by Robert Bevan
“You need a woman to do your torture for you?” asked Rhonda. “Why not grow a sack and do it yourself?”
Gilbert balled up his fists. “She claimed to be an experienced interrogator!”
“Enough!” Frank banged on the table again. “Denise left a few days ago, and nobody has seen or heard from her since. And we’re not torturing anyone. Next.”
A thick meaty hand bounced up and down, barely above the heads of those around him.
Frank rolled his eyes. “Derek, you don’t need to raise your hand. Just spit it out.”
“Remember just before Tim killed the other Mordred?” It was the same dwarf who had suggested hanging Tim. Dave made a mental note to remember that his name was Derek.
“Yeah?” said Frank.
“Dave said he could use a Command spell to force him to say our names while we forced his hand to roll the dice. Maybe we could use it to force the truth out of whoever we have tied up in the cellar.”
Dave felt bad that Derek knew his name but he hadn’t known Derek’s. He felt even worse that all eyes in the room were suddenly fixed on him. But he felt worst about what he was about to confess.
“After further research, I’ve discovered that the Command spell is very limited in what commands it allows. It wouldn’t actually have worked the way I suggested it would.”
“Suggestion!” cried Gilbert.
Everyone turned to him, much to Dave’s relief.
“Let’s hear it,” Frank said after a few seconds of silence.
“No, I meant the spell Suggestion.”
“If a Command spell isn’t going to compel him to talk, what makes you think a Suggestion spell will?”
“Command is a first level clerical spell,” said Gilbert. “Suggestion is more powerful. It’s a third level wizard spell.”
“Okay,” said Frank. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Can you cast Suggestion?”
Gilbert shifted his weight. “No,” he admitted. “I’m only a third level wizard. You need to be fifth level before you can cast Level 3 spells.”
“Do we have any fifth level wizards here?” Frank asked the crowd. Everyone shook their heads. Their strategy of lying low wasn’t presently earning them dividends.
“I can do it!” said Chaz.
There were a few snickers from the crowd, but they did little to diminish Chaz’s enthusiasm.
“Suggestion might be a Level 3 wizard spell, but it’s only a Level 2 bard spell. I’ve seen it in my options.”
Dave felt a little sorry for Chaz. His excitement over having something so improbably helpful to contribute only highlighted how useless he was in general.
Frank took Chaz, Rhonda, Gilbert, and Tony the Elf down to the cellar. Tony the Elf closed the door behind them.
“What the –” Dave couldn’t tell whose voice it was, as the sound was muffled by the closed door. After a few seconds more of confused shouting, a few articulate shouts rose to the surface.
“NO!'
“STOP!”
“GET HIM!”
The cellar door opened, letting out a puff of thick blue smoke. A foot-long wooden stick popped out from the smoke cloud and landed on the wooden floor, spewing more of the same blue smoke from the end that was sparkling like a lit fuse. It smelled like spent fireworks. The door closed again.
“DYNAMITE!” someone shouted, prompting everyone to flee to the edges of the room, turn over tables, and take cover behind them.
Dave was still the closest to the door, but was forced to make a split-second decision between ducking behind a nearby wooden table, or making a run for the door. Frozen for a moment in indecision, he forced himself to make a choice and went for the table. How embarrassing would it have been to have his remains splattered against the door as evidence that he was trying to leave everyone else there to die?
As everyone waited in silent anticipation of their fiery deaths, the room failed to explode. Instead, it merely continued filling up with blindingly thick blue smoke.
The confused shouting from the cellar suddenly grew louder and clearer, as if the door had been opened, but it still sounded as if it was coming from beyond the staircase. As the voices grew louder, presumably ascending the staircase, the confused shouting turned to shouts of pain, then rapidly retreated back downward.
In a moment of clarity, Dave had a sudden revelation.
There’s no dynamite in C&C. That’s just a smokestick.
“Don’t let him escape!” cried Frank from downstairs.
Dave made out a shadow in the smoke, gunning for the door. He wasn’t much of a jumper, but he sprung at the shadow with as much force as his thick dwarven legs had in them. It wasn’t much of a dive, and he was glad nobody could see it, but it was enough. Both of his hands gripped an ankle.
“HA HA!” cried Dave.
CLANG! Something hard smashed against the top of Dave’s helmet. He was dizzy with pain as lights twinkled in the darkness.
“Fuck!” Dave realized that he had lost his grip on the prisoner’s leg and scrambled to regain it, hoping he might have tripped the guy or something. His hands found something in the smoke, but it was no leg. As the dissipating smoke and his probable concussion slowly relented, allowing his vision to return, he confirmed his suspicion as to what he was holding.
Tony the Elf was the first one to make it out of the cellar. He was limping, and frantically scanning the room. When his eyes found Dave on the floor and the open door behind him, he gasped.
Dave’s head hurt like a son of a bitch. He held up the giant wooden dildo. “Why the fuck do we still have this?”
