Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  I got to my knees by the mass of jutting roots. I could definitely fit in there if I just stayed low… I shuffled forward on all fours. My drone swept down and closed in and I could imagine perfectly the exact shot my viewers were now getting of my butt.

  It was dark under the roots, the same deep blue as the evening sky in the Summerlands. I could still see a little, but my hands found it first: a pentagonal hole in the earth. Reaching in, I could just barely touch a stone step maybe a foot beneath ground level.

  “This is it!” I shouted. I wasn’t about to crawl in on my belly, though, so I backed out from under the root system.

  “You found it?” Cass was twisting her hands over and over each other.

  “I found it,” I said. “Another staircase like the one in the pass. It’s gonna be a pain to get in, though.”

  “What’s life without a little pain?” said Cass.

  ***

  “At least there aren’t any corpse statues,” I said. At the foot of the stairs, a long, empty stone hallway stretched in both directions. We were blind until Noah lit a torch and even with its flickering, smoky light we could only see a few yards in each direction.

  “Yet,” said Cass, and she waggled her eyebrows at me again.

  “What do you think this place was, though?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Noah.

  “Well, it’s not like the elves just built dungeons for us to have adventures in, right?” I caught my drone tracking me out of the corner of my eye. “The last one was clearly a tomb of some kind, so what about this place?”

  “Hopefully a treasury,” said Cass. “Come on, let’s go this way.”

  We set off at random down the hall, four camera drones buzzing happily behind us. I was reminded of the last video I’d watched, the day Jason was killed. Four adventurers, a low, enclosed space, the promise of danger and reward everywhere. Golden Apple had looked so cool in that video, so professional, but so far Hearthammer had just muddled through, broke and chasing rumors without any real idea what we were doing. And yet I suspected that on the other side of the camera, we looked better than I thought.

  The walls were etched with line drawings of elves, a perfect example of why we all used that name for the lost inhabitants of the Summerlands. The pictures reminded me of ancient Egyptian art, with flat, slender figures, only these had long, pointed ears sweeping back from their heads. Strangely, their skin seemed to be covered in polka dots, a detail that had never shown up in the other art I’d seen.

  I pointed out details to my camera as I went: the high boots on one elf, the crown on another. The drone’s black eye relayed every word to my invisible fans. I paused at one curious carving, where a figure stood with its right hand raised, facing another elf with a very different look. His build was stockier, and he had what looked like a beard under a heavy helmet. Rather than the narrow, curving sword that most of the elves had, this one carried around shield and a long-handled axe. I stepped back to give my camera a better view.

  “Stop,” said Magpie. I glanced down the hall to see him standing with a hand raised. Cass and Noah paused a few feet behind him. Magpie stood at the end of the corridor, with a door in front of him and one on either side. All three were identical: smooth, neatly-fitted stone with metal hinges that gleamed yellow in the torchlight. I lifted my hand to turn off my camera, then remembered that this was exactly what people wanted to see. So instead I moved down the hallway to give my fans a better view.

  “Just pick one,” said Cass, coming up behind me.

  “Look at this,” Magpie said. He pointed to the floor. Faint scratches marred the otherwise smooth stone, straight lines that extended from the left- and right-hand doors.

  “Are they from the doors opening?” Noah asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Magpie. “The doors are too well fitted for that. Plus that would make an arc, not a straight line.”

  “Then what?” said Cass.

  “Not sure.” Magpie knelt down and pulled his lockpick set from a pocket. He chose an implement that looked sort of like a long, flat dentist’s pick, and tried to slip it between the door at the end of the hall and the wall it closed into. There was no room. “See? It fits perfectly.” He took a long breath. “Okay, everybody move back.”

  We moved back. The elves set traps, everybody knew that. Like the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, and others in our own world, whoever these lost builders were, they’d been concerned with people stealing their stuff after they buried it. Over the years, greedy adventurers had fallen prey to pits covered by false floors, tumbling rocks, automatic crossbows, even poison gas. Apparently the elves had been as paranoid as they were rich. So if Magpie thought the doors were trapped, I intended to take him seriously.

