by Jean Johnson
Above all, however, the Guardian of the Fountain had to be a good person deep down inside, so that the vast powers spewed out of the singularity-point would not fall into the hands of someone selfish, greedy, or outright evil. All Guardians chose their successors carefully, whenever possible. Kerric hadn’t even considered himself in that category, being content to trade his skills as a mage in the maintenance of the Tower in exchange for access to its vast library of magical, mechanical, and architectural knowledge.
The previous Guardian, Master Jonas, had kept an eye on the younger man, and finally coaxed him into taking on more and more responsibility, overseeing the business side of things as well as the magical side. But he hadn’t told Kerric he was grooming the young mage for his own position until Jonas had been certain that Kerric truly cared for the people of Penambrion and the outlying farms of the valley, as well as for the adventurers and workers in the Tower. Its magics influenced everyone within a hundred miles, after all, not just those who ran or maintained the gauntlets and scrycasts . . . which meant its magics could be used against them by an unscrupulous mage.
No, he decided, wiping his hands on a soft towel. This Torven’s arrogance has lost him any chance that I’d consider him for an apprenticeship. As my old Academy teachers used to say, a mage must think things through not once, not twice, but thrice to consider all the implications of a particular action . . . particularly when our actions can change the face of the world beyond all recognition. We have a duty to wield our power carefully.
Liars and cheaters don’t understand that some shortcuts are just wrong, particularly when applied for all the wrong reasons. Whatever this man thinks he can get out of the Tower besides a few trinkets, I will stop it.
Emerging from the gentlemen’s room, he found Myal waiting for him, her face freshly scrubbed, her hair re-braided, and a tiny packet of smoke-dried fish in her fingers, purchased for a few silver scepterai from the vending cabinet. She was chatting with the others, and doing more listening than actual speaking, asking questions that led the four men and women to eagerly relate the adventures they’d had so far in the Tower.
Displaying a level of tact Kerric could appreciate, Myal noted his arrival, asked only two more questions, and brought the reminiscing to a gentle end, adding, “. . . but I’d love to hear more from you once we’re all safely back in the village. I’m not quite as fancy a writer as the Master, but I do have those little booklets of gauntlet-stories. You might have seen them in the merchant stall in the Adventuring Hall, the Tales of the Tower booklets.”
“You wrote those?” the dark-skinned woman asked. “Oh, I love those! It was the story of Fael’s Party and the Waterfall in the Tower that helped me and my group survive the Sucker Punch trap! Hey—if you think I have stories worth putting into print, I’d be happy to tell you everything I know.”
Myal blushed and smiled, quickly cutting her off before she could gush further. “I’d be happy to write them down when we all have the time. For now, as the Master said, keep yourselves as safe as possible. We’ll do our best to put the Tower back to what it should be as soon as we can.”
One of the two men shook his head. “I don’t know how much just the two of you can do, if the Tower’s gone too protectively mad and dangerous for a group of four to be in it, but I know you, Myal; you’re one of the best. And with the Master, well . . . I’d pay to watch him run a gauntlet, and I’m an adventurer, not a patron.”
Chuckling, Kerric touched Myal’s elbow, guiding her toward the second of the two doors leading out of the lounge, opposite the one they had entered. “I’ll keep that in mind, if I ever need to run a special viewing for our clients. Be safe, milords, miladies. This way, Myal.”
Murmuring a few farewells of her own, his partner followed him back into the perils of the Tower. A blessing, all things considered, that the Mendhite was still willing to endure the rest of this trip with him. A blessing she was a good companion, too.
EIGHT
Hours later, Kerric was laughing so hard, he kept having to wipe tears from his eyes in between casting bolts of pure force at the animated skeletons attempting to attack them. A couple got past him, jumping on Myal’s back, but she merely grabbed each in turn, hurtling them against a wall so that the bones shattered, dissolving into piles of dust and shards.
“Oh Gods!” he gasped, trying to catch his breath. “Wh-what did you say to that?”
