A (Mostly) Evil Dungeon, page 1
1
I guess you could say I was pretty tired. I’d just spent all night sleeping outside with the hens, on account of the fox that was on the loose. Dad told me to leave ‘em. They’d stopped laying eggs, and he was going to sell them on for slaughter.
That didn’t sit right with me. To my mind, you didn’t just let something get eaten once it stopped being useful. So I made a bunch of traps, and I spent the night sleeping near the coop. I don’t like boasting, but not a single hen died that evening.
Anyway, I was pretty tired when Dad opened his window and told me he wanted to see me in his office, which was in the family home.
That was weird, because I was rarely allowed inside my family home. People from some of the more enlightened parts of the world would find that really strange, and the first question they’d ask is “Why? You were just a kid. Why couldn’t you live in your own home?”
Well, with Mum, Dad, five siblings, two hunting dogs, and three falcons, there wasn’t room. Besides, sixths weren’t permitted to live with the rest of their family. Everyone knew that. Instead, I lived in an outbuilding across the garden.
“That sounds horrible!” some folks might say.
Well, I tried to see the positive. It was quiet. I had the whole outbuilding to myself. Mum and Dad barely lectured me about school, unlike my siblings. They never asked me about my studies at all, actually. It was great. Sort of.
Besides, who was I to complain about the order of things? I was the sixth kid. Sixths had to accept what they were given. Part of the whole sixth superstition crap. This meant I’d never go to college like some of my brothers and sisters. I’d never earn an apprenticeship with a master craftsman. I would never be a Student of the Spiritual Way, no matter how much I wanted to be.
I was a sixth, simple as that. And that was why it was so strange for Dad to ask to see me.
To say I was surprised was an understatement. What did he want? A small part of me thought he might want to talk about my future. If that was the case, I had to act mature. Whatever happened today, I couldn’t be my usual impulsive, smart-ass self. I was getting too old for that.
After I knocked on his door, I paced around while I waited for his response.
“Come in,” he finally said.
I looked around his office, marveling at the giant bookcase that stretched up to the rafters. At the half dozen college diplomas that Dad had pinned above his desk. At his various plaques fixed to the walls. These marked his ascension from Novice all the way to Expert in the Path of the Spiritual Way.
Dad was a respected Student and a serious guy. I decided I’d better be serious, too. So I straightened up and tried not to look like an overawed kid.
While I waited for Dad to finish writing on a ledger, I looked around. The window nearest me looked out on our farm. Mom was a Student of the Farmer Path, and the fields were her provinces. Grazing upon the sprawling green vistas was a donkey. A black and grey Folkstone breed. His name was Tyler, and he was older than me. Yup, my parents had named me after a donkey. Part of me wondered if it was deliberate, or if a donkey was just the first thing they saw after my birth.
I never held it against the donkey – who I started calling Ty - though. Not his fault, was it? We got on well, me and him. Whenever I’d work the field, he’d charge up to me and demand that I petted him. All the farm animals seemed to like me, actually. I think we had a bond.
“Sit down, Tyler,” Dad finally said.
I took the chair opposite him and I tried to guess what he wanted. Part of me hoped for something in particular, but I knew I was being ridiculous. Whenever one of my brothers and sisters were sixteen, Dad called them into his study. There, he told them what apprenticeships he’d managed to get for them. Or whether he’d been able to secure their entry to their chosen colleges. It was a family tradition.
I never imagined that I’d get summoned. Not as a sixth. Was it too much to dream that he might have broken tradition and found something for me? An apprenticeship where I could learn a skill? A college that would teach me the Spiritual Way?
Slow down, I told myself.
“You’re sixteen today,” he said.
“So that’s why the chickens were clucking the happy birthday song this morning.”
Dad didn’t rebuke me. He just nodded, like he was thinking about something important. “In two weeks,” he said, “You are to collect your things and leave our home.”
I bolted up so quickly that the chair toppled over. “What?”
“When you are sixteen, we are no longer responsible for you.”
My heart was pounding so fast I felt sick. “I thought I could work the farm, or-”
“You’re a sixth, Tyler,” said Dad, his tone perfectly neutral. He might as well have been arranging the sale of a pig. “There will be no place for you here once our legal obligation ends.”
This was too much. Way too much. I was torn between smashing something or just storming outta there. But I was sixteen, and I had to act like an adult.
“Mom wants me to stay and work on the farm,” I said. “She’s been teaching me shearing, plowing, crop rotation…”
“Your mother is the one who asked me to have this talk with you.”
“Screw this. I’ll talk to her.”
“She’s visiting your aunt and she won’t return for a month. You’ll be gone by then.”
I didn’t wait for the two weeks that Dad ‘generously’ allowed me. That night, I packed all my things. It really wasn’t much. Some clothes, which were hand-me-downs from Tom and Peric, my eldest brothers. A harmonica that my grandfather on my mother’s side gave me. I was young when he died, but I got the impression he never minded that I was a sixth. He didn’t buy into the superstition that corrupted our land so deeply it made moms act like monsters. Finally, my books. Two of them, both birthday gifts from Tom.
