19 – Buzz Off

When they emerged from the horse-drawn cab on the steps of the spire, the trio of adventurers took a minute to settle their backpacks and secure their weapons before climbing up to the heavy, wrought-iron gates. As they approached, Ward could see a small courtyard paved with gray stones and, atop a short run of steps, a door, metal, like the rest of the spire. A small wooden building was standing before it, clearly crafted in a different era. The front of the tiny structure was open, looking almost like a ticket booth. A young woman with disheveled hair and a wrinkled uniform jacket sat behind it.

Ward pushed the gate open, and they walked into the courtyard. Lisa was the first to approach the booth. “Hello, any wait?”

“At this hour?” The young woman yawned. “No, you’ll be the first.” Considering the woman was about to accept fifteen hundred glories for their entrance fee, Ward looked at her booth with a more critical eye. He could see a metal grating she could pull across the window, and the little structure looked sturdily built, but still—if he were a criminally minded individual, he’d find the ticket booth a rather tempting target.

“We three will be going in.” Lisa plopped a pouch on the counter with a tell-tale clink of heavy coins. “For me.”

Haley stepped up to the window and mimicked Lisa’s actions but nodded to Ward. “For him and me.”

The girl nodded, then, after confirming the contents of the pouches, she looked up to the wall over the gate and said, “These three are clear to enter.” Ward snapped his head around and saw that a guardhouse of sorts was built above the gate they’d come through. Two men with crossbows stood there with hard expressions in their eyes, and Ward suddenly felt a lot less worried about the girl’s safety. “Go on then. Good luck.” She nodded, gesturing toward the spire, and the trio started up the steps to the metal door.

Despite its apparent age and the metallic nature of the door, when Ward pulled on the handle, it swung wide noiselessly. Inside was a dimly lit antechamber leading to a winding metallic staircase. The illumination came from amber globes of light behind hazy, faceted glass mounted in the spire’s metallic walls. Craning his neck to look up, Ward saw the metal staircase winding around the tower wall until it came to a landing probably fifty feet above their heads. “Does it, um, move us after we go through the door up there or when we start climbing?”

Lisa shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”

Haley strode toward the foot of the stairs. “One way to find out.”

“Hold up,” Ward hurried after her. “We should get on the stairs close together in case it does separate people on them somehow.”

“I don’t think so, Ward. Remember, they told Lisa that if someone was ahead of us, we’d have to wait until they climbed the stairs to the first door.”

“Regardless, let’s be careful.” Ward turned to get Lisa’s support, and she nodded.

“Right behind you.”

Haley climbed three steps, then turned and waited for Ward and Lisa to mount the sturdy metal staircase. When they were all standing on a different step, she started up again. “Do you think we’ll have to fight in the first room?” She tossed the question over her shoulder, and Ward looked at Lisa, indicating he was also curious.

“I don’t know. It seems to be random.” She shrugged. “It’s probably the most well-documented challenge on Cinder with hundreds of first-hand accounts. The analysis I read indicated that people who visit an even number of floors tend to have a tiny percentage, on average, of getting more fights than puzzles.”

“I know I should’ve asked this before now,” Ward chuckled as he took two steps at a time, keeping close to Haley, “but what kinds of fights? Are we talking more frog and lizard men?”

“There’s a massive variety of foes recorded. Yes, sometimes boggerts and reptilians, but there are accounts of clockwork men, spiders, skeletons, ghouls, and even crazed former adventurers.”

The thought of people stuck in the tower and being used as fodder for “encounters” sent a shudder down Ward’s spine, but it didn’t surprise him. Hadn’t the catacombs pitted the entrants against each other? “What’s the damn point of these challenges? I mean, I get that they offer opportunities to folks like us, but why the hell would anyone make them? Why’d they have to be so damn…cruel about it?”

Lisa sighed. “Many historians have made careers theorizing about just those questions, Ward. Would it surprise you to learn that no one has any evidence to truly support their theories?”

