by Jean Johnson
Myal followed, shrugging one-shouldered into her own pack. They arrived in time to see the chalked runes shuddering outward, jolted every few seconds with the force of whatever spells were being applied. Oddly enough, the door itself didn’t move, just the runes. A few bits of chalk dust fell with each blow, weakening the whole—and on the fifth strike, the entire lot blasted outward in a swirling puff of white as they watched, leaving the solid wooden panel bare of markings.
Instinct made Myal move forward to intercept whoever might come through the door. Kerric silently gestured her back, stepping away from the entrance as well. She opened her mouth to whisper a protest, but he held up a finger to his lips and shook his head. As they waited, the doorknob turned slowly. The door itself flung open sharply a few seconds later, revealing the quintet from below.
The clothing-swathed woman knelt to one side, knife held ready to throw in the hand that hadn’t flung open the door. The blonde archer woman stood behind her, bow strung and an arrow nocked. On the other side of the entrance the warrior Barric stood with his sword drawn and ready; the other two men lurked behind the trio, either to guard the hall or just waiting to see if they would be needed inside.
Finding Kerric and Myal waiting for them, the lead trio didn’t relax. The blonde glanced at the mage who had held the maintenance tablet. “Well?”
“He’s not in charge anymore. Go for it,” Torven stated, shrugging dismissively.
Not good, Myal thought, tensing. She didn’t strike first, though, because of two things. The first was how Kerric was standing there, relaxed and smiling. The second was, the moment the woman had permission, her fingers had relaxed their grip on her bowstring. The arrow was in flight faster than thought, faster than Myal could have moved—and just as fast, smashed itself to pieces on nothing at all.
Splintered pieces of wood puffed outward before following the dented arrowhead and tattered bits of fletching as it all fluttered to the floor. Everyone but Kerric blinked in shock. He merely widened his smile, and spoke. “By the power invested in all Guardians of the Tower, past and present, I hereby not only revoke your standing invitations as adventurers and maintenance personnel, I revoke your ability to grant invitations. This ruling applies to the quintet standing here before me, and excludes myself and Mistress Myal of Mendhi.
“Enjoy your meal.” Turning, he caught Myal’s hand and tugged her back down the hall by a dozen or so chairs, before turning and gesturing at the table. “Myal, I invite you to dine.”
“Ah . . . I invite you to dine as well, Kerric,” she quickly replied, recovering.
“Shoot them!” Torven ordered.
Gamely, the blonde drew and nocked another bow, while the short, kneeling woman cast her knife. The small dagger thumped into an invisible barrier a foot from her fingertips and clattered to the ground. The second arrow met the same fate as the first, reduced to a splintered wreck. Cursing under his breath, the sword-wielder sprinted into the room.
Myal tensed her muscles for speed and strength, only to find herself shoved back out of the way by one of Kerric’s hands. He used the other to snatch up . . . a breadstick? It happened too quickly for her to shout: Barric came at him in an overhand swing meant to cleave open his flesh from collarbone to navel. Kerric blocked it—blocked it—with the skinny, finger-thick, forearm-long piece of baked goods.
The sword shattered. Barric wasn’t the only one who gaped; Myal did, too, as well as the quartet still working their way inside. Kerric didn’t hesitate. Taking advantage of the warrior’s stunned pause, the Master of the Tower snatched up a larger, longer loaf and smashed it, clublike, against the bigger man’s head. It thunked against the adventurer’s head, and dropped him to the floor, knocked unconscious by the bready blow.
“That . . . that’s impossible!” Torven protested.
Kerric abandoned the breadstick and snatched up a wedge of cheese. He backed up, pushing Myal back with him as he retreated. “It’s a banqueting hall, Torven. The only kind of fight allowed in here is a food fight. Check your tablet, if you don’t believe me!”
Trusting her partner’s words, Myal snatched up a fistful of crackers, and began flinging them like throwing-knives with her other hand. The hard-baked squares struck the wall behind the dodging pair of women. Several bounced off, but those that struck corner-first stuck as surely as if they had been made of metal, not flour. As soon as her left hand was empty, she snatched up the next thing, a pitcher of fruit juice, and cast it off-hand at the other mage.
