FIC: Dungeon Crawl
Oct. 17th, 2005 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalMaria discoves Tez is responsible for an all too familiar fantasy RPG trope.
by Royce Day
“Are you absolutely certain it’s safe down there?” Maria asked dubiously. She and her elf-lover Tez were standing small open hole at the top of a large earthen mound, once circular in shape, but now rather bumpy from the several large oak trees that had taken root since the mound had formed.
“Nothing is for certain,” Tez answered, then smiled reassuringly. “However, I can tell you that I’m quite familiar with the architecture of the facility below.”
He tossed the rope down the earthen shaft at the top of the mound, once shielded by accumulated leaves and branches, but recently cleared sometime in the recent past. The rope was a good fifty feet long, and it seemed to drop its full length down the shaft as far as Maria could see.
“How is it your reassurances always come with caveats?” she asked, looping the rope to an iron ring hanging from the peculiar leather harness Tez had made a few days ago for her. It would, he’d (ahem) reassured her, allow her to climb up and down the shaft without having to worry overmuch about losing her grip and falling to her death.
“From far too many years of playing diplomat,” he answered. He grabbed the rope and started shinnying down, having not bothered to make a harness for himself. Then again, with the way Tez’s remarkable luck worked, he could probably drop headfirst down the thing and survive without serious injury. “The passage is clear,” he called back up to her.
Maria shrugged, adjusted her leather gloves, and followed Tez down. The shaft was barely wide enough for her shoulders, allowing her to control her descent with her feet as well as her hands. After the first six feet the earth gave way to dressed stone, marking it as an air-shaft of some sort, she guessed. Certainly it wasn’t wide enough to allow regular passage.
Halfway down, she encountered a section where the neat stone dressing had fallen away, revealing a large empty space with a bottom angled towards the shaft, only occupied by a few lonely pebbles.
“What’s this space here, Tez?” she called down to him.
“A deadfall,” he called back. “You’ll see when you reach the bottom.”
She certainly did. Illuminated by the small mage-light in Tez’s hand, there was a large pile of rocks waiting for her at the bottom of the shaft, which opened up into a more roomy corridor, just wide enough for the two of them to stand comfortably. Underneath the pile were the remains of a body, reduced to a skeleton only recently judging by the remnants of tendons that connected the bones.
“Yech!” Maria swung on the rope until she was able to land to one side of the gruesome discovery. She unhooked herself from the rope and asked, “What do you think happened?”
“It was a trap,” Tez replied. “They reached about two thirds of the way down, pressed against the triggering mechanism, and then had all of that unpleasantness drop on their head. An excellent way of discouraging would-be tomb robbers.”
“Like us,” Maria noted.
“Well, yes,” he admitted.
She unshielded her own mage-light and shined it up and down the corridor. The walls were covered with mosaic tiles, depicting scenes of gruesome executions. She touched the death’s head band on her upper arm for comfort, and reminded herself that desecrating this place would probably qualify as a holy act in the eyes of Thanatos the Merciful.
“Lovely place,” Tez said cheerfully. “I have to wonder what went through the mind of artisan assigned to put that together. Can you just hear him asking, ‘Your pardon, Dread Priest, but would you like a larger blood pool depicted in the beheading scene?’”
Maria grimaced. “Tez, you have an absolutely vile sense of humor. Have I ever mentioned that?”
“Several times.”
They began a careful traverse of the corridor, mindful of the tomb’s great age, likely deterioration, and possible other traps. They halted about twenty feet in, as they sighted another body lying in the corridor.
“Another trap?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tez answered. “Poison darts. See them stuck in what’s left of the fellow’s clothes?” She focused her light, spotting them finally, iron needles about three times the length of what she used for her sewing.
“Poison darts?” Maria said with disbelief. “Coated with a poison that was effective after sitting in place for what, a thousand years?”
“Thirty-five hundred years, actually,” Tez corrected. “And it isn’t as unbelievable as all that. The poison was stored in a tightly sealed reservoir. Triggering the mechanism breaks the bottle, the poison flows down small channels to coat the darts, and then the mechanism pops the darts out at the approximate point the victim should be if he was walking down the corridor at a moderately cautious pace.”
