A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 350: Chapter 341 — The Way to the Throne I

The stair went down for a long time.

It turned four more times after the landing, and at every turn the channel on the left-hand wall turned with them and went on, and the red inside it kept going at the speed of a man walking.

The air changed on the way down. The stale mineral cold of the upper corridor gave way to something wetter — the walls were damp to the touch by the second turn and running by the fourth, and the whole stairwell smelled of old mortar and standing water and something underneath both that James did not have a word for.

Their footsteps came back off the walls at two and three seconds and did not agree with each other.

And somewhere well below them, a long way off, something made a noise.

It was not close. It was not aimed at them. It was the sound of a large thing in a large space, arriving through a lot of stone, and it happened twice on the way down and then did not happen again.

”That’s fine,” said Cillian. ”I’ve decided that’s fine.”

---

The stair came out onto a floor.

Not a landing — a floor, a proper level of the fortress, and James stood at the bottom of the steps and understood that they had not been anywhere near the bottom of the thing.

Directly ahead of them was a junction. Four ways: the main route continuing east, wide and arched, and three narrower corridors going north, south and north-east.

Chambers opened off all of it. James could count six doorways from where he stood, and two of them had no doors and four had frames with the pintles still in them.

The ceiling was lower here — four metres instead of eight — and the pillars were closer together and squatter, and the whole level felt as though it had been built by the same people in a bigger hurry.

Water had got in. It ran down the eastern wall in a broad dark stain and spread across the flags in a sheet three centimetres deep for about twenty metres before it found a drain, and everybody’s boots were wet inside a minute.

”That’s not the lower keep,” said Finn.

”No.”

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: REACH THE LOWER KEEP]`

”It hasn’t changed,” said James. ”So there’s more down.”

”How much more?”

”No idea.”

---

They did it the way they had done the level above, which by now took nobody any discussion.

Finn went forward. Ronan held the centre. Cillian took the angles — and there were fewer of them down here, no galleries, but the corridors ran straight and long and that suited him. Maeve started keeping the map, out loud, at every junction: *east is main, north-east we’ve done, north is open, south is open.*

And James put skeletons into the branches.

He had four of them, which was the most he had ever walked into a floor’s second level with, and he sent three of them down three separate corridors on three separate instructions and kept the fourth walking behind his own shoulder.

He could do that now. He had spent a large part of November learning to do exactly that, in a hall, with nobody shooting at him.

”North’s clear for sixty,” he said, about a minute later. ”South bends left and I’ve lost the feel of it round the corner. North-east has something in it about forty in and it’s not moving.”

”Something?”

”Something that isn’t moving,” said James. ”That’s all I’ve got. It’s not eyes.”

---

They cleared four chambers off the main route and none of them had a way down.

The first was a cistern room, which explained the water — a stone tank twelve metres square and three deep, cracked along the bottom, empty except for a foot of black sludge.

The second had been an armoury and had nothing in it but the brackets.

The third was a long hall with a stone table down the middle of it and benches cut out of the same slab, and forty-one iron cups on the floor, and James looked at that for slightly longer than he needed to and then walked out.

The fourth ended in a junction, which meant a choice, which meant Maeve standing in the middle of it reading walls again.

”East,” she said. ”East’s got the wear. Look at the middle of the floor — that’s the route people used, and people used it going somewhere. The north one’s got no wear on it at all.”

They went east, and forty metres in, the corridor opened out into a room with two other corridors feeding into it, and both of those had things in them.

---

The ones in the left-hand passage came forward.