Ward snorted. “Not at all.” He stepped onto the platform behind Haley and looked up, realizing the stairs didn’t continue—all he saw was the smooth metallic interior of the spire dotted with lights, receding into distant shadows. “So, yeah, if we go up another level, there must be some magic involved, eh?”

“Must be,” Haley agreed. She gestured to the door—an intricately carved piece of work adorned with delicate metal flowers and vines. “Shall we?”

Ward shifted Blazewitch so the gun was pointed forward, his hand on the stock. “I’ll go first.” He lifted the weapon to his shoulder, his right hand on the grip, finger near the trigger but not on it. His left hand was ready to crank the little brass lever that would rotate the oversized cylinder, readying the next round. He nodded to Haley. “Open it.”

Haley did so, twisting the metallic knob and then gently pushing the door. Like the main door to the spire, this one opened noiselessly, gliding on ancient metal hinges that somehow remained lubricated. Ward watched as a sliver of amber light expanded, revealing a well-lit circular chamber about twenty strides across. On the far side, he saw another metal door, but in the chamber itself, he saw nothing. Ward stepped forward, and he could hear Lisa and Haley crowding close as they came through behind him.

Lisa whispered, “Accounts I read indicated that often nothing happens until the door is closed. Are you two ready for me to close it?”

Ward nodded, still holding Blazewitch, ready to fire. Lisa shifted behind him, and then he heard the door clang shut. As the reverberation faded, Ward caught a low buzzing sound and scanned the room again, sidestepping to give Haley and Lisa a little more room by the door. Haley breathed, “I don’t see anything.”

“That buzzing, it sounds like—” Lisa’s words were cut short as, with half a dozen snicks, circular openings appeared in the ceiling, and massive, fist-sized wasps descended into the room—hundreds of them.

“Oh, fuck!” Ward exclaimed, something in him objecting viscerally to the sight of giant wasps with stingers thick enough and long enough to puncture a person’s organs. He lifted Blazewitch toward the first opening and squeezed the trigger. Boom, she sang and belched forth a gout of fiery payload. The wasps in her arc of fire exploded into little fiery blooms, flung back by the force of the shot to fall, sizzling on the floor as they died. Blazewitch was a pyromaniac’s dream, leaving a trail of sizzling burning incendiary pellets in a wide arc, throwing the room into chaotic flickering lights as black smoke billowed.

Ward cranked the lever, swung the barrel toward the oncoming swarm, and fired again. Boom! Another gout of fire tore through the buzzing things, and then Lisa’s voice rang out, her words crackling with mana as they echoed off the metallic walls, “Vurvak Krashir!” Suddenly, a powerful gust of wind whirled around, throwing Ward off balance and whipping up the smoke and fire, gathering it into a miniature whirlwind and then scooping the insects still in the air into its billowing embrace. “I’ve gathered them!” Lisa screamed. “Shoot it! Shoot the zephyr!”

Ward cranked the lever and lifted Blazewitch, blasting a fiery explosion into the heart of Lisa’s smoke and wasp-filled cyclone. The gout of fire ripped the gust apart, sending flaming insect bits spraying over the metallic floor. The magnesium pellets in the round pinged into the far wall, sizzling and flaring brightly, adding to the chaotic scene already created by Ward’s previous volleys. “Holy shit!” he laughed, realizing the wasp threat was over. The circular holes in the ceiling had already cleared.

He turned to look at Haley and Lisa, catching Haley lowering her hands; she’d been covering her ears. “Hey, nice spell there, Lisa.” While he spoke, he lowered Blazewitch, cranked the other lever to break the stock away from the cylinder, and began prying the empty casings from the cylinder.

“And that’s quite a menace of a weapon. I thought it looked formidable, but now I know!”

“Thanks, you two,” Haley sighed. “I feel useless.” She stepped toward one of the blackened, smoking insects and kicked it with her boot. “Gah! Apple wasps! They haven’t been seen in the Copper Valley for a hundred years!”

“Apple wasps?” Ward chuckled.

Lisa smiled, gently squeezing Ward’s shoulder as he snapped his gun shut—reloaded. “They’re named such not because they taste like apples but because they’re the size of one.”

