by Zac Gorman
Now, however, there was a problem. Several of them, actually. One of them being that there was no way of knowing how far out toward the center of the lake they were. Another being that they had no boat. The thought of swimming out to that dark and distant rock only to look up and see those big yellow eyes staring back at her was more than Thisby could bear.
“I can get them,” said Vas, already removing his boots. “It’s not far.”
Thisby wondered if he’d read something in her expression that’d made him offer to go himself. It seemed too kind a gesture for her to believe it.
“It’s not safe,” said Thisby bluntly. It was a serious understatement.
“I didn’t come to the Black Mountain for ‘safe’! I came for danger! Adventure! You know, that whole deal!” said Vas as he dropped his second boot onto the rocky island.
Thisby knew she should say something more. That she should explain what kinds of horrors were waiting out there in the dark. But somebody needed to retrieve the books, and she knew it couldn’t be her. So instead she did something that made her thoroughly ashamed of herself . . . she did nothing.
With a splash, Vas hopped down into the freezing inky water.
“Woo! That’s brisk!” he said, laughing. “Okay, give me the light.”
He stuck out his hand, and it dawned on Thisby what he meant.
“What? No! Are you crazy?” said Mingus.
“Well, I can’t see in the dark!” said Vas.
“Thisby . . . ,” pleaded Mingus, but Vas was right. There really wasn’t another way.
“He can’t see in the dark,” Thisby repeated unhelpfully.
“You can’t be serious!” blurted Mingus.
If she hadn’t lost her bag, she could’ve given him one of dozens of waterproof candles she’d lugged around with her for just such an occasion, but as it stood now, Mingus was the only source of light in a very dark place. There wasn’t another option. Thisby wasn’t thrilled with the idea of sending her best friend off with a relative stranger, but what choice was there? Even if she went herself, Mingus would still have to go.
“Please, Mingus. It’s the only way,” she said, ignoring the other way she’d just considered.
Mingus said nothing, and that was good enough for Thisby to pick up his jar by the handle and pass it to a shivering Vas.
“Just be brave,” said Thisby, crouching down to be near his level. “You’ll be okay. It’s a short trip. We survived the Deep Down, remember? This is nothing.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Vas.
“Please be careful,” she said to Vas.
He nodded.
Thisby wondered if he mistook her concern for Mingus as concern for himself. It seemed likely, and she didn’t care for the implication, but she didn’t bother clarifying. He was risking his life, after all, and she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Mingus gave Thisby one last look that was either disapproving or pathetic, it was hard to tell, and then they were off.
Thisby watched Vas swim away as Mingus’s sad blue light faded into the distance. Soon, his light was nothing more than a lonely, distant star in a black blanket of sky, and Thisby became suddenly acutely aware that she herself had been swallowed by absolute darkness. She waved vigorously, but she could no longer see her own hand in front of her face. So she listened instead. There was the rhythmic splashing of Vas’s swimming, and then somewhere, far beyond Bero’s nervous breathing, she heard a noise like grass parting, followed by something very big slipping into the water.
After her run-in with the ammit years ago, Thisby had done some research. What she learned didn’t do much to assuage her fears. Her instinct had been correct: ammits ate people. But so did a lot of monsters; trolls, ogres, wyverns, minotaurs, vampires in their own way, even water horses (to reiterate . . . much more dangerous than the name implies). Actually, most of the monsters in the dungeon would eat people if they were hungry enough. But the information she’d found contained one crucial difference: ammits ate only people.
Thisby found it hard to imagine there were enough adventurers to feed a creature this size, but she certainly didn’t feed it, so the food must be coming from somewhere. She’d never dared ask Grunda. She did her best not to think about the ammit at all. Which had been a fairly successful strategy up until now.
The splashing of Vas’s stroke stopped.
Thisby didn’t want to think that the ammit had already gotten Mingus and Vas, but the thought was unavoidable. She heard Bero’s breathing getting shallower. He must’ve heard it as well.
