Wicked_Fiction - Descend to Heaven #4

Eight days later.

Edmund stood in one of the labyrinth's thirty-one chambers with Poe on his shoulder, watching two clay men try to kill each other with great skill and no enthusiasm whatsoever.

They were the same dull reddish-brown as the ground, roughly man-shaped, with smooth oval blanks where their faces should have been.

Each carried a wooden shield in one hand and, in the other, a sword of bronze, a long, heavy, sickle-shaped thing whose blade swept out and curved back on itself like a reaping hook.

Their movements were slow and sluggish, as if they were fighting through syrup. Their swings were another matter. Every stroke arrived with an unhurried weight that made the packed earth jump beneath their feet, and the technique behind it was, as far as Edmund could tell, unquestionably excellent.

The chamber itself was a courtyard of sorts, a square of earth some fifteen paces across, hemmed in by walls he had raised out of what had once been three houses and a stable.

Around the edges the other four members of the garrison waited, dormant: two archers on a low ledge, as motionless as statues, and two clay hounds curled in alcoves, which looked a good deal more like sleeping than he found comfortable.

Only the two soldiers were awake. Waking them had cost him half a point of mana, which was a pittance, but he had been counting pittances for ten days now and had developed opinions about them.

One of the many fields Edmund had endeavored to excel in over the years was the sword. His physique had never been suited to it, and he had known that within the first week, but he had kept at it long enough to be able to teach swordsmanship to others, after a fashion, though only in terms of technique.

What his own body refused to do, he could at least explain to somebody else's.

The technique in front of him, however, was one he had never seen. It leaned on the hook of the blade. One clay man caught the rim of the other's shield in the curve of his sword and hauled, and the shield came away, or the arm came with it, and in the same motion the blade swung free and chopped down into the opening it had made.

There was an alarming level of intent behind it. It aimed to take advantage of the opening, slicing the opponent's flesh as if it were exposed.

It was the style of a bygone age, he thought, from before plate and mail had become as common as they were now, when a shield was the whole of a man's armor and the surest way to beat a man was to take it from him.

He filed that away, along with everything else he had learned about a people whose name nobody remembered. Whoever they were, they had fought like this.

Still, with that much strength behind the swings, they would shatter the bones beneath armor, if not cut the flesh under it. Not that he wanted anybody's bones shattered. His goal was not to kill the adventurers who came, but to deter them from going forward, all while keeping them coming back.

He had killed once for this place. He did not intend to make a habit of it, and the reasons were only partly strategic. A dungeon that killed too many would be shut down by the Compact. A dungeon that hurt people just enough became a story, and a challenge, and a reason to come back with friends, and the friends breathed, and the breathing was mana.

By the manual's own account, pain and fear were excellent for output.

He had designed the labyrinth with that in mind. Most of it was tight passageways, narrow enough that parties had to string out in single file, and the passageways were thick with traps: flat pitfalls that would at most fracture a foot or break an ankle, and poisoned darts that caused severe pain and no permanent damage.

He had been rather particular about the poison. He had, after all, more personal experience of poisons than he would have liked.

Then there were the chambers, thirty of them, each holding six guardians. Two clay soldiers with sickle swords and shields. Two archers. Two clay hounds. Each of them had cost five points of mana to summon and cost a quarter of a point to activate for a day.

He could charge them with more mana to keep them moving for longer than a day, but he could not charge them for less, much to his disappointment. A day was the minimum unit, like an inn that charged for the night even if you left at breakfast.

The arithmetic was not unkind, provided he was careful. A hundred and eighty constructs at five points each came to nine hundred mana to summon, and while they were dormant they cost him nothing at all.

Brought online all at once they would have cost forty-five a day, which was more than twice his surplus, which was why they were going to spend the vast majority of their existence standing perfectly still.

Dormant was the whole point. The garrison would wake only when somebody walked in, and sleep again when they left.

As for the last chamber, it held the guardian, the final hurdle before the gardens: a stone golem three meters tall, with the body of a man and the head of a lion.

He had wanted to test it, just as he was testing the clay soldiers here. He had dismissed the idea the moment he realized that the lion-headed floor guardian would cost ten points of mana merely to wake up.

Edmund sighed and muttered that it was a shame he didn't have more mana to work with. If he had, he would have filled the entire labyrinth with chambers like this one.

