The cold on the other side of the portal was so intense it took Marcus' breath away; a chill wind hit him and knocked him to his knees, his eyes watering from the sharp blast of air. "Ah, damn it!" he yelled, stumbling to get to his feet and failing, falling into--snow? Snow. He sucked in a deep breath, burning his lungs, and tried to get a look at where he was, but his tear-blurred vision showed only white, white from all angles, white above, white below, white all around. His hand brushed against something warm and he looked down, and could barely make out the blurred shape of his wife laying in the snow, not moving. "Fergy? Fergy! Shit!" he yelled, quickly checking for a pulse--she had one, and was breathing.
Someone grabbed his shoulder from behind, and Marcus spun around, grabbing whoever it was by the shirt. "Aye, lad, relax, 'tis jes' me, ye daffy bassard!" Brasskicker squirmed out of his grip. Somewhere behind the dwarf he could hear a feminine voice--spouting non-sequiturs rapidly. The mage, of course. They had all made it through the portal, but where were they? And what had happened to Fergy?
Another sharp wind tore across the snow and Brasskicker spat out a curse. Marcus buckled under the chill, but the dwarf just stood there, grumbling. "Gonna need t' find shelter," he said under his breath, scratching his beard.
The mage patted Brasskicker on the shoulder to get his attention, shaking her head. "Geophysics altitude feline," she said, before holding a single finger up. She clapped her hands together twice, and the wind stopped as suddenly as it had arisen, and the quartet was bathed in a cold violet light.
Marcus looked up, wiping the moisture out of his eyes again. They were surrounded by some sort of glowing purple bubble, which was shielding them from the wind. It wasn't, however, protecting them from the cold. Marcus was a big man, and was usually pretty tolerant of extreme temperatures, but this was too much even for him. He scooped up his wife from the ground and brushed the snow off of her clothing, holding her against his body to keep them both warm. His eyes went to the mage. "Where are we?"
She shrugged. The cold didn't seem to be affecting her, or the cat under her clothing, much at all--of course it wouldn't, Marcus thought, she's a mage. Probably auto-heated robes or some kind of personal ward. You could almost feel the air tingling around her, there was so much magic coming off her body. He wondered what she looked like without whatever spell she'd cast on herself.
"How can you not know?" he asked, frustrated. "Your tower, your portal."
Again, she shrugged. "Yew branch azure cornbread taters." She reached over to the edge of the violet bubble and touched it; her finger left behind a gold glow, like phosphorescent paint, on the smooth, clear surface. With it, she drew a small circle, then pointed at it, looking at Marcus meaningfully.
"The portal?"
The mage nodded then drew a second ring about a hand's-length away from the first. When she looked at Marcus again he nodded to show he understood. Then, she drew an arrow leading from the first portal to the second portal.
"That's great, hurry up and get on with it," he said impatiently.
The mage looked at him and rolled her eyes. Maybe she was as young as she looked--she certainly had the attitude to match. She re-traced the shaft of the arrow with her finger, but about half-way through the length she suddenly dragged the finger to the left a foot, then drew another arrow-point, and another ring. Then she looked back at Marcus again.
"Okay. But can you tell where we are at all? Use some kind of magic tracer? I dunno, you're the one with the magic here, do something."
She shrugged once more and drew a big X over the first portal; only then did Marcus realize that the disc of light they had arrived through had vanished--he'd been too distracted to notice, at first. It was probably for the best; the last thing they needed was to be assaulted by an insane plant. The mage started drawing more and more lines coming off the first arrow, each ending at their own newly-drawn circle, until there were dozens of lines and rings branching off from that first drawing.
"So we could be anywhere. Damn. Well, why did this happen?"
Once more, she shrugged; then, the mage pointed at the first off-shoot on her diagram, tapping it twice. Turning to Marcus, she pointed at the woman in his arms, and pointed at him, frowning. Before he could respond to her, she stepped quickly across the small space separating them and started rifling through Fergy's bags and clothes quickly.
"Hey hey--stop that!" he shouted, shoving her away.
Looking impatient, the mage reached into her own robe and brought out what looked like some kind of prism shard. She held it up to her breastbone and it glowed a pastel green. Without taking her eyes off of Marcus, she held it up to Brasskicker's--who had been listening impatiently--face, and the glow faded.
"Izzat a magic detec'or, lass?" the dwarf asked warily.
The girl just inclined her head once more, growing even more irritable. Again looking to Marcus, she held the prism up to Fergy's face; no glow presented itself. The girl moved the shard around a few inches from Fergy's body, careful not to touch her--and it lit up, pale at first, then brighter as it got closer to her waist, until next to one of her bags it glowed as bright as it had when placed against the mage's chest. The girl reached into the bag without asking permission and rifled around for a moment, eventually pulling out an amulet on a gold chain. The prism glowed brightest when held up against it.
She furrowed her brow and looked at Marcus expectantly; "Follow run run fireball?"
"It's a delivery--we're couriers, of sorts, and that's our package."
She glared at him, then brushed the amulet against the protective bubble, being very careful to only come into contact with the chain--almost instantly, the bubble vanished, and the cold wind bit him again. The mage tossed the amulet onto Fergy and clapped her hands again, re-forming the barrier.
"It's a nullifier of some kind, isn't it?"
The mage nodded, exasperated.
"Well we didn't know that's what it was!" he shouted, stuffing the amulet back into Fergy's bags. "Though in hindsight that sorta explains a lot." Duke Thieren's anti-magic field, Fergy's protection from the queen of the forest--and the portal going wonky when Fergy and the amulet went through it. "You're a lot smarter than you look," he muttered. "Sorry for snapping at you and possibly getting us all killed."
The mage shrugged for the umpteenth time. "Chocolate."
"So if'n ye two're done bickerin', even wit' th' crazy girl's magic bubble, we still need t' figg'r out where we are, an' try an' find some shelter." Brasskicker turned and looked at the mage, frowning. "This thing mobile?"
She pursed her lips for a moment, then nodded--Marcus wondered if she was going to get sore in the neck from it all. She leaned against the side of the bubble with her shoulder and it started to rock gently, crunching the snow around the base. She pointed at herself and pantomimed having trouble breathing--weakness. Then she pointed at the big man and pantomimed flexing her biceps. "Vortex mushroom hydration."
"I'll try," Marcus replied. He adjusted Fergy in his arms and then put one of his booted feet against the slope of the sphere, pushing forward and downwards--beneath his other foot, he could feel the bubble moving and nearly lost his balance. Brasskicker leaned against the bubble as well, helping him push it, and the stumpy man almost fell too. After a few minutes of false starts the two men managed to get the ball rolling easily, and soon they were rolling along the vast plain of snow at a good clip, their own body heat from all the exertion staving off the cold and warming up the inside of the bubble. It held in the warmth nicely.
"How's yer lass doin'?" the dwarf asked after a few minutes.
Marcus looked down at his wife, adjusted her so that her head would rest more comfortable against his chest. "Heartbeat, breathing's all fine, as far as I can tell. I'm no expert, but I think she's just asleep."
"Really, really deep sleepin', if'n that's th' case."
"Magic," Marcus replied, rolling his eyes. "If--if we find a village of some kind, or anything, I'd like to lay her down and let her wake up on her own, if she will. Maybe find a doctor, or a mage who can communicate easier than, than..." He stopped, looking back over his shoulder at the girl while still pushing the bubble forward with his feet. "You have a name, kid?"
She was walking along casually behind them, as if rolling around in a bubble was the most natural thing in the world, feeding the little cat morsels she'd procured somehow; the feline was nuzzled against her bosom, only its head peeking out of her robe's neckline. The mage frowned at his question, and seemed to be thinking hard. Then, she opened her mouth: "Tater."
Brasskicker let out a guffaw, and Marcus couldn't help but laugh, despite his concern for Fergy. "Tater?" the asked in unison.
The mage looked upset, though mostly at herself. "Fizzy flow rapscallion elephants!" she shouted, glaring at them. "Root diggers!"
Marcus chuckled. "Root diggers, huh? Well, Tater, I don't know if my wife introduced herself, but I'm Marcus, and this is Fergy."
"Tater" let out a little hmph, rolling her eyes at him.
"I'm Brasskicker," the dwarf added, grinning through his beard at her.
"Peanut avocado?!" It didn't take much thought to figure out what she'd meant.
"Yes," the dwarf replied, his grin fading, "Tha's me real name."
The girl laughed, unable to keep herself from grinning. After a moment Marcus--and then, Brasskicker--joined in.
They rolled across the snowy plain this until the blindingly white glare faded to a more tolerable intensity, then faded again to a dismal gray. With the sun starting to go down, it became a lot easier to discern the horizon, as the clouds overhead shifted to a hue somewhat darker than the pure-white snow. Judging from the new powder still falling outside of the bubble, the wind had let up--thick, puffy snowflakes were drifting down gracefully. Wherever they landed on the bubble they slid off, like water on a duck; the snow underfoot did not stick to the shield either.
The most important change, however, was the result of the encroaching nightfall: on the distant horizon, Marcus could just make out a faint glimmer of light. An instant after he saw it, the mage started yammering in her usual gibberish-filled way, pointing at the light insistently.
"Aye, we'll head o'er thataways," Brasskicker muttered, "We en't got much o' a choice, do we?" He chuckled, half-heartedly. "Hopef'lly thassa fire, an hopef'lly--" The dwarfs stomach let out a timely rumble; "Well, ye get what I'm sayin'."
"I didn't think to take the time to grab that magic barrel," Marcus replied, grinning ruefully. "Might've been a bit big, though. Hey Tater, does that thing come in a smaller size?"
"Gazebo."
"I didn't think so. Okay. Look. We head for the light, and hopefully it's... a tavern, or at least a watchtower, or something and not, like... hell, I don't know. Let's not think about what we don't want it to be." Marcus scratched the back of his head.
"Aye, lad."
"I just wish there were landmarks or... something." The big man shifted his wife around in his arms a bit, trying to keep her comfortable. "I've been all over, and I've never seen a place like this. This cold, this much snow, we've got to be pretty far north, yeah? Farther north than Aeros, farther north than... than whatever's north of Aeros, I have no idea. The Great Northern Wastes, I guess."
"Not a lot, lemme tell ye," Brasskicker said. "There's a dwarven mining camp, Midr, just inside the edge o' the Wastes. But this en't the Wastes, s'too flat. Cold 'nough, snowy 'nough, but nae nearly as jagged. If'n we're north o' Aeros, we're north o' the Wastes."
"So what you're saying, my friend, is that we may be well and truly out luck."
"Lad, ye en't had any luck since I met ye. Not tha' I've known ye all tha' long."
Marcus laughed at that. The conversation was keeping him distracted from the labor as the light slowly drew closer--and the night grew darker, and colder. "We haven't had any luck since we picked up that damn amulet. Not much before that, either. I blame our clients."
"Oh, aye? Well, tell me 'bout it--an' cut this courier bullplop. En't ne'er met a courier who didn' travel 'lone, for speed. Ye stole it, didn' ye?"
Marcus just nodded. "Margus and Fergy, thieves for hire." Behind him, Tater snorted back a laugh. "The best damn thieves, she is wont to say. I am not exaggerating when I say I'm yet to meet anyone better--and that's not me being full of myself, it's a fact. Though to be fair--thieves don't exactly run into other thieves very often."
"Were th' two o' ye... eh... straight? Before ye got yerselves hitched?"
Marcus grinned. "No, actually, our meeting was one of those random, unlikely coincidences that I just said don't happen. It's kind of a long story."
"Lad, that light yonder en't gettin' closer very quickly."
The big man shrugged. "I met Fergy... wait, no, let me go a little farther back than that. Before I met Fergy, I was little more than a hired thug, muscle for money. I was working in a hamlet called... hell, what was it--Terrana. I think. The local duke, the aptly-titled Duke of Terrana hired me and some others to guard his vault--which, honestly, was more of a private museum, a gallery--just for him to look at his own wealth. Big room, high-domed ceiling, walls lined with art and treasure and whatnot, and right smack dab in the middle of it all was a statue. Not just any statue--a relic, an obsidian carving that was at one angle a cat, the picture of feline grace, and from a different angle, a nude goddess, the picture of feminine beauty.
"And this obsidian statue was estimated to cost more than the Duke of Terrana's land, house, airships, horses, and serving staff combined. I'm talking--astronomically valuable. So of course some ne'er-do-wells tried to hire me to steal it."
"Tried?"
Marcus chuckled. "Okay, maybe that's the wrong word. Let's just say they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, because it would keep me from having to put any effort into finding food and lodging for the rest of my life."
"Well, lad, nowadays ye're a thief, an' not a wealthy ponce, so I'd say it didn' go off t' plan?"
"Not even remotely. The plan was to bust in using my... physical superiority and prowess to overpower the other guards, smash the door open, and rush out, powering through anything that got in the way. Masked, of course, not that it mattered--I mean, I'm a really big guy, I sorta stand out, yeah? Anyways, someone tipped the Duke off, so I arrive at the vault and find triple the usual guards waiting for me.
"Which honestly wasn't that big of a deal. Despite the Duke's wealth, Terrana's kinda... backwater. These guys he hired, they weren't exactly the creme of the crop, if you catch my drift. They just slowed me down significantly. Anyways, I'm fighting my way through a bunch of hired muscle, and I get to the vault door, kick that bastard open and knock the last of the guys aside--and what do I see? Hanging from a freshly-carved hole in the dome, dangling from a series of ropes and hooks way too complicated to describe out loud, is this woman, this... gorgeous redhead, the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on. She's upside down, her hair hanging down loose over the platform where the carving used to be--the carving already half-way into her bag, and she's got this look on her face like her parents just caught her getting friendly with the neighbor boy."
At that point, Marcus had a huge grin on his face. "I'm standing there gawking like an idiot. And I say--out loud, swear on my life, without even thinking--I say, 'I'm gonna marry that woman.' And before the words are out of my mouth, some jerk clocks me in the back of the head with a blackjack. The last thing I hear before I'm out out is her voice, and all she has to say is, 'Holy crap, that guy's arms are huge!'"
Brasskicker laughed. "An' th' statue?"
"That's the best part," Marcus replied. "My break-in ruined her plans too, and the guards caught her, and in the process of cutting her down from her rigging she dropped the statue on the marble floor--and the damn thing shattered. Immeasurable amounts of money, broken into a million little bits on the Duke of Terrana's floor."
"Applesauce running fire plain." The mage's tone was sarcastic; Marcus chose to ignore her.
After that they traveled in silence for a while. The air grew colder, but their mutual body-heat staved off the chill to a degree; it was very cold, but not so cold that they were risking frostbite. Slowly, the distant light grew closer, until it loomed over them, at the top of a gate, in a wall cobbled together out of large stones. It was a signal fire, both calling in lost travelers and lighting the road to expose shadier elements. Said road almost immediately vanished into the snow.
"Nobody's watching," Marcus murmured, "Probably a gatehouse up there, whatever poor sod is in charge of this gate must be getting out of the cold in there. Better to not make a scene. Tater, drop the shield."
The mage protested: "Stonework lamplight damnation."
"Jes' trust 'im on this, lass," Brasskicker, "It'll be easier t' get in if'n we don' look like a bunch o' loonies in a ball."
"Mud boots cat grass." The girl snapped her fingers, and the bubble vanished--and with it, their built up heat. Immediately Marcus started shivering.
"Hail! Hail!" he shouted up at the top of the gate. "Travelers at the gate! May we seek sanctuary here?"
They waited there a long moment, but no one responded.
Marcus tried again: "Hail! Travelers at the gate! We seek shelter and sanctuary, and bring coin for food and lodging!" He turned to the dwarf and muttered, "That last bit usually helps."
A moment later, a voice called down: "By the Boar's teats, what the hell are you people doing outside this late at night? You're looking to lost an extremity or two that way--and in such flimsy garb!"
"We're lost," Marcus called in reply; he couldn't see the source of the voice, but it sounded masculine, and maybe a little drunk. "Travelers, we lost our way and followed your firelight. Will you let us in?"
"Are you armed?"
Marcus turned to Brasskicker again; the dwarf shrugged, holding up his empty hands. "Left me gun behind."
