Backstory · Mordecai
Mordecai, Part 2: Stock on a Shelf
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 001, continued.
Quick note from me before we start: viewer engagement on this file dipped during the stew scene. Nobody wants to watch a baker be nice. I’ve added a montage. You’re welcome.
On the third floor, I turned a soldier blue, and it was the best day any of us had in the dungeon.
Hold onto that. It doesn’t last.
There’s a thing that happens to a party around the third floor, if it gets that far. I’ve watched it more times than I can count, and I have counted. The panic burns off and something stranger moves in. It isn’t courage. It’s routine. You stop being five strangers who woke up in the same nightmare. You become a small, filthy household, with its own jokes and its own chores and its own screaming arguments about whose turn it is to go first through a door.
Here were our chores.
Dask went first through doors, because he was the biggest and because he enjoyed it. Hollan went second, because he knew what he was doing. The sisters went third, back to back, cleavers out, Pell muttering and Wim humming. I went last, with the satchel.
And every morning, in whatever safe room we’d found, I took stock.
That’s what Orrel called it. Every morning before she opened the shop, she’d walk the shelves and touch every jar. Stock on a shelf, she’d say. If you don’t know what you’ve got, you don’t have it.
So every morning, in the dungeon, I walked my shelves.
Dask: left shoulder stiff, sleeping fine, eating like three men and a dog. Hollan: knee bad on stairs, hands steady except in narrow corridors, still holding that damn cup. Pell: not sleeping. Pell was never sleeping. Wim: eating too little, laughing too much, a cough she pretended wasn’t there.
I checked the list against them every morning, and they hated it.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Pell would snap.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a jar.”
“You’re not a jar.”
“Thank you.”
“Jars don’t snore.”
She threw a boot at me. It was a good throw. Bakers have strong wrists.
Achievement Unlocked: Nobody Asked You!
You have checked on your party members’ wellbeing seven mornings in a row! They find this incredibly irritating! It’s also why they’re all still alive, but let’s not make a big thing of it.
Reward: You have learned the skill Diagnose (Level 1). You can now see a crawler’s status effects. You could already do that by looking at them. Now it’s official, and you can be smug about it in a legally recognised way!
I brewed in every safe room we found.
I used whatever we’d scraped together. Weeds off the walls. Glands out of the things Hollan killed. The dregs of every loot-box potion we didn’t trust, and I trusted none of them. Every potion the dungeon gave us came in those gorgeous sunset colours, and every time I tested one, something was wrong with it. Not poison, exactly. A twist. Something that healed the wound and borrowed something back.
One made you heal faster and dream about drowning. One closed cuts beautifully, then for about an hour made you hungry for things that weren’t food. Wim took that one. She spent the hour staring at Dask’s ear.
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “It just looks so chewy.”
The dungeon doesn’t give you anything for free. It wants you to come back for more.
So I made my own, and they were all the colour of weak tea.
They did not always go well.
The stamina tonic was a mushroom that grew by the stairs, plus a bladder from something we called a cave pig. That was a generous name. It had a face like a shovel and the temperament of a tax collector, and it took Dask, Hollan and both cleavers to persuade it to part with its bladder.
I boiled it slowly. Kept my promise to the heat. Did everything right. I gave the first cup to Hollan, because his knee was bad.
He turned blue.
Not a little blue. Not pale. A rich, deep, royal blue, from his scalp to his toenails, like he’d been dipped in a dye vat. His teeth stayed white.
That made it worse.
Status Effect Applied: Extremely Blue.
Duration: 24 hours. Effects: None. You’re just blue. Sorry, but also: this is the most-clipped moment of your season so far. A paint company on a world you’ll never visit has already licensed the shade. It’s called “Garrison Regret.”
There was a long silence in the safe room.
Then Hollan laughed.
None of us had ever heard him laugh. It came out of him like something breaking loose. He laughed until he had to sit down, then he laughed sitting down, blue and helpless, holding his cup. Wim started laughing too, and apologising for laughing, and laughing harder. Dask slapped his knee so hard I worried about the shoulder. Even Pell put her hand over her mouth and turned to face the wall. Her shoulders shook.
“My knee,” Hollan finally gasped. “My knee feels great.”
It did, too. The tonic worked perfectly. The blue was just a side effect.
I filed it away. Cave pig bladder: excellent for joints, unacceptable for dignity. I’ve used it since. I always warn people about the blue. They never listen, and they always turn blue.
I think that tonic did more for Hollan than anything else I ever made him. Not because of the knee. Because for one day he was ridiculous and alive, and he remembered he could be both.
MONTAGE!
The party descends! Dask spears a giant eel and wears its head as a hat for two days! Pell wins an argument with a talking door, and the door files a formal complaint! Wim learns a cooking skill and makes a pie out of something that should not have been a pie, and it is the best pie on the floor! Hollan loses his helmet and gains a better one off a goblin that had no further use for it, or for its head! The apothecary keeps taking stock!
Viewer engagement: up 340%. Look at you all. Look at this little family. Isn’t it nice? Isn’t it nice to have something?
