by Max Anthony
“What on earth did you cast there?” asked Viddo in a state of mild shock.
“A fireball,” said Rasmus proudly. “A big one.”
“You’re telling me,” said Viddo.
By now, the smoke had dispersed and Rasmus gleefully sped off down the corridor, eager to see the results of his handiwork. In the end office, the walls, floor and ceilings bore the signs of scorching and soot from the burning dust. Where the chest had once stood, there was now a charred, black lump, slightly smaller than chest-sized.
“You’ve destroyed it!” wailed Viddo.
“Not so,” said Rasmus. “Go and stick your dagger into that lump. But be careful. It might still be alive.”
Viddo approached the blackened mass and gave it a tentative stab. He was a master of the blade and it was obvious that he wasn’t poking his dagger into wood.
“What was it?” he asked.
“An undead mimic,” said Rasmus. “And very dangerous if they catch you unawares. I’ve seen some that can spit poison for twenty feet. We were lucky it didn’t strike when we were distracted by the crumbling desk and books.”
“Every day brings something new,” said Viddo. He’d already lost interest in the charred mass and was inspecting the walls carefully. Every so often, he spat and rubbed a clear spot through the soot.
“What are you doing?” asked Rasmus.
“Whoever the owner of this room was, they probably thought themselves clever by leaving that mimic in wait for us. Little did they imagine that by doing so, they in fact betrayed secrets that they did not intend to!”
“Why is that?” said Rasmus, now somewhat confused.
“It’s a well-known fact that a rich man only lays traps to distract thieves from where his wealth is. The presence of that mimic almost guarantees that there’s a secret door in here. And here it is!” he exclaimed.
Viddo examined a tiny patch of the wall for a moment, as if to assure himself that there were no traps. Then, he pressed at a faint indentation. There was a quiet click and a narrow section of the wall slid to one side, silently as if still perfectly greased.
The opening waited before them, dark, beckoning, and just enough for a man to squeeze through without stooping. Rasmus brought the light closer, in order that they could see further inside. It was a passage – winding and with rough walls. It sloped downwards.
“I was hoping for a room stuffed with goodies, I must admit,” said Viddo. “But this looks like it’s worth a look along, don’t you agree?”
“I most certainly do agree,” Rasmus told him.
Without waiting for any more guidance, the thief entered the new passage, with Rasmus close behind.
“Don’t accidentally cast another one of those fireballs in here, will you?” admonished Viddo.
Nine
The passage was damp and unwelcoming. Rasmus scraped his leg on one of the walls and stubbed his toe on a nasty piece of rock which jutted up from the floor.
“Watch your footing,” Viddo whispered unhelpfully, the advice offered far too late to prevent the incidents.
Rasmus hopped and cursed for a couple of steps after the toe-stubbing but was not in reality badly hurt.
“We’re going downwards again,” said the thief. “I wonder if the occupant of that room had a guilty secret that he kept hidden along here. If he had a legitimate reason to come sneaking along this passage, you’d have thought he’d have hired someone to smooth out the walls a little.
The tunnel was long and they had walked for fifteen minutes before it disgorged them into a room. This room was more of a hollowing in the rock than an evenly-shaped chamber. The floor had been made level, but the walls and ceilings had not. It was fifteen or twenty feet along its longest wall and ten feet at its highest.
“This looks like it was a natural fault in the rock,” said Rasmus. “Which someone has found and used for their own purposes.”
That purpose appeared to be torture. There were three metal cages in here, with a quantity of human bones strewn inside. There were other pieces of metal on the floor – sharp spikes and hooks. Several old daggers had been left in a pile.
“I’ve seen these before,” said Viddo, picking up a curved metal hook. “They’re used for pulling things out of places where things should not be pulled. The process is extremely painful, I have been told.”
“This cave might have been a fully-stocked torture room at one point,” said Rasmus. “All the wooden tables and benches must have fallen into dust, leaving only the metal behind.”
