by Zac Gorman
The Princess and Thisby stayed up for a while, not talking, just lying silently beneath the magical stars of the Escape until they nodded off to sleep.
Iphigenia thought about her home and wondered if her parents were worried about her and her brother. Maybe they’d already sent out soldiers to find her. Perhaps, she thought, she’d wake in the morning to find a team of gallant knights standing above her, ready to escort her back to her soft, warm bed.
Thisby thought about all the chores that would be waiting for her when this whole adventure was over. She’d already lost two days of work roaming the dungeon, and it looked like tomorrow was going to be mostly a loss as well. She’d have to work overtime to try to get them all done by the end of the week, and she wasn’t looking forward to that.
Mingus thought about—well, something. It was clearly something bad from the way that he was shaking, but that wasn’t unusual. This time though, something was different. This time, he had good reason to be afraid.
Chapter 17
Mingus and Thisby had been inseparable since Thisby was seven years old, when she found him on her first ever trip to the Darkwell. She’d ended up there by accident, a strange turn of events that resulted in her being both hopelessly lost and lanternless in the lowest recesses of the dungeon. Stumbling around in the dark, she’d tripped over the lip of the Darkwell and found herself face to face with the nothingness that lay beyond.
She had spent what felt like an eternity there, crouched on her hands and knees, the cold blackweave gate pressing its strange patterns into her skin. All she could see was the darkness beyond. She was transfixed by it. That is, until a light caught her eye.
And that was where she found Mingus, sitting next to her on the Darkwell. A sad, glowing blob, halfway slipped between the bars of the blackweave. When she scooped him up, he shuddered in her hands, and to her surprise, he spoke.
“Don’t let me fall,” he said.
And so Thisby put him in an empty jar and took him home.
Since then, Mingus had never left his jar. On the rare occasion Thisby needed to clean it or change him over to a new one after it had gotten cracked or damaged beyond what a touch of ogre snot could fix, she’d simply slide him directly from his old jar into his new one, so he would only be exposed to fresh air for milliseconds before returning safely to his new home. Although, with the amount of complaining he did for a week before and after such an exchange, you might’ve thought she’d left him outside in a field overnight. When she was younger and more gullible, Mingus had convinced Thisby that he was desperately allergic to the fresh air and needed the enclosed space to survive, but over time she had come to realize that he got plenty of fresh air on a regular basis and this was just a ruse to convince her of the importance of him never, ever leaving his jar.
He was a quiet slime, for the most part. Unambitious and perfectly content to sit and do nothing for hours on end. Sometimes, Thisby would give him her notebooks, convinced that he must be bored out of his mind never leaving that jar, but he’d usually just stare at the drawings until he fell asleep. If there was one thing Mingus did enjoy, it was looking at her drawings, so much so that occasionally he’d ask her to tape a small one to the outside of his jar so that he could look at it more often.
They were close. In truth, they were more like siblings than friends. They’d occasionally fight, but always made up shortly thereafter. Thisby would make him a drawing as an apology or he’d put on a rainbow-colored light show for her, and the next thing they knew, they barely remembered what they’d been fighting about in the first place. But now Mingus wasn’t so sure Thisby would forgive him so easily this time if she found out what he’d done. He couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Iphigenia awoke groggily to the sound of birds singing. She rubbed her eyes and watched the sun as it climbed above the tree line, streaming ribbons of bright pink daylight through the leaves. Upon seeing Thisby and her talking slime, the realization that she was still stuck inside the dungeon took her disappointment to new, as of yet untapped extremes. It was like unwrapping a pony-shaped gift to discover that somebody had taped a bunch of wet old socks into the shape of a pony for no apparent reason. It was like drinking a frothy mug of hot chocolate somebody had made with pickle juice.
“Good morning!” said Thisby brightly.
Iphigenia rolled over to go back to sleep, but her pillow was gone.
She looked up to find Thisby stuffing it into her backpack.
“Only a few more hours and we should reach the castle!” she said. “Of course, we’ll have to walk. We could cross through the mammoth grove to get there, but then we’d have to cross the cockatrice hollow. I suppose we could probably cut through the chimera pit . . .”
