by Demi Harper
"We can't be caught," he whispered aloud, half to himself and half to Coll. "They'd put the emberfox back in its cage. I’ve promised I won’t let that happen."
The big man looked from the gently glowing fox to the silhouette of the guard in the doorway. He nodded slowly, jaw set. "Okay." His hands tightened on the haft of his hammer. He jerked his head toward the door. "On my signal, go."
"What?" What was the idiot talking about?
But Coll was already striding out into the open space of the central aisle. The still-blinking guard there jerked back in surprise and opened her mouth to call out to her companions. Coll beat her to it.
"Oi!" he yelled, hefting his hammer and lashing out with it to knock over the pile of empty cages he'd almost toppled earlier.
The deafening clatter of metal provoked more shrieking from the Menagerie’s inmates until the cacophony crowded the room like a physical presence. The two guards in the other aisles immediately abandoned their searches and made straight for the new disturbance. The one blocking the doorway turned around, standing on tiptoes to see what was going on, but did not leave his post.
That was, until Coll swung his hammer again. It smashed into the stone floor with the full force of both his arms. The sound of the concussion made all the guards flinch, even the one over in the doorway.
Benin watched as though in slow motion as a ring of shimmering force—like a solid heat haze—pulsed out from the point of the hammer's impact and spread in ever-expanding circles around the idiot who'd caused it. It sent them all staggering—first the guard in front of Coll, then Benin in the next aisle, then the other two guards. The emberfox screamed, its claws scraping on stone as it scrabbled away from the noise. Even the man in the doorway seemed to experience the shockwave to some extent; he uncrossed his arms, drew something—a wand? A very small knife?—from a pouch on his belt, and left his post to investigate.
Finally.
Stunned by the impact, hands still covering his ears, Benin glanced down at the emberfox as it ducked behind him. But before he had a chance to reach comforting arms toward it, it began climbing.
Hot little claws pricked his skin through his clothes and Benin swallowed a yell as the creature scrambled up his legs and back to latch itself, trembling, atop his shoulders. Waves of near-intolerable heat washed over him and he smelled burning hair, but he gritted his teeth and bore it. He'd promised to take care of this animal, and that's what he'd do. Even if it meant losing all his body hair and skin in the process.
Coll was still standing in the aisle, hammer raised threateningly once more. As the guards converged on him, Benin shook his head, muttered a curse at his companion's folly, then began to wind his way back through the outer aisles toward the now-clear doorway, making sure to stay low and keep his fiery little piggy-backer hidden from view. It was a mercy that the guards' yelling and the racket from the caged creatures covered up the emberfox's growling and Benin’s own lack of finesse; clearly neither of them were made for stealth.
As he reached the doorway to freedom, he couldn't help but glance back. All four guards were now surrounding Coll, shouting at him to drop his weapon. One of them was still holding a short sword, but the other three were armed with alchemical globes in one hand and what looked like small tubes or pipes in the other.
What, are they planning to serenade him into submission? Good luck. That idiot is likely as tone deaf to actual music as he is to everything else.
Coll glanced in his direction as though he'd heard him. Seeing Benin and his four-legged hitchhiker in the doorway ready to make their escape, his shoulders relaxed, and he let his hammer drop to his side.
Unfortunately, the sudden movement triggered the guards’ trained reflexes. Already on edge, they flinched back, and one of them instinctively raised the hand containing the strange tube to their face, cheeks puffed out.
The others shouted at him, and a second later he dropped the tube on the ground guiltily.
Coll looked around, confused. The guards seemed confused too. They started yelling at him again to drop his hammer. Coll yelled back, explaining that if he dropped it, it might cause another shockwave that could hurt them. All the while, he was jerking his head oddly toward Benin.
Belatedly, he realized Coll was urging him to leave. But he couldn't seem to drag his gaze away. Should he help Coll? Could he help Coll? It seemed unlikely.