“Just the same…”
Her elf-lover shrugged. “Mind you, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it actually work after such an extended period. Usually the seals fail after just a few centuries, and the unfortunate victim is simply stung nastily with a risk of tetanus.”
“All right, I can see that,” she allowed.
“Of course this is just the first set of darts.” Tez stepped carefully down the corridor, pausing to kneel down in front of another tile. He pressed it down, pausing to scan the corridor, as deadly darts failed to appear. After a moment he slammed his fist down of the trigger again. A few seconds later there was a soft pop, and perhaps a half-dozen darts emerged from small holes set between mosaic tiles, to drop straight to the floor with a jangle.
“Not terribly effective,” Maria observed.
Tez shrugged again. “The springs must have rusted.” They walked a few feet further down the corridor, passing a heavy iron door, whose lock showed evidence of someone trying to jimmy it.
“I wonder what’s in there?” Maria asked.
“Cells for potential sacrifices,” Tez answered. “Nothing worth bothering with for us. We’re after bigger game.”
“Maybe we should just go back,” she said. “This strikes me as too dangerous by half, even if the traps in this place no longer work.”
“If you want to pay for the school Garvin is so desperate to add to the new temple complex, we don’t have much of a choice but to go raiding,” he replied. “Not unless you want to go into debt to the town burghers.”
“Absolutely not,” she said fiercely. “I’m not going to let anyone ever have a hold over me again. Chains woven with golden links are still chains.”
“Wise of you.”
They passed though a dusty spider-web, and Maria made a disgusted noise as she picked cobwebs from her hair and horns. “Anyway, I don’t see why this is necessary. Don’t you have money ferreted away in a bank or something?”
“All of my assets happened to be on the southern continent,” Tez said. “I was simply visiting here when I got the notion to act as tour guide for those idiot adventurers who eventually sold me into slavery. All the money I had was what I was carrying, and eventually they were carrying.”
“Thank goodness you remembered about this old temple complex then,” Maria said. “Why didn’t you tell them about it? It was what they were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Tez nodded. “Yes. Which is why I deliberately led them away from it. If it was going to be raided, I wanted to be the one to do it.”
“That’s very mercenary of you.”
Tez gave her one of his disquieting smiles. “I had my reasons.”
They narrow passage they were traversing came to an intersection with a larger corridor, the floor lined with alternating square tiles of obsidian and blood red granite.
“All right, that way leads to the entrance. Quite buried now,” Tez noted. “The other way leads to the central chamber. No more traps, at least until we reach the end.” Maria followed him. Another twenty feet and the corridor opened up into a large domed chamber, perhaps fifty feet across. Dry rotted pews had fallen into ruin, lined up in ragged rows in front of a large obsidian altar. Behind them was a fifteen foot high statue, depicting the grossly obese figure of Grizink, the Devourer of Souls. Each of his six hands held several representatives of the Six Races. Two hands were raised towards his mouth, while a third was depicted in the act of dropping it’s load into the maw of the waiting god’s mouth. Souls to go to feed Grizink’s great appetite, consumed and destroyed, instead of being shepherded to their final reward or punishment, as was Thanatos’ charge.
“Abomination,” Maria muttered. It was small comfort that the statue had been mutilated by looters recently, possibly the companions of the two unfortunates they had found back in the passage. It’s two eye sockets, obviously carved to hold several gems to reflect it’s bug like multifaceted eyes, were empty. Also, where traditionally gold plating formed the creature’s hideous tattoos, there were only empty hollows.
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought the sculptor did a remarkable job of it, given the scale,” Tez said cheerfully.
Really, his attitude was too much sometimes. She threw up her hands in frustration. “Tez, I don’t understand how you can be so blasé about this place. It’s a chamber of horrors! How many innocents were sacrificed to that unholy apparition in this place?!”
“None,” he answered, stepping up the altar and examining the rear stone panel.
“You don’t know that!”
