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  FOR ROSE AND LUCA

  1

  MAZE OF THE DISSOLVED

  At the end of a long torch-lit hall, four blinking eyes, each as big as a slither troll’s fist, adorned a stone arch. They were restlessly shifting back and forth, scanning the area for intruders. Wily recognized the enchanted trap at once. There had been one just like it in Carrion Tomb, the dungeon in which he had spent his childhood.

  “It’s an Archway of Many Eyes,” he explained to his companions, who were standing behind him in the shadowy entrance tunnel to the Maze of the Dissolved.

  “I know what it is,” Odette said, flicking a strand of blue hair from her face. “This isn’t the first dungeon we’ve raided. More like the hundredth.” The acrobatic elf gave Wily a big grin. It was still early in the morning, and she was always extra cheerful before lunch (even if they were deep inside a dangerous maze).

  “Let’s not exaggerate,” Pryvyd, the one-armed Knight of the Golden Sun, said. “We’ve only explored eighty at the very most.”

  Righteous, Pryvyd’s former arm, now disembodied and floating beside him, started moving its fingers as if counting in its head—not that Righteous actually had a head—or a body for that matter.

  “Back me up here, Moshul,” Odette said, turning to the giant moss golem.

  Moshul, lacking a mouth, signed quickly to the knight with his big mud fingers.

  “I’m not including the haunted temples or the swamp towers,” Pryvyd countered.

  Moshul signed back in response. Despite knowing Moshul for many months now, Wily was still struggling to learn sign language.

  “That was a castle,” Pryvyd said. “Not a dungeon.”

  Moshul signed again even more emphatically.

  The knight relented. “Fine, if you include the temples and the towers and the castles, we might have raided a hundred.”

  Odette seemed very pleased with herself.

  “I don’t think the exact number of dungeons you’ve explored is important right now,” Roveeka, Wily’s adopted hobgoblet sister, interjected.

  “She’s right,” Wily said. “Once those eyes spot us, an alarm will sound, and every creature in the maze will know we’re here.” He tapped his thumb against the wrist of his other hand. It was something he did when he was thinking hard, like when he was trying to solve a riddle or studying a complicated machine. Or coming up with a clever plan. “But that’s only if the eyes spot us,” he said with a sly grin.

  He moved to Moshul’s side and plucked a dark purple mushroom off his elbow. The moss golem was like a walking garden: vines, toadstools, and vegetables shared space on his lush green body with a hundred different kinds of crawling worms and insects. Wily handed the plump fungus to Roveeka.

  “Roveeka,” Wily asked, “how’s your aim with mushrooms?”

  “Almost as good as it is with knives,” Roveeka said, weighing the mushroom in her hand.

  During Roveeka’s days in Carrion Tomb, she had served as a knife tosser, helping to ambush adventurers searching for treasure. Although she still carried her two precious knives, Mum and Pops, she had been practicing throwing other objects as well since escaping the dungeon with Wily.

  “It needs to land just below the arch,” Wily said. He turned to the others. “When it strikes the ground, move fast. Don’t worry about being quiet. It’s an Archway of Many Eyes, not ears.”

  Pryvyd and Righteous gave Wily matching bronze-plated thumbs-ups.

  “Fast is not a problem for me,” Odette said with a grin. “The question is whether I’m going to do backflips as I sprint.”

  Roveeka cocked her hand and, with a flick of her lumpy wrist, flung the mushroom through the air. It hit the stone ground just below the archway and exploded into a cloud of thick black smoke.

  “Now!” Wily urged the others.

  Odette shot forward in a dazzling sequence of leaps and tumbles, quickly disappearing into the smoke ahead. Moshul grabbed Roveeka by the back of her shirt and tucked her under his arm as he took heavy lumbering steps toward the archway. With Righteous floating by his side, Pryvyd charged ahead, his bronze armor squeaking, clearly in need of a greasing.

  Wily raced after his companions into the cloud of black. He could hear his companions moving on either side of him, but the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t even see his own fingers. Worse still, with each breath, his nostrils were invaded by the pungent odor of rotting carrots. The purple mushroom had created an excellent smoke screen, but its smell left much to be desired.

  After three dozen steps, Wily emerged from the smoke. With a loud gasp, he sucked in a lungful of cave air. His vision cleared, and he saw Odette already standing there, twiddling her fingers as if she had been waiting hours for his arrival.

  Pryvyd, Moshul, and Roveeka stepped out of the haze just as it began to dissipate.

  “Did the eyes spot us?” Pryvyd asked, “or did we get by unnoticed?”

  “There’s no way to tell out here,” Wily answered. “The alarm doesn’t sound in the main tunnels of the dungeon, only in the hidden maintenance tunnels. We’ll just have to go deeper to find out.”

  The group continued down the long corridor to a room whose walls and ceiling were covered in snaking roots and dangling vines. In the middle of the room, a stout man with a tool belt stood on a ladder. He was busy sharpening a row of swinging blades and seemed completely unaware of their presence.

