Mazerynth

by Jeffery Russell

  Thud shrugged. “The plan here was to pull off our disguises, yell ‘SURPRISE!’ and rescue you. Made for a good entrance but I broke my own ‘stab first’ rule.” His head swiveled back and forth as he assessed the looming snake and scorpion war. “Lot of factors we didn’t know to account for so we’re havin’ to improvise a little.” There was a thump and a loud gurgle from above as Gong landed a heavy blow to Yorgi that would have disqualified him from a professional competition. “See?” He cupped his hands and yelled up at Gong. “Good improv!”

  “So all we got to do is break that giant?” Keezix asked.

  “Still leaves us with a missing lamp,” Thud said. “I’d imagined they was using the djinn to make the storms. If rabbit-head can already do that then I ain’t sure what they’re doing with the djinn.”

  “Destroy them all!” Frothnozzle screamed from above. The gnome spymaster turned and ran out of the room, ducking under an airborne dwarf.

  The residents of the pit backed slowly until they were against the door they’d entered through, backs pressed against the thick grate. A barrier at their back and weapons at the front. Perhaps the snakes and scorpions would avoid them entirely. Not likely. There were a lot of snakes and scorpions. The math predicted they would spread into all available space.

  The scorpions skittered forward, claws clicking. The snake response was immediate, heads lowering into position for tactical slithering. Mungo couldn’t decide which side made his skin crawl more. There was less than a second before the two sides met and Mungo spent it debating whether or not to climb Durham.

  There was a ring and a clunk as Leery’s sword parried the first snake jab, followed quickly by another. It looked like fencing an octopus. The snakes’ heads wove back and forth, darting in both low and high. Leery’s sword blurred as she tried to meet the strikes. A loud crunch from the other side heralded the first meeting of scorpion and Keezix’s hammer. Beyond them the pit had become a writhing horror show. Leery grunted as one of the knife-asps made it through her guard, the bone blade skewering through her leg, the point coming through the back narrowly missing Mungo. She staggered back and Durham caught her. Leery gave a swipe with her sword to remove the part of the snake that was not sticking through her leg.

  “Give that a tug, would you?” she asked Durham. The human reached down and grabbed the wriggling snake-head, using it to yank the scaled bone blade back out of Leery. Leery pushed off from him and back into the fight. Her fencing stance had a limp now but a wound like that wouldn’t slow her for more than a few minutes. And now Durham had a knife. Sort of. When he tried to hold it by the head it either wriggled or flopped. If he tried to hold it by the blade it was not only sharp but left a lively fanged snake head next to his wrist. Mungo didn’t know how long a knife-asp’s front quarter could remain alive without the rest of the snake. He surmised the snake didn’t know either. It looked very angry and determined to make best use of its remaining time.

  The gate behind them opened.

  No one worried about checking why. There was a tangle of shoulders and arms as everyone attempted to exit at the same time. They collapsed in a pile and the gate clanged shut behind them. The pit beyond was a hissing nightmare.

  Givup Notachance was standing at the winch, giving them a look that was anything but impressed.

  “Stay here and out of my way,” she snarled. “And since I know that you’re going to ignore that, at least try to be a distraction to them rather than me.” She disappeared up the ladder to the chamber above. It seemed a fair request. Mungo sat up and leaned his back against the wall. There was a grinding noise from far above and then a hiss as huge gouts of steam sprayed and billowed from the joint vents on the brass monstrosity.

  “Damn,” Thud said as he stood. “That thing is getting ready to leave.” He looked down at Mungo. “What’re you doin’ lad? On your feet!”

  Mungo shook his head. “She’s right. I need to just stay here, out of the way. I’m so bad at being a spy that you didn’t even tell me the real plan. Your disguises fooled me completely. All I was in that fight was something to trip over.”

  “Ha!” Thud said, which wasn’t the reaction Mungo had expected. “For all the merits of your collective brain you can be a right gob sometimes. I don’t give a troll fart for how your spyin’ skills are. That ain’t what I hired you for. I hired you for bein’ the best engineer I ever seen.”

