Guardians of Camlan

by A. T. Gilbert

  Within minutes our party has collected a wide assortment of gems in all colors and sizes. We must have what we need to complete the pattern and unlock the door.

  Erinocalypse stands at the door to the stairwell, a wide smile on her face. “Good thinking, Callidus. I’m going to head back up and start trying to fit in my stones. Come up when you all are ready.”

  I follow close behind her.

  “Do you know what the image on the door is supposed to be?” she asks me as we climb.

  “No. Is it an image?”

  When we reach the top, from a dozen feet away, I see that she’s right. There are wide sections all in one color, with clear gaps and borders indicating where the colors change. From close up all I see are the spots where new stones should be placed, but from farther away it looks like a paint-by-number picture that has only been half finished.

  “Where do we start?” she says.

  “Trial and error, I guess. Like I said before,” I answer with a shrug. “Let’s try colors we know are probably wrong and see if we get any error message at all.”

  I dig out a small, bright yellow stone and place it in the spot in the middle of a field of blue. I hold my breath as the rock clicks into place and carefully pull my hand away to see if it stays.

  It does.

  It stays in that spot, there is no game message indicating anything is awry or needs to be redone, and yet, from a few feet away, that yellow surrounded by blue is very clearly incorrect.

  “Damn,” I say under my breath.

  “I mean, there’s a chance that’s right,” Erinocalypse says half-heartedly.

  I scoff. “Sure.”

  I take the yellow stone out again and find a blue gem in my inventory. It’s close to the same color as those stones surrounding it and clicks into place easily. When I step away from the door again to take in the whole image, there’s a tiny sense of satisfaction seeing that blue gap filled. But unfortunately, we don’t get any message from the game indicating if it was right or wrong.

  “This is going to take forever,” I say with a sigh.

  “Better get started, then.”

  As we fill in more of the blue fields with the stones we have gathered, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs behind us as the other four players join us.

  “How does it look?” I ask over my shoulder.

  “No idea,” SteelFeather says.

  “It looks great,” Balderdash13 says. She approaches the door with a lavender gem in hand and holds it hesitatingly up to the door. Testing how the color looks first in one spot and then another, looking for where the purple might go. Finally, she settles on the far left edge where a stripe of empty slots lines the edge of a blue section. “How about here?”

  “Sure,” Erinocalypse says. “Why not? We’ll just try them all.”

  There’s not room for all six of us to stand at the door and work, so once I have used up all my blue gems, I move back to allow TexBadass to fill in some slots while I look at the image as a whole again. Things are beginning to become clear. Someone has filled in a variety of colors around the pale pink stones that are in the center, creating a burst that looks like it could be a bouquet of flowers or a garden. Balderdash13 has added more purple to the left side, and someone else has added a couple of yellow stones to the right side near the green. This makes the bottom third of this image look like a sliver of rainbow—yellow fading into green into blue into violet. It’s nice to look at; I’m not sure it’s right, though.

  Soon all the holes are filled with the gems we gathered from the chests below. As the last one clicks into place, Callidus grins and tries to push the door open. It doesn’t budge. He frowns and tries to pull it open. Nothing.

  “Goddamn it,” TexBadass says more angrily than I would expect.

  “Whoa, dude. Calm down,” I say.

  “You calm down.”

  “We can figure this out.”

  He mutters something to himself and starts pulling stones off the door, seemingly without pattern or reason.

  “Wait,” Erinocalypse says. “They can’t all be wrong. Don’t take them all out.”

  “Fine,” he says. “Fine.” He crosses his arms and leans against the side wall making room for someone else to step forward.

  “What is your problem, dude?”

  “Nothing,” he says sullenly.

  “Don’t lie to us, Tex. We have to be a team here if we’re going to get anything done. I don’t want to have to deal with lies or temper tantrums from you.”

  “Fine,” he says again. “Fine. You clearly don’t need me. You didn’t need me to defeat Marilyn and I can see you don’t need me to solve this puzzle.”

  “Dude.” I shake my head. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Fine.”

  Erinocalypse and I exchange a glance and I sigh. We’ll have to just deal with the guy’s hurt feelings later. “Okay. So … Um.” That was weird. “Let’s look at the whole picture.”

  Even with some gems missing, an overall image is taking shape on the door in front of us.

  “I’m just going to talk through this out loud and you tell me what you think,” I say. “With mostly blue on the bottom my guess is that is a uh … ocean or lake or something. Could be the sky, I guess, but it’s at the bottom.”

  “And over here,” Balderdash13 hurries to the right side, “there’s a green gem all the way on the side. These yellow ones pop out, so we don’t know for sure they’re correct.”

  “But the green one was there originally? Okay, that helps. That could be, what? Grass or something? What about the other side?”

  “Oh, I put these purple ones in there.” Balderdash13 walks over to the left and takes down the lavender stones she had previously inserted. “I could try green here too.”

  “Good. Awesome.” I nod and try to see the whole thing, imagining what it should look like. A river or lake with grass on either bank. “But what is that supposed to be in the middle?”

  “Take out all the extra ones,” Erinocalypse suggests.