The guards took the decision out of his hands. Apparently reaching the end of their patience with the big man's refusal to comply with their orders, another of them raised their tube—a blowgun, Benin belatedly realized—and blew a second dart at Coll. It stuck in his neck.
He swayed, but still didn't drop. Benin couldn't help but be impressed.
It sounded as though the guards were impressed, too. He heard one of them muttering about "Bloody constitution builds," while another speculated that their opponent had some advanced version of the Stone Body ability.
Then Coll swayed again and dropped his hammer. It didn't cause any more shockwaves like he'd warned, but it did make quite the racket. On Benin's shoulder, the emberfox flinched and dug its claws in deeper.
The guards, already jumpy, finally lost it. All three of those with blowguns raised their weapons to their mouths and shot simultaneously.
It seemed Coll's formidable constitution had finally reached its limit. The big man stumbled, falling against a hutch containing a giant neon-blue butterfly, but somehow remaining on his feet.
"Wha' d'ja do 'at for?" His words were slurred almost beyond recognition, and he sounded genuinely offended.
Turning around slowly to take in all four guards—who'd backed away again, though this time it was clear they were just making room for him to fall—he pointed a wobbly finger in front of him.
"You shouldn't've shot me, y'know. I wasn' harming 'nyone." He stared at his own finger, bringing it closer to his face in fascination as he teetered on his feet. "I was jus' causin' a dishtraction. Tha's all."
With that, Coll finally lost his battle with both consciousness and gravity. Without any change in his expression or posture, he toppled sideways and crashed to the ground like a felled oak.
The guards breathed heavy sighs. Then they—and Benin—registered the meaning of Coll's last words.
All four guards spun to face the exit, one of them already raising their blowgun. For a terrifying instant, Benin's feet remained frozen—an especially uncomfortable sensation for a pyromancer. Then the emberfox yowled and dug its claws into his neck. Heat and adrenaline surged down through his body and he twisted away from the doorway.
The dart hit the doorframe and bounced off, but Benin and his new familiar were already gone, leaving Coll alone and unconscious in the lair of the enemy.
Six
The Grotto
Corey
“’Everything’s fine.’” Ket sounded dangerously angry. “’Everything’s fine.’ That’s what you told me, Corey. In what universe is this ‘fine’?!”
The sprite sort of had a point. Though Longshanks was still alive—in other words, "fine," by my definition at least—he most certainly was not okay.
The other scouts had bound his injured leg with makeshift bandages during the journey back. But seeing as the limb in question was partially severed, and given that the gnomes were about as proficient in first aid as an ostrich was at arm-wrestling, they'd left a trail of blood all the way from the battle site to the Grotto, and now my wounded lead scout was looking dangerously pale. His head lolled senselessly over the crook of Ris'kin's left elbow, and his bloody leg dangled loosely over her right.
Even though I'd prepared Ket for what she was about to see, she'd shrieked in horror when the otherwise triumphant procession re-entered my Sphere of Influence. I'd endured her accusatory remarks about my definitions of "slightly hurt" and "a bit scratched-up" without comment, and I'd listened silently to her diatribe about my negligence in letting Longshanks get into such a state.
Now, though, she
'd started on my lack of communication and the less-than-honest nature of my reports from beyond my SOI, for which I genuinely did feel a bit guilty.
At the escalating outrage in her voice—not to mention its rising volume—I'd fled higher up than our usual haunt in the center of the Grotto, and was now hiding amid the fur of Binky's back in the skylight far above my gem. I could still hear Ket, of course, but not as loudly. For some reason, Binky still made her uncomfortable; she always gave his adorably fluffy eight-legged form the widest of berths, making him the perfect refuge from the volume, if not the content, of her current tirade.
I was actually quite glad to be so far away from what was going on down below. The moment Hammer and Graywall, my two drill sergeants, had caught wind of their injured comrade, they'd sent a pair of their warriors-in-training to commandeer some equipment—from the lumberyard, of all places. As soon as I grasped why exactly they were making off with a spare axe and one of the improvised saws, I suddenly wanted to look anywhere else except down at Longshanks, held down by Hammer on a makeshift pallet while Graywall forced some kind of mushroom-based concoction down the semi-conscious scout's throat.
