Mazerynth

by Jeffery Russell

  Thud took another glance behind. The stairs were empty of dwarves but full when it came to mummy lords. It was stomping its way up, step by step, the stones cracking beneath its feet.

  Thud made for the door.

  ***

  Mungo’s magnet-gloves made climbing up the back of the automaton’s leg an easy task. He’d made the gloves long ago but never found a use for them in climbing for lack of metal walls. Mostly he’d used them to find screws he’d dropped on the floor. The giant’s brass leg wasn’t much for magnets but the iron rivets holding it together were. His gloves hooked onto each one with a satisfying clink. If anything the magnets were too powerful. Mungo’s arms were growing tired from the combined effort of pulling himself up as well as the strength necessary to yank the magnet free each time he wanted to move a hand. He’d left Gryngo behind in the knee-joint and hoped that he was having an easier time moving around the giant’s interior.

  The sandstorm whirled around him as he climbed, wind whipping at his clothes and trying to tug him loose. Below him he caught glimpses through the swirling eddies of dozens of figures traveling with the machine as it walked. Adventurers, riding and sprinting, moving in loose formation. Lightning flickered through the storm, the rumble of thunder almost lost in the sound of the wind. Another bolt, crashing into one of the lightning rods on the automaton, electrical sparks merrily hopping down the giant’s length from rivet to rivet. The insulation of Mungo’s gloves protected him though he was worried that the next bolt might find the metal of his goggles.

  Mungo’s objective was close, however, just above the top of the leg. The rear exhaust port. Because of course that’s where Frothnozzle had put the rear exhaust port. He hung beneath it with one hand clamped to a bolt, the other wielding his clockwork spindriver. Long experience had taught him to always wind it in advance. He wasn’t sure how he would have managed the crank one-handed. The spindriver hummed happily as it made short work of the screws. The automaton was taking a long swinging step forward and Mungo’s legs dangled free as he worked. He was glad to not have to worry about dropped screws.

  Two automaton strides later and he was in. He bypassed a mesh screen with his wirecutters then used pliers to spin open an air intake vent from the inside. He pulled himself through and dropped to the floor silently, more due to lack of weight than skill at landing.

  Not that anyone could have heard anyway. The core mechanisms were just above and it was loud enough that the two crew-members in front of him were wearing muffs over their ears. The interior of the posterior looked to be the practical end of the engine room. The base of the boiler was just in front. One of the crew was shoveling coal into the fire, the other looking up at the machinery above and making adjustments to knobbed levers on the wall. Rows of rods crackled overhead as electricity popped and snapped along their lengths. There was a ladder leading up past the works but no way to climb it without being seen.

  He fished around in his pack, his collective minds already calculating trajectories. He kept the slingshot in a holster inside the back of his pack to give it extra stability. He found a ball-bearing to go with it, took careful aim, made a few more calculations based on the current angle and motion of the giant’s swinging leg and let loose.

  The pings of the ball-bearing ricocheting around the walls was just audible over the machinery above. Mungo had added a few extra ricochets in to make the math more interesting. He followed it immediately with a second missile as its flight required at least one impact off of the other ball-bearing in order to find its mark. The pings switched to a clank and then a clunk as the bearings met each other and ricocheted their way into the back of each of the crew member’s heads. The one shoveling took a surprised step forward before dropping. The one at the levers dropped straightaway but readjusted several levers on his way down. There were angry hisses of steam from above and machinery sounding like it was now doing its work faster than it had ever been intended to.

  Mungo was certain that a few more lever yanks could cause the thing to fall apart but none of the levers were labeled and he might just as easily fix it. He didn’t want to take whatever minute or two it would require to sort out their function. If there were other crew around they would be arriving shortly to see what was wrong. If there weren’t, then perhaps whatever was happening now would lead to a lucky mechanical failure in the future or a place to fall back to and wreak havoc if other avenues failed. Mungo liked expanding his possible win scenarios.

  He hurried up the ladder. The hurrying part of the climb lasted for two rungs before his arms insisted he take it slow. He left the gloves off so he wouldn’t be stuck to the ladder. Now that he was above the waist the rolling motion of the giant’s movement was much more bearable. Any more time on the swinging leg and he’d have been sick.