Then I said a last goodbye to my childhood home, and I set off toward Agforth city in search of work.
* * *
I arrived in Agforth a few weeks later. But now that I was here, I didn’t know where to start. Should I get a job? Try to enroll in a college? Maybe find someone to take me on as an apprentice of some kind?
Over the next four weeks, I knocked on door after door. Most folks opened their peepholes, saw that I was a sixth, and didn’t bother answering. I didn’t get mad at them– it was their door I was knocking on, after all. It was up to them what they did.
I knocked on the doors of every kind of craftsperson I could think of, right down to the candlemakers. Not that I particularly wanted to become one, but at that point, I’d have taken anything. As hard as I tried, not a single master would have me as an apprentice.
Finally, I started knocking on doors that I had put off until last. Dangerous doors that most people in their right minds didn’t approach. Yup, I traveled outside of the city and started knocking on the doors of mage towers.
Most of the mages refused to open their doors. One of them threatened to turn me into a walking truffle and send a bunch of wild hogs to chase me. I didn’t much believe her. At any rate, not a single one of them would consider taking me on.
I was about to give up, when I noticed something. There was a forest north of me, with tall ferns packed together and reaching up high enough to hide the sun. The shadows between their trunks seem to promise secrets, if only I would walk just a little way into the darkness.
Behind them, only just poking above the tree line, was a mage’s tower. A tower made of black glass, jagged and unwelcoming, and a blot on an otherwise beautiful land. More importantly, it was a tower that I hadn’t knocked on yet.
It might have been stupid to get my hopes up, but the tower was a chance. A chance of getting ignored, sure, but if you don’t take a risk, you don’t get the rewards. Feeling excited, I set off toward it.
The mage answered on my fourth knock. He was old, with devious eyes that shone impossibly blue. He’d tied his hair into a ponytail, and his beard was wrapped around his staff. His aura was the same as all Students who’d ascended to Master and beyond. A kind of misty power that couldn’t be seen or touched, but I could feel it all the same.
He blinked at me. “Yes?” he said.
I was so surprised that he’d even opened their door for me, that I completely forgot what to say.
“Are you mute, boy?”
He was actually talking to me! And here I was, wasting my chance by saying nothing.
I recovered my voice and organized my wits. “I’m looking for an apprenticeship, sir. I know that I’m a sixth, but I’m a hard worker. Although I haven’t taken the aptitude test, my siblings all scored-”
“Bugger off.”
He started closing the door.
I surprised myself – and him – by putting my foot in the way.
“I know that I’m a sixth, but-”
“It ain’t that you’re a sixth,” said the mage. “I couldn’t give a damn about that hokum. It’s that...”
He suddenly stopped talking.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Hang on a second!”
The mage stepped forward. He smelled strongly of alcohol. He peered into my eyes with an unnerving intensity.
I backed away, but he strode forward again and he pinched my cheeks with his thumb and index finger.
I didn’t much like having the guy right in my face like that. I pushed him away, but then I caught him before he fell over. Only then did my logic kick in, and I thought I might have blown
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
Weird. He didn’t seem in the least bit annoyed that I pushed him.
“Don’t believe what?” I said.
Suddenly, he grabbed my collar and pulled me into the tower. The door slammed shut, leaving us in darkness.
I wondered if I’d just willingly knocked on a door to my own doom. If I had to fight my way out, I thought, could I take him?
In a fair fight, sure. But mages don’t fight fair, everyone knows that. I backed against the door, so at least I knew the way out.
He clapped his hands. Lamps whooshed to life, illuminating a hallway that led to a spiral staircase. Without another word, the mage handed me a broom.
“Sweep the stairs. All 5000 of ‘em. That’s the first task of your apprenticeship.”
My hands took hold of the broom before my brain even started working. When it did, I was still equally as perplexed. Slowly, it dawned on me.
He’s accepting me as an apprentice. Something happened when he looked at me. Maybe he saw aptitude or something. Heck, who cares? I’m an apprentice!
Once the initial burst of happiness wore off, I forced a little control over myself. It was then that I saw the problem.
“This broom has no bristles,” I said.
“That wouldn’t stop a true apprentice. The first, and most important, lesson of an apprenticeship is obedience, boy. The second is that you do not ask questions.”
“Right. Sure.” I said.
“Then off you go, Bristles! Get those stairs brushed!”
I began sweeping with the bristle-less brush, wondering if this was the start of a new life for me, or if the mage was completely insane. Whatever the answer, the mage had already disappeared up the spiral staircase.
It took a while for the strange things to start happening. At first, Mage Baratide had me sweep the stairs of his tower every day. All five thousand of them, using a brush with no bristles. Knowing how tenuous my apprenticeship was, I didn’t complain. Well, except for the occasional muttering under my breath.
When I was done with that, I had to climb out of the tower by a hatch on the top, and clean the bird, griffin, and dragon gunk from the tower windows. Good thing I wasn’t afraid of heights.
Finally, after learning I had worked on a farm and had spent months traveling outdoors, Baratide gave me a list of herbs and shrooms to forage.
