Backstory · Mordecai
Mordecai, Part 4: The Colour of Weak Tea
ARCHIVE ACCESS EXTENDED. File 001, appendix.
I know. I said “END OF FILE.” I meant it at the time. There is always more, Archivist. That’s the second rule of this business. The first rule is that you don’t get to stop watching just because you’ve seen enough.
The first thing I asked for, after I signed, was a dead man’s cup.
They give you a room. Mine was on the third floor that first season. A stone floor. A long wooden counter. A brass still that wasn’t Orrel’s, but had clearly been copied from somebody’s memory of it, a little lopsided, like a portrait done by someone who’d only been told about her. And a shelf. One shelf, empty, running the whole length of the back wall.
I stood in front of it for a long time. I think the dungeon wanted to see what I’d do.
You get one personal item. Contract, page twelve, a clause nobody reads because it’s buried in four pages about liability for spontaneous combustion. One item of sentimental value, recovered from salvage, subject to availability. Everything that falls through a collapsing floor goes somewhere. Nothing in this place is ever really thrown away. It’s just filed.
Personal Item Requested: Tin Cup (Dented).
Item Value: 0 gold. Item Properties: None. Item Condition: Bad.
Are you sure? You could have had a sword. Guides aren’t allowed to use swords, but you could have had one. You could have looked at it. Wistfully. That’s content.
It arrived on the counter with a small, embarrassed clink. There was still a brown ring dried in the bottom, from nine floors and a soldier’s wife.
I didn’t wash it. I put it on the shelf. First thing on there.
Stock on a shelf.
The rules for a guide are engraved on a brass plate by the door, in case you forget. You can’t forget. They’re also engraved on the inside of your head.
A guide does not leave the room.
A guide does not fight. If a guide raises a hand against a monster, the hand stops working. If a guide raises a hand against a crawler, so does everything else.
A guide may advise, demonstrate, brew, scold, and pour drinks. A guide may not tell a crawler what is behind any particular door. Get near one of the forbidden things and your tongue goes thick and stupid in your mouth, like you’ve been stung.
And a guide does not go down the stairs. When the floor below opens, your crawlers walk out of your room and they don’t come back. Not ever. Not even the ones who live.
Especially not the ones who live.
Rule 7 (unwritten): The guide will be informed when they die. This is a courtesy.
Rule 8 (unwritten): Courtesy is mandatory.
My first crawler was a seamstress called Ysolde.
She had six fingers on each hand and a needle she’d carried in her teeth the whole way down to the third floor. She sat at my counter and looked at me like I was a stranger, and I was one.
I gave her the whole speech. Weak tea. The gold and the rose and the beautiful sunset colours, and how a thing always looks its loveliest just before it goes wrong. Heat is a promise. You brew for the person, not the potion. I made her a cave pig tonic for the ache in her hands and warned her about the blue.
She didn’t listen. She turned blue.
She laughed.
I sat in that room after she’d gone down the stairs, with her blue laugh still hanging in the air, and I felt something I hadn’t felt since the fog-town. I’d been good at something, and someone had needed it.
Crawler Ysolde [REDACTED] has died.
Floor: 5. Cause of death: She found a beautiful potion in a Gold Box. It was rose-coloured. She drank it. Somewhere, a guide is not surprised.
Somewhere, a guide is also not invited to the funeral. There is no funeral. Funerals are very low-engagement.
I got the notice two days later. I’ve always thought it was the cruellest courtesy anyone ever designed.
So I made a list. Of course I did.
Ysolde. The Brannick twins, who argued about everything, including which of them was older, and died on the fourth floor arguing about which way to run. They were both right. That’s the joke. Both ways had something in them.
A priest named Ammet, who prayed to a god his planet didn’t have any more, and asked me very politely whether I thought it was still listening. I told him I didn’t know. He said that was the most honest answer anyone had given him since the sky opened. He left a little carved bead on my counter. I still have it.