I knew some of the fungi in the shroomeries had anesthetic properties; I hoped the warriors' potion was made from those and not from the deadlier kind, though I wouldn’t have put it past them to confuse anesthesia with euthanasia. Either way, Longshanks would be in less pain, so that was... good.
Ket seemed just as horrified as I was, and had fallen mostly silent. To distract us both from the procedure going on below, I focused on Graywall and brought up his personal details in the Augmentary.
"Huh," I said. "Did you know Graywall has the Improvised Medicine skill?"
She huffed. "Of course. All the gnomes with combat-oriented vocations have that skill."
"Well, I didn't know."
"Think about it. It makes sense. How else would they have managed to patch themselves and each other up after the big battle?"
"I thought they just... did it. I didn't know it was an actual skill, like my abilities."
Now I thought about it, it was a miracle we’d survived this long without an actual healer among the tribe. Time to remedy that.
I chose one of my non-vocationed gnomes at random and assigned him the “Medic” profession. He immediately leapt up from where he’d been gathering mushrooms, cracking his head on an outcropping of rock and falling straight back to the ground. I sighed and assigned a second medic, who promptly scurried over to tend to the first one.
“Oh!” I remembered. “Speaking of new skills and things—take a closer look at Longshanks."
I felt Ket cringe.
"Will you see if it's safe first?"
I sighed, but steeled myself and risked another look. To my immense relief, Graywall was wrapping bandages around the stump of my lead scout's leg. The operation was over, and Longshanks was still alive.
"It's all right, Ket. You can look. Longshanks is fine. Actually fine. Though... I guess we should call him Longshank now, no?"
"Corey!" If she and I were corporeal, she'd definitely have just punched me on the arm.
"What? I wasn't joking!"
She muttered something about me being insensitive. "You could just call him Shanky," she told me.
I sighed again. "I'm not doing that."
Down in the barracks, Longshanks—no, Longshank now, I reminded myself—groaned and began to stir.
“Poor Shanky.” Ket moaned in sympathy.
“That’s still a stupid nickname,” I told her, hoping rehashing the argument would distract her from her concern (and from blaming me).
It worked.
“No, it’s isn’t," she snapped. "Anyway, I don’t care what you think. It's what I call him. If he could hear us, he'd tell us how much he likes it. And if you try to tell me one more time that it sounds like a ‘cutesy assassin’ name…”
I thought back to him stabbing the mole-rat over and over again. Perhaps Shanky wasn’t such a bad name for him after all.
"Ket, I take it all back. There was nothing cute about the way he dealt with that mole-rat."
"Really?"
"You should've seen him. It was brutal."
"Hmm." She didn't seem to like the sound of that. I rolled my eyes. Gods forbid I ruin her opinion of her precious "Shanky."
"So what was it like?" Even as she asked, she was pulling up the blesmol's blueprint. "Oh, it's actually kind of cute!"
"Are you blind?!" I abandoned my refuge on Binky's back and zoomed over to give her a mental poke. "How can you say that thing is 'cute' but still be frightened of poor Binky?"
Binky followed me down, bless him, descending slowly on a spool of silken thread until he was dangling just above my gem. Ket shuddered and hurriedly relinquished her favorite spot atop it.
"A fear of spiders is rational, Corey. You're the weird one here. Not me."
She went back to examining the mole-rat blueprint. I zoomed over again to point out certain things—like how disproportionately huge and disturbing the teeth were. After I'd described fighting an entire herd of them (yes, I may have exaggerated the number), she agreed that fine, maybe they weren't all that cute after all.
Done scanning the new blueprint for information, Ket was now flipping back through the other recent blueprints we'd acquired. "So how did you manage to beat it?" she asked.
"You'd have been so proud," I told her. "I actually used the Augmentary to help us. It was really difficult, but—"
"Ooh, was it the ghoul's bush?" she interrupted, still flipping through blueprints. "That's what I'd have done. Found a way to get its mouth open and—”
"Beard."
