CHAPTER 17

The door at the far end of this room turns out to be much grander than the rest. The fine-grained black wood is smooth and soft to the touch, and yet resilient to scarring. Its center, wrought in blue metal, bears a complex form, circles within circles. What draws my attention is the little pedestal at its side. It has an indentation made to fit something small and currently absent. This is where the blue light, steady and ghostly, streams from.

Other than running my fingers on the door’s surface, I don’t dare do much else. The last few doors are still fresh in my mind, and the fact that this one isn’t attached to any obvious mechanisms only makes me doubt it all the more. I’m sure the trap is magical, and I say so.

Rue hums. “I wouldn’t say trap.”

He’s riding on my shoulder with two tendrils, which I think of as his feet, circled tightly around the loop of my backpack.

“What do you mean?”

I take a little ripple in his shape for a shrug.

“The others just went through it.”

“It looks important,” I insist.

“It’s weird,” Rue says. “Most times, people just go through it all careful, and I can hear them whisper and mutter to each other even after the door swings shut.” Rue’s humming acquires a thoughtful rhythm. “But sometimes, not very often, they came back. I could hear them through the wall, sounding hurt, and I called out for them, but they always ignored me. If it was one person, they opened the door and were gone, just like that.”

“Right,” I say. “With no sounds or anything, just—?"

“And sometimes,” Rue says. “They would come back in twos or threes and they would fight and kill each other. Those were the worst times. I had to hear all of it.”

“Kill each other? Why?”

“To decide who got to go through the door.”

In the following silence, I try to piece all of the new information together while Rue buzzes somberly on my shoulder. His wilting hum sounds appropriate for a funeral.

“You mean this Challenge has remained the same for years” I finally ask.

“No, no,” Rue snaps out of it with a gargle. I think it’s a kind of laugh. “They just like to keep this bit. Everything else changes a lot. Sometimes you get pierced with bolts, other times a big great hammer flattens you down.”

I honestly can’t tell if he’s joking.

And I don’t know whether I can trust him, this thing that I found in a dungeon next to a corpse. He’s a strange little creature, that’s for sure. The glassy black surface sits perfectly balanced on my shoulder, almost spherical, as if deep in thought. Then it shivers with a hum.

“Anything wrong?” Rue asks, vibrating close to my ear.

“Just thinking about what you said. It seems there are two ways to open this door. One of them is mundane, the other…”

The other is worth killing for.

“…isn’t. In any case, there were never any hammers or bolts or anything, were there?”

“Not that I could hear.”

Which isn’t the same as saying the Godtouched didn’t prepare something new and exciting this time around. Well, then.

Slowly, I press my right hand against the door and give it a little push.

Door opens up a crack. No worrying mechanical sounds follow, no strings come into view.

“That was easier than I—"

A scream.

I jump back and let go of the door, which swings closed. The scream, distant at first, approaches fast, and then cuts off suddenly to be replaced by the sound of running feet echoing along terrified voices. Though the door muffles everything, the sounds grow louder and louder.

Something thumps against the door. Whatever it is, it fumbles with the simple latch, yelling. I reach for my hammer with trembling hands, two thoughts contesting for attention in the forefront of my mind.

Someone needs help, I think, and, hammer in my good hand, reach with the other to help them with the latch.

Something is trying to get inside!, comes the following thought, hot on the previous one’s heels. My hand stops before it reaches the door and hangs treacherously in the air, waiting.

Before I can reach a decision, another sound, much louder sound than the rest, freezes me to the spot. It’s the sound of hooves, followed by a terrible hiss that fills the air. A scream. A thump, and the door shakes. Screams, feet, another thump against the door, and then hooves again, first slow, turning in place, then quick, gaining speed, disappearing.

It all happens within a few seconds. Without realizing, I’ve retreated halfway down the room, heart galloping, hammer hanging useless by my side.

“What was that?” I ask.

Rue doesn’t answer. His hum travels up and down the scale of intensity, jarring and increasing my anxiety. I grit my teeth and walk up to the door again, resting my ear against it before giving it the smallest push.

The door resists. Not like the one before, with the pit hiding behind it, but like something, something soft, is lying on the other side. When I push harder, shoulder against the wood, the obstacle drags a little and lets me peek beyond the door. The corridor is well illuminated with more torches and a dash of soft blue light that mirrors the one on this side. There is a heavy scent in the air.

Well. Here goes.

I heave. The door opens a little, catches, then slowly the resistance begins to give way.

“All right,” I puff. “Just… a little… more…”

An arm comes into view. It’s not attached to anything except a short mess of bone and gristle. I feel the bile climb up in the back of my throat. The heavy smell is blood, I realize, metallic and distressing. I can almost taste it.

