by Jeff Crook
“What now?” Cael asked, as he rose and dusted himself off. He picked up his staff and thumped it against the shining floor, testing its solidity. It rang like metal, echoing loudly.
“I wouldn’t do that again,” Pitch said. “No telling what it might alert.”
Cael nodded. Pitch checked the edge of her sword, then stepped forward, tentatively, ready to snatch her foot back if anything untoward happened, like the floor turning to molten lava, or springing sword blades. She knew to expect anything, but nothing happened. She took another step, then looked back at the elf.
“Come on,” she whispered. “It’s safe.”
The passage took them in a large circle back to their starting point. As they approached the small section of ordinary floor where they had started, they paused and glanced up the shaft they had descended, then continued ahead for a second try. On this circuit, they were more careful to look for secret doors, hidden latches, sliding walls, anything that might indicate a way out of this circular maze. During the third trip around, Cael made it a point to touch each magical globe with the tip of his staff, hoping that one of them might be the key. But once more they came around to their starting point.
Pitch stopped and slammed her sword into its sheath. “This is pointless,” she said dourly, as she gazed once more up the descending shaft “And now we can’t even get out.”
Cael scratched and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “The thing to remember,” he commented, “is that this place was made by dwarves. To succeed, we must think like dwarves.”
“Do you mean, think low? Perhaps the exit is at dwarven height?”
“Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe we are just going the wrong way,” the elf said as he turned and looked back the way they had come.
“What wrong way? It is a circle,” Pitch argued.
“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is a spiral,” Cael said. At his companion’s skeptical look, he explained. “On the surface world we tend to think in two dimensions, this way and that. But aquatic races like the sea elves, and tunneling races like the dwarves, always think in three dimensions. Try to think of this place as a metal spring. Viewed from above it is a circle, and if you run your finger around the top, it is a circle. But turn in the other direction and go the other way, and your finger should find the spiral of the spring.”
“That’s nonsensical,” Pitch said scornfully. “If we went round the other way, of course we would end up right back here, just like all the other times.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to try,” Cael countered.
With a deep sigh for the foolishness of all elves, Pitch motioned for him to lead the way.
And when they had been walking for about ten minutes, her look of scorn had changed to one of obvious admiration. Cael tried not to notice it, but as he led the way, a bit of a swagger appeared in his step.
Finally, the passage began to level out, and the last magical globe came into sight. Beyond it opened a vast dark chamber. Pitch gazed longingly at the magical globe hovering teasingly just beyond her reach. Cael’s earlier efforts to knock one down with his staff had proved fruitless.
Side by side, they entered the mysterious chamber. Pitch prudently drew her longsword, while Cael peered about, trying to penetrate the shadows with his elven sight. The lights from the passage winked out behind them. High overhead, at the apex of the dome-roofed chamber, another magical globe began to glow, shedding a dim illumination over the large circular chamber. They began to see…
Pitch gripped the elf’s shoulder, her indrawn breath a hiss. He spun, ready for whatever danger she had seen, only to find her grinning like an idiot. “This is it!” she whispered excitedly. “This is the Chamber of Doors! We made it, just you and me! One more challenge, and we triumph!”
“What is the final test?” Cael asked.
“We must choose a door,” she said, sweeping the circumference of the room with a gesture. Spaced regularly around the room stood seven doors, each set at one of the cardinal points. The eighth point was occupied by the passage through which they had entered. Four doors were made of stone, two of iron wrought without seam or weld. The seventh door appeared to be made of purest silver. It glistened in the dim light. “Behind one of them lies the treasure chamber of the Kal-Thax.”
“And the others?”
“Death,” she answered grimly, all traces of merriment vanishing from the hard lines of her face.
