She tried to cleanse herself, almost nauseated from the scent, but had her footing swept out from beneath her by the slap of a huge, serpentine object. She hit ignominiously on the side of her hips, landing not on stone pavement, but in a wet and yielding mass. In an instant, she had sunk up to her armpits. It felt and smelled like a cesspool, but it clutched at her, dragging her lower. She went down to her chin, panting. When she did free an arm from the suction, it only made the rest of her sink. In another moment, she submerged entirely.
The morass closed over her head. She could feel its foul texture invade her outer ears. She held her breath, reaching up and failing to feel the open air. There was no solid footing beneath. She was trapped. There was no way out.
She cursed the father who had sent her here. She cursed Alemar for coming here. She cursed the ancestor who had made this place.
And gradually, her thinking became clearer. Her anger had given her the key. She had momentarily quelled a small part of her fear. What was it Gast had said? In a few more moments she would be out of air and perish. There was only one way out.
She opened her mouth and inhaled. Filth flowed down her throat. She let it. She let it fill her lungs. She swallowed it until her stomach threatened to burst. Let it kill her. She dared it.
Gone.
Alemar wept in relief. All gone. No more crawling things, no more walls that moved in, no more suffocation, no more sense of falling, no more voices, and no more darkness.
No more darkness. He gawked in surprise. On the floor nearby, his torch sputtered but maintained its flame. It had never gone out. Likewise, the room had been empty all along, merely another bare chamber, though much larger than the anteroom. It contained only a spell, from which all the other creatures and phenomena had sprung, nothing more.
Well, not quite nothing.
Now that he had retrieved the torch and held it up, Alemar could see the mummified remains of human beings at either end, dry skin stretched taut over brittle skeletons: other entrants who had not been so lucky at conquering the magical attack, denied even the token of a comrade who would dare the chamber to drag the corpse out to a decent grave. He grimaced.
He was sitting on the cold floor in a puddle made of his own feces and urine. Gast had advised them well; one should not challenge Setan's rooms of horror wearing clothes. Though it was a small consolation, Alemar was glad to know that he wasn't the first this had happened to, and forgave his master the undetailed warning. He climbed unsteadily to his feet. The terrors may have been phantoms, but his body had reacted to them as if real, and now he ached. He wondered how Elenya was faring, but quickly stifled his apprehension. The room might react to his worry and send him through another round of what it had just given him. Though he knew he could probably deal with it, he needed the energy for the next challenge. The second room, he was certain, would provide it.
He would have liked to rest, but thought better of it. This was not the place. He would rather get it over with quickly – whatever that meant.
He stood up. One of the corpses, somewhat fresher than the others, lay out toward the middle of the room. He shoved it toward the others with his foot. It slid with a rasp. He tried not to look at the pile of bones beyond it. It was no time to be reminded of failure.
He crossed the threshold into the second room.
As soon as Elenya entered, the room blazed with light. Behind her, a stone barrier slammed to the floor, blocking off her exit. Her eyes had just enough time to adjust to identify the monstrosity before her.
A dragon virtually filled the huge chamber. It loomed over her, balanced on its tail and rear legs, wings fanned out to either side. She saw the glitter of its scales, the flash of fantastically long teeth, and worst of all, the intelligence behind its indigo pupils. It laughed, Elenya not hearing it but feeling it inside her mind. It knew her. She knew it. This was Gloroc, bane of her forefathers.
The Dragon waited only just long enough so that she would know the source of her doom. Then he lunged for her, jaws spread wide to swallow her whole, fearsome talons extended. There was no place to duck. She felt her skin pop and eyes melt in the blast of dragonflame, and the snapping of her bones as his teeth skewered her -
– Then he was gone.
She sagged to her knees, her torch tumbling out of nerveless fingers. Somehow, uncertainly, her heart remembered how to beat. She was in a room identical to the first. There had been no stone wall dropped behind her; the portal was open. There had been no light, other than her torch. There had been no Gloroc, king of dragons, either.
Fast. So fast, she thought. Just time enough to die. That had been the spell's intention, of course. Pick the thing whose sudden appearance would cause the greatest fear and throw it at the victim so fast that there was no time to be rational. She again saw corpses lying toward the sides of the room, even more than in the previous one, a mummified expression of shock on the individual nearest the torchlight. If the spell had been one iota more intense, she would have joined them. But some part of her had realized in time that there was no sensible reason why Gloroc would be here, deep in a mountain in the Eastern Deserts, in a vault with no passageway through which something as large as a dragon could have entered. Still, it had been a terrible jolt. Had she been older or in poor condition, she wouldn't have survived regardless of how well her mind met the challenge.
She was worried by the sentience of the sorcery. This had been no random set of fears thrown at her, as in the first room. Gloroc was a very specific nightmare, and while being fried and swallowed by a dragon would terrify anyone, she was sure that the spell had concocted the image specifically for her. It knew what would scare her, as a unique individual. She wondered if Alemar would face the same trial; it would be logical.
She decided to gather her composure. Whatever the third room held, it was bound to be sinister.
When Alemar had recovered from the vision of Gloroc, he swallowed deeply and crossed into the third room.
No sudden darkness. No blazing menace.
The walls exuded the bluish glow once again. Though he had only seen the person who stood in the center of the room once in his memory, he recognized him immediately. It was his father.
"You have failed me," Keron said.
The hair on the nape of Alemar's neck rose. "How have I failed? How did you get here?" he asked plaintively.
"I am dead," Keron said. He walked in front of the remains of men who had perished in the room over the ages. The pile was smaller than that of the second room; not many men had penetrated so far within. Alemar could see their dehydrated formsthrough the image of his father. He was a ghost.
"You killed me," Keron continued. "Elandris has fallen to the Dragon. I and all of our relatives have been obliterated. They took me to the torture chamber, where I lingered for days. You are too late. Your quest was our last hope, and now it is for naught."
"No," Alemar moaned. Go away, go away! The specter couldn't be real, but nevertheless each word bit deeply. They had become more than words; they were weapons against which Alemar had no shield.
"It is true. You are the only one left."
"There is Elenya!" Alemar cried.
"Elenya is dead! She didn't survive the third room. It's your fault!"
"I…I…"
"Go ahead and babble! I wish you had never been born, you incompetent fool! Elandris is ruined. All the effort of my father and his father and his before that, dragged into the mud by the procrastination and indulgence of my own son. Why did you dally in this wasteland? What has it brought you? Have you found what you came for?"