And I knew immediately what I had to do. It was me, of course, who was weighing us down. Me and my flighty thoughts of levity. I pointed to a far wall, where a great sword hung, crossed with another.
“Drop me off there!” I shouted, pointing to the floor beneath the swords.
Jewel looked at me slantwise, but did not question me. She knew I was the dead weight slowing us down. She leaned forward and we angled down. Behind us the flying beast angled with us. Its humming drone was louder as it got closer and closer. It didn’t sound happy.
The wall was upon us and if Jewel didn’t do something now, we were going to crash into it.
“Uh, Jewel.”
“Hang on!”
As the wall rose up before us, she threw her weight hard to the right, yanking her arms with her, and the carpet came to a nearly abrupt halt. I was dislodged immediately, tumbling head over tail, slamming hard into the wall.
She looked down at me, grinning. “I told you to hang on, your highness.”
The hornet was coming in fast and I urged her to go and she did so, snapping the carpet and giving a sharp order. She sped off as the flying creature banked hard, turning and following.
I next watched an aerial display the likes of which I had never seen before, nor would I expect to see again. With the extra weight off the carpet, woman and beast were nearly evenly matched. When Jewel looped, so did the creature. When she turned hard to starboard in ever tightening circles, the creature followed. And while they did this mid-air dance, I reached up and took hold of one of the curved scimitars, pulling it free from the wall. It was a good weapon, and felt natural in my hands
“Over here!” I shouted up to her. “Lure it over here!”
It was time to end this...and I would do this the only way I knew how, with the sword.
Jewel heard me and responded by heading directly at me. I watched her approach and fought the desire to duck, trusting her already. Indeed, at the last possible moment, she pulled up, and swung off the carpet and into my arms.
The hornet was directly behind, arching its thorax and lifting the stinger before it. It was going to impale one of us to the wall. My guess was me.
I wasn’t wrong. It was coming for me, and it was coming hard.
I raised the sword before me, visualizing the stinger as nothing more than a javelin held by a charging desert warrior. And as Jewel dove to one side, I swung the scimitar with all my strength, deflecting the stinger, and the hateful creature sailed to one side. Its stinger, surely as hard as any steel, drove deep into the fortress wall.
And what happened next surprised even me.
A great bellow erupted from seemingly everywhere at once. The walls of the fortress shook. The ornate throne toppled over and the crystal chandelier from above crashed to the floor. I lost my footing and fell into Jewel. She pointed to a far wall, where a massive face had appeared over the stones. I knew the ugly face immediately. It was Prince Zeyn.
The real Prince Zeyn.
Jewel pointed to the adjoining wall, and I saw it, too. His face was there as well. In fact, his face now covered every wall in the room, including the ceiling and floor, stretching from corner to corner.
As the demon hornet struggled to free itself from the wall, I saw that the face of Prince Zeyn, along the same wall as the beast, was in great pain.
He was in pain from the hornet sting.
“Get the carpet!” I yelled.
Jewel immediately complied, fetching the rug which lay in a heap at her feet. “What’s happening, my king?”
My king...those words sounded so nice coming from her, but I had little time to revel in them.
“The fortress is alive,” I said, as we sat together on the carpet. It lifted immediately. All around us more fixtures fell and crashed.
“I do not understand,” she cried out.
“Prince Zeyn is the fortress. He is everywhere at once.”
“But how?”
“It’s an illusion, of course. All of this. Now go, go!”
Chapter Fourteen
The carpet flew toward the main entry. But a portcullis appeared, looking an awful lot like huge teeth, and crunched down ahead of us. Had we been a trifle faster, it would have caught us and chewed us in half. As it was, we were merely trapped inside the main chamber.
“There’s got to be other exits,” I said.
The carpet spun about and zoomed across the room toward another entry. But this also sprouted teeth and snapped shut before we got there.
We swerved again, toward a third passage, but this too got bitten off.
“He’s playing with us,” Jewel said grimly.
“He wants to recapture us alive,” I agreed. “That’s probably bad news.”
“So he can flay you a sliver at a time,” she said. “And tie me down for the queen to screw.”
I looked across at the queen. She had almost succeeded in pulling her stinger loose. She would be very angry when she resumed the hunt. We had little remaining time to dither. “We’ve got to surprise him,” I said. “Do the unexpected.”
“He expects us to try to escape.”
“Ah, but the manner of it is what makes the difference.”
“Well, get your manner moving!”
“The turret,” I said. “Go back there.”
“Oho!” The carpet reoriented and shot across to the passage leading to the turret stairway. The change was so sudden that the teeth there did not have sufficient time to clamp. They formed as we squeezed through, and gnashed down just behind us, snagging the rear of the carpet. It abruptly halted, and we slid off the front.
I landed on my backside, and Jewel landed on me. At any other time I would really have noticed how her plush posterior mashed my groin, her slender torso fitted itself to mine, and her lustrous hair flung out to caress my face. But unfortunately I was too busy to appreciate any such things.
“We’ve got to stop meeting this way,” she murmured, and pried herself free.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbed the carpet, and yanked. But it remained caught on the teeth. Short of cutting it free, we couldn’t free it, and I was not at all sure it would work correctly if maimed in that manner. “At least it prevents the queen from following us,” I said.
“Praise Allah for small favors,” she said.
“Very small favors. She will surely be let through the moment she seeks passage.”
