Mogworld

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  After all that the effect was lost, because the rogue was still unconscious when Frank dragged him in and deposited him on the carpet. Like warriors with their lack of clothing and mages with their sleeves, the signature for rogues is their fondness for black. This specimen, for example, was wearing a black open-necked shirt, black hose, black boots, black cap, and great big black bruises where he had been struck by Edward’s flailing limbs.

  He was a small and wiry man, built like an acrobat, as rogues tend to be. Frank gave him a kick and rolled him over, and I furrowed my brow, puzzled.

  There was something familiar about the man that immediately began digging at my mind. He was wearing the kind of small black mask with eyeholes that does less to conceal the identity than a pair of spectacles, and a stupid curly mustache so thin that it could have been drawn on, and I could have sworn I’d seen it all before.

  “Wake him up,” ordered Dreadgrave, slipping into his stern growl. Frank responded by gobbing viscous green phlegm onto the rogue’s face, adding a much-needed bit of color to his outfit.

  “Waaagh!” went the rogue, suddenly awake with suspicious rapidity.

  “Who sent you here?” went Dreadgrave, steepling his fingers like a pro.

  “Slippery John will never talk, Dreadgrave!” The rogue was clearly enlivened by the notion that someone considered him important enough to interrogate. “Torture Slippery John all you want, Slippery John never betrays his client!”

  “Take him to the grinding wheel,” said Dreadgrave, bored.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” added Slippery John quickly. “You didn’t let Slippery John finish. Slippery John never betrays his client during peak work hours, but otherwise Slippery John is a free spirited renegade and owes allegiance to no man!” A long, awkward pause. “It was the Magic Resistance in Lolede City. They want your big book of necromancy.”

  Dreadgrave treated us to one of his best booming laughs. I nodded appreciatively behind my helmet. “The Magic Resistance have my terms! If they would know my methods, they must prove their commitment with gold, payable in installments! None will wrest that which is Dreadgrave’s by force!”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what Slippery John said to them,” muttered Slippery John. I definitely recognized him. The thought nagged at me like a bored schoolboy repeatedly kicking the back of my chair.

  “Did you really think you could outsmart one such as I?” boomed Dreadgrave, returning to the matter at hand. “Slip past my invincible undead legions?” He gestured to Meryl and me—the sort of acknowledgement that was another of the many little things that made him such a great person to work for. “Many adventurers have attempted to best my fortress, but never one as pathetic as you.”

  “Well if you’re trying to hurt Slippery John’s feelings, then mission accomplished,” muttered the rogue, not quietly enough.

  “Cast this sniveling wretch into the Acid Fountain,” ordered Dreadgrave.

  “Emptied for cleaning,” I hissed rapidly into his ear.

  “Wait,” he added, without missing a beat. “On second thoughts, throw him into the dungeons. His fate will be all the more agonizing if he is left to contemplate it for a while.”

  “Do you mind if I pop down and . . . interview him, after my shift?” I asked, after Slippery John had sniveled his way down the corridor. “There’s something I’m curious about.”

  “Ah, yes. Interview him,” said Dreadgrave, knowingly. “Just don’t let him die yet. The acid’s more fun to watch. Especially their faces when it reaches crotch level.”

  FIVE

  Dreadgrave’s dungeons were a treacherous labyrinth of twisting passageways, devious traps and slavering monsters, which had claimed more lives than a decent-sized plague. I, however, had taken the employee induction and knew the secret: Turn right at every circular floor grating and left at every chained-up skeleton.

  Fifteen turns later, I arrived at the main cell block and exchanged nods with the slavering monster on duty. Slippery John’s cell was easy to identify. It was the one from which could be heard the sound of a flimsy lockpick rattling ineptly around inside the massive cast-iron lock. I peered through the barred viewing window, and could just about see the top of his head as he labored away. I wondered if it was worth mentioning the three deadbolts on my side of the door.

  “Hey.”