Slowly now, they walked the circumference of the chamber, each silently contemplating their choice. No single door held more promise than the others, at least not at face value. Each was massive, built on the grandest of dwarven scales. One of the stone doors was circular, like a great plug of rock. It was roughly hewn, made to look like it was part of the surrounding stone, but Cael quickly spotted a tiny keyhole in the very center (Hammerfell had told him many times about the doors of the dwarven city of Thorbardin, and how they were fashioned). Another door seemed but a stone etching of a towering arch. In the lines of the etching glimmered a thin vein of silver, while the door itself was covered in ancient dwarven runes. The other two stone doors faced each other across the chamber. Both were carved fantastically—one with fauns and centaurs, elves and unicorns; the other with hideous creatures leering up out of the Abyss.
The iron doors also faced each other. Neither bore any sign or device its contents. One door had no visible lock at all, while the other was draped in anchor chains and mighty padlocks. Lastly was a silver door. It faced the entrance to the chamber, and was the smallest of all the doors. Upon closer inspection, it proved not to be made of silver at all, but of the scales of some silvery fish, perhaps. Yet they proved hard as granite and as difficult to mar. This door had three locks of obvious complexity. Pitch tried to examine them more closely, but the light was too dim to see anything in detail.
“You have made your decision, then?” he asked her.
“No, I was just studying the problem,” she sighed as she sat back on her heels. “It isn’t easy. Which door do you think a dwarf would choose?”
“The least obvious,” the elf answered.
“Well, they are all rather obvious,” Pitch observed.
“It must be some kind of trick.”
“Except for the plug door. It took me a while to find it,” she said.
“Indeed, a door that does not seem a door is the dwarven way,” Cael said. “I can think of no other solution.”
“Let’s try it,” she said.
As they approached the plug door, Pitch withdrew a set of lockpicks from a hidden pocket in her dark gray uniform. “It seems a simple enough lock,” she said, as she peered at it. “That is good. Lockpicking is not my strength.”
“Nor mine,” the elf said.
“I think I can manage this one, though,” she said. She withdrew a pair of wires and inserted them into the keyhole. “No traps, either,” Pitch commented after a moment.
Cael placed his ear against the stone. “I don’t hear anything beyond the door,” he said hopefully, then asked, “So how did Varia, Hoag, and Mancred fail the test and yet live?”
Pitch gnawed on her lower lip as she concentrated on the work at hand. She answered distractedly, with many a lengthy pause between words, “They failed… because they didn’t make a choice at all. Rather than open the door to let possible death rush in… they chose to fail and return to the Guild… and continue living.”
He stood back from the wall and watched his companion toil at the lock, then glanced once more around the room. “This seems too easy,” he commented. His eyes fell on the darkened entrance to the chamber, and a thought crossed his mind. “Wait,” he said.
“Too late.” With a loud click, a roughly circular section of the stone wall began to tum, like the lid of a jar. As it turned, it retreated into the wall. It made no noise at all, and it seemed impossible that something so large and obviously heavy could move without sound, but it took on a dreamlike quality. The two thieves felt as though they also had fallen i
nto a spell. Pitch tapped her sword against the floor just to make sure she had not gone deaf. The steel rang sharply against the stone, and the silence was broken. They looked at each other and grinned, waiting for the door to roll aside.
Beyond the door no gold gleamed, no jewels sparkled. Only more darkness lay within, darkness that suddenly moved, shaking the floor like an earthquake.
Cael shoved his companion aside just as the behemoth burst into chamber. With its huge reptilian head lowered to present a pair of scimitarlike horns, the thing hurtled into the elf. Cael twisted a hairsbreadth to allow the horn to pass under his arm, but as the horn slid past, the lowered head slammed into his chest, lifting him into the air and flinging him across the room. He landed in a roll, stopping himself just before he bashed his head against the wall. The dull ache in his side told of multiple broken ribs, but at the moment, it seemed a small price to pay. He looked round for his staff and found it lying against the wall a few feet away. Then, hearing an angry curse and the ring of steel, he looked up to find a scene from hell playing out before his eyes.