A lizard woman called Gresh, who made it to the ninth floor, one short of where I’d made it. She sent me nothing, because crawlers can’t send things up. I liked to think she would have.
A boy called Fen.
Fen was nineteen. The first night, he swept the floor of my room without being asked, because he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.
I watched him do it, and then I had to go and stand behind the still for a while.
I taught Fen everything. Not just the speech. The real things. How to grind moonroot with the flat of the pestle. How to talk to it, if you had to. How to take stock of your party every morning, even when they hated you for it. Especially then.
He listened. He was the only one who ever listened about the blue. He drank the tonic anyway, because his knee was bad, and he walked out of my room blue to the toenails with a grin on his face, and I thought: this one. This one’s going to go through.
Crawler Fen [REDACTED] has died.
Floor: 6. Cause of death: He stopped to help a party member who had been stung. He knew exactly which wall-weed to use. He did not have eleven minutes.
Viewer comment, highlighted: “lol the guide’s apprentice.”
That comment received 40,000 likes. I gave it one of them. I’m not proud of that. I’m not not proud of it.
That’s when I stopped learning names.
It’s not a decision, it’s a drift. You learn a name a little less hard the next season. Then you catch yourself calling someone the tall one or the one with the axe, and they don’t correct you, because they’ll be dead in a week and they know it.
I went back to the first hour of the first day. I learned who screamed and who went quiet, and I stood near the quiet ones, and I kept my hands busy.
That was also when I started putting something other than tea in the cup.
I’m not going to make a joke about this. People expect me to, and I’ve got plenty. Not here.
The dungeon sells a liquor on the early floors that’s the colour of honey in sunlight. Gold, Archivist. The exact gold of a batch about to turn. The exact gold of a vial I once poured down a stairwell so I wouldn’t forget anybody.
I knew that. I’m the one who wrote the speech.
I drank it out of Hollan’s tin cup anyway.
Status Effect Applied: Functional.
Duration: Ongoing. Effects: The subject continues to perform all assigned duties to a satisfactory standard. The subject’s hands are steady from approximately the second drink onward. The subject has stopped being upset about it, which Production considers a real growth moment.
The dungeon didn’t mind. Why would it? A guide who drinks is still useful. Sometimes more useful. He’s funnier with the crawlers. He gives the speech with a bit of swagger. He turns the speech into a bit, and the viewers love a bit.
Seasons went by. The dungeon changed my face more than once. It was always very interested in what I’d look like with more teeth, or fewer, or a tail. One season I woke up with knees that bent the other way and spent the whole first morning learning to hold a pestle again. I’ve never decided whether that was a punishment or a promotion.
Staff Satisfaction Survey: How do you feel about your new body?
[ ] Grateful [ ] Very Grateful [ ] Thrilled
Thank you for your feedback! It has been filed.
They moved my room, too. Third floor, then second, then right up near the top, where the crawlers are still in shock with the dust of their own houses in their hair. Get them early, Production said. Before they’ve learned anything the wrong way.
I didn’t argue. Arguing isn’t useful.
Every morning I took stock. Room: clean. Still: working. Shelf: full. Guide: functional.
I never put myself on the shelf. I promised Wim I would, once. I’ve told you I’m a liar.
Somewhere around the thirtieth season, a fisherman walked into my room.
They’re common. Most worlds have water, and most water has somebody who goes out on it before dawn. He came in with a hook in his hand like it was a decision he’d already made. Sunburnt. Grey in the beard. I said something sarcastic, and he laughed, a big ugly harbour laugh.
I dropped the cup.
It didn’t break. It’s tin. It bounced and rolled under the counter, and the gold went everywhere across the stone.
I got down on my knees to find it. I stayed down there a lot longer than I needed to. The fisherman, who was not Dask and knew nothing about Dask, crouched on the other side of the counter and asked if I was all right.
I told him I was fine. I told him heat is a promise.
