by Deck Davis
“Ah,” said Rolley. “You’re right, buddy!”
Etta looked confused. “How?”
“Like this. May I, Barny?”
Barnard nodded. “Be careful.”
“That’s my middle name.”
“Your middle name is Elmo, and you’re the least carful person I ever met. Just get it over with.”
Rolley, holding his dagger, pricked Barnard’s thumb. Blood welted from the tiny wound.
“I guess that settles it,” said Tripp. “If player-killing wasn’t enabled, you wouldn’t be able to hurt him. Not only that, but even people in the same party can hurt each other. We better be careful. You especially, Barnard. Your spells might get us killed.”
Rolley looked around now, as if people might have been listening from some unseen crevice. “I guess that means we better be careful who we trust.”
“Guys,” said Etta.
The list of rules disappeared, replaced by new text spinning into golden light in front of them.
You seem to be grasping this. Good. Some of the dullards who’ve been here already, I’m surprised they can pull their pants up. Never mind solve the riddle to get in. Oh well; most of the idiots are dead.
But you, my fine adventurers, have just one last thing to learn. One last riddle. The riddle that begins your journey, and the riddle that ends it.
You, my friends, must know the true purpose of the tower. And the true purpose is:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“The true purpose is what?” said Etta.
“Something that we need to work out,” said Barnard. “Reminds me of hangman. Letter E, please. Logically, that’s always the best letter to start with in hangman.”
Nothing happened, which was a shame. Tripp was almost hoping it really would be that easy.
“Guess we’ll learn more as we go.” He eyed the text now. “Anything else you want to add, Boxe?”
This isn’t Boxe.
“Come on. You can’t fool me.”
Fine, but I have changed.
“Lies,” said Tripp, and he walked into the text, dispersing it, and then faced the others. “Don’t trust a word the tower tells us from now, because Boxe is here. If he’s here, there’s a reason for that. Etta, do you think you could ask Lucas? Send him a message, or something?”
“I told you, he’s out there living it up. He’s out of the loop now.”
“Then we trust only each other from here on out, okay? We stick together, we help each other, we leave nobody behind.”
Barnard put his closed fist into the center of them all now. After a few seconds, he looked around. “I thought we could put our hands in the middle and lift them all together and shout something. No?”
Rolley, sensing his friend's awkwardness beginning to shift a gear, put his fist on top of Barnard’s. “Great idea, buddy. Call it teambuilding. Orc? Bull?”
“Minotaur,” said Etta.
She put a furry hand on top of Rolley’s, and Tripp completed the process by tapping his big, green fist on top of hers.
“Good luck everyone,” said the rogue. “Look out for each other, stick together.”
His voice echoed through the tower now, filling the atrium. It traveled down the endless passageways either side of them before becoming silent.
When they separated their fists, they noticed movement in their peripheral vision.
Figures were approaching from the hallways either side of them. Even so far away, Tripp could see their pale faces and dark robes. His mind flashed back to watching them eviscerate a high-level, well-equipped guild.
“The monks,” said Etta.
Rolley drew a dagger from a sheath on his belt. For all the use it would be against the monks it may as well have been a feather, but Tripp understood his instincts. “Think they’re coming for another dead body?”
“No,” said Tripp, with understand coming to him. “They’re for us. We’ve been standing here for a while; I don’t think the tower likes indecision.”
“At least we know which way to go,” said Etta, looking up at the crooked staircase ahead.
The monks were walking at a slow pace. With their heads bowed, silent except their footsteps and the swish of their robes on the stone, they were unnerving. Tripp couldn’t help wondering what their significance was to the tower. Why were they here? Did they create the tower?
It probably wasn’t a good time to ask.
More movement caught Tripp’s eye, but this wasn’t the monks. This was something up high, something that had just moved from an alcove twenty feet above them.
It was an orb made of glass, with a golden face inside.
He couldn’t believe it.
“Bee?” he said.
The orb paused for a moment. The golden eyes inside it watched him, but its lips stayed closed.
“It’s you, isn’t it?”
He didn’t get an answer, because the orb took off, swooping high up until Tripp lost sight of it.
Etta had watched it too. “You know what thing?” she said.
“I think that was Bee. She was my guide orb the first time I played. We became friends, I guess you’d say. But I thought Lucas took her out of the game and he was using her at home as a kind of smart-device.”
“Lucas took a bunch of Soulboxe assets, but they made him give most of it back. They had a contract, and most of the things he’d created for Soulboxe were included.”
“Makes sense, I just didn’t expect to see her.”
“She probably didn’t recognize you. Guide orbs get assigned to a player. Once their playthrough ends they get assigned to another. Their minds get wiped in between.”
Tripp remembered his adventured with Bee. He recalled how many times they’d discussed that very topic; that Bee hated having parts of her memory wiped. Almost as bad as the wiping was her being aware of it. At least if she’d been ignorant to it, it wouldn’t have bothered her.
Now she was back, assigned to another player in the tower. It gave Tripp a weird feeling. They really had become friends in his last playthrough. Knowing she was now assigned to carry out another player’s orders made him a little jealous.