Pitch was battling for her life. The thing was huge, monstrous, a great lizardlike creature with a serpentine body and twelve short muscular legs supporting its length. Each leg ended in claws that dug and gouged the floor as the beast tried to sink its teeth into the dark-eyed female thief. Only the fine edge of her sword kept those massive jaws at bay, but she could not hold out long against those snapping fangs. The creature’s head was like that of a crocodile, only many times larger, and it had the cunning eyes of a dragon. It bore a pair of horns sweeping back over its long supple neck. The entire forty-foot length of its body was covered in hard blue scales that resisted the thief’s sword blows better than any armor forged by man or dwarf.
No thought of flight entered Cael’s mind. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his ribs, he caught up his staff and rushed at the monster. The creature spun to meet him. Its spined tail swept Pitch from her feet.
Now the elf fought desperately for his own life. He skipped backward, fending off each lunge with a ringing, hand-numbing blow of his staff. The creature was as agile as a hunting cat, its strikes as quick as a viper’s, its jaws clashed like a bear trap, sending hot spittle flying everywhere in its eagerness to feed, and only a six-foot-long pole of hard mountain ash, fiendishly wielded, prevented it from biting the life from the troublesome elf.
Still, a staff was no weapon for battling such a monster, and Cael was quickly running out of space to retreat. Pitch rushed in with her sword, emitting what sounded like a Knight’s battle cry as she drove her blade between two scales of the creature’s thick hide. With a terrific roar that seemed likely to bring the roof down on their heads, the beast switched around. Cael leaped back, avoiding the sweep of its thrashing tail.
Pitch retreated a few steps, her sword on guard, but the creature didn’t advance. Instead, it curled back its neck, sucking in air through its wide nostrils. Cael felt the hair along his arms stand on end, the air crackling and hissing. Suddenly, the great beast’s head shot forward, its jaws gaping. A flash of light illuminated the chamber like an explosion, thunder shook the floor, and a blue bolt of lightning erupted from its mouth. It struck the female thief full in the chest, blasting her across the chamber like a toy swatted by a cat. She slammed into the wall and slumped to the ground, black smoke curling around her.
With a primal howl, the elf swung his staff, swatting the monster squarely. Faster than imaginable, it switched ends again. Cael swung again, this time hitting it across the snout. So mighty was the blow that his staff broke in two, one splintered end bounding across the floor. The beast blinked, the only sign that it even felt his best blow, but that thousandth of a heartbeat’s hesitation bought the elf the time he needed to dive aside when the jaws came chomping down upon the space he had just vacated.
He rolled a dozen yards, scrambled to his feet, and dived aside again as wicked teeth bit the air behind him. A blinding flash of pain tore open his back. He stumbled. The tail swept his legs from beneath him. The beast was upon him, its great reeking belly crushing him down against the stone. The coils of its serpentine body looped around and began to squeeze as its claws dug“ into his flesh. With each breath, he felt his ribs crushed tighter. He couldn’t breath, couldn’t even cry out. Dark splotches appeared in his vision. He searched for help, any help, but Pitch lay against the wall, her eyes glazed, her chest a miserable charred hole. He saw no more.
Chapter Seventeen
He vaguely remembered the scales dragging over his flesh, tearing new wounds to match the score already adding their blood to the stains on the floor. His first thought was one of amazement—that he still breathed, albeit painfully. Amazed that he hadn’t woken in the belly of the beast, amazed that he wasn’t reduced to small bloody chunks.
His next sensation was one of horror and revulsion, as he heard the sickening sound of rending and tearing, the crunching of bones, the splatter of gore, the slurping and catlike purring. He wondered if it wasn’t his own flesh being eaten, and this thought brought him painfully to consciousness.
Still he didn’t move. He opened his eyes a crack and peered through the slits, taking in his situation. The creature was no longer atop him. He was lying on his back, staring up at the glowing magical globe floating at the apex of the dome-roofed chamber. Strangely, the globe’s light was tinted red, as though it were stained by blood.
