A light scratching sound came from above. Scorio jerked the lantern up higher and stared into the dark depths between the stalactites. Was that movement? The whispery sound came again, but this time from various places across the ceiling.
He rose to his feet and turned in a circle, lantern raised high.
The darkness seethed, alive with hidden movements that he couldn’t quite make out.
Maybe there was a reason that a previous traveler had dropped his buckle here.
Hurrying now, Scorio strode on, rushing between the stalagmites, eyes raised as the sound followed him, seeming to track his passage in a great swathe across the ceiling. The very air was alive now with a terrible scritching and scratching, and Scorio was about to break into a run when he saw why.
Large insects. Hundreds of them, grub-white and with the long, angular legs of a grasshopper, each easily the size of a small dog, articulated feelers waving in the air, pincers as long as his forefinger opening and closing as if in anticipation.
Then Scorio did run, and as if that was the signal the insects had been waiting for, they sprang down after him.
The air filled with their falling bodies, several of them landing on him and clinging to his filthy white robes with the clawed tips of their feet.
They were light, as if hollow, and he beat them off, punching and waving them away. They tore great holes in his clothing as they fell, pincers working furiously, seeking his flesh.
Swinging his lantern about his head, he ran blindly toward the cave’s far side and saw that there was no far wall, but that rather the floor sloped down and away into darkness, damp and shining in the lantern light, smooth as if polished and interrupted here and there by slender stalagmites.
Pain lanced in his shoulder as one of the insects dug deep, and the air was alive with them now as they leaped after, bounding higher than his head, most missing him as he ran, but more and more landing on his shoulders, his back.
Scorio didn’t hesitate. The lantern failed to illuminate the depths, but staying up here was certain death. With a cry, he leaped forward to crash down on his back, crushing a number of the insects under his weight, and began to slide down.
The white death crickets leaped after him at first, but as he picked up speed, they ceased their pursuit.
The floor fell away quickly. His moss-lantern lit the low ceiling as it rushed by. He tried to catch hold of stalagmites as he passed, but their surfaces were too slick, too broad for him to do more than just slap them and turn onto his side.
The drop became nearly vertical. Down he flew, and then the floor dropped away altogether, and he fell.
Stomach plastered to his diaphragm, limbs swinging, he fell within the blue globe of his lantern light, certain that he was going to die, only to crash down onto a loose scree of rock.
It knocked the air right out of him, wrenched his left knee as his leg twisted, and shattered his moss lantern.
He lay there, dazed, staring up at the darkness that drank the faint blue light, and let out a low groan. Finally, he rolled onto his side, winced as pain flared from numerous cuts and scrapes, and sat up.
Only to realize just how lucky he’d been. Around him were dozens of stalagmites, their tips sharp enough to have impaled him through and through. If he’d fallen a little to his left, he’d have been impaled on one easily two yards high.
There was no telling the extent of the cavern. The mosslight was spilled all around, and by the soft glow he made out a shape draped across a stalagmite only a few yards away.
A corpse, held together by sinew and clothing and little else, the spear of rock jutting up through its chest.
Scorio crawled closer. It was impossible to tell much about the corpse. The scalp showed wisps of dark hair, the eyes were gone, the lips pulled away to reveal yellowed teeth.
Scorio grimaced. A moldy leather belt was wrapped around its waist with an empty dagger scabbard at the hip. Scorio raised his fistful of mosslight higher. A dagger lay amidst the remains of the skeletal hand.
They must have tried to arrest their fall by slamming the dagger into the rock. The tip was gone, after all.
A pack lay not too far away. Scorio edged over and saw that the leather was badly rotted from the damp. A buckle was missing from the flap, and with a sad shake of his head, he opened it to examine the contents.
The foodstuff was putrid and reduced to slime. There was a coil of rotted rope, a rotted blanket or bedroll, tightly rolled, a badly rusted tinder box, and—
Scorio froze at the sight of the miniature bridge. It was about six inches long, gently arched, and untouched by decay. Cunningly wrought, it lay lightly on his palm, innocuous and plain.
Scorio glanced back at the cadaver, then rummaged further in the rotten pack. He next drew out a steel rod, some eight inches wide and snug enough to fit in his hand. Turning it over and over, he found that it was inscribed with flowing runes, but nothing that he could understand or read.
Finally, he drew out a thick roll of oiled cloth, within which was a stick of chalk the size of his thumb.
Curious, hesitant, he leaned down and drew a slender line across the ground. The air above it immediately shimmered and undulated like haze caused by baking heat. Scorio extended his palm and pressed forward, only to be met with a cool and utterly solid form of resistance.
Scorio laughed, then ran his hand along the sheer pane of nothingness till he found its edge, which corresponded with the limit of the chalk line. Rising carefully to his feet, he reached up, and found that it extended beyond his ability to touch the top.
Sitting back down, he examined the chalk within the diffuse light of the moss, and saw that fresh scratch marks had registered upon its tip. A finite resource, then. It’d wear down eventually and be gone.
Trying to control his excitement, he wrapped the chalk up in its oiled cloth and took hold of the steel rod. Havert had said it would remain locked in place once activated, but he saw no means of doing so. Was the script perhaps an incantation? He pressed and prodded for a few minutes longer, then set it down and took up the miniature bridge.
There was no obvious means of activating its powers. No catch, no trigger, nothing that he could find.
Some of his excitement abated. One treasure out of three was still enormously good luck, but he still felt a little cheated by fate.
“You’ve my thanks,” he said, looking back at the corpse, but the sound of his own words unnerved him.
Carefully he gathered as much of the luminous moss as he could cup in his hands, and formed it into a rough pyramid, sufficiently removed that he didn’t need to gaze upon Radert’s remains. Then he sat cross-legged, back to the stalagmite that had nearly impaled him, and placed the treasures in his lap.
No food, no water, and a labyrinth of passages filled with fiends. A sufficiently deadly place that even so well-armed an explorer as Radert had fallen to his death.
The urge to hobble on, to let his desperation control him, was strong. Instead, Scorio settled himself, pursed his lips, and reviewed all that he knew.
Which wasn’t much.
Sal had said that you had to descend before you arose once more to the city of Bastion. Well, this drop could count as some of the descent already. But how to proceed? He’d need water soon enough. The humidity in the air teased him, but he’d yet to see a puddle or trickle he could drink from.
The treasures. They were his means of escape. Assuming they weren’t props used to trick Sal into doing whatever Radert wanted.
But say they were genuine. How might someone like Radert have used them? Gotten them to work? The chalk was simplicity itself, but the other two objects clearly required something more.
What?
A burning Igneous Heart? Had Radert progressed from Char? He’d entered the warren, not been cast into it, and carried this assortment of treasure with him, so it was likely that he’d powers of his own.