Paid in Full

Vrak

#

I said I would go back. You’ll have read me say it. I am a man of my word – which is, I notice now, the only thing I was ever actually paid in.

So. The company was two. That’s what the Dimly Lit had come to: me, and Morrigan with the purse, and a list of names that used to answer when you called them. The three grey men were gone for good this time, reclaimed by the place that had loaned them back, and I’d be lying if I said the company felt smaller without them. It felt cleaner. Two professionals and no leadership. The best the outfit ever ran.

I went shopping before we left, and I want it in the record because it was the whole of my financial year in one transaction: I bought a torch, and flint, and steel, and that was every coin I had. A man who is paid in shares of nothing eventually owns nothing, and then spends the nothing on fire. I’d given my old flint to somebody who’s dead now and never got it back off the body, because we don’t loot the bodies; we never live long enough to be standing over them when it’s safe. So: a short shopping trip.¹ The shortest. I walked into the Barrowmaze owning a sword I’d had for years, the armor on my back, and exactly one night’s worth of light.

The plan, such as it was, was Morrigan’s, because the plans are always Morrigan’s. If the grey thing showed itself, we split. She’d take the wall – she can take any wall – and go up and over and lower the rope down to me, or her cloak, and haul me after. Like the story with the tower and the hair, she said, except neither of us is a princess and the tower wants us dead. I said I’d hold the light. I always hold the light. It is the one job in this trade that requires no talent and gets you killed first, which is why they give it to the mercenary.

We crossed the pit the way we’d crossed pits before – her on the stonework with the torch in her teeth, me on the comfortable side in my professional capacity as ballast. She makes it look like nothing. It is not nothing. I have watched a great many people fall, and I have watched Morrigan not fall, and the difference is the only thing in that maze worth charging admission for.

Then the room that takes your breath away, and here is where I have to correct the record on myself.

Last time through a room like that, I kept my feet and my breakfast, and I was insufferable about it. Professional standards, I said. The old crew folded and heaved and I stood there judging the quality of their nausea. I want that remembered, so that what comes next has the proper shape.

This time the room won. There were bodies in it – old ones, the kind that have stopped being people and become a quality of the air – and the air got into me and turned me inside out, and I was sick, comprehensively, helplessly, and most of it went down the back of Morrigan’s good cloak.² I apologized. I told her it was waterproof, which is the kind of thing a man says when he has nothing and has just ruined the one nice thing in arm’s reach. She didn’t say anything. Morrigan buys drinks instead of arguing and apparently wears vomit instead of complaining, and somewhere in those two facts is the whole reason the company never deserved her.

We searched anyway. Petrified corpses, sarcophagi already cracked open by somebody who got here first and didn’t leave a forwarding address. I peeked into the stone box like a man checking a strongbox he already knows is empty, and it was, and I want it understood that my wisdom is poor enough that I’m equally bad at searching and at guarding, so whichever job you hand me, you’ve made a mistake. The boxes were clean. The dead were clean. Somebody always gets here first.

Then the skeleton with the gem in it.

I know this one by reputation, the way you know a particular bad tavern. It comes for the torch. Always the man holding the light – it goes through a party straight at the flame, like the dark resents being interrupted and sends the bones to put you out.³ And I was the man holding the light. I had been holding the light since the door. The arithmetic of that was not lost on me even at the time, but a torch in a maze is not optional, and somebody has to be the reason it stays lit, and that somebody is paid in shares of nothing and might as well be useful while he waits to not be paid.

I hit it. I’ll have that, since I’m short on wins – I caught the thing a good clean blow with the longsword, the half-orc weight behind it, and felt the satisfying wrongness of a sword going into something that should already be at rest.⁴ It did not care, much, the way the dead don’t. It came on. There was a gem set in it, or near it, the way there always is – the maze likes to show you the prize riding on the exact thing that will kill you for reaching.

Which brings us to the gem in the ceiling.

There was one. Up in a niche overhead, real and glinting and entirely visible, which is the maze’s favorite cruelty: treasure you can see perfectly and cannot take. To get it you’d want a thief, and we had one, the best I’ve known. To get it you’d also want tools – a pole, a pry, something to scrape it loose that wasn’t a living hand, because a living hand in a dark niche in this place is how you become a name on a list.⁵ We had the thief and not the tools. I held the torch up as high as a tall half-orc can reach, hoping to light the hole, hoping maybe to cook whatever was waiting in it without having to look it in the whatever-it-has. That was my contribution to value extraction: arson, attempted, unsuccessful.

The thing in the niche was grey, and patient, and I’d met it before. I won’t swear it was the same one that ate the halfling out of a wall three months and one company ago. But it was the same kind of patient, and it had the same way of being slow in a manner that doesn’t matter, and when I think about the gem now I think it was never treasure at all. It was bait, set in the ceiling by something that has all the time in the world and only one thing it wants, and what it wants is for you to reach.

A zombie came in while we were deciding. Of course it did. You never get the one monster; the maze runs a tab and pays it all out at once.

I made the joke – I remember making it, it’s the kind of thing I do when the arithmetic has gone bad and I haven’t admitted it yet – that maybe the grey thing would eat the zombie and save us the trouble. Comfort food, I said. Nobody laughed, because by then there wasn’t room to. The zombie went for Morrigan and the ooze came on slow toward the light, toward me, the way they do, the way the bad reputation said it would.

I had a luck token left. One. The ordinary kind. I’d spent the good one – the golden one, the one that bends a bad night back into a survivable one – somewhere earlier on staying upright, and when the moment came that I needed to buy my life back I reached into the purse and found only the small coin, and the small coin doesn’t cover it.⁶ I want to be precise, because I’ve been precise about everyone else’s death and it would be cowardly to go vague on my own: I was out of the good luck. I had exactly enough left to know it wasn’t enough.

The grey thing took me by the light I was holding.

I heard Morrigan, before. Not words – by then nobody had words – but I heard the fight she made of it, which was a good one, because everything Morrigan does is the most competent version of itself, including this. The zombie was beneath her. That’s the part I’d object to, if there were anyone left to file the objection with. A shambling dead thing with its fists, against the woman who crossed every pit in this maze with fire in her teeth and never once fell. It should not have been a zombie. She deserved a dragon, or at least a clean drop, or at the very least to walk out one more time and buy one more round and let me complain about wages I was never going to collect.

We went down in the dark with the gem still in the wall above us, which means somebody will get here first, after us, and find two clean bodies and a sword and a torch burned down to nothing, and they will not loot us, because nobody ever does, because you’re never standing over the dead in this place when it’s safe.⁷

So here is the accounting, final column, ruled off.

I spent two write-ups owed. I said it every way a man can say it – a share of nothing is nothing, a stipend is the only honest wage, I am owed, I am owed, I’ll be going back. I went back. And the Barrowmaze, which is the worst employer I have ever had and the only one that ever kept a promise, paid me in the one coin it has. It kept me.

I’m grey now, I expect. Cold to stand next to. The old crew walked back out of here once, before it took them for good, grey and quiet and not eating, and I never could work out how, and now I won’t have to, because I don’t think I’ll be walking out. I was always the man who found the most comfortable place to stand and refused to leave it. The maze just took me up on it.

If you’re reading this in the tavern in Helix and a half-orc you half-recognize comes in cold and quiet and doesn’t touch his drink – don’t ask him how he got back. Asking is searching, and searching was never in my terms.

I am, at last, paid in full.