Hold that thought.
The fourth floor was a city.
Not a real one. The dungeon built it out of pieces of cities it had already eaten, so the streets didn’t go anywhere sensible. A cobbled lane turned into a marble staircase, which turned into a wooden pier over nothing at all. Every building had a door, and every door was a decision. Some led to loot. Some led to monsters. Some led to rooms full of very comfortable furniture, and if you sat down, you never got up again.
We’d been there four days. We were close to the stairwell. We knew we were close, because the monsters were getting worse. The dungeon always gets worse right before it lets you go. It’s like a cat that way, Archivist. It waits until you’re nearly out of the room.
The last street before the stairwell was a long, narrow corridor of iron doors. Each one hung in a stone arch and slammed shut on a rhythm, one after another, like teeth.
CLANG.
CLANG.
CLANG.
The sign over the entrance said THE GAUNTLET OF HASTE in cheerful gold letters. Underneath, in smaller letters: sponsored by a Valued Partner. Under that, in letters so small I had to lean in: Valued Partner accepts no liability for limbs, persons or feelings.
“Timing,” said Hollan. “We learn the rhythm. One at a time.”
“It’s not a rhythm,” I said. I’d been watching for ten minutes. “It changes. It speeds up when somebody’s in it.”
“Then we go fast.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a speed.”
“It’s the plan I’ve got, boy.”
We went fast.
Hollan went first, through the doors like a man who’d done this in a war, and he probably had. Then Pell, dragging Wim by the wrist, Wim’s little legs going like a clockwork toy. Then me.
The satchel banged against my hip. My heart went so hard I couldn’t hear the doors, only feel them, a slam in the soles of my feet every half-second. Door. Door. Door. A rush of cold iron past my nose. Another past my heel. The air stank of rust and fear and, absurdly, fresh paint.
And then there was one door left between me and the others, and it was closing.
I’d misjudged it by half a step.
Dask was behind me. Dask was always behind me now, in the bad places. He’d started doing it after the sting, without ever saying a word about it.
He put his hand flat on my back and shoved.
I went through the gap so hard I hit the far wall and saw stars. When I turned around, the door was shut and Dask was on the other side of it. Through the little iron grille at head height I could see his face. Grey beard. Sunburn. That enormous harbour grin.
“Useful,” he said through the grille. “Stay useful, boy.”
Then the doors behind him started closing too. Faster and faster. All of them at once. Like the whole corridor was clenching its jaw.
He didn’t scream. I want that on the record. He was still grinning when the grille went dark.
Crawler Dask [REDACTED] has died.
Cause of death: The Gauntlet of Haste. A Valued Partner thanks him for his participation.
Achievement Unlocked: Somebody Else’s Turn!
Someone sacrificed themselves so that you could live! You’ll be thinking about this for the rest of your life! The good news is that, statistically, that’s not very long!
Reward: A Gold Box. Please open it at your earliest convenience. Please. We’ve got a whole segment planned.
I didn’t open it for three days.
I want to tell you that I raged. That I swore revenge and smashed the grille with my pestle and stood in that corridor screaming at the cameras. That’s what the viewers like. I’ve watched a lot of crawlers do it since, and I don’t blame a single one of them.
I didn’t do that.
I sat down against the wall, and I took stock.
Hollan: unhurt. Hands shaking. Still holding the cup. Pell: unhurt. Face white. Already turning toward the stairwell, because somebody had to. Wim: unhurt. Not laughing. Not humming. Not doing anything at all. Just staring at the closed door with her round face gone completely empty.
I knew what was wrong with all of them. I always knew what was wrong with everybody.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I couldn’t find it on the shelf.
I didn’t stop brewing after that. If anything I brewed more. Every safe room, all night, the little brass burner going and the weak-tea colours coming out right every time. The others slept, or pretended to.
I just stopped talking while I did it.
On the third night, when the others were asleep, I opened the Gold Box.
It didn’t play music. That surprised me. It just opened, quietly, like a door in a house where somebody has died.
Inside, on a bed of black velvet, was a single vial.
It was gold. Not the sunset gold of the loot potions. Something deeper. The gold of honey with a light behind it. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen in a glass, and I had grown up in a potion shop.
Item Acquired: Draught of the Clean Slate.
Drink to forget one (1) person completely. Their face. Their voice. That stupid thing they used to say. Gone! Popular with grieving crawlers. Pairs beautifully with improved performance metrics.
Note from me: I picked this one out myself. I want you to know that.
I held it up to the light of the burner for a long time.
A tincture always turns its prettiest colour just before it goes wrong. I knew that. It was the first thing I’d ever learned that was worth knowing.
I could still hear him. Stay useful, boy.
I put the vial in the satchel.
I carried it down six more floors.
I’m not going to tell you yet whether I drank it.
End of Part 2.
For the record, I did contact the Valued Partner regarding the Gauntlet’s door timing. They assured me it was operating within specification. They also sent a fruit basket.
I don’t eat. But I kept the basket. It’s on a shelf. Somebody taught me that.