18. Chapter 18 The Splits
The portal looked different at first light.
Cold Hollow's entrance had been a crack in a rock face, narrow and jagged, something you had to duck into.
The Splits portal was a full archway cut into the cliff face, ten feet wide and twelve feet tall, the shimmer filling it edge to edge in a flat plane that caught the dawn and threw it back orange and violet and something closer to green.
Bjorna stood at the threshold in the new breastplate, the blackstone shield on her arm, and studied the shimmer for two seconds. Then she walked through.
Sif went next, then Nott, then Liv, then me.
Stepping through Cold Hollow had been a wall of cold hitting my face, instant and total. This was pressure. The shimmer pressed against my chest, my ears, the backs of my eyes, and then it let go and I was standing in stone.
[The Splits. Depth: 1.]
A corridor stretched ahead, wide enough for Bjorna to walk with her arms out and not touch either wall.
Dark gray stone, almost black, carved in long vertical grooves that ran floor to ceiling like something had dragged claws down the surface a long time ago.
The ceiling was high, fifteen feet at least, and the ambient light was different from Cold Hollow's sourceless glow.
It came from the stone itself, a faint luminescence in the grooves, pale blue, barely enough to see the floor.
The air was dry, still, and smelled like hot rock. Not warm yet, but something underneath was pushing heat up through the floor.
Bjorna set formation without a word. She took point, shield up, the dark metal rim catching the blue light.
Sif dropped to her right, low and quiet, the new stalker-hide boots silent on the stone.
Liv hung back with an arrow nocked, her ears locked forward, scanning.
Nott stood behind Bjorna's left shoulder, her hands loose at her sides.
I took center-rear, the healer position, exactly where I'd been in Cold Hollow.
"Stay tight until we know what lives here," Bjorna said. "Sif, scout ten feet ahead. Liv, ears open. Nott, save your big casts until we need them."
"Yes, boss," Sif said. She was already moving.
The first sound was clicking.
It came from everywhere at once. The walls, the ceiling, the grooves in the stone. A rapid staccato rhythm, hundreds of small hard surfaces tapping against rock. Liv's ears flattened.
"Contacts," Liv said. "A lot of them. Coming from all directions."
They poured out of the grooves.
Insects, fist-sized and black-shelled, fast. They came in a wave across the walls and ceiling, skittering over each other, and the sound of their legs on stone filled the corridor like rain on a tin roof. Their mandibles were small and sharp, snapping open and closed as they moved.
"Swarm!" Bjorna planted her feet and brought the shield across the front of the corridor. The first wave hit her shield and she swept them off with a single stroke of her longsword, chitin cracking, bodies scattering.
Sif was a blur. The new boots showed immediately.
She'd been fast before, the fastest in the party by a good margin, but the stalker-hide boots turned fast into something else entirely.
She cut through the swarm with speed I hadn't seen from her, her daggers flashing in the blue light, each step covering more ground than it had any right to.
She was there and then she was three feet to the left and then she was behind a cluster of them, and every time she moved, something died.
"These boots are the best purchase I’ve ever made," Sif said while cutting down two more.
Nott threw a spread of [Ember Bolts] into the thickest part of the swarm on the ceiling.
They dropped in smoking clusters. Liv's broadheads punched through the bigger ones, the insects the size of a forearm that came behind the fist-sized regulars.
One of them took an arrow and kept moving for three seconds before it shuddered, stumbled sideways, and curled up.
"The poison is doing something," Liv called. "They don't like it."
"Nobody likes poison," I said. "Nice shot."
A regular got past Sif's side and hit my boot. I kicked it off and it skittered across the floor. Another one landed on my shoulder and I grabbed it and crushed it, the shell cracking in my hand.
"There's a bigger one," Liv said. Her ears were angled deep into the corridor. "Way back. Something is driving them."
The swarm kept coming. The elites were mixed in now, forearm-length insects with thicker shells and mandibles that could cut through leather.
Bjorna's shield rang every time one hit it.
Sif was handling the flanks, the boots letting her cover angles she couldn't have reached before, but the numbers didn't thin.
"Nott, can you see the source?" Bjorna said.
Nott's eyes had gone focused, that look she got when she was reading something the rest of us couldn't see. "It's a queen structure. At the back of the chamber. Kill it and the swarm loses coordination."
"Sif, push through. Find it."
Sif grinned. "With pleasure."