“Yes I do,” Tez replied. He pressed some hidden trigger, and the top of the altar slid back towards Maria, revealing a hidden compartment. Her elf-lover looked vaguely annoyed. “I was afraid of that. They found it.”
Maria rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to gather her thoughts. “Tez, what are you talking about? How can you be sure that no blood was ever spilled here? And furthermore, how did you find that little compartment just now?”
“Well I was the one that commissioned this place to be built,” Tez replied blithely.
She felt her jaws open in shock. “You-- you were once a worshipper of Grizink? Tez how could you be?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say I was a worshipper of Grizink, Maria. I just said I had this temple built.”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
“How do you think I knew about those traps back there, Maria?” he asked in turn. “Three thousand and five hundred years ago I had this temple commissioned, and it was never used. Upon completion it was buried, along with all the finery on the walls, and a little more added in here.” He tapped the altar.
Maria blinked “Why would you do such a thing?”
“Well, I needed someplace to put all of my money,” Tez said. “This is hardly the first time I’ve had a bout of unexpected poverty. About 50,000 years ago I got the idea of building places like this, centered around a completely spurious religion--“
“Spurious!” Maria exclaimed. “Grizink the Devourer is hardly spurious! His worshippers carved a path of fear and destruction across the world, until Merciful Thanatos overwhelmed him with--“
Tez was shaking his head, somewhat sadly. “Er, no. That’s not how it went at all. Grizink never had any existence, at least initially, except in my own imagination. I’ll admit later on that some woefully misguided people took up the idea and ran with it a bit, but those were fairly isolated cases.”
“You… made up Grizink the Devourer?” Maria said.
Tez had at least the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. “Well, yes. You see, the whole project revolved around the fact that I needed a means to store my valuables in a way that would allow me relatively easy access, not so easy access for anyone else, and wasn’t dependant on banking systems that couldn’t possibly last for whomever knows how many centuries or millennia. Hence, this temple. It’s bit easier to find than just a chest buried in the ground, especially using large artificial ground formations like that hill for a landmark. Plus the background for the All Consuming Grizink is sufficiently nasty that the average superstitious peasant would naturally avoid it. So, I built the first temple or two in secret, allowed them to be discovered along with some ‘sacred texts’ I’d created, and suddenly people were confronted with a mysterious dead religion to scare themselves into acts of piety with. And no one would question what the devil a huge hidden temple filled with valuables was doing where none was recorded before.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Maria said. “Grizink is the nemesis of all that Thanatos represents. Treatsies, books, libraries have been written by the worshippers of the Most Merciful on how to confront the threat he presents to the world. And it was all for nothing?”
Tez shrugged again. “Well, given my situation, you can’t blame me for wanting to twist some Thanatosian robes in knots.
Maria buried her face in her hands. “I can’t tell Garvin about this. He’s got such a lovely sermon about the evils of the Devourer.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, you could desecrate the altar a bit.”
“Oh, shut up.” She looked up at him. “Anyway, how did you build temples in secret like this? Not by yourself surely. And any workers who helped would also… Oh, no.”
“They weren’t killed,” he reassured her. “I just slipped them a rather nasty concoction I’d invented that induces amnesia. By the time they recovered from it, they were usually on the opposite side of the continent, involved in rewarding careers as quarry slaves.”
She felt her face grow pale. “That’s… utterly horrid.”
“More merciful than executing them,” he countered. “And anyway, as you might have gathered from the whole idea, I was in a rather megalomanic frame of mind when I initiated the project.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Maria finally said in defeat. Grizink the Devourer, a construct of Tez’s imagination, for the purposes of creating an underground savings account. Gah!
She turned towards the exit, but then paused when heard what sounded like a faint wail of despair. “Tez, did you hear that?” she asked.
“I’m not…” he began, but then they both heard the despairing Help meee…
“You’re absolutely certain you made this religion up?” Maria asked, feeling the hair rise on the back of her neck.
“I don’t think that’s a ghost,” Tez replied, looking grim. She followed him as he went back up the main corridor, passing the narrow passage they’d used to gain entry, and stopping in front of what once had to have been the entrance, now long since collapsed and buried as the ground had shifted.
