Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3

by Luther M. Siler

  "Everything is clearer suddenly," Grond said.

  "What's outside of ogrespace mean?" Brazel asked, a suspicious look on his face.

  "Just outside of ogrespace," Rhundi answered innocently.

  "Okay. It's outside of ogrespace. What's it inside?"

  "The galaxy?"

  Brazel crossed his arms and flattened his ears. "It's in Benevolence space, isn't it?"

  "Only a little," she said. "And there's no Benevolence presence anywhere near it. You'll be fine."

  "For certain values of 'fine' that include 'potentially pissing off the Benevolence,'" Brazel said. "That is not a kind of fine that I want anything to do with."

  "Ah, c'mon, Braze," Grond said. "Treasure hunting! It sounds fun."

  "I'm going to remind you of that when we're asphyxiating in the remains of our blown-up ship," Brazel said.

  Grond grinned. "How? You'll be asphyxiating too."

  "I'll find a way," the gnome said. He looked at his wife. She smiled back, not breaking his gaze.

  "Screw it," he said. "I need a change of pace. She seriously gave no more specific instructions than bring back interesting things?"

  "She literally used the word neat," Rhundi said. "And I did some research. If this place is important to anyone who's still around, nobody knows about it."

  "Fine," Brazel said. "Let me pack for tomb raiding and we'll be off. I may have to buy some new clothes."

  "I'll plan on leaving tomorrow," Grond said.

  "Day after," Brazel said. "I don't think much will change between now and then."

  * * *

  "Just jump," Grond said. "I'll catch you. Promise."

  "Right," Brazel said, and tossed a polymer ladder off the back of the Nameless. The peak of the ziggurat was perhaps eight meters square, with a small, cube-shaped shrine in the center. The door was sized for ogres. Brazel found himself hoping the rest of the structure was too. He wasn't looking forward to exploring the thing by himself if his partner couldn't fit through the corridors.

  Grond was already testing the door by the time Brazel's feet were on solid ground. The surface of the ziggurat was surprisingly slick. He heard a slight whine in the air, some sort of resonant frequency, almost as if the entire thing was vibrating at some nearly-imperceptible level. He wondered if that was connected to the ziggurat's unnatural cleanliness.

  "Any luck?"

  "No hinges on the outside," Grond said. "So it either swings in or up, or maybe just slides out of the way. Haven't figured which yet. The stonework's great. I can't get a blade into the gap here." The halfogre ran his hands over the ornately carved door as Brazel walked around the shrine, inspecting it from all angles.

  "There we go," Brazel heard the halfogre mumble. Anything else he may have said was drowned out by the sound of stone grinding on stone.

  Grond was standing in front of the door, watching it slowly lower into the floor, a self-satisfied grin on his face.

  "What did you do?" Brazel asked.

  "Low-tech," the halfogre answered. "There's a catch up here in the lintel." He pointed. The catch was easily three and a half meters off the ground, and hidden on top of the protruding lintel. It would take an ogre or a troll to be able to reach the thing without climbing.

  The inside of the shrine was completely dark, and smelled of stale air and age. The breeze from the doorway was surprisingly warm.

  "Light up," Brazel said, activating a button on his jacket. His entire ensemble began glowing softly, providing more than enough light to see by.

  "Showoff," Grond said, turning on a pair of lights mounted at his shoulders and a headlamp. "How much firepower do you have with you?"

  "Very little," Brazel said. "A couple of blades. One pistol. You think we'll need it?"

  "Only if we don't have it," Grond replied. "Most of what I've got with me is hand-to-hand too. I left Angela back on the Nameless. Didn't figure we'd have room for her." Angela was Grond's Iklis sniper's longbow. She was his most prized possession, but tight indoor spaces were not the best place for a weapon that big. He was probably carrying three times as many weapons as Brazel had anyway. Grond was not big on being caught unprepared.

  The halfogre led the way, a large knife in his hand, beams of light from his lamps probing the inside of the shrine. Which proved to be entirely empty. The walls were bare stone, lacking the brass-colored covering of the outer part of the ziggurat, and bare of decoration or carving. In the center of the room was a square hole, leading further down into darkness. There was a metal ladder set into one of the sides of the hole.