Chapter 20
Katherine’s early-to-bed-early-to-rise plan hadn’t worked out quite like she’d planned. The pervert innkeeper had cost her precious time, between her confrontation with him and the subsequent need to sort herself out at a different inn, but the money she’d taken from him might make up for it if she could procure another horse, another weapon, and other traveling supplies.
Her clothes were still too wet and tight for her to squeeze into. The cloak was even wetter, the thick wool barely having let go of any of the water overnight. But at least it was loose-fitting enough for her to cover herself with. It was scratchy and uncomfortable, clinging to her skin. She added dry clothes and a new cloak to her mental shopping list.
But as large a city as Cardinia was, there didn’t seem to be any equivalent of a 24-hour Super Walmart where she could pick up a horse, a weapon, and equipment at four in the morning.
She and Butterbean prowled the empty streets near Westgate, where she peeked into store windows, trying to find shops near the stable that would provide what she needed, minimizing the time it would take her to get on the road once everything opened.
Magically illuminated streetlights provided enough light for Katherine to identify shops without having to get too close. It didn’t take her long to find a general goods store and an armory. Provided they and the stable all opened for business at the same time, she could be on the road moments thereafter.
In the meantime, frustrating as it was, she had no choice but to wait. She walked to a nearby park from which she could still see the shops, sat on a bench, and tried to think of some way she could distract herself. The obvious answer came to her almost immediately. She could play with her magical hole.
While digging into her pocket, she made a mental note to never use that turn of phrase around Cooper.
She pulled the silky smooth patch of black fabric out of her pocket and unfolded it. Neither side stood out as the obviously correct one to apply to a surface. Both were completely and identically black.
Wondering if she’d be able to see through to the other side of the world, she placed the fabric on the ground. It remained black and featureless. Poking at it cautiously, she found that her finger went right through the hole. That freaked her out a little, and she jerked her hand back, relieved to still have a finger.
She scooped up a handful of dry dirt, sprinkled it in
to the hole, and listened carefully. The dirt made no sound. It was silently absorbed into the void. Not quite satisfied that she had exhausted all the possibilities of that particular experiment, she bulldozed a larger pile of dirt with both hands, stood over the hole, and thrust the dirt down into it. The dirt that fell on the square perimeter outside the hole made noise, but the bulk of the dirt which got absorbed was silent. Now Katherine felt silly. She glanced around to make sure no one was watching her. Aside from Butterbean, it appeared she was alone.
She peeled the hole off the ground, held it up in the air, and poked at it again with her finger. This time it just moved the same way a normal piece of silk would, not absorbing her finger.
That was interesting. If nothing else, she learned that the magic is only activated when the hole is applied to a surface.
But what was the difference between applying it to the interior wall of an inn, or to the ground? Both triggered magical properties of the hole, but the results were different. Maybe it had something to do with being applied horizontally or vertically. With nothing better to do, it was worth investigating.
Katherine walked to a nearby tree and applied the hole to the smooth bark. It projectile-vomited a cloud of dust and grit right into her face.
“Ow! Fuck!” Katherine said, suddenly blinded as grit stung her eyes. She dropped to her knees and tried to blink the dirt out. Maybe she’d been mistaken about how the innkeeper had lost his eye. It could have been an infection from this stupidly random magical effect.
“Goddammit, that hurts.” Her vision returned, teary and blurred, but both eyes seemed to be functional. She continued to blink until the pain lessened and her vision started to clear. She could still feel the dirt on her face, and she knew she was filthy. So much for that bath.
When her vision had more or less fully cleared and she’d regained some of her composure, she noticed that the dirt on her freshly cleaned cloak was identical, in color and texture, to the dirt that she’d just recently dumped into the hole.
Very interesting.
Also interesting, though perhaps not quite as much, was that she couldn’t see through the tree trunk. The hole was just black.
She stood up and poked at the hole with her finger. It went right through, though she could feel nothing inside. She tried to put her whole hand in, but couldn’t squeeze it into the opening.
Instead, she found a long stick on the ground and inserted it until she was sure it should have been poking out the other side of the tree. It wasn’t. She pulled the stick back out and dropped it on the ground. The dirt thing was more interesting, and she had an idea for further experimentation.
Within a few minutes, Katherine had gathered a few dozen stones, ranging in size from a marble to a golf ball. She stood about ten feet away from the tree and hurled the stones, one by one, into the hole. She guessed she had maybe a 20% success rate.
She peeled the hole off the tree trunk, stood to the side, and prepared to reapply it with outstretched arms. If her hypothesis was correct, a shotgun blast of stones should fly out of the hole.
Her hypothesis was incorrect. There was once again just a plain old black magical hole in a tree, and it was starting to piss her off.
“What’s with this fucking thing?” she asked herself, peeling the hole off again. She returned to the bench to think up some other experiments she could fail at.
She didn’t come up with much about the dirt/rocks situation, but she had a new idea about the seeing-through-walls thing. Maybe it had to do with the thickness of whatever you were trying to make a hole in.
That had to be it. She should have thought of that immediately after the preposterous idea of making a hole through the world occurred to her. Fortunately, the perfect means to test this new theory was right under her ass.