“Ah, I get it.” Ward walked past the blackened areas where Blazewitch had spewed her fire toward the far door. “Is that it? We finished our first floor?”

“I suppose.” Lisa walked to the middle of the room, closer to Haley, and added, “You’re not useless, Haley. We all have our strengths.” Ward appreciated her effort to cheer his younger friend but wasn’t worried about her. When she’d made the “useless” comment, he’d recognized the snark in her tone.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Thanks, Lisa.” Haley winked at her, smiling and confirming Ward’s assessment.

“So, no reward?”

“I suppose our reward, in this case, is that we get to continue up and hopefully earn some prizes further on.” Lisa sat down on a relatively clean section of the floor. “Do you mind if I prepare my Dancing Wind spell again before we continue?”

“By all means.” Ward leaned against the wall, intent on watching her. With any luck, he hoped to learn that spell from her before too long.

She narrowed her eyes his way. “You won’t learn it by watching my forms.”

“Yeah, I know.” He folded his arms. “You’re the only other spell caster I’ve been friends with. It’s interesting to watch you do your thing.”

“He just thinks you’re graceful. It’s true, though—Ward’s like a goat, and you’re like a cat.”

“What the hell?” Ward laughed. “A goat, Haley?”

Lisa smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t take that too hard, Ward; I’ve seen goats do some amazing feats of acrobatics.”

“Still,” Haley grinned, her pale eyes flashing in the amber lights, “you’re no cat, Ward.”

He decided not to argue, rather enjoying Haley’s good mood. The thought gave him an idea, and he gestured to the door, catching Haley’s eye. “You should warm up, do some Gopah before we go up again.”

She nodded. “I was thinking the same thing, partner.” As she began, so did Lisa, working through her meditative poses, and, for the first time, Ward saw Gopah and sorcery being done at the same time, and it drove home the similarities. Lisa was performing movements that would help her build up the words of power in her mind, while Haley performed movements to infuse her body with mana and…what? Physical words of power? No, he decided; her movements were the words, and the mana and heat built up in her body the result of them. Gopah was like magical sign language—she was already casting her spell.

As the epiphany struck him, Lisa clambered to her feet and nodded. “Ready.”

Ward moved to the door, and Haley finished one of her movements and jogged over. “Will there be a stairway, or is the next room right here?”

Lisa reached for the door handle. “According to what I’ve read, we’ll need to go up before we reach the next room.” Ward got ready to shoot, despite her words, but when she pulled the door open, he saw a landing and the dark metal stairway leading up.

“So, if we wanted to call it a day, we go back through the other door and then down?” He turned to reassure himself that the door was still there.

“That’s right. Our path out will remain until we leave the tower.”

“Up we go!” Haley slipped through and started up the stairs. Ward and Lisa followed.

As Haley climbed, Lisa remarked, “For our first challenge, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“I mean, we were freakishly lucky to have a gun like Blazewitch and a spell like your, uh—what was it? Dancing Wind?”

“That’s right, and I suppose you’re correct. A hundred or so angry apple wasps could surely kill folks who weren’t prepared. We aren’t the only people who have the ability to deal with such a threat, however. I met a sorcerer who could spray fire from his fingertips! And you, Ward, aren’t the only adventurer with a fire-breathing alchemical weapon. Even Haley, if she were pressed, wouldn’t struggle to slaughter quite a few of the big, slow insects before they stung her to death.”

“Right. Fair enough.” Ward’s attention was above him. Just a few steps up, Haley had reached the second landing. He readied Blazewitch as he stepped onto the landing. “Same plan?”

Haley nodded, then looked at Lisa as she joined them. “Ready, Lisa?”

She nodded, and Ward gestured to the door with his gun. “Open it.”

Haley pushed the door open, and it swung wide to reveal a room just like the one they’d left below, if not for the ten copper poles rising from the floor to the ceiling. They were spread out evenly around the space, one just a few feet from the door. Haley moved beside him. “I think it’s a puzzle.”

