The War of All Wars

by J. Eric Booker

  After she had stepped down to her feet, he spent a half-minute trying with all of his might to lift this grate, but it would not budge an inch.

  Baltor, after giving up on that futile project, looked up at the hole, and said, “Well, it looks like this is the one and only way to go. Do you want me to jump up there first, which I can do, or do you want to go first?”

  After thinking about his question for quite a few moments, Nemis answered, “I think you should go first…you are, after all, the powerful warrior around here. What I can do before you go is to cast a protection spell on you, if you like, just in case there are some monsters or demons up there. Sound good?”

  “Yeah, sounds good,” he answered with a nod to his head—Nemis forthwith began chanting.

  Once she was done, Baltor’s aura glowed white for a few seconds, before it faded away and disappeared. She then looked over at him, nodded her head, and said, “Whenever you’re ready…but just so you know, the spell will only last five minutes so be quick.”

  He crouched onto the bottom, before leaping straight up with all the power of his legs and body—once within arm’s reach, his fingers clasped the edges of the hole, and then he held on.

  Instead of pulling himself completely into the room above, he lifted just his head up over the level of the hole before glancing around.

  Inside this unadorned room, in which the walls and ceiling were made of sandstone, there stood an exit at each of the cardinal points, all looking identical to each other in that the open-faced doorframe with trimming made of gold and with etched hieroglyphic designs of people who wore strange hats and carried strange objects. Other than that, there were no objects or creatures lying about, only a smooth sandy floor without even so much as one single footprint.

  He whispered below, “The coast is clear, for now.” He henceforth pulled his body into the room. Once on the floor, he laid prone in front of the hole, extending his hand below for Nemis to take.

  After leaping high into the air with her arms straight up over her head, she caught his hand. He pulled her up.

  Once they had both risen to their feet, Baltor swiped his hands together a couple times to get the clingy sand off before saying, “Sorry, but it looks like you wasted your protection spell unless we run into some monsters in the next few minutes.”

  “Huh, it’s all right…no big deal,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “I can do that four times a day.”

  While looking around, he asked, “So…which direction you think we should go?”

  “I have no idea—just pick one,” she answered, while shrugging her shoulders twice.

  After lifting up his left arm and extending his index finger out, he began to twirl his index finger around in tiny circles, in order to pick a random direction. Perhaps the dozenth time, that finger stopped at a particular exit. “Well then…let’s go that way.”

  With Baltor in the lead and looking for booby traps all the while, they made their way down the corridor at a normal walking pace. It spanned exactly three hundred and fifty feet later, before veering right at a ninety-degree angle—sixty feet later, it angled to the left at the same angle.

  One hundred feet later, they came across another four-way intersection.

  Right before the intersection, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder at her—she responded right away, “I’ll trust you, Baltor. Keep leading the way.”

  “All right,” he half-sang, choosing to go straight ahead.

  The path continued for one thousand feet before running across a T-intersection—he chose right.

  This route spanned for two hundred and fifty feet, before running across a unique type of intersection with three other directions that they could choose. Either they could go straight ahead, which tunnel appeared to end two hundred feet away, or they could go down one of the other two Y-passageways that had sharp angles only five hundred feet away. These angles prevented them from seeing anything beyond.

  Right before the intersection, Baltor stopped. Unlike before, he pivoted around until he faced her, before saying, “It appears we are in a maze of sorts…a labyrinth.”

  “Yes it does,” she responded with a frown. “If we’re not careful, we could get seriously lost.”

  With a look of shock on his face, Baltor jabbed his finger toward the ground behind her, while exclaiming, “Look at that!”

  As she turned her head so she could look at the area where he pointed, her eyes noticed that their footsteps in the sand were disappearing one at a time—each in the blink of an eye!

  A handful of seconds later, he asked, “Do you perchance have a quill, ink and some parchment, so we can make a map?”

  “Actually, I do,” she said just before opening her robes and extracting the items—the bottle of ink being the last object to be extracted. As she looked at the bottle, she noted with dismay that the lid had somehow popped open, and all the ink had run out and dried up!

  With quite a bit of agitation and anger, she snapped, “Oh shoot! Well, forget that idea.”

  “Relax, no big deal,” Baltor said with a nonchalant wave of the hand. “Well, do you have anything we can use as markers, so we can mark the tunnels we’ve already explored?”

  She rolled her eyes into the top of her head for a moment, before looking at Baltor and answering, “No, not really, all I have are my spell components.” Looking back the way they had come, she suggested in the form of a question, “but maybe we could go back, and pick up a bunch of pebbles from the river? I do remember feeling them under my feet near the exit.”

  “Not a bad idea at all,” Baltor replied.

  Immediately, they headed back to the starting point—once they had made it back to the hole, nine minutes and thirty-five seconds later, he dropped down into the river, while she waited up above.

  He next dove to the bottom, feeling out for loose pebbles. He found tons of those, ranging not only in colors from white to black, yet in size from as small as a fingernail—to as large as a fist.

