After a while of butt-busting work, the far shore drew near. Keith attacked the chain with renewed energy, no longer feeling the pain in his hands or the soreness in his shoulders and back. Mowing lawns had nothing on hauling a barge across a river for hours. Everyone gave the chain a final, strong tug, and stood there breathing hard as they glided in.
The raft collided against the pylons with a heavy thud.
“We made it,” gasped Sarah.
Again, Elliot spread the minor healing around. Keith opened and closed his hands, working out the soreness from hauling chain. He wanted to pass straight out, but didn’t trust this raft house any more than Sarah had trusted the other one.
Not one word of complaint arose from the group when Sarah resumed walking without asking if anyone wanted to sleep there.
31
The Ruins of Gygax
They made camp two hours later after entering a patch of forest. Sarah used her magic to watch over them all night. When Keith awoke the next morning, she remained seated at the base of a tree with her eyes half closed. He sat up and leaned close, mesmerized by her face.
“What are you doing?” asked Sarah a moment later in a quiet tone.
“I failed my magic save. Your beauty has entranced me.”
The nature energy glowing green within her eyes faded, while a tint of red colored her cheeks. She came out of her half-awake state and gave him a bashful grin. “You must not’ve spent much time around girls if I’m that pretty to you.”
“No other girl matters to me.” He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles—and felt lame for doing it, though he didn’t let it show.
Sarah wiped at her eye. “I’m sorry if I’m like this. It’s not easy for me to think happy thoughts right now.”
“I understand. When we first started playing, I got this mental image of Kyra. After the first game, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I went on the internet and searched about you going missing. They had an age-progression from like 1990-something of what you’d look like at twenty. It was Kyra. Exactly how I saw her in my mind. Well, not exactly. I mean, I pictured Kyra with red hair like what you put on her character sheet, but you’re much prettier with dark brown hair.” He couldn’t help but touch her hair.
She looked up. “What’s an internet?”
“Umm. The internet is… I can’t explain it to you without showing you. Umm. Think of it like a magic oracle with all the information you can get to like from a crystal ball. Only, the crystal ball is shaped like a monitor.”
“Monitor?” asked Sarah.
“Little TV.”
“Oh. David had an Apple IIe. Is it like that?”
Ashur started to say something, but Elliot dragged him off, whispering, “Dude, give him space.”
Keith shrugged. “I don’t know what that is.”
“A computer thing. It looked like a lunchbox had a baby with a typewriter.” Sarah stood and stretched. “It had a couple games, but it was really expensive.”
“Oh. Like everyone has computers now.” Keith winced when he got up. “Hey El, you got any spells to fix soreness?”
“I don’t think so. Only health point damage, disease, poison, and stuff like stuns and sleep.” He shrugged.
“Right.”
“Food!” Tira pulled two long loaves of bread out of the Bottomless Bag along with a hunk of cheese as big as her head that she could barely lift.
After the basic, but quite welcome meal, Sarah again led the way north. She walked fast, keeping a hand on her sword while looking back over her shoulder every minute or so to make sure no one had fallen too far behind.
Elliot struggled to keep up, but didn’t complain. Once he looked close to passing out, Sarah stopped for a short break. Keith took the opportunity to walk a few paces away and water some bushes. Seconds after he started, the bush moved. Keith froze, staring into the eyes of the goblin he’d been peeing on. The three-ish foot tall creature didn’t seem too happy at the situation. Since he already had a weapon equipped, Keith redirected the stream again at the goblin, which backpedaled, spewing curses at him in some incomprehensible language of snorting gurgles. It drew a dagger from a sheath in its rope belt and glowered. Two more emerged from the shrubs nearby, stalking closer.
“Goblins!” shouted Keith, hurrying to put himself away.
At least the creatures let him finish.
He yanked the round shield off his back and drew his metal sword.
Sarah, Ashur, Elliot, Carlos, and Tira ran up behind him, weapons at the ready.
