A Thousand Drunken Monkeys

by Eric Nylund

  Someone was trying to burn through.

  I had to not be here.

  I got into the hole and clambered down four rungs of a ladder bolted to the tunnel wall.

  Upon the square plate, I arranged the chamber pot, pitcher, and toilet paper. I then placed the crate (air freshener and all) atop the thing. Balancing the precarious package, I lifted it over my head and took three very careful steps down the ladder.

  The crate started to slide off.

  I got it level before disaster struck. Whew.

  How funny would that be? On top of everything else tonight, me dumping a load of crap on myself. Hilarious.

  Two more steps down… easy does it… and I got the plate set overhead, nice and snug.

  The seams magically heated and welded solid.

  No kidding this was a one-way trip.

  Below, a light winked on.

  I descended another twenty rungs and jumped the last few feet.

  “No!” Morgana whispered.

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the ledge she and Elmac were on… a ledge that ran alongside a ten-foot wide channel.

  Not quite all of me, though.

  Before I could fully arrest my momentum, one boot dunked into raw sewage. The stuff trickled in and soaked my sock.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sometimes the universe just has it in for you.

  Or maybe my luck tonight was literally excremental.

  Oh well.

  I shook my foot. No dice. I’d be mucking around in this stuff until I could take off my boot and sock and take a boiling-hot bath.

  “I’d hoped to never be using that trapdoor,” Elmac said, looking up, his eyes crinkling in pain. With a heavy sigh, he turned back to the passage and held up a silver coin with an illumination enchantment (the magical equivalent of a tactical flashlight).

  Dwarves could see in total darkness, so Elmac must have had this on his person to accommodate us lesser, non-dwarven creatures.

  He unsheathed a dagger and marched down the tunnel.

  Morgana followed.

  I took the rear guard position.

  High Hill’s sewer was just what I expected: a channel containing assorted floating bits, ledges on either side, curved walls of ancient brick, slick stalactites of dripping algae… oh, and a world-class stench that made Low District in comparison smell like the mythical Avenue of Endless Blossoms in Thera’s capital, Maraval.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Elmac whispered. “There be poop elementals on the prowl, mucus men, and lermix that’ll suck every drop ’o blood out of you. Least this be better than the lower levels. Uhg.” He shuddered. “Oh, and try to not be making any more noise.” He stared pointedly at my smucky-sounding boot.

  “You think,” I whispered back, “the assassins will follow us? Fighting here might get tricky.”

  “They ought to be busy enough burning me bar,” Elmac muttered darkly. “But just in case, we’ll be quick, cross to River Street—then up and out.”

  We slogged along and I noted symbols on the walls—some scratched into the brick and blackened with mold; a few patches of phosphorescing slime molds too organized to be random; and three recently chalked arcane glyphs.

  There were also tiny directional arrows, hobo symbols, sloppy graffiti (in dark elf?), and an odd pictograph of an anthropomorphized fungus man with a throng of stick figures kneeling in worship at his feet… his stem? He pointed to the passage on my left.

  “Psst,” I hissed and nodded at this.

  Morgana took a glance, then shot me an annoyed look for sightseeing instead of watching for danger.

  Elmac leaned back. “That be the Mushroom King. We avoid him at all costs.”

  Okay, a cryptic and threatening answer. But perversely, now all I wanted to do was go that way. I bet if I did, a quest alert would pop.

  I didn’t. Instead, I made a note of it in my game journal for later investigation.

  Around the next corner, the light-emitting slime molds vanished and the glow from Elmac’s fist was our only illumination.

  I had to get one of those coins. Useful little things. Assuming I ever got on her good side, I wondered if Colonel Delacroix might enchant one for me?

  “Either of you seen Delacroix?” I asked, so low I wasn’t sure my companions heard me.

  “She went to Brötmandel Chasms,” Elmac said at a similar volume. “Checking that Abyssal gate be truly shut. Took one ’o the Duke’s cavalry gryphons to fly there last morning, so she should be back by now.”