  After grabbing a few dozen small rocks in both hands, he swam back up to the surface, and asked, “Do you perhaps have a bag we can put these rocks in?”

  “I’ve got plenty of bags, for sure,” she answered, while pulling out a leather bag that was the size of a watermelon from inside the pocket of her robes. After opening it, she pulled out one of the dozen grapefruit-sized bags and dropped it down to Baltor.

  He, in turn, deposited the pebbles in one hand so he could pick up the floating bag with the other, and deposit the pebbles into it—the bag was only a quarter way filled, so he dove to the bottom and scooped more pebbles into it until full.

  Once complete, he swam back up to the surface, tied up the end of the bag, and asked, “Ready to catch it?”

  “Ready,” she answered.

  He tossed it just high enough in the air—she did not have to bend over in order to catch it.

  After setting the full bag down near the edge, she dropped another empty bag through the hole—Baltor grabbed it, dove to the bottom, and filled it up with pebbles until full.

  He then swam back up to the top, and once again, he tied the end before tossing it into the air—she caught it.

  Once they had filled the last small bag, about seven minutes later, she tossed down the watermelon-sized bag—Baltor filled it with approximately five hundred pebbles.

  He then swam to the top, and asked, “Do you perchance have a rope that you can drop one end down here, so we can tie this heavy bag to it, and lift it that way?” Before she could answer, he added, “I can easily toss it up, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to keep a hold of it due to its weight.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have a rope,” she answered. “Hold on a minute.”

  “Okay.”

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out a fifty-foot long rope, untied the end of it, and lowered the one end down—once in reach, he took it and tied the end of the rope around the end of the bag.

  After having comp
leted this task, he said, “Just hold onto the other end of the rope so it leans up against the edge. I’ll be right up, so that I can help you pull the bag up. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Once he had let go, he dropped to the bottom, leapt up with all of his strength, grabbed the edge of the hole, and pulled his way up until he was once again standing on the surface. He next grabbed the part of the rope she was holding onto, pulled the fifty-pound bag up, and set it down onto the ground.

  After untying the rope, he handed it back to her—she began wrapping it up.

  Meanwhile, he asked with a bit of curiosity, “By the way, how much stuff do those robes of yours hold?”

  With a mysterious wink and smile, she answered, “Quite a bit…”

  Once she had placed the rope back into her pocket, as well all but one of the small bags, she picked up the final bag before asking, “Ready?”

  While raising both eyebrows, as well a nod, he answered, “Ready…”

  Just underneath the entryway to the tunnel they were about to traverse through for the second time, she stopped in her tracks, opened the bag, and randomly placed one of the pebbles.

  With Baltor in the lead, the two made their way down all the same tunnels as before—just before each intersection they passed, she placed another pebble.

  Inevitably, they reached that farthest point in their journey so far, which was that one intersection with the three different directions—straight ahead, right or left.

  Baltor said, “Let’s start off with the middle passage.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said before placing a pebble just under the doorframe.

  This passageway traversed for two hundred feet, before running across another T-intersection.

  After looking both ways, Baltor chose right … about fifty feet down, the passageway veered to the left at a ninety-degree angle.

  Upon the pair turning right again, they discovered that this tunnel came to a dead-end about thirty feet away. After turning back around, they made their way back to the last intersection.

  There, Nemis was about to place another random pebble she had pulled out of the bag, but Baltor suggested, “See if there’s any black pebbles in there, so we know not to go down that path again…okay?”

  “Okay,” she said just before looking in the bag. She looked inside, and chimed, “Oh, here’s one! But there’s only two left in this bag.”

  “Are there any other dark pebbles in there then?”

  “Umm, there’s not a lot—only four of those, out of about twenty-five in total,” she answered.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Let’s separate ’em all from each other, so we know exactly what we got.”

  “Why?”

  Pointing his index finger in the air, he answered, “My idea—if there’s enough of each—is that we can use the dark ones to mean dead-ends, bright-colored ones to indicate traps, dull-colored ones to signify that there are still more routes to be unexplored behind us, and the white ones can indicate the most-direct route back to the beginning.” By the time he had finished speaking, four of his fingers were pointing straight up in the air.

  “Sounds like an outstanding idea,” she said with a smile.

  Without any further delay, they dumped out all the contents from all the bags, just before they began to separate the pebbles into four different piles.

  About fifteen minutes later, this task was complete. Fortunately, the dull-colored pebbles had the most numbers by far—seven hundred and three. The dark ones—ninety-seven—bore the least. There were one hundred and eighty-six bright colored pebbles—eighty were white.

  “All right,” Baltor said under his breath, “let’s put them back into their bags and hope we have enough. And once we’re underway, make sure to keep one small bag of each handy.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  It only took them about three minutes to complete this task.

  Once they had placed every pebble into its proper bag, she next placed a black pebble right under the entryway to the tunnel that they had just traveled through.

  At a walking pace, they continued moving straight ahead.

  As a particular thought just hit her, perhaps a minute later, she said it aloud, “Just so you know, I did use a purple-colored pebble at one of the other passageways already.”