  He glanced up elatedly, then his face fell as he took me in. “Oh. Thought it might have been a real person.”

  I let that slide. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Interrogation, is it? Well, know this, demon: Slippery John is an incredibly easy nut to crack. Torture is completely unnecessary with Slippery John. He will sing like a canary at the slightest raised voice.” His hands flew to his mouth. “Oh, crap, you’re probably going to torture Slippery John now anyway since Slippery John brought it up. Well, fine. Just start with the water torture, it’s pretty hot in here.”

  Torturing Slippery John was certainly looking tempting. “I don’t want to interrogate you. I’m just curious about something.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding almost disappointed.

  “Do you have a twin?”

  His thick brow descended into an avalanche of a frown. “Nnnnno, not that Slippery John knows of.”

  “It’s just that we had a bloke break in last week who looked, spoke and acted exactly like Sli—like you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That was Slippery John.”

  “That was you.”

  “Yeah.”

  I tapped my foot for a moment, staring at the floor, wondering how best to phrase my next question. “Didn’t we kill you?”

  “Yeah, you did.” He squinted, assessing my features. “Slippery John remembers you now, creature of twilight. You were the one who kicked Slippery John in the goolies and threw Slippery John into that big pit with all the rats.”

  “The Rat Pit.”

  “Yeah, you should probably think about clearing some of the bodies out of that thing, Slippery John saw five of his old ones down there.”

  I rubbed at my temple. “How many times have you been killed?”

  “In this fortress? Coming up to about twelve, Slippery John guesses. Turning out to be a really hard quest, Dreadgrave’s book.”

  “So . . . wait a minute, every time you die you come back with a new body?”

  He was looking at me as if I was asking him if he knew how to breathe. “Don’t you?”

  “No . . . I mean, I do come back to life after I die but it’s always in the same body.”

  “Whoa, that’d make things a lot easier.” He thoughtfully smoothed his tiny mustache with a fingertip. “Much more convenient than going all the way back to the nearest church. Slippery John guesses that’s because you’re undead. Slippery John can’t believe you wouldn’t know about this. You’d have to be really out of touch.”

  “Well, yes, I’ve been dead for fifty years, and I haven’t spent much time outside since.”

  “Oh. I guess you wouldn’t know, then.”

  “Know what? Is anyone else not dying?”

  “Nobody’s dying. Nobody’s died in fifteen years, not anywhere in the world. Not plants or animals, either. Every time anything dies, it reappears with a new body. Could you pull your jaw back up? There’s a spider in your throat and it’s really turning Slippery John’s stomach.”

  I closed my mouth with an audible clack. I had suspected that the angels weren’t anything to do with Dreadgrave’s magic, but this new intelligence wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Wouldn’t this cause massive overcrowding?”

  “No-one’s being born. Everyone’s gone sterile. No-one seems to be aging, either. It’s like time’s been standing still, but everyone gets to still move around and talk and stuff.”

  “But . . . how? Why?”

  “Look. Slippery John is just a debonair master thief,” said Slippery John. “Slippery John doesn’t know any particulars. All Slippery John knows is that about fifteen years ago people stopped dyin
g. The Infusion, it was called. The population of the world hasn’t gone up or down since then—up until a few months ago, o’course.”

  “What happened a few months ago?”

  It was difficult for him to look at me condescendingly when he was a foot shorter and stuck behind a cell door, but he managed it somehow. “You should know. Dreadgrave found a way to raise the corpses of people who died before the Infusion. The Magic Resistance are trying to figure out how he did it.”

  “Hence all the adventurers, I suppose.”

  “Oh, sure. This is the hottest quest right now. Big rewards.”

  “If any of this is even true, I don’t see how raising more dead people is going to solve anything. It certainly didn’t make my life any easier.”

