Saga of the Soul Dungeon

“Secrets are a coin best left unspent.”

-Spymaster Trixalo

==Zidaun==

The morning failed to dawn, the eternal night a constant outside the windows when I opened the shutters. It felt strange to sleep and then see a night sky. Of course, it was lacking Yamash, and that only added to the strangeness.

I had spent many a night deep inside dungeons, where safe areas were scarce, or nonexistent. Many nights each of us had taken turns staring into the darkness, always on guard against the monster that might be creeping up to attack. Many nights under the cover of so much stone, no more than a few feet above us.

Many nights indeed.

And yet, for some reason, I found this false sky made me crave the real thing even more. My heart ached with it, and we had not been down here very long at all. Was this because I was now bound here; had I stirred some heretofore unknown longing for the sky I had taken for granted most of my Awakened life?

I didn’t know, and that made it hard to deal with. I found it unsettling.

Still, even as my heart was troubled, faith and worship swelled in my breast. It was like a flame, a light, always burning and reducing my other concerns to ashes in its inexorable certitude.

I let myself sigh a little anyway, my emotions settling.

I walked over the plush rugs covering the hard polished wood. The green of sea foam mixed with navy blue accents and deep forest green. The walls shimmered with uneven verdigris, layered under a thin layer of crystal that made it flicker and shine as I moved.

I could smell food, the faint scent reaching up in spreading tendrils. Soup, again. I laughed to myself at the thought.

How soon we grow tired and weary of luxuries.

It wasn’t the best soup (or was it stew?), but chunks of dried meat mixed with dried fruit and water boiled up into something that was more palatable than each would be on their own. Sometimes we added nuts, and sometimes not.

If we had been aware of the dungeon’s largesse, we would have brought samples of various grains, and other goods.

Today was our mandatory break from dungeon diving. Four days in, at least one day off. It hadn’t mattered when we did the tests, since we weren’t actually delving. Now, it was part of the schedule.

As I came down the stairs the kitchen came into my senses, and I was surprised to see the other scouting team was present. Their voices trickled up to me as the wooden stairs gave the tiniest bit beneath me with each step.

“...right, but surely some secrets can be detrimental to the common adventurer?” That was Gurek talking.

Another voice responded quite acerbically.

“Some things, are meant to be secret. Some things are sacred.”

Yeah… that was Anaath for sure. I wasn’t sure what made the other Adar so sour, but I suspected. Ironically, I would have been happy for him to arrive first and become an Ancient. I wasn’t sure how suited I was for the job.

Inda chimed in with her own take.

“Okay, sure, and some things are political. I might hate politics, but I can understand why it matters. And, for the Adar, you could say that the political and the religious are not really separate. Well, anymore than politics and religion are ever separate. That being said, I am sure that some of what the Adar keep secret is done simply out of habit. It starts as a policy decision, whether political, religious, or both. Then, over time, it becomes institutionalized. So it might get applied to things that don’t actually need to be secret.”

I walked into the room, taking a chair. The table in the dining area was more than large enough for both parties. Honestly, this was more like a miniature guild building; both of us could have stayed here without any crowding.

“So what made you guys join us for breakfast?” I asked.

Tarrae, my counterpoint for the other team, looked up from his bowl of soup to reply.

“We figured we might as well synchronize our schedules together. Until other people show up, our parties are the only other social interaction around. We might want to share buildings, too. We will probably end up crowding together with someone, no matter what we do.”

For a moment, I considered objecting. My teammates and I had a secret we were sharing; honestly, that had probably prompted this discussion. However, we wouldn’t be talking about that here anyway. And while I could enforce my will by using my title to ensure that only my group stayed here, it didn’t feel right. I wouldn’t necessarily be letting anyone else join us in the building, but another scout team wasn’t really going to be a burden.

“Sure, makes sense,” I replied. “I should be able to prevent us from being squeezed out of here. Rank does have its privileges, after all.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right!” Tarrae’s face brightened.

I took the moment to grab a bowl of soup, the sweet and savory scents emerging from the pot. My stomach grumbled lightly as I moved to sit down next to Firi. We casually bumped our shoulders against each other, enjoying the proximity. Firi flashed a smile at me.

“Okay, but back to topic, secrets.” Gurek said.

“I hate secrets, they almost always mean trouble.” Soara said, his gaze distant.

“I think it depends on the secret, doesn’t it? Tarrae said, his brows lined with thought. “My family are merchants. Merchant families hold secrets from other families all the time: how much they paid for something, who their sources are, when their next shipment is arriving. They do that kind of thing all the time.”

I could see Gurek slump a little at his response.

“However,” Tarrae continued, “merchants also share the really important things. A route is closed due to snow, or weather, or whatever, we let the others know. Brigands have been preying on a certain route, we let the others and the authorities know. Anything that actually might be about more than making money, and we let the others know. And they do the same for us, we are all safer that way.”

