Chương 8: First Blood Contract

The next hand that reached him didn't want to bless him and it didn't want to chain him. It grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him down, and it belonged to a woman with a face gone long past crying, and what she wanted turned out to be worse than either.

"You can do things." Her voice shook on every word.

"Everyone saw it. You fixed the bridge with your bare hand. So you can do this one too. My brother's in the Maw. Five days. You're going to go in there and you're going to bring him back to me." The crowd went quiet around the word. Maw. Whatever it was, it wasn't a word people said lightly here.

"I don't —" Kaito started.

"Joss." She said the name like it cost her the last thing she had.

"His name's Joss. He went in with three others and not one came out, and the guild won't send anyone, they say it isn't worth a copper to dig out a corpse, and I can't —" Her hand twisted in his shirt.

"Please. You're the one who sees things. You're the only person who's looked at me all week like I'm a person and not a debt."

"Money," Sable said, flat and fast.

"She means money. Say yes. Get the terms, get out of this square, and let's be three miles gone before that runner comes back with whoever he's fetching. A job is a reason to leave town. It's the best thing that's happened to you since you died." Kaito looked at the woman's face. He thought about his empty pockets, and the god watching him from inside the ground, and the man who'd already run off into the dark.

"What's the pay," he said. The pay was four silver, which Sable told him was robbery and also more money than he had any way to turn down. The woman didn't have it on her. She had it buried in a jar somewhere, and she'd dig it up the moment he carried her brother out. Pell got him clear of the crowd. The big baker put a shoulder between Kaito and the reaching hands and steered him back toward the stalls, and once they were out of it he turned around and his face was all worry.

"You don't have to do this," Pell said. Plain, like everything he said.

"I know how it looks. A man with nothing, and four silver in front of him. But the Maw eats stronger men than you, friend. It's been eating them since before my grandfather. Bodies don't come out of there. That's not cruelty. It's just true."

"I know," Kaito said.

"Then don't go."

"I'm broke, I'm hunted, and I can't stay in a town that thinks I'm a saint," Kaito said.

"Those are my three choices, and I don't love any of them. The hole's the one that pays." Pell looked at him a long moment. Then he sighed, and reached under his apron, and came out with a knife. Not much of one. An old bread knife, worn thin, but honest steel.

"Then take this," Pell said.

"It's seen more crusts than throats, but it'll do better than your hands. Bring it back. Bring yourself back, while you're at it." He pushed it into Kaito's grip and folded half a loaf in after it.

"And eat. You go down a hole on an empty stomach, you'll drop dead before anything in it gets the chance." The girl was there too, at the edge of the stalls, the one in the cut-down coat. She didn't say anything. She watched him take the knife, watched the way she watched everything, and when he looked at her she didn't look away. Then a gap opened in the crowd and she was through it and gone.

"Friendly town," Kaito said.

"Walk," said Sable. He walked. He went out of Ashfen in the dark with a bread knife and half a loaf and a god's eye on his back, and he slept four hours in a ditch because the stable was full of people who wanted to touch him, and at first grey light he came up over a rise and saw the Maw, and stopped dead, because he knew it. He'd made it himself.

It was a sinkhole in a bald stretch of rock, a wide black mouth going straight down, ringed with pale stone teeth he'd shaped with a tool, at a desk, in a building that didn't exist anymore. He'd called it the Hollow Maw because the art lead said "the Gaping Pit" tested badly. He'd spent a week on the lighting down there. He'd argued about spawn rates.

"You built this," Sable said. Not a question. She'd worked out what he was a while back, and she didn't make him say it.

"Yeah," Kaito said.

"I built this."

"Then you have one advantage nobody who's ever gone down there has had. You know what's waiting at the bottom." A beat.

"Use it. It's the only edge you've got, and it won't help as much as you think." He went down into his own dungeon. It was wrong before he got ten steps in. He knew the slope of the first tunnel, the place the path forked. But the red was everywhere down here, far worse than in the town. The seams were all through the Maw, in the walls, in the air, thick red knots of broken math where the place had grown past what he'd written. He'd built three rooms. There were more than three now.

There were corridors he'd never drawn, branching off into the dark, dug by something that had had ten thousand years and nothing else to do.

'It kept building,' he thought.

'I left it half a page of rules and it kept building for ten thousand years.' He found the rest of Joss's party in the second room. He made himself not look too closely and kept moving, because there was nothing he could do for any of them and he had a bread knife and a job. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. He found Joss at the mouth of the last room. The boy was maybe seventeen, curled against the wall where he'd crawled to die, dead a day, no more.

He'd lasted four days down here alone. Kaito crouched by him, and something in his chest pulled hard, and he made himself breathe.

"I've got you," he said quietly, to a dead boy who couldn't hear him.

"I'm getting you out. Just give me a minute first." Because the last room was the boss room, and the thing he'd put in it was awake. It filled the back of the room, pale and huge, folded in on itself in the dark, and when his foot scraped stone it came undone, and a head lifted off the floor that was mostly mouth. He'd designed that mouth. A blind burrowing thing, all jaw, built to come up under a careless party and swallow one whole. Low level. A scare for new players.

