“I’ll bear that in mind.” I said, with a level of deadpan that you have to be dead to get right.
“Right on, minion of foulness. We’d better get moving, we’re supposed to be meeting Slippery John’s contact in the underground tunnels.”
“Weren’t you being chased by guards?”
“Witness how Slippery John effortlessly evades his pursuers at every turn!” He took another lightning-fast worried glance behind him. “Yes indeed, there’s not a dungeon in the world that Slippery John hasn’t strolled through as if the very walls were vapor. Except the one in Dreadgrave’s fortress, obviously,” he added quickly, as one of my eyebrows began to climb up. “You creatures caught Slippery John on an off day there. And there was that place in Anarecsia where the guards all wore low cut tops . . .”
I turned him into a rabbit. Moments later, a small platoon of armed guards from the palace dungeons jogged past, kicking their knees high and chanting “hup.”
Meryl hastily picked up the rabbit and stroked it until they’d gone past. “Good timing.”
“I didn’t know they were there. I just wanted him to shut up for a second.”
“Oh, pshh. It was the heroic instincts hastening your arm, right?”
This time I pictured Mr. Wonderful dancing a tango with Bowg on the ruined, undying body of the human race as it cried out for me to save it. For a moment the human race looked a hell of a lot like Meryl. “Sure, whatever.”
She grinned, and lovingly bobbed Slippery Rabbit in her arms. I watched as he cleaned his ears and wiggled his whiskers up and down. I congratulated myself for going for the optional upgrade that also provided the rabbits with adorable little bowties.
“Uh,” said Meryl. “Shouldn’t he have changed back by now?”
I stared at him. He twitched his nose.
—
Some time later, as the sun was going down, we were sitting around a table in a nearby bar. The establishment was operating under the shallow pretense of being an entertainment venue, because there were a couple of boards set up on barrels in the corner as a makeshift stage, on which a trio of underdressed women were gyrating around strangling each other.
Meryl was still clutching Slippery John the rabbit to her chest. Some of the dancers, who had spent several minutes squealing and scratching behind his adorable ears, had managed to find him some carrots, and he sat in Meryl’s arms toying with one of the uneaten stalks.
“How long has it been now?” asked Meryl, again.
“Two hours,” I said.
She rubbed her chin. “How long are these spells supposed to last?”
“Seconds.”
“So what does this mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“I thought you were a magic student.”
“It is because I was a magic student that I am completely without an explanation for this. As far as I knew the world record for prolonged bunnymorph was around two minutes.”
“So it is possible to make the spell last longer?”
“Yes, if you’re a top level mage trained for competitive spellcasting.”
She rested her chin on her folded arms and thought for a moment. “So what does this mean?”
“Could we please stop going back and forth between the same questions? I keep saying I’ve got no idea.”
“But don’t you have some kind of cure spell that turns rabbits into humans?”
“No! It does not work like that! Do you know how hard it is to turn one living thing into another living thing for longer than a second? The universe just doesn’t tolerate it! The spell basically works by pointing over reality’s shoulder and saying ‘Look over there!’ It’s not designed to last! The only possible explanation for this is that I have somehow become more powerful than God!”
“Your blasphemy never ceases!” blurted out Thaddeus, in what I’m pretty sure was some kind of reflex action. Experimentally I turned him into a rabbit again, and sure enough, seconds later he was right back to his grimacing self. “Witness how the LORD deflects your corruption from my blessed form!”
“Just for once it’d be nice if you defied character and made some kind of helpful suggestion.”
“The solution is to PRAY, heretic. Only the LORD may name who shalt person and who shalt bunny rabbit be.”
I watched Slippery John some more. Praying seemed to be the last thing on his mind. He had lost interest in the carrot and had apparently defaulted to the other main instinct of rabbits, his little head alertly tossing left and right on the hunt for female bunnies.
“Perhaps if we killed him he’d come back as a human?” said Meryl.