Maria turned around in confusion. “Is anyone there?” she called out.
The answer came almost immediately from beneath their feet. Help me! Merciful gods, help me!
“Ah, I’d forgotten. This temple has some of my later modifications to the basic plan,” Tez said. He pushed back a small hidden panel in the wall, revealing metal wheel.
“What’s going on?” Maria asked.
“A final trap, or the first one, depending on how one enters,” Tez said, turning the wheel. It squealed and jammed. Maria motioned for him to move aside, and she gave it a turn herself. Even with her strength it was a near thing, but the wheel turned, and gradually a portion of the floor began to crank upwards, revealing a pit perhaps ten feet deep below.
And in the pit was a pitifully thin man, dressed in dirty rags, and sporting a mangy beard. His hair looked like it was once blond, but it was white now, what little was left of it.
“Thankthegods. Thankthegods. Thankthegods,” the man began to sob. Then he looked up and stared at Tez, his face wide with terror. “Nonononononononono!!!!”
“Oh,” Tez said cheerily. “If it isn’t Master Robert. Fancy meeting you here.”
Maria looked at him in bewilderment. “Tez, what--“
“It wasn’t me! I swear it wasn’t me! It was all Jean’s idea,” The man, Robert, began to babble.
“Oh, shut up,” Tez said irritably, “or I’ll close this again and leave you here.”
“You will not! Tez, what is going on?” Maria demanded.
“Master Robert there is one of the fellows that so kindly rapped me on the back of the head and left me to purchased by you, Maria,” Tez explained. He turned back to Robert. “If I’m guessing correctly, that’s Alia who got caught by the deadfall, and Johan by the poison darts?”
“Yesyesyesyesyes!” Robert answered. “Then I went this way and fell through the trap door. I begged Jean to help me out, but he just laughed and said there would be more for him!”
“But that was… Most Merciful! At least five months ago!” she exclaimed.
“About that, yes,” Tez agreed. “How did you survive?”
“I-I-I-I still had the food in my pack. And there’s a trickle of water from some stream,” Robert answered, gesturing to a small wet line on the floor. “And rats. Rats could fit through the holes down here. I can’t, I tried. I-I-I-I tried so many times.” He knelt down on the floor and started to sob.
“Well, it’s been lovely speaking to you, but we really must be going,” Tez said with malicious cheer, and turned to leave.
“Tez!” Maria shouted, grabbing his arm.
“Yes?” he asked, looking utterly innocent.
She took firm hold of his shoulders. “We are not going to leave that poor man there!”
“Hardly poor,” Tez answered. Then a thoughtful look passed over his face. “Hmm. Perhaps we could make a profit from this after all.”
* * *
“I feel dirty,” Maria said stubbornly, as she sat at the table in the school’s dining hall, eating a canapé. Around them, the celebration of school’s grand opening went on unabated.
“It’s hardly your fault Robert’s father wanted to express his gratitude to a worshipper of Thanatos for rescuing his son from the clutches of Grizink,” Tez answered cheerfully.
“Yes, but…”
“And if we spared them both certain theological revelations, who is harmed?”
She frowned. “You wouldn’t really have sold Robert into slavery if his father hadn’t paid up, would you?”
Tez gave her a none too comforting smile, and sipped his wine.
The End
by Royce Day
“Are you absolutely certain it’s safe down there?” Maria asked dubiously. She and her elf-lover Tez were standing small open hole at the top of a large earthen mound, once circular in shape, but now rather bumpy from the several large oak trees that had taken root since the mound had formed.
“Nothing is for certain,” Tez answered, then smiled reassuringly. “However, I can tell you that I’m quite familiar with the architecture of the facility below.”
He tossed the rope down the earthen shaft at the top of the mound, once shielded by accumulated leaves and branches, but recently cleared sometime in the recent past. The rope was a good fifty feet long, and it seemed to drop its full length down the shaft as far as Maria could see.
