by M. K. Gibson
I turned and leaned my back against the hill. I took out my phone to see “39%” staring back at me. Damn it. Animating those corpses the entire voyage had eaten more of my power than I wanted. From here on out, I would be operating at critical-level conservation. No power unless absolutely necessary. I had no idea what it was going to take to destroy Anders, nor the more powerful Chaud, for that matter.
That’s when I noticed I’d gotten a text message from Sophia.
Sir, we need to talk. Now!
Later, I texted back. In response, Sophia sent an emoji of a frowny face. What was my service provider going to charge me for trans-dimensional messaging? That frowny face better not cost me a small fortune.
A moment later, Lydia returned from her sweep of the area.
“What did you see?” Hawker asked.
“Is Carina back?” Lydia asked, and I shook my head no. I wasn’t worried about being overheard, not with the crashing of the waves and other ambient beach noises. But it was best to not talk too much and remain vigilant.
“Then I’m going to hold off until she gets back. I don’t want to create a false impression without collateral intelligence.”
Wren failed to suppress his smug smile. Hawker just glared.
Almost thirty minutes later, Carina returned. She’d taken a longer route, hugging the coastline and staying low along the raised hill line.
“What did you see?” Lydia asked Carina.
Lydia held out her hand and Wren passed her a water skin. She nodded her thanks and gulped deeply. “I saw that that place is impregnable. Every entrance into the fortress I could find was guarded by armed men at all times.”
“Agreed,” Lydia said. “I noted that their shift rotation seemed random.”
“I saw that too,” Carina confirmed. “If I had to guess, the guards’ positions were randomly assigned each day. So even following a particular weaker guard wouldn’t lead you to the place you wanted to infiltrate.”
“Agreed,” Lydia said. “What do you all think?”
“There has to be a way in,” Hawker said.
“It wasn’t like this when I was stationed here,” Wren commented.
I shrugged. “Looks like we passed the Bechdel Test.” When I got the weird looks, I just shook my head. “Damn it,” I cursed.
“What?” Hawker asked.
“All this—” I gestured at the fortress—“is wrong. It shouldn’t be like that. There should be blind spots, paths to sneak in, unguarded water drains. That’s how these things work. All of it points to someone rewriting the story.”
“We saw what we saw, Jackson,” Lydia said.
“Damn it,” I swore again. Again I leaned against the hill. This time, I took out one of my cigarettes and lit up. I closed my eyes and thought about the problem.
Someone was changing the rules. It couldn’t be the gods. They don’t know how to operate outside their own rules. That meant it had to be an outsider like me. Courtney? He would have the military know-how to organize this.
But Grimskull distrusted outsiders. Even if Courtney had arranged a coup with my sister against me with Grimskull’s help, there is no way he would start listening to them right away. He would keep them close, under observation. Still, an outsider would be the only one who could make this happen. So who did that leave?
“It must be that captain of the guard I saw,” Lydia said. “He’s running the guards in a way I’ve never seen before. He knows what he’s doing.”
A thought popped into my head.
“This captain of the guard,” I said, thinking aloud. “What did he look like?”
“Handsome.”
“Could you be a bit more specific?” I asked.
“Very handsome.”
Could she be a little more scorned? “Did you see him?” I asked Carina.
“If it is the same person, then yes, briefly. He was about your height with a soldier’s build.”
“Narrow eyes and hawkish nose?” I asked. “Look of the eagles?”
“I believe so, yes,” Carina confirmed.
“Cooke,” I said under my breath.
“Who?” Hawker asked.
“One of Grimskull’s men from his keep. A recent promotion,” I said. “One of my own spies turned traitor.”
Steve. The former Marine. That explained the tactics as well as someone Grimskull would trust. With his use of modern military knowledge, he’d have the place sealed down tight. His innate military need to command a situation, coupled with his experience, would make him an ideal captain for Anders.
I looked at the water of the sea and that raised another question.
“Wren, what does the fortress use for waste disposal?”
“Waste?”
“Garbage. Privies. Waste.”
“The pipes lead to a cistern in the bottom of the keep, which then leads to a volcanic pit where it’s all—oh. Oh no.”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“Please do not tell us that’s your plan, Jackson,” Hawker said, catching on.
Carina and Lydia just shook their heads.
“OK folks, time to get messy. We’re going in through the toilet.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Where We Climb Through Human Shit and Wren Tries to Burn Us Alive
“This is repulsive and I hate you,” Lydia said.
“Shut up and keep climbing,” I said.
“I’m going to . . . vomit,” Wren said, gurgling on his own bile.
“Please, not again.” Hawker begged. “I’m under you.”
“It isn’t really all that bad,” Carina said as she moved upward through the sewage drain. “When I was a girl back in the Mines of Gharlond, my father took me down a lot of different excavation tunnels. You’d be surprised what kinds of smells and nasty things you discover. One time, we broke through a vein of diamonds only to find a cavern full of methane and sulfur. The smell was . . . well, imagine a rotten egg that’d been eaten by a goblin, who then died, then shat out that egg after his corpse burst from four days of decomposition.”
