18 – A Parting of Ways

“I don’t like this at all,” Haley said as they traversed another long, descending tunnel. They’d been walking for what felt like an hour or more, and they’d passed more than a dozen branching tunnels. Wherever they had to make a choice, they’d been choosing the right-hand option, following some rule Ward had read about mazes—something about following one wall being the way to get out. Ward couldn’t imagine they had to worry about walking in a circle; every tunnel had a downward slope.

“The tunnels?” Ward frowned, running the fingers of his right hand against the curved stone wall. It was damp, and it felt closer than ever. In fact, his head was only a couple of inches from the top. He could smell the moisture as he observed the delicate white veins of niter lacing the stonework in frost-like patterns.

“No. Yes! Everything! I don’t mind solving puzzles and even fighting monsters, but I never wanted to kill a person! Look what it’s done to us. Poor Fost! I’m sorry you died, but you’re lucky to have missed this evil place!” She abruptly stopped speaking as she choked back a sob.

“Yeah, he got a raw deal, Haley. Hang in there.” Ward had said something similar to her at least half a dozen times; the poor girl was near her breaking point, and he dreaded being there to see it happen. At this point, he just hoped they’d find a way out sooner rather than later.

“She’s going to be a problem for you, Ward.” Grace hadn’t been around much during their endless-seeming slog through the latest batch of tunnels, so when she spoke up behind him, he lurched forward and almost hit his head on the tunnel ceiling. Even so, he managed to refrain from another outburst, and the two younger challengers ahead of him didn’t notice. Still, he turned and glared at Grace, and she smiled, cringing sheepishly, “I’m sorry about that; I really don’t mean to startle you.”

When Ward didn’t respond, she continued, “Listen, I know you’re trying not to look crazy in front of your new friends, so just hear me out. You’re getting attached to that girl. I admit it’s been helpful having them both along in these rooms where you had to fight or where you needed three people to make the door appear. However, what will you do if the next room says only two can progress? Do you think you could stomach killing one of them? Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen your suspicious looks at that Nevkin kid, but I still don’t think you’ve got it in you. Why not avoid the problem altogether? Next time they go right, why don’t you try going left?”

Ward frowned, thinking about it. Grace could come off as cold-hearted, but she made a good point. What would he do if they came to a door that only allowed two people through? What if it only allowed one? He stewed on it for a while, and as they approached a junction of three tunnels and he saw Nevkin start to turn to the right, he said, “Hold up for a minute.”

Nevkin and Haley turned to him, and Ward stopped, facing the junction and his two companions. “What do you guys think about the possibility that this place will pit us against each other? What if the next room has a door allowing only two to pass?”

“It’s certainly crossed my mind.” Nevkin reached up and stroked his hairless chin. His sharp nose and deep eye sockets made his brown eyes look like pools of blackness in the dim light.

“I . . .” Haley frowned, and Ward could see some panic enter her eyes as she turned left and right, looking down the different tunnels.

“Look, I’d hate it. I’m not the kind of guy who can turn on people and commit random violence ‘cause some weird challenge programmed by ancient aliens or whatever told me to. I kind of wonder if we maybe shouldn’t split up a bit while we still can.”

“It does feel as though the catacombs have given us plenty of warning. We know such mechanics exist by now. If we stick together, we’re practically tempting fate.” Nevkin nodded as he spoke, his eyes narrowed, and Ward had to admire how resolute the kid was. He didn’t seem shaken or bothered in the least. “There’s no sense belaboring the issue. I think it’s sound logic. It was good to journey with you both. I shall take the right-hand tunnel. Farewell!” With that, the young fellow with the weirdly tattooed head turned on his heel and began to march away.

Ward opened his mouth, caught off guard. He’d been admiring the kid’s fortitude one second, and then the next, he found himself trying to think of a reason to call him back. He couldn’t. Instead, he called after him, “Good luck!”

“I don’t want to be alone,” Haley said in a quiet voice, looking at the ground. “You know, so far, every group limiter has said three. What if we come to another door requiring three again?”

“I thought of that!” Grace announced, moving to stand next to Haley so Ward could look at her more easily. “I don’t think it’s likely that the catacombs will give you the same obstacle twice. So far, you’ve been through a door that only allowed three people, and you’ve been in a room that required three people to form a door. I think it’s improbable you’ll run into another obstacle involving companions in groups of three.”

“I—” Ward started to say, but Haley was already shaking her head and starting to speak.

“I suppose it’s not likely we’ll be challenged in the same way again. Nevkin would have thought of that.”

“Yeah, but what if the next door requires two people?” Ward shrugged. “I don’t know the right answer.”