“How is it your reassurances always come with caveats?” she asked, looping the rope to an iron ring hanging from the peculiar leather harness Tez had made a few days ago for her. It would, he’d (ahem) reassured her, allow her to climb up and down the shaft without having to worry overmuch about losing her grip and falling to her death.
“From far too many years of playing diplomat,” he answered. He grabbed the rope and started shinnying down, having not bothered to make a harness for himself. Then again, with the way Tez’s remarkable luck worked, he could probably drop headfirst down the thing and survive without serious injury. “The passage is clear,” he called back up to her.
Maria shrugged, adjusted her leather gloves, and followed Tez down. The shaft was barely wide enough for her shoulders, allowing her to control her descent with her feet as well as her hands. After the first six feet the earth gave way to dressed stone, marking it as an air-shaft of some sort, she guessed. Certainly it wasn’t wide enough to allow regular passage.
Halfway down, she encountered a section where the neat stone dressing had fallen away, revealing a large empty space with a bottom angled towards the shaft, only occupied by a few lonely pebbles.
“What’s this space here, Tez?” she called down to him.
“A deadfall,” he called back. “You’ll see when you reach the bottom.”
She certainly did. Illuminated by the small mage-light in Tez’s hand, there was a large pile of rocks waiting for her at the bottom of the shaft, which opened up into a more roomy corridor, just wide enough for the two of them to stand comfortably. Underneath the pile were the remains of a body, reduced to a skeleton only recently judging by the remnants of tendons that connected the bones.
“Yech!” Maria swung on the rope until she was able to land to one side of the gruesome discovery. She unhooked herself from the rope and asked, “What do you think happened?”
“It was a trap,” Tez replied. “They reached about two thirds of the way down, pressed against the triggering mechanism, and then had all of that unpleasantness drop on their head. An excellent way of discouraging would-be tomb robbers.”
“Like us,” Maria noted.
“Well, yes,” he admitted.
She unshielded her own mage-light and shined it up and down the corridor. The walls were covered with mosaic tiles, depicting scenes of gruesome executions. She touched the death’s head band on her upper arm for comfort, and reminded herself that desecrating this place would probably qualify as a holy act in the eyes of Thanatos the Merciful.
“Lovely place,” Tez said cheerfully. “I have to wonder what went through the mind of artisan assigned to put that together. Can you just hear him asking, ‘Your pardon, Dread Priest, but would you like a larger blood pool depicted in the beheading scene?’”
Maria grimaced. “Tez, you have an absolutely vile sense of humor. Have I ever mentioned that?”
“Several times.”
They began a careful traverse of the corridor, mindful of the tomb’s great age, likely deterioration, and possible other traps. They halted about twenty feet in, as they sighted another body lying in the corridor.
“Another trap?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tez answered. “Poison darts. See them stuck in what’s left of the fellow’s clothes?” She focused her light, spotting them finally, iron needles about three times the length of what she used for her sewing.
“Poison darts?” Maria said with disbelief. “Coated with a poison that was effective after sitting in place for what, a thousand years?”
“Thirty-five hundred years, actually,” Tez corrected. “And it isn’t as unbelievable as all that. The poison was stored in a tightly sealed reservoir. Triggering the mechanism breaks the bottle, the poison flows down small channels to coat the darts, and then the mechanism pops the darts out at the approximate point the victim should be if he was walking down the corridor at a moderately cautious pace.”
“Just the same…”
Her elf-lover shrugged. “Mind you, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it actually work after such an extended period. Usually the seals fail after just a few centuries, and the unfortunate victim is simply stung nastily with a risk of tetanus.”
“All right, I can see that,” she allowed.
“Of course this is just the first set of darts.” Tez stepped carefully down the corridor, pausing to kneel down in front of another tile. He pressed it down, pausing to scan the corridor, as deadly darts failed to appear. After a moment he slammed his fist down of the trigger again. A few seconds later there was a soft pop, and perhaps a half-dozen darts emerged from small holes set between mosaic tiles, to drop straight to the floor with a jangle.
“Not terribly effective,” Maria observed.