  Balderdash13 obliges, removing the greens, yellows, and magentas from the center, where originally there was just a pale pink with silver above it. With the colors simplified back to the original look, it’s easier for me to imagine what it could look like, what it maybe is supposed to be.

  “Those silver stones are in an awfully straight line, don’t you think?” I ask.

  Erinocalypse steps back next to me, quite close to me, her shoulder brushing mine. I look at her to question it, but she hasn’t even noticed, as focused as she is on the door.

  “Those are awfully straight. And the gaps around it stay straight too. Balderdash13, can you fill those in with more silver?”

  “Cough ‘em up,” she says to SteelFeather and Callidus. “I don’t have enough silver for all these spots.”

  Both of the guys dig into their inventory and between the two of them find enough silver gemstones to fill out the strip. Once that has been completed, I think I know what we’re looking at.

  “That pink is a bit … flesh-toned, don’t you think? A pale, white-person’s hand coming up, out of the water, maybe? Holding what looks like a sword.”

  Erinocalypse looks at me before regarding the door again.

  “I think you’re right.”

  I freaking love it when she says that.

  Balderdash13 fills in the remaining spots with more pale pink. For the rainbow of colors we retrieved from the chests in the room below, we ended up using only four different colors for this.

  As the final stone clicks into place, we hear a heavy thunk as the door unlocks. Callidus eagerly steps forward to push it open.

  The door swings open into the room, and the revolting scent hits us like a wave.

  What are we walking into?

  Chapter 4

  For once, the dim chamber ahead of us is already lit. Not well, but it’s not pitch black. There is only enough space for the wooden door to swing open into the room before t
he path turns abruptly to the left, as though the access to the chamber below was hidden deep in as far as a corner as possible. Rather than being hewn from the rock of the ground and ravine itself, the walls and floor ahead of us are built of stone bricks and tiles. Deep in the corner on the right, the bottom third of the joint is damp and slightly mossy, reminding me how far we still are below ground level.

  Once the door swings open, I go instinctively quiet, listening, and fortunately the other five do as well. There is more of the scratching that we have come to associate with rats, but not nearly at the level of aggression we have had to deal with before. Instead we hear the quiet murmuring of human voices somewhere deeper down the path.

  “Ugh,” Erinocalypse says under her breath.

  Callidus looks back at us briefly before winking out of sight as he activates Stealth and explores on ahead. The rest of us stay quiet, intent. The kid does his job well, and we don’t hear him at all. I think there may be a faint scuff of metal on metal, but it’s difficult to tell.

  He’s gone less than a minute before appearing in front of us again, gesturing us to crowd around so he can whisper.

  “It seems to be a prison,” he says. “I count six individual jail cells but only one of them has an occupant. There are three guards and they’re all congregated near the only other exit. We can’t get through without either fighting them or tricking them.”

  The smell, the sound of metal, the proximity to the queen’s other prisoner. It all makes sense. The very bottom of a well-fortified castle is the perfect place to house prisoners, but that means we’ll have to get through the very NPCs who are tasked with not letting anyone by.

  “So, what do you think? We go in swords swinging and overpower the guards? Take them down before they can sound an alarm? Loot their carcasses for more weapons and stuff? Or we try to sneak in quietly and harmlessly to convince them to let us by without a fight?” SteelFeather asks.

  “I think we can guess what you prefer,” Erinocalypse responds with a smile.

  “Come on,” Balderdash13 says, cajolingly, her hand on Erinocalypse’s arm and batting her eyelashes at the other woman. “We can take them.”

  “We still don’t know what kind of reception Queen Vivian will give us,” I point out. “The longer we can keep from killing her soldiers and raising any alarm, the better.”

  Erinocalypse looks at each of us, sighs quietly and says, “Asher’s right.”

  I will never get tired of hearing her say that.

  “Stow your weapons for now,” she continues. “We’ll go in there looking as harmless as possible.”

  “Looking,” Balderdash13 repeats with a grin.

  “Well.” Erinocalypse shrugs. “If the guard can’t tell that I could kill him with a little hand-gesture and spell, that’s not my fault.”

  Trying to stay quiet, I suppress a laugh but end up letting out a snort. I save my bow and arrow in my inventory. I too have a magic attack spell I could use, but it’s small. Only level one. It probably wouldn’t do more than barely inconvenience somebody, but it’s better than nothing.

  “Let’s not all go in at once and scare them. We outnumber them two-to-one but there’s no reason they need to know that. Callidus, you, me and SirAsh3r go first since we look the most harmless.”

  “Hey!” I object.

  Erinocalypse doesn’t bother even acknowledging my outburst before continuing. “You other three just listen in and come around this corner whenever you think best. You’ll be able to tell.”

  SteelFeather, Balderdash13 and TexBadass all nod.

  As we cross the threshold into the small hallway, Callidus disappears again, leaving Erinocalypse and me the only visible players to approach the guards. My fingers twitch. I wish I could hold a dagger or something. Anything. I feel extremely vulnerable without a weapon despite all my armor.

