“I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”
“No.” She tapped my forehead twice. “A problem with your species. From now on, if that tiny human brain churns out any more bright ideas, run them past me first.”
“You shouldn’t have jailed me,” I muttered.
“It was a lovely jail, though.” She straightened. “If you’ve no more immediate plans to ruin my country, perhaps we should focus on getting out of this mess.”
“Could just be my inferior human brain talking, but we need to find Ronin and Tammagan. Nils said he teleported them outside. But Ronin can glide. He could have grabbed Tammagan and landed safely.”
“Not a bad point.” Eliandra tapped her chin in thought.“I suppose I’ll keep you. Provided you do as I say.”
“Oh, joy.”
“We can’t go anywhere with the teleporters offline and the palace crawling with Dracon’s loyalists. With Nils dead, they’ll be in disarray but not gone. Our main exits will be the docks, the roof, and the grand foyer. They’ll have all three watched. Normally my guard could deal with this, but the Akarri are too scattered to put the threat down cleanly; Nils timed his treachery carefully and struck when my guard was mostly abroad or serving on Ronin’s ship.”
“Can’t we just break a window or something?” I asked.
“The windows are hardened crystal. You have to be imprinted on the founder’s stone to open one. They will have removed my voice from the stone; yours was never there to begin with.”
I groaned. Unbreakable windows. I made this place a prison. Wait—not exactly. “There’s another way out.”
She arched an eyebrow. “And you know it, oh he-who-ruins-well-laid-plans?”
“Through the sublevels, across the Pit of Souls. We have to go through the Labyrinth.”
“And what, pray tell, is the Labyrinth?”
It was a dungeon I was going to run. I’d forgotten about writing it into the basement of the palace. “A way out.” More for my own benefit than hers, I added, “Wish I remembered all the details, but I cobbled it together from other dungeons I’d made—er, made it through before. So on the danger scale, it’s probably easier than storming through Nils’s men. That is, if you can get us to the sublevels.”
She hefted her staff, which I now realized had a rune stone installed somewhere inside. “I imagine we’ll find a way.”
Chapter Four: Royal Pain
Queen Eliandra turned out to be every inch the sophisticated stateswoman. Unfortunately, her hands-on management style needed work. We meandered the miles of uninhabited, unexplored palace with Eliandra dictating every turn, insisting at intervals that I remain silent, speed up, slow down, or hold back.
I had chafed under Ronin’s style of grab-and-drag, her overbearing nature and her threats. I’d thought it cumbersome. I realized, though, I far preferred my bodyguard to the Queen. Ronin gave an order, bolstered it with a threat, and left me to weigh my options—but Eliandra was constantly there, a buzz in the ear pleading, “Hey, listen!” Ronin governed like the Old Testament. Eliandra’s every instruction was delivered with a smile and complementary hand motion. She was less a leader than a dog walker, and I resented it.
There was no chance we’d be intercepted by a search party. The palace was scaled more like wilderness than a building, except the walls made it a forest with nearly zero visibility—an enormous stone-and-carpet maze.
We bickered about leaving through the Labyrinth. Eliandra suggested bombs to penetrate the outer walls, but we both realized Nils’s men would have flying ships outside to intercept us. Then she suggested I draw her an army—yes, her, since she had “real command experience.” Admittedly, my Gold rating in StarCraft II probably didn’t count.
“No soldiers,” I said. “I don’t feel right drawing anything with a brain.” I tried not to look her in the eye. Our still-budding relationship didn’t need me in a deific role.
“Good soldiers don’t necessarily need brains.” Her smile bothered me.
We settled on a stone golem. I poured three hours into the details, so as not to repeat the river incident. However, when I exhaled on the golem, my breath sparked, stray pebbles crumbled from the image, and dark graphite stared lifelessly back at me.
I frowned. “I’m out of juice.”
Eliandra rubbed the bridge of her nose between closed eyes. “Then try something smaller.”
