We crossed over and moved on, undiscovered. I liked the hen better than ever. Timing could be everything.
Now the ground got softer. We were entering the swamp. We should be there soon. I looked up at the castle on the small mountain, its lights pretty. That was deceptive, considering the cruelty of its proprietor.
Henrietta paused, tuning in on the past. She could see the actual building of the castle, when things were out in the open. Then she moved forward again, this time leading us somewhat out of the swamp, up the base of the mountain.
We came up to a dark structure. It looked like a little privy. It turned out to be a shed with a board floor. Joe the dragon breathed just enough fire to light the interior. There was a pull ring set on a big board. “Any alarm attached?” I asked Henrietta in a whisper.
She shook her head in a human like way.
I pulled on the ring, but it didn’t budge. It was a giant size board, while I was merely man-sized. Then Carl came to help, and managed to heave it up; he had a lot more muscle than I did. Beneath it was a sort of manhole from which a warm stench rose. Well, it was the sewer.
Metal rungs descended into the depth, which had a little light, maybe from glowing fungus. They were spaced about four feet apart, so were a challenge, but Carl helped again, anchoring himself on the middle rung and using his hands to steady the rest of us down. I was first, and found a level walk not far below. Harriet was second; she slipped and almost fell, but Carl swept her in close and saved her. “Sorry, ma’am; didn’t mean to grope you.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Forgiven.” I appreciated her point, considering that she might otherwise have splashed into the festering sewer below.
Then Joe, in man-form for this. And Henrietta, flying down.
We were in a huge pipe, about ten feet in diameter, with sewage coursing along its lowest portion. We were able to spread our legs and keep our feet clear of it. But we couldn’t avoid its smell.
“Now we follow this up to the king’s chamber,” I said. “Henrietta?”
The hen led the way. The conduit divided as others intersected it, bringing their fragrant effluvia. It seemed that giants had quadruple the smell as well as the height. Fortunately my nose was becoming numb.
We came to a nexus that might be under the central castle, because half a dozen pipes converged on it, forming a larger chamber. Henrietta paused.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“Rats!” Harriet muttered. Was she swearing?
Then I saw it. A giant sewer rat, maybe a hundred pounds in mass, with baleful red eyes. Behind it were others. Oh, no!
I looked around, but of course there was no retreat. In fact other rats were in the other tubes. They had us surrounded and they didn’t look friendly.
Chapter 18:
Children
“I could teleport us out of here,” suggested Carl.
“But we couldn’t teleport forward,” I said. “We would have to go back.”
“Going back is good,” said Joe, as the rats crept closer. He backed into me, and I could literally feel the man shaking. He stepped onto a steaming turd and didn’t seem to notice. “Very, very good.”
“No going back,” I said. “No retreating. We move forward, through the rats.”
“Now I know you’re off your rocker,” said Joe. “And who died and made you the leader? I thought I was the brains of this operation.”
Before I could answer, a particularly big rat charged. Its claws clattered on the walls as it ran nearly sideways, avoiding the muck and filth that pooled the center trough of the pipes.
I reacted first, raising my hands and was about to hurl a fireball, when Harriet grabbed my arm. “You can’t, Jack. The fire will ignite the methane.”
She was right, of course. Additionally, her electric shock wouldn’t work either. This sewer system was literally a ticking time bomb.
Carl removed the dagger given to him by Sydelle. It was, of course, a giant’s dagger, which meant it was big enough to look like a sword to Carl. Luckily, the ex-athlete’s hands were big enough to wrap around the thick grip. He stepped before us and raised the dagger—
And that’s when Henrietta shouted: “Wait! Don’t hurt it!”
Carl looked from the charging rat to her, then looked at me. He held the blade before him. The rat, which was the size of a medium-sized dog, would probably receive a fatal blow.
“Do as she says,” I said.
Carl nodded and lowered the blade, and instead timed a perfect kick that sent the rat skittering through the muck, but otherwise alive.
Before more of the rats could charge, I turned on Henrietta. “What’s going on? What have you seen?”
“These aren’t just rats,” the hen said, squawking in between her words. “They’re children. Giant children. I see...the king turning them into rats, discarding them down here with the others.”
“Why?” said Harriet, turning to face another rat that was inching closer from another, adjoining tube. “Why would he do that?”
Henrietta flapped in mid-air, above the grimy tunnel. I was certain she couldn’t keep airborne for much longer. I waved her over and she perched on my shoulder, her talons digging into my shoulders. Hens were heavy!
“They were servants...and they did something to annoy the king, who transformed them into rats. Their parents think they were killed—and some surely were. But others were tossed down here, to live out their lives as sewer rats.”
I didn’t have time to be appalled. Another rat had decided to charge, and another, and another. They came from all angles, all directions, all sewer pipes. How long the rats had been down here, I didn’t know. Whether or not some were real rats and some were the transformed children, I didn’t know that either. But we played it safe and didn’t fatally hurt any of them. That they were fairly mindless now was obvious, having none of their prior humanity.
We were able to fend off a half dozen easily enough: kicking them aside, and in some cases hurling them aside. They all smelled of wet fur and filth; that a king would choose to reduce his subjects to such a filthy life was beyond me.