  The center door sighed as he eased it open a fraction of an inch and slipped his lockpick into the open space.

  “Ah—” he breathed, and after a moment, “ha.” He pushed the door shut.

  “What?” said Cass.

  “I almost died,” said Magpie. He looked back at us, grinning. “But only almost.” He tapped the center door with his lockpick. “See this door? Not a real door. It’s just a trigger that pops the other two open. I would guess that whatever comes out of them isn’t very nice.”

  “So if you open one of them—”

  “Same result.” Magpie stood up. “This is a dead end.”

  “Seriously?” said Cass. “It’s been one long hallway other than this.”

  “Maybe the other way?” I suggested. “That must be where Golden Apple went.”

  “Well,” said Magpie, “unless you wanted me to do this.”

  He leapt towards us, away from the dead end, and in the same motion yanked the left-hand door open. Its match across the hall crashed open, too, and as Magpie stumbled forward, a glittering blade swept down from each archway. The doors themselves stopped moving after ninety degrees, making a neat wall that blocked off the hallway behind him just as the arcing blades bit into the floor, fitting perfectly into the long scratches on the floor.

  “Holy shit!” shouted Cass.

  “Did you know that would happen?” said Noah.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Magpie flashed his smile. “Just fine, thanks. I thought it would be something like that. But now…” He gently pushed the right-hand door, which swung silently in. Its blade retracted back into the open shadows of the doorway, timed so that it would be fully reset when the door closed. Magpie slipped through the little gap between the open doors. “You were right, boss!” he called. “There’s more back here.”

  ***

  There was another short hall, then a series of doors and corridors that seemed to turn back on themselves in an endless fractal loop. We marked the corners, scratching little arrows into the stone with our daggers, but any anxiety was soon reduced to tedium as we had to stop for Magpie to check and double-check every new door. As we waited at yet another intersection, I pondered whether this whole part of the complex was a devious invention of the elves to send us in circles until we starved to death.

  “Linnaea?” said Noah. Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize he was talking to me until he said my name again. “Linnaea. You should see this.”

  “What’s up?” Noah had his handheld out, and by the combined green-red glow on his face I knew he was checking our rankings. He passed it over to me without a word. I gave it a quick scan: more messages, a graph with an upward curve…

  There was something new on the screen, near the bottom. A little image of a trophy, glowing gold, and the word CONGRATULATIONS! But for what? I tapped it and the handheld played a tinny little tune as digital fireworks exploded beneath a new message that took up the entire screen.

  CONGRATULATIONS, LINNAEA! YOUR STREAM HAS REACHED THE TOP TEN FOR THE FIRST TIME! YOU ARE CURRENTLY NUMBER 9 IN THE WORLD!

  I dropped the handheld, which clattered to the floor as its celebratory music played out. The firework animation sent multi-colo
red shadows shifting across the walls and floor of the hallway.

  “What?” said Cass and Noah together. I opened my mouth to respond, but Magpie caught my eye with his sudden movement as he stumbled away from the door he’d been working on, staggered to his feet, and began to run.

  “Gold dogs!” he shouted. “Move!”

  They came snapping and scratching out of the door he’d just opened, a wave of rust-colored scales and claws. Gold dogs were the great pests of the Summerlands. They were strange creatures, not like dogs at all aside from being quadrupedal and having teeth; in fact I always thought they looked more like giant armadillos with insect heads and long, searching antennae. They were famously good news/bad news creatures: they hung around piles of gold, hence the name, but for whatever reason they defended treasure with their lives.

  “Sepharad, move up!” I yelled. “Make a wall!”

  Noah shoved past me, sword in hand, to form up with Cass and block the hallway. She had her bow out and an arrow nocked.