I drew a wristband with a “mana” bar to monitor how much summoning power I had left. It popped successfully from the page. I slipped on the band, which nested with my dad’s wristwatch and displayed my mana next to the timepiece. The meter was nearly guttered. “Um. I need to recharge.”
She threw her hands into the air, exasperated. “How?”
I shrugged. “Sleep? Food? Solar radiation? Plug me into a wall outlet, maybe.”
I used the last juice to summon a violet blossom from a flower in one of my old fantasy settings. The “dog dodger” flower was edible and neutralized our scent, keeping search dogs off our trail. Also wild dogs, because oh yeah, it turned out packs of them prowled through abandoned palace chambers feeding on God knew what.
“Why isn’t there more dog crap?” I asked.
“Grub-flies eat some,” Eliandra said. “Enchantoids clean the rest.”
“Enchantoids?”
“Sentient mops, buckets, sponges, dusters—a pack of bristle brushes once mauled my chambermaid; poor darling tried to keep them as pets, but they’re quite feral.”
“Do I want to know about the grub-flies?”
“They ingest waste. You won’t see any during daylight hours. You can hear dusk coming, because they buzz through the corridors. By day, they nest in earthen-floored rooms below ground level and rise through the palace like gnatty tides.”
“This place…” I stared at the abandoned library we wandered through—at mahogany reading desks, decoratively carved bookshelves, and marble staircases leading to a gloomy wraparound balcony. The fine décor had been kept clean of animal filth and damage by enchantoids. But no human had used it in living memory, its only sign of habitation a few dusty paw-prints on a velvet chaise longue. “It only looks like it’s for people. It has its own ecosystem.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” Eliandra said. “If people don’t live here, something will. Be glad it’s living brooms, dogs, and moss. The human contingent in the palace keeps it clear of monsters, at least near inhabited regions. If we travel far enough? No promises. No one’s explored the entire palace.”
I remembered writing that. “I’m an idiot,” I whispered.
Eliandra put her hand on my shoulder. “Yes. But at least among humans, you’re still in the top quintile.”
We traversed corridors, staircases, balconies, and once a really ridiculous slide. The Queen seemed to know her way, but once in a while she tapped her chin in thought.
When dusk arrived, dark swarms of grub-flies flooded the corridors, and my stomach growled at the realization I’d never eaten dinner. “How close are we?”
“Maybe a mile from the nearest inhabited region. By the dust, no one’s been in this room for three years. The molding and balustrades suggest we’re still on the twentieth story or so. We’ve been averaging twelve hundred yards between staircases, but they get harder to find in the sublevels. I estimate three or four days of this and we’ll be near the Labyrinth.”
“Wait. You don’t know the way?”
She scoffed. “I told you: we’re in the middle of a wild palace. The magic changes the rooms around when they’re uninhabited, and we can’t exactly flood it with cartographers. The only way to navigate the Palace of Ten Thousand Chambers is by architectural knowledge and intuition. Do cheer up, though; fortune may smile upon us. We could find a fire pole. That would get us through several levels in one go.”
Wait. “Where did you get the phrase ‘fire pole’?” Rune didn’t have modern fire stations.
“I believe they were first installed outside tall buildings in order to e
scape fires. They were covered in nonflammable grease to survive fire and deter robbers from climbing up. The idea never caught on for fire prevention, but it did at playgrounds. The name stuck.”
“Weird.” I realized in one of my setting notes I’d used the term “fire pole,” and Rune had somehow evolved an explanation. Whatever magic made that happen, it was doing a yeoman’s job.
The palace’s crystal lights dimmed around midnight. I was exhausted, having not eaten a full meal since the sky ship, and we bedded down in an echoing barracks, securing the doors at both ends with stacks of furniture.
Eliandra prodded me awake near dawn. She’d stood alert, watching over me, and ordered me to stand guard while she fell into an “elven sleep trance” for an hour. I yawned, ignored the ragged emptiness in my belly, and snickered at how Eliandra went from trancing in a Buddhist meditative pose to curling up into an adorable ball. She snored just the tiniest bit. It was like a little mouse snore.
