We march.

  It’s a loose march. Sometimes I’m in front, sometimes it’s Jes. Sadie makes sure she’s near me and silently readjusts. Baco, far from being silent, makes some fairly disgusting and sometimes funny biological noises as he sniffs for food and whiffs of danger. The passages are wide enough for two lanes of traffic, so tactically, we aren’t concerned. The walls are stone, possibly mined out or carved by some architectural wizard. If magic is prevalent here, one has to assume there are magic specialized businesses. This passage may have been bored out by some kind of mystical machine, an advanced spell of digging or some super magical shovel. Maybe some sort of geomancer. A Digician. Stone Sorcerer. Granitician. It’s not impossible that it was satyr slave labor, although I’m not sure how they would carve out the fifteen foot ceiling. They probably installed the metal half bowl sconces that burn along the walls for light.

  Whatever is burning in those sconces doesn’t produce smoke. I chalk that up to another useful form of magic I don’t know, possibly some bizarre technology fueled by something we haven’t come across yet..

  “Your stake slash spear,” Jes starts, breaking a boring length of silence as we start trying to figure out just what the hell we do when we actually find the minotaur.

  “You mean William,” I declare.

  She gives me a side glance that I’m starting to get used to. “What?”

  “Its name is William. William Stakespear.”

  She runs her hand over her cornrows and sighs deeply. This is the kind of thing where it’s important to have a local audience. Sadie would never understand. I think. I’m not sure if where we are is past, present or future from plain old Earth, or if it’s some odd parallel.

  “Hey, Sadie,” I call over my shoulder.

  “Dom?” she replies.

  “Do you know who Shakespeare is?”

  She picks up the pace to fill the space between Jes and myself. “Twenty-five years ago, these halls were ruled by a cruel overseer. A satyr with one hand replaced by a barbed hook. He would shout at his workers and threaten them by shaking a spear in his one good hand. No one remembers his real name, but he was known as Shakespear.”

  This time it’s me who gives the side eye. “No shit?”

  Sadie laughs. “No, I just made that up, like when Jes made up the story of finding her gear.”

  “Damnnnnnn,” Jes tones. “You were just owned by your bondling. You show him, Sadie.”

  I’m too impressed to be upset. Sadie is not only developing a sense of humor, but she’s learning to steal ideas from Jes. Not only that, but I completely fell for the story she made up right on the spot. I wonder if she went up a level in sarcasm.

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  “Otherwise,” Sadie continues, still grinning at her joke, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  And that’s why Jes is still an anchor to the old world.

  “Anyway, Jes, what did you want to know about—William?”

  “Can I hold it? The spear?” Jes holds out her hand. “I want to see something.”

  Sadie looks at me. I hand the stake-sized weapon to Jes under Sadie’s wary eyes.

  Jes examines it for a second and throws it up the hallway in front of us.

  “What the hell?” I blurt.

  “I was just starting to trust you, too,” Sadie sneers.

  “Relax,” Jes says, trotting up to the stake and grabbing it. She tosses it gently back to me. “Now, you throw it.”

  I get it. An experiment. I throw the stake, which extends into a javelin, almost like it’s leaving a motion streak behind it. When we get to the weapon, I pick it up and somehow naturally will it back into a stake. I hand it to Jes again.

  “Think the image of the javelin,” I suggest.

  She throws it. Nothing. She just chucked a stake a few yards up the hall.

  I pick it up. I turn it into a spear and flair it around my body. I look at Sadie. “Got a reason for this?”

  “The spear became the spear because of you,” Sadie explains. “The spear doesn’t actually get stronger and become better by itself. The spear is better in your hands. If Jes used it as much as you, eventually she would be able to transform it as well.”

  I change the spear’s length as we walk. “So part of my skill in spear handling allows me to make spears grow and shrink as needed?”

  “With that spear,” Sadie clarifies. “You’re investing levels in that specific weapon.”

  My attention is drawn up the hall. I’ve gotten used to this sensation, my Perception skill refocuses me. I make the spear into usual fighting size and slow my pace. Jes sees, slows, and pulls out her unfolding bow.

  “I don’t see anything,” Jes says lowly.

  It’s weirder than weird, but I don’t either. I sense it. Something on the floor in the distance. It’s like when I felt the door before we approached. It’s not danger sense, but a ‘something worth noting’ sense as far as I can tell.

  “It’s not a monster,” I say. "Something about the floor up ahead feels off." I have absolutely no clue how I know this. All I know is that the floor will require additional attention.

  “Okay,” Jes points. “Yeah. Something dark. Is your eyesight that sharp here?”

  “I can’t explain,” I reply. “It’s part of one of my abilities.”

  We approach slowly, ready for a fight. Except Baco, who discovered that the ground here is soft enough to have worms.

  It’s a pit. An actual dug out pit the width of the entire hallway and just as long. We get to the edge and look down into the darkness. The weirdest feature is that the other side is a solid ten feet lower than this side. From a distance, it looked like the floor continued. It does, just ten feet lower than this side.

  “Twenty bucks say there’s spikes at the bottom,” I decide.

  Sadie spins, hands flaming. Jes and I turn, ready to face whatever spooked her.

  “What’s there?” I ask. How is it I can detect a pit half a football field away, but Sadie notices something creeping up behind us?

  “You said twenty bucks said something,” Sadie explains, ready to throw fire. “I don’t see them.”

  I look at Jes, who is hiding her mouth behind her cestus.

  “Yeah.” I don’t want to be insulting. “That’s kind of an expression where we come from. Bucks are money, and I was saying I would place a bet that I’m right.”

  Sadie looks at me and then Jes. She extinguishes her fists. “You said there were twenty of them,” she accuses. “Bucks are male satyr,” she says. “You know, the only kind you thought there were.”

  She is never going to let that go, is she? This really emphasizes that Sadie knows nothing of where Jes and I are from.

  “Now that we don’t have to fight Sadie’s extended family,” Jes says. “What about this little bump in the road?”