pulled my leather boots back on. Maybe in the river valleys of the Delta high heels made sense, but I doubted it would ever catch on here.
I doubled checked the rug. That was everything. Proportionally not much of use, but the handcannon made up for it. The coloured pencils alone would have as well. How all these treasures had ended up decorating the spiders’ lair was another matter all together, and not one I wanted to dwell on.
I’d record my next spell and leave.