"What?"
"It's ghoul's beard, Ket. Beard! Not bush." I was already grumpy that she'd figured it out so much quicker than I had. And I'd told her about ghoul's beard on multiple occasions now, yet she still couldn't remember its proper name?
"Do ghouls even have beards?" she pondered.
"The man ghouls probably do. And I imagine lady ghouls have bushes—"
"ANYWAY," she said loudly. "What were you saying before about new skills? Why did you want me to look at Shanky?"
I smirked and stayed quiet.
"You big tease!" she scolded. "Fine, fine—let me have a look..."
There was a pause while she brought up Longshank's Augmentary profile.
“’Hunter,’” Ket read aloud. Then she squealed as she read it again. “Shanky gained a new vocation?”
“He did,” I confirmed proudly. “It’s a specialist class scouts can attain by fulfilling certain prerequisites. In this case, murdering a mole-rat while wearing ballbag armor.” Damn, it felt good to be the one who knew things for a change.
“That’s… gross, and not quite how it’s worded here.”
I could tell she was reading it more closely now because she’d stopped flitting around all over the place and was instead perched once more atop my gem, her wings occasionally fluttering and giving off showers of microscopic sparks.
"Aw, Sparky, I haven't seen you this excited in ages."
“How many times do I have to ask you to stop calling me that?”
“At least once more, Sparky.”
She rolled her eyes. I could tell she also wanted to rustle her wings in annoyance, but was very deliberately trying not to lest they give off more sparks and prompt further teasing.
“You know my wings have always done this, right? Why wait until now to start mocking me for it? Surely it would have made sense to do that when we first met. Gods know you antagonized me in every other way you could think of.”
“Think of it as a compliment. In some societies, earning a nickname is a mark of respect. Be proud.”
“You know, Corey, it never ceases to amaze me that despite no longer having an anus—assuming you did have one in your former life, that is—you still do a very convincing impression of someone talking out of theirs.”
“Rude.”
“Anyway, qu
it deflecting. You were telling me all about this new ‘hunter’ profession. You say Shanky gained it automatically? You didn’t have a choice in the matter?”
“Um…”
The sprite fixed me with her glowing stare.
“Fine! The class-up was optional. I was going to wait until later so we could look at it together, but I got impatient. Also the trip back here was really boring, what with Ris'kin having to carry Longshank and all that."
Assuming Ket had eyebrows—she was so tiny the only features even I could make out were shining eyes and glittering wings and not much else—I could tell they’d just risen all the way up into her hair. “You were going to wait? For me? You?”
“It’s the thought that counts, right?"
She trilled sarcastically. “Sure. So, about this prerequisite. ‘Rivalry,’ you said?”
“Right. I looked into it on the way back here. Apparently, Longshank formed a ‘Basic Creature Rivalry’ with the mole-rat species when he killed that one in the tunnels today.”
“But they've killed mole-rats before. How else would they have gotten all that darling armor?" I could hear her smirking, but didn't rise to it.
“Well, it was the armor that did it, you see," I replied loftily. "The previous kills must've been made by gnomes not wearing the new armor."
"Interesting. Maybe it's a rite of passage for them to only wear armor from something they've killed?"
I mentally shrugged. "Maybe. Anyway, it seems the double whammy of skin-wearing plus stabby death is what unlocked the official rivalry, which in turn unlocked the new vocation.”
“Look at you, doing your research, taking your job seriously.” She beamed. “I’m so proud of you. So, what does ‘rivalry’ actually do?”
“Um…”
Ket sighed. “Aaand we’re back.”
Ket's excitement at all this new information had made her forget all about Binky. My beautiful furry spider guardian had grown fascinated with Ket, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that she disdained him at every turn. Right now he was abseiling closer and closer to the gem on which my sprite was perched, and I amused myself by imagining what would happen if he managed to successfully land on top of her.