  He paused partway up the ladder, his brain making the excuse to itself that he was examining the machinery rather than resting his arms. He followed the gears around with his eyes, frowned at the boiler placement, hmmmed at the pistons and the electrical conduits. He spent a moment considering it all, tested his arms and then decided to spend another moment considering before continuing up the ladder.

  The ladder ended at another hatch. He had no choice but to open it blindly and hope that he wasn’t climbing straight into a trap. He pushed it up enough to clamber over the rim and out onto the carpeted floor above.

  Carpet? It was thick and luxurious beneath his fingers. He wanted to lay down on it and press his arms into it to make them feel better. He glanced around. A sitting room in the chest cavity. Apparently Frothnozzle wanted to be able to traverse in style if he wasn’t at the helm. There was a small couch and footstool and a little table with inset rings to keep mugs from sliding. The walls were paneled in wood and decorated with a few framed watercolors of rivers and rustic mills.

  Also in the room was the assassin. He was sitting on the couch, feet on the stool, mug on the table, eyes on the watercolors. He also had two hands which was one more than he’d had the last time Mungo had seen him.

  “Alive and two-handed?” Mungo asked. He was suspicious that he was being fooled by a disguise. He’d learned he had a weakness in that regard.

  The assassin’s gaze shifted to him for a moment then back to the watercolors. “Yes,” he said. “The hook-hand was an interesting look for a day or two but two hands really is more convenient.”

  “You’re one of the ifreet,” Mungo said, remembering the hand dissolving away into sand. “A desert sand-demon.”

  “Plenty of sand around for making new hands,” the demon said, waving his new hand toward the window. The storm outside was a swirling brown wall, the roar of its howl muted by the window but not silenced. “Or new bodies. Destroy our form and we can make it anew. There’s no winning. Ifreet don’t die.” He stood and slipped a foot and a half long dagger out from his waistband. “Gnomes, on the other hand…” He flexed his new hand again.

  “You can still be cut to pieces,” Mungo said. It wasn’t much of a retort and made even less so by the fact that only one of the two of them was carrying an obvious cutting-to-pieces tool.

  The ifreet’s face formed a grin. “Let’s see who can cut the most pieces.”

  Mungo’s thoughts popped up a memory of what Thud had said as he’d kicked this same ifreet off the side of a ship. Delivering one-liners when it should have been stabbing things. Demons always had a weakness. It was part of their nature. Usually they’d chewed your face off before you got around to finding out what it was.

  Mungo pulled the degnominator from his belt. “Don’t take another step,” he said. He didn’t know how threatening the grapple-gun looked but his current list of options both began and ended with it.

  “Or you’re going to climb me?”

  His hypothesis was holding true. The demon needed to have the last word. It had a compulsion for it.

  The ifreet took another step forward.

  Mungo fired the grapple. The shot passed under the demon’
s arm and hit the window with a shatter. Broken shards of glass spun and whipped away in the storm. Mungo hoped an ifreet adventurer or two got to be on the receiving end of one of those when they landed.

  The assassin looked at the taut grapple-wire leading out the window and snickered. “One shot at close range and you managed to miss. You really are as bad as Frothnozzle said.” It took another step forward and raised the blade.

  Mungo did the math.

  He raised his hand to a precise position and released the grapple gun at a precise moment. It snapped out of his hand, the reel pulling it. The handle caught neatly around the tip of the assassin’s blade. And stopped with a click.

  The assassin laughed. “Did you think your toy would disarm me? Did you think disarming me would make me less danger…”

  That was as far as he got.

  Light flared through the room, searing in intensity. A direct hit on the lightning rod that Mungo had fired the grapple at. The bolt sizzled along the wire, arcing and popping its way through the blade. The ifreet twisted and spasmed, blue sparks flickering over its surface, crackling and jolting across the spikes and studs on his leather.