Yeah, he was jealous of a digital orb in a computer game. He needed to get it together.
“Let’s take the stairs,” he said.
Rolley was the first up the stairs, using his rogue agility to leap four at a time. He’d reached the top before Tripp placed his feet on the first tread.
Barnard was a little faster, and the bottom of his yellow robe dragged on the dusty stone. Tripp and Etta brought up the rear. She lumbered up each flight, taking the twists with the speed of a bus turning a tight corner, huffing as she climbed further.
“Guess minotaurs and orcs have one thing in common,” said Etta. “Oh to be a rogue right now. Or an elf, maybe.”
“If we’re dreaming, I’d be a pigeon.”
“A pigeon?”
“And fly up the stairs.”
“If we’re talking wishes and you have to be a bird, you could at least be a falcon or an eagle. Pigeon. Jesus…”
Tripp judged them to have taken twelve flights of stairs now, and there was no door in sight. Sweat poured down his forehead, trickled over his nose, lips, and chin, and snaked under his steel armor.
He leaned on the banister and looked down. Through the gap in the middle, he could see the stairs they’d taken.
There, all the way at the bottom, were the monks. They walked in pairs, going up the stairway at a slow pace, heads bent so that all Tripp could see was their black hoods.
Rolley had disappeared from view now, going so fast he’d left even Barnard behind.
“Rolley!” called Tripp, looking up. He couldn’t see him on any of the upper stairways. His voice echoed back to him now. Olley, ley, ey.
“You guys okay?” answered the rogue.
“How far up are you?”
“I don’t know,” shouted Rolley. “Twenty floors? Twenty-five?”
“Come join us back here while we figure this out,” said Tripp. “I get the feeling that the stairs are just going to carry on and on.”
He turned to Etta now, who was leaning against the banister and breathing so heavy that it came out in snorts. Barnard took the opportunity to sit.
“Not the time to relax,” said Etta, in-between bullish grunts.
“At their pace, the monks will take twenty, thirty minutes to reach this level. By which time, we will have moved on.”
“Fair enough,” said Tripp. He sat beside Barnard as footsteps came from above them. Soon, Rolley joined them. While the rest were sweating, Rolley looked like he could go another hundred floors.
“Anything up there?” asked Tripp.
“Nothing.”
“We’ve got monks following us and cutting off everything below. I’m guessing that if they caught us, it wouldn’t be to shake hands and invite us for brunch. But the staircase just isn’t ending.”
“Maybe that’s the point of the tower. You have to climb to the top, and most people die of exhaustion.”
“You remember what the tower said. We know there’s a purpose to this, and we know how many letters are in the purpose. See?”
He willed the text they’d seen to float in front of them now, and he gave the others access to see the message.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“Three words, fifteen letters. Could be absolutely anything.”
“Well, not anything,” said Tripp. “The phrase reach the top is only eleven letters, so that can't be the purpose.”
“Ah.”
“If you’re telling me I don’t have to walk up more stairs,” said Barnard, “I’ll love you forever.”
“We still have the monks following us. Until we know where to go, we keep climbing.”
“Actually,” said Rolley, staring intensely at a wall. “I know where to go.”
CHAPTER 16
Gallo
He was about to give Bee up for dead when she swooped over to him, her golden face set in an expression of confusion.
“Well?” he said.
His heartbeat in its bone cage inside his armor, the sound amplified by the acoustics of the hallway. He was high up in the tower, taking advantage of the respite between one room and the next. Before the monks showed up.
Thud-thud-thud went his heart, and he wished it would shut up. It made stealth quite impossible.
“You were right,” said Bee, swooping beside him. “The tower has fresh meat.”
“Who is it?”
“Who are they. Four of them, Gallo. And I recognized one of them, I think.”
Now, this was interesting. For Bee to recognize one of the new tower divers, it must have been a player she’d seen whilst traveling with him. Everyone knew that orbs’ minds were wiped in between plays.
“I don’t know his name,” said Bee. “I can’t remember seeing him. He just seemed familiar.” She faced Gallo now.
He always found her golden face to be innocent-looking. It had come as a surprise the first time she told him to stab his enemies until they were drained of blood and then cut out their hearts and make a soup.
“You’re acting strange,” he said. “Even for you.”
“Have you ever looked at something and felt like you’d been there?” she said. “Or listened to a bard song you’ve never heard before, but it’s as if you know the tune?”
Gallo remembered something now. The memory so sudden, so out of the blue, that it sent his pulse racing.
He remembered when he was a kid. Back when things were tough, before the operations, back when his classmates were mean as hell.
He was a lonely boy. He just wanted friends. It was corny, but it was true. Then, one day, he’d met another kid called Seamus who had the same condition as him, and he lived on the same street. They’d spent every second together, becoming best friends in what seemed like days. He was so happy to have a best friend.
But then Gallo had woken up, and he'd realized his brain had played the cruelest trick of all on him. It was all a dream. One so real that it followed him out of sleep. He found himself missing his best friend Seamus who had never even existed.
