by Lionel Fenn
Gideon couldn't help the itching of his palms. "You mean to tell me these people brought all this here voluntarily?"
"I said your way was quaint," she told him as she adjusted a ruby necklace around her throat. "I didn't say this way was smart."
The urge to take some of it with him was strong, but he resisted, knowing that he didn't need the extra weight, nor the possible complications of having his pockets jammed with gems when he had to fight again.
Which he did on the next floor.
When they came through, there were fourteen Moglar sitting on pillows, listening to a fifteenth singing them a song from the days when Moglar were Moglar and the Wamchu was only a small child's nightmare. It was very touching. It gave the scruffy giant dwarves an added dimension, until the singer came to the part about having the child for breakfast because the Wamchu gave him nightmares. That was when Red came through the floor, saw the Moglar just lying around waiting to be trampled, and trampled them. While Tag bashed them, the walls, the pillows, and nearly Vorden Lain.
The noise was horrendous because the warriors, possibly anticipating the band's arrival, and possibly because they knew the singer's reputation, were already armed. And they fought fiercely, bravely, and only their sheer superiority in numbers enabled them to last as long as they did. Which, in the lifetime of a lorra, wasn't that long at all.
The Moglar were good, but Gideon and his band had more incentive than most, struggling as they were to prevent the end of the world; and ultimately, though not without a number of close shaves, which Gideon suspected would not be written in his memoirs because no one would believe them; they prevailed.
And when the fight was over and Ivy was tending a small cut on Gideon's left arm with sufficient solicitation to get her arrested in his old world, he noted the remarkable similarity between the structure of this tower and the Trail of Stairs, saving of course the fact that the spiral staircase didn't move.
"Not so odd, really," said Lain, recovering his arrows from the various Moglar who were holding them for him. "Thazbinn was created hundreds of years ago as a city to which all the villages on the Upper Ground could send their products and services for a decent price. It didn't work, alas. The fact that it was built here was a major factor—the Scarred Mountains, and Shashhag, as you have already seen, make the trip rather a lengthy and unprofitable one."
He pulled up a pillow and sat.
"So it remained virtually empty for centuries, until the Wamchu found a back way to this world and decided to place his own stamp on it. This tower. And the others."
He smiled.
"Okay," Gideon said. "But what does that have to do with the tower looking like the Trail of Stairs?"
"Well," the greenman said, "to explain that we shall have to go back even further in time. Back to the era when the Wamchu was still a prophesy, and his wives were not even in the dreams of their ancestors. It was a time," he said with a sweep of his arm, "when the lorra were the rulers, and the pacchs, deshes, magrows, and ekklers were part of a vast army of—"
"Vorden," Gideon said.
The greenman frowned at the interruption.
Gideon pointed up to the next floor.
"Well," Lain said, struggling to his feet. "I would have thought at least Red would be interested in—"
"The goat," Gideon said, "is interested. The man would like to get on with it, if you don't mind."
On the seventh floor they encountered a complete kitchen, and they voted to rest a bit while they filled their stomachs, checked what wounds they had, and debated whether or not they should move as rapidly as they had.
"They know we're coming," Ivy said, "so what's the problem?"
"Caution," said Lain. "We know they know, and they know we know, but we don't know how many more of them there are to know if you get my drift."
"Stop," said Gideon before Ivy answered again. "I know this part, and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here and listen to you two drag it on forever."
He stood, unholstered his bat, and made for the staircase. Tag followed with his pike and asked if he couldn't go first this time.
"It's only logical, when you think about it," the boy argued. "If there are more and more of them each time we meet some, it makes sense that this thing can soften them up before you get there. Then you won't die, and I won't have to be the leader, which I'd kind of like, see, but not when you're not around."
Gideon wondered if the lad's vest was too tight, smiled instead of shaking his head, and waved him on. Tag had to become a man sometime, he reasoned, and this was as good a time as any, if only to keep him quiet.
Tag hefted the pike to his shoulder and began the ascent, using one hand to grip the railing, the other the weapon. Gideon had no idea how balance was maintained, but the lad was getting the hang of it, no question about it, and he followed Tag with something akin to eagerness. And when he recognized that, he nearly stopped and went back down—that way, beginning to enjoy himself, was tantamount to suicide, since it would only lead to overconfidence and a false sense of his heroic worth. He told himself sternly that something soon was bound to screw things up, and thus make him more secure in his scheme of these things.
He did stop then, and looked up at Tag, down at Ivy on the step below him, and blinked at the revelation that not only was he here to stay, as the Bridge had already proven, but he was now beginning to think like them.
Oh god, he thought, and thought no more when Tag shouted, the shout became more like a scream, and boy and pike were snatched up from the next floor as if they weighed no more than a feather.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He heard Tuesday call a warning and felt Ivy reach for him as he ran up after the boy, but he ignored both, wishing only that the staircase were straight so that he could build up some decent momentum when he shot out onto the eighth floor.
"Gideon!" Tag called.
He looked side to side frantically, heard his name again and looked up. Tag was dangling from a snare that had closed around his chest and snapped him up to a beam that spanned the ceiling. The pike was entangled with him, and every time he moved the mace swung on its chain and added a lump to his shin.