Iphigenia had already tuned her out.
She watched some strange-looking birds soaring above the forest down across the valley. They looked almost like lizards. She squinted her eyes and realized they were indeed lizards.
Iphigenia frowned at them as hard as she could manage. Her face was beginning to get sore from all the frowning she’d done in the past couple of days.
“I hope those pterodactyls don’t give us any problems,” Thisby said casually, sidling up to Iphigenia.
It took all Iphigenia’s princessly powers not to sigh.
Elphond’s Escape was muggy. So muggy, the expression went, that you could sweat through a shirt that you weren’t even wearing. It had something to do with all the trees and water and being trapped inside a cave, which, as you may have figured, tended not to have the world’s best ventilation. The fake sun also generated very real heat, which probably didn’t help matters, either.
Nights in the Escape were quite lovely, but within only a few hours of sunrise, the humidity could make the journey from one end to the other unbearable. This was why Thisby had wanted to get an early start on the several-hour trek, but unfortunately for her, Iphigenia took a bit longer to get ready in the mornings than she did.
Growing up in the dungeon, Thisby had never witnessed anybody do anything that could even remotely constitute “primping,” and as she watched Iphigenia wash her face in the stream and study her reflection, she wasn’t quite sure what to think. Initially, at least, it had seemed like a profound waste of time. But then again, despite living in a cave, Thisby wasn’t blind. She knew Iphigenia was radiant, and that she was, well, not so much. So perhaps there was something to it after all.
Thisby tried to play along and aped the Princess a bit, splashing water on her underarms and sighing at her reflection as she studied it in the water, but when Iphigenia asked for help with her hair braid, Thisby could only shrug helplessly. She’d briefly considered suggesting something like a sheepshank knot but figured that probably wasn’t what the Princess had in mind. Honestly, Thisby only ever even combed or cleaned her own hair after it had gotten to be such a mess that it actually interfered with her field of vision or became so stiff that it poked her when she laid her head down on her pillow. In the end, Iphigenia settled on a more causal over-the-shoulder braid, which she could do herself, and Thisby watched her out of the corner of her eye as she did.
Ultimately, they had set out far later than Thisby had hoped to, but the notes she’d taken on Iphigenia’s behavior seemed like they could be helpful at some point. It didn’t feel like a complete loss.
Crossing the tree line at the edge of the forest turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, shade was a welcome respite from the hot, magic sun beating down on them, but on the other, the jumble of trees, roots, and undergrowth made their walk much, much slower. Also, Thisby knew that out on the plains, they were in little danger of encountering any really dangerous creatures, but here in the thick gnarled woods of the Escape, they needed to be on guard at all times.
The forest was so heavily shielded by the canopy of trees that it took several minutes for Iphigenia’s eyes to adjust to the dark. It seemed to her like Thisby didn’t have that problem, being much more accust
omed to the darkness within the Black Mountain than she was. There were strange noises in the woods—from those as innocuous as the rustle of leaves as something small and frightened scurried away, to the more exotic garbling of fantastic birds, the likes of which Iphigenia had never heard before. And as well-versed regarding the creatures of the dungeon as Thisby was, truthfully she’d never heard some of the strange calls before, either.
Thisby had spent some time in the Escape, occasionally as a well-deserved escape of her own, but much like the City of Night, the Escape more or less regulated itself. Her interference as gamekeeper was largely unnecessary. Thisby’s trips to the Escape were mostly for relaxing—in what little time she had for such indulgences—or for purely academic purposes. In truth, it was often both. There was nothing Thisby enjoyed more than coming down to the Escape to fill her notebooks with pages upon pages of scribblings and drawings about whatever exotic new creatures or plants she had discovered, but even as diligent as she was, there was still so much to the Escape that she’d yet to see. And it always seemed to be growing.
Actually, it was—albeit very, very slowly.