Unfortunately, the arithmetic had not added up, and it had not added up in the cruelest way arithmetic knows, by being perfectly correct.

A labyrinth full of chambers like this one would have eaten every point he owned many times over, and a labyrinth with no mana left to wake anything inside it would have been an elaborate and expensive way of presenting his future guests with an empty maze.

So he had done the only sensible thing and sealed away the majority of it. The great sprawl of walls and alleys he had spent days raising was now mostly very large, very convincing stage scenery, closed off behind blank stone.

What remained were four paths, each of which crossed at least four chambers and a truly unreasonable number of traps before it reached the final chamber, where the guardian waited with its lion's head and its ten points of mana.

That was only if a party went straight for it and did not get lost along the way. Getting lost was very easy. He had made sure of it.

In any case, the effort had cost him most of his reserves. He had started with three thousand seven hundred and change and a plan, and he now had two hundred and fifty-four points to his name, which he had already divided with the dull neatness of a man who has been poor before.

Fifty of them were for practicing magic, since a mage who could not cast a fire bolt was merely a gentleman with a hobby, and he intended to rectify that. The remaining two hundred and four were an emergency fund, to be touched only if something went wrong, and something, in his experience, always did.

He was just about to begin making his way back to the core room when Poe began to caw.

It was not the usual caw, the dry, sardonic one the raven deployed whenever Edmund said something particularly pompous. This was a frantic, rattling sound, and Poe went at it with his whole body, flailing his wings so hard against Edmund's ear that his hair stood up.

"What is it?" Edmund frowned. "What's wrong?"

Before he could process the answer, the chamber vanished. The world lurched, and he was suddenly looking through the eyes of one of Poe's clones, high in the air, with a wind he could not feel tugging at feathers he did not have.

It was an odd thing to have forced on a man without warning, and he swallowed hard, but he understood at once what the raven was trying to tell him, because he could see it.

Out past the Lion Gate, on the pale salt, a plume of dust was rising, long and low and slanted, the way dust rises behind something moving quickly in a straight line. It was heading directly for the dungeon.

Edmund frowned. Who could it be? It was far too early for the adventurers from the Compact to be arriving, by his estimates, and they would not have been in such a hurry in any case. Adventurers did not gallop at dungeons.

They arrived tired and sunburned and complaining, and they arrived on foot.

"Closer," he said. "Give me a closer look."

Poe cawed, in what sounded almost like approval, and the clone tilted and dropped, sweeping down toward the plume in a long, curving descent until the dust resolved into shapes: horses, running hard, with riders on their backs.

He counted eight of them. Their heads were wrapped in cloth the color of sand and the lower halves of their faces were covered with the same cloth, so that nothing showed but their eyes, and their robes were the same shade of desert.

So, he noticed, were the horses, whose coats and blankets had been chosen, or dyed, to vanish against the salt. They rode like people who had done this many times.

Edmund recognized them at once. Not every desert nomad was a raider. He had met enough honest ones to know that, and the honest sort did not ride eight abreast in sand-colored veils toward a newly awakened dungeon. These were the other kind. Bedouin marauders.

Edmund frowned. What were they doing here?

These were no ordinary bandits. He knew of them by reputation, from sixty years of reading and caravan gossip, and the reputation was of an established band with a history of at least two centuries behind it, handed down from one leader to the next under whoever happened to hold the title of Prince of Thieves.

They made their living raiding the trade routes between the river principalities and the Crownlands of Valedorn, and in all those years the powers on both sides had made a great many attempts to scatter them, and had succeeded about as often as a man succeeds in scattering fog.

They knew these drylands like the backs of their hands.

They could appear out of the dunes and vanish back into them before a pursuer had finished deciding to pursue, and the people who had tried to hunt them down had mostly come home with nothing but sunburn and a new respect for sand.

In a way, it made sense that they would be here. This was their territory, after all, and the dungeon sat squarely between the two realms whose caravans they bled. But sitting between two nations was not the same as sitting on the road between them, and the dungeon was a good distance off the most profitable path.

There was nothing here to raid. The only reason Edmund could think of was that the ruins, before he had claimed them, might have served the marauders as a kind of shelter, a place to wait out a storm or a pursuit.

But he had gone over the outer city and the temple more times than he could count while he was rebuilding them, and he had not found a trace of anyone ever staying: no old ash, no gnawed bones, no tally marks scratched into the walls.