“Blaaargh!” Wren heaved and rained puke onto Hawker’s head. “Sorry Kyle.”
“I should have jabbed you harder in the guts with that sword and killed you.”
“Right now . . . I wish you had.”
“Just keep climbing,” I reiterated.
Since it had become abundantly apparent I was never going to get my secret passage, I had to opt for the next best thing. A not-so-secret but underutilized passage in and out of any major keep or stronghold.
Waste disposal.
The simple fact is, you can’t have that many people inside a structure and not have a place for the waste to go. Some may use bedpans and piss-buckets, but they all get dumped. And oddly, they have to make them large enough for a person to crawl through for when things eventually get backed up.
General Anders’s keep’s sewage exit actually fed into the volcano itself. Wren showed us an entrance just below the sea’s water line. A small undersea cave that fed into the volcanic mountain. From there, we made our way into the bowels of the volcano. A massive lake of molten rock bubbled and churned. It didn’t appear that it was going to blow anytime soon. I supposed Chaud’s magic upon the island, keeping the entire region in perpetual winter, had slowed the volcano’s natural cycle.
Once we were inside, it wasn’t hard to find the chute we needed. It was the one with a carved stepladder going up towards it with a supply of scrubbers on poles nearby. It was also the one with a perpetual trickle of piss and shit. The ablutions fell into the lava and were incinerated into smoke and ash. In all honesty, the idea and execution were brilliant.
The lack of guards made sense as well. As I said before, the guards of this world often overlooked strategic weak points. And Steve, no matter how militarily brilliant and well-versed in the lore of the realms, didn’t consider where his morning constitutionals went.
Carina had gone first up the narrow, curved chute. She tied a rope to he
rself and scurried upwards through the disposal shaft. Her dwarven heritage gave her the best skill set. As well, she was clearly the strongest of us all. Wren was a brute, but no human could match a dwarf, even a half dwarf, pound for pound in raw strength. With Carina being the strongest and most adept climber, she went first, followed by me and Lydia. Wren, with his size and bulk, was next to last, while Hawker brought up the rear. Hawker’s strength and youth made him the best candidate to block Wren, should he fall. And had the big man been closer to the top, his collapse would assuredly have taken Lydia or me with him. This was our Mount Everest climb and Carina was our anchor.
If Mount Everest were a stinking slope of human shit.
The rest of us followed, each tied to the rope. The only way to move up the steeply angled chute was to place your back against one side with your feet and hands out in front. We had to brace ourselves and move inch by disgusting inch up the . . . well, anus of the keep.
“What can we expect when we get to the top?” I asked Wren, doing my very best to keep my lips as closed as possible, less a stray drip land in my mouth.
“More shit,” Lydia guessed.
Wren gagged. “She’s not wrong. This chute will lead to a cistern beneath the keep. A large circular room with a sloped floor. In the very center . . . gods, this is wretched.”
“Focus, Wren,” I told the ammalar. “We need to know what we’re getting into.”
Wren grunted as he moved his bulk slowly upward. The chute seemed to no longer be at an angle. Instead, we were moving straight up. From here on out, it was all our own strength fighting our body weight, gravity, and shit-slick slime-coated walls.
“We’re going to come up right in the center of that sloped floor. All the garbage and waste flows into the cistern from other chutes and pipes throughout the keep. It won’t be pleasant.”
“Is there . . . any . . . nnng, good news?” Hawker asked.
“Yes,” Wren said. “There is a door in to the cistern. One that leads into the keep itself. It is rarely guarded. And when it is, it is by the worst guards. The one they don’t trust to look after anything other than everyone’s waste.”
“I can see the top,” Carina said. “Give me a moment and I will begin pulling you all up.”
With as much noise as we’d been making during our climb, I was amazed Anders herself wasn’t there waiting on us. But Carina had assured us that the stone, and years of sewage buildup, would dampen any sound we would make.
Carina pulled me up and I in turn helped to pull Lydia though the chute’s opening into the cistern. The three of us pulled Wren and Hawker up the rest of the way, while they grunted and cursed.
All of us took a moment to rest and recover. The climb had been a testament to our conviction. We had succeeded through sheer will and determination.
We reeked of decayed garbage and human excrement. Rest as we did, we were still in the bowels of the keep in an ankle-deep pool of piss and worse.
I spotted the door and nodded towards it. “That way?” I asked Wren.
“Do you see another door?”
“No,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “I do not. But please enlighten us on where we go from here.”
“Depends.”
“On what?” I asked.
“What you want to do.”
“Are your being obtuse on purpose?” I asked.
“Dunno what that means. If you’re asking if I am tired, angry, and mad about being back in the one place in creation I don’t want to be so I am acting out in terse responses, then yes, I am being ‘obtuse.’”
“Let’s all move up to a higher point in the room, by the door perhaps,” Lydia suggested. “Maybe we can have a rational discussion when we’re not standing in the epicenter of the keep’s asshole?”
“Works for me,” Hawker said, while Carina nodded.
The five of us slogged through the waste and made our way across the massive cistern to the exit. Carina held her ear against the door and listened.