I squeeze into the corridor and see the entire morbid scene. It looks like two bodies. Two boys, savaged beyond what something natural could do. Limbs were severed from torsos, faces still bear the expression of all-consuming panic. I absorb the details mechanically, years of accompanying Dala to the beds of accident victims coming to the fore, blocking everything else. Whatever killed them, it did so in seconds. They didn’t try to fight it.

I didn’t try to help them, I think.

The bodies carry nothing apart from the Black Sword uniforms they were issued. I can’t remember the boys’ faces from the arena, but they must have been there, in that sea of green apprehensive expressions.

When I stand back from my examination, I tell myself the trembling in my hands comes from Rue’s soft buzzing. Much too soft.

This corridor is very short; a quick passage connecting to a larger and grander one. A bloody trail leads away from the mess of bodies and into the wider path. To the left, where the corridor stretches unsullied, there is a well-illuminated room. Its door has been permanently removed from its hinges and lies in two clean pieces on the floor. Inside, there is a table full of supplies, like the one I found before.

“More supplies,” Rue says in a whisper. “You can use those, can’t you, Malco?”

Instead of answering, I look to the right, where the trail of blood continues. The corridor curves beyond sight, showing only a few closed wooden doors. The path of blood becomes dimmer after a few meters, but another pattern surges. Bloody footprints, they appear at first, but they’re much too large and round to have come from feet. Hoofprints, maybe. Strange sounds echo down to us, a strange cacophony of yelling and hissing.

I start down the corridor. Rue immediately buzzes in alarm, and is ignored.

Every door I pass is closed and shows no blood marks. I pick up the pace and try to step on the blood, hoping to evade any traps that might be lying in wait.

“Malco, the monster went this way,” Rue says timidly. “You can tell with the blood.”

“Shut up,” I huff. The sounds are louder now. I hear shuffling, scraping, strange meowls. And above it all, little panicked yelps. My feet hit the stone floor hard. Images of Katha and Rev, wounded and facing a terrible beast, course through my mind.

Suddenly, the curving corridor opens up into a larger room. I skid on the floor, almost losing my balance, and catch a dash of short red hair. A short, pale figure, dangles from a short wooden walkway running along the top of the room, legs kicking against open air. Right under them, missing them by inches with outstretched hands, is a roaring, jumping slice of nightmare.

Its lower half is hairy, strong, ending in hooves like millstones. Midway up its squat body, the hair abruptly ends and is replaced with a reddish scaly torso, ripped with muscle, topped with head like a bald sphere bisected by an incredibly wide mouth. A single large eye takes up most of the remaining space. All in all, the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen after Bago.

“Turn,” Rue whispers into my ear. “Turn very, very slowly, and—"

The creature jumps again with a bellow that shakes the walls. The figure up in the beams pulls up, yelping, but can’t quite scramble to the top. The monster misses by a hair. Lucky. I’m moving before I realize it.

“No, no, no!” Rue buzzes.

Ping!

The iron spike clatters to the floor. The beast looks up, confused. I don’t think the hit even registered as pain, though I got him square in the head. The pale-yellow eye, with a deep black pupil in its center, focuses on me, and I feel the fear spreading through my body and catching hold of my limbs. The thing takes a step towards me. I don’t move. Everything feels very distant, like it’s happening on the other side of a waterfall. So a beast from hell is approaching me, licking the lipless skin around its mouth with a tongue that looks much too long. What does it have to do with me?

“—RUN!” Rue yells in a burst of vibration right in my ear.

The world immediately comes into sharp focus. Red hair in the wooden walkway. Murderous ugly bearing down on me. Right.

I dash back into the corridor. A bellow sounds, hooves pound on stone, and the chase begins. Rue’s buzz flares as doors pass in a blur along the gently curving wall. The cyclops eschews turning in favor of barging into things, each time scraping against the wall and hissing hungrily after me. I can almost feel its bloody breath on the back of my head.

Suddenly, a dizzyingly loud cascade of metal onto stone and I’m lighter. Flying down the corridor.

“What—what was—”

“Spikes gone,” Rue buzzes. I hadn’t even felt him move down to my backpack. “Do you have a plan?”

“Uhh…”

“It’s gaining!”

I speed up, taking the energy from I don’t know where. My lungs feel like they’re about to burst, and I can feel the looming threat of the monster growing, a step from catching up…

“Turn!”

I almost lose my footing as I turn into the black door passage, the corridor illuminated in faint blue, but the heavy beast clatters past, arms swinging wide and missing me. The mangled bodies are still where I left them. I stumble into the room, letting the door swing closed behind me.

“Plan!”

“Uhh…”

Rue vibrates rapidly in place, making my teeth clatter.

The stomping of hooves outside, hammering against the flagstones. I retreat down the room and take out my hammer.

I can fight it, I tell myself.