The mage, too, admitted to being unarmed. Marcus shouted up, "The only person here with any weapons is unconscious; we'll gladly remove the weapons from her if you'll let us in."
There was a long pause. Marcus thought he heard talking above them, but it was hard to tell. Then, "Open the gate!" the voice shouted. The wooden barrier let out a crack, then a low rumble as it was dragged off to the side; beyond it was a steel portcullis of some kind, lit by torches set in the archway; the travelers quickly moved under the wall, and the gate rumbled shut behind them, effectively pinning them in to a cell some ten feet across formed by the portcullis and the gate. Above them, Marcus noted warily, was a small hole, probably for dumping hot oil or some such on intruders. He made it a point not to stand directly under it.
They stood there, Marcus standing near one of the torches to keep warm, for several minutes before anyone came down to greet them. Two slightly-hunched figures, both heavily bundled in dirty white furs, stepped in front of the portcullis and observed them. Their faces were hidden behind masks, with glass discs over their eyes, tinted black, with leather straps holding them in place. Not a bit of skin was visible. "The woman's armed, and not the rest of you?"
"Aye," the dwarf replied.
"That's most curious. Well, big man, remove her weapons and we'll let you into Hobber."
Marcus nodded, carefully laying Fergy down on the hard-packed--but snow-free--ground. He carefully removed two long, curved daggers from her belt, sticking them into the dirt point-first.
One of the figures started to speak: "Alright, raise the ga--" But Marcus held up a hand, looking up at the speaker from his kneeling position over Fergy.
"Look, I really want to do this right, without any snags or crazy crap happening," he said. "Let me finish what I'm doing, and I'll tell you when I'm actually done."
The figure looked puzzled. "O... kay. As you wish."
"Thank you," Marcus replied. He set about completely disarming Fergy, placing each of her daggers point-first into the dirt like the first two: two daggers concealed in each boot, one on both of her thighs, one hidden on the small of her back, a pair up each sleeve, and three more hidden in the lining of her jacket.
"Lass likes t' be prepared," Brasskicker muttered, eying the fourteen total daggers.
"She just likes knives," Marcus retorted, looking back up at the two figures on the other side of the portcullis. "Makes her a bitch to carry around, all that steel weighs a ton. Okay, that's all of them."
The fur-clad pair looked slightly alarmed. "Um. Well. In that case, welcome to Hobber. Thank you for your... um.. honesty." The figure waved at someone above him, and the portcullis slid out of the way. The more outspoken of the two figures motioned for the travelers to follow; "This way, if you will. I believe you requested shelter and sanctuary, food and lodgings?"
"Indeed, and we're most grateful for anything you can provide, sir," Marcus said, scooping his wife up once more and cradling her gently. A third fur-clad figure had hobbled up to them and was gingerly gathering up Fergy's weapons. Marcus said to him, "Make sure those all stay together, and are well-treated. She's going to be really pissed off at me when she wakes up as it is." He grinned ruefully, but couldn't discern any response from the heavily-garbed figure.
The hodge-podge trio followed the first two figures deeper into the walled village. "It's not much to look at, but Hobber's home," one of them said; Marcus couldn't tell which one was speaking. "We'll put you up at the old tavern. Oh--incidentally. I'm Isa, my companion is Pri." It was unclear which one had which name. "We'll put you up for the night, free of charge--couldn't leave you out in the cold, now could we, eh?" One of the figures--Isa--looked back at Marcus and, the big man could only assume, grinned. "If you don't mind, we'll be locking you in."
"That's... well, not what I expected," Marcus replied.
Turning forwards again, Isa continued: "Unfortunately, it's a fact you'll have to get used to. We don't get a lot of travelers this far out, and until we've had a better chance of checking you out for the safety of the village we'll keep you confined. You're more than welcome to leave the town, mind you--you're not prisoners--you just can't go anywhere in the village."
"I understand. All I want is a place to lay my wife down, and food for the rest of us. I know we aren't exactly the most... usual group of people to find at your gate. As such, your restrictions are understandable."
Isa chuckled. "That's good. The tavern is well-kept, but sadly underused. We should be able to get you separate rooms--"
"Ac'shully, we'd prefer if'n ye'd put us all up inna single, if'n ye don' mind," Brasskicker interrupted. The mage immediately protested with gibberish, but the dwarf leveled a glare at her that shut up her.
"What did she say? I can't have heard that correctly," the less-spoken of the figures--Pri--said, and Marcus realized for the first time that the body under all those furs was female.
"Nothin'," the dwarf explained. "The lass's... touched inna head. A 'ffliction o' th' speech."
"Poor thing," Pri murmured.
Isa clapped his hands once. "Well, here we are. If you would rather a single, that can easily--more easily, even--be arranged." He pushed the door of the building they'd stopped before open, spilling out the firelight from inside. "After you."
The travelers slipped into the tavern, and Marcus immediately moved before the fire in the hearth, warming himself and his wife. Behind him, he could hear Isa speaking to his female companion. He turned and saw that Pri was removing her furs from the top down. What he saw was surprising: under all that bundling was a hearty woman in her middle years, completely devoid of hair on her head--including her eyebrows--who stood with a slight hunch; her skin was as white as the snow they'd trekked across, her neck was thick, and her ears were set low on her head. She left her eye protectors on; under her furs she wore a thick tunic and jacket, and heavy trousers and boots. Her figure was vaguely pear-shaped, with wide hips and waist. She bowed to Isa from the middle, and he left the tavern, nodding in Marcus' direction as he slipped out. Once he was gone Pri locked the door behind him, but didn't bar it--they weren't trying to keep people out, after all.
"Your room is this way," she said, addressing the dwarf now. "There's only one bed, but it's large and should fit at least a couple of you. If you want you can drag some chairs in there with you, but they're not padded, so it's up to you."
"Th floor'll be fine, lass, but thank ye." The dwarf smiled, doing his best to be genial. "An' vittles?"
"I'll be cooking them up myself. You can stay in the common room until after you've been fed; I'll start working in the kitchen now." She nodded, and vanished into an adjoining room.
They chose to dine in the room that had been selected for them; the meal consisted of what looked like potatoes mashed into a paste, covered in some kind of brown sauce, along with thick slices of what tasted like roast elk. "You ever see anyone like that?" Marcus asked Brasskicker once Pri had locked them in, keeping his voice low. He sat on the wide bed next to Fergy's inert form; she continued to sleep away peacefully, unchanged from the condition he'd found her in.
"Nay, lad. Wherever we be, it en't within th' borders o' the ol' Kingdom. Not even close." The dwarf tore into his food ravenously, his eyes crossing the room to stare at their youngest companion. "Tell ye who 'as seen 'em, though," he continued, nodding at the mage, "that 'un."
Marcus turned his own gaze on the girl, frowning around a mouthful of potatoes. "That true, Tater?" he asked.
She just glared at him, then at Brasskicker, before turning her chair around and facing the wall, sulking. The men exchanged glances, and shrugged. They ate in silence for a while then, when they realized that the mage had fallen asleep sitting up, the two men split up the watch--Brasskicker went first, letting Marcus get some much needed rest; he fell asleep with his face in his wife's hair.
When he woke up, it was dawn; the sky outside the window was once again a uniform, eye-aching grey. Brasskicker was still awake, his back against the wall opposite the door; the mage had moved down to the floor in the corner, her tailless cat curled up in the crook of her arm.
"You let me sleep?" he muttered, sitting up; he made sure Fergy was comfortable (or at least as best as he could tell), then slid off the bed and stretched. The room was cold, but not uncomfortably so.
"Ye got me outta that godsfersaken forest, figure it was the least I could do, lad." He grinned through his beard. "I hope breakfas' in this dive is as good as th' dinner. Whatsername came by 'bout an hour 'go an' unlocked th' door, said t' wait for an escort 'fore we left the buildin'. Was waitin' on ye to get up."
"Oh yeah?" Marcus faced the door, reaching back to scratch between his shoulders. "Watch the ladies, would you? I'll be back, just gonna try and find a map."
The big man wandered out to the tavern's common room, where he found Pri leaning against the bar; the exceptionally white woman hadn't changed clothes as far as he could tell--she had probably been watching the door to the room they'd slept in all night. "Coffee?" she asked, gesturing towards the hearth, where a pot was hanging over the fire. Her eye-protectors dangled from their strap around her neck; they eyes previously behind them were a vivid, clear shade of red.
"You read my mind." He smiled and grabbed a mug from the bar, and set about preparing himself a serving. "So."
Pri smiled half-heartedly. "So."
"Where are we, exactly?" Marcus asked, leaning up against the bar next to her.
"Hobber."
"This is good coffee."
Her smile went a little more earnest. "Um. Thank you."
"And where's Hobber?"
"About a hundred miles from Snowport, in Vastness."
"Snowport? Vastness?"
"You get curiouser and curiouser. How, tell me, could a person get this far into Vastness--lost--and not know what Vastness is?"
Marcus chuckled. "Magic."
Pri raised a hairless eyebrow. "Intentional?"
"Accidental. Do you have a map?"
"Of Vastness? No--there's nothing to map, to be honest, just a big blank whiteness with Hobber a little off the center. I can get you a wider map, though."
"Could you, please? We're trying to figure out how to get home."
Pri nodded, and slipped behind the bar, rummaging around under its surface. She talked while she searched. "So is the girl with the funny speech impediment your mage?"
"Well, not my mage. We sorta got thrown in together in a crisis."
She laid a length of parchment out on the bar, unfolding it carefully. On it Marcus could clearly see a moderate-sized continent in the upper-left quadrant, the majority of which was covered in empty whiteness. The upper-right quadrant was peppered with smaller landmasses, and the bottom half of the map was dominated by a vast sea and, at the edge, one large continent, fading away into obscurity only a small distance inland and stretching across the entire width of the map. Nothing on the parchment looked familiar to Marcus in the slightest.
Pri pointed at the continent in the upper-left quadrant. "This... big empty space in the middle here, is Vastness, and here--" she pointed at the lower edge of the land mass, "--is Snowport." Various other marks on the mass were named Rorr, Yanil, Whitecourt, and so on, none of them anywhere Marcus had heard of. The smaller masses in the upper-right quadrant were given names too, but they were even more strange: R'hilla, Zon-yi, and so forth.
"This doesn't make any sense," the big man muttered to himself, looking the map over. "None of this looks familiar."
A noise behind him got Marcus' attention, and an instant later the mage was standing next to him, eying the map. She looked at at Marcus and rolled her eyes, exasperated.
"What?" he asked.
She shook her head and put her palm on the map--and rotated it one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, moving Vastness and Snowport to the bottom, and the massive, blank continent to the top. Without a word, she looked up at Marcus expectantly.
"Oh," he said, after a moment of re-examining the parchment. "Oh." He ran his finger along the coast of the great unmarked continent. "Of course. It looked totally different upside down," he muttered. "Look, here--this is where Porsin Harbor is, and here's the Bilox shipyards... and..." Then the realization hit him--"Oh, shit, we've crossed the Yawning Sea. Somehow."
The mage just nodded. Pri watched the two of them, frowning. "Then you're from the Northlands, from the Greater Unknown?"
Marcus nodded, overwhelmed. He plopped down on a barstool, rubbing the back of his head. "Across a vast sea with no wind and no current, from which no explorer has returned." He frowned. "It sounds melodramatic--but honestly, it's as bad as it sounds. When I was younger I crewed on a merchant ship, and we were set on by pirates. We fled, until the wind and the sea died, and we coasted on pure momentum out into the Yawning Sea. The pirates didn't follow us."
Pri was regarding Marcus cooly, her thumb resting on her pale lips. "Snowport is full of similar stories."
"We ended up rowing our way back out, but the whole place just felt... empty. No fish in the water, no birds in the air, no wind, no movement in the water other than that of our ship; it was spooky, and I'm not and haven't ever been easily spooked. In theory, one could simply row across it--but I mean, look at it. It would take months of non-stop progress to get across, and when the sun's in the sky it's swelteringly hot, year round."
The mage was trying to get his attention again; she was motioning with her hands like a pair of flapping wings, moving from one end of the map to the other, across the sea.
"In what, an airship?" Marcus asked. She nodded. "Wouldn't make it across. The mineral that powers the lift and propulsion devices is powered by its proximity to Aeros and, more specifically, the Aeros Crater. I don't even begin to understand it--I don't think anyone does, really, but it's generally known that about... here--" he pointed to a spot an inch or two off the coast of the northern continent "--airships lose power completely. Closer to the Aeros Crater means more power, and the closer you get to the coast the squirrellier your ship's lift and propulsion get--and then at this point, zilch, you drop out of the sky. Ker-sploosh."
"It sounds fairly fantastic," Pri murmured. "Flying boats? There's nothing of the sort here."
Marcus nodded. "It's not a surprise, really, given how the devices work. If it wasn't so... well, then we wouldn't be in this pickle, now would we?" He finished off his coffee and poured another mug's worth. "Well now we have a point of origin and a point of destination--Tater, could you magic us up a portal back to the north?"
The mage shook her head.
"Why not? You made the one in the tower, didn't you?"
She shook her head again. "Verisimilitude ejecta pasta-sauce."
"Well," Marcus muttered. "I guess that makes sense. If you could just make it yourself you wouldn't leave it sitting open in your tower, would you? Someone else must have made it for you."
She nodded.
"Before you ask," Pri interjected, "We have no magic here. Not in Hobber, not in Snowport or even Whitecourt in all its grandeur. We know about it, sure--but there's no dedicated organization, and magic-users are a rare find. Much less a magic user who could transport you over such a vast distance."
"Figures." Marcus regarded the woman's red eyes for a moment, thoughtful.
"Tell you what," she continued, matching his gaze. "Let's say I took you two outside--just you two. We'll go to the repository, and the two of you can, um, dig around in the books. I don't know what you'll find, but maybe you'll find something. Stay here, I'll fetch you some clothes a little more appropriate and a little less eye-catching--even out of sight, your presence is causing something of an hubbub in the town, so let's bundle you up so you look local. Does that sound alright to you?"
Marcus and the mage exchanged looks. "Sure," he said. "Whatever gets us home."
Monday, September 29
Monday, August 18
92. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Three)
Marcus and Fergy had just finished failing to dust each other off when an explosive crack tore through the air, and something smashed into one of the closer tree-branches on the other side of the fire, shattering it. The pair immediately ducked reflexively, quickly looking around--and towards the tower's entrance, where a stubby figure was standing on the front steps, pointing a long instrument of some kind at them.
"Oy, ye lot," the figure shouted, its mouth hidden in a thick, white beard. "Hands in th' air, step 'way from each other, ye hear? That was jest a warnin' shot, next one en't gonna be."
Fergy raised her hands, taking a step away from her husband, but Marcus just stood there, glaring incredulously at their attacker. "Is that a musket?!" he asked, a huge grin growing on his face. "Are you threatening us with a musket?"
"Bloody 'ell lad, ye got some cheek, don' ye?"
Marcus laughed, walking calmly towards the short man. "Can you blame me, mate? That thing's about as dangerous as a kitten."
"Oh aye?!"
"Oh, aye," Marcus repeated. He stopped walking, crossing his hands over his chest. "Go on then, shoot me."
Fergy took half a step towards him; "Marcus, baby--"
"Just trust me, love."
"Fine lad, ye asked for it!" The short man--a dwarf, Marcus could see by then--took aim down the shaft of his musket. "Ye sure?"
"I'm sure."
"This is a stupid plan," Fergy muttered.
A heavy silence fell over the ashy clearing, and all Fergy could hear was her own heart beating. She could just imagine in in her head--the musket ball striking Marcus in the head with the force it had shattered that branch with, splattering his brains all over the place. She closed her eyes, unable to watch.
"Baaaaaaagh!" the dwarf shouted, shouldering his weapon. "C'mon then, Ah'll get ye some vittles." And with that, he turned and stomped back into the tower, grumbling.
Fergy opened his eyes, dropping her hands to her sides. "What the hell?"
Marcus grinned at her. "He hadn't loaded in a second shot, and that takes bloody forever. Hungry?"
She let out a little half-hearted laugh. "Quite." Together, the two closed the distance between themselves and the entrance to the tower, and slipped inside.