The tides of sleep washed Eliandra’s face clean of expression, smoothing it like wet sand until she looked like a stranger. And, my God, I realized how strange this woman was: a Machiavellian queen one moment, an axe-wielding hellion the next, and finally one of those know-it-alls who liked to tell folks what to do. On Earth, those people got masters degrees in something not too mathematical or started blogs, but it seemed on Rune they made them Queen. Regal Eliandra was a match for my portrait, but what about Barbarian Eliandra and Know-it-all Eliandra? In her sleep, I couldn’t see any of those three people. Just who the hell did I draw?
I stared until Eliandra stirred with a catlike stretch and a yawn. I glanced sharply to the door I guarded.
She fingered the layer of grime accumulated on her silver gown from travel. “Can you draw yet?”
I checked my wristband and realized sleep had returned a third of my charge. “I won’t be building an army today, but something smaller, yes.”
“I need hiking gear.”
“What’s the magic word?”
She straightened and put fists to her hips. “How about, ‘I’m your queen.’ ”
“I’m American. You’re not the queen of me.”
She hefted her scepter and tapped both my shoulders. “I dub you a full citizen of Korvia. There. Now I’m your queen. Draw, or it’s treason.” She winked. “Make it rugged.”
It took an hour, since I didn’t want to summon a deadly fabric elemental by mistake. Eliandra hovered and made comments: fewer buttons; smaller bust (“How big do you think they are?”); a looser fit for her breeches. I resolved the boob issue by drawing a sports bra. I apparently had no idea what queens liked for footwear, because my eight attempts at boots nearly devolved into me giving her six-inch stilettos out of spite. Instead, I yelled, “You’ll take what I draw or you can hang your newest citizen!”
She lifted an eyebrow at the outburst, but probably sensed her over-shoulder prodding wasn’t going to get her what she wanted, because she stepped back.
The fact she’d been the bigger person and backed down made me feel like a jerk for yelling. “Screw it,” I muttered, and I finished the footwear.
I exhaled on the wardrobe, which uncoiled from the paper. I was thankful to get clothes and not bloodsucking vampire clothes.
Eliandra changed behind a dusty screen partition, her silhouette yet another thing I forced myself to ignore. I think if there’s one seriously unfair part to male sexuality, it’s being instantly aroused by good-looking people I otherwise find insufferable.
The Queen popped from behind the screen in a pair of sturdy breeches, a sleeveless shirt, and a brown-leather bomber jacket that featured a dragon-wing motif and stretched to mid-thigh. Instead of boots, she wore calfskin Nikes, complete with swish. She wound up loving them.
“You should make a teleportation device,” she said while lacing a shoe.
I went to tell her that was stupid, but my mouth hung open. No. That’s not stupid, it’s brilliant. My dictionary gave no kanji for “teleport,” so I set to work instead on a gauntlet-mounted device that used a miniaturized version of the bowling-ball-sized orbs in the palace teleporters. I added a “safe teleport” feature in the form of a remote viewer operated with dials and switches. Provided an area was observed before executing the transport, I’d avoid fusing with walls or other people.
The drawing took another two hours while Eliandra kept watch. Finally, I exhaled onto the paper and silver light filled each line.
Something went wrong. The gauntlet pushed halfway out, but the moment the teleportation orb materialized, it rattled violently within its fixture. The orb’s surface darkened to charcoal and cracked. Hairline fissures seeped angry red light and—with sensitivity born from making reflex saving throws in Dungeons & Dragons literally hundreds of times—I flinched and waited to die.
Eliandra threw me to the floor, putting a bunk between us and the device. An explosion pounded the air. My ears rang as it echoed.
I nevertheless stood and hurtled the bed the instant danger had passed, kicking smoky debris off my sketchpad. I picked the pad up and blew hot sparks from the surface. A few sizzled painfully into my forearm.
“Why did it do that?” Eliandra panted. “What did you do wrong this time?”
