by Zac Gorman
Three Fingers had never been designed to accommodate the mass of people that the Wretched Scrattle drew. The dirt streets had been pitted and ravaged by wagon wheels, and the little bits of vegetation that once grew on the small farms had either been trampled flat or eaten by horses. Litter was everywhere. Fences were smashed, gates broken, windows shattered. It reminded Thisby of the City of Night after the tarasque had gone on its rampage.
For the shopkeepers, though, it had been a period of unparalleled success. Most of them were already looking for ways to use their newfound wealth to uproot their businesses and move to nicer locales, while the few that were determined to stay behind were busy buying up whatever was left. Salty Sam’s, a general store located on the least desirable corner of the town square—downwind of the pig farm—was one of the businesses that had elected to stay.
As the girls approached the store, an old man with the same number of eyes and teeth (one) was standing out front with his arms akimbo, examining the empty store next door, which had just been put up for sale. The paint on the For Sale sign was still wet, and he squinted at the building as if he expected something to change at any second.
“Whaddya think?” he asked the girls as they approached. “I’m thinkin’ o’ expandin’. Knock down this wall right here, have a li’l breezeway connect the two buildings. Whaddya think? Come on, out with it! Tell me the truth!”
Thisby, who’d never met this man before in her life, was a bit concerned that he seemed so eager to trust a complete stranger with such a major life decision.
“I’m not sure,” she said honestly.
“Hmm. Me neither. Yer right. When yer right, yer right. I could never fill that space with goods. In a month, it’d be just another warehouse. Convenient, sure, but that’s a storefront property right there. Be a total waste.”
The man rubbed his bald head, thinking it through.
“’Course I could buy it an’ jus’ rent it out,” he continued. “Don’t s’pose you know anybody lookin’ to rent a storefront.” He chuckled.
“Not off the top of my head.”
He paused and looked at the girls as if he’d just now thought to check and see who it was giving him business advice.
“Ah! Prin—” he started, but immediately cut himself off.
“Hello, Sam,” said Iphigenia.
“I s’pose yer here for yer package! Right this way! Jus’ come in this mornin’.”
Salty Sam walked them over to his shop, which hadn’t yet opened for the day. He unlocked the door with one of the many seemingly identical keys on a large brass ring and led them inside the dark store, which smelled of stale pipe tobacco and incense. Sam reached out a gnarled tree root of a hand and turned a knob affixed to an iron pipe. A row of small gaslight lanterns tinkled to life overhead, casting a warm glow that revealed countless rows of shelves so jam-packed with odds and ends that it felt like they were walking into an oversize version of Thisby’s backpack.
“A friend of yours?” whispered Thisby.
Iphigenia lifted a brass oil lamp off a shelf and studied it. It was intricately patterned and quite pretty.
“Sam’s an old friend of the family,” she said, setting the lamp back down. “Used to be one of the biggest importers of goods from across the Nameless Sea back in the day. There’s not a town in the entire kingdom where the Larkspurs don’t have connections.”
Thisby watched Sam walk on ahead, seemingly paying no attention to them. When he reached the door behind the counter, his gigantic key ring came out again, and he began to search through it. It was amazing he was able to tell the keys apart.
“And you trust him?” asked Thisby, not taking her eyes off the man. “Not to tell anyone who you are?”
“He’s loyal to the Larkspur family. Not to mention that he’s a businessman and naturally, I’m paying him well for his discretion. Besides, I needed somewhere to ship it, and the inn where I’m staying would’ve been much more suspicious.”
“Somewhere to ship what?” asked Thisby, but it was too late. Sam had the door open and was waving them back behind the counter.
Thisby followed them into a small back room, where Sam removed the lid from a crate and presented Iphigenia with a brown paper package from inside.
“Hope it fits, ’cause I’m no tailor!” he laughed.
“What is it?” asked Thisby.
Sam nodded politely and excused himself from the room.