Once they were inside, both of them were so distracted by the structure's interior that the apple the dwarf tossed at Marcus caught him in the chest. He clumsily caught it and relayed it back to Fergy, then caught the dwarf's second throw and took a big bite. The room they were standing in was fairly barren, save a few barrels and crates on the far side, and clearly spanned the entire base of the tower. The ceiling, some thirty feet up, only covered half of the room; the other half was open, apparently, all the way to the top of the tower. From where Fergy was standing, she could see the different floors of the tower above her, as if she were looking at a cross-section of the structure. The third and fifth floors were lit, while the one directly above them and the fourth were darkened. There were no stairs leading up from the ground floor, and none connecting the other floors that Fergy could see.
"What... exactly is this place?" she asked, munching idly on her apple and turning her eyes to the dwarf. "And... why does this apple taste like stale bread?"
"'Ell if I know, lass," the stumpy man replied, shrugging his broad shoulders. "Sorc'ress lives up there, flits aboot some'ow without stairs, I reckon. Don' ask me 'ow it works, I en't got th' slightest." he crunched on his own apple, grimacing at the taste of it. "Conjured food--reach int' the barrel an' ye can pull out jest aboot whatever ye want, but no matter what ye pull out it all tastes like last week's bread."
"That's... very strange," Marcus muttered.
"Oh, en't jest strange, 'tis barkin' mad!" The dwarf threw his arms in the air and stomped over to Fergy so he could see up the empty half of the tower. "Ye hear that, ye daft bitch! Ye'r barkin' mad!" He hurled his apple upwards, but missed his angle and it fell back to the ground a few feet away, splattering.
A head, with long black hair, poked out from the top floor, and a moment later, words floated down in response: "Excelsior! Panda tunic rocking sky!" The head vanished and silence fell over the trio at the bottom.
"Baagh!" the dwarf groaned. "Don' pay that useless thing a fig o' attention. She's always like that--utter gibberish. Been tryin' t' get 'er t' help me get the hell out o' this damn wood, but she won' even come down here."
While he was talking, Fergy was eying the wall, and without a word to interrupt him she walked across the room and started shoving a crate across the stone floor.
Marcus watched her nonchalantly. "Going climbing?"
His wife just grunted, then said, "If I can get a little higher up, yeah, the stonework looks climbable. Just gotta push this really heavy, bulky crate over there and it shouldn't be hard. Really heavy. Pushing it all on my own."
Her husband grinned. "You want some help?"
"A little late now, you think?" Fergy shot back, rolling her eyes; a second later the crate thunked dully against the wall, and the woman climbed on top of it. A second later she was clinging to the wall like a spider, working her way towards the level directly above them.
Down below, the two men watched her; the dwarf let out an impressed whistle. "Nimble lass, en't she?"
"That's my wife," the other muttered. "I'm Marcus, by the way. She's Fergy."
The dwarf shook his hand eagerly. "Brasskicker."
Marcus nearly spit out his bite of stale-bread apple, choking back a laugh. "Seriously?"
"Cross me heart."
"You pick that name yourself?" Fergy called down, laughing.
Brasskicker chuckled, walking over to try and get a look at the floor above. "Me pa... he had high hopes fer me. If'n it weren' for me ma, I'd pro'lly jes' be 'Asskicker'. She didn' think it was a proper dwarf name without the metal in it, so the two o' em came t' a compromise, or so they tell me. I do me best t' live up to the name."
"I'll bet you do." Marcus patted him on the shoulder, watching his wife climb. A moment later, Fergy vanished into the level above, and Marcus and Brasskicker craned their necks in vain to try and get a look. "So," the big man said, "Does that sorceress have an airship or something we can ride out of here on?"
"Hell if I know, lad." The dwarf scratched his beard thoughtfully. "En't ever seen anythin' but this room, never seen 'er flyin' in or out on one, that's fer sure. Mebbe she's got one tucked away up there, that lass o' yers'll be the first t' know. Ye lot come in on one?"
Marcus nodded, taking another visual survey of the room. "Forced landing a few miles from here. It's wasted, though, torn apart by the woods, so even if we stood a chance of getting through the trees, it wouldn't matter."
"Queen o' th' fores'?"
"The lackey, actually--"
"Aye, the creepy bugger. Gave me the willies, that 'un did."
"Yeah, I sorta figured you'd say something like that. What the hell are you doing out here, anyways?"
"Jus' passin' through." Brasskicker shrugged and waddled over to the food bucket, pulling out what looked like a leg of mutton. As he munched on it, he continued, "Makin' me way north o' here. Was runnin' a'hind schedule, so I figured I'd cut through these woods. Pah, that came back an' bit me in the ass, didn' it?" He let out a loud guffaw and tossed the conjured food over his shoulder. "Ran into that woody bassard, then hoofed it here when 'e tried t'... ugh, I don' even wanna talk aboot it. Ye?"
"Queen tried to possess my wife. It didn't take." Marcus frowned, thinking about that.
"It didn' take? Why not?"
"Search me, I've got no idea. Neither does she. Neither did the queen."
Up above, the woman in question squatted on floor, stretching her arms over her head languidly. She was in pretty good shape, and scaling the wall hadn't been that difficult, but her muscles burned from the strain nonetheless. She stood up and surveyed the room around her, stretching her legs as she did so. It was mostly dark, but she could see well enough from the torchlight below. She appeared to be in a library of sorts--there were a lot of books, but they seemed to lack any kind of organization. Some were on shelves, other were stacked on top of tables, and still others were just scattered on the floor. On the far side of the room, a spiraling metal staircase led up to the level above; Fergy headed for it, careful not to step on any of the tomes.
She was about to mount the steps when a shadow across them moved, and immediately the woman dropped into a crouch and slipped a pair of daggers out of her belt; in the same motion she slipped silently backwards and behind a table, hiding, ready, holding her breath.
She crouched there for a minute or two before peeking back over the pile of books on top of her hiding place, brows furrowed. Sitting a few steps from the bottom of the spiral, at about eye level, was a small black cat. It regarded her coolly, its head tilted just slightly one side.
"Well," Fergy said, standing up, "I guess the sorceress isn't the only one hiding up here--or maybe she is." She slipped the daggers back into her belt and curtsied quickly, keeping a fair distance from the animal. "A pleasure to meet you, m'lady sorceress. That is one hell of a shape-shift."
The cat just stared at her, and let out a little "Mew."
"I hope you don't mind me climbing up here. We're kind of in a bit of a snafu down below--I'll bet you've met the queen of the forest, right? Well, her little goon tore our airship to bits, and we're looking for a way out of these woods--and, since she's taken a liking to me, sanctuary until we can skidaddle."
The cat continued to stare at her.
"You're just a cat, aren't you?"
"Mew." The cat padded silently down the stairs and closed the short distance separating them, then rubbed against Fergy's legs amiably.
"Just a cat... without a tail. Poor thing, what happened to it?" She reached down to scratch it between its ears, then picked it up and held it against her chest. The cat curled up into a ball and rubbed its head against her chin. "Sweet thing. Let's go find your lady mistress, yeah?"
Holding the cat with one hand, Fergy mounted the spiral staircase, her other hand on the curving banister. The second story up was much like the first, in that it was messy and disorganized; instead of books, however, its shelves, tables, and floor were lined with glass jars, each full of some kind of clear fluid, floating in which were various bits and pieces of--well, for the most part, Fergy wasn't sure what they were bits and pieces of. As she walked idly through the room, which like the two rooms below it took up the entire half-level of the tower, she saw claws, plants, scales, rocks, crystals--and, seeming to stick out to her specifically, what looked like a long, black worm, curled into a spiral in the clear solution.
"Well, I guess now we know what happened to your tail, fella," she muttered, scratching behind the cat's neck, her lips twisting into a little frown. The cat just purred against her breasts, pleased with the attention she was giving it.
The entire room was softly lit with a bright, natural light. At first, Fergy thought it was coming from the jars themselves, as there were no windows, but soon she realized it was coming from another source, a flat-looking disc of light just off the center of the room, hanging vertically in mid-air. Looking at it made her head hurt; Fergy dismissed it as some random magical do-dad, something she probably wouldn't be able to wrap her mind around even were it explained to her, and continued up the stairs.
The floor above was utterly empty, and covered in dust, which was marked with lines of paw prints.
The top floor was also empty--or nearly so. In the center of the room stood another strange light source, this one a lantern hanging from a curved pole. The lantern was emitting a soft glow that shifted from blue to green, and back again, as she watched it.
"Hello?" she called out. "M'lady sorceress? The hell did she go?" There hadn't exactly been a lot of places to hide that Fergy had seen on her way up the tower--she would have seen someone under any of the tables, and all of the bookshelves and cabinets had been flush against the wall. She set the cat down and walked around the edge of the room, towards the empty space on the other side, keeping a fair distance away from the odd lantern. She leaned out over the ledge carefully, and spotted Marcus and Brasskicker on the ground level.
"Any news from down below?" she called out, waving a hand to get their attention.
Marcus looked up and grinned; a moment later, his voice floated up to her: "We pulled a keg out of the barrel of tasteless food, but--surprise!--it tastes like bread. Worse, it's not getting us drunk."
"A crime, if'n I ever heard o' one!" the dwarf shouted. "Oughtta string th' daffy lass up fer it."
There was a noise behind Fergy, but when she turned around, the room was still empty, save for the black cat, which looked like it might be having a spasm or a seizure of some kind. She frowned and leaned back over the drop; "Have to find her first, I haven't seen her anywhere. Hang out down there, I'll get back to you. See if I can find some rope or something."
"Aye."
Turning back to the cat, Fergy walked across the semicircular room and kneeled down next to it, watching its odd movements. "What's gotten into you, friend?" she whispered; then, reached out and grabbed a fistful of air; the air attempted to pull away, but Fergy held on tight, then pressed it up against the wall before taking two quick steps back and raising her empty hands. "Drop the invisibility, m'lady sorceress, I'm not here to hurt you. You know I know you're there now--can we talk?"
The space of nothing next to the cat shimmered, and suddenly a young woman with long black hair was standing there; the cat was rubbing up against her legs, purring. "Treebranch moonlily," the sorceress muttered, glaring at the animal.
Fergy just stared at her. "I have no idea what that means." She dug around in her bag, then held out small pouch of cloth, which was tied shut with a bit of purple ribbon. "Here, you can have this, as a sort of peace offering, I guess."
The sorceress eyed her warily, her brows forming a sharp V shape. She looked twenty, twenty-one, and exceptionally pretty--but being a magic-user, that didn't exactly come as a surprise. Her robes were thick and well-decorated, with a golden insignia attached above one of the girl's breasts. "Corsair grass plains..."
"I don't know what that means, just take the bloody chocolate!"
"... Crackers?" The sorceress' eyes went wide and she snatched the little pouch up, slim fingers yanking it open viciously. Inside were several small squares of the sweet, brown substance. The sorceress immediately popped several in her mouth, and leaned up against the wall, eyes closed, savoring it.
"I figured you might be a little tired of the stale bread downstairs. Do you have a name?"
"Evergreen rats plank sky."
Fergy just let out a sigh. "I officially hate this job. Okay. Fine. No words."
"Juniper midni--"
"Just stop!" Fergy threw her arms in the air. "Don't talk. Yes or no--just nod, or shake your head. Don't speak. Okay?"
The girl nodded.
"Okay, good, you can understand me."
She nodded again.
"Are you the mistress of this tower?"
And again, a nod. She was chewing on another square of chocolate.
"Have you met the wood nymphs outside?"
Another nod, this time more vigorously.
"Have they trapped you here?"
This time, the sorceress shook her head.
Fergy frowned, confused at that. "Then why are you here, in this god-forsaken place? No--wait! Don't answer that--"
But the girl only held up a hand, her pointer finger extended. She quickly slipped over to the spiral staircase and beckoned Fergy to follow, before vanishing down it. Fergy found the sorceress on the floor full of books, shoving several around, searching, until she found the volume she was looking for. Grinning, she held it up for Fergy to read the title:
On Behavior of and interaction with Magical Creatures; vol. Seven: Nymphs of the Wood, Water, and Sky.
Fergy put a hand over her own mouth and let out a sigh. "You have got to be kidding me. You're here to study them?!" She noticed, then, that several of the tomes scattered about the room were marked with the same insignia as the mage's robes.
The younger girl nodded vigorously.
"How did you get out here, then?"
The sorceress held up a hand, forming a circle with her pointer finger and her thumb. She stuck the opposite pointer through the ring and wiggled it around.
"I don't understand."
The sorceress repeated the gesture, a frustrated look on her face. "Compound eloquence!" she shouted, clearly annoyed.
"Okay, new subject--what the hell happened to your... to you?"
The sorceress let out a little huff, dropping her arms to her sides. She glared at Fergy for a moment, then walked past her to a bookshelf against the wall. Regarding it for a moment, she selected a tome from one of the middle shelves and laid it out on a relatively-clear table. She opened it up to the middle and pointed at it, looking at Fergy.
Fergy looked at the page in question, but, "I can't understand any of that--I've never even seen that language written down before."
The girl nodded repeatedly. Then, she pointed at the page again and shrugged melodramatically and pointed at herself. After that, she wiggled her fingers at the book--and then slapped the page with her palm, formed a fist, and thrust the fist in her own face, opening it up and wiggling her fingers again. With this last motion, she made a little "pssssh" sound with her mouth.
"Oh, wow, that is unfortunate," Fergy replied. "Your translation spell backfired and hit you in the face--so, if what little I know about magic is true, the only person who can... fix it is... you. So... why haven't you fixed it?"
Looking impatient, the sorceress pointed at her mouth and rolled her eyes.
"The... fix is a verbal spell. Amazing--someone with worse luck than ours!" Fergy couldn't help but grin. "So are you just screwed for life, or what?"
The sorceress pointed at her mouth again and wiggled her fingers, then spread her palms apart; then, she pointed at herself, and placed her palms much closer together. "Apricot snowfall..."
"You need a more skilled magic-user."
The girl nodded.
"Have you tried writing? This pantomime garbage is going to get tiring fast."
The girl nodded again, and found a third book to show Fergy; this ones pages were blank for the most part, but at the front of the book was what looked like utter gibberish--random words with no apparent relation, written in lines as if they were actual sentences.
"Okay, look. I think I can help you out here, would you like that?"
The girl nodded.
"Do you have a way to leave the tower other than going through the forest?"
Another nod--and at almost the same instant, a thunderous impact rocked the tower; Fergy and the sorceress leaned against tables to steady themselves, and were suddenly bathed in a shaft of sunlight. Down below, they could hear Marcus and Brasskicker shouting and cursing. The far wall of the tower now had a massive hole in it. Peering down over the ledge, Fergy could see a large boulder down below.
Marcus looked up at her; she could just barely make out a redness on the side of his face. Blood, probably. "I think your green lady-friend outside is tired of waiting on us to come out," he called up. "And she smashed our keg."
The sorceress was suddenly beside her, looking down at the men below; then, a look of confusion came across her face and she turned her gaze to Fergy and said, "Thesis horseback arrogant grasslands?" Her tone was as bewildered as her expression, but it was pretty clear what she was asking.
"I may have set the queen nymph on fire before we came here."
"Quantum philandry?!"
"I had a good reason!"
Down below, Marcus examined the boulder, and the hole it had made. He blinked and wiped the side of his face against his shoulder, staining his jacket with blood. Best he could tell, a bit of shrapnel from the shattered wall--the same kind of shrapnel that was all over the floor now--had caught him in the temple. It wasn't a serious wound, but like most head wounds, it was bleeding profusely. The big man was already feeling a little light-headed, and was trying to keep himself focused.
He managed to catch a glimpse of the second boulder through the hole the first one left, and just barely had enough time to shout "Incoming!" before it hit the side of the structure. The impact shook the tower again, but the wall held somehow, and outside he heard the muffled thud of the boulder landing in the ashes.
Brasskicker was at the doorway, shouting madly; "Ye'll 'ave to do better'n that, ye old bag!"