  The lightning dissipated quickly. Mungo picked himself up from the floor and brushed ashes off of his goggle lenses. His eyes had been protected by the goggles but his ears were ringing loudly enough to almost drown out the thunder rumbling through the sky around them and the wind howling through the broken chest-window. Outside the storm eddied and snarled, allowing only glimpses of the vast desert landscape stretching before them.

  What was left of the assassin still stood in the center of the room, hand extended. The knife blade was twisted and black. The rest of him had been seared into a giant lump of glass. Mungo stepped forward and gave him a tap. There was a clink noise. Something swirled deep within the statue’s murky depths.

  “Still in there, are you?” Mungo asked. “Good luck with reforming.”

  He looked up at the hatch in the top of the room. It could only lead into the automaton’s neck and, subsequently, the head. It was time to face Frothnozzle.

  ***

  Thud stepped through the doorway into a dimly lit chamber with thousands of dwarves. The mirror maze. Givup didn’t follow him through. Instead she stopped and closed the door behind him, the mirrored back becoming another reflection. The light in the room came from a pixie lamp that Ginny had lit and was holding over her head. It was bright enough to bring out a cascading series of reflections of the dwarves clumped together in the middle of the room.

  It was also bright enough to show one of the mirrors still had a blanket draped across the front. Not the blanket they’d left, however. They weren’t the only dungeon team to have used that trick.

  “I’m hoping at least some of you have the same type of idea in your head for a plan as I do,” Thud yelled. “Because we don’t have time to go over it. Get to cover!”

  There was a brief swirl of motion as the dwarves broke into groups heading different directions, adjusting as necessary when discovering they were following a reflection. Once they formed up Ginny extinguished the lamp and the maze returned to darkness.

  ***

  Cornelius Frothnozzle sat in The Chair. That was how he thought of it at least. ‘The Chair.’ A title for a position of power. Because, honestly, he who sat in The Chair controlled the automaton and, as he was about to demonstrate to the Knearaohs, he who controlled the automaton controlled the kingdom. The control panel in front of him was a work of beauty. Polished wood and gleaming brass, studded with buttons and levers and neat little rows of dials and gages.

  The two big levers in the middle were pushed forward all the way. The brass giant was striding forward at full speed. Visibility was low due to the sandstorm but that was fine. He’d let Knearaoh Khomen believe that the lightning powered the machine which wasn’t precisely true but as long as the Knearaoh felt like he controlled the ‘off’ button he’d let Frothnozzle do whatever he wanted when it came to the giant’s actual design. In the meantime, the storm made for excellent camouflage. When an approaching sandstorm was spotted people took cover rather than marshaling the troops and firing on it. By the time they realized an attack was occurring it would be far too late.

  And after this attack? He’d be the only one in the land with three djinn under his control. Three djinn and a brass giant were more than enough to become the dominant force in the kingdom. He didn’t have any illusions that ruling Karsin would make him a god-king but he figured that didn’t matter. Who needed to be a god when the gods took orders from you?

  He heard the hatch behind him open and gave a quick glance back to see the ifreet assassin pop his head up through the floor. Frothnozzle turned back to frown out the cockpit window, pushing a few irrelevant buttons and adjusting a knob that didn’t need adjusting to make his importance clear to the demon. Frothnozzle wasn’t a fan of working with demons and was looking forward to having the thing off of his robot.

  “I told you to wait below,” he said in his frostiest voice.

  “There’s a problem,” the assassin said, climbing the rest of the way through the hatch.

  “Your purpose for remaining below was to be a solution to problems. Out with it.”

  “The gnome.”

  “Notachance?”

  “No, the other one.”

  Frothnozzle searched his memory. “You can’t mean Mungo, can you? We left him far behind. He was irrelevant then and even more so now.”

  “He’s broken the window in the front of the chest.”

  “He’s here? Impossible! You got rid of him, of course, or you wouldn’t be here, correct?”

  The assassin stood next to him, arms crossed, looking out the pilot eye. He seemed short next to Frothnozzle’s command chair. The Chair made all others less significant. “I knocked him through the window but there’s always the chance that he’s clinging on outside somewhere. Seems the sort of thing that bunch likes to do.”