“If you need anythin’, I’ll be up front.”
When Sam had closed the door, Iphigenia presented the brown paper package to Thisby.
“Here,” she said. “I got you something. For your birthday.”
Thisby hadn’t wanted to say anything and was touched that Iphigenia remembered. In light of everything else, turning thirteen had seemed so unimportant, almost selfish to even think about, but that was the thing about best friends: they did all the being selfish for you.
“You didn’t have to,” said Thisby.
“Nonsense. Just open it,” she said.
Thisby pulled the string and unwrapped the package. Inside was a tunic, a shade of blue so dark that it was nearly black, with delicate silver embroidery around the neckline, cuffs, and hem. The craftsmanship was remarkable.
“It’s beautiful. I don’t know what to say,” said Thisby.
It wasn’t entirely a figure of speech. Over the course of her life, the only gifts Thisby had ever received had been from Grunda, and she wasn’t sure if there was a proper response that polite society used other than the obvious “thank you,” which felt woefully inadequate.
“Here. Look,” said Iphigenia, taking the tunic from Thisby’s hands.
Without another word, she grasped the collar of the tunic with both hands and tugged as hard as she could. The seams gave way, and a nice split ripped the neckline.
Thisby gasped.
“Just wait,” said Iphigenia with a grin.
From the spot where the tunic had ripped, little blue threads had sprouted to life and begun weaving around each other in an intricate dance. In almost no time at all, the tunic had mended itself completely. It looked as pristine as when Thisby had taken it out of the package.
“It mends itself!” exclaimed Iphigenia. “Dries and cleans itself, too, if you give it enough time. Knowing what you put your clothes through on a daily basis, I figured you’d get your money’s worth more than anybody.”
“Iphi, I . . .” Thisby trailed off as Iphigenia handed her back the tunic.
“It’s nothing,” said Iphigenia casually. “Besides, we couldn’t have you winning the Wretched Scrattle smelling like you’d just crawled out of the Deep Down, right?”
“Iphi,” said Thisby. She’d wanted to say more, but it was the only word that didn’t seem completely jammed in her throat at the moment.
Thisby stared at the tunic and then at her friend, who was positively beaming. How she, an orphan from the Black Mountain, had gotten so lucky as to become best friends with Iphigenia, the Princess of Nth, was something she could not comprehend. It was beyond her wildest imagination.
“Thank you,” said Thisby.
“Don’t mention it. There are perks to being friends with the heir to the throne,” laughed Iphigenia.
“Not just for the clothes,” said Thisby. “For everything.”
She hugged her best friend.
Iphigenia flushed with embarrassment. Her family wasn’t exactly the hugging kind, and the gesture still felt a bit strange to her.
“I-it’s nothing,” she stammered. “Just be safe in there, okay?”
Thisby withdrew from the hug, brought back down to reality by the mention of what she was about to do.
“You should really get going,” said Iphigenia.
Thisby nodded. It was a long hike to the mountain entrance, and the road would be crowded. She picked up her backpack and noticed that Mingus had fallen asleep in his lantern again.
When they made their way back through the shop, Sam was
nowhere to be seen, but Thisby could hear someone moving boxes around upstairs and knew that had to be him. Lazy dust motes lingered in the still shop air, lit by the gaslight lanterns, and they danced and swirled around the girls as they made their way toward the door. It reminded Thisby of a clockwork snow globe that she’d found once, a sentimental treasure that had been left behind in the dungeon by an explorer who hadn’t made it back. When you wound it up, a pair of ice skaters would spin on a glass pond amidst the drifting fake snow to a tinkling song. Only now she and Iphigenia were the ice skaters, twirling in an endless circle.
She pushed the door open, and the spell was broken by the heat and light of the morning. A cart of cabbages rattled past, and Thisby could smell that they were already well past their prime. This was the real world. She took a few steps away from the door and into the dusty street before she turned.