Myal grunted, flinging another skeleton off her back. The enchanted rack of bones jerked on her pack and scratched her arm in an attempt to cling, but at least half of him went flying across the room, and when that half broke, the rest of him crumbled into rubble. “I said . . . that if he wanted me to be . . . his broodmare, he wasn’t good enough stock—ha!” she yelled, whipping her sword around so that the flat smashed through another skeleton’s skull, “—to breed with me! Then I said—incoming!”
Warned in time, Kerric thumped the air, smashing a bolt of power onto the overgrown, ogre-sized bone monster bearing down on them. It staggered wobbled, and collapsed. He prompted her when she kept smacking their attackers. “Then you said . . . ?”
“That if he was just looking—ungh—for a whore, he couldn’t afford me!” She grunted with the effort of slicing through another skeleton’s lower leg bones with her steel blade. Never having been a Healer, she didn’t know what to call them, but there were two per shin, and they cracked like dry tree branches under her blows. A backhand smashed the skull, collapsing the skeleton. Only a few were left. “I then said if all he wanted was a cook or a pot-washer, he couldn’t afford to hire me, because I certainly wasn’t going to be his slave! Hai!”
One of the last two skeletons had grabbed her braid mid-spin. Gritting her teeth, she whipped her blade through the ribs and spine of the other one, then whirled tattoo-fast with a flex of the colorful band around her right bicep, flinging the skeleton off by sheer speed. It barely missed Kerric, smashing into the wall next to him.
“Hey!” he protested. “I’m agreeing with you, here!”
“Sorry. I can’t control when they let go,” Myal apologized, straightening up from her spin. Breathing hard, she looked around the chamber. Bone shards lay all over the floor, in some places ankle– and even knee-deep. “Is that the last of them, for this one?”
“Uhhh . . .” Kerric glanced over at the golden numbers hovering near his right shoulder. “Ninety-nine. We have one more to go. Probably another big one. And that was the single lousiest proposal I have ever heard in my entire life. ‘You will do me the honor of becoming my wife.’ What an ass! Someone should’ve checked his brains to see if a mage secretly swapped them with a donkey’s,” he scorned. “I’m surprised you didn’t break him like one of these skellies. Did he not once think of you as a fellow human being?”
Myal shook her head. She blotted at something trickling down her brow, and blinked, discovering it was blood. Her head didn’t hurt much beyond a bit of a stinging throbbing sensation, and she knew even a tiny scratch on the scalp tended to bleed profusely, so she didn’t worry too much. The concerned look Kerric gave her and the soft exclamation was a balm, though; she held still while he hurried over, hands lifting with a faint glow of greenish energies as he touched each wound. She could have healed them easily with her spine tattoo, but his concern pleased her. It did not, however, distract her.
“Coagidermic,” he muttered, gently brushing his fingertips over the scratches just above her hairline. “There. You’ll need a wash, but you won’t bleed anymore.”
“Good. Duck,” Myal ordered. He stared at her for one brief, blank moment, then dropped into a deep squat. She slashed through the air over his absent head, cracking her blade into the horselike jaws of whatever-the-skeletal-thing-was. It had wings and talon-tipped legs in front, the head and hindquarters of a horse, and a tail like a snake’s, ending in a barb-tipped bone at the back. Her blow cracked the head right off its spine, forcing the rest of the body to collapse. “That would be the full One
Hundred Bones.”
“Well done,” Kerric praised her, glancing over his shoulder as he recovered from his crouch. He dusted himself off, then muttered over a few of his own scratches. “Thankfully, the next two rooms are much easier to endure. Well, relatively. We’ll have to be very careful to help each other with the next one, but the one after that is a piece of cake. Or pie, or pudding, or ice cream, your choice.”
Myal mouthed his words, repeating them to herself. Her brow cleared. “Oh no . . . not the Banqueting Hall?”
Her tone was far more humorous than dolorous. Kerric chuckled and kissed her chin, the nearest bit of her face in reach, since she had solved his own little riddle. “Oh yes, the Banqueting Hall. I’ll presume you saw the replays we occasionally show of ‘Team Rogue’ clearing the riddle in two seconds flat?”