The container struck, but did not shatter; instead, it splashed, dousing him from face to belly in fruit juice, interrupting his spell. Her attack was more effective than she thought, though, for he started screaming and rubbing at his juice-stung eyes, coughing and spitting between howls to get the liquid out of his mouth. From the way his skin reddened and began blistering, Myal realized Kerric’s command had come true: all the food in this hall was now poisonous to the quintet across from them. She snatched up a bunch of grapes and a spoonful of something gravylike, and flung the contents at the other two women, who were forced again to dodge instead of attack. The glop—spinach dip?—splattered harmlessly against the wall; the other two women weren’t taking any chances that it could harm them, and had dodged.
Torven wasn’t casting a spell, but instead was digging in his pack for his maintenance tablet. The moment that rectangle of crystal came into view, Kerric hissed a spellword and yanked his hand inward in a snatching movement. Caught off guard, the other mage didn’t tighten his grip in time. The tablet yanked out of his fingers, flew across the room, and smacked into Kerric’s grasp, leaving Torven to gape and scowl.
“What the—? If this is a food fight, that shouldn’t have worked!” he protested.
“That was a theft, not an attack,” Kerric retorted, nudging Myal back toward the refreshing room. “You might want to save your partner, there,” he added, pointing at the howling third man.
Torn between attacking them and saving his helpers, Torven growled and whirled, chanting a spell to cleanse the too-acidic juice from the other man.
Myal snatched one more bit of food off the table, a slender summer sausage, and retreated ahead of Kerric. The blonde launched a spoonful of something in their direction in return. Kerric flung up a shield spell, letting the coleslaw splatter harmlessly against the thickened curve of air. It wouldn’t poison them, but there was no point in walking out drenched in sauce-covered cabbage, either.
As soon as the door slammed shut, Kerric scribbled on it in chalk, using a double set of the previous runes to lock and ward it. The chalk went back into its pouch; the bread and cheese wedge, tucked under his arm, he passed to Myal. Pulling the crystal tablet out of his belt, he eyed it, grimaced in disgust, and dropped it on the floor.
“Smash it,” he ordered. Myal gave him a curious look. Kerric gestured impatiently at the tablet. “Power up that sexy leg of yours, and smash it under your heel. We don’t dare take it with us, because the deeper in we go, the more the Tower will think we’re cheating by using it and step up the danger levels. And we cannot leave it for those idiots to recover. Smash it.”
Shrugging, she handed him all the bounty they had pilfered from the table, flexed the right patches of skin, and cracked her boot heel onto the rectangle. It shattered with a pop of light and a rush of heat that warmed her calf where leather boot and metal armor didn’t quite cover. Thankfully, it didn’t burn. Relaxing her tattoos, Myal lifted her chin at the door. “Do we lay traps for them?”
“No. It’ll take them time to break through the door, time we don’t want to waste. You’re going to pick me up and use that anti-scrying trick of yours,” Kerric told her, “then I’ll tell you what our next chain of tasks will be, and we’ll be on our way. We’ll have to eat breakfast as we go.”
“Right.” Holding out her arm, Myal scooped him up onto her hip, and used her other hand to press behind her skull. She kissed him on the cheek as soon as she was done. “That’s for defend
ing us with bread.”
“My pleasure. Here are the next five rooms,” Kerric stated, knowing she couldn’t hold him like this for long without exhausting all the energy they had just recovered with his spell. “First, we go down to the third door on the left . . .”
* * *
Myal dragged Kerric the last few inches necessary, then staggered over to the door on the hateful corridor and shut it. Bracing herself on the edge of the doorframe, she worked on recovering her energy and her breath. Her partner wasn’t a large man, no, but he was solid enough that dragging his unconscious carcass yard after yard without any tattoo-based magics to help her was an exhausting task.
Partner, and lover. Between rooms filled with bits of paper that exploded on contact, statues of dragons that had to be appeased with gold, pools of flame and a snake-headed, snake-bodied woman with looks that could literally kill, they had continued to kiss and cuddle, rewarding each other for navigating traps, destroying enemies, and saving each other’s skins.