The Escape began as a room no bigger than a linen closet. It was there that Elphond planted a magical seed that eventually grew to become the Escape as Thisby knew it, only along the way, something unexpected happened—the Escape never stopped growing. Even when it reached the outer walls of the Black Mountain, the Escape continued to expand, and this was when things got really strange. By the time the current Master took over the Black Mountain, Elphond’s Escape had grown beyond the edges of the mountain, but it didn’t burst through it like an overfilled balloon; instead, it simply kept growing into space that didn’t quite exist. At least, not in the way space is commonly understood. If you stood on the edges of the Escape, you both were and weren’t inside the Mountain, depending on how you choose to understand the physics of it.
Magic was just kind of like that sometimes.
For the purposes of both cooling and mobility, Iphigenia had rolled up the bottom of her dress into a kind of makeshift skirt. Thisby suggested simply cutting it off, but apparently that wasn’t a viable option. She said something about “silks from across the Nameless Sea,” but Thisby had mostly tuned her out by then. Regardless of where the dress came from, it seemed like the Princess was struggling with the heavy fabric, and Thisby was grateful for once for her practical patchwork leggings, as ugly as they were. It was much cooler in here than out on the plains, but the humidity was far worse as the trees slurped up the thick wet mud of the forest floor and exhaled their sweet, warm breath back into the air.
“At least let me loan you a pair of boots,” said Thisby, stopping to mop her brow with her sleeve. “It’s no trouble, honestly. I have an extra pair in my backpack.”
Iphigenia looked down at her shoes. They’d become so caked with mud that she could no longer even see the emeralds sparkling on her toes. And what good were bejeweled shoes if you couldn’t even see the jewels? Iphigenia only sighed in response, but it wasn’t a sigh of contempt; it was a sigh of capitulation. Thisby had become acutely aware of the distinction over the last two days. They stopped and rested by a small pond, sitting on toadstools large enough to support their weight.
“Oh! Thank you! Thank you!” exclaimed Iphigenia the moment her feet slid into Thisby’s old leather boots.
Thisby had been mindlessly tossing pebbles into the pond, but now she froze and turned slowly toward the Iphigenia. It had just slipped out. They both knew it. When the Princess felt the difference between the pair of worn leather boots and her jewel-encrusted slippers, the feeling of relief had been so great that she’d just blurted out the words without even thinking.
“You’re welcome, uh, Your Highness,” muttered Thisby.
Iphigenia saw Thisby’s face redden.
Despite her better judgment, Iphigenia felt the sudden urge to say something like, “Never mind the formalities! Just call me Iphigenia!” She could imagine herself and Thisby back at the castle, hanging out, laughing at all the other pompous royals. They’d dine together and ride horses and stay up late just talking. Maybe they could when everything was all said and done. Iphigenia had never had a best friend, maybe not even a real, proper friend, and the feeling made her uncomfortable. It was an embarrassing thought. So instead, she said nothing.
Iphigenia stood up and adjusted her dress, rolling it back up to an appropriate height. She puffed out her chest and mustered up the most dignified air she could manage given the circumstances.
“These will do quite well, I mean,” she said, looking down at her feet.
“Great,” said Thisby, whose mouth was still hanging a bit slack, as she searched for the right words to say.
She never found them.
Before she could, an arrow struck the tree beside her.
Mingus screamed as Thisby hefted her backpack onto her back just before two more arrows sank into it. One of them managed to pierce straight through the thick canvas near the bottom of the bag, where it punctured a bag of flour, causing Thisby to leave a snowy trail as she bolted through the heavy woods.
Iphigenia was thankful she’d managed to switch over to the boots in time for their sprint, but that was just about her only good fortune. Her dress was continually being caught and snagged by sharp roots and branches, once so badly that she actually had to stop and free herself from a thorny branch. As she bent down to untangle her dress, several arrows whizzed by her head, and she tore her dress badly as she ran away in a panic.
Thisby could hear the croaking chatter coming from the trees and recognized the voices as forest imps. Imps could be vicious hunters, but she’d never seen them attack outsiders like this. They were territorial but typically wary. Cautious, even. More prone to keep their distance than to risk an outright attack.
