Bill realised that the staff was home to more than just the malevolent spirit of the Faerie King, but also a host of other victims and they, it seemed, were being released first. Though he couldn’t begin to guess where the spare bodies came from.
Bently, who’d, for a moment, stood in complete bewilderment, suddenly leapt across the room, his claws bared, his face snarling.
“You killed my master!” he snarled.
Brianna was the first to react. Drawing her short sword, she thrust it towards the enraged hobgoblin so that he only just drew up in time before being skewered.
“We clearly didn’t kill him enough,” she said, with a grim smile, “but perhaps we can make amends.”
“No!” screamed Bently as he paced just beyond the range of Brianna’s weapon. He watched as Bill, who’d belatedly drawn his weapon, sidled past him and into the chamber.
“Who in the hells are you,” spat the pretty girl with the blonde hair.
Bill, who’d been heading for the portmanteau of the warrior and her acolyte, turned to face the girl. She was beautiful in the kind of universal way that would earn him a week’s worth of subtle punishment from Brianna if he dared to notice. And yet, his instinct told him that something was very wrong - a kind of inner voice that was trying to make itself heard over the monkey noise of his baser instincts. No, he reckoned that this girl’s beauty was, indeed, only skin deep and that, just beneath the surface, was something altogether darker, hairier and entirely alien.
“My name is William Strike,” he said, despite his reservations, his inner ape deciding that, whatever lurked beneath the skin, she was a bit of alright on the surface. And, after all, politeness never hurt anyone37.
The girl’s face contracted. It was almost as if the owner of the face was still getting used to the finer controls of its musculature. Bill was pretty sure she was trying to communicate anger, but the effect more closely resembled the sort of expression a baboon’s face might wear having consumed rather too much papaya sangria. Whatever a baboon was.
“I don’t care what your name is!” she screamed, “I asked what are you doing here?”
Bill shook his head. “Actually, you did…”
“Who are you?” asked Brianna.
Ice poured down Bill’s spine and the self-preservation circuit of his inner monkey brought his hands down to his groin as if protecting a banana.
“I asked first!” pouted the girl.
Brianna thumbed at Bill dismissively. “And that idiot answered you. He’s called Bill, and I’m his girlfriend.”
Bill warmed up considerably at this, took his hands away from his bowl of fruit and concentrated on preventing them from exploding.
The girl looked from one to the other, her face rippling between anger, fear and sheer perplexity.
“I am called Ambler, and this is Aligvok,” said another voice.
The trio had become a foursome, with Bently still haunting the extreme range of Brianna’s short sword.
The young man in the white shroud smiled. “This body was meant for him, you see. And now he finds himself trapped in the form of a woman.”
“Yes, curse you. If it hadn’t been for you and that lump over there, I’d be inhabiting a much more credible body, one that I could coordinate more easily.” As he said this38 his chest wobbled and Bill developed double vision as he focused his concentration on keeping the increasing warmth contained.
“Welcome to my world,” said Brianna. Although, Bill thought, Brianna had somewhat less to worry about, and keep coordinated, than the voluptuous blonde. His reward for thinking this was a sharp kick in the shins.
“What was that for?”
Brianna just looked at him. “Consider it either payment on account or fair warning,” she said.
“Will you all just shut up!” bellowed Aligvok, his perfect features bent out of shape as if they momentarily mirrored the soul inside. “I want to know what you are doing here!” He stamped his foot and stood, shaking with barely contained rage.
“We were sent here by Marcello of Varma,” said Bill.
Aligvok’s face froze and drained of colour. He fell.
#
Lunch had been meagre fayre, taken as it was in the dusty corridors of the labyrinth of Minus. Epocrypha had, again, offered to share his spider cache with his fellow soldiers but had been refused by all but Maestro Minito. The world’s greatest chef had nibbled at a fried leg and pronounced it a little tart for his taste.
“Now, if you could come by a couple of nice, juicy, rats, I could cook us up a right nice stir-fry,” he said as Epocrypha secreted the remains of the arachnid within the filthy folds of his jacket.