I shook my head. “Polymorphed rabbits are indestructible.”
“Why?”
“Well, think about it. If you had a spell that could instantly transform any foe regardless of size into a convenient fragile bunny rabbit, why would you need any others? It’d completely destroy the offensive magic industry.”
“Then I guess there’s nothing we can do but wait.”
I heard a powerful, authoritative cough. Behind me, I saw two black-suited Adventurer’s Guild agents in a booth, reading newspapers. One of them caught my eye for an instant, then slowly licked his finger and turned a page portentously. Clearly Mr. Wonderful was expecting fast results, and it probably wouldn’t be long before his extremely limited patience gave out and he decided that the wellbeing of his herb garden took priority.
“No,” I said, making sure everyone heard. “We can’t waste any time. Come on, think. He must have said something to you about how he contacts his people.”
“Well, yeah,” said Meryl. “While you were on the beach he mentioned that he got up to all kinds of secret business in the men’s toilets in the park.”
A few moments of silence passed as I considered this. “Did he mention . . . exactly what kind of secret business he was talking about?”
“Not really. Magic Resistance business, I guess. He said there’s some kind of tunnel entrance in there.”
I drummed my fingers for a second, then stood up. “I guess we’d better take a look, then.” I turned my face partly towards the agents behind me. “A look in the toilets in the park, that is.
The toilet where we suspect might be found a tunnel. A tunnel that may lead us to the Magic Resistance. Which we are still diligently looking for.”
One of the newspapers rustled in a gesture of acknowledgement.
“That’s the spirit!” said Meryl, encouraged. “Let’s go.”
“Okay then,” I said. “You bringing the bunny?”
“Sure am.”
“Could you . . . stop him from . . . doing that?”
She looked down. “Oh, come on. He just wants somewhere warm to hide.”
SEVEN
The park turned out to be a network of bright green lawns and beautiful flower gardens, taking up a large chunk of the city’s west side and bisected by the river. Of course, the knowledge that plants were as immortal as everything else spoiled the effect somewhat. The place would look forever beautiful no matter what the groundskeeper did, which explained why he was sitting motionlessly on a bench near the park entrance, leaning on his rake and no doubt contemplating suicide for the umpteenth time.
The area around the toilets was one of the zones set aside for adventurers suffering from the final stage of Syndrome: a small forest of men like sweaty bipedal horses, women like hip-thrusting shop window mannequins, wispy elves like windswept ornamental trees, and dwarves like scowling piles of suet pudding. They stood in the usual Syndrome poses, the men with hips thrust forward, the women presenting their chests and posteriors like barnyard hens. The only motion was the slight up-down movement as they filled and emptied their magnificent heroic lungs.
The effect could have been eerie, and if there had been an ounce of perceptible humanity remaining in any of the buggers it probably would have been, but as it was, the display was actually rather appealing. Children chased each other between the row
s and a young couple was sharing a sandwich and a bottle of wine between the legs of a particularly tall barbarian warrior.
The toilets were located in a small, pleasant, cottage-like building, with a sign reading “Relief Center,” because there is a certain kind of local authority who will reluctantly concede that toilets must exist but feel there’s no harm in dancing around the issue. Once again I could tangibly feel the massive distance between me and Garethy, where hanging actual toilet paper in the shithouse as opposed to old newspapers was considered hoity-toity.
The interior of the gents’ was much closer to home. The custodian obviously hadn’t dragged himself through here in a while. The stink was foul, the mirror was broken, and the corpse slumped against one of the sinks had probably injected himself with fatal amounts of illicit substances weeks ago—and no doubt a few more times since then.
“So what are we looking for, exactly?” I said.
There was a long silence.
“Redemption for your ungodly sins,” barked Thaddeus opportunistically. “Fall to your knees and plead for a righteous evaporation, foaming urine of demonic puppies.”
I sighed and poked my head outside. “Meryl, just come in.”
