Steele Alchemist

by Deck Davis

“What?” said Jake. “I brewed loads of them for you!”

  “I had them boxed in the house, but we had to leave a little sooner than expected. I made sure I always had a couple in my coat pocket, but they smashed while I was climbing up the chimney.”

  “So that’s why the chimney was wet,” said Jake.

  “What did you think it was?”

  “I thought Solly had gotten a little too scared.”

  “We need another way out. We can’t just keep wandering around,” said Faei. “For all we know, the maze is changing as we go through it. The Watcher, or Thotl, might be trying to wear us out before they close in on us.”

  He thought about it. Faei had a point; having a maze on your doorstep that could twist and change at will was a handy way of tiring out unwelcome guests before they had chance to reach you. On the other hand, that didn’t seem to fit in with how they’d got here. It felt like, after failing to get close to them at the alchemist’s house, Thotl had driven them here, into Widow Leaf’s maze.

  Whatever the answer, their hosts weren’t playing fair. Just walking and walking and walking wasn’t going to get them out of it, so they needed something else.

  Just ahead of him, two of the rat-like creatures scurried along the path. One of them stopped to nibble at something on the ground. The other creature patiently waited for its friend, before the two of them carried on their way.

  “That rats,” said Jake, pointing.

  “They’re not rats,” said Solly. “They’re crowlers.”

  “Thanks, zoologist. But whatever they are, they seem to know their way through the maze. Maybe we should follow them.”

  “They probably just squeeze through the vines,” said Faei.

  Jake reached to his left and grabbed hold of a couple of intertwined vines in the wall. Were they closing in after all? No, couldn’t be.

  “The walls are way too tightly woven. I mean, the crowlers aren’t massive, but they’re still too big to squeeze through. They must have another way out of here. You know what they say about rats in a maze.”

  “They’re not rats,” said Solly.

  “Yeah, you said! But terminology aside, they’re our way out of here. We just need to follow them.”

  With the other two in agreement, they set off, but they soon realized it was easier said than done to keep up with the scuttling creatures. They just moved too fast, and no sooner did they have them in their sights, then the animals would dart away.

  After thirty minutes of this chase, Faei stopped. “It’s not working,” she said. “They’re too quick for us.”

  “If we hang back a little, can you hit one of them?” asked Jake.

  “I could hit a fly’s wings mid flutter.”

  “I’d settle for you putting a bolt in the rump of a crowler,” answered Jake. “Can you injure one? Nothing major, we still need it to be able to walk. Just slow it down a little.”

  “That’ll scare the others away.”

  “Just trust me,” said Jake.

  They pushed on forward. This time they walked slower and tried not to make a sound, until soon, they had four of the crowlers in view. Faei drew her bow, nocked a bolt and then shot. The crowlers spread out and then darted away.

  “What was that about a fly’s wings?” said Jake.

  “It must be the light,” grunted Faei. “Makes it hard to get a good shot.”

  “There is no light here, my dear,” said Solly.

  Faei huffed. “Why do you even need me to hit one?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he walked forward a few paces, until he reached where the critters had gathered. There, he saw a few brown lumps on the ground. He kneeled down. He took his potion vials out of his pocket, and inspected them until he found the one he needed. He uncorked it. Grimacing, he picked up a piece of the foul smelling brown lump and added it to the potion. He corked it and shook. The liquid inside the vial changed to a dark color.

  “Voila,” he said, turning to the others and holding the potion aloft. “One crowler follow potion.”

  “So that’s what you needed it for,” said Solly. “Well thought.”

  Jake couldn’t help but grin. It was always a good feeling when his alchemy worked.

  “The question now is, who’s gonna drink it?”

  “Just to be clear,” said Solly. “the brown stuff you mixed into it was faeces, correct?”

  “It sure wasn’t delicious lumps of crowler sugar,” said Jake. “I needed something from their body to mix with the potion. I thought Faei could injure one, or something, but it turns out the light is affecting her shooting.”

  “And if you’re going to have that attitude, you can drink it,” said Faei.

  He held the vial close to his eyes. Were little brown specks floating in it? Eurgh. He at least hoped it would have dissolved, or something.

  But Faei was right. This was his idea, his potion. He should be the one to drink it. After working in the Rum Drum bar and tasting some of his fellow bartenders cocktails, he’d had worse.

  He uncorked it. “Down the hatch,” he said. “Way, way down.”

  And then he drank. Just a little gulp, but enough for him to realize that it tasted as bad as it smelled. He held his breath until he was sure that the foul potion had settled in his stomach and wasn’t coming back up, and then he waited. Not too long after, he knew where the crowlers had gone. He sensed that they were much further along the maze but now, he knew where.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. “You can thank me later.”