  “Linnaea, bomb ’em!” Cass ordered.

  “They’re fireproof!” I called back. Magpie skidded to a stop between Cass and Noah and the gold dogs, which were spilling down the hallway in a tumbling rush. There were at least a half-dozen of them.

  “Fine, genius, you think of something!” Cass’s bow hummed as she sent an arrow into the mass of monsters. It was impossible to miss, but the gold dogs didn’t slow down as arrow after arrow stung them. I caught a glimpse of Magpie’s face as he ducked between Cass and Noah. He didn’t seem to be panicking, and frankly, he was right to run. He had no armor and only knives for weapons, which wouldn’t put much distance between him and the gold dogs’ snapping jaws. He stopped by me and turned to face the monsters roiling towards us.

  My mind riffled through my list of spells like the pages of a catalog, checking and discarding each in turn. There was only one that might help, and it was the one I hadn’t tested. I ducked both hands into my bag of magic implements and fumbled around until I had a bell in each. It was time to see what I’d learned from Dr Agony.

  “Hold them back,” I shouted. “Buy me some time!”

  The spell was as tricky as any I’d ever learned. I stuck my arms straight out, almost punching Magpie in the face. I began to roll the bells in little circles, one forward, the other backward. They clanked faintly under the sound of the skittering gold dogs. I tried to let half my mind focus on keeping them in motion—roll, snap, reverse—as the other half dredged around for the right incantation.

  I found the words, painstakingly memorized by rote from Dr Agony’s feed. I had never noticed how well they fit the movement of the bells, locking into spaces between rings to make a hypnotic polyrhythm. I focused on the gold dogs, now only a few feet from my friends, will them to slow, slow, slow… stop. Freeze. Hold.

  My arms were burning. Holding them rigidly out was bad enough, but the motion of the bells was wreaking hell on the tendons along my wrists. My left arm started shaking, then my right. Everything was blurry except the trembling mass of gold dogs, which strained in sharp focus as they battled my will. Cass’s arrows soared in leisurely slow motion, their fletching riffling in the stale dungeon air, and Noah’s sword arm rose and fell like a long, heavy pendulum. I could feel the monsters’ massed rage pressing against my mind. They hated me for holding them, caging them, forcing them to stay still when they wanted so desperately to run rampage and paint the hallway with our blood.

  My left arm gave out as the bell in that hand came around in a loop and my hand spasmed open. The bell arced over Cass’s head and disappeared among the gold dogs. The world snapped back into place. The monsters screeched as they charged.

  “Run!” Cass screamed, and I ran. I sprinted down the hall, hared around the first corner, and ducked through an open doorway. A swift thunk made me turn: the door had closed, or some other panel had cut off the hallway. It seemed important, but panic had taken over, and I kept running. All these little twisting halls intersected; I could find my friends again if I just kept my head. Maybe I could even get behind the gold dogs, take them from the rear with some better magic, if only I could think of a spell.

  I took another corner at a run, bouncing off the far wall as again a sliding panel thudded into place behind me. Two open doors loomed up, one on either side. I nearly fell over as I skidded through the opening on the right. It was dark in here and suddenly it was deep black as the doorway closed itself off.

  “Shit,” I hissed. I pulled my dagger from my belt and held it pommel-up in a finger-twisting grip. I tapped the weapon with each finger in succession as I whispered a few Elvish words, then flung it down the hall. It trailed a fat white line of light that stayed hovering in the air even as the dagger clattered to the floor somewhere far away.

  In the new glow, I saw the glinting black eyes of a single gold dog, staring me down from a T-junction at the end of the hall. A glance behind me showed that I was trapped. The gold dog twitched its antennae, snapped its mandibles twice, and charged.

  I had lost one bell and just thrown away my only weapon. I didn’t have time to heat up a coin, and gold dogs were notoriously resistant to fire magic anyway. I eyed the gold dog’s approach, took half a breath, and jumped.

