4.43: Treasure Hunt

I was eating scrambled eggs when I found myself surrounded.

“Treasure hunt today,” Pete said, sitting to my right while Saina cut off my left. I automatically went to push my chair back, but Hammond was a veritable wall in a cheerful scarf back there.

“I know,” I said. “We’re meeting in half an hour, right?”

“Sure,” Peter said. “Just making sure everyone’s ready.”

“I’m sure everyone will be ready, in half an hour.” I ate my eggs extra slowly, just to make him squirm.

“So, we all understand how this competition works?” Peter asked while I ate, apparently having no respect at all for agreed-upon meeting times.

Saina nodded. “There’s a treasure, we get a map with riddles to find the treasure, first team to put their hands on it wins.”

“Are any of us actually any good with riddles?” Hammond asked.

“I don’t know about good,” I said, “but I have a lot of experience with them. I room with a prophet.”

“Fantastic,” Peter said. “Should be no problem, then!”

I shrugged. “I can’t guarantee that. Kylie’s prophecies have certain… quirks… that you can get to know, to help interpret them. These riddles were presumably made by a human. I have no idea if my experience will help.”

“Well, we’ll all just have to do our best.”

“And people won’t die horribly if we don’t solve these ones in time, so, bonus!”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I finished my eggs.

Peter immediately grabbed my arm. “Great, you’re finished, let’s go get ready.”

“We’re not meeting for twenty more minutes,” I protested as he tried to pull me out of my seat. Peter was a skinny guy and he didn’t have much leverage, so his efforts were more annoying than successful, but I dutifully stood up. “And we’re not competing for nearly an hour.”

“We have less than an hour to get ready! Come on!”

The team we were up against were called the Robins, one of the few teams with a name dumber than ours. (If you’re gonna name your team after a bird, it should be a magical fire bird, at least.) I vaguely recognised one of them, a stocky girl with her long brown hair pulled in a ponytail at the base of her neck, from my magical history class. I think her name was Tessa? Theresa maybe? The other three, I didn’t know at all, so I had no idea how much of a challenge the Robins would be to beat.

More people were watching from the stands than last time. I doubted we’d become any more popular, so either the Robins were pretty popular, or people just liked watching treasure hunts.

We were given a map, five minutes before starting time. A physical map, drawn on paper. It looked to be drawn in charcoal, but my fingers didn’t smudge it at all. The map marked several paths up a mountain to a cave at the very top, where the treasure presumably was. The paths crisscrossed each other in several places, and were marked in many spots with little X’s. Touching an X caused a little poem to appear on the map, describing the challenge that needed to be defeated at that spot. I knew basically how this worked; some of the challenges were just barriers that one needed to get through on one’s way to the top, but some of them would hide bonus treasures that would assist in the final challenge at the top. It was up to us to pick a route that would have the fewest number of challenges, or the most if we preferred, or just pick a route with the kinds of challenges we thought we’d be fastest at. Whichever team got the treasure at the top first, won.

I touched a little X at random and skimmed the poem.

Deep within the Glassy Lake lies a Winter Prince’s sigh.

To pull the breath out from his lung will take the keenest eye.

His children whisper in the reeds, their teeth all sharp and keen;

To avoid their serpent’s bite, you must pass unseen.

Hmm, yeah, I wasn’t going to do that one.

“Is it just me or are these things becoming less ‘school competition’ and more ‘Rowan of Rin’ every day?” I asked.

Saina grinned in delight. “You do read!”

“My friend Melissa went through this big Emily Rodda phase when we were kids.”

“Look at this,” Peter said, tapping part of the map. We looked. It seemed like there was a deep gorge in the mountain with what looked like a thin bridge over it. It acted as a bottleneck for a lot of the routes up the mountain.

“What about it?” I asked.

“How easy do you think it would be to destroy?”

Ah.

The fastest way up the mountain was clearly over that bridge. The couple of routes that didn’t cross it were long, winding, and involved taking on several extra challenges while going around the gorge. Whoever could get to that bridge first, cross it, and destroy it, would have a big advantage.

“Our goal is to get to that bridge first,” Peter said. “We can worry about picking up side challenges for extra things to help in the final challenge on the other side of that bridge. Until we get there, our focus is speed.”

We nodded.

“So. Let’s find the fastest route to that bridge.”

This was easier said than done. The terrain of the mountain varied a lot, but it wasn’t clear on the map which parts were easier to traverse and which parts were harder. It also wasn’t clear what a low of the challenges were, or how hard they were, so picking a route with the fewest challenges could also be picking the route with the hardest challenges for all we knew. We just didn’t have enough information to plan too far in advance.