She blushed yellowly. “It’s the boys’ toilets!”
“No-one’s around.”
“Don’t lie. You’re around and Thaddeus is around.”
“We’re not having a pissing contest, Meryl, we’re looking for a tunnel. Get in here.”
“Oh, fine.” She stepped gingerly into the room as if she were commencing a bout of firewalking, and her eye was immediately drawn to the corpse. “Ooh. You know, I did always wonder what goes on in here. Any idea where the tunnel entrance could be?”
“Not yet.” I was investigating one of the cubicles as well as I could without actually touching anything. “Wait. Scratch that.”
She came in for a closer look. “‘Slippery John’s secret tunnel entrance,’” she read aloud. The words were nestled in the middle of several items of graffiti detailing who woz ere and what kind of good times they could provide.
I noticed that the rabbit was reaching out a paw, trying to touch the graffiti. “I guess this is it. Unless it’s a trick, but Slippery John doesn’t strike me as the sophisticated type.”
“So this must be the secret switch,” said Meryl. She leant forward and decisively pushed the brick inwards. It fell out the other side of the wall.
“No, I think you just open it by the big ring in the floor,” I said, crouching. The trapdoor was old and rusty and the hinges squealed like a grief-stricken violin, but the rust had flaked off around the edges and the handle, so it had obviously been opened and closed many times in the recent past. A set of worn stone steps led down into the foul-smelling underbelly that the unrelenting beauty of the park was doing its damnedest to compensate for.
We descended into a sort of disused basement-sewer type chamber, then the stairs ended and were supplanted by a sloping tunnel that must have been magically bored into the rock. The walls were an archaeologist’s wet dream; as is usually the case with cities as old as Lolede, most of the buildings had been regularly destroyed over the years by wars and barbarian invasions, so building contractors throughout history had saved time by laying foundations over the ruins and starting again. We descended through countless generations of broken architecture and fossilized artifacts, sandwiched together in layers like a descending diagram representing the development of weapons technology. At the top, magical superweapons. Then gunpowder. Then crossbows. Then swords. Then sticks. Then rocks. Then magical superweapons again.
We finally reached the bottom of the tunnel somewhere around the third crossbow layer and found ourselves in the middle of a centuries-old alley, the cobbled paving stones now inseparable from the petrified bones of the lucky bastards who died permanently while futilely defending these streets in some long-forgotten turf war.
I summoned a small fireball and held it aloft to light the way. The rocky ceiling was barely a foot above our heads, and some of the stalactites almost reached the floor. It was like some colossal granite hedgehog had rolled onto the city and died.
“Old, isn’t it,” said Meryl.
I stopped walking. “Surely even you ran that through your head before you spoke and realized how inane it was.”
“All right, all right. Let’s just keep going.”
“Which way?” We had arrived at a junction. A great number of petrified skeletons were here, half-sunk into the floor and now inseparable from each other or the surrounding rock—the site of either a particularly bloody ancient battle or some very dangerous traffic.
“Don’t ask me,” said Meryl, beaming at her own lack of sense. “You’re the one who wanted to come down here.”
“You scheme to lead my unsullied being to the corrupting satanic depths from which you spawned,” interjected Thaddeus. “Truly your rejection of the LORD has left you cursed with demonic ignorance.”
I tightened my lips, counted to ten, then turned to Meryl. “Does Slippery John know?”
“You . . . want me to ask him?”
“You got a better idea?”
We stared at each other, and her gaze dropped first. She sighed, pulled her neckline out and spoke loudly and clearly into her dress. “Which way do we go, Slippery John?” The wobbling mass in her clothing jostled around for a second. “He’s indicating the right.”
I didn’t move. “How, exactly, is he indicating the right?”
“None of your business.”
“The right.” I bounced the fireball thoughtfully up and down for a moment, looking back and forth at the two identical dark passageways. “Okay then.” I took the right.