“Right, exactly!” Gurek said. “If a secret could save lives, people ought to share it!”

If it were up to me, I might share more of the Adar secrets. Honestly, I hated lying. However, the Adar as a whole had made decisions about what we ought to share. A point worth exploring…

“Okay,” I said, looking at Gurek. “Let’s assume for a moment that you get placed into a position of power. You have to work with the framework of the society you live in, even if you might have control of the sphere you are overseeing. However, if we decide to look at this as a longstanding policy,” I nodded toward Inda. “then we can imagine, even if you are given a seat of whatever governing body rules your nation, that you cannot change things all on your own. Sure, you might be able to try to steer the nation toward being more open, but it would take time.

“The only exception to this, is if you somehow become the total ruler of your nation.”

I pointed at Gurek.

“Congratulations, you are now king!” I said dramatically.

The others laughed lightly, with the exception of Gurek who scowled at me.

“So, now that you are king,” I said, “you can choose to reveal whatever secrets your nation had. Of course, if you do, the people who had an interest in keeping the secret might come after you. You might not rule very long.”

Gurek looked dissatisfied, but eventually sighed.

“Well, okay. Sure, but suppose you had a secret, and you wanted to tell it. How would you spread it so that no one could take the secret back?”

And there went Gurek, he loved his hypotheticals. I was just glad we had moved on from the more sensitive part of the subject. I would probably need to take some time to talk to Gurek on my own. I understood his issues, but there really was nothing I could do about it in the short term.

“What about you Inda?” Gurek said.

She hummed in thought for a moment before replying.

“Really it comes to getting the secret out of range of the influence of whatever group was keeping the secret. In some cases that would be easy. If you manage to smuggle a document out of the local adventurer’s or merchant’s guild, then you can pass it to whomever else has power in the city. If they have too much control in the city, then getting it out of the city, preferably to multiple cities, would work. Or, if you have a trusted organization, who has their own power, you could spread it to them.”

“Okay, but what if you cannot get it out of range?” Gurek said. “You are in the middle of one of the large empires on the Eastern continent, for example. You don’t have the resources to get the secret out of the Empire on your own.”

Gurek turned to look at Soara.

“Soara, you said you hate secrets, what would you do if you had a major one and wanted to make sure it would spread?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” Soara said. “My only contacts are in the adventurer’s guild. Post a notice there to have someone deliver notes maybe?”

“Not the worst plan,” Tarrae mused. “Honestly, if I really needed to spread a secret, but it was like you said,” he tipped his head toward Gurek, “I would use my family to spread it. Most of them have traveled to various cities. If my family was there in the empire, instead, I would have them travel to many different cities. We could time it so that we revealed the information in different cities at the same time. We could probably arrange to send messengers to as many contacts as we could before we made the announcement public. If we hired criers, especially near adventurer’s guilds, wealthy mercantile families, and nobles, some of them would spread the news even farther.

“Honestly, many of them have resources that rival my own family multiple times over. We couldn’t use a message capsule to send news, it would cost far too much. Some of those families, though, send one every few days; they could simply add this in with their other news.”

Inda nodded grudgingly before speaking.

“That is the other plan. Spread the news as far and wide as you can. Make it impossible to contain because it is impossible to find everyone who now knows about it. The more powerful people who know about it, the better, because they are harder to stop.”

Gurek was practically vibrating in his seat.

“Wow, that is actually a realistic idea,” he said. “I wonder if you could use it send another type of news. Frame something as a secret that isn’t actually a secret and trick people into sending it everywhere for you.”

“In the first case,” Inda said, “where it was an actual secret, one of two things is likely to happen. Whoever spread it would get punished by whoever wanted to keep it, simply to send a message. Or, because people know the secret now, and powerful people are watching, the original holders decide to just leave it alone.”

She raised her finger toward Gurek who was opening his mouth.

“Don’t interrupt. The point I am making, is that if you spread a false rumor, secret, whatever, and you make powerful people spread it, they will not be amused. They may not act directly, but it is highly likely that they will apply pressure to you, or if they didn’t know it was you, to your agents. It gets you the worst of both worlds.”

The conversation continued on for some time. None of us were busy today, and the wandering conversation was pleasant and mostly relaxing. Fortunately we didn’t end up discussing anything so charged again.

Slowly, the morning shifted into early afternoon.

After we had finished lunch, we began to hear a sound. At first it was simply something barely registered at the edge of perception. Then it became more prominent, and we all emerged from the building to find out what was going on. The sound resolved itself into the susurration of feet, all treading on the ground in random rhythm.

We moved toward the entrance, and there we began to see them. Thousands of Adar carried packs as they strode into the cavern.

My people had arrived.