The Princess stood tall in the doorway with a strange smile on her face. It was both playful and dead serious at the same time, the smile of a master sword fighter heading into a duel.
“Now there’s just one thing left for you to do,” said Iphigenia.
“What’s that?”
“Win.”
Chapter 12
Waves of people undulated and churned outside the archway at the foot of the Black Mountain. Thisby was afloat in a sea of bodies, jostled around, drowning in the odors of nervous sweat and freshly sharpened steel, of extinguished campfires and the desperate, last-minute meals that had been hastily prepared over them this morning.
She was closer to the back of the crowd than the front. The colorful tents that had covered the ground only last night had been folded and tucked away by morning. The stakes had been pulled from the earth, and the wagons had all but vanished, leaving behind only tracks and donkey droppings. The party was over now. The Wretched Scrattle was beginning.
Thisby pulled out a small notebook and flipped through it, not really reading the pages. It was mostly sketches of dungeon plants. Next to her, a boy only a few years older than herself kept bumping into her backpack as he shifted his weight from side to side, humming nervously. His sword was really more of an over-polished pigsticker, and with a cursory glance, Thisby could tell that he’d buckled his hand-me-down armor incorrectly. He’d obviously tried to don it himself and hadn’t done a very good job.
“Excuse me?” she said.
The boy stared straight ahead.
“Excuse me, but you’ve put your armor on all wrong. I could help you with it, if you’d like,” she offered.
“Maybe he’s hard of hearing?” offered Mingus.
He’d been quiet up until now, and it was pretty clear that he wasn’t comfortable with the crowd, either. His muddy ochre color—one that Thisby jokingly called “wet snot”—was a dead giveaway.
“Excuse me, would you like some help?” Thisby asked louder.
When there was still no response, she reached out to tap the boy on the arm to get his attention, but an older woman smacked her hand away.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. “Worry about yourself!”
“I was just trying to—”
“Don’t touch him!” she spat, clawing again at Thisby’s outstretched hand.
Thisby withdrew her hand and locked eyes with the older woman but immediately regretted her decision. The woman’s eyes were sunken and wild. She looked dangerous. It was a look that Thisby had seen before in cornered gnolls and sickly fire bats.
“If he’s too stupid to buckle his armor properly, that’s his own problem!”
Her words dripped with venom. Thisby took a step back and bumped into someone behind her, who gave her a shove. The crowd was restless.
“I was just trying to help . . . ,” began Thisby, but she was having a hard time finding her words in the face of such nastiness.
“Are you stupid?” she rasped. “The more treasure he gets, the less there is for us!”
“Come on,” said Mingus. “We should go.”
“Not yet!” said Thisby, finding her voice.
She shoved her way over to the boy and tugged on the misplaced strap.
“This one goes underneath,” she said. “Are you listening?”
At last, the boy shook himself awake and stared at Thisby as if he’d just woken up from a dream. He began to fumble nervously with the strap on his breastplate.
“Oh. Th-th-thank you,” he mumbled.
The woman hocked a loogie on the ground and glowered at Thisby. It was obvious she was saying something quite nasty under her breath, but Thisby couldn’t make it out. She was already wading through the crowd to distance herself from the awful woman.
Thisby couldn’t help but think of the crowd of Deep Dwellers she’d encountered last year. These people didn’t have the same level of desperation or sadness, but she could still sense their fear, and it was powerful. But there was something else there as well. Another sensation mixed in with the fear. It was one that the Deep Dwellers hadn’t possessed. A kind of hunger or excitement. Greed. She could practically taste it, and it made her ashamed to be a part of it all.
The sound of a booming horn silenced both her thoughts and the crowd.
Everyone froze.
The Wretched Scrattle had begun.
Thisby dodged through the throng of people, trying her best not to be crushed in the stampede. She’d never seen so many people so eager to rush headlong to their likely deaths.