  “Slippery John wouldn’t know anything about that. Slippery John doesn’t ask questions. Slippery John is just the kind of master thief who fetches things that no-one else can fetch. Slippery

  John doesn’t let things like reason get in the way of—”

  He was interrupted by a loud THUMP coming from directly above us. It was followed by a steady rumble, and orange dust drifted down from the ceiling. We both looked up very slowly. “Is it supposed to do that?” he asked, his voice very quiet and high-pitched.

  “Erm . . . ”

  A crack snaked across the ceiling of the cell, spitting dust and pebbles as it went. Slippery John had just enough time to say “Er,” before the ceiling gave and he was crushed by a hundred tons of wall, floor and foundation.

  When the last few scraps had finished rattling to a halt and the dust had cleared somewhat, I stood stunned and frozen for a while, as the small non-terrified part of my brain tried desperately to encourage some motion into my muscles and remember the the emergency escape procedure.

  “Aw, crap, Slippery John’s spine is powderized,” came a voice from somewhere around floor level, with the nonchalant tone of someone discovering a hangnail.

  “Oh dear,” I said, then felt pretty stupid about it. “Do you need any help?”

  “Nah, that’s okay, Slippery John’s lungs are filling with blood, so Slippery John’ll head right on out after he dies. You should probably make a run for it, though, if you’re not going to be growing a new body after this.”

  Somewhere in the distance I heard another section of the dungeon become intimately acquainted with the room directly above it. “Right,” I said. Slippery John’s corpse had no further comment.

  The ground was shaking, now, and dust was falling continuously from cracks that criss-crossed the ceiling of the cell block. The duty slavering monster had apparently shown greater intuition than I and scarpered. A slab from overhead landed with a dirt-scattering thud a few feet away. Instinct took over and I legged it.

  The last three months of undeath had done a lot to clear up the stiffness in my joints and nervous system, and while I couldn’t keep pace with, say, a high school athletics club, I could work up a decent speed. It didn’t help, though, because half-way through the labyrinth I turned a corner and bounced off a fresh cave-in.

  I changed direction and took a random turn to see if I could find another way around—something which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake. Within two seconds I had tripped a pressure plate, and within three I had an arrow sticking out of my chest. I glared down at the vibrating shaft, exasperated.

  Another rumble shook the fortress, and the distant sound of rocks falling put another dent in my already battered hopes. “What the hell’s going on?!”

  “J,” said a nearby wall.

  “What was that?”

  “Im,” added the floor.

  Something was scrabbling around in the infrastructure, searching. “Over here!” I cried.

  “Jim!” cried a sewer grating set in the bottom of the wall to my right. It was, of course, Meryl. Her hair was stained brown with dust and was quickly disentangling itself from her pigtails.

  “What’s going on up there?!” I yelled.

  “I dunno! The whole fortress is collapsing! Some . . . things are flying around zapping it! Everyone’s running away but I came to find you!”

  “Why?”

  She made a few incoherent frustrated noises before pulling her vocal chords back into line. “I don’t want you to die, all right?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean! The way back’s caved in as well but if we can get into the sewer system we can ride it out of here! Together!”

  “Where’s the sewer system?”

  She disappeared from view for a second. “Take a side-step to your left.”

  I did so.

  “Okay, now move about two feet forward.”

  “Now what?”

  “You see that torch bracket? Not that one, the one just by your elbow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it a little push like you’d accidentally brushed past it. And try to keep your body completely straight.”

  Taking a deep breath, trying to avoid thinking about exactly to whom I was entrusting my unlife, I reached out and nudged the bracket with my fingertips. The entire floor immediately gave way. I fell in a pencil dive down a one-foot wide gap between two gigantic troughs of boiling acid. Directly beneath my feet a rather heavily corroded drain cover was set in the floor. By the time I realized it couldn’t possibly take my weight I had already plunged straight through.

  I landed with an almighty splash in a fast-moving current, which immediately snatched me and yanked me into an underground stream. It was pitch dark, but judging by the smell, I probably didn’t want to see what I was swimming in anyway. It had presumably been water from the river at some point, but the doom fortress had a lot of sewage, rubbish, noxious chemicals, and dismembered bodies to get rid of so by the time it was ejected from the fortress it had transformed into a rather lively soup of hazardous waste.