The polished wooden plank that formed the seat of the bench was only about an inch and a half thick, probably similar to the thickness of the walls at the inn.
Katherine excitedly spread the hole flat on top of the bench. An eruption of rocks flew upward, all of which would have pelted her in the face had she been holding her head directly over the – Shit.
“Watch out, Butterbean!” Katherine cried as she huddled on the ground with her hands covering her head.
“Ow. Shit. Fuck. Ow.” The success rate of the falling stones hitting her was considerably higher than 20%, but they didn’t really hurt that much.
When she stopped hearing the thuds of stones hitting dirt, Katherine stood up and looked at the hole. It was a proper hole now, and she could see straight through the bench to the ground below it. One mystery solved. One remained.
She picked up one of the fallen stones and dropped it into the hole on the bench. It fell straight through to the other side.
The other side. The other side!
Excitedly, Katherine peeled the hole off the bench and set it back on the ground. She scooped dirt, rocks, twigs, whatever she could find, into it. When she was satisfied, she peeled the hole off the ground, flipped it over, and applied the opposite side to the tree. All the shit she had just dumped into it spewed down the trunk.
“Hell yes!”
She wanted to test the rock experiment one more time. Standing five feet back from the tree, she gathered five of the nearest fallen stones. She tossed them lightly toward the hole, and it took her four tries before she got one in. She dropped the fifth, went back to the tree, and peeled off the magical hole. When she flipped it over and reapplied it, the rock dipped upward for a split-second before dropping back down, right into Katherine’s waiting hand.
As incredibly cool as that was, Katherine could think of no practical application for this item outside of party tricks and peeping at naked people. If it was bigger, it might come in handy for escaping a cell or something, provided she was willing to part with it. She didn’t know if she’d be able to retrieve it from the other side of the wall without losing her hand, or getting it stuck in solid stone or something. She could think of ways to experiment with that later. There wasn’t much point as long as it was only big enough to fit her hand in... unless she used it to open a locked door from the other side.
That might come in handy for breaking into a place as well as out of one. Say, for example... a weapon shop or general store... perhaps even a stable...
Katherine felt a little hypocritical after having lectured the dwarf about not using this thing for nefarious purposes, but this wasn’t the same as whacking it to a woman taking a bath. Katherine was trying to rescue her brother, and time was a factor. Anyway, she could always leave a few coins on the counter. That wouldn’t be stealing at all. It’s just shopping after hours.
She debated whether it would be best to hit the weapon shop or general store first. On one hand, the weapon shop seemed like the wiser option. That way, if any shit went down at the general store, at least she’d be armed with something more substantial than the dwarf’s dagger.
On the other hand, the general store seemed far less intimidating. If she was going to make mistakes that she could learn from, she wanted to learn from them before breaking into a shop full of weapons and pissing off a shopkeeper who was intimately familiar with how to use them all.
The general store also had a nice row of hedges out front, and Katherine let herself believe that the concealment they would provide was what swayed her in that direction.
She looked left and right before darting across the road in front of the general store. It was partly instinctive, but she was more concerned about patrolling guards than oncoming traffic.
Satisfied that the coast was clear, she led Butterbean to the front entrance, crouched down behind the hedges, and placed the magic hole on the door next to the latch. She sat her Bag of Holding at the ready next to her, and wondered how honest she’d been with herself when she considered leaving behind enough money to pay for all the shit she was about to take.
Her hand hadn’t quite fit through when she’d tried shoving it into the tree, but she h
adn’t tried very hard. She didn’t need it to go through all the way anyway. She just needed her fingers to be able to find and reach the locking mechanism. It would be so much easier if this hole was just a little bit bigger.
Her fingertips grazed what might be the lock. If she still had her longer slimmer vampire hands, this wouldn’t have been a problem.
“Come on, mother–”
“You there!” demanded a familiar voice with the confidence of authority.
Fucker.
“Turn around slowly and raise your hands.” The voice came from behind, and considerably above, where Katherine was crouching. It was either from a freakishly tall person or a man on horseback. Either way, she might be able to conceal the fact that she was removing the magic hole from the door, but she’d definitely be caught if she tried to slip it into her pocket. She peeled it off the door and stuck it to the front of her cloak. A perfectly square hole might be a curiosity if it was pointed out, but she didn’t think it looked all that conspicuous. Only after the fact did it occur to her that she might be opening a massive cavity in her body where her lung should be. Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case.
“Stay,” Katherine whispered to Butterbean. He was lying down closer to the hedges, and it was possible he hadn’t been seen. She raised her hands above her head and slowly turned around.
Captain Righteous and his younger, less-physically-imposing partner looked down at her from atop white horses. The captain had a crossbow pointed at Katherine. The other one had a piece of paper pointed at her. With the light of a nearby street lamp, Katherine could make out the sketch of Tim that she’d seen posted throughout the city.
Both guards looked annoyed and disappointed as the younger one rolled up the paper.
“Couldn’t have been farther off the mark,” he said. “Neither male nor halfling.”
“Lower your hood and state your business,” demanded Captain Righteous.
