Chapter 97 – Into the Labyrinth

After Mirian finished putting up basic wards in her quarters, she started working on an eavesdropping device she could deploy, then an all-purpose divination device. Already, she was annoyed that she didn’t have access to a focus. What she really wanted to do was scan the town’s populace for the kinds of soul marks Specter liked to put on her agents or for other abnormalities. Arenthia had said that such marks weren’t common practice, but that was during her tenure years ago. A focus would also help her scan soul energy in the Labyrinth. How many priests have bothered to investigate down there? she wondered.

It would have to wait. For now, she’d get as much information as she could. Still, she felt an urge to scream sometimes. Everything about the time loop required a great deal of tolerance for repetition, and she was growing impatient with it all. One disaster conversation with Beatrice had been enough; it was not something she wanted to repeat.

The divination device ended up being modeled on three different devices she’d made at different points in her loops. One part detected passages, another light anomalies, another glyph sequences, and another different types of energy. It was inefficient, bulky, and a bit of a mess, but she could always revise the design later when she had a better idea of what to look for and what the expeditions usually did.

Then she worked on her spellbook the rest of the day, stuffing into the pages every combat spell she could think of, and every divination spell she hadn’t be able to fit into her detector.

The next day, she met the Torrviol Expeditionary Team for breakfast. Grimald had a map on the table, already marred by grease dripping from the bacon he was munching. “To review. This is what the route to the Vault looked like a week ago. It’s already shifted, as one of the teams has already reported a change in the first level layout. First floor should be clear. Then we stay as close as we can to this region. Expect several fights on the second level. The shaft down to the third level seems to be linked to the Vault, so as long as we find that shaft, we should be able to avoid actually needing to fight down there. The shaft had stairs last time, but nothing the two times before, so we’ll take the rope. Niluri, your job is to learn and follow orders the first time. Can you do that?”

Mirian nodded.

“Great. If we encounter Scrappy, we disengage and wait outside the vault until it goes away.”

“Scrappy?” Mirian asked, even though she remembered Lily telling her about the Elder automaton that was roaming the vault.

“Eight-foot tall golem. Nothing we’ve thrown at it has even dented the thing. But it won’t leave the vault, even if you’re just across the threshold. Ready?”

“Yup.”

As they headed toward the building that housed the entrance to the Labyrinth, Mirian heard Beatrice whispering to Cediri, though she didn’t seem to realize Mirian could hear her. “…don’t trust her. She’s far too calm for someone who’s never been down there before.”

Cediri whispered something back, but she couldn’t make it out.

The entrance to the Labyrinth was in the one fortified building in town. Unlike normal fortifications, though, this one had the gear wheel for the portcullis and bars for the doors on the outside. The arrow slits in the building also faced inward. It wasn’t designed to keep people out, but anything that made its way up from getting loose.

“Remember, if you get lost or stuck down there, you’re on your own. Everyone goes down there at their own risk,” one of the soldiers said.

“Reconsidering?” asked Grimald.

“No,” Mirian said. “Let’s go.”

Mirian knew something of what to expect from both Professor Viridian’s lectures and her dreams. Beatrice first used a glyphkey that all authorized expeditions were given on a second door inside, then took a self-moving platform, dubbed an ‘elevator’ by her companions, down a vertical shaft. It was a strange experience for her, but it certainly was nicer than taking that many stairs. It lowered them into a large cavern hanging with unnaturally glowing stalactites. At the back of the cavern was the door. It loomed large, at least twenty feet high, with black statues of twisted creatures made of too many spines and teeth.

That was the next thing to expect: labyrinthine horrors. Like chimeras, it was a classification of similar myrvites, not a single species, but they were all basically the same: horrible looking creatures without many of the organs common to normal surface life.

“Spellbooks ready?” Grimald asked, hefting his warhammer. The team was prepared with various supplies tucked into their packs, and Grimald also wore a breastplate and plated greaves over his padded armor.

“Ready,” they said, one by one. These checks weren’t just for fun. Once they crossed into the Labyrinth, the team stopped joking and took on an attitude more like the military discipline Mirian had grown used to when helping lead the Battle of Torrviol.

