Main Page |
His night is not especially restful, but Dawn is an old hand at running on less than perfect sleep. He is up with the first light and in the warehouse front to the house, clearing space for the day's work. To one side, well out of the way, are a number of largish wooden boxes, for the bodies. To the other side is a table and two chairs; on the table is a washbasin, a loaf a bread, and a jug of well-watered wine. Draped over one chair is a dress, or perhaps a robe -- not remotely fashionable, but certainly clean and likely to fit Ellie. In Dawn's beltpouch go his notes from his studies, a "continual light" stone, his travelling spellbook, a handful of coffee beans (because it's horribly rude to fall asleep in mid-rescue) and an assortment of spell components. He adds a ring, his shabby brown cloak, and a short sword to his usual attire. Once everything is in place -- by now it is mid-morning -- he goes back to his office to retrieve the Box. He leaves the letters in the center of his desk, which is otherwise clear, and locks himself in the warehouse with the Box. He stands in the center of the cleared space, and lets himself become fascinated by the trinket. For almost an hour, he simply stands, turning the Box over in his hands and admiring its complex whorls. Finally, he murmurs, "Follow the snake," and begins to follow the path. Dawn takes full advantage of the head start Flip's notes and Bonesteel's advice have given him, and begins with all confidence. With any luck, he can use the early turnings of the puzzle to get into Frederach's twisty head and learn his tricks. Even with his first cursory examination of the Box, he can hear the soft chinking within as of hidden coin, feel the itch in his fingers that begs him to make a try at unlocking its secrets. The seductive glamour is almost palpable, and the smooth polish of the silver and bone is like cool silk against his fingers. The amount of detail crowded onto its surface is incredible; Dawn wonders that Frederach didn't go blind making the thing. The designs are many and varied, although not particularly cheery: skeletons; geometric patterns and knots; insects of all sorts, mainly poisonous; bodies male and female, human and not, voluptuous and diseased. No snakes immediately visible, at least. Dawn tries a different tack, closing his eyes and tracing over the surface with care until he encounters a hint of roughness under his fingertips. Opening his eyes again and peering closer, he discovers an ornamented line of silver winding around the ivory cabochon adorning the center of this side of the Box, holding it in place. The surface of the silver is engraved with tiny scallop-marks, like scales. As he strokes his finger around the circle, he sees that the ring of silver is not perfect; one end narrows to a point, not quite meeting up with the thicker end, which seems to turn down into the Box itself. A snake's tail! He frowns at the little white round under his finger, recalling Flip's first note: "press black button, turn c.c." Dawn turns the Box in his hands once more, and sees similar rondels on each face, six in all. There is another ivory disc on the opposite face, matching the one under his finger. To the left and right of the first panel are two more in which the materials are reversed: silver button, ivory snake. Above and below the white-buttoned panel are two more identical faces, where the ivory has been dyed black. But wait... the panel above has a different pattern of silver circling its rim, one which goes all the way around. Not a snake, therefore not the right button. The bottom panel has the familiar little snake curling around the edge. Dawn lets out a breath as he presses it in. The two halves of the Box separate ever so slightly. Holding the bottom half steady, he turns the top half counterclockwise, following the snake backwards. The top half clicks to a stop at a 45 degree angle to the bottom, forming a sort of 8-pointed star shape along its meridian. Dawn feels a slight tremor under his fingers, and the Box comes alive in his hands. A band of silver sloughs away from the center line and drifts away, curving over Dawn's shoulder in a gleaming line. The entire artifact expands in his hands several inches, and a black fog exudes from its open edges, slowly filling the warehouse. The Box seems to draw all remaining light-- and all of Dawn's attention-- to itself, a lone, gleaming star in a field of darkness. The first move is his: he is in. Dawn continues to follow Flip's directions, his hands moving more quickly as he picks up on the patterns and tricks of the Box... or perhaps it's this odd urgency, a constant nudge against the back of his mind to find out what's inside. Adrenaline makes his hands tremble slightly, and he makes himself stop and take a few breaths to calm down. This... is not normal. Is it another trick of the Box? Is the thing really so powerful, or is he really that eager to get inside? He wonders how much worse it would be *without* his protective cloak. He follows the path of the snake backwards from the tail, although it is not as easy as it sounds. With every successful manipulation of the Box, it expands, revealing new surfaces to be explored and fresh, fiendishly