The three goblins leaned back, their eyes growing large. Menace faded to pleading. Carlos called a small sphere of fire into existence over his hand, tossing and catching it.
Screaming, the goblins ran away among the trees.
Keith laughed. “They do have lame morale rolls, don’t they?”
“Six on three,” said Sarah. “Goblins don’t even check morale unless they outnumber humans two to one. They auto-fail.”
“No one should be alone.” Carlos shook his head. “Even for a pee break. Especially Tir. They’d grab her and run.”
Tira glared at nothing in particular, then clung to Ashur while eyeing the woods warily, whispering, “I still like the game. But I don’t want to be in it anymore. I’m scared.”
“We all are,” said Keith. He stepped closer and patted her shoulder. “And going home is the plan.”
“Wow.” Carlos blinked. “You’re getting into that whole paladin deal.”
Tira stuck her tongue out at Carlos.
Elliot farted.
“Aww, man.” Ashur pulled Tira with him and hurried back to the campsite.
“Dude,” said Keith, fanning the air. “Chanters don’t have access to Fetid Cloud. That’s a necromancer spell.”
Sarah leaned closer to Keith and muttered, “Your friend really should go to a doctor.”
Hand over his mouth, he rolled his eyes in response as if to say, ‘yeah, seriously.’
The group returned to their rest.
Perhaps ten minutes later, Sarah nodded toward the north. “Ready?”
“I’d say ‘what’s the hurry,’ but I agree with her.” Elliot groaned. “If we find a stream or something, I am thirsty as hell.”
Sarah smacked her lips. “Yeah, me too. I’ll find one. Come on.”
Twenty minutes or so after they resumed walking, they came to a stop at the edge of a small creek. The water barely managed a foot deep at the midpoint, but no one cared about swimming. The stream worked fine for drinking. From there, they continued crossing the forest for several hours until the trees came to an end at a vast meadow dotted with wildflowers and tall, pale green stalks. Here and there, glowing orbs of light in pastel colors glided along inches above the tips of the grass, weaving and dipping about.
Sarah waved Tira over and pointed. “Faeries. Don’t try to go after them, though. These are Meadow Darters. They’re skittish, and if they feel threatened, you’ll wind up hanging from the branches of a tree with all your stuff scattered hundreds of yards in all directions. Even your clothes.”
Tira gasped.
“They won’t hurt you, but you’ll wish you never scared them.” Sarah winked.
“Are they always mean?” whispered Tira.
Sarah tugged her along, continuing off into the meadow away from the drifting lights. “No. There are ways to go about making friends with faeries, but we don’t have the time.”
“Okay.” Tira gave her a wounded look. “I wanna go home, too.”
Grim determination flattened Sarah’s eyebrows. Keith took a deep breath, anxious but reassured by her confidence. He much preferred this Sarah to the frightened, hopeless, lost soul from the Bansford dungeon. Truth be told, he’d been every bit as scared, but too worried about her to think much about his own feelings.
As one hour bled into the next, they entered a field of tall grass, which only left Tira’s head and shoulders over the top. The continuous uphill march slowed Sarah’s pac
e to a purposeful trudge. The taste of ocean salt flavored each breath and the distant crash of waves upon rocks roared in the distance.
“Please tell me we don’t have to go on another boat,” said Ashur.
Sarah shook her head. “No boats.”
The meadow came to an abrupt end at the top of a long swath of sea cliffs. Sarah veered to the left and walked in line with the edge, keeping a safe distance away, though Keith couldn’t resist the temptation to at least peek. He scaled the last few feet of meadow, which angled upward at a sharp, waist-high curve, almost a natural wall. Waves churned against dark rocks at the bottom of a sheer cliff at least a football field’s length down. Each crash of water threw a glittering spray high into the air, infused with rainbows. Thin trickles of foam seeped among the cracks, running back to the sea as the water receded. Salt teased at his tongue and his nose filled with the presence of the ocean.