We didn’t have much time to plan too far in advance, either. We’d barely started analysing the map when the Pit swirled with magic, and the game began. We stepped through.

There were two routes up the mountain that involved only going through two challenges before getting to the bridge, so obviously we should try for one of those. Both routes started with the same path, so we didn’t need to make a choice right away. As soon as the games began, we set off down the path.

The Robins took off in the opposite direction with equal determination. That worried me a bit. The idea of getting to the bridge first and destroying it seemed like such an obviously good strategy; why were they taking a longer route? Did they know something we didn’t? Were they forsaking speed in favour of doing as many trials as possible, maybe, to collect artefacts to help them at the top? They might be more experienced at these treasure hunts than us. I should’ve looked them up before the event. Stupid not to.

“Kayden?” Peter called.

I’d lagged behind, thinking. I rushed to catch up.

We weren’t required by the game rules to stick together or anything. We just needed one team member to touch the treasure first to win, there was nothing requiring all of us to be involved. We could split up and each try a different route, if we wanted, but that was a fool’s strategy. Four people working together had a much better chance of besting any trial than one alone, so why not face them together?

We made our way through rocky scrubland along a path with barely any incline, to the point that it didn’t feel like we were even climbing a mountain. I wasn’t even out of breath by the time we hit a fork in the road, the place where our two possible routes diverged. The terrain changed dramatically; the left path headed into the mountain, through what looked like a cave network, and I thought I could see some… crystals, or something, deep in the cave? Something shiny. The right path snaked around the mountain, the scrub turning to tall trees with foliage dense enough to block out almost all light. Giant white cobwebs stretched between the trees high above.

The terrain change was artificial, in a kind of video-gamey way; an effort had obviously been made to blend the environments together, but there was only so much realism you could expect from a setup like that. Scrubland branching into open, human-sized tunnels one way and a spider-infested forest the other (apparently the spiders didn’t want to live in the caves?) just wasn’t something you’d get in nature.

Hammond unrolled the map and tapped the two marked trials to bring up their poems. I read the poem for the left path.

Mirror, mirror in the earth, do you know your true soul’s worth?

To burrow into stony hill, you must determine what is real.

Where facets of oneself abound, the true reflection must be found.

Look clear and find your truest face, or roam forever in this maze.

A mirror maze. With some kind of ‘find the right reflection’ puzzle. In a dark cave. Ooookay, whatever the audiences want to see.

I read the message for the right path.

In shadows of oaks old and deep, among her children, mother sleeps.

To convince them that you belong, you must dance to a hidden song.

Be the music, feather-light, lest she wake and hear your flight;

Move softly under silk-strewn skies and dance a moonlit lullaby.

Well. That wasn’t super creepy. Not at all. My eyes caught on part of the riddle – ‘be the music’? Where had I heard that before? – but there wasn’t much time to think on it. “Any preferences?” Peter asked.

“Tunnels might be faster,” Hammond said.

Saina shook her head. “The tunnels sound like they’ve got some kind of vague ‘true self’ thing going on, that could take hours to puzzle out. I think avoiding the Mother, whom I assume is a giant spider or something, will be faster.”

They looked to me.

I shrugged. “I’d really rather not deal with the tunnels,” I said.

“Claustrophobic?” Peter asked.

I shrugged again.

“Anyone have a problem with spiders?” Peter asked.

“Not a fan,” Hammond said, “but it’s not an uncontrollable phobia or anything. I can deal.”

“Spider forest it is, then,” Peter said, and we marched in.

I wasn’t claustrophobic, of course. I lived in a tunnel network. The problem with these tunnels was that the whole ‘true mirror image’ thing reminded me uncomfortably of that one time I’d been trapped in the Labyrinth of Dreams and my own false reflection had just about convinced me to give up and die. I didn’t think that would be a problem – I looked into my own mirror every day and never even thought of it – but the last thing I wanted to do was be blindsided by another freakout mid-competition, so on the off-chance that a tunnel of warped evil mirror selves or whatever was in there would upset me, I should avoid it.

Dr Peterson had better be proud of me for this.

The trees of the forest weren’t a problem; they were nothing like any forest I’d ever been in, real or Pit-constructed. This was more like a thickly wooded swamp; fould-smelling mud sucked at my boots and I tried to walk on tree roots as much as possible, which turned out to be easy because boy were the trees close together. Hammond, being the width of approximately two normal people and built more like a bear than a human, had difficulty squeezing through some of the gaps, and anywhere with any trace of spiderweb was impossible; there just wasn’t enough room to be sure of being able to wriggle path cobwebs without touching them.