The trouble was obvious: there were too many of them. They just kept coming and coming. Good God! How many kids had the king transformed? I didn’t have time to ponder the question. It was all we could do to throw the vicious creatures off us, even as they continued to come.
I didn’t have to be psychic to see what was developing. Soon, we would be overrun, and it would only be a matter of time before rats swarmed us completely, and ate us to the bone. Children or no children, these were now vicious, hungry creatures.
Many of us were now bitten. I nearly used my fire power, but resisted. I sensed Harriet holding back, too. Desperate, I looked up and spotted what had been our goal: a light high above, that surely led into the depths of the castle.
I had an idea. I grabbed the ex-football player, who was presently heaving two snapping rats off his shoulder, one of which had buried its front teeth deep into his flesh. He grunted, wincing, and turned to me. I pointed up to the pinpoint of light.
Focus on that spot, I thought, for the hellish, hungry, snapping sounds in the tunnel were too loud for him to hear me clearly. The clear spot above the hole.
He nodded and did just that. We were just going to have to risk that there was enough space above the hole for all of us. The rats seemed to redouble their efforts, pausing briefly, before charging as one collective unit.
I ordered everyone to grab hold of Carl. I did, too, and felt him wince as I accidentally gripped his wounded shoulder. Indeed, we were all bitten and wounded—which surely drove the rats’ blood lust. They continued coming, swarming and churning, like an ocean tide of red eyes, teeth and hunger.
As the tide of claws and fur swept toward us from seemingly all directions, I closed my eyes and felt the familiar sense of non-movement.
One moment we were in the tunnel, and the next we weren’t.
I almost didn’t wan
t to open my eyes.
But I did so now...
Chapter 19:
Deal
We were in a reasonably clean chamber with brooms, brushes, buckets, and bars of what looked like soap. It was a maintenance working area where the necessary tools were stored. There was a round manhole cover that evidently was normally used to close the hole in the floor; for some reason it had been left off, fortunately for us.
There was a sound. “Get out of sight!” I whispered, leading the way into an overturned bucket whose diameter was a good six feet; there was room for all of us. Then I peeked out around its edge to see what was coming.
It was a giant servant maid, hauling a heavy bag. She went to the hole and peered down. “Are you there, darlings?” she called.
There was an eager chittering from below. She was addressing the rats!
“Here you are,” she said. She reached into the bag and pulled out half a loaf of bread. She dropped it into the hole. There was the sound of scrambling below as the rats pounced on it. She brought out a section of melon, and dropped that. Then the remnant of a cooked animal haunch.
She was feeding the children! She knew the origin of the rats; one of them might have been her own child. She had to know that they had become vicious creatures, but she still loved her child, and was helping in perhaps the only way she could, by feeding the rats the castle leftovers. That was why the cover had been left off: so she could return with the bag of scraps and feed them efficiently. Because it had to be fast; if she got caught, she would surely be punished, maybe beaten, maybe killed. Maybe transformed to something worse than a rat. We had been lucky enough to arrive in time to use the access hole.
“Not coincidence,” Henrietta said. Oh, of course: she had led us to the spot we needed to be, at the time we needed to be there.
The whole scene was both horrible and heartwarming. The servants were giants, but also human. They surely had no love for the cruel king. They were not our enemies. That didn’t mean they would help us; the king could read their minds, and would know the moment one sought to betray him. We remained on our own.
The giant woman emptied her bag of goodies, covered the hole, and departed. We relaxed, relieved.
What next? “We can use this servant’s network of passages to get to the king’s chambers,” I whispered. It was easy to converse quietly, here in the bucket. “It’s designed to keep the help out of sight but able to do their jobs. It will help us do our job.”
“Good thinking,” Harriet murmured.
“Lead us to the king’s suite,” I told Henrietta. “By a route that avoids the castle personnel.”
“Of course,” the hen agreed.
We headed out. The service routes were a labyrinth of diverging and intersecting passages, cunningly fitted around and between the regular halls and rooms of the castle. They seldom were direct, but did deviously get there.
“Oops,” Henrietta said.
“What is it?” I asked, concerned.
“Someone changed his route. He’s blocking off the passage we need to take, and there are workers in the others. We’re caught.”
Harriet glanced at me with a ‘Do Something’ look.
“Gather in to Carl,” I said, doing so myself. “Carl, take us back to the storeroom.”
Suddenly we were there. We had escaped discovery. This time.
“We need a distraction,” Joe said. “Chicken, make some gold.”
I didn’t like his preempting my position of authority, but let it be. “Why?”
“So the next time we’re trapped, we have something distracting.”
I worked it out. If a giant discovered a gold artifact that wasn’t part of the king’s treasury, he would probably snatch it up and depart post haste. And not bother us.
“Good idea,” I said grudgingly. It was, after all, his job to be cunning. I swallowed my pride.
Henrietta touched the smallest mini-bar of soap, and it became a gold brick. She touched others, converting them similarly. We each took one. They were heavy, but the protection they represented was worth it.
“Is it clear now, where we were?” I asked Henrietta.