"Brasskicker," Marcus said calmly, "Come take a look at this. There's something up with this rock." There were several odd depressions in the boulder, almost like scraping, and strange cracks scored the surface. The dwarf hobbled over, and as he examined the boulder Marcus could hear Fergy and the sorceress upstairs, arguing. Or at least, that's what Fergy's half of the conversation sounded like--the other woman's words didn't make any sense to him. It sounded like, somehow, she and his wife had come to some sort of verbal understanding.
"Ye hear that?" Brasskicker murmured.
"What, them?"
The dwarf shook his head, leaning down close to the boulder. "Ne'er been in a dwarven city, have ye? No fire, no light, gotta have good hearin'."
Marcus just stared at him. "Why no fire?"
"T'dangerous--something goes up, fire sucks all the air out--jes' trust me on this, lad, en't really got time t'explain, ye know?" he interrupted himself inpatiently, "I got pretty damn good hearin', and there's somethin' movin' 'round in there."
"I think we should probably move away from it."
"Ye think we should prolly move away from it?!" Brasskicker shouted. "Ye think so, do ye?! Well screw that!" The dwarf leaned down and threw his shoulder against the boulder, rolling it towards the door; as he did so bits of the rock started to break out and fall to the floor. It looked like an egg hatching.
"Shit," Marcus muttered, moving to help Brasskicker. "Queen's more devious than I figured."
"No kiddin', lad," the dwarf replied, giving the boulder one last shove out the door; as he slammed it shut, Marcus caught a glimpse of whatever was stored inside as it "hatched"--long, sinewy vines, which seemed to be growing larger by the second.
"We might just be well and truly screwed," he muttered, vaguely amazed.
"Best I can tell, lad, that wall o' fire out there en't just yer normal fire," the dwarf said, looking upwards into the higher areas of the tower. "'Tis a magic shield o' some kind. Queen's not gonna have a lot o' power in here, and we know she cannae cross it 'erself."
"She's throwing over those things, whatever they are," Marcus said, continuing the dwarf's line of thinking, "Hoping to hit us, maybe?"
"Mebbe." Brasskicker brushed himself off. "Thing had plenty o' time to grab me, didn' do snot." He tried to peek through a crack in the door, probably split open by the impact of the attack. "Jes' sittin' there now," he said after a moment. "But gettin' bigger. Weird. Y'ougthta tell yer lass t' get a move on with wha'ever plan they got goin' on up there, aye?"
"Aye." Marcus looked up into the tower again, trying to figure out which floor Fergy was on now. He started to shout for her when a third impact rocked the tower, this one higher up. He could hear the boulder tumbling down the side of the structure--then nothing, the noise stopped. The tell-tale sound of the boulder hitting bottom never came.
"Oy, lad." Brasskicker was still peeking out the door. "Bloody thing's lookin' at me. Friggin' eyeballs on it."
"Oh, well, that's just fantastic, isn't it? Queen of the forest's taking a peek. Oy! Fergy, love! We need to get a move on!"
Fergy's head appeared two floors above the bottom. "Look," she called down, "I think we've got a thing figured out. There's this thing up here--I think it's some kind of magic transport, a portal. We're working on a way to get the two of you up here to it. How're things down there, baby?"
Marcus' voice floated up to her. "Decidedly distressing. We're running out of time."
Fergy frowned. "Just a little longer." She turned back to the flat disk of light--the portal, or at least that's what she thought the sorceress was trying to tell her. It certainly felt like one; standing in front of it, if she got close enough, she could feel a warm, muggy, tropical breeze. Whatever was on the other side, it was overwhelmingly pleasant.
The sorceress was busy rummaging around the room of jars, clearly looking for something. What it was, Fergy had no idea. The younger girl had her tailless cat stuffed into the neckline of her robes, its little head poking out under the girl's chin.
Fergy watched her for a moment, then asked, "Look, don't you have some rope? Nothing fancy, just a length of rope. Maybe half as long as the ground floor is tall would be enough."
The sorceress just looked at her, and muttered, "Taters." She started searching again, then stopped suddenly, her eyes staring across the empty space at the far wall. Fergy followed her line of sight and took a small step backwards: hanging there in the hole in the wall, about level with the floor above them, was a plant. It wasn't moving, just hanging there and slowly getting bigger. And looking at them.
"That's... eerie." It took Fergy a moment, but it dawned on her that the plant thing wasn't looking at just them, but in lots of places, above and below them.
She could hear the sorceress murmuring, more gibberish words, but now she sounded legitimately scared.
And suddenly it dawned on Fergy what it was the plant was looking for. "That thing--" she snapped out at the sorceress, "That lantern thing upstairs, at the very top--that's what's making the wall of fire, isn't it?"
The sorceress just nodded once.
"The nymph is aiming," Fergy hissed, then let out a string of profanities. And then she could hear it, the wind-like sound of something flying through the air; a shadow passed over the hole in the wall, and Fergy had just enough time to throw her arm over the sorceress' head and yank her down to the floor before a fourth boulder smashed through the tower, much higher than the previous three. She caught a brief glimpse of it as it sailed into the top floor above them, and heard it smashing through the floor into the empty room between the lantern and the portal. The sound was immediately interrupted by a metallic impact as the boulder hit the spiraling stairs, a long chunk of which immediately came crashing through the ceiling and landed, horizontal, on the floor only a hand's breadth away.
Fergy stood up and looked out the hole--the wall of fire was still up. "You missed!" she shouted.
They wouldn't get that lucky again, and Fergy knew it. Without a word, she threw herself into shoving the stairs towards the ledge, the hard metal screeching in protest as it scraped against the stonework. She hardly noticed when the sorceress, panic still in her eyes, started shoving with her. A moment later the stairs toppled over and fell to the ground level with a clang.
Marcus had to dive out of the way, but as soon as he saw what Fergy had thrown down to them he knew what her plan was. It was simple, the kind of simplicity that only came from accidental boons. With a look to Brasskicker, he lifted the stairs up and leaned them against the wall, then held them steady as the dwarf scrambled up them, cursing. It wasn't quite to the second level above them, but he could jump. The dwarf hit the ledge with his stomach and grunted--his gun slipped off his shoulder and fell to the floor with a clatter. After a moment of stumpy legs dangling over the ledge, Brasskicker vanished, only to reappear a moment later to help Marcus once the big man had made it to the top of the makeshift stairway; it fell away below him.
"Dropped me gun," Brasskicker muttered,
Marcus replied curtly: "Not worth it."
Another impact rocked the tower, another boulder smashed its way onto the top floor, and all four pair of eyes turned to look out the ravaged wall--just in time to see the wall of fire go out.
"We are so bloody screwed," Brasskicker shouted. It only took a few seconds for Marcus and Brasskicker to reach the next level up, the room with the portal in it. There, they found Fergy and the sorceress waiting before the flat disk.
Marcus gave his wife a kiss, muttered, "I love you," and before she could protest he shoved her bodily through into the light, following immediately after.
Fergy squeezed her eyes shut and let out a shout as she hit the portal--a shock passed through her, and for an instant before she blacked out she was very, very cold.
As the woman passed through the portal, the duo still behind her watched as the warm, golden light shifted suddenly to white, followed by a blast of cold air and a biting, freezing wind; the round portal began to waver, destabilizing. Brasskicker turned and glared at the sorceress, whose eyes were as wide as saucers.
"Weren' s'posed t' do that, were it?" the dwarf snapped.
She took two steps back and shook her head--and Brasskicker grabbed her by the wrist and dove through the portal, taking her light frame with him.
"Oy, ye lot," the figure shouted, its mouth hidden in a thick, white beard. "Hands in th' air, step 'way from each other, ye hear? That was jest a warnin' shot, next one en't gonna be."
Fergy raised her hands, taking a step away from her husband, but Marcus just stood there, glaring incredulously at their attacker. "Is that a musket?!" he asked, a huge grin growing on his face. "Are you threatening us with a musket?"
"Bloody 'ell lad, ye got some cheek, don' ye?"
Marcus laughed, walking calmly towards the short man. "Can you blame me, mate? That thing's about as dangerous as a kitten."
"Oh aye?!"
"Oh, aye," Marcus repeated. He stopped walking, crossing his hands over his chest. "Go on then, shoot me."
Fergy took half a step towards him; "Marcus, baby--"
"Just trust me, love."
"Fine lad, ye asked for it!" The short man--a dwarf, Marcus could see by then--took aim down the shaft of his musket. "Ye sure?"
"I'm sure."
"This is a stupid plan," Fergy muttered.
A heavy silence fell over the ashy clearing, and all Fergy could hear was her own heart beating. She could just imagine in in her head--the musket ball striking Marcus in the head with the force it had shattered that branch with, splattering his brains all over the place. She closed her eyes, unable to watch.
"Baaaaaaagh!" the dwarf shouted, shouldering his weapon. "C'mon then, Ah'll get ye some vittles." And with that, he turned and stomped back into the tower, grumbling.
Fergy opened his eyes, dropping her hands to her sides. "What the hell?"
Marcus grinned at her. "He hadn't loaded in a second shot, and that takes bloody forever. Hungry?"
She let out a little half-hearted laugh. "Quite." Together, the two closed the distance between themselves and the entrance to the tower, and slipped inside.
Once they were inside, both of them were so distracted by the structure's interior that the apple the dwarf tossed at Marcus caught him in the chest. He clumsily caught it and relayed it back to Fergy, then caught the dwarf's second throw and took a big bite. The room they were standing in was fairly barren, save a few barrels and crates on the far side, and clearly spanned the entire base of the tower. The ceiling, some thirty feet up, only covered half of the room; the other half was open, apparently, all the way to the top of the tower. From where Fergy was standing, she could see the different floors of the tower above her, as if she were looking at a cross-section of the structure. The third and fifth floors were lit, while the one directly above them and the fourth were darkened. There were no stairs leading up from the ground floor, and none connecting the other floors that Fergy could see.
"What... exactly is this place?" she asked, munching idly on her apple and turning her eyes to the dwarf. "And... why does this apple taste like stale bread?"
"'Ell if I know, lass," the stumpy man replied, shrugging his broad shoulders. "Sorc'ress lives up there, flits aboot some'ow without stairs, I reckon. Don' ask me 'ow it works, I en't got th' slightest." he crunched on his own apple, grimacing at the taste of it. "Conjured food--reach int' the barrel an' ye can pull out jest aboot whatever ye want, but no matter what ye pull out it all tastes like last week's bread."
"That's... very strange," Marcus muttered.
"Oh, en't jest strange, 'tis barkin' mad!" The dwarf threw his arms in the air and stomped over to Fergy so he could see up the empty half of the tower. "Ye hear that, ye daft bitch! Ye'r barkin' mad!" He hurled his apple upwards, but missed his angle and it fell back to the ground a few feet away, splattering.
A head, with long black hair, poked out from the top floor, and a moment later, words floated down in response: "Excelsior! Panda tunic rocking sky!" The head vanished and silence fell over the trio at the bottom.
"Baagh!" the dwarf groaned. "Don' pay that useless thing a fig o' attention. She's always like that--utter gibberish. Been tryin' t' get 'er t' help me get the hell out o' this damn wood, but she won' even come down here."
While he was talking, Fergy was eying the wall, and without a word to interrupt him she walked across the room and started shoving a crate across the stone floor.
Marcus watched her nonchalantly. "Going climbing?"
His wife just grunted, then said, "If I can get a little higher up, yeah, the stonework looks climbable. Just gotta push this really heavy, bulky crate over there and it shouldn't be hard. Really heavy. Pushing it all on my own."
Her husband grinned. "You want some help?"
"A little late now, you think?" Fergy shot back, rolling her eyes; a second later the crate thunked dully against the wall, and the woman climbed on top of it. A second later she was clinging to the wall like a spider, working her way towards the level directly above them.
Down below, the two men watched her; the dwarf let out an impressed whistle. "Nimble lass, en't she?"
"That's my wife," the other muttered. "I'm Marcus, by the way. She's Fergy."
The dwarf shook his hand eagerly. "Brasskicker."
Marcus nearly spit out his bite of stale-bread apple, choking back a laugh. "Seriously?"
"Cross me heart."
"You pick that name yourself?" Fergy called down, laughing.
Brasskicker chuckled, walking over to try and get a look at the floor above. "Me pa... he had high hopes fer me. If'n it weren' for me ma, I'd pro'lly jes' be 'Asskicker'. She didn' think it was a proper dwarf name without the metal in it, so the two o' em came t' a compromise, or so they tell me. I do me best t' live up to the name."
"I'll bet you do." Marcus patted him on the shoulder, watching his wife climb. A moment later, Fergy vanished into the level above, and Marcus and Brasskicker craned their necks in vain to try and get a look. "So," the big man said, "Does that sorceress have an airship or something we can ride out of here on?"
"Hell if I know, lad." The dwarf scratched his beard thoughtfully. "En't ever seen anythin' but this room, never seen 'er flyin' in or out on one, that's fer sure. Mebbe she's got one tucked away up there, that lass o' yers'll be the first t' know. Ye lot come in on one?"
Marcus nodded, taking another visual survey of the room. "Forced landing a few miles from here. It's wasted, though, torn apart by the woods, so even if we stood a chance of getting through the trees, it wouldn't matter."
"Queen o' th' fores'?"
"The lackey, actually--"
"Aye, the creepy bugger. Gave me the willies, that 'un did."
"Yeah, I sorta figured you'd say something like that. What the hell are you doing out here, anyways?"
"Jus' passin' through." Brasskicker shrugged and waddled over to the food bucket, pulling out what looked like a leg of mutton. As he munched on it, he continued, "Makin' me way north o' here. Was runnin' a'hind schedule, so I figured I'd cut through these woods. Pah, that came back an' bit me in the ass, didn' it?" He let out a loud guffaw and tossed the conjured food over his shoulder. "Ran into that woody bassard, then hoofed it here when 'e tried t'... ugh, I don' even wanna talk aboot it. Ye?"
"Queen tried to possess my wife. It didn't take." Marcus frowned, thinking about that.
"It didn' take? Why not?"
"Search me, I've got no idea. Neither does she. Neither did the queen."
Up above, the woman in question squatted on floor, stretching her arms over her head languidly. She was in pretty good shape, and scaling the wall hadn't been that difficult, but her muscles burned from the strain nonetheless. She stood up and surveyed the room around her, stretching her legs as she did so. It was mostly dark, but she could see well enough from the torchlight below. She appeared to be in a library of sorts--there were a lot of books, but they seemed to lack any kind of organization. Some were on shelves, other were stacked on top of tables, and still others were just scattered on the floor. On the far side of the room, a spiraling metal staircase led up to the level above; Fergy headed for it, careful not to step on any of the tomes.
She was about to mount the steps when a shadow across them moved, and immediately the woman dropped into a crouch and slipped a pair of daggers out of her belt; in the same motion she slipped silently backwards and behind a table, hiding, ready, holding her breath.
She crouched there for a minute or two before peeking back over the pile of books on top of her hiding place, brows furrowed. Sitting a few steps from the bottom of the spiral, at about eye level, was a small black cat. It regarded her coolly, its head tilted just slightly one side.
"Well," Fergy said, standing up, "I guess the sorceress isn't the only one hiding up here--or maybe she is." She slipped the daggers back into her belt and curtsied quickly, keeping a fair distance from the animal. "A pleasure to meet you, m'lady sorceress. That is one hell of a shape-shift."
The cat just stared at her, and let out a little "Mew."
"I hope you don't mind me climbing up here. We're kind of in a bit of a snafu down below--I'll bet you've met the queen of the forest, right? Well, her little goon tore our airship to bits, and we're looking for a way out of these woods--and, since she's taken a liking to me, sanctuary until we can skidaddle."
The cat continued to stare at her.
"You're just a cat, aren't you?"
"Mew." The cat padded silently down the stairs and closed the short distance separating them, then rubbed against Fergy's legs amiably.
"Just a cat... without a tail. Poor thing, what happened to it?" She reached down to scratch it between its ears, then picked it up and held it against her chest. The cat curled up into a ball and rubbed its head against her chin. "Sweet thing. Let's go find your lady mistress, yeah?"