  “I’m not even good at that.” He pointed at the giant robot overhead. “You don’t build something like that as a bluff. That thing works and I’ve no idea how Frothnozzle managed it.”

  “You heard him,” Thud said. “He’s got Knearaoh Khomen helping him by powering it with lightning. And you’re the one that might be able to break it. Stop bein’ a mailroom spy. Get up there and be a Dungeoneer.”

  Mungo arrived at the top of the ladder in the middle of chaos. Several of Frothnozzle’s ifreet-adventurers had arrived and the dwarves were clumped around the room trying to fend them off. Yorgi was still crashing around. He wasn’t hitting much with his wild swings but they worked as a distraction. Anyone in Yorgi’s path had to focus on getting elsewhere or get launched across the room. The ogre’s idea of who he was fighting seemed to be ‘anyone who wasn’t Yorgi’. Steel clanged, voices grunted and weapons and bodies flew through the air.

  Mungo took a deep breath and closed his eyes to refocus his mind. When what you were doing wasn’t working it was madness to not try something else and Thud’s suggestion was as good as any.

  He let Mungo the spy melt away and reopened his eyes as Mungo the Dungeoneer. He looked around the room and chuckled. It had seemed chaos before but now the entangled groups resolved in his head until they made sense. He could see how the dwarves had maneuvered so that their opponents were separated out and unable to reinforce each other. How three of the fights ringed the door so that any new entrants could be immediately engaged and isolated. He could spot how the mechanisms on the statues worked and even sussed out where the snake and scorpion storage areas had to be. He tugged on Durham’s sleeve to get him to follow then strolled across the room as if through a park, easily weaving amongst the fighters, anticipating the shift and flow of the battle. It was all just math being played out in real time.

  Yorgi lumbered in their direction and he heard Durham make a yelping noise behind him. It wasn’t relevant. Mungo could see at a glance where a creature with Yorgi’s mass had to have its center of balance. Yorgi’s clumsy movement was due to the fact that he was on the verge of falling over every time he took a step. Gong stepped in front of him, ready to meet the charge and protect them. His armor was dented, a few pieces missing and he had a trickle of blood down one side of his face that was parting around an egg-sized lump on his brow. His arms were trembling and they struggled to raise his ax again but there he was all the same, doing his job. Meeting his duty. He poised to swing.

  Mungo stepped forward quickly and lay one tiny hand on the dwarf’s thick arm. “Wait,” Mungo said. Gong paused, ax cocked. His breath was ragged and his cheeks streaked with sweat and blood. Mungo watched Yorgi’s advance, waiting, calculating. The perfect moment, right as Yorgi was shifting his weight forward on his advance foot, right as he was bringing up his meaty fist to swing and bash Gong’s skull in.

  “Knee! Now!” the gnome barked and Gong swung low. He didn’t have to go too low as Yorgi’s knees were at his chest level. Dwarven combat styles tended to err on the side of going high on the presumption that their opponent is probably taller. How Gong thought of it in his own head Mungo didn’t know, but Gong knew his job well. When he swung an ax it hit where he wanted it to.

  Yorgi howled as he shifted his weight onto his knee and it buckled under him. His left bent awkwardly to the side, giving him the choice of dislocating his knee or letting his body go to the side with it. He chose the latter which Mungo had known he would. Simple survival instinct.

  Yorgi tumbled sideways, falling into the pit even as he clutched at his knee
with both hands. He landed below with a crunchy crash and a bellow. Mungo decided to stop looking. He didn’t know how well ogres, snakes and scorpions got along but, if they didn’t, Yorgi wouldn’t be a problem anymore. If they did get along then Mungo wanted to be far away before they came back out of the pit.

  Yorgi going down seemed to have revitalized the dwarves. All across the room they began pressing their opponents back. There was a sinister laugh from behind one of the statues. The assassin appeared at the top, somehow managing to look like he was posing for a painting, his hook around the statue’s neck.