  I hit the ground just beyond it, stumbled, and landed on my shoulder. I scrambled to my feet and set out at a run as the gold dog behind me skittered around to chase me. A few long strides took me to the end of the corridor. I hared left. My heart was beating in my ears, nearly drowning out the sound of the monster’s claws on the stone floor.

  I dared a look over my shoulder. The thing was closer than I’d thought, much closer. Its antennae were reaching out for me. Were they venomous? Suddenly I couldn’t remember, but—

  Thunk.

  A panel slammed down from the ceiling, neatly severing the gold dog’s snapping head from its body. The head rolled a few feet and came to a stop, its quivering antennae inches from my face.

  I sat down on the stone floor, trying desperately to catch my breath. My brain rifled through a pile of pressing questions: where was I? Where was everyone else? Why could I still see?

  My dagger lay cocked in the corner of the hall, near where the panel had come down. It was still glowing with a faint white light, nothing compared to the hovering fluorescent beam it had made when I threw it, but still enough to see by. I picked it up. There was no way to know where my friends had gotten to when I didn’t even know where I was. We’d broken the first rule of adventuring: never split the party.

  I gave myself two minutes to settle down, then I set out, holding the dagger at arm’s length ahead of me to light my way. I quickly found myself at another dead end, with a single door in the wall before me. I was tempted to sit down and wait; thoughts of the traps Magpie had uncovered taunted me as I imagined opening the door that barred my way. Eventually, though, I decided that I couldn’t count on the others to come find me. There was every chance that they were in just as much trouble, hoping I might show up with light and fire to save them. I had to take my chances with the door.

  It opened easily, swinging silently on ancient hinges. I stepped through into a space that was clearly too big to be another hall. My little light was lost in a vast, echoing darkness, or I thought so until my eyes adjusted and I began to pick out faint gleams of ruddy yellow bouncing back at me from the shadowed beyond.

  I took a cautious step forward and my feet rustled something. A coin, no, a handful of them. The edge of a pile, a slumping mound of gold and silver that sat in the heart of what must be a treasury or tomb or storehouse. Gems glinted red and green and blue in the metallic mass. My mind reeled, trying to count it all, calculate its volume, its value, how many meals and shirts and shoes and bells and nights at the inn it would turn into.

  Another light appeared, white and warm. It bobbed as it came into the room from some other entrance out in the blackness. It floated at chest height, and illuminated a swathe of red robes and the face of its bearer, white,
bearded, and lined: Dr Agony. He turned green eyes to me.

  “That’s an awful lot of treasure, isn’t it?”

  Number One

  “It’s mine,” I said. “I got here first, and—”

  “I know,” Dr Agony said. “I made that rule.” He was right, of course; he’d set it down at the very beginning to discourage player-versus-player fights over treasure. Whoever saw it first had claim to it and that was that. The treasure, all of it, was mine by rights.

  “Okay then,” I said.

  “But,” said Dr Agony, “can we talk?” His little light flared, making me squint as it filled the room. It was a pentagonal chamber with a door on each wall, about twenty feet high and thirty across. In the center of the room was a sort of dais raised about a foot off the floor, also pentagonal but with its angles offset from those of the room. This platform was absolutely heaped with treasure, some of which had spilled off as far as the doorway where I stood.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Money, of course,” said Agony. “Moving it, storing it, spending it, exchanging it.”

  “Well—”

  “I’m just worried,” he cut me off, “that you don’t have a good support system in place yet. You want to send money home, isn’t that right?”

  I glanced at my camera drone. “That’s right.”

  “Here, look.” He pulled a handheld drone controller like ours from a pouch on his belt and held it up to me as though I was a scared animal. “You seem nervous. I’m sorry about that. Let me turn my camera off.” He hit a few buttons with the handheld screen still facing me, and his drone moved into a neutral position. “There, that’s better. Do you mind turning yours off? Then we can talk.”