  As he tracked the crowlers through the maze, it began to get darker. It wasn’t through the onset of night, since in the rare patches above where branches didn’t quite meet, he saw teasing rays of sunlight. This was a different kind of darkness. Something a lot deeper and thicker, like the kind of pure black found in the deepest unexplored caves miles under the earth.

  They started to hear sounds behind them. Hurried footsteps that stopped whenever they did, as though some practiced stalker was pursuing them, never getting too close, but always reminding them it was there. Jake felt a shiver run down his back when he first heard it, and that shock of cold stayed with him. He told himself to keep going, just keeping following the crowlers and they’d find their way out.

  Just when the maze seemed darkest and the sound of their stalkers footsteps seemed closest, they reached the end. Open air, a place without thorn-covered vine walls, without thick branches arching overhead.

  Ahead of them, were two things. One was an oval-shaped well in the center of a patch of muddy land. The second was a human-spider monstrosity, much more spider-like than the ones Thotl had taken with him. This creature had the black, bristly body of a spider but with a man’s face, almost as if it had been surgically grafted on. It just didn’t fit. It was wrong. Jake wanted to stab it, set it alight, or just leave.

  The spider made the choice for him. It scuttled across the muddy ground and then, having either not seen them or decided they weren’t worth paying attention to, it stretched four of its hair-lined legs onto the well edge and heaved itself up, before dropping down into whatever waited in the depths.

  Solly visibly shook on seeing this. Even Faei was disturbed by it. She put her arm on Solly’s shoulders.

  “Keep calm,” she said, in a comforting voice. Then she faced Jake. “What now?”

  “Now,” he said, “We need to go down that well.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  News stories of children getting trapped inside wells had seared one clear message into his head; never climb down a well. Especially not after having just watched a spider with a human face crawl into it.

  The last time he’d even contemplated well-climbing and its pitfalls, he’d been stretched out on his uncle’s sofa with a twenty-four-hour news channel cycling on the television. He should have been in school, but he wasn’t; he was watching reports about people getting shot in liquor store hold-ups gone wrong, and about congestion problems on a local byroad.

  O
ne memorable saga of a news report was that of a kid named Holden Peacock. He had climbed down to a well to try and retrieve a coin he’d watched his step brother throw into it. They didn’t find him until he’d been stuck three days, despite his wailing. And boy, how he’d wailed. Poor kid had broken his ankle, his left arm, and fractured his skull. By the time they got him out, he’d puckered up like a grape in the sun.

  That was why you didn’t climb down wells.

  “We’re really going down there?” said Solly.

  Unfortunately, he was going to have to climb down this well.

  Jake shrugged. “This is the end of the maze, and there’s nothing else here. We already know Thotl and the Watcher use these spider freaks to fight for them, so it makes sense their…lair…is underground.”

  Faei arched her eyebrows. “That makes sense to you? Any of this makes sense?”

  “I’ve learned to adjust my perception of reality a little since I came to Sarametis. I didn’t think you’d struggle to believe it.”

  “We’re working on an awful lot of assumptions, that’s all,” said Faei.

  After making sure they were alone, he peered down the side of the well. It was certainly wide enough to fit them. Unlike the chimney, the well could have fit three of them at once. The problem was that it plunged into a gaping darkness with no end in sight. Its walls were slick with dew, though he guessed that was because of rainfall, rather than this being used as an actual well. There was no water at the bottom of this. What waited, he couldn’t tell, because the darkness wouldn’t offer him a glimpse.

  “Another plan dissolves into ash,” said Solly. “Unless you have a potion that will grant us the wings of an eagle?”

  Jake thought bitterly of the bird mutoction he’d made, and how instead of granting him flight, it had made him great at building nests.

  “Unfortunately, not. There must be another way. Otherwise, how does Thotl get in?”

  “Back through the maze somewhere,” said Faei. “I’m guessing anyone who enters through the well doesn’t do it willingly.”

  Jake heard trees rustling. The crack of twigs. The unmistakable crunch of feet on the forest ground. The others seemed to have noticed too.

  “Where is it coming from?” said Solly.

  Faei’s spectral archer senses were more attuned than his. “To the right.”

  They darted away from the well and to the left, where they hid behind an untamed bush. The leaves were sparse, but they were far enough away that whatever approached the well wouldn’t see them.

  But they saw it. It was another spider humanoid; this one with the body of an arachnid and the face of a man, but with a difference. This creature had six spider legs and the sides and back, but two human arms. In those arms, it carried a young child.

  It was a small boy wrapped up in a ragged sheet. He couldn’t have been older than a year. He wasn’t crying the way you’d expect a baby kidnapped by a giant spider freak should have been. If that had happened to Jake when he was a kid, he’d have been bawling his eyes out. If it had happened to Solly, the mage would have lost his sanity.