“Nor do I, Ward. You’ve been very brave and kind to me, though, and I appreciate it. As much as I hate this, as much as I fear being alone in here, I think we should separate before one of us is forced to do or witness something terrible.” She stepped toward him, putting her long, slender arms around his ribs and hugging him. Ward sighed, feeling some pent-up stress release as she made the tough decision for them. He hugged her back, gently patting her between the shoulders.

“You’re going to be okay. You’ll make it out of here, and your folks are going to be proud.”

“Thank you. I hope so.” She sniffed and let go of him. Then she looked at the central and left-most tunnels. “Which passage do you wish to take?”

“You choose.”

“Very well. I will venture to the left. Good luck, Ward!”

“You too.” Ward watched her descend the slightly curving tunnel, and in less than a minute, she was gone.

“Well! Alone at last!” Grace clapped her hands together, once again startling Ward. “Quite a time you’ve had in here.”

He scowled at her, stretching his neck, trying to shake off the chill she’d given him. “Yeah, I’m not saying you didn’t have ulterior motives, but I’m glad I never had to go against those two.”

“Oh, I know. Trust me, I could see the writing on the wall. It would have ruined you. No, this is for the best. Just you and me now. Come on! Let’s see what’s down this way.” She turned and, being the figment of his mind that she was, began to skip barefoot down the musty rough stone passageway.

“Dammit! Hold up! I’ve had a few things I’ve wanted to talk to you about.” Ward took a few steps toward her, entering the tunnel and noticing a slightly steeper slope. Grace stopped and came back toward him, hands clasped behind her back.

“Yes?”

“You get how fucked this whole thing is, right? It’s really dumb luck that I’m not dead yet. Here I stand, deep in the belly of some alien world, surrounded by God knows how much stone and dirt. Some kind of intelligence is running these ‘catacombs,’ and it seems to want to kill as many of us as it can. Did I miss anything?”

“Well, you missed that you were smart enough to start running on the stairs. You were the first to tell everyone to stand still when the flame jets started. You were tough enough to survive two hostile encounters. Oh, and I helped keep an axe out of your forehead! Doesn’t sound like dumb luck to me.” She shrugged. “What’s your point?”

“My point? Well, shit.” Ward sighed and started walking. “I guess I don’t have a good one ‘cause if you hadn’t brought me to this world, I’d be dead back on Earth. I’m not a dummy. Well, I mean, other than the whole thing about you stealing my goddamn soul!”

“It’s not your—”

“Soul, right. Forgive me—my anima, which, you know, allows me to avoid oblivion if I die. Anyway, did you see what I saw on the hemograph?” Ward held up a hand, forestalling a snarky response. “I know you did—that was rhetorical. I am improving my ‘vessel.’ Still not sure what we’ll get out of this place, though, other than the chance to linger around some corpses.”

“I agree the prizes have been lackluster, but stay hopeful, Ward. Hopefully, the best is yet to come.”

“Yeah, let’s hope.” He walked ahead of her for a couple of minutes, then paused and turned to face her. “How far from me can you wander?”

“Only to where you can see. Remember, I’m actually inside you. I can only physically interact with your body. This manifestation is only a mental construct.” She gestured up and down her body. “Sorry, but that means I can’t scout into places to see the unknown.”

“I suppose you don’t notice things that I don’t notice then? Well, wait! How’d you know to shove me out of the path of that axe?”

“Oh, you saw it; you just didn’t register it. I’m a little better at objectively analyzing the things you take in—sounds, smells, and even your peripheral vision. With that said, I’m constantly looking for traps and dangers. I know I annoy you sometimes, but I am trying to help.”

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“And when you shove me? Are you just making my muscles spasm or something?”

“No. It’s more like psychic energy. I can affect you physically, but that’s about all.”

“How much can you affect me? Could you control my body?”

“What are you getting at, Ward? What’s with the twenty questions?”

“What’s with them? How about the fact that you’ve already lied to me? Maybe all these questions are piling up because you keep slipping away when I start to ask them!”

“If you think I’m a liar, why bother asking questions like that one? Do you think I’d tell you the truth? How about a more interesting topic? That Nevkin fellow mentioned seeing a ‘better’ hemograph. It got me thinking back to the stories I’d heard, the old diaries I read. I’m fairly sure I remember accounts of powerful mana-users who could channel their harvested mana into desired areas of their vessel. It seems like your vessel is almost randomly using the mana you harvest. I wonder—”

“Grace, I know you’re just changing the subject, and if you’re not going to be honest with me, then let’s just cut the bullshit. I want to know more about mana and anima and all that stuff, but I’m struggling to concentrate right now, and I think I can probably find a better source than your childhood memories. Let’s focus on getting out of here.”

“Fine. I’ll continue to watch ahead.”