“Did you hear that?” His voice was shaking.
Thisby groped in the dark and found his arm.
“Quiet. Stay still,” she whispered.
It was the most rational plan she could come up with. Thisby listened to the silence, straining her ears to separate the sound of Bero’s breathing, the occasional dripping of stalactites, and anything else. There was something else, but she couldn’t be sure what it was. Water moving.
A scream tore through the cavern. It was Vas.
A light blazed to life, bright red, like a hot coal in the darkness, and what Thisby saw made her heart drop. Vas was swimming for his life toward her, holding Mingus aloft with one hand, and behind him, standing on the island where he’d just been, was the ammit.
Everything went dark again, but she heard Vas’s frantic splashing and cursing as well as the sound of the ammit diving back into the water. It wasn’t being careful to conceal its location now. When the light came back, Mingus and Vas were closer to her and the ammit was gone. Vanished below the water. She saw ripples. The light went out again.
The next thing Thisby heard was Vas swearing and splashing near the edge of their small island. She fell to her knees and felt around frantically in the darkness, cutting her fingers on sharp rocks as she followed the noise. In the darkness, she found Vas’s arms and pulled to help him out of the water. Mingus’s light came back on, and Thisby realized what’d happened: Vas had dropped him. Twenty yards back out into the water, Mingus bobbed like a buoy, and in the glow of his red light, Thisby saw the water around him begin to swirl.
Without thinking, she dove into the water to be engulfed by the most complete darkness she’d ever known. The shock of the cold hit her hard enough to take her breath away. By the time she found it again and began swimming, Mingus’s light had come back on and the crown of the ammit’s head had breached the black water behind him. Thisby swam with everything she had, every ounce of her fighting with absolute clarity of purpose to go just a little faster, to swim just a little harder. There was no runny jelly in her arms and legs now. There was no time for it.
Mingus blinked his light on and off. Red. Black. Red. Black. Red. Black. With every flash, Thisby watched the ammit emerge more from the water. It felt as if time had slowed down.
She was finally there and grabbed ahold of Mingus’s cold, wet jar, pressing it to her cheek so she could feel him sliding around through the glass.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thisby. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
This time Mingus stayed lit. He needed to see his friend. For as long as possible. He needed to focus on her face so that she would know that it was all right.
The ammit loomed over them. The monster opened its colossal jaws, and Thisby could see the rows of jagged teeth and smell the ancient decay. For a reason she didn’t understand, she didn’t close her eyes or look away. The world slowed down and then . . . something incredible happened. The ammit continued past them. Thisby felt the pull of the tide as the enormous beast dropped back beneath the water. She felt her thrashing feet tangle in its mane and kick the bumps on its leathery back as it brushed past.
The taste of relief turned sour in her mouth when she realized where it was headed.
“No!” she cried.
There was no reply.
With Mingus in hand, Thisby began to swim back toward the island, following the wake of the ammit. She
begged her tired muscles not to quit on her. Not now.
Mingus lit brighter than ever, and in his light she could see the island where Bero was desperately digging through his spell books as Vas lay exhausted and shaking on the ground, too tired to move.
“Bero!” she yelled. “It’s coming!”
It wasn’t much help, but it was all she could do.
A scream tore through the cavern. It was Vas.
Bero finally decided on a book. He was busy peeling apart the waterlogged pages when the ammit resurfaced only a few feet from where he stood. Thisby splashed closer, her arms screaming at her, aching with cold and fatigue. She was close enough now to see Bero’s face and the surprising look of calm that had come over him. The conjurer looked down through half-lidded eyes and began to recite words from the spell book. A glow began to emanate from his body, shining out through his skin as if he were a sheet of parchment held in front of a lantern.