“I wonder how long this iron takes to crumble,” said Viddo, tugging at one of the bars on a cage. The bar snapped easily in his hand and rusted flakes fell to the stone with a dull rattle.
“Human bones seem to last a long time as well,” commented Rasmus.
“That’s assuming this cave wasn’t used more recently than the other areas we’ve seen. There’re a surprising number of things that want to kill us, so it would come as no shock if people or creatures have been in here since the ancient civilisation vanished.”
Viddo snapped a few more of the cage bars and poked amongst the bones with the toe of his boot. He knew that valuables could appear in the most unexpected of places and he’d learned to rummage in locations that other adventurers might turn their noses up at. He was lucky on this occasion and a glint of silver caught his eye.
“I’ve found a ring!” he said happily. “Platinum as well! One of the poor sods in this cage must have swallowed it so that it wouldn’t be found. And then here it has fallen after they’ve decayed to their bones.”
“Any hint that it’s magical?” asked Rasmus, peering at it.
The wizard had spells he could use to determine any magical properties, but he preferred to keep them in reserve. Viddo had a thief’s eye for the valuable and could usually decide if there were any magical energies within an item.
Viddo ran his fingers over the ring and pretended to concentrate. “Just a normal ring, I’m afraid. Worth a fair bit though – there was quite a weight of metal used in its making.”
“Keep it safe then,” advised the wizard. “The pickings have been slim so far.”
There was a single exit from this chamber – another unappealing tunnel that was slightly too small for comfortable travel. Neither of the pair particularly wanted to traipse back to the mimic room and besides, they’d found something worth pocketing here, so there was always the chance that they might find more.
This tunnel was much shorter than the last, though it was a little more of a squeeze to enter. After a couple of hundred yards, the tunnel floor rose up on one side, while the other side dropped three feet lower. A wide crack ran along the middle. The disparity increased until eventually, one side was five feet higher than the other and the only way to proceed was through a very narrow opening.
“It looks as though the rock has shifted here,” said Rasmus. “This half has gone up, and this half has gone down”
“I’ll see if I can wriggle through this gap to find out if it’s worth our while continuing, or if we’ll have to go back.”
Rasmus knew that Viddo hated going back, so he was sure that the thief would prefer to risk getting himself wedged if he thought it would stop him having to return.
“I don’t have any spells that can shift a trillion tonnes of rock, mind you,” he told Viddo. “So don’t get yourself trapped.”
Viddo turned sideways and inched his way through. Rasmus directed his light forward, in the hope that it would make things a little easier. After a few moments, Viddo had gone from sight, having inched his way around a turning in the crack. A short while after that, the sounds of his movement ceased as the distance became too great for them to be heard.
The wait was longer than Rasmus had expected. He got bored quickly when he had nothing to do and although Viddo only took half an hour, the wizard felt like he’d been stood there for much longer.
“I thought you’d got lost,” the wizard grumbled.
“It was a bit further than I imagined,” Viddo replied. “Do you want the good news, or the bad news?”
“Give me the bad news, please.”
“Spiders. Lots of spiders.”
“There’re always spiders! Everywhere I go, there’re spiders. If they’re not running up my leg, they’re hiding under my pillow. You mean giant spiders, don’t you?”
“Yup. Giant, undead spiders. It looks like the shift that caused the crack in this tunnel has opened up another crack in the cavern ahead. I couldn’t really see inside it, but it’s a big crevice and they probably got in through there.”
“How giant is giant?” the wizard wanted to know.
“Knee high, I’d say. Probably just possible to burst one if you jumped hard enough on it. It was hard to tell from a distance. Pretty big leg span, though. On the bright side, I’ve seen some spiders that came up to my hip. Pretty nasty, those ones were.”
“What about the good news?” asked Rasmus, his heart falling at the thought of a skittering swarm of undead spiders.