  We walk slowly, heel-to-toe, keeping our footsteps as quiet as possible. Directly in front of us is an empty jail cell and after about eight or ten feet, the hallway turns to the right, leading further into the jail. We pause at the corner before taking that final step into visibility.

  Erinocalypse pauses, putting her hand on my arm to stop me as well. She looks intently at me, without saying a word. I’m not totally sure what message she is trying to convey with that expression when I hear a ding of a private message.

  Erinocalypse: Let me do the talking.

  SirAsh3r: Um. Yeah, okay.

  Erinocalypse: Trust me.

  I nod. I hope she has a plan because I sure don’t. I let her lead the way around the corner. I’ve lost track of Callidus; his Stealth is working well. With just a couple steps we find ourselves standing in the middle of the corridor, jail cells on each side and three armed guards sitting and leaning at the end of the corridor ahead of us.

  They’re not fully decked out as knights, but close. Each guard, two men and one woman, wears a chainmail vest, heavy pauldrons, a light helmet and carries a substantial sword. The bearded man, the one practically lounging against the wall by the door, spots us first and stands up straight, his hand going immediately to the pommel of his sheathed sword.

  “What’s this now?”

  Name: Sergeant Martin

  Level: 35

  Description: One of Queen Vivian’s guard, currently assigned to guard the queen’s prisoner and jail.

  Next to me, Erinocalypse gasps. I look at her, concerned. Is she really that surprised?

  “Oh my gosh, I’m soooooo sorry!” she says.

  She clasps her hands in front of her, holding them to her chest and leaning slightly forward. I stifle a grin. Is this her ‘damsel in distress’ act? I also clasp my hands in front of me, and bow my head a little, to look as unthreatening as possible.

  “I’m sorry,” Erinocalypse says again. “My friend and I are just so lost.” She lets out an unnatural nervous little giggle. “Can you help us, please? We started exploring and the next thing we know we’re all the way down here. I don’t even know where here is, actually. Is this the bottom of the castle? Could you show us how to get back? To maybe the, uh, entrance hall? We can’t be that far away, right? But my friend here was determined to find the stables and so of course I went with him and we went down hallways I’ve never seen before and the next thing you know here we are. In the jail. With you lovely people.” She paused her chatter. “I’m sorry. Can you help us?”

  Throughout this whole speech, the female guard never takes her eyes off of Erinocalypse.

  Name: Sergeant Lipton

  Level: 36

  Description: One of Queen Vivian’s guard, currently assigned to guard the queen’s prisoner and jail.

  At the conclusion of the rambling, the woman stands up and unsheathes her sword.

  “Come here.”

  Chapter 5

  “Um.” Erinocalypse swallows and looks at me before flashing a bright grin at the female guard at the end of the corridor in front of us.

  “I’m not going to tell you again,” she says in a low voice.

  “Oh, okay. Great. Thanks so much.” Erinocalypse begins her incessant chatter again as we slowly take some steps forward. “We really appreciate this. We might never find our way out of here without your help. Maybe even one of your … um, friends could escort us?”

  It doesn’t take long for us to reach the end of the corridor, passing a few empty jail cells on either side. Only one of the cells holds a prisoner, a handsome man though it’s hard to tell under the layers of grime and dirt.

  Name: Lance Dulock

  Level: 50

  Description: A warrior and spy, Dulock has been prisoner in Castle Nennius for only a short time. The life he has to return to is unknown.

  When we pass, he reaches out to finger my Cloak of the Hidden Army. I catch his eye and he grins at me, a bright white smile that seems at odds with his surroundings. I pull my cloak out of his grasp and look away immediately, not wanting the guards to think we are in league with him.

  We sto
p our walk about three or four feet away from the guards; both Erinocalypse and I keep our hands in sight, and our shoulders hunched over a little to make us look smaller. Once we stop in front of them, Erin ceases her nonsensical prattling. The female guard has not moved, but the other two guys walk toward us, hands on their sword pommels, and proceed to circle around us, looking us up and down.

  Next to me, Erinocalypse stiffens. Between her Petrify spell and everything else at her fingertips, she could get us out of here in seconds. But if we can manage it without turning the whole castle against us, that’d be great. There are, after all, plenty of empty jail cells for all of us and we have a lot still to do here.

  I catch the eye of one of the guards as he passes close to me. I half-smile, but the glare I get in return leads me to look down. The longer I spend acting helpless the more tempted I am to pull out my bow and arrow and prove otherwise.

  “How did you get in here?” the guard in charge says. “How did you get past us without being seen?”

  “Oh, um,” Erinocalypse says. “I don’t know?”

  “Is that a question?” the guard asks.

  “No. Sorry. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Like I said we were, um, looking around, and found ourselves here.”

  The Sergeant Lipton shakes her head. “You just found yourselves here? I don’t think so.” She nods to the guard closest to Erin. “Go search. See if there’s another way in.”

  Erinocalypse and I look at each other. They’re going to run straight into the rest of our party. There’s no way the other three can hide; there’s nowhere to go. I open my mouth to object, but her eyes widen and she shakes her head at me. We’re just going to let this happen? I hope TexBadass and the others have been listening to the conversation and at least are expecting a guard to turn the corner and find them.