Chapter Forty
As I sprinted for safety, I kicked at spiders and used the torch on them. Zain was busy stabbing spiders who had made it through the open door. Once I ran through, I helped him to push the heavy door shut.
Then I killed everything that had managed to make it into the hallway.
When I was done, I looked back at the door. The spiders were on fire, but they had climbed up and reached for us through the metal bars, shrieking.
“An Epirian did this?” I asked him, and he nodded. “Have I mentioned how much I hate Epirians?”
He started to laugh and I joined him. We stood against the far wall, watching the flaming spiders still trying to get through.
“I’ve never been afraid of spiders before but I’m fairly certain that I am now,” he said.
I nodded. “Me too.”
We stood and watched as the fiery spiders finally succumbed to the flames and fell from the door.
“I really hope there’s an exit on the other end,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen if we have to go back through those rooms.”
What would we do if there wasn’t an exit at the end?
I didn’t tell him that when Lia and her sisters had faced these kinds of challenges, the exit had been sealed over and Suri, the one who could manipulate earth and rocks, had created an opening for them.
Or that it had taken so much out of her that they couldn’t revive her for a while.
I didn’t think that Invara’s power of seduction would be helpful to me in opening an exit.
We would figure it out like we’d figured out the rest.
“How many more of these do you think we have to go?” he asked.
I shook my head and didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think that far ahead.
I just wanted to get through the next challenge until we were done and had retrieved the caduceus.
“What I keep thinking about is that, so far, we have needed to have at least two people trying to get the god-weapon. What if at some point we need more?”
How many people had died coming here because they tried it without enough help?
“You and me,” he said with a smile. “That’s all we need.”
His words lifted something inside my chest, and it felt like tiny butterfly wings flapping.
“And Dagger,” he added, and I’d actually forgotten he still carried his dog.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
Zain pulled the front of his tunic away. “He’s sleeping.”
I laughed again.
He drank from his waterskin and then handed it to me. I used it to rinse out my mouth three times before taking a drink. I didn’t want to accidentally ingest any of the accelerant.
“Should we go?” he asked as I handed it back.
“Yes, let’s go see what other types of almost-deaths wait for us.”
We stood up and he had the torch. I took my sword and knife out and followed.
I noticed that the hallway we were in seemed to be sloping down. The slope got worse the farther we walked. We turned a corner and a bright blue light emanated from something in front of us.
Zain used the torch to see the walls around us until he found a sconce. He left the torch there and we went quietly toward the blue light.
At the end of the hallway was a long ledge that looked down into a massive cavern. We crouched at the spot where the ledge began, close to the hallway we had just exited. I spotted stairs that we could use to get down into that area, and then wondered why the walls were making that blue light.
I surveyed the cavern. There was a massive pool on the left-hand side, and on the right, I saw large rocks spaced unevenly in rows that looked as if they’d been placed there deliberately.
It reminded me of when my grandmother had set up mock battles for us to fight.
She had used wooden walls, but they had been places for us to hide and recuperate before heading back out to face the enemy.
There was another metal door in the far wall. I assumed it was locked. How were we supposed to get it open?
“What do you—” I started to ask, but he put his finger over my lips, wanting me to be quiet. He picked up a small rock and threw it at the pool.
The moment it hit, something exploded out of the water and the room seemed to shake from the awful sound it emitted. A green-scaled monster with more heads than I could count climbed out of the pool to patrol the cavern. The heads moved like snakes, bobbing and testing the air with their tongues.
Zain grabbed me and dragged me back into the hallway where he’d left our torch.
“Is that a—”
“Hydra? Yes,” he said.
I let out a long groan. “I hope you know that this is your fault. You spoke this into existence by making jokes that there weren’t any hydras in the Wastelands.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You think I conjured this creature up?”
“There are so many other monsters you could have made fun of, and the one you chose is the one that’s almost impossible to kill.”
“As I recall, you were the one who made the last joke about the hydra,” he countered.
“Because I was mocking your jest that was so obviously wrong!”
“I hope you’ve learned not to make fun of jokes that are objectively funny at the time and later are not, only because they turn out to be disproven.”
“We cannot sit here and argue about whether or not you’re funny,” I said. “We have to come up with a plan on how to kill that thing.”
His smile faded, and he had that look on his face that indicated he was thinking deeply.
“Why would a thief put a hydra in here?” I wondered.
“I told you, thieves have the best guards. And they need knowledge and information so that they would know how to fight the hydra. See that neck stem on the bottom left that has two heads growing out of it? And others where there is only one? That is because if you try to cut off the head of a hydra, it grows two in its place. Thieves need to know a little bit about everything.”
“Which you do. So, King of Thieves, how do we defeat this hydra?”
“When you cut off a head, we need to cauterize the neck stem so that nothing can grow back.”
The hydra had a lot of heads. That would take a while.
I needed to know how many heads I had to cut off. I looked around the corner to count. Zain moved into position behind me, also watching. The hydra was lumbering throughout the cavern, avoiding the lines of rocks.
Then it appeared frustrated at not finding any prey because all the heads screamed at the same time.
One head, right in the middle, seemed to scream the loudest. It was a much darker green than the others.
That head reared back and the others moved out of the way.
The darker green head then spit on one of the rocks.
I watched in horror as the spit seemed to bubble and burn, eating its way through the rock.
“When you’re fighting, make sure that you don’t get hit by the acid,” Zain whispered.
“Thank you so much for that extremely helpful tip,” I responded.
And although I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was smiling at my sarcasm.
We moved back into the hallway. I said, “So the plan is I cut off heads and you cauterize the neck stump.”
“Or maybe one of us with a goddess-given gift could fight the hydra and the other, extremely charming person could run into the next room.” At my withering look he asked, “No? Are you sure?”
I knew he was teasing but I needed him to be serious right now.
“I’m going to attack the hydra and I want you to hide behind one of those rocks with the torch. I’ll tell you when I’m about to cut a head off and you run out with the fire and seal it.”
“Without getting torn apart by the other heads and while avoiding the acid from the middle one and not getting stepped on. Got it.”
It looked smaller from a distance, but I guessed that its body was at least nine feet high. I was going to have to jump on it so that I could saw off heads. “It seems awfully big for a creature that’s been trapped down here with no food source.”
“I’m assuming that’s where the magic takes over,” Zain said. “We should wait until it sinks back in the water. Maybe we can get through this room without having to kill it.”
That seemed far too easy.
But I agreed, and after a few minutes, the hydra got bored and went back into the pool. When the last head had gone under, Zain grabbed the torch, and then he and I started for the stairs. We went down them quietly. I felt like a large, lumbering goat, not able to be as silent as I wanted.
Zain, on the other hand, glided down the stairs like he was a shade.
When we reached the bottom, we moved quickly to the rock barrier closest to us. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’m going to check the door.”
I leaned around the edge to keep an eye on both him and the pond. I had my sword out and ready.
He quietly made his way to the door without making a sound. I had to keep checking to make certain he was still there.
When he got to the door, he put his hands on it and pushed.
Nothing happened.
Then he reached for the handle, to test it as well.
The second his hand made contact, the hydra burst out of the water and screamed.