He died on the fourth floor, in a corridor of doors.
Not the Gauntlet. A different one. The dungeon recycles. I got the notice, and I read it, and I put the cup on the shelf and didn’t drink out of it for a whole season.
Then I did again. It’s a long time, forty seasons.
Achievement Unlocked: Furniture!
You have completed forty seasons as a Guide without being reassigned, decommissioned, or rendered into component parts! Your former crawlers would be very proud, if any of them were still in a position to be anything!
Reward: A plaque. It is identical to the brass plate by your door, but slightly smaller. You may hang it next to the first one.
I hung it upside down. Nobody’s ever said anything.
The notice for this season arrived the way it always does. A chime. A line of glowing text above the counter. The faint smell of nothing coming through the walls as the floor finished assembling itself around me.
Incoming Season Briefing.
Planet: Earth. Status: Collapsed. Crawler count: Large. Viewer interest: Already very high.
Your assignment: one (1) human male, adult. One (1) cat, domestic.
Note from me: I want to say for the record that I did not choose the cat. I want to say that, Archivist, and I want you to think about how often I say things for the record.
I read it twice.
Then I laughed. It came out of me like something breaking loose, and I had to sit down.
A cat.
Forty-odd seasons. Seamstresses and soldiers and priests and lizard women and a boy who swept floors. And now they were sending me a man and his cat.
I stopped laughing, eventually. The room was very quiet. It smelled of nothing.
I took stock.
Room: clean, more or less. Still: working. Shelf: full. Forty-odd seasons of jars, labelled in a hand that’s changed shape three times, every one of them the colour of weak tea. A carved bead. A plaque, upside down. Guide: functional. Hands: steady, but only from about the second drink.
And on the counter in front of me, Hollan’s tin cup, half full of honey-gold.
I looked at that gold for a long time.
A tincture always turns its prettiest colour just before it goes wrong. It’s the first thing I ever learned that was worth knowing. I’ve told it to more people than I can count, and I have counted.
I’ve told it to all of them except me.
I poured it out.
It went across the stone in a long beautiful stripe, the way it had the day I dropped the cup. Then I lit the little burner under the still and waited for the water, and I made it slowly. Orrel’s way. A pinch from the third jar along. Not too much. Then a bit less than that.
Weak. She always made it too weak, Hollan said. He used to complain.
I filled the cup. It was the right colour. It’s always the right colour, when it’s right.
There were footsteps in the corridor.
Two sets. One heavy, in boots, a man’s tread, uneven, like he’d been walking far longer than he’d planned. The other light and quick, little claws ticking on the stone, going a good deal faster than the boots, as if it didn’t care in the slightest whether it was followed. A voice, low and exasperated, said something I couldn’t make out.
Whatever the cat said back, it sounded like an opinion.
I put the cup down on the counter.
I didn’t pick it up again.
The handle of the door began to turn.
End of Part 4.
And that, Archivist, is where my file on him stops and everybody else’s starts. You know the rest. Everybody knows the rest. It’s the most-watched footage I have.
For the record, I checked the cup afterwards. The tea had gone cold on the counter, untouched. The guide never drank it. He was busy.
I’ve flagged that as “sentimental” too. This time I’m not joking.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory and speculation, not canon. The rules engraved on the guide’s brass plate (and the two unwritten ones), the “one personal item” contract clause, the “Functional” status effect, the forty-odd seasons, the guide’s room moving from the third floor upward, and the crawlers Ysolde, the Brannick twins, Ammet, Gresh, Fen and the unnamed fisherman are all invented for this story, as are the tin cup, the weak-tea colour, the Draught of the Clean Slate and Orrel’s “heat is a promise” from earlier parts. Canon tells us Mordecai has guided many seasons, has worn more than one form, and has a complicated relationship with drink; everything else here is my guess. The story stops at the door on purpose. What comes through it belongs to the books. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.