  “That’s all right—just remember what it looked like in case we have to go back to the beginning.”

  Nemis nodded her head, while noting that this straight tunnel—after a hundred feet—began to zigzag back and forth every one hundred feet at an angle of seventy-degrees, which angles prevented them from seeing anything beyond the next turn.

  That is, until about a quarter mile down and a dozen such turns later, they came across a rectangular-shaped room that was eight hundred feet in length, six hundred feet in width, and fifty feet in height. Stacked against the sandstone walls—every ten feet—was an upright golden coffin bearing the inscribed shape and size of a human male, or a female. Hanging between each coffin from ceiling-to-floor, there happened to be a tapestry made of pure gold that bore strange, pictorial letters all over it.

  In the very middle of the room, there rested fifty more coffins lying flat on the ground, though thirty of those were much smaller, bearing the images of either cats or dogs. Baltor’s analytical mind valued the cost of all the gold in this room to be about ninety million parsecs.

  After stopping in his tracks just before the entrance to this room, Baltor held his arm out barring Nemis from entering. Sounding a bit uneasy, he stated only a moment later, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for you to enter—I sense that there are undead mummies lying in each one of those coffins. Besides, I see no other exits in there, which means this room is a dead end. Do you?”

  After shaking her head, she said, “No, I don’t see any other exits.”

  “Well, let’s backtrack.”

  “Okay, Baltor.”

  Without any further adieu, the pair began making their way back to the very first T-intersection.

  It was there that he suggested, “As we covered everything beyond this point, I’d suggest that we put a black pebble under this doorframe.”

  “Okay,” she said, just before she did.

  After going down the only unexplored tunnel that they had come across so far, they discovered that this tunnel veered ninety-degrees to the right, sixty feet later; and about sixty feet after that, it made yet another ninety-degree turn to the left.

  Fifty feet down, they came across a four-way intersection.

  Nemis was about to put a dull-colored pebble onto the ground, but Baltor strongly suggested, “I would also put a white one there. After all, it is also the route back to our starting position.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, just before doing so. She then asked, “So which way?”

  “Let’s keep going straight.”

  “Okay.”

  Two hundred feet down this passage, they saw another room—after stopping just before the entryway, they saw that this room possessed the shape of a vertical cylinder, about two hundred feet in diameter and three hundred feet in height.

  Though the walls and ceiling were made of unadorned sandstone, the floor consisted of yellow-, black-, and white-checkered shiny tiles—all five feet squared. About half of the tiles bore a strange rune on them, while the other half were blank. In the very middle of the room stood a black ladder that leaned up against a hole at the very top.

  “Hmm,” Baltor said thoughtfully.

  “Let me cast a ‘detect magic spell’ and see if this area is enchanted.”

  “Good idea,” he replied with an affirming nod.

  Once she had finished chanting, thirty seconds later, every single one of the tiles instantly lit up with a yellowish-bluish colored glow! Even the ladder now glowed the same colors.

  “Yup—this area is definitely enchanted, including that ladder,” said Baltor thoughtfully, while his eyes squinted even deeper in contemplation. “This me
ans that if we want to go up to the next level, we must first figure out the solution to this riddle.”

  “Is this riddle worth figuring out, or should we explore the other routes first?”

  “Good questions, both of them. And to be honest, I don’t have an answer to either one, just yet. All I know is that I don’t recognize even one of these runes, although I have studied runic magic for nearly two centuries. Do you recognize them?”

  “Nope,” she answered.

  “Well,” Baltor sighed, “I say we go back and check out any of the other routes not yet explored, and possibly back to the beginning to the room with the hole in it. If all of these other routes turn into dead ends, or coffin rooms, we will come back here and look at all of this closer…sound like a plan?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said with a little smile.

  Enroute, Baltor stopped at the four-way intersection, turned around, and asked, “Do you have an inexpensive jewel on your possession so we can mark that the route we just came from as ‘special’?”

  “Not inexpensive, no,” she answered.

  “I got an idea,” he said. Instead of explaining out his idea however, he instead took a dagger and carved a picture of the ladder in the wall next to the entryway.

  Again, just as the footprints, the picture quickly faded away.

  “Hmm,” he said with a hint of annoyance.

  Nemis suggested in the form of a question, “Why don’t we just put three rocks here, one from each bag?”

  “Great idea!”

  She did.

  Baltor took the tunnel to the left—Nemis followed.

  One hundred feet or so later, this tunnel didn’t make crisp angles like any of the other tunnels, yet smoothly began to weave back and forth at forty-five degree angles—visibility was still impossible beyond every fifty-foot weave. At its end, one thousand feet later, this route proved to be a dead-end.

  After having made their way back to the intersection and Nemis had placed a dark stone at the entryway, they took the final direction they had not yet gone.

  This tunnel continued its way for about five hundred feet, until an entryway stood just before that revealed another room—oddly possessing the shape of “a right triangle.” Other than two exits, one to the left and one to the right, there was nothing else notable.