The imps of the Black Mountain were not what most people thought of when they heard the word imps. Due to poor translation of an ancient and quite popular folktale around Nth, imps were often confused with gnomes and depicted as diminutive, bearded folk with pointy red caps. Actual imps, however, were froglike humanoids with bluish-green skin and soft leather shells on their backs. True to their name, forest imps lived in forests, always near a river, and had their own language and culture that couldn’t be further away from that of the bearded, peaceful, hill-dwelling gnomes. They got the diminutive part right, however. Most imps only stood about three feet tall on their tiptoes.
There were several other species of imps throughout the Black Mountain, organized by color and habitat. Dark blue water imps had webbed hands and were amphibious, spending almost their entire lives underwater. They were typically the most aggressive of the imps and lived in the small lakes and ponds deeper in the dungeon than their cousins. Grayish rock imps lived near the top of the Black Mountain and had a tendency to develop a crusty buildup of soil on their shells caused by lying still for days on end, feeding off earthworms who happened to crawl into their open mouths. These imps were no trouble whatsoever, but they also weren’t nearly as advanced as forest or water imps. In general, it was the forest imps, the ones who were shooting at them, who were considered the most reasonable of the three, but as their arrows whizzed overhead, Thisby quickly began to rethink her position.
Another arrow struck Thisby’s backpack. This one hit something metal and ricocheted off, falling to the forest floor.
The sound of rushing water in the distance signaled to Thisby that they were headed toward the river. As another arrow flew wide of her shoulder by at least a foot, a bigger picture came into view. Something wasn’t right. Forest imps were skilled hunters. They could hit a bat between the eyes at twenty yards, even on the run. Thisby knew that without even looking at her notes. Maybe the arrows weren’t supposed to hit them. But why?
The sound of rushing water grew louder.
By the time Thisby had figured it out, it was too late. The river. They were being herded toward the river.
There was no time
to turn around. Thisby and Iphigenia skidded to a full stop on the bank of the river. They were cornered, but the imps had stopped firing at them. What were they waiting for?
Iphigenia and Thisby watched as the small froggy imps stepped silently out from the woods, their arrows nocked and pointed straight at the girls. Behind Thisby, the river raged on through the forest, faster than she’d ever seen it move. Iphigenia squeezed Thisby’s arm down by her wrist, silently imploring her to do something. There was a notebook in Thisby’s backpack that held the notes she’d taken on the imp’s language. It might offer some hope of communication, if only she could reach it, but she knew full well that reaching back for it now would likely end with an arrow sticking out of her throat. Thisby was going to have to improvise based on what she remembered. It wasn’t much.
“Krr-krooorrrr?” said Thisby, adding as much of a verbal question mark as she could manage in a language made entirely of two consonants and one vowel.
The imps looked at one another, perplexed, keeping their bows trained on the girls.
“Krroooo-koo-krrrrkrkrrr?” added Thisby helpfully.
More blank looks. No good. She was going to have to get her notebook.
Thisby yanked her hand free of Iphigenia’s iron grasp and held up both her hands submissively as a sign of good faith. Then she slowly began to slide her backpack off her shoulders as the nervous imps watched. When she went to reach for the top flap of her bag, one of the imps—the youngest of the hunting party—lost his nerve. The twang! of a bowstring was followed by the sharp tink! of steel hitting glass as the errant shot pinged off Mingus’s jar, putting a nice crack in it.
Whether he’d intended to hit Thisby or simply fire a warning shot, it was now too late to try to find out, and with one confident motion, Thisby grabbed her backpack—and Iphigenia—and leapt into the raging river.
The cool blast of the river after their sweaty run through the forest would’ve felt pretty nice if it wasn’t for all the drowning. Upon hitting the water, Thisby’s backpack slipped free from her grip, and as luck would have it, one of the straps managed to become tangled around her ankle as the current swept them all downstream. The weight of her massive bag dragged her beneath the tumbling waves, pulling her down to where the water was coldest—which, again, actually would’ve felt pretty nice except for, you know, the drowning.