It swiftly led into a narrow network of alleyways in the ancient city’s red light district. Long-forgotten flyers and posters were still hanging on the walls, some still bearing faint images of exposed breasts and buttocks whose owners had long since gone to dust, evidence of a saner, pre-Infusion era. We were passing through the parking area behind a prehistoric strip club when my firebolt reached its preset lifespan and fizzled out, plunging us into darkness.
Instantly, I heard the stumbling skitter of something big and insect-like moving nearby. Slippery John gave a high-pitched wheeze as Meryl tensed up, hugging him tighter.
I’d never had a problem with the dark, even less so now that the three of us were probably the most disquieting things in it. Still, there’s something instinctively terrifying about hearing what sounded like the skittering of either a six-foot cockroach or five hundred regular-sized ones marching in eerily perfect unison.
I summoned another fireball as fast as I could, just in time to see something on a nearby wall hastily disappear. I had only caught a glimpse, but it had vaguely resembled a drying rack wrapped in bone-white skin. I found that Meryl and I were suddenly standing back-to-back, while Slippery John had disappeared into the deepest recesses of her dress again. Thaddeus was a few feet away, watching us contemptuously.
Maintaining fireballs for so long was rapidly draining my meagre magic reserves. The new one was already dimming. I could hear the scuttling noise from all around us, now, and many pairs of milk-white eyes were peering at us from the surrounding blackness.
“Thaddeus,” said Meryl from the corner of her mouth. “Maybe you should come a bit closer to the light?”
The priest was at the edge of the illumination my magic could offer, arms proudly folded. “Ask me not to warm myself at the sputterings of demonic conjuration. I am already closer to the Light than you abominable—”
He had to stop, then, because a skinny white arm had snapped across his mouth. Several more seized his limbs and torso. The arms were stick-thin and pure white, but unmistakably humanoid. They hauled Thaddeus back into the shadows and out of sight, but we heard him loudly and determinedly singing hymns all the way until he was out of earshot.
“They took Thaddeus! They took Thaddeus!” whined Meryl.
“I noticed!
I noticed!”
By then I was already running through the tunnels, holding the fireball in front of me like a relay runner, our pursuers scuttling close behind. I barely made fifty yards before I tripped on a bit of kerb and fell catastrophically onto my chin.
I was pulled onto my back and restrained by countless pairs of skinny grasping hands. Somewhere nearby I heard Meryl yelp as she, too, was taken down. But I kept concentrating on the fireball and was able to keep it going about a foot above my face for long enough to finally get a proper look at our captors.
They were human, or at least had been once; now they looked like asylum patients who had been coated in plaster dust and had all their body fat sucked out. Their eyes were pale and squinted against even the pathetic light my magic could provide, but as my reserves dwindled and the fireball shrank, they drew closer with increasing audacity and brazen lack of concern for personal space.
The face of a particularly wizened albino appeared upside-down in my vision. His cracked and paper-thin lips parted, and after the usual spontaneous heave at the first sight of my face, he spoke.
“W-will you turn off th-that bloody light,” he whispered.
“Sorry,” I said automatically, snuffing it out. Only then did I think to refuse, but it wouldn’t have mattered; my magic reserves were depleted anyway.
“People are—hup—trying to s-sleep,” he hissed. He spoke with tremendous difficulty, as if he’d only just learned how to talk from a narcoleptic chain smoker—or, indeed, that he’d spent most of his life in an underground cave. He also had a tendency to quickly intake breath at odd points in his sentences. “You w-will not—hup—steal the treasure!”
“We don’t want to steal your treasure!”
“S-seriously?”
“Yes!” I offered a silent prayer of thanks that Slippery John was in no position to talk.
“Then w-why did you—hup—come down h-here?”
“We’re just looking for some people! We didn’t even know you had a treasure!”
“We don’t.”
I wondered when someone was going to hand me the script for this scene. “What?”
Mogworld Page 21