Holding the cat with one hand, Fergy mounted the spiral staircase, her other hand on the curving banister. The second story up was much like the first, in that it was messy and disorganized; instead of books, however, its shelves, tables, and floor were lined with glass jars, each full of some kind of clear fluid, floating in which were various bits and pieces of--well, for the most part, Fergy wasn't sure what they were bits and pieces of. As she walked idly through the room, which like the two rooms below it took up the entire half-level of the tower, she saw claws, plants, scales, rocks, crystals--and, seeming to stick out to her specifically, what looked like a long, black worm, curled into a spiral in the clear solution.
"Well, I guess now we know what happened to your tail, fella," she muttered, scratching behind the cat's neck, her lips twisting into a little frown. The cat just purred against her breasts, pleased with the attention she was giving it.
The entire room was softly lit with a bright, natural light. At first, Fergy thought it was coming from the jars themselves, as there were no windows, but soon she realized it was coming from another source, a flat-looking disc of light just off the center of the room, hanging vertically in mid-air. Looking at it made her head hurt; Fergy dismissed it as some random magical do-dad, something she probably wouldn't be able to wrap her mind around even were it explained to her, and continued up the stairs.
The floor above was utterly empty, and covered in dust, which was marked with lines of paw prints.
The top floor was also empty--or nearly so. In the center of the room stood another strange light source, this one a lantern hanging from a curved pole. The lantern was emitting a soft glow that shifted from blue to green, and back again, as she watched it.
"Hello?" she called out. "M'lady sorceress? The hell did she go?" There hadn't exactly been a lot of places to hide that Fergy had seen on her way up the tower--she would have seen someone under any of the tables, and all of the bookshelves and cabinets had been flush against the wall. She set the cat down and walked around the edge of the room, towards the empty space on the other side, keeping a fair distance away from the odd lantern. She leaned out over the ledge carefully, and spotted Marcus and Brasskicker on the ground level.
"Any news from down below?" she called out, waving a hand to get their attention.
Marcus looked up and grinned; a moment later, his voice floated up to her: "We pulled a keg out of the barrel of tasteless food, but--surprise!--it tastes like bread. Worse, it's not getting us drunk."
"A crime, if'n I ever heard o' one!" the dwarf shouted. "Oughtta string th' daffy lass up fer it."
There was a noise behind Fergy, but when she turned around, the room was still empty, save for the black cat, which looked like it might be having a spasm or a seizure of some kind. She frowned and leaned back over the drop; "Have to find her first, I haven't seen her anywhere. Hang out down there, I'll get back to you. See if I can find some rope or something."
"Aye."
Turning back to the cat, Fergy walked across the semicircular room and kneeled down next to it, watching its odd movements. "What's gotten into you, friend?" she whispered; then, reached out and grabbed a fistful of air; the air attempted to pull away, but Fergy held on tight, then pressed it up against the wall before taking two quick steps back and raising her empty hands. "Drop the invisibility, m'lady sorceress, I'm not here to hurt you. You know I know you're there now--can we talk?"
The space of nothing next to the cat shimmered, and suddenly a young woman with long black hair was standing there; the cat was rubbing up against her legs, purring. "Treebranch moonlily," the sorceress muttered, glaring at the animal.
Fergy just stared at her. "I have no idea what that means." She dug around in her bag, then held out small pouch of cloth, which was tied shut with a bit of purple ribbon. "Here, you can have this, as a sort of peace offering, I guess."
The sorceress eyed her warily, her brows forming a sharp V shape. She looked twenty, twenty-one, and exceptionally pretty--but being a magic-user, that didn't exactly come as a surprise. Her robes were thick and well-decorated, with a golden insignia attached above one of the girl's breasts. "Corsair grass plains..."
"I don't know what that means, just take the bloody chocolate!"
"... Crackers?" The sorceress' eyes went wide and she snatched the little pouch up, slim fingers yanking it open viciously. Inside were several small squares of the sweet, brown substance. The sorceress immediately popped several in her mouth, and leaned up against the wall, eyes closed, savoring it.
"I figured you might be a little tired of the stale bread downstairs. Do you have a name?"
"Evergreen rats plank sky."
Fergy just let out a sigh. "I officially hate this job. Okay. Fine. No words."
"Juniper midni--"
"Just stop!" Fergy threw her arms in the air. "Don't talk. Yes or no--just nod, or shake your head. Don't speak. Okay?"
The girl nodded.
"Okay, good, you can understand me."
She nodded again.
"Are you the mistress of this tower?"
And again, a nod. She was chewing on another square of chocolate.
"Have you met the wood nymphs outside?"
Another nod, this time more vigorously.
"Have they trapped you here?"
This time, the sorceress shook her head.
Fergy frowned, confused at that. "Then why are you here, in this god-forsaken place? No--wait! Don't answer that--"
But the girl only held up a hand, her pointer finger extended. She quickly slipped over to the spiral staircase and beckoned Fergy to follow, before vanishing down it. Fergy found the sorceress on the floor full of books, shoving several around, searching, until she found the volume she was looking for. Grinning, she held it up for Fergy to read the title:
On Behavior of and interaction with Magical Creatures; vol. Seven: Nymphs of the Wood, Water, and Sky.
Fergy put a hand over her own mouth and let out a sigh. "You have got to be kidding me. You're here to study them?!" She noticed, then, that several of the tomes scattered about the room were marked with the same insignia as the mage's robes.
The younger girl nodded vigorously.
"How did you get out here, then?"
The sorceress held up a hand, forming a circle with her pointer finger and her thumb. She stuck the opposite pointer through the ring and wiggled it around.
"I don't understand."
The sorceress repeated the gesture, a frustrated look on her face. "Compound eloquence!" she shouted, clearly annoyed.
"Okay, new subject--what the hell happened to your... to you?"
The sorceress let out a little huff, dropping her arms to her sides. She glared at Fergy for a moment, then walked past her to a bookshelf against the wall. Regarding it for a moment, she selected a tome from one of the middle shelves and laid it out on a relatively-clear table. She opened it up to the middle and pointed at it, looking at Fergy.
Fergy looked at the page in question, but, "I can't understand any of that--I've never even seen that language written down before."
The girl nodded repeatedly. Then, she pointed at the page again and shrugged melodramatically and pointed at herself. After that, she wiggled her fingers at the book--and then slapped the page with her palm, formed a fist, and thrust the fist in her own face, opening it up and wiggling her fingers again. With this last motion, she made a little "pssssh" sound with her mouth.
"Oh, wow, that is unfortunate," Fergy replied. "Your translation spell backfired and hit you in the face--so, if what little I know about magic is true, the only person who can... fix it is... you. So... why haven't you fixed it?"
Looking impatient, the sorceress pointed at her mouth and rolled her eyes.
"The... fix is a verbal spell. Amazing--someone with worse luck than ours!" Fergy couldn't help but grin. "So are you just screwed for life, or what?"
The sorceress pointed at her mouth again and wiggled her fingers, then spread her palms apart; then, she pointed at herself, and placed her palms much closer together. "Apricot snowfall..."
"You need a more skilled magic-user."
The girl nodded.
"Have you tried writing? This pantomime garbage is going to get tiring fast."
The girl nodded again, and found a third book to show Fergy; this ones pages were blank for the most part, but at the front of the book was what looked like utter gibberish--random words with no apparent relation, written in lines as if they were actual sentences.
"Okay, look. I think I can help you out here, would you like that?"
The girl nodded.
"Do you have a way to leave the tower other than going through the forest?"
Another nod--and at almost the same instant, a thunderous impact rocked the tower; Fergy and the sorceress leaned against tables to steady themselves, and were suddenly bathed in a shaft of sunlight. Down below, they could hear Marcus and Brasskicker shouting and cursing. The far wall of the tower now had a massive hole in it. Peering down over the ledge, Fergy could see a large boulder down below.
Marcus looked up at her; she could just barely make out a redness on the side of his face. Blood, probably. "I think your green lady-friend outside is tired of waiting on us to come out," he called up. "And she smashed our keg."
The sorceress was suddenly beside her, looking down at the men below; then, a look of confusion came across her face and she turned her gaze to Fergy and said, "Thesis horseback arrogant grasslands?" Her tone was as bewildered as her expression, but it was pretty clear what she was asking.
"I may have set the queen nymph on fire before we came here."
"Quantum philandry?!"
"I had a good reason!"
Down below, Marcus examined the boulder, and the hole it had made. He blinked and wiped the side of his face against his shoulder, staining his jacket with blood. Best he could tell, a bit of shrapnel from the shattered wall--the same kind of shrapnel that was all over the floor now--had caught him in the temple. It wasn't a serious wound, but like most head wounds, it was bleeding profusely. The big man was already feeling a little light-headed, and was trying to keep himself focused.
He managed to catch a glimpse of the second boulder through the hole the first one left, and just barely had enough time to shout "Incoming!" before it hit the side of the structure. The impact shook the tower again, but the wall held somehow, and outside he heard the muffled thud of the boulder landing in the ashes.
Brasskicker was at the doorway, shouting madly; "Ye'll 'ave to do better'n that, ye old bag!"
"Brasskicker," Marcus said calmly, "Come take a look at this. There's something up with this rock." There were several odd depressions in the boulder, almost like scraping, and strange cracks scored the surface. The dwarf hobbled over, and as he examined the boulder Marcus could hear Fergy and the sorceress upstairs, arguing. Or at least, that's what Fergy's half of the conversation sounded like--the other woman's words didn't make any sense to him. It sounded like, somehow, she and his wife had come to some sort of verbal understanding.
"Ye hear that?" Brasskicker murmured.
"What, them?"
The dwarf shook his head, leaning down close to the boulder. "Ne'er been in a dwarven city, have ye? No fire, no light, gotta have good hearin'."
Marcus just stared at him. "Why no fire?"
"T'dangerous--something goes up, fire sucks all the air out--jes' trust me on this, lad, en't really got time t'explain, ye know?" he interrupted himself inpatiently, "I got pretty damn good hearin', and there's somethin' movin' 'round in there."
"I think we should probably move away from it."
"Ye think we should prolly move away from it?!" Brasskicker shouted. "Ye think so, do ye?! Well screw that!" The dwarf leaned down and threw his shoulder against the boulder, rolling it towards the door; as he did so bits of the rock started to break out and fall to the floor. It looked like an egg hatching.
"Shit," Marcus muttered, moving to help Brasskicker. "Queen's more devious than I figured."
"No kiddin', lad," the dwarf replied, giving the boulder one last shove out the door; as he slammed it shut, Marcus caught a glimpse of whatever was stored inside as it "hatched"--long, sinewy vines, which seemed to be growing larger by the second.
"We might just be well and truly screwed," he muttered, vaguely amazed.
"Best I can tell, lad, that wall o' fire out there en't just yer normal fire," the dwarf said, looking upwards into the higher areas of the tower. "'Tis a magic shield o' some kind. Queen's not gonna have a lot o' power in here, and we know she cannae cross it 'erself."
"She's throwing over those things, whatever they are," Marcus said, continuing the dwarf's line of thinking, "Hoping to hit us, maybe?"
"Mebbe." Brasskicker brushed himself off. "Thing had plenty o' time to grab me, didn' do snot." He tried to peek through a crack in the door, probably split open by the impact of the attack. "Jes' sittin' there now," he said after a moment. "But gettin' bigger. Weird. Y'ougthta tell yer lass t' get a move on with wha'ever plan they got goin' on up there, aye?"
"Aye." Marcus looked up into the tower again, trying to figure out which floor Fergy was on now. He started to shout for her when a third impact rocked the tower, this one higher up. He could hear the boulder tumbling down the side of the structure--then nothing, the noise stopped. The tell-tale sound of the boulder hitting bottom never came.
"Oy, lad." Brasskicker was still peeking out the door. "Bloody thing's lookin' at me. Friggin' eyeballs on it."
"Oh, well, that's just fantastic, isn't it? Queen of the forest's taking a peek. Oy! Fergy, love! We need to get a move on!"
Fergy's head appeared two floors above the bottom. "Look," she called down, "I think we've got a thing figured out. There's this thing up here--I think it's some kind of magic transport, a portal. We're working on a way to get the two of you up here to it. How're things down there, baby?"
Marcus' voice floated up to her. "Decidedly distressing. We're running out of time."
Fergy frowned. "Just a little longer." She turned back to the flat disk of light--the portal, or at least that's what she thought the sorceress was trying to tell her. It certainly felt like one; standing in front of it, if she got close enough, she could feel a warm, muggy, tropical breeze. Whatever was on the other side, it was overwhelmingly pleasant.
The sorceress was busy rummaging around the room of jars, clearly looking for something. What it was, Fergy had no idea. The younger girl had her tailless cat stuffed into the neckline of her robes, its little head poking out under the girl's chin.
Fergy watched her for a moment, then asked, "Look, don't you have some rope? Nothing fancy, just a length of rope. Maybe half as long as the ground floor is tall would be enough."
The sorceress just looked at her, and muttered, "Taters." She started searching again, then stopped suddenly, her eyes staring across the empty space at the far wall. Fergy followed her line of sight and took a small step backwards: hanging there in the hole in the wall, about level with the floor above them, was a plant. It wasn't moving, just hanging there and slowly getting bigger. And looking at them.
"That's... eerie." It took Fergy a moment, but it dawned on her that the plant thing wasn't looking at just them, but in lots of places, above and below them.
She could hear the sorceress murmuring, more gibberish words, but now she sounded legitimately scared.
And suddenly it dawned on Fergy what it was the plant was looking for. "That thing--" she snapped out at the sorceress, "That lantern thing upstairs, at the very top--that's what's making the wall of fire, isn't it?"
The sorceress just nodded once.
"The nymph is aiming," Fergy hissed, then let out a string of profanities. And then she could hear it, the wind-like sound of something flying through the air; a shadow passed over the hole in the wall, and Fergy had just enough time to throw her arm over the sorceress' head and yank her down to the floor before a fourth boulder smashed through the tower, much higher than the previous three. She caught a brief glimpse of it as it sailed into the top floor above them, and heard it smashing through the floor into the empty room between the lantern and the portal. The sound was immediately interrupted by a metallic impact as the boulder hit the spiraling stairs, a long chunk of which immediately came crashing through the ceiling and landed, horizontal, on the floor only a hand's breadth away.
Fergy stood up and looked out the hole--the wall of fire was still up. "You missed!" she shouted.
They wouldn't get that lucky again, and Fergy knew it. Without a word, she threw herself into shoving the stairs towards the ledge, the hard metal screeching in protest as it scraped against the stonework. She hardly noticed when the sorceress, panic still in her eyes, started shoving with her. A moment later the stairs toppled over and fell to the ground level with a clang.
Marcus had to dive out of the way, but as soon as he saw what Fergy had thrown down to them he knew what her plan was. It was simple, the kind of simplicity that only came from accidental boons. With a look to Brasskicker, he lifted the stairs up and leaned them against the wall, then held them steady as the dwarf scrambled up them, cursing. It wasn't quite to the second level above them, but he could jump. The dwarf hit the ledge with his stomach and grunted--his gun slipped off his shoulder and fell to the floor with a clatter. After a moment of stumpy legs dangling over the ledge, Brasskicker vanished, only to reappear a moment later to help Marcus once the big man had made it to the top of the makeshift stairway; it fell away below him.
"Dropped me gun," Brasskicker muttered,
Marcus replied curtly: "Not worth it."
Another impact rocked the tower, another boulder smashed its way onto the top floor, and all four pair of eyes turned to look out the ravaged wall--just in time to see the wall of fire go out.
"We are so bloody screwed," Brasskicker shouted. It only took a few seconds for Marcus and Brasskicker to reach the next level up, the room with the portal in it. There, they found Fergy and the sorceress waiting before the flat disk.
Marcus gave his wife a kiss, muttered, "I love you," and before she could protest he shoved her bodily through into the light, following immediately after.
Fergy squeezed her eyes shut and let out a shout as she hit the portal--a shock passed through her, and for an instant before she blacked out she was very, very cold.
As the woman passed through the portal, the duo still behind her watched as the warm, golden light shifted suddenly to white, followed by a blast of cold air and a biting, freezing wind; the round portal began to waver, destabilizing. Brasskicker turned and glared at the sorceress, whose eyes were as wide as saucers.
"Weren' s'posed t' do that, were it?" the dwarf snapped.
She took two steps back and shook her head--and Brasskicker grabbed her by the wrist and dove through the portal, taking her light frame with him.