"Hang on," Gideon said. "I'll get you down."
"Gideon!" Tag called again.
"I said—"
And grunted when something smashed across the back of his shoulders, driving him to the floor on his hands and knees. The bat skittered away. He heard Ivy's war cry. Another blow caught him in the same place, and though it wasn't as forceful as the first one, he still went down to his chest, arms splayed, forehead striking stone and stunning him into a field of pinwheels and fire that stuck around just long enough for him to get used to before it faded to a gentle black that seemed like a good place to be at the time since his back didn't hurt anymore and his forehead didn't ache, and when he rolled over and saw Lain staring worriedly into his eyes, he made it a point not to throw up his supper on the man's stomach.
"How are you feeling?" the greenman asked.
"Like I was hit with a club."
"Fine. You were."
He reached down and helped Gideon sit up, holding him until the dizziness passed. Gideon saw Ivy across the room, standing over two Moglar who were larger than normal and who were also either dead or unconscious. She was looking at her dagger, at their greasy hair, and back to her dagger.
"Don't," Gideon said weakly.
Lain let him go just as Ivy looked up.
The pinwheels were still lovely, but the stars lacked a certain warmth he had seen in them before, and it was less time therefore before he was sitting up again, waving off Lain's apologies. Ivy was still standing over the Moglar. The dagger was still in her hand.
"Hey!" Tag called from the beam under the ceiling.
"Thanks," Gideon said, blinking the pain away.
"No problem," she told him. "The thing is, you see, do I kill them or not?"
"They're not dead?"
"I just hit them
, that's all."
He looked at her fist; there was no club in it.
Red was at his side, and when he managed a smile, the lorra began licking his face as gently as he could. Gideon laughed and hugged him, using the grip to haul himself to his feet.
"Hey!"
His head had somehow stayed on his neck, and his neck didn't protest more than a stab or two when he rubbed his nape in an effort to spread the pain around to diffuse it. And when he thought he could walk, he let go of Red, swayed, grabbed the animal's neck again and decided that Ivy could come to him for her thank-you kiss.
"I don't know," she said. "It would be like murder now. They can't fight back."
"It's a problem," Lain agreed. "And we can't wait for them to wake up so you can kill them, because time is running out."
Tuesday flew up to the beam, walked around, flew down.
"If you don't want them to follow us," Gideon said, "why don't you just tie them up? That way you won't have to worry about murder, or about them stabbing you in the back."
Lain nodded agreeably, and Ivy volunteered him to return to the kitchen to find something to use as binding; she did it, however, less than gracefully, and her expression left no doubt as to what her final decision would have been had she worked on it long enough.
"Hello?"
Gideon knew there was a lot about that woman he still didn't understand, and wondered if he would ever really understand once he thought he did. It was not a situation likely to clear up soon, however, so he beckoned his sister over and asked her if she wouldn't mind nipping up the stairs to see what was up there. Just a quick look, nothing permanent.
"I want the goat with me," she said.
"The goat is holding me up."
"So are you, unless you let me take the goat."
They left it up to Red, who was on the stairs before Gideon hit the floor again; this time, Ivy came over to help him, holding him so closely, so snugly, that he wondered if he could get away with a mild swoon just to make it last.
He couldn't.
The Moglar woke up, and Ivy regretfully rushed over and ended their doubts about the ambiguous Other Side.
"Oh," said Lain, who was left holding the rope.
"Goddamnit to hell, anyway! I'm getting airsick up here!"
Gideon looked up, regretted it when his head and shoulders rather pointedly reminded him that he shouldn't look up, and crawled over to the staircase. "Hey, Sis!"
All he could see was Red's tail, Red's rump, and the way his clawed hooves were digging into the stone to keep him from sliding back down to the ground floor.
"Hey! Sis!"
Her "What?" was muffled by the screen of Red's long hair.
"We need you to help get the kid down."
"I'm busy!"
"Save it. The kid needs help now."
Then he heard Red's growling and saw the claws dig in for a charge, and before he could get to his feet and find his bat, Ivy had shoved him aside and was racing up the stairs just as the lorra vanished through to the next floor.
By the sound of it, there was a lot of fighting.
Lain, who was halfway up the wall, asked if he should turn around and go to their assistance.
Tag's vote was ignored, though Gideon surmised from Red's cheerful bellows that no help was needed. Lain shrugged, lost a few feet in the shrugging, and made his way back up. When he reached the beam, he swung hand over hand to where the snare had been anchored, and began to saw at it with a knife.
"Wait a minute!" Gideon said. "He'll fall!"
"Well, he certainly can't fly, can he?" the greenman reminded him.
And Tag fell. Not as fatally as Gideon would have imagined, since the other anchor of the snare was still tied around the beam, which allowed Tag a drop of some distance before he was jerked up short and swung into a spinning imitation of a vested pendulum. When Lain cut the other end, he fell again, this time to the floor, where he landed neatly on his feet, grinned, and stepped nimbly to one side as the pike speared the floor where his left foot had been.