  That explained why she hadn’t dragged me in yesterday for a debriefing (her polite word for “interrogation”).

  Had Elmac said “cavalry gryphon?” Hmm. He’d mentioned that Dame Rose Beckonsail, who was on the Syndicate’s hit list, was a captain of such a unit. A coincidence?

  But wow—gryphon cavalry! And I thought Pendric on his titan warhorse, Bell Ringer, had been bad news. With apologies to my brother and sister warriors in the 101st Airborne, gryphon cavalry gave a new twist to the motto: “Death from above.”

  “Those assassins on Gut Slit Lane,” Morgana said. “Sure was lots of them, poisoned weapons and all. But don’t you think it was, I dunno, easy?”

  “Might be something to that,” I said. “Their leader was only second level, the rest, first.”

  “Maybe they were meant to herd us along to the Rooster?” Elmac suggested.

  “We’d have been sitting ducks in any normal vault,” Morgana said.

  Elmac raised his free hand. His other closed about the enchanted coin.

  We plunged into total darkness.

  Nice that Elmac could see in such conditions, but my elven eyes were useless. I kept still, lest I slip off the ledge, and take a few involuntary laps.

  A small hand touched my arm. Morgana.

  We locked grips. Her skin was warm and calloused. Fingers long and strong.

  A guy could get used to holding such a hand…

  Ahead was a splash.

  My wistful thoughts washed away.

  Ten paces ahead, a gout of flame lit the intersection—just an instant.

  Burned into my retinas was the image of five assassins poised flash-frozen: two chest-deep in the channel muck, two on the ledge, and one clung to the arched ceiling like a gecko. The guy on the ceiling had held a tube belching the fire.

  This next part is hard to describe. I got just a glimpse.

  Something else was in the intersection. It was the size of a car, gelatinous, with tentacles wrapped about the assassins on the ledge.

  I think one more assassin was inside the thing’s body.

  Whatever I thought I had seen in that instant, I could now only hear it surge and thrash in the dark.

  Water was displaced by these motions. Lots.

  Churning. Slopping closer.

  A wave crashed over the ledge, up to my hips. It had to have covered poor Elmac. I gripped the wall with one hand, Morgana with the other.

  Disgusting.

  But she and I thankfully had remained on the ledge.

  Suddenly there was light and wavering lines on the curved tunnel walls. Elmac was in the drink, treading water, and sputtering through a soaked beard. He must have dropped his light coin.

  The gelatinous monster in the intersection turned toward us.

  Three assassins were now trapped inside the thing, their features stretched in tortured anguish, flesh and bone dissolving. Their blood tinged the creature pink.

  And, since our luck apparently could get worse, it did.

  Down other passages leading to the intersection… two more teams of assassins came slinking. Ten, maybe fifteen of them.

  The idea of half swimming, half choking, in this sewage muck, grappling with a giant amoeba, and dodging a few poisoned darts? Well, discretion seemed better at the moment, not valor.

  I would have given anything for a good old-fashioned M67 “baseball” frag grenade.

  But maybe I had something that might work just as well. A “weapo
n ’o last resort”, Elmac had called it.

  Morgana reached down just as Elmac got back to the ledge.

  “Underwater,” I told them in English. “Swim. Straight ahead. As fast as you can!”

  Morgana looked at me, then to the monster and assassins closing.

  She trusted me, took a deep breath, and jumped.

  Elmac was already gone.

  I opened my inventory, grabbed the vial the assassin on Gut Slit Lane had tried to open in his final moments—and I chucked it.

  How did I know the vapor creature inside would provide distraction enough for us to get away? Or for that matter, how did I know it wouldn’t attack us?

  I didn’t.

  But if you’re about to be killed by one monster, did it make a difference if you were killed by two monsters?

  Odds were it was going to do something… and I’d take whatever came.

  The vial shattered on a wall.

  A purple cloud rapidly expanded and filled the intersection. It reminded me of the genie emerging from his bottle in the classic 1940 movie, The Thief of Bagdad. This, however, was no djinn offering me three wishes. These vapors reddened to the color of rubies and flickers of static sparked inside like heat lightning.