  Wily knew at once that this man had to be the maze’s trapsmith. Just a few months ago, before he learned that he was in fact the Prince of Panthasos, Wily had been just like him, stuck doing the mundane tasks that kept the dungeon operating smoothly. He had spent years sweeping Carrion Tomb’s crypts, sharpening the spikes, feeding the rats, and greasing the gears of the crushing walls.

  As the stout man performed his monotonous task, he sang an off-key tune:

  “Got to keep the blades swinging, swinging, swinging overhead.

  Got to keep the snakes biting, biting, make sure they’re well fed.

  Got to keep the slime dripping, dripping, then I’ll go to bed.”

  Wily hadn’t sung while he performed his duties, but now, thinking back, perhaps it would have made the endless stretches of dullness pass more quickly. Of course there was a lot Wily didn’t know back then. He had been convinced by Stalag, the master of Carrion Tomb, and his surrogate father, that he was a hobgoblet rather than the human he actually was. And he had believed Stalag’s other lies as well: that the sun would melt the skin clean off his bones the moment he left Carrion Tomb. And, worst of all, that his parents had been killed when in fact they were very much alive. His mother was the famous freedom fighter known as the Scarf and his father was the recently dethroned Infernal King. There were still mornings when Wily woke from slumber and didn’t think any of it was true—just a wild, dizzying dream.

  Wily spied the exit on the other side of the room. He signaled his friends to move
for it. The trapsmith did not seem to have the slightest clue that Wily and his fellow adventurers were silently sneaking through the shadows along the perimeter of the room. As Wily and the others tiptoed out of the room of dangling roots, he heard the trapsmith begin a new song.

  “My sister kissed a troll down by the river.

  She thought that kiss would break a cursed spell.

  But that troll was just a troll down by the river.

  Still, she married him and now they’re doing well.”

  The group moved down a short hall and stopped before the entrance to a cavernous room strewn with skulls and bones. Peering inside, Wily could see a giant fanged bear sleeping soundly on the floor. A spine of sharp needles grew all the way down its back.

  “A quill grizzler,” Pryvyd said with a tremble of fear.

  Although Wily had never seen one in the flesh before, he had heard stories of this fearsome creature. It was rumored to be capable of tearing a dragon in two with a single twist of its mighty fists. But, at this moment, it was extremely difficult to imagine this particular quill grizzler doing anything of the sort; it was snuggling a fluffy stuffed sheep while sucking on its own clawed thumb.

  “Ohhh,” Roveeka said, “he’s so cute.”

  “Adorable,” Odette added. “When he’s not ripping your arms off.”

  “Shhh,” Pryvyd said, “I’d rather not wake him.”

  Wily and his fellow adventurers walked silently through the cavern. As he moved past the snoring animal, Wily thought about how just yesterday he had been enjoying a plate of cookies in the palace garden with his mother, thinking his days of dungeon crawling might be over. Then adventure had called on him once more.

  Since the defeat of the Infernal King, Pryvyd and the Knights of the Golden Sun had been desperately searching Panthasos for Stalag. If the rumors were true, the pale-skinned master of Carrion Tomb had been crisscrossing the land, meeting cavern mages, dungeon lords, and catacomb witches with a promise: if they joined his army and helped him overthrow the new prince—Wily—no longer would they have to hide away in their caverns, dungeons, and catacombs behind traps and foul beasts. They could keep their treasures in the grand castles of the Above. They could live in the sunlight without the fear of being driven away and having their loot stolen.

  Despite Pryvyd’s best efforts, Stalag always managed to stay ahead of them. Wily’s mother had offered a reward to anyone who knew where Stalag would head next, but no one had come forward with anything helpful.

  Then, yesterday, an old locksage smelling of dried squid had visited the palace with a valuable piece of information. The locksage told Wily and his mother that while he didn’t know where Stalag was, he knew of something that could help them find him. He said that the Sludge Duke kept an enchanted compass hidden inside his Maze of the Dissolved. Unlike a normal compass, which always points north, this enchanted compass could point in the direction of anything that the holder wished to find as long as they had a small bit of metal to give the compass the magnetic scent, whether it be an incredible treasure, their true love, or the cruel surrogate father who had kept them trapped in a dungeon for the first twelve years of their life. The Sludge Duke had created the compass to find his lost Ring of Rodents, the only thing that made him happy, but when the compass led him to a bottomless pit, the furious duke buried it deep within the maze, promising misery for all who hoped to retrieve it.

  The locksage said that getting to the compass would be very tricky and dangerous; it would take some very talented dungeon explorers to survive the maze. Fortunately, Wily and his companions were just that.

  With the quill grizzler still nursing his clawed thumb, the group hurried out of the large room and down the next hall. Wily kept his eyes down, scanning the floor for pressure plates and traps. He was startled when a gruff voice called out from up ahead.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Wily looked up to see a boarcus leaning against the wall, holding a plate of salted crab. The hairy, tusk-faced guard stood tall with surprise.

  “How’d you sneak past the Archway of Many Eyes without sounding the alarm?” the boarcus asked, the words slobbering through his large flabby lips.

