by Harry Nix
From somewhere far ahead of us came distant cries, as faint as a whisper on a breeze. We crept into the corridor, the cold gripping us. I could feel Ebony’s rage. Harnesses for spiders. A well-organized group of spider handlers, cheerfully doing their jobs.
The sheer horror of spiders locked into those harnesses by whomever this Apothecary was.
And for what sick purpose?
14
Industrial and medical. It was back again, that scent of disinfectants and grease. The floors were stone, highly polished and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Deep Dive where my body was locked in a pod.
Maybe it was intentional—Lucy drawing on my memories, incorporating them into her stories.
The temperature dropped as we made our way down a corridor that was longer than first assumed. It had a slow curve to it and in the gloom felt like it would go on forever. All I could hear was our breathing and the spiders, their feet clacking. I was walking slightly ahead of them, and yeah, about thirty percent of my unease was having these giant spiders scurrying so close behind.
I couldn’t help but to think of the beehive idea—once you were inside you could do whatever you wanted and wouldn’t be challenged. This was a little different of course—this beehive appeared empty. After slaughtering October and his men, I was expecting to come up against more enemies soon enough. Like a campaign, new room, new enemies, or at least every second room.
But this... silence... it was sinking in the heart of me. This was like a prison that was so hard to escape that no guards were even posted. The distant unseen spiders crying out were helpless and pitiful. The cold air itself seemed to rob all hope, and the slight occasional glimmering light made me think of Gollum, deep underground, forgetting the warm light of day.
Gloom
The ones who died are considered fortunate. The ones who still live fear they will be trapped forever. Much evil brews here. It is seeping into you and having unknown effects...
“Great,” I muttered under my breath as the status message flashed by on my HUD. Like when I’d been killed by the Orc in the forest, I now had a status effect. However this one had no timer counting down until it was gone.
The morose text was right though—this place was affecting me. I couldn’t help imagining being a spider, strapped to a cart, wheeled down here. It was like the freezing chill of an operating room, except whomever was behind all this wasn’t there to help.
This was about power and control.
Isabel moved under one of the lights ahead, enough to give us fair warning she was there but even still, the spiders hissed at the sudden sight of her. I clenched my hand on my staff, feeling the urge to cast Bolt and barely holding it back. Perhaps the only reason I didn’t cast it was the oppressive atmosphere sucking away at me.
“There are two guards, but the doors are very wide. I need someone to come with me,” she said.
“I would do it but I suspect my feet are making too much noise,” Ebony said, tapping one on the stone floor.
“I can do it. I have the Echo Knife,” Scarlet said.
In the darkness, I swear her red skin had a faint luminescence to it, as though she was lit up from within. She held the knife in her hand, the blade reflecting slightly, giving it a murky appearance.
“I’ll do it, they can’t see me,” Ori said.
I looked for the little demon but I couldn’t see him.
“Are you sure?” I asked, scanning the walls.
“Let’s go,” he said to Isabel, ignoring me.
I glanced at her and she just shrugged like, well, he has a point if you can’t even see him.
She took two steps and was gone, just like before. I heard a faint whisper of a sound—Ori’s feet on the stone.
Nominally I was the leader, I guess, but it didn’t feel like it waiting in the dark. Ahead of us was just more curve, the endless stone wall. Scarlet moved to stand beside me and her hand brushed the back of mine. Her skin was warm, which made me realize how much the chill had been seeping into my bones.
I glanced back and the spiders. It even felt like they’d become deflated somewhat by this place. Their rage at the distant cries of their family was slowly fading away.
“Let’s move,” I said and began walking, not waiting for an answer. There was no other status effect on me other than gloom but who knows, maybe that was a spell, designed to sap all fight out of incoming victims. If so, we had to move fast.
The curve continued, stretching on and as we walked I realized there must have been another entrance far behind us. After all, where did the man who opened the elevator go? Was this just a giant circle dug into the mountain and we’d rushed on without bothering to investigate?
Questions questions but then no more time for them because the curve suddenly ended in two large double doors, made of refracting crystal. The two guards on each side had been standing bored, one leaning on a wickedly sharp spear. Their gazes turned towards us just as Isabel and Ori struck.
Isabel came out of nothing as usual, leaping on to a guard and stabbing away at his back and shoulders. She wasn’t as fast as before, not with her injury, but it was still plenty. On the other side a patch of black detached from the wall and wrapped around the guard’s throat before starting to constrict.
I don’t know if he’d had training against fighting ink demons but he slammed his mouth shut, stopping Ori going down his throat and then slashed at the black ink with his spear. Ori recoiled from the wound, which enabled him to get a hand up to rip the ink demon away. I expected him to throw Ori but instead he began to squeeze, bits of dead ink squishing between his fingers and dropping to the floor.
Isabel, despite a strong start, wasn’t going much better. The guard slammed back against the wall, crushing her against it. He was bleeding freely from the wounds on his shoulders and neck but none of them looked to be a killing blow.
As one, we rushed in, which was a tactical error.