  “Play time is over, fools,” he snarled. “I’ve brought a reinforcement. Enjoy!” He leapt from the statue and rolled dramatically through the doorway after Frothnozzle.

  A figure stepped through the doorway in his wake. It towered in height, shoulders broad, with ancient and yellowed wrappings criss-crossing their way around its body, parted only across the face to reveal its gleaming blue eyes. They matched his blue shoes. The mummy lord from the dungeon. Mungo guessed that whatever restrictions the mummy was under when playing its dungeon role no longer applied. The thing had been unleashed.

  It threw its head back in a wordless howl as it raised its arms. A blast of wind went through the room, full of sand and beetles.

  Now it was Thud’s turn to step in front of Mungo. “Go on, lad. Do your thing. We’ll handle this.” He grinned and winked. “That’s our part of the job, eh?” He jerked his thumb. “Take your protege with you. Take Gryngo too. Ain’t seen many engineering problems where explosives wasn’t one of the possible solutions.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mungo and Durham sprinted along the gangway that led toward the automaton. Well, Durham sprinted with Mungo tucked under his arm calling out encouragement. Mungo had tried several times to invent something that would allow him to move faster but so far the results had all either been explosive or resulted in excessive propulsion that ended in unanticipated momentum failure upon high-velocity interaction with the nearest wall.

  Gears were beginning to whir and great gouts of steam hissed and roared from the giant’s joints. There were a dozen adventurers scattered around the floor below them, moving equipment away from the tree-sized brass legs and unhooking chains and clamps. Ahead of them on the gangway a pair were raising the laddered ramp that had allowed access to an entry hatch on the side of the statue’s waist. Beyond them a small knot of adventurers were watching, puzzled expressions on their faces. The notable thing about the second group was that they were all very short.

  “Is that…?” Mungo began.

  “Our support team,” Durham answered. “Still in disguise.”

  Mungo pointed at the pair raising the plank. “Stop them!” he squeaked at the highest volume he could manage. The support team jumped into action quickly but the two techs had heard him yell as well. They glanced in Mungo and Durham’s direction first, looking perplexed at seeing a human running toward them with a gnome under his arm and a dwarf sprinting to keep up. Then they looked the other way at the group of short adventurers running toward them throwing off pieces of adventurer disguises. The two techs turned to look at each other then dropped the plank, letting it fall to the floor twenty feet below with a musical clonk. They immediately followed after it, evidently favoring a twenty foot drop over being flanked by four times their number in opponents.

  “Intruders!” Mungo heard one yell. Mungo wasn’t sure how long it would take for the adventurers below to get up to them but he knew that it was going to be less time than he wanted it to be. An arrow sizzled past as if to emphasize.

  The two Dungeoneer teams met up where the entry plank had been, Durham gasping for breath. The open hatch above taunted them. Ten feet of empty space between them and ten feet up.

  “I need to be on that!” Mungo said.

  A blinding vertical seam of light appeared in the wall in front of the robot as the tower began to open like a very long and sideways clam. The doors were big and slow. Mungo imagined there were a dozen grumpy camel teams pulling winches to move them.

  The support team all had blank looks.

  “That’s the sort of thing you usually figure out how to do,” one said. He had dropped the banjo he’d been carrying and was now removing his feathered trilby letting Mungo recognize him as Doc. Doc pointed. “Some sort of maintenance hatch there in the knee straight across from us. Might be easier to get to.”

  “Rope!” Mungo said.

  Doc shrugged. “No rope in my medical bag.”

  “No time,” Mungo heard Durham say and suddenly he was airborne. Flying through the air was something Mungo tried to avoid on general principle. Now that he was midway through the experience he was pleased to find that his thoughts remained calm and orderly rather than panicked and screaming. He had time to consider several dozen ways to manage landing without having to rely on grabbing onto something with his tiny fingers before a separate train of thought concluded that it was not going to be necessary. His trajectory took him through the maintenance hatch and straight into unanticipated momentum failure upon high velocity interaction with a wall.

