Chapter 16
Voices woke Alsen up.
He lay still in his sleeping bag, eyes half-open, doing his best to figure out what was going on. The floating light orb he’d left running had dimmed to a faint ember, just enough to catch the outlines of the room.
Luna and Garrett sat against the far wall, near the collapsed doorway.
Luna had her knees drawn up, arms folded over them.
Garrett sat with his back straight, sword across his lap, clearly on watch.
They spoke in near-whispers, but the chamber’s acoustics carried sound in strange ways.
The vaulted ceiling bounced fragments of their conversation right to where he lay.
“She can’t keep doing this,” Luna’s voice said, a little distorted by the strange echo. “She completely mispositions herself in fights just to stop me from joining the fray.”
“She’s protective. It’s how she shows affection.”
“That doesn’t matter at all. The way she fights is highly dependent on positioning. Between me and the threat, isn’t it? If those statues had been faster, she’d have had to fight one head-on, because she blocked her own retreat path through me.”
Silence.
“I can fight.” Luna’s voice dropped lower. Alsen almost lost the words. “I’m not a civilian, Garrett. She knows that. She’s choosing to ignore it because it doesn’t fit what she wants me to be.”
Garrett exhaled slowly. “She’s not going to hear it from me the way you want her to.”
“Then find a way to make her hear it. She sure as shit won’t listen to me, but you’ve been with her for a while. Get through her stubbornness and explain it to her. You’re her party leader.”
“I’m her leader in combat. Whatever this is between you two, that’s not something I can butt into.”
“This isn’t about relationships. Figure it out before someone gets badly hurt, be it Sonja because she’s positioned wrong, or whoever is trying to help her.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“I’ll talk to her,” Garrett said.
“Do it like you mean it.”
“I said I’ll talk to her.”
Luna stood. She didn’t make a sound as she moved, but Alsen saw her silhouette cross the dim light, heading toward her sleeping spot by the wall. She passed within ten feet of him. He kept his breathing steady and even.
She paused. Just for a beat. Then continued.
She did that to show him she knew he was awake.
He lay still for another few minutes, listening to Garrett settle back into his watch. The conversation rattled around his head. He got Luna’s point.
He turned onto his side, facing the gate. The symbols on its surface caught the faint light of his dying orb, their concentric circles almost seeming to shift in the dimness.
Sleep wasn’t coming back, and he still had a puzzle to solve. He pulled himself out of the sleeping bag, grabbed his spellbook, and walked to the gate.
Twelve tiles. Dozens of symbols arranged in concentric circles. A language he didn’t know, written in a grammar he couldn’t read. He’d spent hours before sleep copying symbols, mapping their frequency, looking for patterns.
He had patterns. He had yet to derive any meaning from them. Not that he was going to understand what the text meant, that wasn’t going to happen due to a lack of context.
Alsen sat cross-legged before the gate, spellbook in his lap, and opened it to the pages he’d filled the night before.
Three pages of symbol frequency charts. Two pages of positional mapping, tracking where each symbol appeared in the concentric circles and how many times.
One page of tentative groupings based on proximity patterns.
Religious texts had structure, especially prayers, one of which this one was. And all religions were about the same when it came to prayers. Simple, repetitive, praising whatever god it worshiped, easy to pronounce and remember, so that everyone could easily learn them.
He started with the highest-frequency symbols. Three symbols appeared far more often than anything else, clustered in positions that suggested grammatical function rather than meaning. Connecting words. The glue of the language.
He marked those and set them aside.
Next, the repeating phrases. He’d identified four clusters of symbols that appeared multiple times across the text, always in the same internal order. Phrases. Complete semantic units that the writer used more than once. Like the refrain of a song.
One cluster appeared six times, more than any other. It bookended sections of the text, appearing at what looked like the start and end of passages. Definitely a liturgical refrain. Something the congregation would repeat.
He looked at the symbols on the movable blocks. They had all the symbols of the refrain. Not a coincidence, so a part of the answer was the refrain. Two more symbols remained, probably the adjustments to the refrain so that the puzzle wouldn’t be too easy.
He focused on the two remaining symbols. If they were to be placed outside the refrain, then he only had six combinations left. One of the symbols was unique to the starting cluster. The second one looked like the spiral symbol itself, the same spiral carved into every surface of this dungeon.