  "No treasure yet," Grond said.

  "Great, we can go," Brazel answered.

  Grond didn't bother to answer, pulling another light from a belt pouch and dropping it into the hole. It fell about ten yards, bouncing a couple of times and casting a thin light as it rolled away from the ladder.

  "Bigger room down there, then. I'll go first," Grond said. Brazel watched as the halfogre started down the ladder, testing each rung first to make sure it was still able to support his weight. The gnome waited until Grond was halfway down before climbing down himself. It wasn't as annoying as he had feared. While the rungs were too widely spaced for gnomes, they were deep enough to count as ledges. The descent went easily.

  "We should be in the second level," Grond said. "They'll get bigger as we go down." The room was about twice as large in either direction, with an ornate door at the center of each wall. Unlike the bare stone above, some attempt had been made to work the stone in this room, with long, sinuous shapes carved into the walls and on the floor. The stones sparkled brightly in the artificial light.

  "Getting somewhere," Grond said. "You think we'll be as lucky with the doors on this one?"

  "I'd try that first," Brazel said, easily scaling the lintel around the door and looking for the catch.

  "Hmm," the gnome said.

  "Is that a good hmm or a bad hmm?" Grond asked.

  "There's a catch here, all right," Brazel said, looking closely. "But ... hell, pick me up." The halfogre reached out and set Brazel on his shoulders, and the gnome fished out a dagger and carefully prodded at something on top of the lintel.

  There was a screech and a flash as two blades spun out from the corners of the lintel, coming down just in front of where Brazel's hand would have been. The door clunked, as if it had fallen a short distance.

  "That would have taken your fingers off," Brazel said. "Do you remember Rhundi saying anything about traps?"

  "I do not," Grond replied. "And I like my fingers." He rummaged through his pack, pulling on a pair of armored gloves. They were lightweight, but they'd turn a severed finger into a broken one, and broken ones were much easier to fix.

  The two of them put their shoulders into the door, which begrudgingly slid out of the way.

  The room was empty, save for debris and dust.

  "This used to be wood," Brazel said. "Look around; it's clustered by the walls. Shelves, maybe, or furniture. It's just fallen apart over the years." He picked up a larger piece of trash from the floor, which crumbled to pieces in his hands.

  "Look at the floor here," Grond said.

  Carved into the floor was a sigil inside a circle.

  "Are those snakes?" he asked.

  "I think they might be," Brazel said. If they were snakes, they were an abstract representation, with hundreds of wavy shapes curled into one another. Some of them had what appeared to be sharp teeth, and forked tongues protruded from others. Brazel stared at the sigil, trying to coerce hidden meaning out of it.

  For a moment, the snakes moved. Brazel jumped back, then felt silly.

  "What?" Grond asked.

  "Optical illusion, I think," the gnome replied. "Stare at the thing for a minute."

  Grond did. "It's moving," he said. "That's impressive." He reached out a hand, brushing his fingers over the symbol, then yanked them back.

  "It's moist," he said. "Touch it." Brazel did. The stone felt cool to the touch and had an al
most rubbery texture to it.

  "Weird," he said.

  "Shall we keep looking?" Grond asked. "Whatever that is, I don't think we can take it with us, and we definitely can't sell it."

  "Yeah," Brazel said. There were three more rooms to examine. The first two were much the same, differing only in size: a trap on the door, easily avoided, and a room with a symbol carved into the floor and the rotten remains of furniture around the outside of the room.

  The final room had no catch on the door.

  "I don't see a place for the blades to come out, either," Grond said. "Should we just try and push the door open and see what happens?"

  Brazel dropped down off the halfogre's shoulders and looked carefully at the door. "I don't— oh. Wait a minute." His clothing began glowing more brightly.

  "Take a look at this," the gnome said. "But don't get too close." Grond leaned down, peering at the part of the door Brazel was pointing at.

  "That's a hole," Grond said.