  Maybe the boy was doped. It certainly made sense given the placid way he stared around him. It was almost a disinterested look, more akin to that of a kid being carried around a supermarket by his mum. Yeah, he was drugged in some way. No way would he be so calm otherwise.

  “This is sick. We have to do something,” said Faei.

  Jake agreed, but before he could think of a plan, the spider clambered into the well.

  “The rumors were all true,” said Faei. “About the spiders sneaking into towns and stealing children. But why?”

  “I heard a story back in Smoke and Rumors. Something about the Watcher floating in his orb outside children’s windows at night.”

  “Selecting which ones to pick,” said Faei.

  Jake looked at Solly. He expected the mage to look scared, but instead he seemed angry.

  “We need to get down the well,” Solly said, between gritted teeth.

  “You actually want to go down there?” asked Faei.

  “No. I would rather take a naked swim in a river filled with pincer-crabs. But all these children…it’s horrific. Where are they taking them from?”

  There was such emotion in the mage’s face that Jake felt he was taking this personally. It revulsed Jake, sure, but not to the point of his face getting red and spit flying from his lips when he talked. Solly was positively raging. He looked like a faulty kettle with no off button, so that when he reached boiling point he was just going to bubble until there was nothing left but steam.

  They heard more sounds from the forest. Another spider was approaching, no doubt.

  “Faei, can you get a bolt ready?”

  She swiftly readied one on her bow. This was a normal bolt with no spiritual imbuement on it. Jake took out his dagger. When Faei hit the spider, he’d rush in and finish it off, if that was even necessary. Then…well, he had a plan. But first things first, the spider had to die.

  It was just a matter of waiting now. Of watching the well, and waiting for an opportunity.

  The sound got louder. Multiple feet crunching on twigs, bracken and vines all at once. A steady rhythm getting closer and closer.

  And then a weight leapt onto Jake’s back with such force that it squeezed the wind out of him. He heard a high-pitched squeal and the click-clack of legs scuttling. Jake squirmed until he was on his back, only to see a giant spider leering over him. Faei called out, and Jake saw that she and Solly also had spiders of their own to deal with.

  Faei struggled to pull back her bow string, but when she fixed her aim the spider was too close and too strong. It grabbed her arm and shoved it so far back that she cried out and released the string, and her bolt sailed into the air. It reached the tree tops and then began to dip back down in an arc.

  Jake saw with horror that Faei’s errant bolt was going to hit him square on the forehead. Even at its current speed, it was still falling from high enough that it would puncture bone. Time to move, before he got a hole in his head.

  He struggled with the spider in front of him. It clambered onto his stomach, and he felt it press its weight down onto his bladder. He realized that it had been a while since he’d had a pee, and if the spider kept pushing its weight on him, it was going to get a little embarrassing for the both of them.

  He strained to push it away, but the spider reached forward, clacking its teeth in snapping the air in front of his nose.

  Damn, this thing was heavy. He gave one last push.

  The bolt sailed closer. Just milliseconds before it hit him now.

  He strained to move his head. He could face either the spider’s pincers, or the bolt. That was it; one or the other. And they say too much choice is a bad thing, he thought.

  He made his choice. He moved his head forward, letting the bolt sink into the ground where his head had been. As he did, the spider snapped at him and tore off a chunk of his nose.

  Any semblance of rational thought disappeared from his mind, replaced by hot pain. His face was burning, and it felt wet from the blood gushing from his nose and onto his lips onto his chin, his neck, and down his shirt.

  The spider wasted no time, snapping forward and aiming for the rest of his face to finish its cosmetic surgery.

  Adrenaline washed through him. Shock took place of agony and made him numb, enough that he could forget the pain and act. There was no time for thought, just instinct.

  He pushed as hard as he could with his left hand. The spider’s teeth snapped in the air. He felt the gust of its hot breath. Its hair bristles were sharp enough to poke his skin.

  By focusing all of his strength on pushing the spider off him, he created an inch of room, enough to swing his dagger and sink it deep into the spider’s stomach. He felt the knife cut through flesh, and the sensation was revolting. He plunged it deeper still, cracking through the hard parts of the spider’s insides. The creature thrashed as the knife wormed throug
h its intestines.

  It tried to rear back, but Jake matched its movements. As the spider rocked backward he followed it, until the momentum turned in his favor and he found himself leering over the arachnid. He sank his dagger into it again, ripping through its black flesh, hearing the squelch of the knife and smelling the stench of arachnid blood as it gushed onto the ground.

  With the spider dead, pain exploded afresh on his nose as if it had diverted the sensation for just long enough to let him deal with his foe. It felt like someone was holding a blowtorch to his face. He didn’t dare touch for fear that he was mutilated, but a quick scan of the ground revealed no signs of the part of his nose that the spider had torn off.