difficult puzzles to solve. Time had lost meaning for him some while ago, as it often does when he is working on some finicky, detailed project-- or perhaps it is more like the stretch of time that occurs in the midst of lovemaking.... How long *has* it been? Hours? Minutes? Days? He doesn't particularly notice any hunger pangs, but then, the Box is offering its own kind of sustenance, feeding his mind with the sweetness of every triumph over its tricks. He frets over it for a moment, then recalls that Bonesteel was able to get in and out of the Treasure Room in the space of an evening, according to Flip. Even moving somewhat slower than the more experienced Bonesteel, it can't have been more than an hour or two... he thinks. Dawn shakes off the calculations and returns his full attention to the puzzle of the Box. At some point, when the Box is about the size of his chest, Dawn realizes that it is so light that he is expending no more strength than it takes to hold up his unencumbered hand at chest-height. Almost, he thinks, if he released it, it would float there. And yet, he's not quite willing to try. Yet. The latest puzzle is eye-rending in its complexity: the snake's body appears to have split into two trunks here, each trunk twisting into intricate whorls and knots, constantly reversing and winding about itself until the entire surface seems to writhe before his eyes. The two halves mirror each other almost perfectly, and he nearly makes himself cross-eyed trying to track both at once. Snake-heads pop up from the knotted mass to bite sections of snake-body at odd intervals; connected or not, it's almost impossible to tell without following each end from the split. A loose cage of silver and ivory dances around him beyond his vision-- for he finds it nearly impossible to look away from the Box at this point-- and he realizes suddenly that he is near the end of Flip's increasingly opaque guidance ("remove finger pin, far l. loop over mid. r., spin old mid. r. 1 f. up, turn far r. loop out r. 180"), and at the start of Ellie's section. Something about this twisting, chaotic pattern feels vaguely familiar. Dawn takes a deep breath, fighting a strange urge to plunge onward recklessly, and starts from the split again, scowling as he tries to bring the nagging familiarity into focus. The ring, he realizes at last. The interlocking turns of the snake remind him very strongly of the puzzle ring he found in Flip's possessions. Perhaps.... He gives up for the moment on trying to follow the snake's tortuous form, and turns the Box lightly in his hands. It is so light now that it nearly bounces off his palms as it spins. On the opposite face of the Box, several lengths of snake come together briefly to lie parallel in six straight bands. He examines the panels to either side of the band, trying not to get caught up in following the loops of snake again. The very center of both panels bears a gape-fanged snake-head carved out of ivory, near-invisible in the confusion of heads and twists of snake unless one is looking for them specifically. Caught in each snake's jaws is a tiny, grinning skull; the left-hand one appears to be winking at him. Dawn grasps the tiny snake-head and pulls, and the ivory rod-- an inhumanly long finger-bone, he discovers-- comes free and slips from his fingers to join the other solved pieces hemming him in. He turns back to the parallel bands, and finds enough room now to hook his finger under the far left band and ease it towards him. It is tight and does not go easily, but it moves just far enough to clear the other bands. He swings it over to the right, stopping just past the second band from the right, and pushes it in again, a little more smoothly now. He grasps the band beside it, pulling it upwards towards the next adjoining side of the Box. The bands clink faintly against one another now as they loosen. As Dawn tries to grab the far right band, the others tangle, and he feels them catch against each other with nothing else holding them in place. This one, it appears, is going to take both hands. Cautiously, keeping hold of the right-hand ring, Dawn removes his supporting hand from the bottom of the Box and makes a quick grab at the other bands to hold them in place. He discovers that his speed was not necessary; the Box is indeed floating now under its own power. It rests comfortably in mid-air, and spins slowly when Dawn gives it a tentative push in one direction. Dawn swings the band out to the right, clearing the edge of the face easily and bringing it around to the far side of the Box. The puzzle-knot dissolves into six twisty, interlocking snakes with their tails in their mouths, and the rings fall away over Dawn's shoulder and the Box expands again. The next few sets of instructions are easier to follow, and at last Dawn comes to the circled bit. The incorrect direction removes a piece that appears to hold a panel in place. Dawn studies the Box closely and discovers a near-identical piece connecting the opposite panel. Holding his breath, he pulls it free. The Box clicks, and both panels pop off at once. The Box expands, and Dawn releases the breath on a sigh. Ellie has given all the help she can; the rest is up to him. Dawn works on, finding