The ammit came to a stop at the edge of the island, the tip of its long snout no more than a few feet from Bero, whose glow grew stronger and brighter, until Thisby saw him take one hand, reach it into his chest, and bloodlessly withdraw his own heart. Bero held it out in front of himself as if it were any other mundane object—a rubber ball, a muffin, a teacup—and the ammit sniffed it with its massive nostrils for several seconds before it opened up its mouth and gently took it from the conjurer’s outstretched hand as if it were a loyal dog receiving a treat from its master. Thisby thrashed and kicked as hard as she could, but by the time she’d reached the island, the ammit was gone, sunken below the water, and Bero had fallen to his knees.
Thisby was too winded, to stunned, to speak for some time. She simply lay there, panting, waiting for her breath to return and staring at the conjurer, who refused to return her gaze. Instead Bero’s eyes remained fixed on a single spot on the unremarkable ground.
“What . . . ,” she gasped.
“I . . . did . . . what I did,” he said, bereft of emotion.
“But how?”
The conjurer stood up and sighed, shifting his focus to something unseeable in the darkness out over the water.
“I never used the thing anyway,” he said. And with that he seemed to snap awake, turning to Thisby for the first time and offering her a sad smile that seemed oddly lacking in any actual sadness.
Vas had been unconscious throughout the whole affair, exhausted from his swim, and only now did Thisby think to check to make sure he was breathing, which, thankfully, he was. She relaxed her shoulders as she laid her hand across Vas’s chest, feeling it rise and fall.
She patted her pocket and was relieved to find that her scrobble had survived her dip in the lake. Sticking her hand into her pocket, she was also surprised to find that her tunic was completely dry to the touch. She’d almost forgotten it was magic and smiled at the memory of receiving her birthday gift from Iphigenia.
Everything else might be terrible, but at least she was dry. It was good to be thankful for the little things.
Chapter 15
The first person to reach the door of Castle Grimstone was a thirty-four-year-old farmer from the river town of Ranth by the name of Auggie Mudd. When he’d reached the impassable steel door, inlaid with thousands of skulls and covered in a tangle of jagged spikes, he found a bare spot on it and knocked. Because it was only polite.
Auggie’s success had been the result of pure dumb luck. Or, perhaps more accurately, pure dumb probability. If you put enough rats in a maze, eventually one of them will make it to the end. That’s just how probability works. And in the Wretched Scrattle, probability had worked in favor of Auggie Mudd.
The usual way someone entered the Black Mountain was to take the long, winding path up through Feldspar’s Folly—the mountain pass created by one of Castle Grimstone’s chief architects, Matthias Feldspar, whose ghost still haunts it to this day—all the way up to the large front gates. Once inside the gates there were two paths, one that led down into the Black Mountain and the other that led up into the courtyard of Castle Grimstone. What this meant was that your typical adventurer began their exploration of the dungeon at what was essentially the very top of the mountain, just below the castle, and worked their way down. For this reason, the weakest monsters were at the top of the dungeon and the more dangerous ones were at the bottom. This might seem obvious. Dungeons 101 stuff. However, the polar opposite was true during the Wretched Scrattle.
The reason for this was, quite obviously, because the goal of the Wretched Scrattle was to reach the top of the dungeon and Castle Grimstone. If the adventurers had gotten their start at the usual entrance, the tournament would have been over in a matter of hours. So Auggie Mudd and the rest of the participants in the Wretched Scrattle had begun their journey at the base of the mountain, where the blackdoor gate opened.5 Starting a trip at the ground level of the dungeon and traveling all the way up to the gates of Castle Grimstone—assuming you didn’t encounter a single monster and made every correct turn—took an absolute minimum of a day and a half. Which was exactly how long it took Auggie.
Auggie Mudd knocked even louder, but there was still no response. He looked around to see if there was some kind of lever or switch, possibly a door chime, and when he couldn’t find one, he grew frustrated. Auggie couldn’t help but think that maybe this dungeon was sort of tricky after all. Up to this point, he’d been pleasantly surprised by how easy everything had been.