Up ahead, as the crowd funneled in through the enormous blackdoor at the base of the mountain, she could hear an occasional zapping sound followed by intense wails of pain. It didn’t take long for Thisby to connect the dots. In Three Fingers, she’d overheard some adventurers claim they’d witnessed a warlock trying to sneak through the blackdoor, only to get zapped so hard with a bolt of green lightning that all that was left behind was a pair of smoking old boots. It was undoubtedly one of the many fail-safes Marl had designed to ensure that no magic users entered the Wretched Scrattle.
When Thisby heard this, she’d gotten a little worried about Mingus’s slime healing magic, but Grunda had explained to her last year that there was a difference between what Mingus was able to do and the sort of magic practiced by wizards and their ilk. The metaphor she’d used was that Mingus’s healing was more like rubbing baking soda on a splinter to draw it out and that “proper” wizard magic was more like growing a new finger that didn’t have a splinter in it to begin with. Thisby wasn’t really sure she understood what Grunda had meant by that, but she’d also never claimed to understand magic, nor did she want to. What Thisby did know, however, was that a smoking pair of boots was something to be cautious about. Actually, there was a lot to be cautious about, and exploding warlocks were probably the least of her worries.
Thisby had made up her mind early that the best way to survive the Wretched Scrattle was to think like Marl. Cold, analytical, uncompromising. And if Marl’s strategy involved stopping adventurers as soon as they entered the mountain, the first thing she would do would undoubtedly be placing a series of simple traps on the other side of the blackdoor. Probably something as straightforward as a pit full of spikes. It was a crude trap, but it would serve to weed out the weaker adventurers who were never going to make it very far anyway. It made sense in an awful way. The overeager people would be near the front of the pack, and they would also be the types to not look before they leapt.
It bothered Thisby to think like this. She hated the idea of treating people as if they were disposable, even if they were desperate jerks eager to slaughter monsters in exchange for gold. Most of them weren’t evil. They were just greedy and hoping to make off with an armful of treasure before they met their untimely demise. Still, whether it bothered her or not, Thisby had no choice but to think like the Overseer if she was going to make it to the top of the dungeon.
Thisby worked her way toward the blackdoor portal but stayed near the corner. She was banged around by the tidal wave of adventurers, most of them more than twice her size, but wh
en she finally managed to reach the entrance and peeked her head in, she realized that her caution had been well advised.
Just as she’d suspected, immediately on the other side of the entrance into the Black Mountain was a pit—or rather, what used to be a pit and was currently a pile of unhappy adventurers stacked atop each other in a very deep hole. The pit had been successful. So successful that it was now was overflowing with people who were trying to crawl out while some less considerate adventurers used them as a human bridge. The people on the top of the pit seemed to be doing okay—aside from the light trampling, of course—but Thisby shuddered to think about what it must be like for the people trapped at the bottom.
She inched her way around the edge of the pit, trying not to look down. She wished that there was some way to help the poor people who’d fallen in but knew there was nothing she could do now. She was going to have to get used to the feeling. There’d be a lot more fallen adventurers along the way, and she couldn’t save them all. Not if she wanted to win the Scrattle and save the dungeon. Thisby took a deep breath and hurried on toward the commotion ahead.
In all her years as gamekeeper, Thisby had never heard such a racket. Screaming and cursing and the clanging of swords roared down the hall, echoing through the smoky torchlight haze. As she walked on, several adventurers came bursting through the fog. They were headed in the opposite direction, back toward the blackdoor through which they’d entered only moments ago, realizing that maybe adventuring wasn’t really for them after all.
Up ahead, the tunnel widened into a chamber Thisby recognized at once as what the denizens of the dungeon called “the basilica.” The basilica was a long hallway, a hundred feet wide, with ceilings even taller than that. The length of it was lined with crumbling stone arches and pockmarked walls that provided plenty of nooks and crannies for monsters to hide. From the Overseer’s point of view, it made perfect sense to funnel people through here to thin the crowd a bit.