I was going to shove my staff against the guard who had Ori, electrocute him but in the rush, a spider knocked me down. I was on the cold stone for a moment before a searing pain burst from my calf as one of the other spiders stepped on me, piercing through the muscle like a spike into soft earth.
On the way out, I felt the flesh rip from small unseen barbs on the spider’s legs.
I managed to roll over and get to my feet as the guard holding Ori went down under two spiders. On the far side of the door Scarlet was stumbling to her feet, shaking her head, a trickle of blood running down it to match the splotch on the wall. She’d been knocked aside too.
The guard holding Ori had been bitten multiple times but wasn’t foaming at the mouth on the way to a quick death. He was red-faced, bleeding, but still had the ink demon in a death grip.
“Clear,” I said as I limped my way to him. The spiders did as I instructed, which is the good thing about any command spoken in a clear tone. With all the force I could muster, I jammed my staff down on his body and cast Bolt, going for center mass.
I was expecting an explosion of light but instead the Bolt shot out the end of the staff, hit his armor and then fractural patterned over it, dissipating. It had been hidden in the gloom but his leather armor seemed to have fine strands of some conductive metal sewn into it.
I lifted my staff again, intending to stab it down into his face but then went down again as Isabel crashed into me, thrown across the room. I hit the wall with my face and slid to the floor, my injured leg giving way. If the walls hadn’t been as smooth as glass I would have ripped half my face off.
Isabel was dazed and bleeding again from her wound. On the far side of the room, the guard was facing off against Scarlet who had the Echo Knife in one hand and a fireball in the other. He grabbed his spear from the ground and brought it to bear on the Demoness.
Bolt was on cooldown so I cast my only other spell: vibrate. It shrank down to a point, focused on his spear and then my mana gulped away as the spell was cast, from my hands instead of my staff
.
I was just hoping Scarlet wouldn’t get speared, or me and it seemed a little luck was on my side. The guard had wedged his spear under his arm, locking it against his body. Vibrate hit the spear and flung upwards. He was pulled off his feet and hit the ceiling headfirst. There was an almighty crack as his neck broke and he dropped lifelessly to the ground.
I turned back to the one remaining guard who was now a mess of puncture wounds. He was trying to fend off the spiders with one arm but weakening quickly.
“Clear,” I heard from behind me and barely managed to roll away with a limp Isabel in my arms before Ebony came rushing in. The two spiders stepped aside as she jumped, sticking her eight legs together into a point and landed on the guard’s torso.
The guard’s chest collapsed with a sickening crunch and there was a spray of blood as everything inside him was pushed up his throat.
He was dead... but so was Ori. The little ink demon was down to a sliver of health which soon vanished as the last of him dripped on to the floor.
I dragged myself into a sitting position but struggled to get up. My calf was ripped wide open, blood running out fast enough that I’d bleed to death if I couldn’t stop it. Isabel was stirring and was wounded but looked like she’d be okay so I dragged myself over to Scarlet who’d gone down on one knee. There was a pool of blood beneath her.
“What happened?”
“Spear to the stomach,” she said, grimacing as she lifted her hand to show me the wound. It was a gash, rather than a direct stab wound in but it was deep and had torn into the muscle.
I managed to get myself up and went back to Isabel. She’d brought along spare rags we could use. I was searching her cloak when her hand clamped down on my wrist and she put her knife in my face.
“Hey, I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, blinking at me.
“I need to make bandages.”
“This pocket here,” she said, letting go of my wrist and pulling out a handful of rags that were far too big to fit in such a small pocket. It briefly crossed my mind that a cloak that doubled as a bag of holding would be quite useful.
Battlefield medicine means stop yourself from dying first so I tore strips and bound my calf muscle in record time. The blood immediately soaked into the bandages but it seemed to be slowing. I glanced at my status screen and saw I had a list, alongside gloom. Bleeding, bruised, chilled.
With my leg bandaged I went to Scarlet and began wrapping the rags around her waist. She held a wadded part of a shirt against the wound as I looped the fabric around her until it was tight in place.
Scarlet took her hand away and then let out a sign of relief at the small trickle of blood that escaped.
“Are you interested in dipping your staff?” she said in a sultry voice. Then she laughed, quickly followed by a grimace before pointing to the blood she was kneeling in.
“Ouch, that hurts,” she said, frowning at the patched up wound.
I helped her to her feet, feeling the heat of her arm around me. I really was suffering from the chilled status effect. She felt hotter than ever. That meant despite our injuries, we needed to keep moving before we all just sat down in defeat and died.
Once she was out of the blood pool I did dip my staff, expecting another sliver of demoness blood but all I got was a new message.
New Blood Only!
Yeah, that’s not how it works. Otherwise you’d just drain your demoness (before she can drain you, get it? Get it?) to transfer yourself into an awesome murder machine. You need new demon blood for that.
“Need new demon blood,” I said.
“We can go on a murder spree just as soon as we’re finished here,” Scarlet said, mixing another smile with a grimace.
I turned around to find six spiders watching us. They didn’t have faces like us but you could tell they were confused by flirting right after a battle.
