Book 2, Chapter 23

I had to be overthinking things. For the past five minutes, I’d been poking at this door, trying to figure out what the trick was. It wasn’t warded at all. There were no magical traps. I’d even gone so far as to waste mana on a second ward scanner spell to confirm there weren’t any sort of magical trip lines directly behind the door, not that it would have mattered since it swung outward toward me.

After confirming there was no trace of magic on or near the door itself, I sent a scry sensor to the other side to see what was waiting for me. It wasn’t that I was expecting a loaded crossbow attached to a pulley system pointed directly at my face, or more realistically, a foot over my head, but it was possible. My shield ward would have protected me anyway, but it would have been nice to know about beforehand.

But there wasn’t one. There were no poisoned darts in the walls, no scything blades waiting to drop down from the ceiling, no hidden pressure plates that would trigger a roof collapse, no floors waiting for me to step on them so they could swing open and dump me into a spike-filled pit.

And it didn’t make sense. What was the point of an unlocked door at the end of a hand-dug tunnel connected to an old, ruined sewer system? Somebody had gone through the effort to set it up. Somebody had left that detection ward and built a shadow construct to spy on whoever set it off. The door was an obvious defense point, but I couldn’t find a single way it was actually being defended.

I was starting to think someone had put this door here just to mess with people, but I’d run out of tests to perform, at least ones I was willing to waste mana on, so there was nothing left to do but open the damn thing and see what would happen.

Even though I hadn’t been able to find a single clue about what would happen when I opened the door, I still moved back thirty feet and used a telekinesis spell to turn the handle and pull. It swung wide, revealing more darkness behind it, and I sent my orb of light forward to show me what it could.

After a short hallway of no more than ten feet, I found myself in a massive room, one so big that my light couldn’t brighten the whole thing at once, so I sent three more out to do the job. The floor turned into some sort of wide, flat paving brick, mostly smooth but for an occasional piece that had been forced out of place by the slow, subtle shifting of the ground, but that wasn’t the interesting part.

Many centuries ago, I’d been forced to briefly suffer the company of a petty, foppish nobleman who’d spent the tax money he’d taken from the suffering peasants of his duchy building an exotic menagerie of rare and magical creatures. He’d been inordinately proud of the beasts, as if he’d personally gone out and captured each and every one with his own hands.

I’d only been interested in the one, a particularly rare specimen called a black-ringed octopus, so named for the suckers on the underside of its tentacles and, more importantly, for the black, necrotic wounds they inflicted on anything unlucky enough to be caught by one. I’d wanted to study how the living creature managed to safely consume necrotized flesh, but finding one in the wilds had proven problematic.

I could still remember walking next to that idiot of a duke, counting the cages and pens as we passed them while he spun outlandish lies about his exploits. In fact, the sight of that endless line of iron bars was what stood out to me the most from that visit. Whatever else he might have been, the duke had been no slouch about his menagerie. There had been hundreds of rare and beautiful animals and monsters inside those cages.

With the giant room fully revealed by my magic, I saw a similar sight. Dozens upon dozens of pens had been dug out of stone walls, each one blocked off by anywhere from five to twenty feet of bars. None of them had doors, but then, with magic involved, there were other ways to bypass the wall of iron.

The things inside the cages were not natural. I glanced around the giant empty room and saw disfigured and mutilated creatures, one after another after another. Sometimes, I could recognize what an animal used to be, but usually the alterations were too severe. In a few cases, I spotted characteristics of two or three different animals that had been fused into one horrendous amalgamation of flesh, bone, and teeth.

And then there were the thankfully rare cages that held monsters that had been sculpted from meat and magic, things that had never been natural, and whose creator had not cared for such distractions as bilateral symmetry or skin. When the lights went up, about half of the misshapen creatures trapped in the cells reacted in some way, but every single one of the flesh-crafted abominations immediately went into a frenzy.

They slammed against bars that suddenly seemed too flimsy to hold them back over and over again with no regard for how they might be hurting themselves. It was entirely possible they didn’t feel pain. In a way, I hoped that was true. It would be a small mercy to them. Several of them were ramming themselves into the iron with such force that I could hear the stone around their pens cracking.