“All right.” Ward turned and started walking again. About ten minutes later, he realized he was hunching; the tunnel had continued to diminish in height, and now he had to stoop to avoid scraping his head on the rough, damp stones. As usual, the catacombs provided some mysterious ambient light, but it was only enough for him to see about ten feet in any direction. If he hadn’t already been down there for hours, wending through similar tunnels, he’d probably have been stressed out by the dark, wondering what lurked in the shadows, but he’d grown desensitized to the circumstances.

After another twenty minutes of progress with no branching tunnels or any other sign of egress, Ward was almost doubled over, his backpack constantly brushing against the ceiling. After a while, he swore and knelt down for a break, stretching his back and pulling the pack off. “This is shit!”

“I certainly don’t envy you. This looks like torturous progress!” Grace stood right behind him, leaning over but looking perfectly at ease, per usual. “I wonder if the other tunnels also diminished like this. If not, you certainly got the short end of the stick from your erstwhile companions.”

“Well, even if they have tunnels like mine, they’re both much smaller.”

“True, true. Do you ever rue eating all your veggies?”

“Huh?”

“When you were a kid! Didn’t your mom tell you to eat your veggies to grow up big and tall?”

“Jesus, is that an attempt at humor? Don’t quit your day job.” Ward fished his water bottle out of his pack and took a good long drink. When he finished, he screwed the cap on and shook it, figuring he’d drunk about half. “Be nice if we found some fresh water.”

“Many things would be nice. Right now, I think you should worry about a tunnel that seems to be getting smaller and smaller. Do you think you should back up and follow behind one of your friends? You could also further backtrack to one of the other branching tunnels.”

“I dunno. You think this’ll keep getting worse? I hate to give up. What if the end’s just past the edge of the light?”

“Ever heard of the sunk cost fallacy, Ward?”

Ward smirked and shook his head. “Yeah. So you’re saying I shouldn’t consider how much work I spent getting here when I decide if I should turn around or not.”

“I’m not saying what you should do, but be aware of your inherent bias.”

“If I were totally logical, I’d have missed a few big case breaks in my career, you know. I listen to my instincts more than most people might be comfortable with.” Ward stood, stooping nearly in half, and reached one hand behind him to grab the top strap of his backpack. He’d decided to leave it off and drag it behind him.

Grace spoke up from behind his pack as he started forward, “What are your instincts saying?”

“That this is another test.”

“It seems plausible . . .” Grace trailed off, growing quiet while Ward began to work his way deeper. It was uncomfortable going, not just from the awkward nature of his posture but also because of the poor quality of the air. It grew ever damper and mustier in the passage, and soon Ward could hear his well-worn leather shoes squelching through damp fungi. As he’d feared, the passage continued to narrow. Soon, he was stooped over so far that it became untenable, and he dropped to his knees to reevaluate his progress.

“This sucks,” he grunted, shifting his damp knees off some wet, spongelike growth.

“Are you sure you want to keep—”

“Yeah.”

“The test might be one of rationality. It might be the catacombs trying to see if you’re pig-headed enough to crawl into a space so confined that you grow stuck!” Grace had lost her cool, detached affect, and her near-hysterical tone was grating on Ward’s already frayed nerves.

“If you can’t calm down, you need to disappear for a while. Let me think.”

He reached under his armored shirt, fishing around for the old leather belt holding up his trousers. He unclasped it and pulled it out of the loops, then, twisting sideways, he looped it around his ankle, pulling it tight through the old brass buckle. He hooked the long end around the top loop on his backpack, using a piece of leather cord to tie it in place. He nodded, giving it a few hard tugs to ensure it was tight. “That way, I can drag it behind me as I crawl.” He turned to start forward again, but Grace was there, on her hands and knees, staring into his eyes.

“Ward! Hear me out.” She spoke calmly, clearly trying not to aggravate him, so he sighed and settled back on his haunches, taking the opportunity to rest a minute more.

“Go ahead.”

“If this tunnel gets much narrower and you keep going, what will you do if you find you cannot progress? What if it’s too tight to turn?”

Ward sighed and rubbed his palm along the damp, rough stone blocks. They were smaller here than back in the section where he could stand. It really did feel like they were slowly closing in on him and that he’d end up squished or trapped. It was a freaky, claustrophobia-inducing situation, but Ward was good at compartmentalizing his emotions. He was good at putting them, including fear and panic, into a box so he could handle the situation at hand. Now, granted, that might be the wrong thing to do in a situation like this. Maybe the right move was to freak out and get the hell out of that tunnel. Ward didn’t think so, though, and he knew he couldn’t explain it. He just had a feeling that he was on to something.