“I need a pocketful of each one,” he told me. “An exact pocketful.”
“Pockets are different sizes depending on what you’re wearing each day.”
“Don’t back-chat me, Bristles!”
As weird as it might have seemed to some, all this felt normal to me. I knew from my brother Peric that nobody learned anything related to their craft in their first year of apprenticeship. Even so, I’d hoped that Baratide would at least test my aptitude. As much as I wanted it, he didn’t show any signs he was going to do that.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t pay any attention to me. In fact, one night I woke to find him measuring my skull with a pair of forceps.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said, the shock making me forget my discipline.
“Measuring your skull,” said Baratide, not seeming to care that I didn’t call him master.
“Why?”
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t, Bristles?”
Hells yes there’s a reason you shouldn’t measure my head, I wanted to say, but Baratide had already gone into his workshop and bolted the door.
That incident was strange enough that it made me consider leaving the tower. Mages could be dangerous, with the weird Paths they studied and the way they manipulated spirit. Had I gotten myself mixed up in something I couldn’t handle?
The only thing that kept me there was knowing that all that waited beyond the tower was a city of closed doors and suspicious glances. Not just for a while, but the rest of my life. I was a sixth, and there was no escaping that. Baratide was the only mage in the world to ever offer an apprenticeship to a sixth.
So, I did what sealed my fate – I stayed.
For the next week, nothing irregular happened in the tower except for Baratide creating a talking sunflower. Even that was normal in the context of his life. My duties went on as usual, and Baratide even gave me a book to read – First Steps on the Path: An Apprentice’s Guide. I studied it during my evening free time, and Baratide quizzed me at breakfast.
Even though it meant I didn’t get any time to relax, I was happy about the extra work. My days felt long back then, but it felt good to have someone take an interest in me.
It was around this time that the gentle cool of autumn was giving way to a stormy winter. An icing of white lay all around the tower. In the mornings, snowplows constantly worked the roads between Agforth and surrounding towns, farms, and quarries. By nightfall, the snow just piled right back up again. Over in the city, the wall guards spent their mornings clearing snow off the battlements, and rumors told of snow wolves migrating from the east, their coats hidden by the flakes drifting from the skies.
Most mages used spirit to keep their towers warm during the fell months, but not Baratide. He rarely performed practical magic at all these days and was saving his spirit for something. It made the tower a cold, cold place, and I added another duty to my growing list – collecting wood for the fire.
Not only did Baratide refuse to heat his tower using magic, but he also installed a lightning rod on his tower. This would have been a normal, practical thing to do, except for one thing. The rod connected to some kind of runed-marked cauldron, intended to trap the lightning. In turn, Baratide would absorb its spirit. The first time I saw lightning flash inside the cauldron, I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Relax, lad,” Baratide said. “The runes stop it killing us. The worst you’d ever get is badly maimed!”
I resolved there and then to never go near the cauldron again. “Good to know,” I said.
During this time, Baratide finally said the words I’d been waiting for.
“It’s time to take your aptitude test, Bristles.”
The announcement came so suddenly that I almost didn’t comprehend what he said. I’d waited so long for this that I expected there to be fanfare or something. At least some build-up. I wondered if I was dreaming.
“The aptitude test? Today?”
“Today’s better than tomorrow but worse than yesterday, my ma used to say. You’ve stuck around. You’ve done everything I have asked. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Okay. Great!”
He picked my thumb and collected blood in a thimble. It didn’t hurt much. After this, he breathed some of his own absorbed spirit into a beaker and mixed some weird liquid into it.
“Drink this,” he said.
I hesitated. Inside the beaker was a purple liquid that had caught the spirit and condensed it. It didn’t look like the tastiest of drinks. I sniffed it. It didn’t smell great, either.
Baratide sighed. “It’s not poison, boy. Much too messy a way to kill someone. Do you really imagine me dragging your corpse down the stairs? No, if I wanted to kill you, I’d ask you to go to the river, and then send a mercenary to clobber you on the back of the head. Or I’d tell you to go outside and clean the windows, then throw stuff at you until you fell off.”
“Thank you, master. That’s very reassuring.”
Baratide looked at me strangely. He wore an expression that was almost a smile. His face didn’t seem to know how to properly make such a look.
“You’re amusing, in a way, Bristles. Not the worst presence to have around here. If only…”
He sure was talking strangely. I didn’t like it. “Only what?”
“Never mind. Come on, then. Drink up. Let’s see if you’ve got the aptitude or not. If you haven’t, well. You know.”
“The apprenticeship is over.”
He nodded. “But let’s not count our gold until we’ve checked if the dragon’s home.”
After I drank the drink, Baratide took more of my blood, and then he left the room, locking himself away in his study. He was in there for hours.
I waited as patiently as I could, but those were the longest hours of my life. It felt like my whole destiny hinged on what Baratide found out. I’d already decided on a backup plan that involved touring farmhouses in the countryside and looking for work, but the prospect filled me with a sludgy feeling. Like dread, but more drawn-out. Deep down, all I ever wanted was to learn a Path of the Spiritual Way.
