A Frigid Gaze

Chestin was right, there was light in the chamber but not much of it by any stretch of the imagination. Trick could see the stairs right in front of him but not much further than that. Still, he did his best to follow Chestin’s instructions and kept his head on a swivel, not only watching the stairs on either side but also scanning the open center of the chamber both above and below. In spite of that he didn’t see anything even when Sari put a hand on his shoulder.

“Shh,” she breathed in his ear. It was kind of enticing, even considering the circumstances. Still, he figured whatever she was pointing at, about forty feet away and twenty feet overhead, was probably more important than her breath on his ear. He couldn’t see it but that didn’t mean anything.

So he tapped Chestin on the shoulder. When the other man turned around Trick put his finger over his lips in the internationally acknowledged sign for being quiet. Belatedly he realized it was best known on Earth. Fortunately, from the look on Chestin’s face, it was universal enough to extend to Casparians, too. Of course Chestin wasn’t the kind of guy to talk a lot in the first place so he just glanced up, saw Sari pointing and turned that way, too.

He instantly shrank down, pushing himself into the corner where the stairs met the wall, and motioned for them to do the same. With his back to the wall he carefully slid sidewise down the stairs. Trick did his best to mimic the motion, sliding one foot down to the next stair then bringing the other there to meet it. He wasn’t sure what had the other two so spooked but it wasn’t the time to ask.

In spite of the looming mystery overhead Trick’s mind still managed to sidetrack him into wondering what the massive vertical chamber was for. He couldn’t see the floor or the ceiling so he estimated it was at least sixty feet tall. The stairway was about eight feet wide and some kind of strut or beam jutted out from under the stairs towards the middle of the chamber. They only protruded about four feet so they didn’t go very far. The whole chamber was about forty feet from one side to the other and Trick couldn’t imagine all that room was necessary for a simple stairway. Something else must have occupied the center of the space at some point.

He was busy squinting at the struts when he realized there was a shadow moving on the one protruding from his stair. The light was so dim Trick thought his eyes were playing a trick on him at first. But there was definitely something darker than the stairwell’s general gloom shifting out there and it was big. He could almost feel the creature’s presence, like it was large enough to have its own gravity.

Trick froze, except for the hand he held up to signal Sari to stop.

Something reached down and grabbed onto the protrusion jutting from Trick’s step. It looked like a cross between a hand and a tentacle. It had an obvious palm and fingers but the whole assembly was floppy and jointless, a wriggling appendage at the end of a long, rubber hose limb that had the hints of jagged metal joints poking it from the inside. His gaze followed the thing up to a massive central core.

The creature’s main body was about the size of a full size van, shaped roughly like an egg, with a massive glowing amethyst eye at the fat end of the egg. This was not a crystal reservoir, like the machine snake had. Trick could see a clear pupil, sclera and white in the eye although the details were partly obscured by the sinister violet light emanating from it.

The eye had four limbs total, extending from the narrow end of its body, spaced radially around it. Each reached out to grasp a jutting strut as it climbed slowly down the chamber. So far the creature’s sinister eye hadn’t taken any note of the three of them. Trick held his breath, hoping not to give it any reason to change that.

After what felt like several hours, but was probably more like forty to fifty seconds, the huge thing moved past them and continued down the stairs on whatever business such creatures had in the Steel Perilous. Trick heard Sari exhale quietly next to him. She must have been feeling the tension just as badly as he had.

“Keep moving,” Chestin murmured from the next stair down. “That one had an amethyst eye. The next will have a cobalt and if it sees us it will freeze us solid. We want to be gone by then.” There was no arguing with that kind of logic and they started down the stairway again, all but running in their haste to get out of the chamber before the creature Chestin warned them about showed up. They almost made it.

The bottom of the chamber had just loomed up out of the gloom when Trick felt it. A cold, prickling feeling running down his back. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t just some phantom manifestation caused by stress and an active imagination. When the purple eyed monstrosity went past he’d broken out into a sweat. Now the moisture that soaked through the back of his shirt was starting to freeze, making the cloth ridged and causing it to rub against his shoulders and spine.

“Chestin,” he hissed.

“I know. Don’t look up, just keep moving.”

It was good advice, if a little nerve wracking, and Trick decided he’d draw his sword just to be on the safe side. After all, when he’d wanted it during the fight with the serpent he’d struggled to get it ready in time.

He’d practiced drawing the crystal blade many times in the days since his last trip to the Steel Perilous. No weapon did you any good if you couldn’t get it ready in time to use it. So being able to draw and ready his sword without thinking about it seemed like a good skill to have. At that moment, it was a mistake.

It wasn’t very intuitive to hold the weapon with his thumb along the back rather than in a hammer grip so that was something he’d made a part of his quick draw drill. That way the blade was immediately ready to throw an attack if he needed to strike a distant target. Since that was what he’d practiced in Harbek, that was what he did on the stairs.

Of course, with his grounding ring in its slot on the handle the blade began to glow, its internal light shockingly bright in the dim light of the underground chamber. Chestin spun around, horror on his face. Sari grabbed his elbow. Trick immediately realized his error and tried to shift his grip to extinguish the light but it was too late.

A beam of blinding blue light smashed into the stairway between Trick and Chestin, creating a freezing cold wave of expanding ice that drove them apart.