Tez shrugged again. “The springs must have rusted.” They walked a few feet further down the corridor, passing a heavy iron door, whose lock showed evidence of someone trying to jimmy it.
“I wonder what’s in there?” Maria asked.
“Cells for potential sacrifices,” Tez answered. “Nothing worth bothering with for us. We’re after bigger game.”
“Maybe we should just go back,” she said. “This strikes me as too dangerous by half, even if the traps in this place no longer work.”
“If you want to pay for the school Garvin is so desperate to add to the new temple complex, we don’t have much of a choice but to go raiding,” he replied. “Not unless you want to go into debt to the town burghers.”
“Absolutely not,” she said fiercely. “I’m not going to let anyone ever have a hold over me again. Chains woven with golden links are still chains.”
“Wise of you.”
They passed though a dusty spider-web, and Maria made a disgusted noise as she picked cobwebs from her hair and horns. “Anyway, I don’t see why this is necessary. Don’t you have money ferreted away in a bank or something?”
“All of my assets happened to be on the southern continent,” Tez said. “I was simply visiting here when I got the notion to act as tour guide for those idiot adventurers who eventually sold me into slavery. All the money I had was what I was carrying, and eventually they were carrying.”
“Thank goodness you remembered about this old temple complex then,” Maria said. “Why didn’t you tell them about it? It was what they were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Tez nodded. “Yes. Which is why I deliberately led them away from it. If it was going to be raided, I wanted to be the one to do it.”
“That’s very mercenary of you.”
Tez gave her one of his disquieting smiles. “I had my reasons.”
They narrow passage they were traversing came to an intersection with a larger corridor, the floor lined with alternating square tiles of obsidian and blood red granite.
“All right, that way leads to the entrance. Quite buried now,” Tez noted. “The other way leads to the central chamber. No more traps, at least until we reach the end.” Maria followed him. Another twenty feet and the corridor opened up into a large domed chamber, perhaps fifty feet across. Dry rotted pews had fallen into ruin, lined up in ragged rows in front of a large obsidian altar. Behind them was a fifteen foot high statue, depicting the grossly obese figure of Grizink, the Devourer of Souls. Each of his six hands held several representatives of the Six Races. Two hands were raised towards his mouth, while a third was depicted in the act of dropping it’s load into the maw of the waiting god’s mouth. Souls to go to feed Grizink’s great appetite, consumed and destroyed, instead of being shepherded to their final reward or punishment, as was Thanatos’ charge.
“Abomination,” Maria muttered. It was small comfort that the statue had been mutilated by looters recently, possibly the companions of the two unfortunates they had found back in the passage. It’s two eye sockets, obviously carved to hold several gems to reflect it’s bug like multifaceted eyes, were empty. Also, where traditionally gold plating formed the creature’s hideous tattoos, there were only empty hollows.
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought the sculptor did a remarkable job of it, given the scale,” Tez said cheerfully.
Really, his attitude was too much sometimes. She threw up her hands in frustration. “Tez, I don’t understand how you can be so blasé about this place. It’s a chamber of horrors! How many innocents were sacrificed to that unholy apparition in this place?!”
“None,” he answered, stepping up the altar and examining the rear stone panel.
“You don’t know that!”
“Yes I do,” Tez replied. He pressed some hidden trigger, and the top of the altar slid back towards Maria, revealing a hidden compartment. Her elf-lover looked vaguely annoyed. “I was afraid of that. They found it.”
Maria rubbed the bridge of her nose, trying to gather her thoughts. “Tez, what are you talking about? How can you be sure that no blood was ever spilled here? And furthermore, how did you find that little compartment just now?”
“Well I was the one that commissioned this place to be built,” Tez replied blithely.
She felt her jaws open in shock. “You-- you were once a worshipper of Grizink? Tez how could you be?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say I was a worshipper of Grizink, Maria. I just said I had this temple built.”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
“How do you think I knew about those traps back there, Maria?” he asked in turn. “Three thousand and five hundred years ago I had this temple commissioned, and it was never used. Upon completion it was buried, along with all the finery on the walls, and a little more added in here.” He tapped the altar.