Now, in terms of context, this gate protected something valuable. The prayer on the gate was the question. The moving blocks would spell out the answer. In a religion of a spiral, the spiral was the answer, so that symbol had to be last.
Two combinations left.
He could brute force that. If, for some unfathomable reason, the puzzle was to seal itself, he would drill the wall with a couple of lances of annihilation. Alsen walked to the center.
First, he moved the symbol he didn’t understand, expecting it to be a name of something like an angel, then the refrain, as the symbols could probably be read both as a question and an answer depending on the symbols around them, and finally, he pushed the spiral.
Rumbling echoed through the chamber. The stone door started opening. He smirked. First try.
Luna, who had already tied up her sleeping bag, walked to his side. “I see you’ve decoded it.”
“Seems so,” he said, almost bursting with pride.
“And here I was waiting for an especially violent session with the supremely divine lance of complete annihilation. Tomorrow night, then, I guess. Good job.”
“Thanks.” He smiled, genuinely.
The stone gate was completely sunk into the floor. Darkness of a descending tunnel waited on the other side. Garrett, Theron, Sonja, and Marena stopped packing, hands by their weapons.
No sound or enemies came from the other side.
“Nice one,” Garrett said. “Thought it would have been good to tell us ahead of time, so we could prepare in case enemies awaited behind the gate.”
“Right,” Alsen said. “Sorry. I didn’t think of that.”
“Next time.” Garrett hastily packed his sleeping bag. They all did.
Alsen strengthened his floating orb. Its light pushed into the corridor ahead, revealing walls covered in the densest carvings he’d seen yet, spirals layered upon spirals, every surface inscribed.
Alsen stood in front of the open gate and stared into the darkness beyond. His pulse hadn’t settled yet. This felt good.
The camp took a few more minutes to break.
They ate a quick breakfast of dried meat and bread from their rations. Sonja edged closer to Luna during the meal. Luna had positioned herself at the far edge of the group, eating in silence. Sonja sat down next to her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
“You know,” Sonja said, keeping her voice light. “I think this calls for a celebration kiss. You solved the puzzle together, right? Kitten and the mage, cracking ancient mysteries.”
“I didn’t solve anything.”
“You helped though. Moral support counts.”
Luna rolled her eyes, quickly finishing her meal. “You’ll need to start being careful.”
“About that,” Garrett said, walking to them. “I need to talk to you, Sonja.” He motioned to the far corner of the room.
Luna used the opening to vanish, putting distance between herself and Sonja in the blink of an eye. Garrett led Sonja to the corner. They spoke in whispers that he couldn’t hear, but their facial expressions told Alsen everything.
He clearly told her to take things more seriously, and she was having none of it. He insisted, gesticulating wildly, and she conceded. For now, at least.
They all formed up into their usual formation, this time with Sonja at the rear.
Garrett and Theron led the way deeper into the tunnels.
The corridor descended in a gentle slope. The carvings grew denser, more intricate. Alsen’s light orb reflected off symbols that seemed to shift at the edge of perception. The air cooled further, carrying that metallic taste he’d noticed before, but sharper now, almost acrid.
The passage opened into a long gallery, wide and low-ceilinged. Thick pillars lined both sides, carved from floor to ceiling. Alsen’s orb couldn’t reach the far end of the room.
“Hold,” Garrett said. “Something’s ahead.” He drew his sword.
Everyone stopped, drawing their weapons.
Well, aside from Luna, who stretched her neck, and Alsen, who didn’t have any weapon to begin with. He really needed one, some staff or wand or orb or something else he could draw when everyone else did. Not having anything made him look weird.
Sounds echoed from the darkness ahead. Faint at first, then rapidly approaching. A skittering of stones clicking against stones. It came from everywhere at once, the ceiling, the walls, the spaces between pillars.
Shapes emerged from the darkness.
Smaller than the guardian statues, barely knee-high, mostly shaped and moving like insects.
They scuttled towards them. They had segmented bodies of dark stone, four to eight tipped legs, half with tails ending with a spike, the other half with pincers disproportionate to their body size.
They had no heads, only crystals embedded at the top of their body.
Sonja drew, fired, and hit a gem of one that climbed on the ceiling. Her arrow shattered the crystal, disabling the construct.
Alsen pulled on his power. Indirect missile. Times twenty.