If they had used the place, they had been tidy about it... or they haven't used it in a very long time.

He was still turning that over when the intelligence spoke up.

[Eight common existences have entered the dungeon's premises. Expected mana revenue increased by 1.43 units]

[Eight lesser existences have entered the dungeon's premises. Expected mana revenue increased by 0.6 units]

"Lesser and common existences, horse and bandits..." Edmund murmured, and wondered briefly what an uncommon one would look like, and whether it would be billed separately.

He hummed.

The figure was lower than he would have liked, but the riders were still at the very edge, where, by the manual's own account, proximity to the core counted for a great deal, and a man could hardly expect a decent return from a guest who had only just wiped his feet.

He let himself consider his options. The first idea that came to him, and he was not proud to admit that it came first, was to capture them and keep them somewhere, to be charged against the dungeon like cattle in a fattening pen.

He dismissed it almost at once. Eight armed, mounted raiders who knew the land better than he did were not a harvest. They were a risk, and a chore, one that would require guards and food and locks and a great deal of sleepless worrying, all for a return that, at these numbers, would not have paid for the bread. Too much work, too much risk, for too little reward.

After a while he turned his head and looked at the constructs in the chamber. The two clay soldiers had gone on with their duel, hooking and hacking at each other with a grave and tireless dignity, and the archers and the hounds stood waiting on their ledge and in their alcoves.

Edmund watched them for a moment, and then nodded slowly to himself.

This, he thought, was a very good opportunity to put them to the test.

"Intelligence," he said. "Deactivate all traps on the first floor."

◆

Three days after their failed attempt to raid a caravan bound for Al Amari, the nearest city of the River Principalities to the Crownlands, no one had the strength left to pretend they weren't afraid.

The horses were the only ones still doing any real work. Eight riders in cloth the color of the sand, slumped in their saddles like sacks of wet grain, and the only sounds were hooves and the creak of leather and, every so often, somebody clearing his throat as though about to say something and then thinking better of it.

Bram Hollis rode third from the front with his eyes half shut. He had been a bronze-rank adventurer in the Crownlands once, in a life he did not discuss, before a series of decisions that had each seemed reasonable at the time, and he had learned two things in the years since.

One was how to sleep in a saddle. The other was that the silence after a disaster is the one you should be listening to.

It was Dhal who finally broke it, because it was always Dhal. "I still can't wrap my head around it... she didn't even stand up."

Nobody answered.

"What is with that? She was sitting on the back of that wagon eating something. An apple, I think. And then she just..." He lifted one hand off his reins and waved it at the air, a small, lazy flick, the kind a woman might use on a fly. "And the whole left flank was gone. Like somebody wiped a slate."

"We know," said Ossik, from somewhere under his headcloth. "We were there."

"Forty of us went in." Dhal could not stop now, because stopping meant listening to the quiet. "Forty. And she never drew a weapon. She didn't even look angry. She looked bored."

His voice cracked on the word. "Even now... it feels like she'll appear at any moment to finish the rest of us. I can hardly believe we survived."

"It's too early to say we survived," said Karrow, who rode at the back and had not spoken since the second night.

Dhal twisted around in his saddle. "What?"

"The Prince's nephew rode in the first wave."

That was all he said, and it was enough. The cloth hid their mouths, but nothing could hide what happened to their eyes. Dhal turned slowly back to face the front.

Somebody swore, very quietly, in the old tongue. After that no one said anything at all, and the eight of them rode on through the white glare with the hot wind in their faces, each of them quietly working out how a man might look when he explained to the Prince of Thieves that he had come home alive and his sister's boy had not.

They reached the Lion Gate soon after, and dismounted without a word, and stood in the shade of the first headless lion while the horses blew and shook. It was Bram who frowned first.

It had been a long time since any of them had come here to seek shelter. Years, for most of them, and for Karrow, who was the oldest, longer than that. But a place like this stayed in a man's head the way a bad tooth did, and something about the picture in front of him was wrong.

The city looked smaller. Bram could not have said how at first. Then he saw it. The ring of broken houses at the edge, the ragged outer fringe where they used to tether the horses, was simply gone.

There was bare ground where the third house from the gate had stood, a pale clean strip of it, as if somebody had come along with a broom.

Once he had noticed one thing, the others came easily. The old alley the horses used to take toward the market now ended in a wall, a perfectly good-looking ruin of a wall that he would have sworn had not been there.