I had a feeling that we definitely didn’t want to touch them.

The canopy above us was so thick that it became too dark to see almost immediately. I didn’t really want to pull out my tablet for light; making headway between the close trees on uneven ground was hard enough already, and losing one hand to holding a light source would make it a lot harder. Fortunately, we had options.

Peter pulled on a single long-sleeved glove with the palm cut out, and began to cast his spell. After a moment, his entire body began to glow.

“Single file, hold on tight,” he said. “Saina, you’re up.”

We’d been training together long enough to have a good idea of each others’ strengths and weaknesses. Saina had the best low-light vision and the best eye for detail in the team. We arranged ourselves in the order we’d already decided on for matters like this; Saina in the lead, to be our eyes. Peter directly behind her; he’d be her light source without shining directly in her eyes and killing her night sight. I was third. Peter couldn’t see a damned thing while he was lit up, obviously, so my job was mostly to keep him steady and stop him from tripping on anything. Hammond was the rear guard.

With Peter positioned as he was, Hammond and I couldn’t really see ahead either, but that was alright. Forward navigation was Saina’s job; my job was watching Peter, and Hammond was mostly looking behind us, anyway. I grabbed Peter’s elbow, and Hammond grabbed mine. Saina took Peter’s gloved wrist and aimed his exposed palm in front of her, a flashlight. Now we didn’t all have to struggle through the trees individually with a tablet in hand; we just had to follow Saina, and there was no chance of getting split up.

“Don’t let go,” Peter said, as if we hadn’t practiced this formation a dozen times already.

Movement through the trees was swift, and not even all that creepy; I couldn’t really see anything except for my and Peter’s feet, and I was concentrating on supporting his weight whenever he wobbled, so there could have been looming ghosts or giant snakes or eyeless lake children or whatever out there and I wouldn’t have noticed. But even I couldn’t ignore one change – the cobwebs.

At the start of our journey, they’d been high in the trees, with a few wisps trailing down to ground level, easily avoided. As we moved forward, Saina started hesitating more often and taking more circuitous routes, and it was obvious why’ the cobwebs were descending. It was subtle at first; a few more trailing webs, a few more potential routes blocked. But then… was the canopy lower than before? No; the trees were just as high, but the thick matting of cobwebs through them came further down. More trailed at ground level. We had fewer and fewer choices in moving forward; an open expanse of gaps between the trees became five or six paths between trees, beame two or three, became one. Until we were in a tunnel made of cobwebs, a single path between cobweb-strewn trees with the webs above barely higher than our heads.

“Hammond,” Saina called, “is this too narrow for you?”

“No,” he called back. “I can just barely fit without touching them.” He certainly didn’t seem happy about it. I marvelled at the coincidence for a moment, that our biggest team member could just barely fit through, before I realised that it probably wasn’t a coincidence. This puzzle had been put here for us. They would’ve checked the sizes of everyone involved and sized the puzzles accordingly.

Then Saina stopped walking.

I took Peter’s weight as he stumbled forward. “Problem?” I asked.

“Um,” she said. “Yeah. You guys might want to see this.” She took a few more steps forward, and we weren’t in a cobweb tunnel any more. It just stopped, opening up, giving us room to spread out. Without letting go of each other, we all sidled up next to Saina to see. Peter stopped channelling; Saina and Hammond, the only ones among us with free hands, pulled out their tablets instead.

We were at the edge of a clearing. Or a space without many trees in it, anyway; it probably didn’t count as a ‘clearing’ since it was far from clear. Vast swathes of cobweb stretched between the trees at the edges and over the top of the clearing like a ragged circus tent, filled with enormous holes. Through one of the holes I saw a full moon shining down; if we killed our lights and let our eyes adjust, we might be able to see most of what was in the clearing from the moon alone.

Which was a pity, because I didn’t want to see what was in the clearing.

Cobwebs blanketed the ground in thick white sheets, and unlike those around and above, there were very few holes in the web. Some areas were thickly coated, some thin, but the biggest area with no web at all was the area we were standing in. On the far side of the clearing, a particularly large gap in the cobwebs beckoned like an exit, but between that gap and us were about two dozen spiders, maybe more, each the size of a person crawling around on all fours. Their exoskeletons glittered in many colours that shifted in the light, like insect wings. And in the very centre of the clearing was a giant black mass, half-buried under layers of cobweb. It took me a moment to make out what it was. A black spider, its body the size of an elephant, its legs three times longer than that, all folded up under and around it at odd angles. It was motionless. For now.

“So,” Hammond said, “you guys remember how I said I didn’t like spiders but it wasn’t really a big issue? I’ve changed my mind.”