“I thought it was one second, myself,” she quipped, smothering a yawn behind the back of one hand. Mindful of the sword in her other hand, she returned it to its sheath. “So, what lies between us and the Banqueting Hall? Mind you, just the thought of that place is driving me mad with hunger. It’s been a while since I had that smoked salmon jerky, and that apple you gave me. I could use some food to wake me up. Not too much, though, or I’ll go to sleep.” Catching herself starting to babble, Myal shortened what she had been about to say to a simple question. “How many hours have we been at this?”
Kerric sighed. Removing his cap, he let it drop to the floor so he could ruffle his fingers through his curls, scratching vigorously. As soon as he felt relief from the itching, he spoke. “Probably about five or so, by now. Doing this at the end of a long day was not my idea, I assure you. I do have a spell I can use on both of us to speed-sleep us, giving us the equivalent of five hours sleep in fifteen minutes, but it’s best to do that after we’ve eaten.”
“So let’s move on to the next trap,” she told him. “You keep changing the subject, rather than say what it is.”
That made him grimace. “It’s a bad one. On the plus side, we can get through it safely, if we work together.”
“Kerric,” Myal stated flatly, giving him a hard look. “The trap?”
“The Canal Trap.” He winced, waiting for her reaction.
She stared at him, then turned, walked over to a stretch of wall with the least amount of bone-rubble at its base, and thumped her head against the polished granite stones. “Goddess . . . Goddess . . . Goddess . . . I hate that trap! Those three stupid songs get stuck in my head for days!”
Kerric quickly moved to join her, hand going to her shoulder. “Myal, it’s okay. We just have to stick our fingers in each other’s ears and distract ourselves.”
“That doesn’t work! I’ve tried sticking my fingers in my ears!” she argued, turning back to glare down at him. “I can still hear the tunes when I do that, and if I can hear them, I am going to climb out of the boat and attack those stupid wooden golems, and they’ll kill us both, because you’re not strong enough to keep me in the boat!”
Catching her hands, he lifted them to the sides of his head, where he pressed her fingertips against his flesh in emphasis as he spoke. “Not in our own ears. In each other’s ears.” Uncurling a finger on each hand, he tucked them into his ear canals just firmly enough to cut off part of his ability to hear. “If we do this to each other, we will not be able to hear the music—it’s a hidden cheat worked into the song-magic. Plug your own ears, you can still hear and be affected. Help your companions by plugging their ears, and each of you, so plugged, won’t hear a single note of any of the tunes, though you’ll still be able to hear each other speak. It’s yet another reason why I couldn’t take this trip alone.”
He pulled her fingers free and kissed her knuckles in apology for manhandling her. Myal studied him warily, not sure for a moment she could believe the solution was just that simple. It had to be, though; Kerric had proven himself right at every step along the way.
It couldn’t be that easy, though. She didn’t trust easy solutions, and for a very pragmatic, physical reason. “Won’t that be awkward, though? Leaning over against each other, arms all tangled up, trying to get our fingers in each other’s ears?”
“It’s a case of two birds smacked with one spell,” he countered. “I figured if I could sit on your lap, we’d more or less face each other, fingers in the other’s ears . . . and then just spend our time kissing. That way we wouldn’t even have to see the golems, since even their gyrations can be considered hypnotically aggravating. Particularly when they do the hand-signs for that one song, the one about the bunny?”
He shuddered. So did she. “Ugh. Do not remind me. But why should you sit in my lap? Women sit in the laps of men.”
“Torso length.” At her bemused look, he explained. “Men usually have longer torsos than women, but if you and I were the same height, mine would be a hand-span longer. You’re a full foot taller. It makes more sense for me to sit on your lap.”
She sighed and shook her head ruefully. “I never knew that courting a shorter man could be so riddled with all the things you have to consider . . .”
He winced a little at her word-choice, but didn’t correct her. “Well, there are some perks.”
“Oh?” Myal asked.