The market square sat at a slightly different angle to the temple than he remembered. Even the temple seemed to stand a little more severely than it had, like a man who has been told he is being watched.

"Something's different," said Karrow.

"Everything's different," said Dhal, whose gift was saying out loud what everyone else had already noticed. "It's smaller. Is it smaller?"

"This was a dungeon, wasn't it? Before?" Another of them spoke up from the back, a thin man whose name Bram had never quite caught. "A real one, I mean. With a core and everything." He hesitated. "Do you think it woke up?"

Ossik laughed, a short, dry bark of a laugh. "Woke up. Dungeons don't wake up. They're dead rocks, like the rest of the desert. Maybe it heard you were hungry and came to feed you."

"They do," said Bram.

They turned to look at him. He kept his eyes on the ruins. "Dormant isn't dead. A sleeping dungeon is just a dungeon waiting for the right time to awaken. A Compact clerk told me once that on rare occasions, ancient dungeons return to life. It scarcely happens. But it's possible."

He rubbed his jaw through the cloth. "In fact, I hope that's what this is."

"You hope," said Ossik.

"I do." He looked at them then. "The Crownlands run every dungeon for a hundred leagues, and the river princes run the rest, and every man at every gate has our faces on a list. Men like us walk into one of those, and they won't walk out."

He gestured with his chin at the ruined city, the temple, the white sky. "But this one could be ours. It's in our sand. No Crown tax collector at the door, no Compact to hang us on the way in. If it's alive, and if we are the ones to bring news of it to the Prince..."

He let the sentence hang. It was the kind of idea that had a way of finishing itself.

"He might decide a living dungeon is worth more than a dead nephew," said Karrow slowly.

"He might decide he'd rather keep us alive to run it," said Bram. "Or at the very least, not gut us."

The others looked at each other. It was a long, quiet look, passed from one pair of tired eyes to the next, the look of eight men who have just been handed something that might be a rope or might be a noose, and who have decided, without anyone having to say so, that they would rather hold it than let go.

It was Dhal who said it, with an eagerness that made him sound twelve years old. "Then we go back. Now. We tell him everything."

"Now," said Ossik, already reaching for his horse. "Before somebody else gets to him first."

"No," said Bram.

They stopped.

"If we ride in empty-handed with a story about a city that looks smaller, the Prince will have us gutted for wasting his time. He's lost his nephew. He is not going to be in a mood to listen to eight men who say they have a feeling."

He shook his head. "We need proof. Something we can put in his hand. Something like the stones, the magic ones, that the monsters in a dungeon sometimes drop."

It took them less than a minute to agree. Nobody liked it, and nobody had a better idea, which was how most of the decisions in the band's history had been made.

They left the horses tethered in the shade of the headless lions, took what water and weapons they could carry, and went in through the gate on foot, eight tired men the color of the desert walking toward something that might not exist.

The ruined city swallowed them within a few streets. Then it began to do something Bram had not expected from a pile of old houses, which was to confuse them. The streets bent, and split, and ended in blind walls, and doubled back on themselves in a way that felt less like decay than design.

Every wall looked like a ruin, with the same sagging tops and scorched windows, but none of them sat the way ruins do. They stood far too straight.

By the end of the first hour Dhal's sense of direction, which had never been good, had given up entirely. By the end of the second, even Karrow, their pathfinder, was shaking his head and muttering about corners that had not been corners before.

It was Bram who put his finger on the other thing, somewhere in the third hour, when they stopped to drink and he found himself staring at the ground. "It just occurred to me, but...where are the traps?"

They looked at him.

"I've been in a few dungeons myself," he said slowly. "I've never walked this far into one without a pit, or a tripwire, or a loose flagstone trying to kill me, especially in a maze. And this is a maze. You don't build a maze and leave it empty."

"Maybe nobody's home," said Dhal.

"Maybe it's a ruin," said Ossik, with enormous satisfaction. "Like I said. A dead pile of rocks with a pretty gate." He spat into the dust. "We've been wandering around for hours, and all we've found is old walls. Your dungeon is a hole in the sand. Let's go home and tell the Prince we got lost."

Bram opened his mouth to argue, and found that he did not have anything left to argue with. He looked up at the blank, burned wall in front of them, at the sky above it, at the long road back, and he began to conclude, with a slow, sinking disappointment, that Ossik might be right.