“Rats? That’s disgustin', so it is,” he said, before rustling away and plopping himself into a mercifully dark corner.
Thun and Minissun sat together, backs against the wall. Minissun had almost entirely recovered from her brush with death. Dwarfs are, after all, remarkably resilient. It’s said that, should the Dark One return spreading fire and ash to the four corners of the world, leaving a smoking ruin behind him, the first moving thing in the desolation would be the hands of a dwarf pulling himself (or herself) from the rubble. Hairless, skin burned to the colour of bacon, but alive and ready to exploit the shit out of anyone else who’d survived.39
An unlikely friendship had formed between Jonathan Clegg and Ratbag. Clegg seemed to appreciate having someone to listen to and Ratbag, it seemed, was content to wait upon his stool. Takes all sorts.
Chortley, McGuff, Velicity and Mother Hemlock sat beside the tiny camping stove that the sergeant had, rather resourcefully, brought with him into the maze. Its feeble flame was the brightest light in the corridor once Fitzmichael had ordered all but one of the torches to be extinguished.
As Velicity gracefully made herself comfortable, Chortley became distracted by the sweet, floral, scent that seemed to emanate from her very soul. However tired, bedraggled and downright rank the rest of them were, she seemed barely affected; her dusty, dirty, clothes somehow given an air of grace by her beauty. As she moved again, the fire momentarily flared.
“It feels as though we’ve been in this maze for ever,” she said, pouting beautifully and drawing doodles in the dust on the floor.
“We’ve got a long way to go, yet,” responded Mother Hemlock.
A chill crept over Chortley. What was wrong with the older witch? In all the time he’d known her, she’d delighted in taunting Velicity and yet here, when even Chortley would have to admit she was behaving like a child, Mother Hemlock had been handed the guillotine string and hadn’t pulled. Was it possible she was scared?
“H’yes,” interjected McGuff, as he chewed on some preserved gristle, “I h’expected to be facin’ monsters and traps and suchlike, I didn’t h'expect to ‘ave to walk so far.”
Chortley had noticed that, in the presence of the witches, McGuff switched to a form of the language that he would consider his Sunday best, but which, in fact, only made him sound like a seal with a chest cold.
“Indeed, Sergeant,” responded Chortley, “we seem to have been walking along dusty corridors for hours. Surely the labyrinth can’t be that huge? At this rate we should have walked through the whole thing and out the other side by now. What do you say, Mother?”
There was no response.
“Mother?”
“What?” Mother Hemlock said, as if waking from deep thought.
Chortley sighed. “We’ve been walking for too long - what’s going on?”
“What?” she responded. “Oh, yes, I’ve been wondering about that.”
“You said the labyrinth wasn’t supposed to be difficult to pass through, it seems quite the reverse to me,” said Chortley, feeling increasingly nervous.
Mother Hemlock turned to face him. “Yes, but then it ain’t us who’s supposed to be in ‘ere.”
Now it was Chortley’s turn. “What?”
“The maze is designed to be no barrier for the servants of Minus. So,
stands to reason there’s somethin’ different about us, somethin’ that’s stoppin’ us goin’ further. We’ve been going in circles, in a manner of speaking.”
“Look,” said Chortley, “I’m exhausted and my patience is thinner than a Rotundian Sovereign.40 Will you please get to the point?” A little vein on his forehead began to pulse.
“Calm down, lad,” Mother Hemlock said, having precisely the opposite effect on Chortley’s stress levels. “I knows this maze was built so’s it would be easy for his henchmen to cross. What do they all have in common, I wonder?”
Velicity stirred. “They’re all evil?”
Mother Hemlock shook her head. “Trouble with that is, who’s to say what’s evil? Who’s to say Minus himself was evil?”
“Well, building a secret maze in the middle of the desert, guarded by stone trolls and with a portal to another world full of goblins isn’t exactly the mark of a hero, is it?” said Chortley.