“Yeah.” Ward looked at Lisa. “We gotta go in to see what it’s about, right?”

“Yes, but let’s study it from the safety of the landing for a moment. Look at the posts and imagine them as dots on a page. What do you notice?”

Ward tried to do as she asked, and he could see Haley straining to do the same. He saw the poles in his mind’s eye as two rings of dots—five outer ones and five inner ones. He said as much, and Lisa smiled. “Yes. Now imagine lines connecting them.”

“It just makes two circles,” Haley said almost immediately.

“No, not like that,” Ward said. “Imagine a line from the outer point to the inner, then out again, and so on. I think it makes a star.”

Again, Lisa nodded. “A pentagram.”

“Does that mean…” Ward wanted to ask if pentagrams were some sort of symbol for evil or magic like he’d heard in so many TV shows over the years. That was right, wasn’t it? Didn’t witches put pentagrams on the floor before they did a spell, or—

“I’m not sure what it means, but keep it in mind when we go in.” Lisa stepped closer. “Are you ready?”

“Yep.” Despite the prevailing opinion that they’d be facing a puzzle, Ward kept his gun ready, stepping through the doorway but careful not to approach the copper column too closely. When he heard the door slam shut, he turned to see Haley and Lisa standing to either side of it with looks of apprehension on their faces. When a low buzzing sound came to his ears, Ward jerked his gaze to the ceiling, sure he’d see more wasps descending upon them, but there were no holes.

“The columns!” Haley pointed, and Ward looked to see that the source of the humming, buzzing sound was a build-up of static electricity at the base of each column. After several seconds, the electricity on the nearest column made a popping sound and arced up with a sharp zwapping sound, tracing the length of the metal with a forked tongue of electricity. Ward inched backward, moving past Haley to press his back to the wall of the chamber.

“Doesn’t look good,” he muttered, eyeing the dancing prongs of electricity on every pole.

“Look! The center!” Lisa pointed, and Ward saw, at the center of the room, in the middle of the electrified columns, a tarnished copper chest had appeared, either having risen out of the floor or magically materialized there.

Ward shook his head, grumbling more to himself than anyone else, “We’re supposed to get that chest without getting fried, huh?”

“That would be my guess,” Lisa replied. She looked from Ward to Haley. “Any ideas?”

“Can’t we just carefully move between the columns?” Haley pointed to the gap between two of the outer copper poles. “If we walk between them, it won’t hurt, will it?”

Ward shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not an electrician, but that looks like a whole hell of a lot of amps. See how far from the pole it arcs? If it had something to jump to, like a person…” He trailed off, leaving the rest to her imagination.

Lisa nodded, looking at Ward, her wide, green eyes staring into his. “So, if we know how electricity works, can’t we solve the puzzle that way? Couldn’t we lay down some wires or something to ground the poles?”

Ward nodded. “Sure. Have you got any? Wire? Metal rods?” He knew the answer, of course; none of them had thought of anything like that.

“I don’t.” She frowned. “Surely, the ancients would have had a solution in mind.”

Haley sighed. “Maybe these challenges were meant to test magical students. Maybe if you and Ward had the right spell, something to deal with electricity, this would be easy to pass.”

“Hang on,” Ward said, digging into his pack. He took out his grimoire and then pulled free one of the many blank pages he had in the back. Two minutes later, he held aloft a paper airplane. “Let’s test this before we start talking ourselves into defeat. Anyone got something thin and made of metal, like a hairpin, maybe?”

Lisa smiled and reached up, pulling a thin, copper clip from her hair. “I have more,” she said, handing it to Ward.

“Thanks.” He fastened it to the nose of his plane, then, once Lisa stepped back, he tossed it toward the center of the room, aiming for the chest. Just as he’d predicted in his head, an arc of electricity zapped out of not one but two of the copper poles, reducing the paper plane to ash and flinging the remnants, along with the hairpin, toward the ceiling where more electricity arced out of other poles, creating a sizzling, crackling ball of lightning, reducing Lisa’s hairpin to bits of molten copper that splattered down like sizzling rain. After that, the poles returned to their normal behavior: electricity arcing up and down them menacingly.