Cediri had both a spellbook on one chain and a journal full of maps on another chain. The page he was open to was an exact scale copy of the map one of the first-floor-only teams had made. He made a note about the status of the room, as he said, “Room clear. Niluri, you brought your device, right? Can we get a measurement on that?”

Mirian activated one of the glyph sequences, letting the device measure the length, then width of the room. “Seven point four meters by five point eight,” she reported.

“No change to dimensions, then. Good. We’re not likely to see a shift event while we’re here.”

As they moved through the first level, Mirian had both the sensation of deja vu and stepping into the unknown. She recognized the glowing fungi that lined the strange stone of the Labyrinth, that stone that never did seem to reflect light the way it should. The walls of undecipherable hieroglyphs were also familiar. And yet, being there, actually being there, felt different, and everything about it was more visceral.

There were strange sounds that echoed through the rooms, and every so often the fungi on the wall would stir, the stalks turning toward them so that the circular, eye-like patches followed them as they moved across a room. The tight hallways linking the rooms felt more claustrophobic. Above them, the tangle of metal pipes were mixed with the pale hyphae of the fungi. Below, the stone floor was seamless.

Occasionally, Mirian’s device would detect faint glyph sequences, embedded in the stone walls. Even with a magnifying lens, she could barely make them out. Removing them would require special diamond-tipped drills (or Jei’s stone-transmuting spells, Mirian thought), and they were on a strict timeline, so they didn’t stop to examine them.

As reported, the first level was empty, and none of the rooms had changed since the last team investigated. The other team had encountered a few smaller labyrinthine horrors, but by now the corpses had vanished. That was unnerving, but also normal. What exactly removed them, no one knew. Cediri mentioned they’d used monitoring equipment to try and figure it out. They’d detected strange low vibrations and a small spike in arcane energy, but were no closer to answering the question than anyone else who’d investigated.

A half-hour of cautious walking brought them to one of the passages to the next level. They made their way through another large gate, this one dripping with stalactites so that the door resembled a maw. Except, Mirian knew from Professor Holvatti’s class there was no way the rock formations were natural. Some sort of slippery slime-mold had grown over the stairs, and Beatrice casually used a flame spell to clear a path down the middle. They had just enough time to pass over it; Mirian could hear it making a schlorp sound as it regrew behind them.

Grimald paused at the threshold. “Darklamps ahead. Niluri, turn them off for me.”

The darklamps were a strange part of the Labyrinth. Each room had glyphic light sources—the inspiration for the first glyph lamps—but sometimes they had darklamps that intentionally bent or displaced light in the room to hide some part of it. It was the kind of place the labyrinthine horrors liked to lurk in. Mirian didn’t have a counter dark spell, but she did have a counter light spell. She used her technique of starting a spell on one page, then flipping to the next to finish the spell with a different glyph set, targeting each darklamp one by one until the shadows receded.

“Room looks clear. Advancing,” Grimald said. “Two doors. Beatrice, cover the north door. I’m on south.”

“Got it,” Beatrice said. “Niluri, get us measurements.”

Cediri didn’t need to be told what to do, he was working on his map. Instead of creating a bulky mapping device like Mirian had done for the Underground, he preferred his small journal and using precision measurement spells to guide his pen so that the drawing was to scale. Mirian gave him the measurements.

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“Niluri, divination on the north tunnel and the room beyond. Cediri, south.”

Mirian channeled into her divination device. The readout was a bit primitive; the magical detector used a single colored light that changed color depending on the intensity of the arcane force detected, going from red on the low end to violet on the highest end, following the color spectrum of light. The interface could otherwise only project numbers with a numeral illusion spell. Cediri’s device projected a three-dimensional representation of what he detected. Mirian made a note to get a closer look at the construction of it later.

South, there was a room with two more doors. North, a room with five that split off in all directions. North would take them closer to the third level, but Grimald said, “Get out the device. Blocking barrier engine on that north door. If there’s one room I don’t want overrun in an ambush, it’s this one. We’ll go south and circle back around. Beatrice, you’re on rearguard.”

Beatrice swung her pack off and took out a small spell engine that she set up by the door. She turned it on, and a forcewall spell covered the north door.

“Good. Let’s go.”

They repeated the process, slowly tracking east and then north.

“It’s too quiet,” Cediri said.

“Agreed,” Grimald said.