Isabel was back up and bandaging her wound.
“You good to keep going?” I said.
“I know Armando is in there. Death herself couldn’t stop me.”
“Herself?”
“Oh, one of those are you?” Isabel said, but this time with a hint of a smirk under it. “Death is a man, the sun is a man, time is an old man.”
“Yeah, okay. We need to stealth it behind these doors. We don’t know what we’re going to find. Two guards nearly wiped us out just now.”
“The sea is a man,” Isabel finished. She patted her new bandage and then packed the last of the unused rags away.
I checked my status bar to see if I could bring Ori back, but he was grayed out, and there was no time indicator for when I could bring him back. Another spell? A no-respawn zone?
“We need to keep moving,” Ebony said when she saw me stop to check the dead guard’s armor. It was hacked and broken where she’d pierced right through it, but I thought it could still be worth something. Maybe I could repair it, get resistance to lightning.
But she was right. There was no time for stripping dead bodies now. This was a game, but there was no automatic loot button. If I wanted armor, I’d have to cut it off them.
I left the dead guard who was still seeping blood from his mouth despite being stone-cold dead and approached the crystal doors. There was a fine line down the center where they opened but no clue as to how they operated. Lacking any better idea, I touched the line with my hand.
The doors smoothly opened, quieter than a supermarket entranceway. There was even a gust of cold air from above as they did so.
I turned back to the spiders.
“Wait for my signal to attack, and please, spread out. We don’t need to be fighting on top of each other.”
This might sound racist, but I honestly couldn’t tell the other spiders much apart. I don’t know which one knocked me down nor which one stepped on me.
“Isabel and I will go in first. Follow as quiet as you can and hide until we say otherwise,” I added.
My leg was killing me, but if I moved slowly enough, I could do it without shuffling along.
We passed through the doors and under the gush of cold air from above that was coming from a slot cut into the stone itself. The gloom deepened, rendering everything in tones of gray. We were in a room maybe twenty feet across. On the far side were fabric partitions, much like you’d see at a hospital. The sounds of the distressed spiders were louder now, and between the partitions, I could see someone moving around. The man who’d opened the elevator maybe.
As I moved through the room, my eyesight adjusted, and I saw there were tables around the sides of it. There were a few that looked like something out a bondage dungeon nightmare. Leather and metal and a spiked ring that looked just the right size to fit over a spider, hold it in place so it would hurt itself if it struggled.
I crept up to the partition and looked through, vague shapes finally resolving themselves into spiders, strapped down in harnesses, row after row of them.
Most were quiet, staring dully at nothing, but there were smaller ones sobbing to themselves.
“Momma? Momma...” a spider wept. She sounded like a six-year-old girl.
On each harness was a golden lock, faintly illuminating the area.
“I bet he has the key,” Isabel whispered from beside me. She pointed at the distant figure that was hunched over beside a spider.
There was no one else down here. Just the man and the spiders. Despite the fact we outnumbered him, it made me feel worse. He had to be powerful if he was left here alone.
I moved through the partitions and made it partway down a row, not yet to the first spider before Isabel gripped my arm.
“I need to go ahead alone. If the children see you, they’ll call out.”
Damn, she was right.
“Don’t attack him whatever you do. He’s bound to be more powerful than he appears,” I whispered back.
The man moved on from the first spider. In the dim light of the glowing locks, I saw him stash two full vials inside his cloak and take out new
empty ones.
“He’s milking their venom. I think he’s the Apothecary,” Isabel said. I could practically hear the capital letters falling into place.
“What do you know about him?”
“Poison-brewer, bomb-maker, if it’s toxic and harmful he makes it. They say he killed every child in a town of ten thousand just to see if he could.”
“He’s not Rax?”
“Rax is far worse. Now stay,” Isabel said and vanished into the dark.
I glanced behind me, but Scarlet and the spiders had hidden well. I checked my status as I waited. Ori was still grayed out, and I assumed he wasn’t coming back until I got out of here. I was down to minor bleeding now, and my health was slowly recovering. My leg was still hurting, but it was like the wound was hours rather than minutes old.
I swiped away the HUD with a thought and went back to watching the Apothecary. There was definitely something off about his movements. He had a long beard like an old man, was even hunched over, but there was a quickness about him in some moments. He was moving like a film with frames missing. He put two vials away and pulled out two more and moved to the next spider, a child by the size of it. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but from the tone of it she was begging for her mother. In the slight glow of the lock, I could see the Apothecary’s face. It wasn’t cruel or angry but flat and calm, which was levels more chilling. He had no emotion about these spiders trapped her. They were utterly nothing to him.
I saw the child spider attempt to squirm away from him as he brought a vial close to her fangs. Moving like he had all the time in the world, he touched something on the table and the entire harness constricted somehow. The spiked band inched downwards and small metal arms began moving inward.
“No, I’ll do it, please no!” the spider screamed out but he didn’t stop. Didn’t even blink. Held in place, the spider had its mouth forced open, its head held still. Then he milked both fangs before moving on, leaving the spider trapped like that.