  Whatever it was, the plumbing system was trying to get rid of it as fast as possible. I was hurtling down the canal at bewildering speed. I bounced from wall to wall, swearing involuntarily with each impact, before the canal narrowed into an outflow pipe and things became even less comfortable. A few tosses and turns later I completely lost my sense of direction and could no longer even tell the difference between vertical and horizontal.

  Finally, I rounded a corner and saw a circle of murky daylight rocketing towards me. I was almost relieved, until I remembered that the sewer outflowed directly into the deepest, darkest crevasse in the south of Greydoom Valley, in strict accordance with Dreadgrave’s “out of sight, out of mind” waste disposal policy. So I was heading towards a two hundred foot drop onto spiky rocks, where there would be no-one to stitch me back together but plenty of vultures to entertain.

  I pushed all four limbs against the sides of the pipe to try and stop myself, but the fast-flowing sewage all around me had other ideas. I could barely slow myself down, the staples in my joints groaning and twanging in protest, and I was fast running out of pipe.

  Moments before popping out of the outflow for my date with gravity, I saw a lip at the top of the opening. A small one, but solid enough to take my weight. I held out both hands and braced myself for impact.

  No amount of bracing could have been adequate. The ridge struck like a scimitar to the palms. The jarring blow tore off my left arm at the elbow and flung it away. Somehow my right arm held, although two of the staples pinged free. My entire body below the shoulders kicked forward like a mule’s hind legs. But I had stopped. I was safe.

  After getting my breath back, I was forced to revise my hasty use of the word “safe.” I was dangling from the edge of a hole in an otherwise smooth cliff wall, getting a faceful of biological waste. I had lost one arm and the other was being stretched to breaking point. The edge of the cliff was ten feet above my head, and to cap it all—

  “Man, that was intense.”

  I sighed through my teeth. And to cap it all, Meryl was there. “What are you doing here?”

  “I jumped in after you. T
o rescue you.” A pause. “Sorry. Didn’t really think. But hey, problem shared, right?”

  The voice was coming from somewhere around the region of my crotch. I looked down, tried not to notice the yawning abyss directly below, and focussed on Meryl. “What are you hanging from?”

  “The arrow in your chest. Sorry. I caught your arm, though.” She waved it. “So there’s no need to worry.”

  Another staple flew out of my other shoulder and my reach extended by an inch. Only three staples remained, and then I’d be relying on the knots Meryl had used to tie my tendons together. “I can’t hold on much longer,” I said, in case it wasn’t obvious.

  “Can’t you climb up?”

  “Not with one arm, no. Can you?”

  “Oh, no, I’m completely hopeless at that kind of thing. When I was a kid I could never get all the way up to the treehouse because I was afraid the boys would look up my skirt.”

  Another staple flew off and lodged itself in my forehead. “We’re going to die,” I said.

  “No we’re not.”

  “All right. I might have deserved that. But we’re going to be pretty inconvenienced.”

  “Okay. We need to think of a plan.”

  “How about this,” I said. “I’ll let go, then when we hit the ground, you hit the ground first. Then maybe your carcass will cushion my impact to keep me functioning long enough to stitch you back together.”

  “Why don’t you just grab that rope?”

  “What rope?”

  “That rope that someone’s letting down for us.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever be so grateful to see spun hemp. I planted my foot on the pipe, let my hand go, felt a terrifying moment of peril that made me grateful my heart had already stopped, and grabbed the rope with all the limbs I had left.

  Our rescuer took the strain with some difficulty, and I braced my feet on the cliff face. Meryl made her way from me to the rope and did the same. I edged my way gradually up to the top, employing my teeth in place of my missing arm, and with safety fragilely restored, I had time to thank whoever had come to our rescue.