I nursed my singed forearm. “It wasn’t my fault—I think.” It wasn’t like I had a degree in this. I slumped onto the bunk and rubbed my chin in careful thought. The stone had caused the detonation. Realization sunk in: “There’s no teleportation in Rune except through fixed points.” I’d written it that way to prevent abuse. Most fantasy-world challenges were geographic in nature, after all, so teleportation spoiled the fun. I now lived under my own idiotic setting rules.
“Fixed points?”
“The palace uses a magical projector and a similar reception device.” Also, I realized the palace predated my setting rule—Rune may have just grandfathered in its teleporters. “Anyway, we can’t teleport out of here. I guess some things I just can’t do.”
Eliandra sat next to me and put a hand on my shoulder, and I knew she was about to dispense unnecessary criticism. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Magister Grawflefox, because I value your skills. But are you certain you should be bending the laws of reality? You’re not terribly―” She scanned the shattered rune stone and mangled teleporter. “―proficient.”
An idea hit me. I checked my mana. The clothing for Eliandra had barely dented it, but my failed spell had taken a bite. I prayed there was enough left. “I want one more try, coach.”
She smirked. “Have at it. I’ll stand way over there.”
I set to work. So far, I noticed the magic worked best when I drew things that fit Rune—but some things, like the “dog dodger” blossom, came from other fantasy worlds. So I let someone else’s fantasy setting inspire me.
Curiosity eventually had Eliandra on tiptoe, trying to spy my drawing from two bunks distant. “Are you drawing… another piece of paper?”
“A map.”
“What sort of map?”
“A little of Ms. Rowling, a dash of Google.” I worked out in my head how it would function, then blew on my paper. I tensed, but the map manifested without incident. Immediately, ink on its magical surface resolved into an aerial blueprint with tiny colored markings for Eliandra and me. It showed nearby rooms and tiny triangles that indicated wild dogs milling in a tight cluster nine or ten rooms away. “This should help us find our fire pole.”
“How does it work?”
“The map reads surrounding rooms and draws itself as we go. We can scroll around, too.” I tapped the surface and panned across. Then I showed her how to zoom in and out. “Looks like we’re only…” I tapped our destination and it drew a red line through several rooms and hallways. “…about a quarter mile from the nearest fire pole. Hang on.” I clicked the “avoid tolls and savage beasts” option and it created a slightly longer line. “Make that a third of a mile. C’mon.”
We darted through corridors with newfound purpose. While
I rarely get hungry right after waking, it was nearly lunchtime and I hadn’t eaten much last night. Maybe that was why I was so irritable with Eliandra. If my mana hadn’t been down to a sliver, I’d have tried summoning a BLT.
“You can draw us food when we’re down the fire pole and clear of dogs,” Eliandra said.
“How did you—”
She grinned. “You’re a soft touch, magister. For one so skinny, I take it you don’t skip a lot of meals.”
“I skip them sometimes.” Usually while distracted by video games or drawing. “What about you? Most royals aren’t known for their ascetic lifestyle.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I wasn’t born royal.”
“What were you born as, then?”
“I didn’t promise you all my secrets.”
“How about if I guess? Will you tell me if I’m right?”
“That’s childish.”
“So you won’t play?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I scratched my chin while we navigated a balcony over a larger chamber. “You’re not what I expected.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Not at all. Almost like you switched places with the Eliandra I met before.”
“Almost, yes.”
I froze, narrowing my eyes at her. “Wait a second. Royalty use doubles all the time.”
Eliandra paused too, a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“You’re not her, are you? You’re the Queen’s double.”
The grin worked all the way to her eyes. “Perhaps. It would have been smart for Queen Eliandra to sneak away. In which case she’s probably found Ronin by now, and we should meet them outside the palace.”
“Tricksy elfs,” I muttered.
With difficulty, we pushed open one massive side of a double door. The chamber beyond, supported by columns, was designed like a vaulted cathedral sanctuary; there were no pews, though, and it was filled from front to back with two dozen upright mops slopping soapy water across the floors, as if wielded by invisible servants.
Mistakes Were Made (A Pygmalion Fail Book 2) Page 5
