Backstory · Mordecai
Mordecai, Part 1: Heat Is a Promise
ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED.
Hello, Archivist! You asked for the oldest file I’m still permitted to show you. Most of the old ones have been compressed, corrupted or tastefully deleted by Legal. This one survived. I’d love to tell you that was an accident.
Now playing: File 001. Subject: the guide.
Viewer discretion is advised. Viewer discretion is always advised. Nobody has ever exercised it. Content includes death, grief, poison, and a tonic that does something genuinely unforgivable to a man’s complexion. Enjoy!
The world ended on a market day, and I missed it, because I was in the back room rinsing seed pods.
I’ll get to that. First you need to know what I was, because everybody asks. They always ask it sideways, like they’re asking about a scar. So what were you, before all this? And you can see them hoping. A warlord. A prince. Some poor bastard who killed a god by accident and has been apologising ever since.
I swept floors.
I swept the floor of a potion shop in a town that was mostly fog and fish, on a world with three moons. All three were too small to be any use. They hung there like somebody had started a project and lost interest.
The shop belonged to a woman named Orrel. She was older than the harbour wall and meaner than the gulls, and she smelled of burnt sugar and copper wire. She once poisoned a tax collector. Slightly. As a warning. He came back the next year with a much more reasonable figure.
I was twelve when I started. She paid me in bread and in lessons I didn’t want.
“Heat is a promise,” she told me, the first week. She tapped the brass still with one yellow fingernail. “You make it slowly, and you keep it. Break it and the whole batch knows.”
I nodded like I understood.
I thought she was talking about potions.
Here’s what I learned in that shop. Nobody teaches you this in a dungeon, and it’s kept me alive longer than any spell.
Moonroot bruises if you look at it wrong, and a bruised root brews bitter. Grind it with the flat of the pestle, not the edge, and talk to it if you have to. Orrel did. She told the moonroot it was handsome. She never once told a human being that.
A tincture always turns its prettiest colour just before it goes wrong. Gold, usually, or a lovely deep rose. When it goes right, it’s the colour of weak tea.
Nobody ever believes this. That’s why so many people die holding something beautiful.
Customers lie about their symptoms and never about their fears. A man would come in and say his chest hurt when he climbed the hill. What he meant was that his father had died at forty-one, and he was forty. You treat the fear first. The chest usually follows.
And the big one: you don’t brew for the potion. You brew for the person who’s going to drink it.
By nineteen, the fog-town was coming to me instead of her. Orrel let them. She pretended she didn’t care and drank a little more at night. Once, when she thought I’d gone home, I heard her tell the moonroot that the boy was going to be better than her.
I never told her I heard that.
It’s one of about four things I regret, and I’m counting carefully.
So. The market day.
I’d love to give you the spectacle, Archivist. The people who watch these things always want the spectacle. But what I actually remember is that the light changed. Not brighter. Thicker, like somebody had turned the air into syrup. The salt water in my basin went perfectly still. The seed pods stopped turning.
Orrel was upstairs. I went for the stairs.
The stairs weren’t there.
Pardon the interruption!
The planet formerly known as [REDACTED] has been selected for an exciting new opportunity in interstellar entertainment!
Its structures have been reclaimed. Its residents have been processed. Some of its residents have been processed into crawlers. Congratulations, if applicable!
Please proceed to your designated starting room. Please do not try to proceed anywhere else. There is nowhere else. We checked.
There was a stone room. It smelled of nothing at all.
That’s the worst smell there is. I didn’t know that yet.
There were nine of us in it at first. I’m going to tell you about four, because the other five were gone by the end of the first day and I never learned their names. I’m not proud of that. In the first hour of a dungeon you don’t learn names. You learn who screams and who goes quiet, and you stand near the quiet ones.
Dask was a fisherman. Broad, sunburnt, grey in the beard, built like a mooring post. He’d come out of the harbour with a gutting knife in his hand, and he kept holding it like it was a decision he’d already made.
Pell and Wim were sisters who ran the bakery on the harbour road. Pell was tall and sharp and permanently annoyed, like a heron that had been insulted. Wim was small and round and laughed at things that weren’t funny, then apologised for laughing. I’d bought bread from them every morning for seven years. They both looked at me like a stranger. In that room, everyone was.
Hollan was a soldier from the garrison, off duty, still holding a tin cup of something that steamed. He never put that cup down. Not then, and not for a long time after. I think he forgot it was in his hand.
A cheerful voice explained the rules. Then it explained them again, more slowly, as if we were the problem.
Welcome, Crawlers!
You are now participants in the most-watched program in the known galaxy! Each floor of this dungeon contains wonders, treasures and an astonishing variety of things that want to eat you. Find the stairwell before the floor collapses. Do not be on the floor when it collapses. That’s really the whole thing!
Your viewers are excited to meet you. Try to be interesting. Uninteresting crawlers are a drain on everyone’s time, and we do eventually drain them.
“Is that,” Wim whispered, “is that a god?”
“No,” said Hollan. He was the only one of us who’d ever been in a war. “That’s management.”
The dungeon gave us starting gear. Dask got a harpoon, which delighted him. Hollan got a short sword and a dented helmet, which didn’t. The sisters got matching cleavers and a debuff called Flour Allergy (Ironic), which I still think was a cheap shot.
I got a satchel, a mortar and pestle, a small brass burner, and a tunic the colour of old porridge.
Class Assigned: Hedge Apothecary.
You know which plants won’t kill you! That’s more than most people can say. Your starting kit includes the basic tools of the trade and absolutely nothing that could be described as a weapon. We checked that, too.