Ward frowned, staring at the two nearest poles. It seemed like the one before the door, closest to the three of them, was more heavily charged than the others. The arc of electricity was wide and bright, lurching more than a foot away from the pole as it cycled up and down. Glancing across the room, Ward was pretty sure the one on the furthest wall only had a thin sliver of static electricity running up and down its length. He inched to his left toward the next outer pole, and as he progressed, sure enough, its electrical charge seemed to grow brighter and move faster.

“I think I have an idea.”

Before he could act, Haley asked, “Is that chest fastened to the ground?” Ward followed her gaze and saw what she meant. What if they could drag it out? Haley confirmed that’s what she was thinking by saying, “We could loop rope around it and pull. The electricity won’t attack rope, will it?”

“I mean, it shouldn’t…” Ward didn’t sound as sure as he wanted. If there was something “magical” about the electricity, it might not behave as it should. “Hang on; we can test that next,” he said, then began stripping off his weapons, his belt, and his boots—anything with any metal attached.

“What’s the occasion?” Lisa asked with an arched eyebrow.

“Just an idea. Hang on.” He piled his belongings atop his pack near the door, then, once again, in his bare socks, inched toward the next metallic pole. This time, the electricity didn’t seem to respond. “It should, though,” he muttered, “I’m a conductive material, aren’t I?”

Suddenly, he heard Grace in his ear, “Don’t die, old man!” He jerked his head to the left, but she wasn’t there. Had she spoken to him from inside his head? That was new. He shook his head; maybe he was just used to her voice and had imagined it.

“Should we follow—”

“Stay there!” Ward barked, nervously glancing over his shoulder. “I think this puzzle is set up so the electricity is hyper-reactive to metal.” He continued around the chamber until he was on the opposite side, near the locked exit door. He positioned himself directly equidistant from two of the outer pillars and then, gritting his teeth, inched forward. Neither pole seemed to react to him. Both had thin lines of electricity that barely arced.

“Careful, Ward!” Haley cried.

Beads of sweat popped out on Ward’s forehead. “Just stay there. Please don’t move.” He held his breath as he took the step that would put him directly into the plane between the two poles. Nothing happened. “Shit, man,” he sighed, “this is nerve-wracking.”

“I think it’s working, Ward! The electricity is thicker over here with us!” Lisa exclaimed, finally realizing what Ward had been doing.

“Yeah! Just please stay there.” He chuckled nervously, then inched forward toward the inner ring of poles. On the outer ring, there’d been several strides between them. He’d be close enough to reach out and touch a pole on either side when he passed through the inner ring. He was closer now to Haley and Lisa and all their metal gear. The inner ring had a stronger charge than the poles on the far side of the room. “And I’m closer,” he repeated in a hoarse whisper, slowly moving forward, watching the electricity on the poles, waiting to see if it reacted to him.

When he was just a step away from breaking the plane of the inner circle, he paused and stared at the two closest poles. They weren’t reacting. Could he do this? Was that really the key? Just leave the metal behind? What about the chest at the center? Ward’s eyes grew wide as he looked at the chest, only a few feet away, and realized it wasn’t copper! It was made of pottery painted to look like it had a copper patina. “Holy shit, those tricky assholes.”

“What?” Haley called.

“Sec.” Ward stepped between the two electrified poles, and as soon as his foot touched down in the middle, he squatted to lift the lid of the chest. With a crackling, sizzling, zwapping sound, the electricity on all the poles died away. He could see why: a wire was attached to the inside lid. When he’d pulled it, he’d deactivated the puzzle.

“You did it!” Haley cheered, but Ward noticed she didn’t move.

“Good for her,” he muttered, pleased that she seemed to be getting more savvy.

“What’s our prize?” Lisa called, and Ward could see her inching forward, nervous but eager to see inside the chest.

“I think it’s safe to come over and find out.” Ward looked inside the pottery “chest” and grinned. “I think you’ll be happy.”