“No need to get sarky,” Mother Hemlock said, with surprising restraint. “No, I don’t know much about this Minus character, I was never one for history books, or any books for that matter, but he probably didn’t think he was evil. Like most men, he thought he was doing great things, and that what he wanted was also what was good for everyone else.”
Chortley shrugged. “Then what was it? How could his servants pass and his enemies not? Magic?”
Mother Hemlock shook her head. “I don’t think so. Magic has its price and, for it to hold this long, it’d have to be stronger than anything I’ve ever heard of. I reckon I’d sense it if that were the case.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s much point in moving on until we solve it. Shall we ask Clegg?” Chortley sighed. So far, Mr Lah-di-dah had proven to be the most useful of their number, to Chortley’s extreme annoyance. He watched the former adjutant and inveterate smartarse as he languished in the shadows, Ratbag at his heels. What could they be discussing? He was obviously some kind of genius and she was a complete idiot. The only member of the cracked squad with fewer marbles than her had to be Thun, and his IQ was into negative figures.
Chortley’s gaze swept over to the barbarian. He was standing by a corner formed by a right angle in the corridor wall and he looked agitated. Somehow Minissun had communicated to him that they needed to whisper while they were in the labyrinth, but the only effect of this was to make his urgent grumblings even more unintelligible. Chortley wondered what motivated these two simplest of creatures. Why was Thun even part of the Crapplecreek garrison - Chortley was certain he hadn’t been at the battle of the stones and made a note to ask McGuff when they next had a chance to talk privately. He was pretty sure that Thun went wherever there was trouble and that Ratbag would have followed anyone prepared to offer somewhere reasonably comfortable to curl up at night. They’d have just as happily followed someone like whoever it was that built this infernal maze.
Then he had it.
“Minissun!”
The dwarf detached herself from her massive companion, bobbed across to Chortley and nodded.
“What’s the problem with Thun?” Chortley asked.
“Him? I’m not entirely sure, but he seems to think we’re going round in circles.”
Mother Hemlock looked up. “What?”
Minissun looked across at Thun. “Yeh, he says we’ve been here more than once.41Says ‘why we not go through door?’”
“What door?” Chortley said, glancing over at the barbarian who as he watched, was running his hands over the dogleg wall in the corner. “Of course!”
Chortley jumped up, winced, steadied himself and then strode over to Thun. “What are you looking for?”
Thun paused for a moment since talking required all his mental effort. “Door here and not here. We go past more times. Why?”
Chortley thought for a moment, he knew he was on the edge of solving the riddle. Then he saw the chalked line on the wall, made by Ratbag or Epocrypha as their guide back to the entrance. And then he saw another chalked line, just above it. And another. Going round in circles.
“You open it?” he said to the barbarian, trying the McGuff Method of addressing him.
Thun shrugged and his hand began to move again down the wet stone wall which was illuminated fitfully by the guttering light of the camp fire. Suddenly, it came to a stop about halfway down. Thun pushed down hard, there was the metallic shriek of distressed metal being forced to move after centuries welded shut. As if a curtain had been torn aside, the piece of corridor wall turned into a door, plain and obvious, and it swung painfully back on its rusted hinges, Thun’s muscles rippling as he pushed.
By the time he’d finished, the barbarian’s audience included the entire company and McGuff held aloft the lit torch. A gentle breeze disturbed the flame as he held it in the doorway and Chortley could see ancient brickwork extending as far as the light would allow.
He stepped back and looked at Thun, who was pointing down the tunnel with both hands in the manner of a put-upon gorilla showing its particularly slow offspring that they’ve been opening a banana from the wrong end42. Repeatedly.
Chortley clapped Thun on the arm, flinching as his hand hit rock solid muscle. He bit back a yelp, then nodded up at the impassive face. “Well done Thun.”
The barbarian rolled his eyes.