his careful study of Frederach's work coming in handy more than once. Some catches he recognizes as trap triggers from Fred's notes, and manages to avoid serious injury or agonizing death by simply being ready to duck or shield at the appropriate moment. Some puzzles are merely incredibly intricate, requiring reserves of patience to work through... reserves that are constantly being drained by the Box's insistent pull. Some are not so much puzzles but exquisitely detailed, sickeningly lifelike renderings of a scene straight out of Fred's basement, where the solution involves reaching one's fingers straight into the center of some tableau of unspeakable horror. In a backhanded way, Dawn has reason to be glad that an innocent like Ellie failed when she did-- she didn't have to look at this stuff. The Box does try to trick him several times: once, he reaches for a catch only to realize that what his fingers feel doesn't *quite* match what his eyes see. When he explores the surface of the box again with his eyes closed, he discovers that the true catch was hidden beneath a clever illusion. Another illusion cloaks the catch inside what appears to be an ivory sea urchin with needle-sharp, poison-oozing spines, which Dawn must first disbelieve before he can disengage. Another time, the friendly, winking skull appears not to be in evidence when Dawn is desperately in need of a hint to solve a challenging mirror-puzzle. He finds it at last, cunningly hidden in the reflection on a silver panel, where it had not been visible by looking directly at the puzzle. Dawn has long since stopped thinking about the decor as he reaches inside the latest artistic horror: the open, screaming mouth of a tortured figure whose limbs are bent backwards to embrace the Box. Half of the figure appears rotted away; there is enough left to identify it as female, but everything below the torso is worms and twisted bones. Dawn pulls a length of snake from the victim's throat and the puzzle-piece falls away, the Box expanding again until it is taller than the reach of his arm above his head. At last, he sees something he recognizes from Flip's notes. The coils of the snake he's been following all along make up the other five sides of this latest incarnation of the Box, and its neck divides in the top panel to sprout two open-mouthed heads. On the panel facing Dawn, the gaping fangs frame two arched, panelled doorways, each with a strapwork design decorating the center that holds eight little figurines: a grinning (but not winking) fanged skull; a disgustingly lifelike heart; a knotted python, the tip of its tail peeping out from beneath its coils; a curvaceous, nude woman with a death's-head for a face; a scorpion, poised to strike; a small, wavy-bladed dagger, its blade disappearing into the door; a duplicate of the Box itself, in miniature; and lastly, a dragon, twined around a tower. Dawn frowns, studying the two doors in turn, and wonders how Bonesteel correctly chose the last piece with no grinning skull to offer a hint. The two doors appear identical in every respect: same coloring, same sigils, same order. It seems a bit of a letdown to have to rely on someone else's deduction to solve this, the final puzzle. Dawn reaches for the snake-sigil on the left and hesitates, eyes scanning both panels in hopes of spotting the clue. The surfaces of the doors themselves are made up of curved rounds of ivory set in silver, alternating black and white; it takes little imagination to realize that the round ivory panels are, in fact, the tops of skulls. Rounded panels... something tugs at his memory again. Dawn lowers his hand and forces himself to take a step back from the panel. Another. A third. With the Box's will pressing against his own, drawing him close with its charms like a lover, begging to be opened NOW, they are perhaps the hardest steps he's ever taken in his life. He studies both panels again carefully through narrowed eyes, and at last realizes that the shadings of ivory are not *precisely* even on both doors. A natural irregularity, perhaps. Or.... Dawn stares hard at both doors, and suddenly, a familiar pattern pops out from the subtle changes of color. Like the back of Fred's failed book-box, the panels of the left-hand doorway form an optical illusion of the winking skull; the little snake sigil is square in the center of its open eye socket. Dawn studies the right-hand panel and nearly laughs; the right-hand skull does not wink, but sticks out a snake's forked tongue at the viewer. Perhaps Fred had a sense of humor after all. The final challenge isn't exactly a puzzle, Dawn realizes; it's the ability to walk away from the game. Standing directly in front of the portals, in arm's reach of the Box, the patterns are not at all noticeable; not until one musters the strength of will to step away from the prize do the images resolve themselves and offer up the final clue. With a grin, Dawn approaches the left-hand door again and pulls on the tail of the coiled python. It comes free in his hand and, rather than flying off behind him as the other pieces have, it stays there, a cool, comfortable lump of silver in his palm. A bright light pours from the exposed hole, and slowly, the portal yawns open.
|
|
|