She went through the swarm like a knife through paper.
The boots carried her past the elites, between the snapping mandibles and the clawing legs, and she was gone into the dark at the far end of the corridor.
Two seconds later, chitin cracked and something bigger screamed, a high thin sound that made my teeth hurt.
The swarm stuttered. The clicking lost its rhythm. The insects on the walls stopped moving in unison and started crawling in confused circles. Sif came back, wiping her daggers on her thigh.
"She was ugly," Sif said. "Very large, very angry, and now, very dead."
The remaining insects scattered into the grooves and the corridor went quiet.
I healed a cut on Bjorna's knuckle where an elite's mandible had gotten through her gauntlet. The magic flared and her skin closed in two seconds.
"That was a hell of a warm-up," I said.
Bjorna checked the corridor behind us. "Everyone, go back through and grab what's worth taking. Loot in the rings. We aren’t walking back up when we finish because we have the portal scrolls, remember? We move in two minutes. Put everything in your rings and we’ll look at it later. We don’t need to be distracted.”
The looting was fast. Nott collected the queen's remains and the crystals from the elite shells while Sif and Liv grabbed everything that looked like it had value. Rings swallowed it all.
Sif flexed her feet in the new boots. "I could get very used to being this fast."
Liv tugged at the hem of her huntress skirt. "And I told you the skirt would be fine. Did you see the arcane barrier light up when that thing tried to claw my thigh? Not a scratch on these legs."
"Thank God. I love those thighs, Liv."
"I want it on record that my legs are perfect and protected."
"On record," Bjorna said. "Move."
The corridor continued deeper for another hundred yards before it split.
Two passages, identical, branching left and right from the main corridor at the same angle. Each one ended twenty feet in at a portal, the same flat shimmer as the entrance but smaller, barely fitting Bjorna's shoulders. No markings. No indication of what waited on the other side.
Bjorna stopped at the fork and studied both portals. Then she turned to the rest of us.
"Let’s vote on which way to go," she said.
"On what basis?" Nott asked. "We have no information."
"Pick one and we will acquire information when we go through that portal.”
Sif walked halfway down the left passage and sniffed. She came back and walked halfway down the right passage and sniffed again.
"Left smells warmer," she said. "The air coming through the left portal has heat in it."
"Warmer is worse," I said. "Warmer means fire or lava or something that burns."
"Or warmer means the dungeon is generating more mana on that side, which means better loot," Nott countered. "Higher ambient temperatures in natural mana formations correlate with denser resource deposits."
Sif laughed. "Nott, did you just argue for left because it's hotter?"
"I argued for left because the thermodynamic signature suggests greater mana concentration."
"She said it's hotter and she wants better loot," Sif translated.
Liv pointed right. "I say right. Left smells like trouble."
"You can't smell left from here."
"I can smell trouble from anywhere. It's a rabbit thing. My nose is excellent."
Sif snorted. "Your nose is cute. That doesn't make it accurate."
"My nose has saved your life at least twice."
"Name once."
"Cold Hollow, depth three. I smelled the brood-tenders before we walked into the chamber. You're welcome."
"That was your ears, not your nose."
"It was both. I'm talented."
Bjorna looked at me. "Daniel?"
"I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea which one to pick and I think we're all just guessing and pretending we have reasons."
Sif pointed at me. "He's right, you know. Nobody has a clue."
"I have a clue," Nott said. "I just explained the thermodynamic basis for choosing left."
"You sniffed the air and said it was hot."
"I did not sniff anything. That was Sif."
"Sif sniffed. You theorized. I pointed. Bjorna is standing there looking like she wants to strangle all of us," I said.
Bjorna's face hadn't changed. "Left."
"Why left?" Liv said.
"Because we've been standing here for two minutes and someone has to decide."
"That's your tactical reasoning? Someone has to decide?"
"That's always been my tactical reasoning. Left."
Sif walked toward the left portal. "I'll go first. If I die, pick right."
"That's comforting," I said. "Really inspirational leadership moment."
"I'm not the leader. Bjorna is the leader. I'm the one with the fast boots who walks into portals that might kill her."
"Nobody is dying," Bjorna said. "We go together. Formation. Now."
We reformed into the same formation we'd been running all morning. Bjorna at point, Sif on the flank, Liv and Nott behind, me at center-rear.
Bjorna stepped through the portal and the rest of us followed.
The heat hit immediately.