Breaking Step (Dungeon Runner 3)

Breaking Step, Chapter 69

"Quigly!" Jackal announced on entering the inn and silencing it. Tibs had confirmed the warrior was there beforehand. "You are going to be amazed by the fourth floor!"

The chair scraped loudly as Quigly stood and said in disbelief. "You didn't. No. You're making this up."

"Me?" Jackal said, sounding hurt. "Make up something like that? I would never."

"You would," Mez replied, without the usual amusement. "But this time he isn't. It's..." he trailed off.

"Impressive," Khumdar said, "does not do the sight justice." He headed for their table. Tibs hurried after him, wanting to be out of the knights' sight. The pride in their eyes as they raised their tankard to him was...disconcerting.

"So pay up," Jackal said. "If I remember correctly, it was one gold coin, wasn't it?"

Quigly snorted. "Not without proof. Tell me what's there."

"Can't talk about the floors outside the dungeon. You know that."

"You'll get your proof at your next run," Don said. "The guards will let you know the fourth floor has been breached. You can resolve your bet then."

Jackal was the last to sit down, still straight from his strutting to their table.

Quigly's glare at the fighter was dark the entire time, but finally he sat and huddled in quiet conversation with his team.

Tibs was considering what he'd need to do with air to hear them without also bringing all the other voices within the inn to him when Kroseph placed tankards on the table.

"Did you really clear the boss room?" he asked.

"Oh yeah," Jackal said, beaming. "Don worked out the last of the puzzles to making it easier, then it was just about pounding the creature into rubble."

Kroseph kissed the top of Jackal's head. "I knew you'd manage it." When he returned with their meal, he pulled a chair and they quietly recounted the run. By the time they were done, Kroseph was called back to work.

Tibs told the others what Sto and Ganny told him.

"Do you believe them?" Don asked.

"They don't lie," he replied. "If they don't want me to know something, they say that."

"But they're a dungeon. Shouldn't they try to trick you? Maybe they aren't there to kill us, but just telling you things as they are sounds like it's too easy."

"The dungeon likes Tibs too much," Jackal said, while Tibs considered what Don said. There was never light on any of Sto or Ganny's words, but was that because they didn't lie? Or because, as a dungeon with all the elements, they could keep them from glowing? In the end, because there was no way he could think of finding out, he decided that as his friends, Sto and Ganny wouldn't lie to him.

"We have all benefited from the dungeon's affection for Tibs," Khumdar said, after something from Mez, about Jackal, from the fighter's smirk, that Tibs missed. "That it be our intent or not."

"What do you think it is?" Tibs asked after forming a bubble around them to keep their words from reaching others.

"A city," Don replied confidently,

"Inside a mountain?" Tibs asked in disbelief.

"Why not?"

Tibs stared at the sorcerer, trying to come up with a way to explain just how impossible it seemed to him.

"The dungeon said there were no ways in or out," Mez said, "until me made the stairwell."

"But it was there before they did anything," Don countered. "They don't know how long it's been there. Passageways could have collapsed and been sealed over time until it was impossible to tell them apart from the rest of the stone."