He turned his head very slowly, so as to not attract the creature’s attention, and looked toward the sickening noises of feeding, noticing as he did so that everything was tinted with that same blood red light. The creature faced away from him, reveling in its meal, and as he watched, it lifted its head and made a loud gulping sound. A leg vanished down its throat, forcing the elf to stifle a cry and turn away.
When he finally managed to look back, the beast was still absorbed in its feeding. The great reptilian head tugged and jerked as it tore apart poor Pitch’s body and gulped down the pieces. Cael quickly realized that when it was done with her, it would turn to him. The exit lay on the opposite side of the chamber. His staff was broken in two pieces, and even whole it had not been much use except to stave off the inevitable.
A stronger glow of red at the edge of his vision caught his attention. Grinding his teeth against the pain, he rose to his elbows. There, not a half dozen feet away, lay Pitch’s longsword. It glowed red with heat, and the wooden hilt and its leather bindings were flaming and crackling. The lightning bolt had struck it full force, and only its superior Solamnic craftsmanship had prevented it from being turned into a puddle of molten slag. It still held its shape, yet the edge and point were useless.
Looking at it wanly, Cael knew it was his one hope to live. He felt no pain, no anguish, no grief, no fear—only hate and the desire to avenge Pitch.
He rose silently to his feet, pushing back the blinding pain. He moved as if in a trance, as though everything was happening to someone else. When he lifted the burning sword and seared his flesh, he gazed at his hand for a moment as though it were all some wonderful joke. Then he was moving as fast as he had ever moved, flying, his lips pulled back in a deathly grimace. Before the creature was aware of the danger the sword had plunged between its ribs. Smoke erupted from the wound as Cael drove the sword deeper and deeper, calling on all his strength, the glowing blade burning through scale and hide, tendon and muscle, until it found the throbbing vitals and finally was quenched in the heart of the beast.
If a gate had been opened to the Abyss and all the fiends of that dreadful plane issued forth, no more hellish shriek could have sounded than the death cry of the beast. Cael loosed his hold on the blade and staggered away. The creature rose before him, towering, bellowing. He clutched his sensitive elven ears lest the noise drive him mad. The beast began to thrash about, filling the chamber with its violence as it coiled upon itself, biting at the sword lodged between its ribs. The floor shuddered, the walls shook, and pieces of stone rained down around the
elf. He collapsed against the wall. The creature’s thrashing slowed, grew feeble, and then it fell altogether still. Only its labored breathing continued. Finally, with a rattle, it breathed no more.
A voice nearby said, “He killed a behir.” The incredulity in the voice and the murmurs of awe roused him. However, it was the touch of a cool hand on his cheek, and the soft words that followed, at which he fought off the darkness and delicious oblivion.
“Are you all right?” Alynthia asked, as she stooped over him and stroked his cheek.
Cael rose up, suddenly, to his full height, surprising everyone, including himself. Hoag was there, a look of disbelief on his face. Beside him was Ijus. Mancred was fiddling with a scroll. Rull towered protectively beside Varia, who gazed at the elf with concerned eyes.
It was their captain whom the elf now sought through the red haze of pain and hate that still colored his vision. Alynthia had staggered back, then tried to recover her dignity. With a snarl, the elf lashed out. His scorched and blackened fist caught her squarely on the chin and sent her flying into Hoag. The two tumbled to the floor, Ijus chuckling nervously as he danced nimbly out of the way.
Cael lunged for her again, but Rull was there, catching him in a bear hug, pinning his arms and lifting him completely off the ground. Despite his great strength, the thief was remarkably gentle. Cael could no more break his hold than he could have broken that of the monster.
“This is a stupid, foolish waste of life!” the elf spat at their leader. “Isn’t there danger and death enough without creating it for ourselves?”
Alynthia rose slowly to her knees, all sympathy gone from her expression. Instead, danger flashed in her dark eyes. “I will forgive you for that, this time,” she growled as she rubbed her chin.