Friday, June 13
89. (The Best Damn Thieves: Chapter Two)
Marcus found piloting the silver craft easy; it handled significantly smoother than their previous vehicle. Below them, the clouds were thinning out with the dawn as the sun just barely peeked over the horizon. The big man leaned over carefully--Fergy had fallen asleep with her head on her arms, her arms crossed on his lap--and below the ship he could see a dense, thick forest.
He put his free hand on his wife's head and stroked her hair absent-mindedly, letting his thoughts wander. They had been on this job a long time, and some days he could feel it taking its toll. Three months back they had been contacted through rather unusual means by Lady Elizabetta of Merriam to the north, and Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox. Marcus and Fergy's presence, the letter informed them, was requested, to discuss a matter of employment. The letter, which had appeared on the bed of the room they had rented for the night, while they were still sleeping on it, crumbled and turned to dust only seconds after they had finished reading it.
"Magic," he'd muttered disdainfully.
It wasn't much of a surprise, then, when they met in person, to find the Lady Thieren garbed in heavy red robes lined with glowing white slashes; the woman, who looked to be roughly in her fifties, had shoulder-length white hair that flowed in loose ringlets and never seemed to be still. What was a surprise was how old she looked--her skin and facial features didn't seem enhanced at all, an oddity among magic users. It was a rare thing to meet one who didn't look fresh out of her teen years. "You must be Marcus," she'd said as they'd disembarked from their airship, "And Fergesdottir."
"'Fergy' will suffice, thank you," Marcus' wife had replied, smiling coolly; she hated her full given name. "And you must be the ladies Thieren, or rather, the lady and the dame."
"Indeed," Lady Thieren said, bowing. "The proper titles are important--they'll keep us from getting each other confused." She'd winked, smiling with an oddly crooked mouth.
Behind her, Dame Thieren inclined her head slightly in greeting. It was easy to tell she wasn't a magic user, once you got a good look at her: she was a woman in her middle years, her bare arms showing an unusual degree of musculature for what was essentially a lady of the court. She was at least two hand-breadths taller than Marcus. A bastard sword hung across her back, and she wore what looked like a strange cross between an elegant dress and a suit of leather padding and chain mail. Despite her size, garb, and choice in armament, there was oddly very little masculine about her.
"Welp," Fergy had interjected, clapping her hands once, "Enough of the pleasantries. You wanted us here, might I ask what the hell for?" She grinned, and placed her hands on her hips.
The job, as explained by Lady Elizabetta, was simple enough: fly to Pikely, break into her son's keep, and acquire from his person an amulet of some worth. "You're probably wondering," she'd said at the time, "Why I just don't spirit the amulet away with magic or some such, yes?"
"The idea had crossed our minds," Fergy replied. "After all, you planted a letter on us, without ever entering the room. You could say it piqued my curiosity."
"The explanation is simpler than you'd expect," Dame Thieren elaborated. "You're both people of the world, I'm sure you're aware of my brother's reputation. Suffice to say, it's well-earned. He is, in so many words, a very bad man, with the aforementioned very bad reputation, which he himself is aware of. In recent years, he's grown somewhat paranoid that the League of Magisters wants him taken out."
Lady Elizabetta grinned at this, unable to stifle a chuckle. "The League couldn't give a fig, of this I'm sure. They do their best to avoid becoming as meddlesome as they were before the king died."
Fergy asked, "He put up an anti-magic field, didn't he?"
"Indeed," the sorceress replied. "We don't know how, exactly, he's done so--like Rose he takes after his father more than me--but it's there, and I can't get through it, even to verify his location; I only know he's there because I can't find him anywhere else. I imagine the amulet is at the heart of it. Incidentally--if you find he's no longer at Pikely, your contract extends to finding him and finishing the job, regardless of location, at double the pay."
Marcus had spoken up then, "The place is pretty fortified, if what I've heard is true. How do you expect us to get in, much less get an object that... you say he keeps it on his person?" Already a plan had been beginning to come together in his mind.
"My understanding is that you're the best there is at what you do." Lady Elizabetta had smiled. "Besides, I can already see the gears turning in that rugged head of yours. Once you've acquired the amulet, you are to meet Rose in Aeros, where she will be waiting for you. Now," she had extended a hand, which Fergy and Marcus had both shaken, sealing the deal, "Come inside, dears, I've had our cook throw together a bit of a spread. Come eat and relax, and we can discuss the details of your payment."
At the "spread", which was more like a feast than anything he had had in the past, Marcus had gotten to know Dame Thieren a little better while Fergy dealt with the dame's mother.
"You know," he'd said, "A female knight such as yourself isn't exactly... rare, these days, but you're something of an oddity--unless I'm mistaken about your actual title."
Dame Thieren had looked at him over her wine-glass, bemused. "Mother did make it a point to emphasize it, didn't she?"
"She did," Marcus replied. "You're Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox, right?"
"You're correct, yes."
"Bilox, as in the Bilox Shipyards?"
"You know your geography." She'd leaned against the table and regarded him, more curious now. "Have you been there yourself?"
Marcus grinned. "I have. My point is--it's very far from here, on the coast. What's a knight of Bilox doing all this way north?"
"I was born, like my brother, in Pikely. Mother brought me here to Merriam, and I married my way into the Bilox court." The Dame poured herself another glass of wine and drank it down quickly. "My husband was the Lord of Bilox, master of the shipyards. Sadly, we lacked much in military might--"
Marcus held up a hand; "Which is why your mother sent down the might of Merriam and her allies to aid you when Gotha invaded."
"Geography and history," she'd said, amused now. "You're a box of surprises, aren't you?"
"Not so much. Do you know who, exactly, the Duke of Gotha formed his armies with?"
"Rabble, basically," Dame Thieren had replied. "Hired muscle, mostly, cutthroats and corsairs, thieves and mercenari--" She stopped, realization hitting her. "Oh."
Marcus just crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, watching her face.
"Well, I hope you don't harbor some kind of personal grudge," the dame continued, recovering from the shock.
"Of course not," Marcus replied, grinning. "The best part of hired thugs is that we don't have a personal stake in what we get into, for the most part--as long as we get paid."
"If only we could all be so lucky," Dame Thieren murmured.
"Allow me to be frank, Dame Thi--"
"Rose, please. We're in my home, there's no need for formalities, despite what mother may say."
"Allow me to be frank, then, Rose," Marcus repeated, pouring himself a glass of wine. "What the hell happened? Everything was going along fairly dully--skirmishes here and there, both sides grabbing this chunk of land and losing that piece of the coast. And then one day you came sweeping down on your horse, your forces behind you, and you just... smashed us. I'd never seen anything like it."
"It got personal," Rose replied. "My husband fell--and not in battle. Cutthroats in the night. The two of us led the Biloxan forces together, side by side; we treated our men fairly and well. We ran a clean war, pushing your forces back as cleanly as we could--no torture, no rape, and so on. The men my mother sent down to help us were all good men, clean men."
"And in the night," Marcus continued for her, "Dirty men snuck into your camp and put a knife in your husband's ribs."
Rose nodded, lost in thought for the moment. Without a smile, Marcus reached across the table and put a hand on her wrist. "I understand," he said, nodding towards the other end of the room, where Fergy and the Lady Thieren were conversing animatedly.
Rose followed his gaze, frowning. "In any case," she said, "It was a long time ago. Lordship of Bilox was handed over to me, but I turned it down, handing it over to the local nobles, and returned home. I was young still, and it was too much for me. Before I left, they granted me a knighthood for my valor in the final days of the battle."
"You were terrifying," Marcus admitted. "In all that black armor. We called you the Iron Widow. Gothans still tremble at the name."
She furrowed her brows at that. "You knew the moniker? Then why ask me what happened?"
"Getting to know a client," Marcus replied, "And I was curious if the rumors were true. We do dirty deeds for people, Dame. It's good to know how badly it's going to come back and bite us in the ass."
She seemed entertained by the notion. "Well, let me say now that I think you have nothing to worry about on that front. We waged a clean war then, and we'll run this thing clean too. You have my word on that, on my honor as a knight."
"I'm sorry if I've opened up old wounds," Marcus said, smiling.
"No, no. Like I said, it was a long time ago. Now--tell me of your past. If we're going to hire a couple of thieves, I'd like to know they're not going to rob us blind." She grinned, pouring another glass of wine.
They'd talked for a while after that, until Fergy had dragged him off to their room to get some rest. "I like her," he'd said, as they lay in the large bed the Thierens had provided. "It's nice to get a job from someone who isn't a complete terror to be around. We need a better client list."
"Do I need to be jealous?" his wife had murmured, half-asleep.
"You know better."
"Her mom's a hoot." Fergy chuckled, and they drifted off to sleep.
It had taken them two months to properly gather the information needed to set their plan into motion--they'd had to figure out exactly where in the keep Duke Thieren slept, where he kept his spoils, how many soldiers he employed--and that was when they'd realized they were dealing with Rickards, who was almost as notorious as his master. His presence added another level of complexity to the plan--they not only had to catch the Duke off his guard, in a small room with the fewest possible number of guards, but they had to do it without the majordomo there to defend him.
"You scared of one little henchman?" Fergy had chided.
Marcus only response had been a curt, "Yes."
The silver airship they had stolen from him ran so quietly that, lost in his thoughts, it took Marcus a few minutes to realize that the propulsion device had cut off. He frowned, pulling a few levers and hitting a few switches, but none seemed to have any effect on the craft's performance. They were, once again, traveling by momentum alone, and slowly descending towards the forest. "You've got to be pulling my leg," he muttered to himself. He leaned on the control shaft, trying to steer the silver ship towards the edge of the woods--but while he could hear the rudders in the rear turning, the ship itself continued on its course.
"You have got to be pulling my leg," he exclaimed. Leaning back in the pilot's chair, he put a hand on his wife's shoulder and shook her gently. "Ferg. Hey, Fergy love, wake up."
"Did we make it to Aeros already?" she muttered groggily.
"Not quite," Marcus responded. He explained the situation to her.
Fergy's lips twisted into a crooked frown. "We're being pulled down there," she said eventually. "This is going to end stupidly. I've just got a feeling. That's the kind of luck we've been dragging around with us this whole job. First the letter, then that nut in Sully, then my airship..."
"I don't doubt it," her husband replied. "Well, we're about to hit the treetops, better tie yourself down. I'm sure it's going to get bumpy."
A few minutes later they touched down on the forest floor after a short, strangely smooth descent. Marcus stood on the deck, staring up at the canopy, a confused look on his face. "There's no way we just flew straight down through that without either zigging and zagging, or hitting something."
"That's great and dandy. Can you fly us out of here, baby?" Fergy hopped over the guardrail and landed on the thick grass, stumbling forward slightly with the impact.
"Just give me time and I'll get it working again." He jumped down beside her and moved around to the back of the ship, muttering to himself.
"Just do your thing. I'm gonna see if I can find... I dunno, some berries or something. I'm starving and we left all our food on the other ship." Fergy picked her way across the thick underbrush. When she was what she figured was a suitable distance away, she dug around in her pack for a moment and produced two objects: a brown cylinder a little bigger around than her thumb, and a gold cube, open on one side. She held the cylinder between her teeth by one end and placed the other end inside the cube; a moment later the cube produced a flash and a faint hissing noise. When she moved the cube away, the end of the cylinder not in her mouth was glowing bright orange with a smoldering flame. The cube disappeared into her pouch and she stood there, puffing idly at the cigar, surveying the area around her.
The forest was just as dense and thick as it had looked from the sky, and Marcus was right: there was no way the airship had just slipped through the canopy as easily as it had without some kind of outside influence. She had just started going through a checklist of possibilities when a voice behind her piped up: "Lass, if'n ye don' mind, could ye put that abominable thing out?"
Fergy spun around, her hand moving to her dagger instinctively--but the weapon stayed in its sheath. The speaker was a good distance away, its hands held in the air--if they could be called hands. It appeared to be a stocky, stumpy approximation of a man, made entirely of brown, knotty branches intertwined into a roughly human shape. Its arms and legs terminated in round clubs. Its face was a single sheet of wood, blank and expressionless--ambiguous--with a horizontal slit approximating a mouth. There was something off about it, though--the proportions were all wrong: the head was too small for the shoulders, the arms too long for the torso, and the legs too short for the whole thing.
Fergy took the cigar out of her mouth and examined it, then smelled the shaft, frowning, before looking back at the tree-person. No, it wasn't one of the "special" cigars she'd acquired in Sully, so she was definitely seeing the stumpy figure and not hallucinating. "And..." she stopped, unsure of how exactly to react, "And if I don't?" She puffed at the cigar defiantly.
The tree-man hobbled towards her, making a noise that could almost be called a sigh. Then, it made a sort of wet rattling sound, drew back its head, and spat--with uncanny accuracy--a glob of something directly onto the burning end of the cigar, dousing the fire. A bit of it splattered on Fergy's cheek and into her hair; she reached up and touched it, flabbergasted: it was sticky sap.
The tree-man let out a dry chuckle, crossing its arms. "C'mon then, let's go get ye compan'in." It hobbled past Fergy in the direction she'd come from. "Th' pair o' ye got business wit' me queen." She walked behind it sullenly, trying to scrape the sap off of her cigar. She slipped it back into her pouch before they reached the airship.
Hearing them approach, Marcus peeked out from behind the silver craft. He stared at the tree-man for a moment. "What the bloody hell is that?"
Fergy shrugged, walking past the stumpy figure to her husband. "It says we have business with its queen."
"Aye, lass, t'was me queen wot brought ye down here. She be in need o' ye."
The couple exchanged a look, and Fergy took the lead: "Well, we refuse to get involved. We were just passing through--over, even, we've got urgent business elsewhere."
"Oh aye? I don' remem'er given' ye a choice, lass."
"What are you going to do?" she asked, grinning, "Spit sap on us 'til we submit?"
Again, the tree-man made a sound like a sigh, a dry rattling like leaves in what was meant to be his throat. There was a creaking noise, like a great tree blowing in a heavy wind--and then it was like the forest had come to life around them, as vines and other plants shot up from the undergrowth to intertwine their way into the airships inner workings, pulling and tearing at it. And at the same time, two massive, club-like tree-branches swung down from above them, battering the silver craft around like it was a toy. As Fergy and Marcus scrambled away from the attack, the combined might of the plants of the forest bent the ship in two, and then tore it apart, scattering gears and bits of metal everywhere. It only took a matter of seconds, and then silence fell over the woods again.
The tree-man made a noise like it was clearing its throat. "Did tha' get the pi'ture across, ye two?"
Marcus eyed the remains of their stolen craft. "I don't... think we really have a choice, do we?"
"Tha's a good lad. Let's mosey." It turned and hobbled deeper into the woods, Fergy and Marcus trailing behind it.
"You know," Fergy said, after about an hour of difficult hiking through the forest, "He was just asking a question. He wasn't refusing, so much as finding out what would happen if we did."
The tree-man chuckled. "An' I showed ye."
"Which is true, yes," the woman continued. "But think about it. We could've just flown the airship to your queen, saved us a lot of time."
"Would ye 'ave?"
Fergy pursed her lips and looked thoughtful for a moment. "Probably not," she answered.
Behind them, lagging a few steps, Marcus slipped his hand into his jacket and produced a silver flask, which he took a sip from; he never took his eyes off his wife while he drank, and as she started to glance back, he slipped it silently back into his pocket.
"How long has it been since we got any real sleep?" she asked him, walking backwards for a moment.
Marcus shrugged. "Couple days, I reckon. We were up all night last night, at the Duke's soirée, and the night before, we--well, we were awake. So yeah, a couple days."
Fergy turned around and resumed speaking to their escort. "See, it's just that we're bloody tired. I mean--I dunno, do you even get tired? Do tree-people... er... what the hell are you, anyways?"
"A nymph o' th' wood," it replied.
"Wait," Marcus interrupted, "Wait, whoa-whoa-whoa--you're a wood nymph?"
"Aye, what'd ye expect? A bloomin' faerie or summat?"
"Well, yes."