Chapter 20
If Aligvok had entertained any hope of overcoming his physical form as a ringleted blonde girl and to be taken seriously as one of the age’s great wizards, it was lost when he fainted.
He was now sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, with Ambler looking down on him. “Are you quite recovered now, wizard?”
Aligvok looked up at the young man standing above him, a body almost as unrepresentative of the spirit within as his was. Almost. It would be easy to underestimate him if you didn’t know that, behind the boyish exterior, lay the mind of a hardened warrior from centuries ago.
“I am recovered, it must be the dry air down here,” he simpered,
“Seems to me you fainted just after we told you about Marcello,” Brianna said, with her trademark scorn.
Aligvok shook his curls. “Of course not. I am simply not used to this feeble body.”
“Stop!”
They all turned to see Bill running towards Bently who was standing beside one of the remaining, unopened, coffins. Bently pulled the lever.
“Awake, master,” he bellowed, “your faithful servant awaits. Awake!”
There are many forms and interpretations of nothing. There’s the sort of nothing that is the absence of matter, the kind that, when dramatic tension is called for, tends to be labelled nothingness. There’s the nothing that describes how much of a politician’s manifesto promise will see the light of day once the serpent has won the election. And then there’s the sort of nothing that is commonly followed by the word happened. This nothing was of that nature.
The silence was broken by Bill. “Did anything happen?”
“Idiot,” snorted Brianna, “I think we’d know if the Faerie King had been reborn, I mean, look at his servant’s face!”
Tears were running down the pock-marked, sunburnt face of Bently. “He is gone, he is gone,” he muttered, shaking his head sadly.
He stopped moving. “He is gone,” he said again, though this time his voice was edged with anger. “He is gone!”
Bently unfolded like a hunting spider and, with astonishing speed, leapt across the room, grabbing Aligvok by the throat and propelling him backwards to the floor.
Bill darted after him and grabbed at his collar, yanking his head back but the enraged hobgoblin simply tightened his grip on the flailing female body. “You promised my master he would be reborn, you promised! He is my master, my precious, and you stole him from us!”
Muscular arms lifted Bently off Aligvok, leaving red marks on the wizard’s throat. Bently was thrown across the room, as Negstimeaboi looked down at her arms, surprised by her strength, and smiled.
Bill, meanwhile
, ran to Bently’s side and made ready to hold him down. But he lay there, unmoving, his shoulders heaving.
Bill patted his shoulder. “He must have been a good, kind, master to inspire such loyalty,” he said, struggling against the image of the Faerie King glorying in destruction on that hill crowned with a stone circle.
“No, he was, is, a complete bastard,” Bently said, shaking his head sadly, “but he was my master, sadistic as he was, and that craven traitor over there promised to release him.”
Bill looked across at Aligvok as he was helped to his feet by Negstimeaboi, who was still smiling.
“Fool,” he croaked, “it is not my doing that your master remains in the staff, it is these idiots.” Aligvok pointed at Negstimeaboi and Ambler, who was lurking, adoringly, by her side. “All the energy of the orb was used up in their transfers.”
“And yours,” Brianna said.
“Yes, but I am needed to help with the transfer!” Aligvok spat. “Because of their foolishness, there is now no power in the world that can reactivate it and free your master.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said a voice from the doorway.
#
“So, this entire labyrinth is designed to be passable by the stupid,” Chortley said, picking himself up and brushing the dust from his torn breeches. The ballista bolt embedded in the wall behind his head shivered.
“Or very, very, literal,” Mother Hemlock replied. “Seems to me, our friend Minus employed mainly trolls - they’d have been through this maze like a dose of clap in a brothel.”
They’d made good progress over the last hour, and Chortley had made the executive decision that the party should be ordered according to brain-power, thickest first. Thun and Ratbag led the way, followed by Epocrypha, Minissun, Minito and McGuff. Chortley walked in the fragrant company of Velicity and the flammable company of Mother Hemlock, with Clegg bringing up the rear and under strict instructions to say nothing.
Trolls and Tribulations Page 17