“Someone got down there before us. It wasn’t good news for him, of course, since he’s dead. But he was definitely carrying valuables. I can feel it in my bones.”
“There was an exit from this room, wasn’t there?” asked Rasmus, seeking reassurance. “We’re not going to squeeze through this little gap and then fight with a load of spiders…”
“Leaping spiders,” interjected Viddo.
“Leaping, giant, undead spiders.” This extra snippet of unwelcome news had fairly derailed the sentence he’d been in the middle of and he made no attempt to resume it.
They pushed and wiggled their way forward, with Rasmus building himself up into a huff over what was coming. It wasn’t that he was afraid of spiders, so much as he found them distasteful. And the more unwanted features they had – such as leaping, being undead, enormity and so forth – the more distasteful he found them. In the past, Rasmus had been known to go completely over the top in his efforts to kill arachnids and had once diverted three hundred yards off course just to waste a valuable meteor bombardment spell on a patch of webs he’d seen.
“Little shitbags,” he muttered foully to himself as he did his best to keep up with the thief. Viddo pretended he had not heard.
Had either of the pair been chunkier in build, possessed of a paunch or an oversized midriff, they could have become stuck on more than one occasion. It was fortunate that they did not, since neither was in the habit of carrying grease or butter. After a period of grunting and grimacing, one hundred percent of which came from the wizard, Viddo raised a finger to his lips. Rasmus took the hint and desisted in his plaintive expulsions.
The crevice widened and twisted to the left, giving them a small place in which to crouch as they surveyed the area. Rasmus had extinguished his light earlier, but the webs which festooned this room had an eerie red glow to them, illuminating the nearby walls. Every so often, a dark shape would move rapidly across the webs. There was no sound at all to be heard and Rasmus remembered that he especially despised spiders that moved silently.
“How many spiders?” whispered the wizard.
“Lots of spiders,” came the reply, with its burden of undesired detail.
“They can’t be catching many flies down here.”
“They don’t need to eat - they’re undead. You know full well that they’re just going through the motions of what they did in life.”
“Do you have a plan?” asked Rasmus, aware that he should have asked this question some time ago.
“Plan?” asked Viddo. Rasmus couldn’t see the thief’s face, but he pictured the blank expression that it would show.
“You’re the one that dragged us all the way here for loot!” said the wizard hotly.
“You know I act first and think later!” protested Viddo, as if this somehow excused all of his failings.
A plan popped into the wizard’s head. It was a plan so evil and malicious that a quiet cackle came from his mouth before he could prevent it.
“I’m not going to like what you’re about to say, am I?” asked the soon-to-be-sacrificial Viddo. Another quiet, knowing cackle told him that he was correct in his assumption.
When the details of the plan had been imparted, Viddo sat, shaking his head in the darkness. Rasmus could not see the head shaking, but knew that it was taking place.
“That’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard!” hissed Viddo.
“It’s a splendid plan!” said Rasmus with satisfaction. “Fool proof.”
“Can’t you just throw fireballs in there until they’re all dead?”
“I don’t have an unlimited supply of such spells and as you can see, that cavern is a large one. The further from the centre of the blast you get, the more likely things are to survive. Even if I used up all of my fireballs, there is a chance that some spiders might remain. And I’d like to keep some few spells up my sleeve for later. You never know when you might need an emergency fireball.”
“You’re sure it’s going to work?” asked the worried thief.
“Trust me - I’m a wizard,” said Rasmus, ignoring the quiet choking sounds that came from the direction of his friend’s mouth. “Anyway, I’m ready whenever you are.”
Viddo was now regretting his impetuous desire to plunder the contents of this cave, but was game for most things. He set off across the cavern, remaining out of sight until he was in position. Then, a bright light appeared high above him, close to the roof of the cavern. Rasmus had the spell on maximum power, so its light reached in a globe many yards across. Still it was not enough to fill the whole of the space.