It let out another dry chuckle. "Well, ye're only 'alf wrong, lad. See, I am a bit mo' faerie-like than I'm lettin' on--but ye cannae see me, flittin' aboot th' forest. Ye' mortal eyes jes' en't built for it."
Marcus lit up, understanding; "Then this is a representation--a form you've taken to communicate with us, built out of branches to represent something like us. But if you'll pardon my criticism, that's a pretty shoddily formed human-look--you look like an overweight kid more than a grown male."
"En't 'ooman. S'posed t' be a dorf."
Fergy piped up then: "But how do you know what a dwarf even looks like? They don't ever come out of their caves."
"En't true, one o' em passed t'ruough 'ere couple weeks back. Took a fancy t' 'im, but 'e wouldn' 'ave any o' it and fled t' tha' damnedable tower."
"Took a... fancy?"
"Aye, but 'e wouldn' let me in. Took up a fight an' ran offt, like I say."
Marcus' brows furrowed. "Wouldn't... wait, what does your queen want us for?"
"En't for me t' say." After that, the nymph's stumpy form went silent, and the couple couldn't get an answer out of him. Eventually, they reached a clearing, in the middle of which was a large stump, formed almost like a chair, with a large green plant apparently growing out of it. "'Ere we are now, ye two, th' queen o' th' for'st."
At first, they weren't sure what it was, exactly, they were looking at. Then, like a blooming flower, the plant--the queen of the forest--rose from its throne and stood to its full height, a good head taller than Marcus. Green vines and leaves, brown branches and twigs, twisted and wound into a willowy human-like shape. Looking at it, it was clear that a more skilled hand had created the lanky body than the one that had created their stumpy escort, but even then, it wasn't quite right. The figure's hips and breasts were too wide and round, its waist too narrow and its neck too long; it looked almost like a caricature of a human being, like a child's drawing. From behind the flat wooden face, identical to its servants, long green vines streamed out, each "hair" spouting tiny pink flowers.
Marcus bowed and Fergy curtsied, lowering her eyes, and when they both rose, the queen stood before them, oddly majestic. "Well, aren't you lovelies something nice to look upon?" it said, the voice coming at once from behind the wooden face and from all around them. "Yes, yes, darlings, you will do nicely."
Fergy took a step towards the green creature, and curtsied again. "Your grace--you've plucked us from the sky and destroyed our means of conveyance. Is there some job you'd like us to perform, some task?"
The queen gave out a musical little laugh, sounding almost human. "To the west of this spot, deep in my woods, magicians built a tower of stone, wherein lives a sorceress. Around it, she has created a ring of fire and scorched ground, chopping down and burning my trees, my plants, to keep me out." The queen reached up one green arm and stroked Fergy's cheek with the end of it--the arm lacked hands and simply came to a point. "You can imagine how frustrating that might be? This place is more than my home, it is me. Can you imagine it? A creature, say, setting your shoulder on fire and living in the burn?"
Fergy tilted her head to the side. "The circle keeps you out--you can't handle fire. Would you have us cross this ring and fetch something for you? That's sort of our specialty."
Again, musical laughter echoed from the forest queen. "Aren't you a funny thing? I'm the queen of the forest, darling--why would I send a common... a thief, you say? Why would I send a common thief when I could just do it myself, dear?"
Marcus interjected, "But you just said you couldn't do it yourself, you can't reach the tower."
"Indeed no," the queen replied, now idly stroking Fergy's hair. "Not in this body, at least. Why do you think I dragged your magic boat out of the sky?"
Realization hit the couple. Fergy tried to take a step backwards but the queen's arms were behind her neck and back, holding her in place. Marcus tried to grab for her, but the stumpy tree-man threw itself between them and shoved him violently back with its club hands; he was oddly strong, and the much-larger Marcus lost his balance and fell. Fergy stammered out, "No no wait wait wait, whoa, no no no!" and squirmed to get free as the queen brought its wooden face close up against Fergy's. The tree-man held Marcus down, aided by the undergrowth of the forest itself.
A heavy silence fell over the clearing, an utter stillness as Marcus watched helplessly from the ground. He struggled again to get free, but was held too tight.
And then Fergy cocked her head to the side and asked, "Wait, what? Was something supposed to happen there?"
The queen pulled her face back, and almost seemed to frown. "Quite."
"Didn't work, did it?" the woman continued.
"No. Hang on, lovely, let me try again." And again, the queen brought her face close against Fergy's, but again, nothing happened. "Well," she said, "That is really frustrating. How are you doing that, darling?"
Fergy just smiled.
"Well you're doing it somehow, anyways." The queen stroked at what would have been her chin, were she human. "Well, I suppose you want to make it more difficult. A very human trait, I love you for it, dear. Well then, we'll just torture that handsome mate of yours until you let me in."
Fergy held up her hands; "Wait wait wait, I'll cooperate, under one condition."
"Speak your terms."
"Let my husband go."
Marcus struggled more fervently to free himself--and suddenly he was free, though the tree-man interposed itself between him and Fergy.
"Done," said the queen. "Now now, let me in, dear."
Fergy was still smiling. "Can I at least kiss him good-bye?"
"Of course, darling. However, any sign of duplicity and he'll be dead before you know it, and I'll torture you until you let me in. I only want your body in top form, I don't need it that way."
Fergy curtsied; "Wouldn't think of it. Hell, I'll even show you why you failed." Still smiling, she walked around the tree-man her husband, standing close against him. "Trust me," she whispered, winking, before leaning in to kiss him, her hands slipping into his jacket to brush against his chest. "Love you."
Marcus had a confused look on his face. "Love you too."
"Right then," Fergy said, turning back and walking to the queen, "First things first, this is how I screwed you over." She grinned hugely, reaching into her pouch and pulling out the golden cube. She held it in front of her eyes, the open side facing off to the left. "This is how I got away. It's called a lighter, it makes a tiny bit of fire."
The queen leaned in close, her mask-face tilting slightly. "Just a bit, darling? That would hardly keep me out of your brain."
"I know. Wait, I'm sorry, I cocked that up. I said it's how I got away--it is, in fact, how I am going to get away."
"Duplicitous darling! But a tiny bit of fire isn't going to save you."
Fergy laughed. "Of course not! That's why I have this--" With her other hand, she held up a silver flask, unable to keep back a huge, mad grin. "This, your grace, is liquor. Whiskey, I think." She took a long drink from the flask, and spat it out in a stream at the queen, and at the same time activated the lighter, turning the spray of alcohol into a blast of fire. The queen lurched back, and burst into flame. "Hoof it!" Fergy yelled, sprinting away in the confusion. Marcus shoved past the tree-man and followed quickly after her.
Behind them, the queen let out a horrid howl, a howl that was echoed by the forest itself, and soon all the vines and trees and undergrowth they ran through was reaching for them, trying to stop them, trying to smash them. They didn't look back.
"You know you only pissed it off!" Marcus shouted over the noise, leaping over a tree-limb as it swung down to trip him up. "That wasn't its real body!"
Fergy threw herself to the ground and rolled, barely missing a second branch. As she sprung back to her feet at a run, she called back, "I know! But it bought us time, didn't it?!"
"We need to go west, towards this tower it mentioned," Marcus said, running beside his wife now. "This is west, right? I think we're going west."
"We're going west, baby."
"Was that my flask?!" he asked, laughing and dodging a bush as it leaped out at him.
"Yes."
"How did you even know I had it?"
Fergy grinned at him. "We've been married for over a decade, Marcus, it's a bit hard to keep secrets from each other!"
Still running, he threw an arm over her shoulder and shoved her head down protectively. "I knew you hadn't stopped smoking!"
"Did you?"
Marcus laughed. "No--look, there, fire, a wall of fire--the tower!"
"Told you we were going west!" Around them, the forest let out a roar of frustration. "Jump through it?" she asked.
"Jump through it!" Marcus yelled, and together, then sped ahead and jumped, hand in hand, towards--and through--the wall of fire.
On the other side, they landed in a soft bed of burnt plants and ash, rolling and slapping each other to put out the fires that had sprung up in their clothes. Extinguished, they lay there, still holding hands, laughing, covered in ash and soot.
"So how did you do it?" Marcus asked, standing up and attempting to dust himself off in vain.
"What, snatch your flask from your jacket?" Fergy stood up and did the same, and attempted (also in vain) to straighten her hair. "Easy enough."
"No no, how'd you keep that thing out of your brain?"
Fergy shrugged, her smile fading. "No idea. I was as surprised as it was."
He put his free hand on his wife's head and stroked her hair absent-mindedly, letting his thoughts wander. They had been on this job a long time, and some days he could feel it taking its toll. Three months back they had been contacted through rather unusual means by Lady Elizabetta of Merriam to the north, and Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox. Marcus and Fergy's presence, the letter informed them, was requested, to discuss a matter of employment. The letter, which had appeared on the bed of the room they had rented for the night, while they were still sleeping on it, crumbled and turned to dust only seconds after they had finished reading it.
"Magic," he'd muttered disdainfully.
It wasn't much of a surprise, then, when they met in person, to find the Lady Thieren garbed in heavy red robes lined with glowing white slashes; the woman, who looked to be roughly in her fifties, had shoulder-length white hair that flowed in loose ringlets and never seemed to be still. What was a surprise was how old she looked--her skin and facial features didn't seem enhanced at all, an oddity among magic users. It was a rare thing to meet one who didn't look fresh out of her teen years. "You must be Marcus," she'd said as they'd disembarked from their airship, "And Fergesdottir."
"'Fergy' will suffice, thank you," Marcus' wife had replied, smiling coolly; she hated her full given name. "And you must be the ladies Thieren, or rather, the lady and the dame."
"Indeed," Lady Thieren said, bowing. "The proper titles are important--they'll keep us from getting each other confused." She'd winked, smiling with an oddly crooked mouth.
Behind her, Dame Thieren inclined her head slightly in greeting. It was easy to tell she wasn't a magic user, once you got a good look at her: she was a woman in her middle years, her bare arms showing an unusual degree of musculature for what was essentially a lady of the court. She was at least two hand-breadths taller than Marcus. A bastard sword hung across her back, and she wore what looked like a strange cross between an elegant dress and a suit of leather padding and chain mail. Despite her size, garb, and choice in armament, there was oddly very little masculine about her.
"Welp," Fergy had interjected, clapping her hands once, "Enough of the pleasantries. You wanted us here, might I ask what the hell for?" She grinned, and placed her hands on her hips.
The job, as explained by Lady Elizabetta, was simple enough: fly to Pikely, break into her son's keep, and acquire from his person an amulet of some worth. "You're probably wondering," she'd said at the time, "Why I just don't spirit the amulet away with magic or some such, yes?"
"The idea had crossed our minds," Fergy replied. "After all, you planted a letter on us, without ever entering the room. You could say it piqued my curiosity."
"The explanation is simpler than you'd expect," Dame Thieren elaborated. "You're both people of the world, I'm sure you're aware of my brother's reputation. Suffice to say, it's well-earned. He is, in so many words, a very bad man, with the aforementioned very bad reputation, which he himself is aware of. In recent years, he's grown somewhat paranoid that the League of Magisters wants him taken out."
Lady Elizabetta grinned at this, unable to stifle a chuckle. "The League couldn't give a fig, of this I'm sure. They do their best to avoid becoming as meddlesome as they were before the king died."
Fergy asked, "He put up an anti-magic field, didn't he?"
"Indeed," the sorceress replied. "We don't know how, exactly, he's done so--like Rose he takes after his father more than me--but it's there, and I can't get through it, even to verify his location; I only know he's there because I can't find him anywhere else. I imagine the amulet is at the heart of it. Incidentally--if you find he's no longer at Pikely, your contract extends to finding him and finishing the job, regardless of location, at double the pay."
Marcus had spoken up then, "The place is pretty fortified, if what I've heard is true. How do you expect us to get in, much less get an object that... you say he keeps it on his person?" Already a plan had been beginning to come together in his mind.
"My understanding is that you're the best there is at what you do." Lady Elizabetta had smiled. "Besides, I can already see the gears turning in that rugged head of yours. Once you've acquired the amulet, you are to meet Rose in Aeros, where she will be waiting for you. Now," she had extended a hand, which Fergy and Marcus had both shaken, sealing the deal, "Come inside, dears, I've had our cook throw together a bit of a spread. Come eat and relax, and we can discuss the details of your payment."
At the "spread", which was more like a feast than anything he had had in the past, Marcus had gotten to know Dame Thieren a little better while Fergy dealt with the dame's mother.
"You know," he'd said, "A female knight such as yourself isn't exactly... rare, these days, but you're something of an oddity--unless I'm mistaken about your actual title."
Dame Thieren had looked at him over her wine-glass, bemused. "Mother did make it a point to emphasize it, didn't she?"
"She did," Marcus replied. "You're Dame Rose Thieren of Bilox, right?"
"You're correct, yes."
"Bilox, as in the Bilox Shipyards?"
"You know your geography." She'd leaned against the table and regarded him, more curious now. "Have you been there yourself?"
Marcus grinned. "I have. My point is--it's very far from here, on the coast. What's a knight of Bilox doing all this way north?"
"I was born, like my brother, in Pikely. Mother brought me here to Merriam, and I married my way into the Bilox court." The Dame poured herself another glass of wine and drank it down quickly. "My husband was the Lord of Bilox, master of the shipyards. Sadly, we lacked much in military might--"
Marcus held up a hand; "Which is why your mother sent down the might of Merriam and her allies to aid you when Gotha invaded."
"Geography and history," she'd said, amused now. "You're a box of surprises, aren't you?"
"Not so much. Do you know who, exactly, the Duke of Gotha formed his armies with?"
"Rabble, basically," Dame Thieren had replied. "Hired muscle, mostly, cutthroats and corsairs, thieves and mercenari--" She stopped, realization hitting her. "Oh."
Marcus just crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, watching her face.
"Well, I hope you don't harbor some kind of personal grudge," the dame continued, recovering from the shock.
"Of course not," Marcus replied, grinning. "The best part of hired thugs is that we don't have a personal stake in what we get into, for the most part--as long as we get paid."
"If only we could all be so lucky," Dame Thieren murmured.
"Allow me to be frank, Dame Thi--"
"Rose, please. We're in my home, there's no need for formalities, despite what mother may say."
"Allow me to be frank, then, Rose," Marcus repeated, pouring himself a glass of wine. "What the hell happened? Everything was going along fairly dully--skirmishes here and there, both sides grabbing this chunk of land and losing that piece of the coast. And then one day you came sweeping down on your horse, your forces behind you, and you just... smashed us. I'd never seen anything like it."
"It got personal," Rose replied. "My husband fell--and not in battle. Cutthroats in the night. The two of us led the Biloxan forces together, side by side; we treated our men fairly and well. We ran a clean war, pushing your forces back as cleanly as we could--no torture, no rape, and so on. The men my mother sent down to help us were all good men, clean men."
"And in the night," Marcus continued for her, "Dirty men snuck into your camp and put a knife in your husband's ribs."
Rose nodded, lost in thought for the moment. Without a smile, Marcus reached across the table and put a hand on her wrist. "I understand," he said, nodding towards the other end of the room, where Fergy and the Lady Thieren were conversing animatedly.
Rose followed his gaze, frowning. "In any case," she said, "It was a long time ago. Lordship of Bilox was handed over to me, but I turned it down, handing it over to the local nobles, and returned home. I was young still, and it was too much for me. Before I left, they granted me a knighthood for my valor in the final days of the battle."
"You were terrifying," Marcus admitted. "In all that black armor. We called you the Iron Widow. Gothans still tremble at the name."
She furrowed her brows at that. "You knew the moniker? Then why ask me what happened?"
"Getting to know a client," Marcus replied, "And I was curious if the rumors were true. We do dirty deeds for people, Dame. It's good to know how badly it's going to come back and bite us in the ass."
She seemed entertained by the notion. "Well, let me say now that I think you have nothing to worry about on that front. We waged a clean war then, and we'll run this thing clean too. You have my word on that, on my honor as a knight."
"I'm sorry if I've opened up old wounds," Marcus said, smiling.
"No, no. Like I said, it was a long time ago. Now--tell me of your past. If we're going to hire a couple of thieves, I'd like to know they're not going to rob us blind." She grinned, pouring another glass of wine.