It wasn’t just the physical side, either. The more they talked, the more Myal really liked the Aian male sleeping on the hallway floor. The more time they spent together on this long gauntlet run, the more she wished they had time to just stop, relax, talk, and make love again. That first time had been too brief, in her opinion. Fun, enjoyable, but brief, and pretty much under his control. Watching him recover from the hall that drained magic, Myal imagined what she would do to him if she had the chance to take the lead in their next round of lovemaking.
The rapid patter of footsteps interrupted her musing. Tensing, she drew her sword, ears straining and eyes searching down each of the three corridors around them. The thumping feet grew louder, until their owner burst into view, turning a corner at a junction about thirty feet down the left-side hall. It was big, it was hairy, and it was male. Nakedly male. It—he—ran toward her, making her shift forward and brace herself between him and the still unconscious mage on the floor.
Whatever he was, he wasn’t human; no human had that much hair sprouting all over their body, nor arms that long or shoulders that broad. The creature almost reminded her of the jungle monkeys from back home, save that it moved upright like a man, didn’t have a tail, and its coarse black hair was both longer and more sparse than the fur most monkeys typically bore.
Skidding to a stop just out of slashing range, the being jogged in place, eyed her, eyed the mage on the floor, then flung up his hands and screeched at her. “AAAAAAGH!!”
Twitching at the shout, Myal screamed back, brandishing her sword over her shoulder, ready to strike and parry if it tried to attack. “AARRRGH!”
To her shock, the hairy man-thing grinned as if in approval, nodded politely at her, and slipped past while she was still gaping in surprise. He leaped over Kerric without a second look, resuming his loping run. A grunt from down by her feet returned her attention to her gauntlet partner. Rubbing at his forehead, Kerric peered up at her. “Did I miss something?”
“A giant . . . naked . . . hairy . . . thing?” she managed to offer, gesturing in the direction it had fled. “It just . . . He ran up to me, screamed at me, I screamed back, it grinned, and . . . and ran off somewhere that way!”
Kerric nodded, looking oddly satisfied. “Good.” Grunting again, he pushed to his feet, dusting off his leather-skirted backside. “Good. You did exactly the right thing.”
“Well, what was it?” Myal demanded, resheathing her sword. “And why didn’t you warn me about it?”
“I didn’t warn you because it’s on a random patrol,” he told her, removing his helmet so that he could scrub at his scalp. “I had no idea if we’d encounter it or not. As for what it is, obviously it’s a Hairy Naked Thing. What else should it be?”
“You . . . This place is insane,” Myal stated. She poked her thumb at the door they had just come through. “On the other side of that hall, we fought hellhounds, illusions of literally flaming, deadly dogs born and raised in a Netherhell, and on this side, a . . . a Hairy Naked Thing that just jogs all over and screams at people?”
Kerric grinned and spread his arms. “What can I say? I love my job. I’m almost never bored.”
Caught off guard, she laughed. In fact, she laughed so hard, she sagged back against the nearby wall for support, tears leaking down her cheeks. Warm hands, callused only in the ways that said he was used to wielding a pen, not a sword, stroked the moisture from her cheeks. It was a tender touch, and as her mirth died down, it was replaced by a warmth that blushed her cheeks and curled all the way down to the bottom of her belly.
Looking into Kerric’s eyes, she tried to duck her head shyly. He traced a thumb over her bottom lip, adding a sensual layer to the intimate moment. When he lifted up on his toes a little, bringing his head close to hers, she sagged lower on the wall, letting their kiss meet on more equal ground. It was soft, it was sweet, and it was over too soon. Resting his forehead against hers, he caressed her cheek again, then sighed and pulled back.
“As much as I love making you laugh and really enjoy kissing you, we still have the Gerbil Route ahead of us, followed by the Seraglio,” he warned her, looking into her dark eyes. “Are you ready to continue?”
“Have you recovered from the hallway?” Myal asked him. At his nod, she agreed. “Then I am ready . . . except for one thing. What is a gerbil?”
“It’s a small animal. Related to rats and rabbits, I think, but kept as a pet. I’m not really sure,” Kerric dismissed. “The important thing is, it cuts off about seven other lethal traps from our route.”