Strangely, I didn’t feel a bit of mana coming from any of them, nor had my scrying sensor spotted them. The cages must have been enchanted to trap it all inside, perhaps to keep it from dissipating into the environment. I spared a moment to consider that this might be yet another form of mana farming the local mages had thought up to compensate for the lack of ambient mana, which might explain the attention given to hiding them.

The monsters weren’t the only thing in the room. The very center was dominated by a huge circular table about as tall as I was. It was festooned with leather straps and metal bands, all currently undone and dangling over the edge of the table, giving the whole thing the look of some sort of torturous jellyfish.

Four more workbenches surrounded it in a rough circle. There was an extra large gap in the formation at the far side, presumably to allow whoever owned the place to lead their next unfortunate victim to the table and strap it down. The workbenches themselves contained a multitude of saws, knives, hooks, and clamps, and I spotted a suspiciously large collection of buckets stacked up next to one of them.

As disgusting as it was to stumble into a flesh crafter’s lab, I couldn’t say I was surprised. I hadn’t spent a lot of time studying the giant fish I’d killed, but it had displayed some of the signs of being a manufactured life. The only surprising part was that someone could cobble together a creature like that using such crude equipment. Perhaps there was another lab somewhere else in this underground complex better suited to marine experimentation.

I spotted a single door on the far side of room, sandwiched between a cage with something that looked like the unholy spawn of a lion and a giant spider and one of the more aggressive, skinless aberrants. It was vaguely humanoid except for a third arm coming out of its right shoulder, but its muscles were grossly out of proportion. The third arm was twice as thick as a normal one, but its left arm was barely more than bone with some red muscle fibers clinging to it. Its legs were shorter than mine, despite being over six feet tall, and where a face should have been was a stack of three overly large eyes more or less lined up down the right side.

I’d have been worried about it trying to grab at me as I walked past, but the only limb long enough to reach me was the one on its back, and that wasn’t getting more than a few meaty, bone-tipped fingers through the bars. As long as it didn’t break through the cell itself, I didn’t see any way it could manage to attack me.

That was important, because much like the door I’d come in through, the one I was heading toward was at the end of its own short hall, the depth of the cage on either side, by my guess. I was fully planning on examining that door as well, and I’d prefer not to need to keep an eye on the abomination in the cage next to me. By my guess, the stone that made up the wall separating that hallway from the interior of the cage was less than six inches thick. A strong enough monster could break through that given some time and motivation.

I doused the lights until only a single orb was left to guide me as I hurried across the floor. It didn’t do much to calm the monsters down in their cages, but I’d seen what I needed to. Right now, I was still close enough to the maximum amount of mana I could hold that playing with the chimeras would be wasteful. I was more interested in finding the mage responsible for the lab and getting some answers from him.

The new door looked the same as the old one, with the sole exception being my position on the inside this time. I took a moment to inspect it, but I already knew it wasn’t warded. It was well within the range of my last ward scanner spell, and that had come back blank. I was more concerned with what I hadn’t found but might still be there. I already knew whoever owned this place was capable of shielding against mana detection and scrying.

My shield ward was full, my core was full, and my mana crystal was almost completely full. I could cast a single master tier spell right now, as long as it was one of the easier ones like teleportation. Short of leaving Derro and coming back in a year or two, I wasn’t going to be more prepared than I already was to face the unknown.

I still sent a scry spell through anyway, just in the interest of thoroughness. It was entirely possible that I’d spot some mechanical trap in time to avoid triggering. Unlike the foul menagerie I was currently standing in, the next room was a simple hall that led to a well-lit botanist’s paradise. There were rows upon rows of wooden planters with hundreds of samples growing in them. Herbs had been hung up to dry on lines under lights that had to be magical but nonetheless didn’t emit any mana that I could sense.

That was interesting, but it was the hallway leading up to it that I cared about. That was simple brickwork, so similar to the sewer tunnels that I suspected this whole underground lab might have been integrated with the sewer itself. There was no channel in the center of the hall, but the dimensions otherwise matched up.

What I didn’t find was any sort of trap on the door. Backing up and using telekinesis to open it would send me back out into the line of sight of the chimeric beasts, and they had, for the most part, quieted down. No one had come to check on them, but I didn’t see a good reason to press my luck with a second round. I pushed the door open myself.

Immediately, I was hit with a rush of warm, humid air and an almost overwhelming number of smells. Without a backward glance, I stepped through and pushed the door closed behind me.