After searching for a few minutes, and considering giving up all the while, Auggie found a button to the right of the door that was shaped like a little silver skull. That was probably why he’d overlooked it, as the whole skull motif of the door made it blend right in. Very tricky indeed.
He pushed it.
There was a loud buzzing noise followed by a voice he didn’t recognize. It sounded tinny and distant.
“What is the secret of magic?” asked the voice.
Auggie scratched his chin.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
There was a brief silence followed by mechanical whirring and clicking noises, and in a flash, hundreds of tiny balls of light streamed into the chamber through the eyeholes of different skulls. Auggie screamed as the balls of light began to sting him, swarming and darting faster than any physical creature had a right to move. He threw his hands up over his head and crouched down on the floor as the stinging grew more intense. It was no use. Auggie Mudd was dead. It wasn’t fair or deserved or justified. He was not a particularly bad man nor was he a good one, and his death was not an act of divine retribution, nor was it a punishment for his hubris. His luck had just finally run out.
Thisby turned to the two boats behind her and signaled to Vas and Bero that they needed to crouch. The path ahead was low, and they needed to keep their hands on the oars to steer around the rocks. They’d been at this for hours now, and every muscle in Thisby’s body ached from the stress of it. The good news was that she’d already bounced the magical glass boat off several rocks and had yet to see any chipping or cracking on the hull, so it seemed as if Bero had been correct about the durability of his spell. Unfortunately, there were still plenty of other issues to contend with.
Navigating the Floating River with a map was difficult enough. Doing it by instinct and memory was next to impossible. Still, the river was undoubtedly the quickest way back to the top of the mountain and therefore their best chance of winning the Wretched Scrattle. Thisby had done her best to push thinking about what she’d do if she won out of her mind, but the thoughts kept creeping back in. First things first, she’d have to undo all the changes that Marl had implemented as Overseer. She’d bring back Grunda, of course. Better yet, she’d offer to make Grunda the new Master of the Black Mountain, and then Thisby could go back to her job as gamekeeper, only this time with somebody competent as her boss.
She wondered how Jono was handling her responsibilities while she was off running around the dungeon. She’d quickly come to think of the skeleton boy as a friend,
and she was worried about him. She’d had her whole life to prepare for her tenure as gamekeeper, but Jono had only trained under her for a few weeks. It was a lot of responsibility for one person to take on. Too much.
Her boat passed over a rock as her thoughts wandered, and the jolt of it nearly threw her overboard. Thisby grabbed the sides of the boat and tried to steady it, calling back a warning to the others. She couldn’t help but think about how much easier this all would’ve been if she hadn’t lost her backpack and notebooks. Thinking about her poor backpack sitting forever on the bottom of Long Lost Lake was heartbreaking. At least she still had a heart to break. Unlike Bero.
She’d wanted to know more about the spell he’d performed to appease the ammit, but it still felt too early to ask. Admittedly, though, it was hard to know how long was an appropriate length of time to wait before asking somebody about a monster eating their heart.
She heard Vas cry out when the rock that had struck her boat a moment ago got his next. She shot back a dirty look, but the tunnel was far too dark for him to notice. Thisby didn’t care that he was scared, but did he have to be so loud about it? The last thing she wanted was to attract unnecessary attention. There was no way to know what was lurking beneath the water, or in the shadowy nooks as their boats drifted ever forward along the never-ending river.
Thisby was relieved when the boats came out of the narrow passage and into a wide, dark cave and she could stand upright again. Her knees popped as she stretched her legs.
“Mingus,” she whispered, and he grew brighter.
It was the same cave where she’d seen the catoblepas what felt like a lifetime ago. The gamekeeper in her was initially happy to see that the algae she’d spread in the water had proliferated quickly and formed a nice, nutritious scum on its surface, but just as quickly she realized that it’d only grown so well because there was nothing around to eat it. The catoblepas had all disappeared. Without asking permission from the others, Thisby rowed her boat over to where the beasts had been previously.