Maria blinked “Why would you do such a thing?”
“Well, I needed someplace to put all of my money,” Tez said. “This is hardly the first time I’ve had a bout of unexpected poverty. About 50,000 years ago I got the idea of building places like this, centered around a completely spurious religion--“
“Spurious!” Maria exclaimed. “Grizink the Devourer is hardly spurious! His worshippers carved a path of fear and destruction across the world, until Merciful Thanatos overwhelmed him with--“
Tez was shaking his head, somewhat sadly. “Er, no. That’s not how it went at all. Grizink never had any existence, at least initially, except in my own imagination. I’ll admit later on that some woefully misguided people took up the idea and ran with it a bit, but those were fairly isolated cases.”
“You… made up Grizink the Devourer?” Maria said.
Tez had at least the good grace to look mildly embarrassed. “Well, yes. You see, the whole project revolved around the fact that I needed a means to store my valuables in a way that would allow me relatively easy access, not so easy access for anyone else, and wasn’t dependant on banking systems that couldn’t possibly last for whomever knows how many centuries or millennia. Hence, this temple. It’s bit easier to find than just a chest buried in the ground, especially using large artificial ground formations like that hill for a landmark. Plus the background for the All Consuming Grizink is sufficiently nasty that the average superstitious peasant would naturally avoid it. So, I built the first temple or two in secret, allowed them to be discovered along with some ‘sacred texts’ I’d created, and suddenly people were confronted with a mysterious dead religion to scare themselves into acts of piety with. And no one would question what the devil a huge hidden temple filled with valuables was doing where none was recorded before.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Maria said. “Grizink is the nemesis of all that Thanatos represents. Treatsies, books, libraries have been written by the worshippers of the Most Merciful on how to confront the threat he presents to the world. And it was all for nothing?”
Tez shrugged again. “Well, given my situation, you can’t blame me for wanting to twist some Thanatosian robes in knots.
Maria buried her face in her hands. “I can’t tell Garvin about this. He’s got such a lovely sermon about the evils of the Devourer.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better, you could desecrate the altar a bit.”
“Oh, shut up.” She looked up at him. “Anyway, how did you build temples in secret like this? Not by yourself surely. And any workers who helped would also… Oh, no.”
“They weren’t killed,” he reassured her. “I just slipped them a rather nasty concoction I’d invented that induces amnesia. By the time they recovered from it, they were usually on the opposite side of the continent, involved in rewarding careers as quarry slaves.”
She felt her face grow pale. “That’s… utterly horrid.”
“More merciful than executing them,” he countered. “And anyway, as you might have gathered from the whole idea, I was in a rather megalomanic frame of mind when I initiated the project.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Maria finally said in defeat. Grizink the Devourer, a construct of Tez’s imagination, for the purposes of creating an underground savings account. Gah!
She turned towards the exit, but then paused when heard what sounded like a faint wail of despair. “Tez, did you hear that?” she asked.
“I’m not…” he began, but then they both heard the despairing Help meee…
“You’re absolutely certain you made this religion up?” Maria asked, feeling the hair rise on the back of her neck.
“I don’t think that’s a ghost,” Tez replied, looking grim. She followed him as he went back up the main corridor, passing the narrow passage they’d used to gain entry, and stopping in front of what once had to have been the entrance, now long since collapsed and buried as the ground had shifted.
Maria turned around in confusion. “Is anyone there?” she called out.
The answer came almost immediately from beneath their feet. Help me! Merciful gods, help me!
“Ah, I’d forgotten. This temple has some of my later modifications to the basic plan,” Tez said. He pushed back a small hidden panel in the wall, revealing metal wheel.
“What’s going on?” Maria asked.
“A final trap, or the first one, depending on how one enters,” Tez said, turning the wheel. It squealed and jammed. Maria motioned for him to move aside, and she gave it a turn herself. Even with her strength it was a near thing, but the wheel turned, and gradually a portion of the floor began to crank upwards, revealing a pit perhaps ten feet deep below.