  “Oof,” he said then rolled over and sat up just in time to serve as a landing pad for a dwwarf Durham had tossed after him. The dwarf scrambled off of him and favored him with a gold studded smile from a wiry black beard. Gryngo. There was a lurch in his stomach as the view through the hatchway behind Gryngo swung away. The leg had taken a step. The automaton was in motion. One side of the pyramid had opened along with the tower and the shimmering desert lay beyond. There was a rumble of thunder and eddies of sand began swirling across the desert floor as a storm began to form.

  “Durham figured I might be of use,” Gryngo said. “Weather’s taking a turn, eh?”

  “Do you have your supplies with you?” Mungo asked.

  Gryngo’s grin got bigger as he gave a slow, predatory nod.

  “Then Durham was right,” Mungo said. He took a look around the chamber they were in. They were in a space just above the knee joint, the room tilting back and forth with the rhythm of the machine’s gait. The air was full of the sound of clanking metal, clicking chains and hissing steam. The sweet smell of oils and lubricants was thick enough that Mungo was worried he’d get lightheaded. Maybe a daredevil climb up the exterior? An action packed internal ascent full of close-quarters fighting with the crew? He took a deep breath. They weren’t a pair of spies. His thoughts reordered in his head. Thud had been right. Who better to stop this thing than an engineer? Durham had been right as well. What better assistant than a demolitionist?

  He lowered his goggles and rotated the dials to bring down the dark lenses. “Here’s the plan,” he said. He could hear the music begin to play in his head.

  ***

  Ruby was almost getting used to the explosion of sound when the djinn arrived. The preceding whistle of wind gave her just enough time to cover her ears and close her eyes. She opened them a second later and set about straightening the scrolls that had gotten blown around.

  “My apologies once again for interrupting, wise one.”

  “Not at all,” Ruby said. “I was just writing out some of my initial observations after meeting your master.”

  The djinn gave a polite bow of acknowledgment. “I am here to inform you that the lamp will be moving soon. You should feel no disruption in here but the noise and changing light from outside may disturb your concentration.”

  “I’m sure I’ll manage. You wouldn’t believe some of the conditions I’ve worked under.”

  “It is my impression that your services will be called upon once we arrive at our destination. I anticipate the journey will take an hour. Is there anything I may provide for you while you wait?”

  “There is, actually,” Ruby said. She set her quill down and looked up as if this were an idea that had just occurred to her rather than one that she’d spent an hour concocting. “I would like a nice seafood dinner. Steamed clams, some shrimp, a nice fish, fresh octop
us—make it a grand feast. I’ve not had good seafood in so long.”

  “It shall be my pleasure,” Zabawa said. “Perhaps I will even be able to join you later.”

  ***

  Thud had elected to start with a rapid tactical advance in the opposite direction from the enemy. He had a clear notion that any hallway without a mummy lord was automatically better than one with. The dozen dwarves gave them the numbers advantage but he didn’t feel that the walkway around a pit full of snakes and scorpions was going to be the best place to tangle with a mummy lord. They followed the hall up a flight of stairs. Back to the dungeon level, by Thud’s internal reckoning.

  The gnome appeared at the top of the stairs as they reached the halfway point. Givup Notachance. Thud’s inclination was to stop and assess but she was gesturing rapidly for them to get a move on and there was the matter of the mummy lord somewhere just behind them. Thud kept his legs moving.

  “This way,” Givup said. “Through there!” She pointed at a door just past where she waited. It was hanging open, only darkness beyond it. Thud stopped next to her. He had to make sure his whole team made it up the stairs and it gave him time to both ask questions and catch his breath, possibly not in that order.

  “Out with it lass,” he said. “What’s yer role in this? You’re on a different side every time I see ya.”

  “Undercover Gnome Intelligence. I was SUPPOSED to be your inside contact. Still doing my best given the circumstances. Now get through that door!”