That was in the past, and things had improved a thousand-fold now. He had friends outside the game, and he even had a friend within it.
“Yes,” he told Bee. “I know exactly what feeling you mean.”
She smiled at him and swooped a little closer, settling next to him. “The orc…it’s like I knew him. I’d seen him before. The longer I stared at him, the more I could almost remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Something about a hammer and a place. I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Gallo. “Who was he with? Tell me everything. Classes, races, weapons. Their demeanor. What they said. If they have any plans.”
Bee relayed everything to him. Gallo asked her question after question until she got a little exasperated with him. He had to remind her that this was just his way; he liked to be prepared.
By the end, he knew he was facing an orc, minotaur, a strange-looking wizard, and a thief or rogue of some sort. They looked as prepared as could be, but not enough for the tower. Then again, as Gallo had discovered, there was no way to be truly ready for this place.
“What do you think?” said Bee. “Go take care of them now? While they’re new here and still looking around like newborn lambs? We could cut their heads off and use them to terrify our enemies.”
“Nope. We wait. Let them get through a room or two. That’ll knock eight shades of crap out of them, and it’ll give me time to plan. When we’re ready, when they’re weak, we’ll go knock seven shades of hell out of them.”
CHAPTER 17
Rolley was leaning against the wall surrounding the staircase. It was made from white marble. Torches placed every ten feet gave off a soft glow and cast a sheen over various pictures carved into it.
Some faces seemed to become more monstrous the further up the tower they went. Carvings of people terrorized by some unseen horror the artist had chosen not to show. It made it even more sinister.
Despite the grim subject matter, the carvings were exquisitely done. Tripp was no art critic, but even he could see that. As horrific as the tower was, it had a beauty, too.
“We’ve been doing this wrong,” said Rolley. “We need to stop walking.”
“Is it the carvings?” asked Tripp, annoyed he didn’t spot it before Rolley. “Do they tell a story, or something? A way to the top?”
Rolley shook his head. In one quick motion, he punched the wall, tearing a hole in the stone the size of a pumpkin.
Etta stared with her mouth open, showing her big gums and her minotaur teeth. “How the hell did you do that?”
Rolley nodded at the rubble surrounding his feet. He picked up a baseball-sized piece, held it between his index finger and thumb, and then squeezed it.
The marble squashed down into a dust that covered his leather trousers.
“It’s an illusion,” he said. “The walls aren’t marble. They aren’t even really here. That’s why once I realized it, I could mentally command them to break and squash. Once you’re aware of an illusion, you can master it.”
“But how did you know?”
Barnard joined his friend and rested his hand on his shoulder. He gave a smile full of pride. “Because my buddy is a rogue, and rogues can sense traps and illusions. Now, out of ten, how glad are you that you found us?”
“Six for you,” said Etta, “and nine for Rolley.”
Just like that, the walls around them disappeared. The marble went, the carving erased, the beauty fled. It left a thinner staircase surrounded by grey walls made from stone that was wet to the touch. It looked like it was weeping, with the thin trickles of water that ran down it. It smelled of age, of year and eons gone by. Tripp couldn’t help feeling a shiver rush over his skin, even in his steel armor.
Rolley took the steps two at a time
, followed by Barnard whose robe trailed over the stone became dirtier.
Tripp began to sweat under his metal armor. He’d imagined he would be used to it by now, but he felt sweat on his armpits and the back of his neck. He began to wonder if its Defenseweave properties of healing him with damage was worth the heat rash.
Then he saw Etta behind him, struggling under all her fur, and he decided it could be worse.
“A door!” shouted Rolley, his voice seeming to ping back and forth on the walls as an echo that got quieter and quieter.
Tripp looked up. He could see through the gap in the middle of the stairs. They went three more turns before reaching a roof that hadn’t been there before Rolley dispelled the illusion.
As well as that, he couldn’t hear the monks anymore. They must have stopped following. Or were they an illusion too?
No, they couldn’t be. An illusion didn’t decimate a guild of armed fighters. Illusions didn’t carry corpses from the tower. Maybe it was because they’d found the door. Making progress in the tower kept the monks happy.
Whatever the answer, it made Tripp happy, too. He lumbered up the staircase, his steel armor jostling and his boots thudding on the stone floor. Finally, he stood in front of the door.
It was a little small. Very small, actually. The door was as tall as his knees and barely wider than him.
“Maybe the people who built the tower were hobbits?” said Barnard.
“Or maybe they just think of lots of different ways to make it really, really uncomfortable, and they do it. The Tower of Minor Annoyances,” said Tripp.
Rolley grabbed the circular, black iron handle. “Ready?”
“Wait a second,” said Tripp. “I’ve learned from the last dungeon I was in that you don’t just charge into a room. We only get once chance, right? If we die, that’s it. I’m guessing once we commit to a room, we can’t back out. We need to try and find out what’s in there.”
“How?” asked Etta.
Tripp knew his inventory off by heart, and he knew that resting in there was a little glass jar of psychic essence. The essence had belonged to a psychic dwarf named Rita who had disintegrated before his eyes.