And in the pit was a pitifully thin man, dressed in dirty rags, and sporting a mangy beard. His hair looked like it was once blond, but it was white now, what little was left of it.
“Thankthegods. Thankthegods. Thankthegods,” the man began to sob. Then he looked up and stared at Tez, his face wide with terror. “Nonononononononono!!!!”
“Oh,” Tez said cheerily. “If it isn’t Master Robert. Fancy meeting you here.”
Maria looked at him in bewilderment. “Tez, what--“
“It wasn’t me! I swear it wasn’t me! It was all Jean’s idea,” The man, Robert, began to babble.
“Oh, shut up,” Tez said irritably, “or I’ll close this again and leave you here.”
“You will not! Tez, what is going on?” Maria demanded.
“Master Robert there is one of the fellows that so kindly rapped me on the back of the head and left me to purchased by you, Maria,” Tez explained. He turned back to Robert. “If I’m guessing correctly, that’s Alia who got caught by the deadfall, and Johan by the poison darts?”
“Yesyesyesyesyes!” Robert answered. “Then I went this way and fell through the trap door. I begged Jean to help me out, but he just laughed and said there would be more for him!”
“But that was… Most Merciful! At least five months ago!” she exclaimed.
“About that, yes,” Tez agreed. “How did you survive?”
“I-I-I-I still had the food in my pack. And there’s a trickle of water from some stream,” Robert answered, gesturing to a small wet line on the floor. “And rats. Rats could fit through the holes down here. I can’t, I tried. I-I-I-I tried so many times.” He knelt down on the floor and started to sob.
“Well, it’s been lovely speaking to you, but we really must be going,” Tez said with malicious cheer, and turned to leave.
“Tez!” Maria shouted, grabbing his arm.
“Yes?” he asked, looking utterly innocent.
She took firm hold of his shoulders. “We are not going to leave that poor man there!”
“Hardly poor,” Tez answered. Then a thoughtful look passed over his face. “Hmm. Perhaps we could make a profit from this after all.”
* * *
“I feel dirty,” Maria said stubbornly, as she sat at the table in the school’s dining hall, eating a canapé. Around them, the celebration of school’s grand opening went on unabated.
“It’s hardly your fault Robert’s father wanted to express his gratitude to a worshipper of Thanatos for rescuing his son from the clutches of Grizink,” Tez answered cheerfully.
“Yes, but…”
“And if we spared them both certain theological revelations, who is harmed?”
She frowned. “You wouldn’t really have sold Robert into slavery if his father hadn’t paid up, would you?”
Tez gave her a none too comforting smile, and sipped his wine.
The End
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-17 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-17 09:46 pm (UTC)Though the rats? Ew. He'd have caught a disease long before then, from his own filth if nothing else -- five months of human waste isn't pretty. Perhaps give him a "worthless" item such as an item that can "create food and water" a limited number of times -- say, it creates a feast for 6, but in a limited space and with limited mobility, it can't have been too much use to him, especially if it disappeared after a few hours. Something like that might actually be *worse* because it gives you false hope, which would make it even nastier to have to resort to rats after a while.
...
"Luckily, the last time we split up magic treasure, I'd drawn the short straw and wound up with a ring with a few charges of "Create Feast". You know the one -- makes plenty of food and drink for six hungry adventurers?"
"Must have been fun trying to fit a feast for six in that tiny space. And the food disappears again after a few hours, doesn't it?"
"Yes. Even if you pour the water into your own canteen, it disappears if you don't actually eat it. For months I'd use the ring, eat all I could, and then when the food disappeared I'd wait days, as long as I could stand it, before I used it again. We never bothered to find out how many charges it had left, so I was careful, and always afraid that this meal would be my last. I think it worked out to about a dozen meals but the last one was ages ago."
"So what have you been living on since?"
"I still had some preserves and jerky in my pack. I saved that for last. After a week or two I started using the food I couldn't eat as bait for the rats. The rats were plentiful at first but they got wise to me after a while...but they still came." (and then continue with what you have).
no subject
Date: 2005-10-18 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-18 03:07 pm (UTC)