  It stretched and curled about the amoeba as if in an embrace.

  The two creatures coiled and thrashed trying to envelop each other.

  I stood and stared, fascinated. Terrified.

  The amoeba relented and retreated up a wall.

  The cloud retreated as well, concentrated its gases into a needle-like lance—pierced the monster gelatin over and over, disintegrating where it touched.

  The gigantic single cell shuddered and spilled thick gel from its wounds. Where that stuff touched the wall, bricks smoked.

  The assassins that had been coming, turned and fled.

  Lucky for me I was still gaping at the scene because even as the sentient cloud of death sucked the amoeba dry, the retreating assassins in their haste made splashing sounds. Very loud splashing sounds.

  When I looked back, the amoeba was gone and the cloud sent tendrils down the passage after the assassins… searching.

  It stretched thin enough to reveal its inner workings: a thousand pinpoints of light boiled. Bioluminescent insects? Molecular acid? Antimatter? I had no intention of finding out.

  Misty tentacles caught the closest assassins and made short work of the ninja-clad appetizers, leaving dried husks and skeletons… and then nothing.

  Gone in a single heartbeat.

  The cloud rippled as if it liked what it had tasted.

  A dozen new vaporous tendrils probed the tunnels, up and down, right and left.

  One snaked straight toward me—fast.

  That snapped me out of my stupor.

  I closed my eyes, ducked underwater, hoping the noxious smell and/or taste of raw sewage masked my presence—and then swam straight ahead for all I was worth.

  I didn’t dare open my eyes, so I went blind, heart pounding as things touched me, some squishy, others curling, feeling with tiny suckers.

  There was a caress on my thigh. It burned like a hundred fire ants.

  I awkwardly kicked, made contact, kicked again, and something peeled off.

  I focused on paddling, getting as far away from the intersection, as fast as I could.

  When dots swam on my eyelids and my chest was about to burst, I forced myself to keep going for five more strokes—then surfaced, wiped my face clear of muck, spat, and took the longest inhalation of my life.

  I was in the dark (figuratively and literally). No sparks. No flashes of fire. Just inky black.

  So where was Elmac? Morgana?

  Then the smell (and taste) of my little dip registered.

  I suppressed my gagging, which would have made far too much noise.

  I waited for three heartbeats, straining to hear splashes or feel incoming waves.

  Nothing.

  So I moved toward the side of the tunnel, or at least what I thought was the side… slowly, very slowly, so as to not cause even a ripple.

  “Here…”

  I almost missed her voice, the racket of my pounding heart almost drowning it out.

  Ah, Morgana.

  I almost answered her but held my tongue. No need to make more noise. If she was calling to me, it was a pretty good bet that she could see me in this total blackout. There had to be a druid spell for that.

  I bumped against the ledge and carefully pulled myself up.

  “Slow and steady, mate,” she whispered, took my hand, and placed it on her shoulder. “Other hand on the wall and follow, yeah?”

  So, we went like that for a while.

  I was dazed, but nonetheless had the presence of mind to fire off a few Spiritual Regenerations. I had a feeling I was about to get an in-game alert telling me that my leg was infected with “instantaneous gangrene” or something of equivalent lethality.

  My leg healed… and distressingly filled in chunks of flesh that had been missing.

  There wasn’t as much as a flicker of light, not even one bit of phosphorescing mold. Maybe that was a good thing; otherwise, I’d have slowed us down, every two seconds looking over my shoulder to see if the cloud was coming after me. I shivered.

  If our assassin buddies had managed to open that vial, things would have turned out very differently on Gut Slit Lane.

  Now that I thought about it, capturing and compressing such a high-level monster into that container must have taken a lot of magic and cost a fortune. Who would give a second-level flunky such a powerful weapon?

  Someone rich. Someone desperate to remove us from their calculations.

  Morgana halted.