Two attacks, a lunge and a tail sweep, and a soft spot under the jaw so they'd have something to aim at. A box came up over it, red, boss-red, the color he'd locked years ago for the worst things in the game. [Vorr.]'I called you Greg,' Kaito thought, a little hysterically.

'For three years. In the files. Big Greg.' Then Vorr spoke, and the bottom dropped out of everything.

"Another one comes down," it said. The voice was wet and slow and came from somewhere under all those teeth, and it was thinking, it was a thing that thought now, and he had not given it that.

"They always come down. Predator above. Prey below. That is the shape of it. That is the only shape there has ever been." The huge head tilted at him.

"But you came down on purpose. The prey that walks into the mouth. I have wondered for so long how one of you would taste, when it chose."

"Don't answer it," Sable snapped.

"It wants you talking. Talking is slow. Kill it or run." He ran at it, because she was right, and because he knew this thing. He knew the lunge was coming before it came, and he was already gone when the jaw smashed down where he'd stood. He knew the tail sweep, and he jumped it. For about four seconds he felt almost safe down there, dancing around a monster whose homework he'd written himself.

'I know everything you do,' he thought.

'I wrote every —' Vorr split its own jaw sideways, both halves peeling apart wrong, and spat a wide cone of black bile across the front of the room. He didn't know that one. He threw himself flat and most of it went over him, but a strip caught his shoulder and his side, and it burned, it burned like nothing had a right to, eating through Pell's good shirt and into the skin under it, and a red number he didn't want to read dragged his health down in one long ugly drop.

'I didn't write that,' he thought, and the almost-safe feeling was gone, all of it at once.

'That's not in the design. You learned it. You taught yourself that, down here, alone.'

"Prey learns the old moves," Vorr said, dragging itself around toward him.

"So a hunter must learn new ones. I have had a very long time. I have had nothing else at all." He scrambled back, and threw the only thing he had, which was the bread knife, and it bounced off the pale hide and was gone into the dark.

'Great. Wonderful.' Then the floor moved. That was the second new thing. Vorr drove its head down into the stone and went under, the whole length of it sliding into the rock the way it was always meant to, except he'd built that to be an animation, once, for show. He'd never made it actually leave.

Now the room was empty and silent and the boss was somewhere under his feet, and he understood, cold all over, that the lunge from below was about to come up through the floor with everything ten thousand years had added to it, and there'd be no soft spot to aim at, because he had no knife and no time and the thing had finally stopped playing by his rules. He had maybe two seconds. He spent one of them looking. The red was everywhere in the room.

And there, in the ceiling above the center, was the biggest knot of it he'd seen yet. A failed weight-value holding up a hundred feet of rock that should have come down a long time ago and simply hadn't, because the world had never noticed it was broken. He'd put a number back into a bridge to hold it up. He could pull one out. The floor under him bulged.

He threw himself sideways as Vorr exploded up through the stone, jaws wide, and he hit the ground rolling and reached up with his mind, fast and clumsy and bleeding, and grabbed the failed value in the ceiling, and instead of putting it back, he tore it the rest of the way out. The roof came down. A hundred feet of his own ceiling fell on the thing he'd made, right where it had surfaced, and the noise of it was the loudest thing he'd ever heard.

Then a chunk off the edge clipped him and threw him into the wall and the world went white. When it came back he was on the floor, half-buried in grit, one ear ringing and the other gone quiet, his shoulder on fire and his side worse, and he was breathing, which he had not expected to be. Vorr was under a mountain of rock. One pale broken limb stuck out of the pile and didn't move, and the red box over it had gone dark. Then it flickered, one last time.

"... new," Vorr said, from somewhere under all that stone, so quiet he almost missed it.

"That was... new." And then it was gone, and the box winked out, and the thing he'd built and left thinking in a hole for ten thousand years was finally, mercifully, dead. A box slid up through the dust. [Level 7.] Four levels off one kill. His health, what was left of it, ticked up to a bigger number that still wasn't much. He didn't care. He lay in the grit and breathed and let his hands shake.

"You're alive," Sable said. Quiet, for her.

"I did not think you would be. Well done. Now get the boy and get out, before the rest of that ceiling decides to follow the first hundred feet." He got up. It took three tries. He went and got Joss over his good shoulder and turned for the way out. That was when he saw it. It sat on the floor where Vorr had surfaced, where the rock had cracked open and spilled whatever the Maw had been holding in its gut for ten thousand years. A shard of something.

Black, the length of his thumb, with a dull blue light moving inside it, slow, in and out. He didn't reach for it. He'd learned that much. He just looked. Nothing came up. No item box. No name, no rarity, no grey or green or gold border. His Observation ran over it and gave him nothing at all, which it had never once done, not on a road, not on a wolf, not on anything.

"Sable. What is that." A pause.

"Pick it up," she said.

"Carefully." He crouched, and closed his hand around it, and the second his fingers shut on it the blue light pulsed once, hard, and a sound went through his head that had not come from the room. It was a voice. A woman's voice. He couldn't catch a single word of it, it was a language he had never heard in his life, but it was a voice, an old one, frightened or sorry or both, packed into a sliver of black glass at the bottom of a dungeon that should never have held it. It cut off. The light went dull.

"Sable?" he said.

"What was that. What language was that." Sable didn't answer. For the first time since she'd spoken his name in the dark of the tower, Sable had nothing to say at all.