Keith leaned back, having had his fill of such a sight in mere seconds. “Wow. That’s… far. Ash, keep Tira away from the side.”
“I wanna see, too,” she muttered.
Ashur took his advice and held her hand tight, fighting her continuous effort to run up to the end of the meadow. Sarah walked onward, heading down the grassy slope toward a pale brown dirt road, which the group followed long enough to need another break. As the sky dimmed once more from the endless march of afternoon to early evening, a large expanse of broken rocky buildings came into view up ahead at the end of the road.
A large wall of light brown stone spanned the mouth of a pocket valley, where a crumbling city nestled between flat, grey walls. It looked as though a god had taken the universe’s largest ice cream scoop and gouged out space for a town in the side of a mountain. The buildings had a Dwarven aesthetic, though the brown material and overall design looked more Middle Eastern. Cracks and holes marred almost every surface except for the outer wall, making the city feel centuries-abandoned.
“Welcome to the city of Gygax,” said Sarah. “It was once a great metropolis of trade where Humans, Elves, and—mostly—Dwarves gathered in peace. Fourteen hundred years ago, the Cult of Dargir conducted a ritual in the catacombs beneath the city and set loose a demonic horror that some people believe is still down there. Few have set foot within the walls of this city since.”
She turned her back to the ruins, looking at everyone with an expectant glimmer in her eye.
Keith nodded. Elliot picked his nose. Carlos raised an eyebrow.
“There’s a big demon under it and you want us to go in?” asked Tira.
“No, it’s like eighteen floors down. Impossible to stumble across by accident. And no, we’re not going down there. That’s a level twenty game.” She gestured at the wall. “City of Gygax? Anyone?”
Keith shrugged. “Sorry. I know you’re hoping we get a reference to something, but I’m missing it.”
Her eyebrows tilted up in the middle. “Really? You guys never heard of that name?”
“Nope,” said Elliot.
Shrugs went around.
“Wow…” Sarah blinked. “He like only invented the whole idea of these types of games. C&C is much different rules wise, but the concept is the same. Every fantasy RPG that exists owes its life to him.”
“Cool.” Keith gazed at the city in the distance. “So you made this up?”
“Well, no. Not the whole world… That’s in the sourcebooks. I added this city to my campaign as a tribute. I had it all prepared and stuff for when the characters hit level twenty, but we never made it that far before the book trapped us.”
“The gateway we need is in there?” Keith moved up to stand close at her side, still staring at the distant, crumbling buildings.
She put an arm around his back. “The portal isn’t in the city. It’s on the other side of it. The only way to get to it is going through or flying around. There’s a passage out to a sea cliff at the back of the city. That’s where the gate is.”
Keith shifted his gaze to the left, at a stretch of thick pine forest about a half-mile from the gates of Gygax. “That’s where you ran.”
She prodded him forward. “Yeah. Come on. I don’t wanna have to do that again.”
He snagged her hand and pulled her to a stop, drawing her close. “You won’t have to.”
“Kiss her!” shouted Elliot.
Sarah blushed and cracked up giggling.
Laughing too hard to do anything with his lips even close enough to kiss-worthy, Keith gave Elliot the finger.
He and Sarah hurried up the road toward the ever-growing fortress, the others close behind. By the time they reached the gate, the true scale of the wall became apparent. It had to be over ten stories tall, almost perfectly flat, and topped with crenellations where archers could fire down on attackers. Few cracks marked it, suggesting that no one had been foolish enough to attempt to siege such an impregnable city.
“Tira,” said Sarah. “Need you.”
She scurried forward.
“Opening the gate is something I designed for the rogue. You’ll need to climb up to that little hole there.” She pointed at a square opening twenty feet off the ground. “It’s a short tunnel, but there are three traps, one every ten feet. At the end, a grating above you will lead into the control room. The city had loads of magic, so the gate is enchanted. There are three orbs on a table, red blue and green. You have to tap them in a specific order like a combination.”