They'd talked for a while after that, until Fergy had dragged him off to their room to get some rest. "I like her," he'd said, as they lay in the large bed the Thierens had provided. "It's nice to get a job from someone who isn't a complete terror to be around. We need a better client list."
"Do I need to be jealous?" his wife had murmured, half-asleep.
"You know better."
"Her mom's a hoot." Fergy chuckled, and they drifted off to sleep.
It had taken them two months to properly gather the information needed to set their plan into motion--they'd had to figure out exactly where in the keep Duke Thieren slept, where he kept his spoils, how many soldiers he employed--and that was when they'd realized they were dealing with Rickards, who was almost as notorious as his master. His presence added another level of complexity to the plan--they not only had to catch the Duke off his guard, in a small room with the fewest possible number of guards, but they had to do it without the majordomo there to defend him.
"You scared of one little henchman?" Fergy had chided.
Marcus only response had been a curt, "Yes."
The silver airship they had stolen from him ran so quietly that, lost in his thoughts, it took Marcus a few minutes to realize that the propulsion device had cut off. He frowned, pulling a few levers and hitting a few switches, but none seemed to have any effect on the craft's performance. They were, once again, traveling by momentum alone, and slowly descending towards the forest. "You've got to be pulling my leg," he muttered to himself. He leaned on the control shaft, trying to steer the silver ship towards the edge of the woods--but while he could hear the rudders in the rear turning, the ship itself continued on its course.
"You have got to be pulling my leg," he exclaimed. Leaning back in the pilot's chair, he put a hand on his wife's shoulder and shook her gently. "Ferg. Hey, Fergy love, wake up."
"Did we make it to Aeros already?" she muttered groggily.
"Not quite," Marcus responded. He explained the situation to her.
Fergy's lips twisted into a crooked frown. "We're being pulled down there," she said eventually. "This is going to end stupidly. I've just got a feeling. That's the kind of luck we've been dragging around with us this whole job. First the letter, then that nut in Sully, then my airship..."
"I don't doubt it," her husband replied. "Well, we're about to hit the treetops, better tie yourself down. I'm sure it's going to get bumpy."
A few minutes later they touched down on the forest floor after a short, strangely smooth descent. Marcus stood on the deck, staring up at the canopy, a confused look on his face. "There's no way we just flew straight down through that without either zigging and zagging, or hitting something."
"That's great and dandy. Can you fly us out of here, baby?" Fergy hopped over the guardrail and landed on the thick grass, stumbling forward slightly with the impact.
"Just give me time and I'll get it working again." He jumped down beside her and moved around to the back of the ship, muttering to himself.
"Just do your thing. I'm gonna see if I can find... I dunno, some berries or something. I'm starving and we left all our food on the other ship." Fergy picked her way across the thick underbrush. When she was what she figured was a suitable distance away, she dug around in her pack for a moment and produced two objects: a brown cylinder a little bigger around than her thumb, and a gold cube, open on one side. She held the cylinder between her teeth by one end and placed the other end inside the cube; a moment later the cube produced a flash and a faint hissing noise. When she moved the cube away, the end of the cylinder not in her mouth was glowing bright orange with a smoldering flame. The cube disappeared into her pouch and she stood there, puffing idly at the cigar, surveying the area around her.
The forest was just as dense and thick as it had looked from the sky, and Marcus was right: there was no way the airship had just slipped through the canopy as easily as it had without some kind of outside influence. She had just started going through a checklist of possibilities when a voice behind her piped up: "Lass, if'n ye don' mind, could ye put that abominable thing out?"
Fergy spun around, her hand moving to her dagger instinctively--but the weapon stayed in its sheath. The speaker was a good distance away, its hands held in the air--if they could be called hands. It appeared to be a stocky, stumpy approximation of a man, made entirely of brown, knotty branches intertwined into a roughly human shape. Its arms and legs terminated in round clubs. Its face was a single sheet of wood, blank and expressionless--ambiguous--with a horizontal slit approximating a mouth. There was something off about it, though--the proportions were all wrong: the head was too small for the shoulders, the arms too long for the torso, and the legs too short for the whole thing.
Fergy took the cigar out of her mouth and examined it, then smelled the shaft, frowning, before looking back at the tree-person. No, it wasn't one of the "special" cigars she'd acquired in Sully, so she was definitely seeing the stumpy figure and not hallucinating. "And..." she stopped, unsure of how exactly to react, "And if I don't?" She puffed at the cigar defiantly.
The tree-man hobbled towards her, making a noise that could almost be called a sigh. Then, it made a sort of wet rattling sound, drew back its head, and spat--with uncanny accuracy--a glob of something directly onto the burning end of the cigar, dousing the fire. A bit of it splattered on Fergy's cheek and into her hair; she reached up and touched it, flabbergasted: it was sticky sap.
The tree-man let out a dry chuckle, crossing its arms. "C'mon then, let's go get ye compan'in." It hobbled past Fergy in the direction she'd come from. "Th' pair o' ye got business wit' me queen." She walked behind it sullenly, trying to scrape the sap off of her cigar. She slipped it back into her pouch before they reached the airship.
Hearing them approach, Marcus peeked out from behind the silver craft. He stared at the tree-man for a moment. "What the bloody hell is that?"
Fergy shrugged, walking past the stumpy figure to her husband. "It says we have business with its queen."
"Aye, lass, t'was me queen wot brought ye down here. She be in need o' ye."
The couple exchanged a look, and Fergy took the lead: "Well, we refuse to get involved. We were just passing through--over, even, we've got urgent business elsewhere."
"Oh aye? I don' remem'er given' ye a choice, lass."
"What are you going to do?" she asked, grinning, "Spit sap on us 'til we submit?"
Again, the tree-man made a sound like a sigh, a dry rattling like leaves in what was meant to be his throat. There was a creaking noise, like a great tree blowing in a heavy wind--and then it was like the forest had come to life around them, as vines and other plants shot up from the undergrowth to intertwine their way into the airships inner workings, pulling and tearing at it. And at the same time, two massive, club-like tree-branches swung down from above them, battering the silver craft around like it was a toy. As Fergy and Marcus scrambled away from the attack, the combined might of the plants of the forest bent the ship in two, and then tore it apart, scattering gears and bits of metal everywhere. It only took a matter of seconds, and then silence fell over the woods again.
The tree-man made a noise like it was clearing its throat. "Did tha' get the pi'ture across, ye two?"
Marcus eyed the remains of their stolen craft. "I don't... think we really have a choice, do we?"
"Tha's a good lad. Let's mosey." It turned and hobbled deeper into the woods, Fergy and Marcus trailing behind it.
"You know," Fergy said, after about an hour of difficult hiking through the forest, "He was just asking a question. He wasn't refusing, so much as finding out what would happen if we did."
The tree-man chuckled. "An' I showed ye."
"Which is true, yes," the woman continued. "But think about it. We could've just flown the airship to your queen, saved us a lot of time."
"Would ye 'ave?"
Fergy pursed her lips and looked thoughtful for a moment. "Probably not," she answered.
Behind them, lagging a few steps, Marcus slipped his hand into his jacket and produced a silver flask, which he took a sip from; he never took his eyes off his wife while he drank, and as she started to glance back, he slipped it silently back into his pocket.
"How long has it been since we got any real sleep?" she asked him, walking backwards for a moment.
Marcus shrugged. "Couple days, I reckon. We were up all night last night, at the Duke's soirée, and the night before, we--well, we were awake. So yeah, a couple days."
Fergy turned around and resumed speaking to their escort. "See, it's just that we're bloody tired. I mean--I dunno, do you even get tired? Do tree-people... er... what the hell are you, anyways?"
"A nymph o' th' wood," it replied.
"Wait," Marcus interrupted, "Wait, whoa-whoa-whoa--you're a wood nymph?"
"Aye, what'd ye expect? A bloomin' faerie or summat?"
"Well, yes."
It let out another dry chuckle. "Well, ye're only 'alf wrong, lad. See, I am a bit mo' faerie-like than I'm lettin' on--but ye cannae see me, flittin' aboot th' forest. Ye' mortal eyes jes' en't built for it."
Marcus lit up, understanding; "Then this is a representation--a form you've taken to communicate with us, built out of branches to represent something like us. But if you'll pardon my criticism, that's a pretty shoddily formed human-look--you look like an overweight kid more than a grown male."
"En't 'ooman. S'posed t' be a dorf."
Fergy piped up then: "But how do you know what a dwarf even looks like? They don't ever come out of their caves."
"En't true, one o' em passed t'ruough 'ere couple weeks back. Took a fancy t' 'im, but 'e wouldn' 'ave any o' it and fled t' tha' damnedable tower."
"Took a... fancy?"
"Aye, but 'e wouldn' let me in. Took up a fight an' ran offt, like I say."
Marcus' brows furrowed. "Wouldn't... wait, what does your queen want us for?"
"En't for me t' say." After that, the nymph's stumpy form went silent, and the couple couldn't get an answer out of him. Eventually, they reached a clearing, in the middle of which was a large stump, formed almost like a chair, with a large green plant apparently growing out of it. "'Ere we are now, ye two, th' queen o' th' for'st."
At first, they weren't sure what it was, exactly, they were looking at. Then, like a blooming flower, the plant--the queen of the forest--rose from its throne and stood to its full height, a good head taller than Marcus. Green vines and leaves, brown branches and twigs, twisted and wound into a willowy human-like shape. Looking at it, it was clear that a more skilled hand had created the lanky body than the one that had created their stumpy escort, but even then, it wasn't quite right. The figure's hips and breasts were too wide and round, its waist too narrow and its neck too long; it looked almost like a caricature of a human being, like a child's drawing. From behind the flat wooden face, identical to its servants, long green vines streamed out, each "hair" spouting tiny pink flowers.
Marcus bowed and Fergy curtsied, lowering her eyes, and when they both rose, the queen stood before them, oddly majestic. "Well, aren't you lovelies something nice to look upon?" it said, the voice coming at once from behind the wooden face and from all around them. "Yes, yes, darlings, you will do nicely."
Fergy took a step towards the green creature, and curtsied again. "Your grace--you've plucked us from the sky and destroyed our means of conveyance. Is there some job you'd like us to perform, some task?"
The queen gave out a musical little laugh, sounding almost human. "To the west of this spot, deep in my woods, magicians built a tower of stone, wherein lives a sorceress. Around it, she has created a ring of fire and scorched ground, chopping down and burning my trees, my plants, to keep me out." The queen reached up one green arm and stroked Fergy's cheek with the end of it--the arm lacked hands and simply came to a point. "You can imagine how frustrating that might be? This place is more than my home, it is me. Can you imagine it? A creature, say, setting your shoulder on fire and living in the burn?"
Fergy tilted her head to the side. "The circle keeps you out--you can't handle fire. Would you have us cross this ring and fetch something for you? That's sort of our specialty."
Again, musical laughter echoed from the forest queen. "Aren't you a funny thing? I'm the queen of the forest, darling--why would I send a common... a thief, you say? Why would I send a common thief when I could just do it myself, dear?"
Marcus interjected, "But you just said you couldn't do it yourself, you can't reach the tower."
"Indeed no," the queen replied, now idly stroking Fergy's hair. "Not in this body, at least. Why do you think I dragged your magic boat out of the sky?"
Realization hit the couple. Fergy tried to take a step backwards but the queen's arms were behind her neck and back, holding her in place. Marcus tried to grab for her, but the stumpy tree-man threw itself between them and shoved him violently back with its club hands; he was oddly strong, and the much-larger Marcus lost his balance and fell. Fergy stammered out, "No no wait wait wait, whoa, no no no!" and squirmed to get free as the queen brought its wooden face close up against Fergy's. The tree-man held Marcus down, aided by the undergrowth of the forest itself.
A heavy silence fell over the clearing, an utter stillness as Marcus watched helplessly from the ground. He struggled again to get free, but was held too tight.
And then Fergy cocked her head to the side and asked, "Wait, what? Was something supposed to happen there?"
The queen pulled her face back, and almost seemed to frown. "Quite."
"Didn't work, did it?" the woman continued.
"No. Hang on, lovely, let me try again." And again, the queen brought her face close against Fergy's, but again, nothing happened. "Well," she said, "That is really frustrating. How are you doing that, darling?"
Fergy just smiled.
"Well you're doing it somehow, anyways." The queen stroked at what would have been her chin, were she human. "Well, I suppose you want to make it more difficult. A very human trait, I love you for it, dear. Well then, we'll just torture that handsome mate of yours until you let me in."
Fergy held up her hands; "Wait wait wait, I'll cooperate, under one condition."
"Speak your terms."
"Let my husband go."
Marcus struggled more fervently to free himself--and suddenly he was free, though the tree-man interposed itself between him and Fergy.
"Done," said the queen. "Now now, let me in, dear."
Fergy was still smiling. "Can I at least kiss him good-bye?"
"Of course, darling. However, any sign of duplicity and he'll be dead before you know it, and I'll torture you until you let me in. I only want your body in top form, I don't need it that way."
Fergy curtsied; "Wouldn't think of it. Hell, I'll even show you why you failed." Still smiling, she walked around the tree-man her husband, standing close against him. "Trust me," she whispered, winking, before leaning in to kiss him, her hands slipping into his jacket to brush against his chest. "Love you."
Marcus had a confused look on his face. "Love you too."
"Right then," Fergy said, turning back and walking to the queen, "First things first, this is how I screwed you over." She grinned hugely, reaching into her pouch and pulling out the golden cube. She held it in front of her eyes, the open side facing off to the left. "This is how I got away. It's called a lighter, it makes a tiny bit of fire."
The queen leaned in close, her mask-face tilting slightly. "Just a bit, darling? That would hardly keep me out of your brain."
"I know. Wait, I'm sorry, I cocked that up. I said it's how I got away--it is, in fact, how I am going to get away."
"Duplicitous darling! But a tiny bit of fire isn't going to save you."
Fergy laughed. "Of course not! That's why I have this--" With her other hand, she held up a silver flask, unable to keep back a huge, mad grin. "This, your grace, is liquor. Whiskey, I think." She took a long drink from the flask, and spat it out in a stream at the queen, and at the same time activated the lighter, turning the spray of alcohol into a blast of fire. The queen lurched back, and burst into flame. "Hoof it!" Fergy yelled, sprinting away in the confusion. Marcus shoved past the tree-man and followed quickly after her.
Behind them, the queen let out a horrid howl, a howl that was echoed by the forest itself, and soon all the vines and trees and undergrowth they ran through was reaching for them, trying to stop them, trying to smash them. They didn't look back.
"You know you only pissed it off!" Marcus shouted over the noise, leaping over a tree-limb as it swung down to trip him up. "That wasn't its real body!"
Fergy threw herself to the ground and rolled, barely missing a second branch. As she sprung back to her feet at a run, she called back, "I know! But it bought us time, didn't it?!"
"We need to go west, towards this tower it mentioned," Marcus said, running beside his wife now. "This is west, right? I think we're going west."
"We're going west, baby."
"Was that my flask?!" he asked, laughing and dodging a bush as it leaped out at him.
"Yes."
"How did you even know I had it?"
Fergy grinned at him. "We've been married for over a decade, Marcus, it's a bit hard to keep secrets from each other!"
Still running, he threw an arm over her shoulder and shoved her head down protectively. "I knew you hadn't stopped smoking!"
"Did you?"
Marcus laughed. "No--look, there, fire, a wall of fire--the tower!"
"Told you we were going west!" Around them, the forest let out a roar of frustration. "Jump through it?" she asked.
"Jump through it!" Marcus yelled, and together, then sped ahead and jumped, hand in hand, towards--and through--the wall of fire.
On the other side, they landed in a soft bed of burnt plants and ash, rolling and slapping each other to put out the fires that had sprung up in their clothes. Extinguished, they lay there, still holding hands, laughing, covered in ash and soot.
"So how did you do it?" Marcus asked, standing up and attempting to dust himself off in vain.
"What, snatch your flask from your jacket?" Fergy stood up and did the same, and attempted (also in vain) to straighten her hair. "Easy enough."
"No no, how'd you keep that thing out of your brain?"
Fergy shrugged, her smile fading. "No idea. I was as surprised as it was."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