It would have been perfect had not the pike, its shaft supple as fiberglass, thwacked him a fair one in the middle of his pate. But to his credit, the boy didn't cry out; he merely rubbed his head, grabbed the pike when it sprang back, and broke it in half.
"There," he said.
"Jesus," Gideon said, and went up after his sister, who was, when he arrived, standing on a refectory table in the middle of a huge bowl of iceberg lettuce, chewing thoughtfully, while Red and Ivy finished off the last of twenty-three Moglar and a half-grown magrow.
"You have no idea," the duck said, "how symbolic this all is."
Gideon shrugged. He was looking up again and wondering how much farther they had to go. It was all right knocking off the Moglar guards as they were, and it was certainly no skin off his back that Agnes seemed to think she had an unlimited supply of them. But the effects were beginning to show on him and his friends—Lain was puffing, Tuesday wasn't gorging herself, Red was shaking his head slowly in an effort to fill his great lungs again, and Ivy was leaning heavily against the wall, not bothering to check to be sure the bodies at her feet were all she would have desired.
Sooner or later, he thought, they were going to drop.
And when they did, Agnes was going to make her move.
The bat slipped into its holster, and he walked gingerly across the corpse carpet until he reached Ivy's side. So weary was she that she didn't object when he put an arm around her waist and led her to the bench by the table; so weary was she that she didn't protest when he poured her a cup of water from a pewter jug and held it to her lips; so weary was she that when she passed out, she trusted him enough to catch her before she hit the floor.
"Jesus!" he exclaimed. "Tuesday, help me."
The duck didn't answer.
As he lowered Ivy to the bench, adjusting her legs so she wouldn't roll off, he saw that his sister was slumping in the lettuce bowl, eyes closed, wings draped limply over the sides. A foot twitched; otherwise, she didn't move.
"A drug," Lain offered when he sniffed the jug and the leaves. "Ah, she's a clever bitch, that one."
Gideon looked down at the unconscious woman, at the way her face was determined even in repose, and impulsively leaned over to kiss her lightly on the lips. It wasn't honey, he thought, but it wasn't diet soda, either.
A loud exhalation, and he rubbed his hands over his chest, down his jeans, and pointed to the stairs. "We can't wait for them to wake up. Let's go, old friend. If she's waiting, I don't want to disappoint her."
Red attempted a purr of encouragement that sounded more like a belch, but he made it to the stairs just as Tag staggered up from below, complained about having a pip of a headache, and fell in a heap of discarded Moglar armor. Neither of the men bothered to go over to see if he was all right. They only passed a glance between them, checked their weapons for suitability for Armageddon, and followed the lorra up.
"What floor is this?" Gideon asked when they checked yet another empty room.
"Lost count," Lain panted. "Why?"
"I was just wondering if there wasn't some sort of significance to the number of the floor she's waiting on. I mean, if it's thirteen, that might be considered bad luck."
The greenman nodded sagely. "I suppose that would be true, if that's where they killed you."
Again they reached a deserted room, though they spotted a pile of desert-bleached pacch bones against the wall, and a rotted wineskin beside them; and again Gideon could not help but think that there was a purpose behind this, other than to drive them into a stupor to make them helpless against assault.
Agnes, though her Day had not yet dawned, was not so without armament that she couldn't have met them on the first floor and saved them all a lot of trouble.
It was wrong.
It was all wrong.
"Rest," Vorden gasped then, and with a look of dismal apology, he sat down where he stood and put his hands over his face. "Not as
young," he said ruefully. "Away from the trees, I'm not as young."
Gideon sat beside him, his legs dangling over the edge of the staircase opening. "You know," he said, "it's a shame we had to leave Whale's mead behind. I sure could use some of it now."
Red wandered over, curled up, and went to sleep.
"Indeed, Gideon, I know what you mean."
Five minutes later: "Y'know, Vorden, I must be more tired than I thought. I'm sitting down, and I feel like I'm on the deck of a ship."
Lain removed his hands, exposing a dangerously flushed face and feverishly bright eyes. "It's the wind."
"Huh?"
"The wind, Gideon. We're so high up the wind is making the tower sway."
"Oh."
"Yes."
"I hope it doesn't fall."
"Never has."
"There's always a first time."
"Oh."
And yet another five minutes during which Gideon wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep the way Red was doing. But if he did, he'd never get up, and so thinking he nudged the lorra's side. Frowned. Nudged him again, prodded him, took out the bat and shoved it into his ribs.
"Shit," he said.
Red snored, unperturbed and unoffended.
Finally, Vorden Lain toppled onto his back. Without a sound. Without blinking his eyes. Gideon twisted around to kneel beside him, take off his hat and loosen his green jacket, his green vest, his pale green shirt.
"I'm not dead, you know," the man said with a trembling smile.
"But you will be if you try to go any higher."
Vorden's eyes closed slowly, and opened again. "Lord, I feel as if I've been climbing for days."
"I know just how you feel. As a matter of fact, I was just saying to myself that—"
He stopped. Rocked back on his heels. Looked down at the floors they had climbed thus far. Set into motion a slide show of each room, and what had happened there. Measured the distance between floor and ceiling with an inexpert eye. Squinted as he tried to recall how long he'd been unconscious.