  “No matter,” Frothnozzle said but there was a hitch in his voice. “The storm will clear him off soon enough. More likely is that he’s laying face-down in the sand somewhere behind us.”

  Lightning crackled outside, illuminating the cockpit in flashes of blue as it was filtered through the eye-windows.

  The assassin reached up and whipped off his shroud.

  “Ha!” he said. “It is I, Mungo!”

  “Of course it is,” Frothnozzle said. “Only you would be stupid enough to pull off your disguise before taking advantage of it.”

  “No,” Mungo said. “I’ve already taken advantage of it. I just wanted to make sure you knew it was me.” He pointed an accusatory finger. “You’re a fraud.”

  Frothnozzle puffed up a little, eyebrows coming together like head-butting caterpillars. “How dare you?”

  “I’ve seen the inside of your so-called automaton.” Mungo’s voice dripped with contempt and his mouth twisted into a sneer. The width of gnome mouths made a full sneer an event that could only be missed if you were standing directly behind them. “It’s almost entirely for show. Your lightning rods just conduct the energy around and discharge it. The only purpose your boiler tanks have is to send gouts of steam out to make it look like it’s working. You’re using the djinn to power this thing. You didn’t make an automaton, you made a suit of djinn armor. You’ve broken the oldest gnome law. You mixed magic and science.”

  “Yes!” Frothnozzle said. “I did exactly that and look at the power it’s given me. You are looking upon the world’s first technomage! Call it a djinnimaton if it suits you. The djinn lies at its heart and wields its power. A djinn under my command!”

  “More like a djinnimatonic,” Mungo sneered. “You cheated! You didn’t achieve any great work. Magic powered trinkets are nothing new. The word you’re looking for is enchanter.” The last word flopped out of his mouth like a dying fish. “Add a cup of water to a barrel of goblin sweat and you get a barrel of goblin sweat. Add a cup of goblin sweat to a barrel o
f water and you’re also left with a barrel of goblin sweat. Once you add magic to anything you’re left with magic. Untestable. Unpredictable. Unreliable.”

  “And currently conquering a kingdom. Your adherence to scientific laws is quaint and obsolete.”

  “Unpredictability should come from usage rather than origin,” Mungo said.

  With that he pulled the lever alongside the base of Frothnozzle’s chair.

  If there was any one thing that was a given when it came to gnomish engineering it was that there was always, ALWAYS, an ejector seat. Frothnozzle had just enough time to squeak as the top of the giant’s head released and was torn away by the wind and then, with a loud SPROING, the Chair made a rapid exit into the sky carrying Frothnozzle with it.

  “Pull the lever,” Mungo said. “And up goes the chair. Predictable. Reliable.”

  ***

  The mummy lord stepped through the door and into the darkness. It gave a low, evil chuckle then choked out something mocking in a guttural language that sounded as dusty and ancient as the mummy’s voice. It stomped its way forward and the door swung shut behind it.

  A light flared in the room and a thousand mummies appeared surrounding him. The mummy lord’s head jerked back in a gawk of surprise while the rest of it continued a step forward before stopping so as to not leave the head behind. One of the reflections stepped forward, moving from phantasm into a form that cast reflections of its own.

  Mummy lord versus itself. Thud was positive he didn’t want to be anywhere near whatever was going to happen next. He ducked back behind his wall and made for the exit. He didn’t figure the dueling mirror would keep the mummy lord occupied for long but it might bank them just enough time to matter down the line.

  ***

  Mungo examined the control panel. Was it just for show as well? He reached up and pulled back on the two levers in the console’s center. The automaton slowed and came to a stop. He pushed forward on the left lever and the brass giant turned to the right, shuffling its clanking feet. So, a controllable djinn giant. He could understand the appeal. A djinn-powered automaton was great right up until it wasn’t. He’d heard stories of the squirrely ways that djinns would employ to twist their orders. Ask for a sandwich and the djinn might make a sandwich for you or it might go murder someone with a sandwich and bring you theirs. He hadn’t seen a djinn lamp anywhere on his climb to the cockpit but it had to be within the giant somewhere. Maybe hidden in a foot? Maybe Gryngo would find it but that wasn’t an event he could rely on.