Then the wall moved.

It did not collapse, or crumble, or shudder. It simply slid aside with a low, patient grinding, the way a door does in a house where somebody is expecting company, and behind it lay a new passage that had not existed a moment earlier, narrow and straight and perfectly clear.

Nobody moved.

It had the unmistakable look of an invitation, and every man there had a lifetime of experience with invitations that ended in knives.

"That's not natural," said Dhal, in a very small voice.

"It's alive," said the thin man. "I told you it was alive."

"Gods help us," muttered Ossik, who had stopped laughing.

They stood there for a long moment, and the fear in the passage was real. But there was another fear, an older one, waiting for them on the road home with a nephew's name on its lips, and it was the larger of the two.

It was Karrow, in the end, who said what everyone was thinking. "Better a wall that eats us than the Prince." And he went in first.

The passage ended in a courtyard some fifteen paces across, hemmed in by high walls, with a low ledge on one side and a row of alcoves along the other.

In the middle of it stood six figures. Two were men of clay, reddish-brown, faceless, a shield on one arm and a long, curved sickle of bronze in the other hand. Two more crouched on the ledge with bows. Two were hounds. They were perfectly still. They looked like statues. Then the first clay man turned its blank face toward them, and they stopped looking like statues.

The hounds came first. They were fast, much faster than anything made of clay had any right to be, two low brown streaks that crossed the courtyard in a heartbeat and went for the nearest pair of legs.

Dhal screamed, and went down, and Ossik got a knife into the first one's flank and found that it cracked and did not bleed. They fought it with their hands and their blades, hammering at the joints where the clay was thinnest, until the dog came apart in a spray of brown dust and the second followed it in a long, ugly scramble.

Dhal had a torn calf and was still shouting. He seemed to consider this a victory.

The archers were quieter, and worse. They loosed slowly, deliberately, and they did not miss.

An arrow sank into the thin man's shoulder and spun him around, another cut a furrow along Ossik's ribs, and Bram understood, in the middle of rolling behind the lip of a broken wall, that these things had all the time in the world and would simply keep shooting until nobody was left.

So he did the thing a bronze-rank learns in his first season, which was to stop thinking about the arrows and go straight at the bows. Two of the others went with him. The archers turned much too slowly. They died, if that was the word for it, with their heads in pieces.

The soldiers took the longest.

They were slow, and Bram could see it and could not make use of it, because their swings were so heavy that slow did not matter. One sickle caught Karrow's buckler by the rim, hooked it, and ripped it sideways in a single heave, and in the same movement the second blow came down on his arm. Bram saw the blood splatter. It was a sight he would not forget.

"The hooks!" he shouted, through his teeth. "They go for the shield first! Don't let them catch your rim!"

And so they fought the clay men the only way a man can fight something that cannot be hurried, by dodging the first blow and the second and the third and then going in low, and hitting the knees, and the elbows, and the neck, until the clay cracked and the thing fell in pieces on the packed earth.

When it was over, there were six small stones on the ground.

They had not been there before.

They lay in the dust where each guardian had fallen, no bigger than a thumbnail, dark and smoky, with a faint warmth to them that Bram felt even through his glove when he picked up the first.

He held it up to the light.

Nobody spoke.

Then Dhal, sitting in the dust with his leg wrapped in somebody's sash, began to laugh, and the thin man laughed with him, holding his shoulder, and then they were all laughing, eight men and six stones and the promise of brighter futures.

They had paid for it. Karrow's arm hung at an angle that made Bram's stomach turn, and Ossik was breathing carefully around his ribs, and the thin man could not lift his left arm at all. But they were alive, and they had come out of it with something they could put into the Prince's hand.

It was the first good thing that had happened to any of them in three days.

"Outside," said Bram, when he could breathe. "We take a rest. Water, shade, bind these up. Then we go home."

Nobody argued. They gathered themselves, and the stones, and each other, and limped out through the opening in the wall, one at a time, into the passage beyond.

They got barely a dozen steps.

In front of them, the wall shifted. And out of the newly created passage stepped a man, as if he were coming through a doorway in a house. He was perhaps thirty, thin and long-limbed, with an ordinary face and eyes that were a good deal sharper than the rest of him, and he wore a wool coat, a heavy one, in the middle of the desert.

On his shoulder sat a raven. It was black as a hole, and it looked at the eight of them as though it were counting.