He didn’t say anything to Grace at first, running those thoughts through his mind, measuring his determination—his fortitude to keep the course. When he decided he still wanted to continue, he opened his mouth to say so, but Grace sighed heavily and beat him to it, “Oh, forget it, old man. I can see it in your eyes. Well, good luck, I guess. It’s only our funeral if you’re wrong.”

“My funeral and your time-out, you mean.”

“Fair.” Suddenly, she wasn’t in front of him any longer, and Ward leaned forward, crawling on his hands and knees into the damp, tight tunnel, his pack scraping along on the ground behind him every time he pulled his right knee up. His knees grew sore after just a few minutes, but he’d been expecting that. In fact, he was surprised it took so long—Grace’s uncle had done a damn fine job fixing him up. He was tired and sore from his exertions, but overall, he felt pretty good.

The cut Jon had given him with his knife had scabbed up nicely, and Ward hardly noticed it if he didn’t think about it. He couldn’t even feel the scratches and cuts he’d gotten fighting the frog creatures. He supposed part of that was down to Haley dressing his wounds with her healing ointment. All that considered, he was pretty damn surprised he was still going so strong. His time in the catacombs hadn’t been easy, but his body was holding up well, much better than it would have been back on Earth.

It was strange, really, when he thought about it. Grace claimed she’d taken ten years off his age, but he felt like a lot more than that had changed. He should be sore, hungry, and thirsty. He was all of those things, but not to any extreme level. He felt like he could eat a sandwich but wasn’t exactly starved. In nearly a day, he’d drunk about twelve ounces of water, and that was with a lot of heavy exertion. He was thirsty and knew he was close to pushing himself past some kind of threshold, but he’d definitely held up better than he should have.

He crawled his way forward, always in a dim section of cramped, damp tunnel, liberally covered in mossy or moldy—Ward wasn’t sure what they were—growths. All the while he toiled, his mind kept coming back to the strange nature of his endurance. Was it due to the mana he’d absorbed? Could those tiny particles of shimmering blue dust be affecting him that much? He couldn’t think of another explanation unless Grace or her uncle had done a lot more than heal his old wounds and de-age him a bit.

He grew so absorbed with his thoughts that when he shifted from his knees into a stomach crawl, he hardly noticed. It was about ten minutes later, when he felt the sides of the tunnel start to brush up against his shoulders, that he realized just how tight things had become. “Damn. I was in the zone, I guess.”

“Ward?” Grace’s voice was small and, if he didn’t know better, timid sounding, drifting up to his ears from behind him.

“Yeah?”

“I’m starting to freak out.”

Ward paused and considered her words. She certainly sounded freaked out. Was that possible? She was a devil, wasn’t she? How could she be more bothered by this experience than he was? She didn’t even have a body to get stuck in. “Are you afraid you’re gonna get stuck down here somehow?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been in a place like this. The catacombs must use some kind of magical transport system; how else can you explain the falls and doors, the weird tunnels and light and rooms that don’t match up to any plausible mental map I can try to draw? What if the aether doesn’t flow here? What if I get trapped when you die?” She paused then more earnestly, suddenly beside him, though there wasn’t room for her, she said, right into his ear, “I know that sounds horrible. I don’t want you to die, Ward! I don’t want to watch you suffer, losing your mind as you get stuck under all these tons of rock!”

“Grace, you need to calm down!” Ward growled. “Come on, give me some space,” he barked a short laugh and shook his head, “I mean what little I have, and let me get back to work. I think we’re getting close.”

“You’re insane! If you start inching your way backward now, you’ll only lose a few hours. Half a day at most!”

“Grace!” At his shout, she disappeared, and he was alone in the tunnel again. Ward did feel like he was nearing something, but he didn’t know why. It was only after he’d crawled for another ten minutes or so that he figured it out—the air was fresher, and he could even feel a faint breeze tickling the hairs on his sweat-covered arms. Buoyed by the realization, he began to scrabble forward in earnest, shimmying his way over the damp, fuzzy stone until the light that seemed to follow all of the challengers through the catacombs expanded to reveal a circular room with a tarnished copper stairway winding its way up the walls.

As relief washed over him and he hurried toward the small, barely-Ward-sized opening, eager to be out of the tunnel, his eyes fell on another object sitting near the base of the tarnished stair. It was a copper chest, just like the one he, Haley, and Nevkin had found. “Well, well, well,” he said, sliding out of the tunnel like a slime-covered, stubble-faced, gigantic fetus from a muddy womb.

“Oh, thank the lord!” Grace suddenly appeared in the much larger space, prancing around as though she was center stage at a dance recital.

Ward smirked, leaning against the stone wall, sighing heavily as he tugged his backpack up beside him, digging around for his water bottle. “Hey,” he said, unscrewing the lid, “you being a devil and all, when you say, ‘thank the lord,’ who exactly are you talking about?”