  “We didn’t sneak past,” Wily bluffed, while out of the corner of his eye, he could see Roveeka reach for Mum and Pops, tucked into her waistband. “That would be impossible. We’re the new recruits.”

  There was a reason that boarcus were never used as the first or second or even third line of defense. They were extremely dim and thickskulled. Their primary purpose in a dungeon was to wander about and look intimidating.

  “Hmmm,” the boarcus said, thinking hard. “Then shouldn’t you be in the Hall of Swords?”

  “Yes,” Wily said, feigning embarrassment. “We must have gotten lost. It is a maze, after all.”

  The boarcus considered this last statement for a long moment, then came to a conclusion. “That makes sense,” he said, relaxing his overworked brain.

  Roveeka let her hands fall from her knives.

  “Here’s my trick to keep from getting lost,” the boarcus added with a curl of his snout. “You never walk around without a map. I got the Sludge Duke to draw one on the back of my shield. That’s what I did.”

  The boarcus pulled the shield off his hairy arm and proudly showed them the inside. Etched into the metal was a very detailed map of the Maze of the Dissolved.

  “What a brilliant idea,” Odette said. “Maybe I can borrow yours.”

  “Hmmm,” the boarcus considered. “If invaders come, I may need my shield to defend myself.”

  “As if any invader would get past the quill grizzler,” Odette said with grin.

  “You do have a point,” the boarcus said. “But I don’t know…”

  “What if I offered to trade you my leftovers at dinner for it?”

  With that, the boarcus handed the shield over to Odette with a smile big enough to lift his tusks.

  “So where are we?” Pryvyd inquired, gesturing to the shield map.

  “You really are confused,” the boarcus said. “We’re right here.” He pointed to a spot near one of the shield’s handles.

  “And just to get my bearings,” Wily asked, “where is the enchanted compass?”

  “The treasure room is here.” The boarcus moved his finger to a spot at the bottom of the shield, then pointed down the hall before them. “Which is that way. But you want to be heading in the other direction, back past the quill grizzler.”

  “And what did you draw down here?” Odette asked, pointing to a dot in the center of the shield map.

  “I can’t tell what you are pointing to,” the boarcus said, squinting through the tufts of hair just below his eyes. He leaned in for a closer look.

  As he put his tiny eyes up to the etched map, Odette smashed him in the face with the back of the shield. The boarcus collapsed to the floor.

  “He’ll just take a quick nap,” Odette said with a glint of mischievousness in her eyes.

  Wily and his companions took off fast, following the map on the back of the shield toward the treasure room. Moshul scooped Roveeka up and tucked her under his arm to make sure she didn’t slow them down; Roveeka might have been an expert knife- and mushroom-thrower, but she wasn’t a sprinter, and there was no time to waste. It would be only a matter of time before another guard found the unconscious boarcus lying on the floor and raised the alarm to alert everyone that there were intruders in the maze.

  Despite the danger of traps and monsters, Wily was surprised to find he was overcome with a feeling of joy and freedom. Yes, life in the palace was wonderful, with its courtyards and banquets and grand libraries, but along with all the good came a tremendous amount of pressure. One day, not long from now, Wily would officially take the throne and become King of Panthasos. He would be responsible for the safety and well-being of everyone in the land. That would be an overwhelming task for even the most brilliant grown-up, let alone him, someone who only just last week had
learned how to peel an orange. (One didn’t find a lot of citrus fruits in a dungeon.) There was still so much that he needed to learn, including how to read, which was proving to be more of a challenge than he had expected. Wily didn’t want to disappoint everybody. At times, the pressure to live up to expectations was suffocating him.

  But here in a dungeon, in a world he knew like the back of his hand, with his friends by his side, all the worries of the Above seemed very far away.

  2

  THE ENCHANTED COMPASS

  Following the zigzagging lines on the shield map, the six companions sped through the twisting corridors at a breakneck pace. Wily traced his finger along the path. If the map was correct, the enchanted compass was just around the next bend.

  “This way,” Wily said as he shot off down the rightmost of three forking passages.

  After one last turn, they found themselves at the edge of an underground lake. The lake was not filled with water, however, but thick green slime that bubbled and gurgled like slug stew over a crackling fire. At the center of the lake was a small island on which stood a stone pedestal. A rope bridge with wooden planks stretched from the room’s entrance to the island.

  “That must be the enchanted compass,” Roveeka said excitedly as she looked across the lake.

  Wily spied some kind of object resting atop the pedestal, but he couldn’t make out its shape in the dim light. Once again he had to admire Roveeka’s keen night vision.

  Pryvyd was about to start for the bridge when Odette stopped him.

  “Hold up,” Odette said. “Rope bridges in dungeons and mazes have a tendency to collapse. Usually on purpose.”

  “Let me check,” Wily said.

  He walked up to the edge of the bridge and ran his finger along one of the rope’s handrails. It was smooth on the top and rough on the bottom.

  “Is it safe to cross?” Odette asked.

  “It’s very worn,” Wily said. “And quite old.”