Tira nodded.
“You’re going to ask my little sister to climb two stories up a wall and deal with traps?” asked Ashur.
Sarah looked at him. “There’s no other way in unless you can break down a three-ton gate. Besides, we all still have our character’s skills and abilities—just not their physical stats. She has traps skill. Even if she can’t really understand it, when she tries to do something, it will work.”
“Hey don’t forget…” Keith patted Tira on the head. “She busted us out of jail. She can do it.”
Tira beamed. “Okay. What’s the code?”
“Red twice, green once, blue twice, green once,” said Sarah.
“R, R, G, B, B, G,” said Tira, and continued repeating it.
The nine-year-old approached the wall and stared up. After a few minutes, she noticed something and grasped a gouge. She set her foot in another bit of damage, and climbed. A pattern of pockmarks formed an almost-ladder straight to the opening.
Ashur grabbed Keith, clinging like a nervous mother watching their child do something dangerous.
“Relax, man. She’s got this.” Keith patted him on the back.
A minute after Tira scrambled over the edge of the hole and crawled out of sight, a metallic clank echoed from the shaft along with a short, high-pitched scream.
“Tira!” shouted Ashur.
“I’m okay! It scared me.” Her voice floated out from the opening. “I set it off on purpose. It’s loud!”
Ashur squeezed Keith. “Mom’s gonna kill me if she gets hurt.”
“I won’t tell her she spent hours sneaking around among corrupt town guards all alone.”
The flat stare Ashur gave him made Keith laugh despite being nervous as hell.
Crunching metal, something brittle snapping in pieces came from the hole, but Tira didn’t say anything. Moments after, another metallic clang followed, like a crowbar dropping on a stone floor.
“She’s in the control room,” said Sarah. “That had to be the grating.”
“What kind of traps did you put in that hallway?” Ashur glanced at her, twitching.
“Snapping jaw trap, masher, and a patooey.”
Ashur tilted his head. “What the hell is a patooey?”
Sarah made a spitting gesture that sounded like patooey. “If the trap goes off, it spits the person out the tunnel like a crossbow bolt. Trap doesn’t do any damage, but a twenty-foot fall does.”
“Nice.” Keith snickered. “That’s awesome. And evil.”
“And that’s my sister,” shouted Ashur.
Keith’s laugh stopped. “Oh. Crap. Yeah.”
“Don’t worry, man. She built her character right.” Elliot walked up to the giant stone slab of a gate.
“Any monsters in here?” asked Keith.
Sarah looked guilty. “Umm. Just some skeletons.”
“Level twenty skeletons?” asked Carlos.
She nodded.
“Crap.” Keith kicked at dirt.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” said Sarah. “They don’t animate until dark, and the passageway that goes down into the crypt is only visible under moonlight. During the day, this place is an abandoned ruin. You could have a picnic in there. It’s only at night it turns into a high-level adventure.”
“We’ve got about twenty minutes before dark.” Elliot looked up at the sky.
The ground trembled and a massive cloud of dust sprayed off the gate. As the earth quaked under their feet, the enormous portcullis of solid stone split open down the center and slid apart to either side. Dazzling bright blue magical sparks lapped between the separating halves, tinting the air with the flavor of ozone.
Everyone cringed from the noise.
With a final slam, the gates reached their widest point and stopped, leaving an opening three giant trucks could’ve fit through side by side. A few seconds later, Tira wandered out of an opening on the left a short distance inside, her hands clamped over her ears and a sheepish expression on her face.
Ashur hurried over to her.
“I thought I broke something at first when everything started shaking,” said Tira.
“No, you did great.” Sarah ran over and hugged her.
Tira’s eyes almost bugged out of her head. “Thank you for telling me there were traps every ten feet. The middle one I didn’t see right away. I had to keep looking and looking.”
“Well, this place was geared for level twenty.” Elliot raised both eyebrows. “You’re lucky to see them at all.”
The Cursed Codex Page 25