“Other lethal traps?” Myal clarified. “This one is deadly, too?”
“If I can’t get our opponents’ attention, yes,” Kerric admitted. He backed up from her, turning toward the left-hand corridor. “If I can’t, you’ll want to toss down either the mirror, which becomes a lake, the comb, which becomes a tangled briar thicket, or the ring, which becomes a trapping spell. And toss them behind us, so we ourselves don’t get caught. But don’t use them unless we absolutely have to; I’d rather talk our way out of this next fight.”
“Right. I will follow your lead,” she said, pushing off the wall to follow him. “Anything I need to know?”
“We’re going to land in a cage filled with sawdust. Do you have any wood allergies?” he asked, looking back at her.
“Only if it’s being used to hit me. Then I’m very allergic,” she quipped, making him chuckle. He opened one of the right-hand doors and gestured her to join him in a plain, empty stone chamber.
The moment the door shut, the floor gave way. It wasn’t the first time. Myal crossed her ankles, locking her legs together, though she kept her joints flexible enough to bend with the curves of the chute, particularly as this one was dark and difficult to see as they descended, Kerric just ahead of her. A strange, disorienting tingle washed over her flesh at one point, leaving behind a pins-and-needles effect that slowly faded.
Their emergence in a place of bright light distracted her; a quick flex of one buttock-tattoo lightened her mass. It was needed; she landed on Kerric, forcing an ouf out of him, bounced, tumbled, and skipped across a fluffy mound of sawdust curls. Hastily restoring her weight stopped her skid. Myal righted herself into a sitting position, wiped wood shavings from her face and mouth, and squinted around the chamber.
The vast, sitting-room-style chamber.
She knew it was a sitting room because there was a couch with brightly colored cushions, artwork on the walls, end tables, and a vast platform upon which their large, roomy prison cage sat. That vast platform was nothing more than a couch table, Myal realized, with the couch itself sized for someone who would have to tower a good ten or twelve floors tall in order to seat themselves comfortably upon its creamy, flower-sprigged cushions. Somewhere off in the distance, a crowd was cheering and someone was speaking, both sounding as if they were being heard from the bottom of a bucket.
Or perhaps they were trapped in one, given the scale of this place.
“Oh
, no,” she muttered, wincing. Pushing to her feet, Myal absently brushed off more sawdust from her limbs. “We’re in the Giant’s House, aren’t we?”
“Yep.” Cupping his hands, Kerric hauled in a deep breath and shouted. “COOOO-EEEEE! GEORGE!!”
“What are you doing?” Myal hissed. “We have to get out of this cage!”
“Exactly,” Kerric agreed. He pointed at a high shelf laden with knicknacks, porcelain figures, little leaded crystalline figures, glass bells and baubles. “But as I said, we need the shortcut to the Seraglio, and that means we need to get up there. The fastest way is if they lift us up. I could fly us, but—”
“George?” a high, strident feminine voice called out from an open doorway off to the right. “George! Red light, George! Go pick up whatever dropped in an’ bring it t’ the kitchen, there’s a dearie?”
“Bollocks t’ that, Mandy; I was listenin’ to the cricket match in me study!” a deeper, masculine voice called back from a hall off to the left. “Can’t th’ little blighters wait a bit? Game’s just gettin’ good—an’ why can’t you get ’em yourself, woman?”
“I’ve got my lil’ fingers up to th’ wrist in your fav’rit soda bread recipe! Cricket match’ll wait; you want yer tea on time, you gotta go grab them whatsits now, an’ strip’ n’ gut ’em fer supper!”
Myal shuddered. If this was a lethal trap, those giants actually meant it. They’d be killed and cooked in a trice. She’d heard of adventurers getting crushed, bashed, hacked in half, and even eaten alive—though she wasn’t sure that last one was true; there were certain things which even the Tower wouldn’t show.
“. . . But they have butterfly nets for just such a chase,” Kerric finished his interrupted sentence. “And the door back into our own dimension takes a bit longer to open than usual, up on that shelf. Mandy insisted on a child-proof lock on the door that leads to the Seraglio, though I don’t know why, as children are never allowed to run the gauntlets anyway.”