  "Yeah," Brazel said. "And so is this—" he pointed at another part of the door— "and this, and this, and this, and ... man, they're everywhere."

  "Spike trap?" Grond said.

  "Probably projectiles. Any good ideas about how to trigger it?"

  "I suspect opening it or pushing on it too hard will do the job," Grond said.

  "So how do we get in?"

  "If we're smart, we don't," the halfogre said. "If we're not smart ..." he produced a grenade from his pack.

  "We blow the door altogether. Okay. Sounds fun," Brazel said. "And not at all like something that will backfire."

  "Shoulda brought something shaped," Grond said. "Dumb. Ah well." The two hid behind a doorway and Grond tossed the grenade at the closed door. It exploded on impact, a cloud of dust filling the central room. They waited for a few minutes, letting the dust settle and their ears recover from the sound, then went to examine the damage.

  The door was blown to pieces. Thousands of tiny needles lay scattered around the room.

  "That wouldn't have been good, I'm guessing," Grond said.

  "Poison, you think?" Brazel asked.

  "Those wouldn't do a lot of damage to an ogre," Grond said. "And they look like they wouldn't even penetrate thick clothing. So I'm guessing poison, yeah."

  "Let's see what they're protecting," Brazel said, and moved into the room, Grond following behind him.

  A moment later, the floor collapsed.

  * * *

  "Ow," Brazel said.

  He tried to move his arms and legs, which cooperated, if grudgingly. Nothing felt broken, and while he had some cuts and scrapes no part of him seemed to be in any more pain than any other part. His clothing was flickering, lending a ghostly glow to his surroundings. Must have landed on the power supply, he thought, and looked up. The fall had to have been fifteen meters.

  Lucky, he thought. If I'd landed differently, I could be dead.

  A moment later it occurred to him to wonder what he'd landed on. The floor that had collapsed had been stone, and it had presumably landed on more stone. This should hurt a LOT more than it does.

  He looked around for Grond. His partner was a couple of meters away, also beginning to stir. He didn't seem any more injured than Brazel was.

  There was a hissing sound in his ears.

  Wait.

  Hissing?

  Something crawled over his hand, and Brazel staggered to his feet.

  He was standing on a large chunk what had been the floor, big enough that it looked like he had ridden it down during the fall. His lights were still struggling to reassert themselves, but he could see beyond the edges of the chunk of masonry at what he had landed on.

  It was moving.

  "This can't be good," he mumbled.

  The floor started surging over the edges of the piece of stone he was standing on.

  "Grond," Brazel said. The halfogre pushed himself up onto his elbows, shaking his head. Grond had taken a harder fall than Brazel, and had several broken pieces of stone underneath him. It looked as if whatever was moving toward Brazel was already starting to crawl over his legs.

  "GROND!"

  Grond shook his head again and then abruptly came to himself, swinging his arm at his legs and clearing something off himself. He stood up, unsteadily, swatting at the lights he was wearing and turning them back on.

  The floor heaved.

  There was almost too much going on to parse. They'd landed on a pit of living creatures at least a half-meter deep: snakes, insects, lizards, other things that didn't seem to fit into any of those categories. Some were pretty clearly mechanical. Others were feeding on each other. An alarming percentage of them were trying to reach Brazel and Grond.

  "You've gotta be kidding," Grond said. Brazel found his gun and fired a few shots into the floor. His effort blew apart a few of the creeping mass but made no real difference of any kind to what was happening.

  "Not kidding," Brazel said. "Any ideas?"

  "Yeah," Grond said, and unhooked a device from his bandolier. "Get over here." Brazel took a couple of steps back and leaped, landing lightly on one of the pieces of floor Grond had been laying on. Grond thumbed a switch and pointed the thing he was holding at the swarming horde on the floor. There was a loud keening noise and the creatures scattered.

  "Directed sonics," Grond said. "I was hoping I'd get to use this sometime." The device looked like a projectile gun with an unfolding dish in place of a barrel. Whatever sound it was making, Brazel couldn't hear it, but the scratching of millions of tiny feet and claws and the screeching sounds most of them were making now was overwhelming. Grond waved the device around, clearing the floor for a meter or so around the two of them.