“Yes, for now. It’s a fairly busy annex.”
“Carl, take us back there,” I said.
We gathered in to him, and were back at the other passage. We resumed cautious travel.
Only to encounter a sleeping giant. He was evidently goofing off on the job, but woke when we intruded. Henrietta hadn’t picked up on him because he had been unconscious and not in motion. Before we could back off, he woke. “What’s this?” he demanded.
My mind blanked; I had no strategy to deal with this.
Joe stepped into the breach. “We are elven inspectors,” he said smoothly. “Checking out passages and performance. Now I might question why you are sleeping when you should be working, but I’m softhearted, so take this bar of gold and get out of here, and we’ll pretend this never happened.” He proffered his gold soap.
The giant scratched his head. He was evidently not the brightest bulb on the chandelier.
“Of course if anyone sees you, they’ll take that gold,” Joe pointed out.
“Yeh,” the giant agreed. He heaved himself up, took the gold, and departed rapidly. He would stay away from the others, at least until he had hidden the gold.
“That made no sense at all,” Harriet said. “Why should an inspector pay off a miscreant?”
“But he believed it,” Joe said. “That’s what counts.”
So it seemed. Joe was a con man, and could be persuasive when he wanted to be. It had seemed to make sense to me, until Harriet spoke.
We moved on, this time not encountering any other servants.
“Here,” Henrietta said, pausing at an access door. “The king is on his bed, with a concubine, sleeping.”
“Um.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the king would have company, but of course he would. Well, it might mean that we would wind up with an extra person in the cage. We could sort that out at the other end.
“This is too pat,” Joe said ominously. “I think it’s a con.”
And he was a con man. He surely had a feel for what didn’t add up.
“What would you have us do?” I asked him.
“Get out of here now, and not return. This is a bum mission.”
I looked at the others. “Any seconds to the motion?”
“No,” Henrietta squawked.
“No,” Harriet said.
“We’ve come this far,” Carl said. “Let’s finish it.”
“We’ll finish it,” I agreed grimly.
“This is mischief,” Joe muttered. “I hope I am mistaken.”
I put my hand on the big access panel lever and pushed it down. The panel door swung inward, revealing the candle-lit king’s bedroom. I stepped quietly through, followed by the others. There was the giant bed, eight feet high, with a giant woman’s bare foot at the edge. I knew it was the concubine, because the toenails were brightly painted. It seemed that women of any size were vain about their nails.
But it was the king’s foot we needed, or any other part of his body that Carl could lay a hand on. Maybe a hand would be dropping over the edge, in our reach. Then zip! and we’d all be in Sydelle’s cage and zonked out by her sleep spell. We sidled on around the bed.
Suddenly I froze. This wasn’t deliberate; something had fastened on my mind, paralyzing me. I felt rather than saw the others freeze similarly.
“Welcome, travelers, to my humble abode.”
It was the king, wide awake!
“You should have heeded your adviser,” the king continued. “But maybe it takes one con man to recognize the wisdom of another.” The king’s huge legs swung down over the edge of the bed to land on the floor. His head came into view, looking down on us. “Did you really think you could walk in here and capture me? I haven’t kept my crown by being stupid.” He glanced to the side. “Topsy, make our guests comfortable. Wash them off first, so they
won’t stink so bad. The sewer is hell on hygiene.”
The concubine got off the bed and circled around to us. She set down what looked like a have-a-heart mouse trap, the kind that caught rodents without hurting them. She picked Joe up, efficiently stripped away his clothing, washed him with a wet sponge, then opened the cage’s wire door and put Joe in. Then she did the same for Carl, then Harriet, then Henrietta, and finally me. She closed the door and it latched. Then we were released, mentally. Not that it did us any good: we were prisoners in a cage. Carl, I saw now, was in a separate chamber, out of our reach. He would not be teleporting us to safety.
“Now let me consider,” the king said. “Should I let you try to persuade me that you have talents I can use, such as pyrotechnic, electricity, retrocognition, shape changing, or teleportation? Certainly I can use the gold the chicken provides. Or should I simply conclude that you are not trustworthy, and turn you into rats?”
He knew all about us! He must have been able to read our minds despite our shields.
“He’s toying with us,” Joe muttered.
“Ah, I have it,” the king said as if just thinking of it. “I will use you as hostages to trade for the one I want, the Sorceress Sydelle. The bunch of you real world midgets are largely harmless, but she is dangerous. I underestimated her once, thinking that execution would deal with her, and she escaped me. Now she’s too canny to come within my reach. But she has one surpassing weakness: decency. She won’t want to see her little friends tortured, enslaved, or killed. So she just might make the trade, if properly persuaded.”
He gazed at us. “Yes, I believe that will do. Very well. You, Carl, will teleport back to her, carrying my offer. I will give her an hour to decide. If she comes here within that time, I will free the rest of you. If she does not, I will torture one of you to death and send her the corpse. If that does not persuade her, I will do the same with another, and so on, until the list expires. I suspect that in time she will see the light.” He eyed us coldly. “I hope for your sakes she does,” he said, smiling. But there was no smile in his eyes.
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