The hooves stop outside and the latch shakes. To my surprise, the creature doesn’t break the door down or even try to barge in, instead pulling it with almost reverential care, the bodies beyond offering almost no resistance in the face of its enormous strength. It steps inside, blocking the entire passage with its thickness, and then turns to the door again. Its mad yellow eye scrunches up in focus and worry as it navigates the difficult world of latches. Finally, the black door closes again, caressed by thick, clumsy fingers.

When the cyclops turns, it’s all madness and fury again. The jet black pupil in the sea of yellow is just like the puzzle-image on Rue’s cell. The beast’s otherworldly shriek, something between a howl and a hiss, makes the blood ripple in my veins. A sharp tongue lolls out of the cyclops’ mouth and tastes the air between us. The monster is in no rush. It knows I’m trapped.

“Plan!” I yell, and the beast steps forward and raises a muscled arm.

As it lunges, I jump sideways into the pit room to my left. I have to push myself sideways, and for a moment the rope backpack gets stuck to the jamb before a knot on my shoulder falls apart, letting all my worldly possessions crash to the ground in a jumble.

Thank the gods for shoddy knotting. I dive inside.

I dropped my torch somewhere in the corridor, and this room is dark as pitch. All I can see as I scramble through the floor is the crack of torchlight streaming through partially open door. Suddenly, the light winks out. Big, gnarled fingers curl around the side of the door and push…

The door sticks. My back bumps against the supply table. After a mad search of its surface, my hand closes around a heavy stick. The club.

Shriek. Clatter of hooves outside as the monster takes a step back and then charges the door. It doesn’t resist. Light bursts into the room and a big yellow eye is suddenly suspended in midair, hungrily focused on me.

It flinches. Confusion spreads across its face when it realizes, in a split second, that there is no floor, that solid ground has been replaced with a short drop onto long, sharp poles. The powerful hooves find no purchase in thin air. The cyclops reaches for support, grabs at nothing, and falls into the hole. The noise is immense, hissing shrieks mix with the skewering of meat and the snapping of wood. Rue’s buzz adds to the cacophony, drowning the worst of it.

When it stops, I see the eye is there still, held above the deadly drop by one hand against each side of the pit. The muscled body strains, pushing, but the bloodied, sharp ends of spikes stick out in several places along the monster’s body and stop it from climbing up. As I stand up, the cyclops looks around himself, pitifully confused.

Until the black pupil lands on me, and a low hiss escapes through long, sharp teeth.

As best as it can, the thing reaches for me. The neck strains forward, the tongue darts through the air as if tasting the distance that separates us.

The club comes down, aimed at the monster’s hand. I’m not thinking. I’m not thinking.

Crack!

The creature slips a little. I can’t make out the damage, but its clear that there was some. The smell of blood permeates the air.

In desperation, the thing shoots out its tongue. I twitch sideways, but still it slashes me across the cheek, right below the eye. It feels like a hot coal is being pressed against my skin. I ignore it. I must. The club comes down again, held with both hands, and catches the center of the monster’s hand.

The cyclops holds on, looking at me with nothing but hate and mad determination in its sick-yellow eye, pulling itself up, whipping its tongue about.

And then it can’t anymore. With a third hit the hand slips, broken beyond its strength. The monstrous body slips into the hole, and there’s a horrible sucking moment, a spearing of flesh and muscle.

The shriek flares, dwindles, and dies.

After a moment where all I can do is shake to the rhythm of my overworked heart, I step carefully around the hole to retrieve a new torch. By its light, I see the monster spread across the thick, sharp stakes on the bottom of the pit. Its eye was split by the tip of one, and its mouth remains grotesquely open.

Before my eyes, the monster’s corpse begins to glow, and then, slowly, to dissipate, turning into pale yellow mist. There is a clatter in the darkness, I realize with a small, apparently undisturbed part of my brain. But that part is very small indeed. Before I know it, then the monster is gone, faded into thin air like it was never there to begin with.

I only realize the extent of my nervousness when I drop the club and fall back against the wall. It takes a few moments for my breathing to stabilize.

“That,” says Rue. “Was a very bad plan.”

The chattering of my teeth stops me from answering immediately.

“How happy are you that it worked?” I ask eventually.

Rue hums a quiet, happy note.

I pick myself up onto unsteady legs and grab the club again. I notice the thing’s metallic end was shaped by a smith into the vague likeness of a bear’s head. I spare a prayer of thanks for the man’s craftsmanship, mortal or Godtouched.

It takes me a moment to retie the faulty knot on my rope backpack. Then I sling it over my shoulder and look into the corridor before walking out. By my count, I’ve opened four doors in this place and almost died three times. I leave the torch behind and don’t pick up another one. The dungeon is, so far, well illuminated. After a moment’s consideration, I leave the hammer as well; I’m not letting go of my club and I’m sure it can drive a few nails home in a pinch. Finally, I stop by the black door, hand resting on the latch.

“Ready?” Rue asks.

“No.”

I turn the latch all the same.