  "How long will that last?"

  "An hour, maybe," Grond said. "And you never know, the intensity may just kill some of them. But we gotta find a way out of here." Brazel peered into the darkness around the two of them. It looked like they'd fallen into a larger room than the one above them— which made sense, since the next-lower level on the ziggurat would be bigger. But there ought to be a way out somewhere. They hadn't seen any way down from the floor above them, so it had to have been in here somewhere—

  "There," the gnome said, pointing at the corner of the room. There was no door, but it looked like there was a passage. Grond waved the gun back and forth a few times between them and the door, and the swarm did its best to scatter.

  "C'mere," he said, grabbing Brazel. "This is gonna suck." He deposited the gnome on his shoulders and then, stomping heavily and using the sonic gun to clear a path, worked his way toward the passageway.

  "Don't trip," Brazel said.

  "Ya think?" Grond shouted. "You get heavier when you talk." Brazel could hear the bodies crunching underneath his partner's boots, and was suddenly glad the halfogre, who tended to leave his legs bare in hotter climates, had chosen to wear pants today. There was a step up from the snake-pit into the passage, and the individuals in the swarm were too busy pulling each other down for many of them to be able to climb it. Brazel leapt as soon as they were close enough, then got out of Grond's way as he leapt the last few steps.

  "Look back up there," Brazel said. Grond turned, pointing his lights back up at the floor above them. The floor had collapsed in a neat rectangular pattern.

  "That was a trap, not your grenade," he said. "I like this place less with every passing minute."

  "When I yell at you about this later, I'm pretending it was your idea, just so you know," Grond said. Brazel ignored the jab, moving along the corridor carefully, looking for anything that could be a wire or a pressure plate. The good thing about being so much smaller than his partner was that the traps would probably be sized and weighted for ogres and not for gnomes. Grond, meanwhile, was shaking things off of his boots and stomping anything left alive in the corridor.

  "These were good boots, too," he said. Brazel glanced over. They were shredded. It seemed unlikely that nothing poisonous had managed to bite him, but Grond wa
sn't frothing at the mouth yet or anything.

  The hallway looked safe. Suspiciously safe, actually.

  "Give me another couple of minutes," Brazel said. "Don't go anywhere yet." Grond nodded, stomping something mechanical and many-legged into pieces and kicking its body back into the room.

  A moment later, Brazel reached the end of the hall. There was no door this time, just an abrupt left turn to the hallway and then a widening stairway down into an enormous open room that had to fill the rest of the open space on that floor of the ziggurat. Did we count the levels? Brazel thought. There had to be at least three, but maybe this one counted as the fourth. He didn't remember how many there were from outside.

  The question was knocked clean out of his head when he saw what was in the room.

  Four golden, gem-studded sarcophagi were aligned in two perpendicular lines. At the intersection of the lines stood a brass-colored stand with a book sitting on top of it. The book was open. It was also enormous, measuring at least two meters square, and perhaps half a meter thick. The sarcophagi glittered in the light.

  Wait. There was light. And it wasn't coming from him.

  "The book's glowing," he said.

  "What?" Grond said. He was still trying to clean bugs out of his boots.

  "Get down here," Brazel said. "But be careful. And ... brace yourself." The halfogre loved books more than Brazel had ever loved anything, and it would be difficult to stop him from charging into the room and trying to read the thing. That felt like a very bad idea.

  "What's that mean?" Grond asked, and then peered into the room.

  "Oh," he said. "I want that."

  "No," Brazel said.

  "Yes," Grond said. "We told the client we'd give her anything neat. Nobody likes books anymore, and besides, that is not neat. It is unspeakably awesome. That means it's mine. I'll haul the coffins out for her." He leaned into the room.

  "See anything on the floor to worry about?"

  "No," Brazel said. "But I really don't trust the fact that the thing's shining."

  "Phosphorescent ink," Grond said. "That doesn't mean trap."