Rasmus peeped out from his place of hiding and saw the scores of webs that clung to the walls and floors, reaching to the ceiling in many places. The cavern was as much as fifty yards long and forty across, with most of the webs clustered at the far end, leaving a clear space, which the thief was shortly going to make use of. The wizard felt a sudden doubt when he realised how many spiders such a cavern could hold. High above, the crevice that Viddo had mentioned was clearly visible, climbing away to who knew where.
“Come and get me, you little bastards!” shouted Viddo at the top of his voice. The sound echoed, but strangely, as though the webs muffled the noise.
There was no sound, but there was movement aplenty. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of night-black shapes swarmed from the webs, covering the ground at an appalling speed. To his credit, Viddo stood his ground until the last moment, though he had to cut one leaping shape out of the air as it jumped for his throat. Rasmus imagined the creature’s sharp mandibles, extended to suck his friend’s life blood away, and hoped that his plan would work.
Having killed the first spider, Viddo hared off back towards Rasmus’ hiding place. Following behind was a carpet of hideous black arachnids, which crawled over each other and knocked their fellows aside in their desperation to taste living flesh. The spectacle was almost enough to make Rasmus’ gorge rise.
Just when it seemed as if Viddo would come so close that he would expose the wizard’s hiding place, he changed direction, with the vast cluster of spiders in his wake. Rasmus crouched out of sight, but not before he’d seen the grim determination on the thief’s face. The wizard poked his head up again when he was sure that Viddo had gone by and saw that the thief was now on the opposite side of the cavern and running hard. When he reached the webs, he turned again and ran in front of them, before he once more changed direction and headed towards the wizard.
The spiders were fast, but so was Viddo. After he’d completed two circuits of the web-free half of the cavern, he’d succeeded in gathering all of the spiders into one pursuing mass. Every so often, one would leap above the others, as if the act of jumping would bring them closer to their prey.
When Viddo had sprinted by for the third time, Rasmus rose from his hiding place and completed the cast of the spell he’d been preparing. His timing was good and with a wave of his hand, he conjured up a thirty feet cube of free
zing whiteness, centred on the undead spiders. From the outside, it looked like nothing more than an unusual snowstorm had magically appeared, but Rasmus knew that inside it would be a maelstrom, with shards of ice pelting downwards.
As soon as the ice storm appeared, Viddo doubled back on himself and ran adjacent to the cloud, without stepping within. Inside, he could see the spiders as they changed direction to follow his path, but in the process ensured they remained inside the magical blizzard. The ice shards within the cloud not only sliced open the spiders’ flesh, but it also slowed them down, ensuring that Viddo was able to maintain a tighter circle around them, thereby keeping them within the spell’s area of effect.
The spell lasted for only twenty seconds, but it was enough. When it faded, all that remained was a pile of frost-rimed spider bodies, many with legs snapped off by the cold. Rasmus looked at the damage he’d caused and knew happiness. He was tempted to approach and kick one or two of them for good measure, but he refrained in case a few of them remained alive and decided to jump in his direction.
“Where’s this loot?” he asked instead.
“Over there,” said Viddo. “You can just make out something metal about three quarters of the way up the wall.”
“Think you can climb it without getting stuck? That was some good work, by the way.”
“Thanks. Yes, I’m sure I can get up there without getting stuck. Only bad thieves get trapped in spider webs.”
With a wary eye on the pile of spiders, they crossed the cavern floor until they reached the area that was festooned in the webs. Their red glow was less apparent under the light of the wizard’s spell, but they glistened with fluids unknown.
“See, look!” said Rasmus. “The webs are wet. A fireball would never have worked here.”
“Fine, fine,” said Viddo, already eight feet off the ground. Had the wizard tried to climb, he’d have likely become stuck immediately, but Viddo was a thief and trained to handle mundane situations such as the webs spun by giant undead leaping spiders. The webs criss-crossed thickly and soon he was hidden from view by their skeins.