Tip: Many Hedge Apothecaries enjoy a long and fulfilling career standing behind other people! Some of them even enjoy a long one.
“Well,” said Pell, looking me up and down. “You’re useless.”
“I’m useful,” I said. “Just not yet.”
“You’re holding a bowl.”
“It’s a mortar.”
“It’s a bowl with ambitions.”
Dask laughed, a big ugly harbour laugh, the first laugh anyone had made in that room. Hollan took a sip from his cup.
We walked out onto the first floor together. The five whose names I never learned walked the other way.
I’ve sometimes wondered which of us was right. Then I remember that I’m the one telling this.
The first floor was tunnels. Wet ones, which suited Dask and nobody else.
We found out what the dungeon thought was funny on the very first turn. It was a creature like a giant louse, with a human face and a very polite voice. It asked us how our day was going. Then it tried to take off Wim’s arm.
Hollan put his sword through its face.
It said “how rude” and died.
Achievement Unlocked: Small Talk, Big Stab!
You and your party have killed your first monster! It had a wife. It did not have a wife. We’ll never know! Doesn’t matter!
Reward: A Bronze Adventurer’s Box! Please don’t open it in the middle of a corridor. Okay, you’re going to do that anyway. Everyone does. It’s adorable.
We opened it in the middle of the corridor. Inside were three small, stoppered healing potions, the colour of a summer sunset.
I didn’t like that colour. I couldn’t have told you why yet.
On the second day, Dask got stung.
The thing came out of a drain like a hand made of knees. He crushed it with the butt of his harpoon and laughed about it. Then he stopped laughing and sat down, very suddenly, on the wet stone.
The skin around the sting was going grey. Grey at the centre, then a ring of yellow, then a fine pink line spreading outward like the edge of a map.
Pell already had a sunset potion uncorked. “Drink this,” she said, “drink it, Dask, drink it.”
“Wait,” I said.
Everybody looked at me.
I want you to understand that I had never once in my life told anybody to wait. I was the boy who swept floors. I said sorry to doors. But I’d seen that grey and that yellow and that pink line before, on a dock worker bitten by a harbour eel. A well-meaning sailor stitched him up. Orrel made me sit with him for the whole of the next day, so I’d know.
Closing the wound seals the poison in.
“It’ll kill him,” I said. “Not now. Tomorrow.”
“You don’t know that,” said Pell.
“No,” I said. “But I know what that colour means.”
Live Viewer Poll: Will the large one survive?
Yes: 12%. No: 71%. “Is the porridge boy single”: 17%.
Thank you for voting! Your vote doesn’t affect anything. It never has. We just like to watch you do it.
I went down on my knees in the wet and searched the walls. Things grow out of the cracks down there, because the dungeon is lazy and copies whatever it eats. One of them I knew. A pale creeping thing called deadwife, off the harbour wall. Chewed raw, it’ll stop your heart. Steeped slowly, with a little salt, it pulls venom toward the skin like a poultice.
The difference between those two things is about eleven minutes and your nerve.
Heat is a promise. You make it slowly.
I lit my little brass burner and I made it slowly.
Pell stood over me the whole time and called me every name a baker knows. Bakers know a surprising number of names. Some of them were about my mother. Some of them were about bread, and I still don’t fully understand how she made those insulting.
Status Update: Crawler Pell has achieved a Profanity Combo of x23!
This is a new record for your floor. Your viewers have clipped it and set it to music. It’s charting.
Dask’s breathing went shallow. Then wet. His lips went from pink to grey to a colour I didn’t have a name for.
Minute nine, he stopped answering questions.
Minute ten, Hollan put his hand on my shoulder, very gently, the way you do when you’re about to tell someone it’s time to stop.
“Not yet,” I said.
Minute eleven, I packed the steeped leaves into the wound.
Nothing happened.
Then the grey crept out of his skin like a tide going out. Into the leaves. The leaves turned black, one after another, curling up like something burnt.
Dask opened his eyes and said, “Ow.”
He lived.
Achievement Unlocked: Malpractice, But It Worked!
You saved a party member’s life using a remedy you basically made up on the spot! Your viewers love an underdog. Your viewers also love it when the underdog is wrong, so a lot of them lost money just now.
Reward: Your Alchemy skill has increased to level 3. You have received a Silver Benefactor Box from a viewer who wishes to remain anonymous. The viewer is a sentient fungus. You’ll never know that, but I will, and I’m going to bring it up at parties.
Dask looked at the blackened leaves for a long time. Then he looked at me. He reached out with one enormous, shaking hand and patted me on the head, the way you’d pat a dog that had pulled you out of the surf.
“Useful,” he said.
Pell didn’t say anything at all. But that night, in the safe room, she put the first bowl of stew in front of me instead of herself. Nobody mentioned it. Wim laughed and apologised for laughing. Hollan sipped his cup.
After that, nobody asked whether I could fight.
I lay awake that night on the stone floor, listening to four people breathe, and I did something I’d never done before. I learned their names properly. On purpose. I said them over in my head like a list of stock.
Dask. Pell. Wim. Hollan.
I want you to remember that he lived, Archivist. I did. I held onto it all the way down to the fourth floor.
End of Part 1.
I’d like the record to show that the creature with too many legs was operating well within its specification. I review all complaints personally. I have reviewed this one, and it is denied.
Coming up next: a montage, a tonic, and a corridor full of doors. Lots of doors. Keep count, Archivist. He did.