“All clear. No one is on the other side.”
“Small miracles,” Hawker said.
“How do we get clean?” Lydia asked.
“Afraid of a little dirt?” Wren said.
“No, I am not afraid of a little dirt. But what we are is coated in shit.”
“And vomit,” Hawker added as he tried, in vain, to wipe his armor clean.
“And vomit,” said Lydia. “Anyone past this door will smell us long before they see us. There has to be something we can do.”
“She’s right,” I said, trying to think of something. I could clean myself. The power it would take was a mere fraction and it was a necessity.
“I have an idea,” Wren said. “Link hands.”
We all did as instructed. I reached for Lydia’s hand and she recoiled at first, giving me a venomous look. Reluctantly, she took it as the rest of us joined hands and stood in a circle.
Wren seemed to concentrate and warm, purplish fire flared up around his hands and enveloped his body. The fire spread, catching Hawker and Carina, then spreading to Lydia and me.
The fire was warm. Pleasant even. It was like a hot shower. The flame burst and crackled as everything that was filth upon us hissed and evaporated. The smell was awful, but considering where we were, it wasn’t anything new.
In moments, all of us were clean and revitalized. I didn’t know about the others, but I felt healthy and strong. All the aches and soreness my muscles had endured from the climb were now a memory, replaced with hope and newfound strength.
“What did you do?” Carina asked.
“I tried to burn us all alive,” Wren sighed. “Praise Vammar.”
“Where to next?” Hawker asked.
“We find General Anders,” I said. “And we kill her.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Where I Skulk, Learn About Giant Sex, and Contemplate Romance
The keep was blissfully devoid of soldiers and guards. Being a wanted fugitive had its benefits from time to time. In this case, it meant that most of the general’s guards were out scouring the empire looking for you, leaving their home base running on a skeleton crew.
“Where would Anders be?” Lydia asked as she put on the oversized tabard and belted it around her waist.
“How do we know she’s even here?” Hawker asked, doing the same thing over his armor.
Wren had opened a storage container near the cistern, where fresh, laundered livery was kept. He distributed tabards in the colors of Grimskull and General Anders to each of us. The disguises were not fully convincing. But they would pass a cursory glance. Wren explained that new recruits flooded in all the time. So new faces were the norm here.
“She better be,” Carina said. “I didn’t crawl through all that for nothing.”
“She’s here,” Wren said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“It’s what she does,” Wren said. “When she is not on assignment, this is where she resides. Thanks to Chaud’s magical enchantment on this isle, this is the one place she can walk freely without her ice armor.”
“So, where would she go without her armor?” Hawker asked.
Lydia smiled. “Well, if you spent all your time in the field wearing cold, hard armor, once you were free of it, where would you want to go? Or better yet, what would you want to do when you were free of it?”
“Oh, well that makes sense,” Carina giggled.
“What?” Hawker asked, clearly not getting it.
“Kyle, dear, what do adults like to do when they are not wearing anything . . . restrictive?” Lydia asked.
“I don’t know . . . oh.” Hawker blushed. “Well, yes, that I suppose.”
Wren nodded in agreement. “Yes, the general was quite fond of her extra-curricular activities. She frequently would visit the barracks for . . . inspection. Otherwise she would spend all her time either in her private quarters or in the great hall. It was from there she could view the empire via Chaud’s scrying device and orde
r her troops, or assassins, wherever she wished.”
“The general never enjoyed her dalliances in her own chambers?” I asked.
“No.” Wren shook his head. “Her chambers were for her alone. She deemed no one worthy of stepping foot in her living area. She always said we were all too unclean.”
“We? So you know from experience?” Carina asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Um, I prefer not to discuss that.”
“Oh, you are cute when you’re embarrassed.” Carina smiled. “I know there were women before me.”
“OK, enough of this. We need to split up,” Hawker announced. “We have three areas of the keep to search. Carina and Hawker, you take the great hall. I’ll check the barracks. Lydia and Jack, you check her private quarters.”
“Um, about the pairings,” Lydia said. “Can we rethink the teams?”
“Just do it,” Hawker said. “Wren and Carina work well together.”
“Yeah we do!” Carina said as she swatted the ammalar on his backside. Wren just grumbled.
“And you two need to get over whatever your issues are. So a fighter and scout in pairs. I work better alone. Meet back here by the cistern in one hour and report what we’ve found. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Lydia mumbled. I simply nodded my approval as Hawker turned and left. Wren and Carina practically pranced off together.
“So, what was it like, you know, being with her?” I heard Carina ask as they made their way down the long hallway.
“Awkward.”
“How so?”
“Bitch is almost ten feet tall,” Wren said, shaking his head at Carina. “Had to use a step ladder to do any of the fun positions.”
I watched them leave and then turned to Lydia. “Alone at last?”
“Let’s just go,” Lydia said, turning to leave.
After following the general path Wren had described, we moved down the hall towards where I believed General Anders’s quarters to be. As we searched, the keep’s features transitioned from a functional design to one of luxury. I assumed this meant we were entering the living quarters of General Anders and her top military retainers.