  A faint glimmer ahead, no more than an anemic firefly from a clenched metal fist.

  Elmac must have had a spare magical light coin.

  My eyes adjusted.

  He had halted at a dead-end.

  Elmac patted the wall. He stuck his face against the bricks for the closest look he could get, back and forth, practically dragging his large nose over them.

  “Ah, gotcha,” he whispered, pushed one brick, and then rotated it a quarter turn.

  I felt a thud.

  Elmac then used several protruding bricks (that had not been protruding a moment ago) as handholds, climbed up—and vanished.

  Morgana and I moved closer.

  A bobble of illumination and a dwarf-shaped shadow ascended through a hole in the ceiling.

  Morgana leaned close and, lips pressed to my ear, murmured, “This where we’re supposed to be?”

  Under other circumstances, a beautiful woman’s lips touching my skin… well, it would have been a lovely distraction. All things considered though? I was just glad to have a person touch me.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but please, ladies first.” I made a gallant gesture for her to go ahead.

  She went. I followed.

  As soon as I’d cleared the tunnel’s ceiling, the secret passage to the sewer shut.

  “Glad to be out of there,” Morgana said. “Monsters, dysentery, and crikey, can’t even imagine how much my old human joints would’ve ached in that damp.”

  I could sympathize. I had a tiny piece of shrapnel near my spine. That is, Hector Savage of Earth had. Every time it rained, it felt like an icepick twisting in my back.

  Morgana might have had a similar injury.

  We climbed forty feet, then halted because Elmac’s butt blocked the way.

  He scratched at the roof overhead.

  A pull ring came free. He gave it a tug and there was a faint ping.

  Hey—I knew that ping. It sounded just like the hotel front desk bell on the counter of Hiltmyer & Co, Trading Post Extraordinaire.

  So we had made it across River Street.

  There was a click.

  Elmac pushed the trapdoor open and pulled himself through.

  So did we.

  Elmac fully opened his fist and light flooded the room.

>   If you could call it that.

  Apart from a patch of stone under our feet, there wasn’t anything here. Literally. Outside Elmac’s circle of illumination was flat darkness. My eyes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, focus on anything out there.

  I reached out.

  Elmac grabbed my sleeve. “Don’t. Seriously lad, no.”

  “What kind of rabbit hole did you just take us through?” Morgana asked.

  As if in response, the strange dark parted like a curtain and a dozen gnomes stepped through… each holding a tiny crossbow (most of them aimed at me).

  CHAPTER 7

  The leader of this miniature gang was a dead ringer for a garden gnome statue with red hat, coat, and curly-toed boots. I knew him, Lordren Hiltmyer, proprietor of Hiltmyer & Co., Trading Post Extraordinaire.

  My casual acquaintance with the guy, however, only went so far…

  Guns, bows, Shakespeare’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, broken bottles, and shivs filed from prison-issue toothbrushes—any of these pointed my way put me in a foul mood. That went triple tonight.

  I stepped forward to grab one of those toy crossbows, stuff it right up—

  “Halt,” Lordren commanded in his helium squeaky voice. “You have three words to explain yourselves, then we open fire.”

  Elmac cleared his throat. “Don’t. Be. An. Ass.”

  Technically four words.

  I didn’t point this out as they seemed to be the right words.

  “Oh dear.” Lordren blinked, obviously recognizing Elmac’s voice, but not the sight of the bedraggled dwarf dripping before him. “I am so sorry.” He waved his hands at his cohorts and they lowered their weapons.

  Lordren removed his hat and bowed to Morgana. “Deepest apologies, Madam Nox. I did not know who or what to expect when the backdoor bell rang.”

  “No harm, no foul,” Morgana said.

  Lordren gave a microscopic nod my way. “Master Saint-Savage…”

  He then gave Elmac a bear hug.

  “Now—just—that be—” Elmac protested, but gave up, and patted the little guy consolingly on the back.

  “We saw the fire.” Lordren’s voice cracked and he squeezed Elmac tighter. “We tried to—I thought you might be…”