Stepping right up to her, Kerric looked down by a few inches at most. “You do realize I’m the perfect height to nibble on those while making love, yes?”
She glanced down as well, and burst into laughter at the obvious innuendo. Her breasts were indeed just about mouth level on the man. “Yes, but only when standing upright.”
“Oh, no, they’ll be at the right height for when we’re horizontal, too, I promise you,” he told her.
That made her lift one brow. “You’ve made love to a tall woman before?”
“No, but I did get run over by a Mendhite adventuress several years back, when she was running through the village. It was when I was still a lower-ranked peon. By some twist of humor, we spun around as we fell, and I landed on top of her. She was about your height,” Kerric added, waggling one hand. “Give or take a thumb-length, I think. Smaller breasts, bigger hips, and no face tattoos. A lot of your folk have come to the Tower over the years. Some for a few years, some only for a few runs or a few months before they move on again, like that one.”
“That’s all that happened? You tripped and landed on top of her?” Myal asked, curious. “You didn’t try to court her?”
He shook his head. “She had a husband. He helped sort us out and stand us up. He had tattoos all over the place. And a thankfully forgiving nature, since I’d smacked face-first into his wife’s cleavage. It made for a good laugh, but that was all.”
She chuckled softly at that. “Much better than a proposal from an arrogant Netherhell . . . which reminds me, you were going to tell me about your worst proposal.”
“I thought I did, a good five or six of them,” Kerric pointed out. “You want more?”
“Not from other women to you. I meant the other way around. Haven’t you ever proposed to anyone?” Myal asked him. She hoped her question came across casually enough, though her interest in the answer was acute. “I haven’t . . . but have you?”
To her relief, he shook his head. “No. I’ll admit I’ve been rather picky. Women like to throw themselves at me because I’m the Master of the Tower. And some men, too,” he added, to be fair. “But at the end of the day, I am me. Kerric Vo Mos, not Master Kerric. I’d like to find a woman who can understand and appreciate that.”
“You should have her run a gauntlet with you,” Myal said. She blushed in the next moment, realizing what that revealed, but she didn’t take it back. “You have a great sense of humor. We women like that in our men.”
He nodded. “So you do. Of course, I have one more requirement in a potential wife that most women would refuse to comply with . . . so that’s made it doubly difficult to find someone with whom I could spend the rest of my life.”
“Oh?” she asked, unable to help herself. “What requirement is th
at?”
Sighing, he picked up his helmet from the floor and moved toward the far door, revealed now that they had slain the full force of this room’s illusionary foes. “Most women want children. And as much as I want a woman to love me just for myself . . . I am the Master of the Tower,” he reminded her, speaking over his shoulder. “This is no place to raise a child. No matter how many nurses or nannies or watchers you set, a child will go wandering off at some point, maybe even sneak off deliberately out of mischief, and get killed. For that reason, I will never allow a child into the Tower, brought or conceived.
“Unfortunately a lot of women just don’t understand that, so every time a woman looks at me with stars in her eyes, all I can think is, She’s going to get a child killed. And the corollary to that gloomy statement? I love my job more than I have ever loved the idea of having kids. Nor will I ever lie about it, since that would rob a woman of the right to find someone she could have children with.” Spreading his hands, he shrugged. “So what woman would have me for more than a brief liaison, knowing all of that?”
I would, Myal thought, but the words didn’t escape her. At least, not with actual sound behind the movement of her lips. Nor was he facing the right way to read them, since he had turned to the door and was now working his familiar little metal tools in the opening of the lock. Her quietness . . . her shyness . . . had robbed her of a good opportunity to talk about it. But in the quiet following his rhetorical query, she could at least think about it.
Kerric pulled the close-fitted, oil-hardened, steel-lined cap back over his hair. It bore a couple scratches from close calls in this and previous rooms, as did the rest of his armor. The same as hers bore. No, he wasn’t a professional adventurer like her, and she had seen several who were better, but he was competent. She had been paired with far worse partners than him in her years here. Kerric did hang back from most of the physical fighting, but he did fight. And he made spellcasting look easy.