We turned and ran up the winding stairway. We were soon winded. Again, at any other time I would have noticed how Jewel’s bare chest was heaving, and how her disheveled tresses gave her a certain appealing wild-woman look, and especially how her bottom flexed as she preceded me up the steps. But it seemed to be my fate to be too distracted by events to take note of passing points of interest.
“I have to rest!” she gasped.
I understood. “We can’t afford this extra weight,” I said, regretfully divesting myself of my scimitar.
There was a sound behind us, as of something mounting the stairs.
I lurched forward, swept Jewel up into my arms, and charged up the steps. But soon I too was too fatigued to continue.
“Will this help?” Jewel inquired. She turned her face to mine and kissed me.
“You feel lighter!”
“I’m diffusing.”
Ah. That did make sense. “I had thought it was just the kiss.”
“That, too,” she agreed, smiling.
Recharged, I charged up two more loops of the spiraling stair. But soon even that energy gave out.
However, Jewel had had time to recover, and resumed climbing on her own. I followed, relieved of the pleasant burden of her weight. Also of much of my own weight, as I diffused myself. Both of us looked the same, but we were only half our normal density.
The ascent seemed interminable, but we made it. We burst into the highest turret chamber. There was the window with the bars bent outward from Jewel’s entry. Our escape!
Except for one detail. We no longer had
a flying carpet.
We gazed out across the colorful landscape. We had undensified so as to be able to interact with this realm, but now a fall to the ground from this height would squash us flat. Were we trapped after all?
“If we densify,” Jewel said, “We’ll drop right through the fortress and go splat below.”
There was another sound behind us, suspiciously like huge insect wings flying up a steep incline. The queen must finally have gotten loose, and gotten the door teeth to let her through. Our time was getting strained.
“We can do the opposite!” I exclaimed. “Because we’re mortals, we can densify beyond the ability of the natives. We can also diffuse beyond their powers. We can make ourselves so light we’ll float!”
“I hardly trust this,” Jewel said. But she started diffusing further. So did I. What choice did we have?
“Now you are mine,” the queen said, appearing at the entry. She looked almost completely human at the moment, except for the huge stinger. She must have put away her wings, knowing we had nowhere to go.
“Go sting your own ass!” Jewel said. A stranger might have gotten the impression that she did not much like the queen.
The queen walked into the chamber, enjoying the moment. “First I’d better nullify the man, because I don’t like distractions while I’m seeding a female.” She turned to me, inhaling impressively. She was one amazing figure of a woman, in this form. “Aladdin, there are two ways we can do this. One is to have you make your effort to impregnate me in your human fashion, and I will merely touch you with my poison, just enough to make you passive. That way I can save you for future pleasures, until I finally tire of the novelty.”
And I lacked even a scimitar to deter her. I knew she could overpower me when she tried. Her luscious form was highly deceptive. Maybe it was illusion, covering her metallicly tough carapace.
“What’s the other way?” I asked. I was trying to stall for time so we could diffuse further.
“You can try to oppose me. Then I will have to sting you harder, stunning you and perhaps killing you. I fear you would not much like that.”
I glanced at Jewel. Had we diffused enough? I feared we hadn’t. How long would it take the queen to accommodate my, as she put it, effort? “I’ll try the first way.”
“Excellent.” She approached me, completely ignoring Jewel. That was a signal of her certainty, surely justified.
I put my arms around her. She felt exactly like a lovely woman. I kissed her. Her lips were invitingly soft. I felt her bottom. It was superlative. Taken as a whole, she was enough to make any normal man desperately desire her.
“You will prefer it on the bed,” she murmured. She disengaged and went to lie on her back on the bed. Her stinger disappeared, confirmation that her present form was illusion; she could make any part of it disappear.
I was careful not to look at Jewel. Even if I got stunned and could not escape, she could still get away. She had the lamp, which I hoped was losing density too; otherwise she would not be able to float away with it. More important, she knew exactly what I was doing: giving her time. Though it wouldn’t have hurt to see her evince just a trace of jealousy.
I joined the queen on the bed.
“You will do better without your clothing,” she murmured.
There was the problem. When I stripped she would see that I remained unready to make any “effort.” I suspected Jewel, knowing this, was privately amused.
What could I do? I stripped.
“I see we are not quite ready,” the queen said. “That should be readily handled.” Indeed, she reached out to handle it. Then she frowned. “What’s this?”
“I know your nature,” I said. “That you aren’t really the marvelous creature you appear. That you’re a big ugly insect. That’s a problem for me.” And that was true, though hardly the whole truth.
“Nature, smature,” she snapped. “You can get it up if you really want to.” She kneaded vigorously.
Too vigorously. Her fingers sank into my substance. Because, of course, I had continued diffusing.
“So that’s your game,” she said. “Well, I have a spell that will stop that.”
I lurched back to my feet. “Get out of here!” I said to Jewel, and plunged toward the window.
We both dived out and fell. But we were still diffusing. Our descent slowed, then stopped. We were floating.
Then the queen emerged from the window. She was now in her full insectoid splendor, and looked annoyed.
We had to get away. But how? We were floating like Chinese balloons, just waiting to be popped by the queen’s stinger.
I saw some mist rising from a small lake beyond the fortress. “Get into that!” I called. I stroked my arms as if swimming. Gratifyingly, it worked.
Our progress was dismayingly slow compared to the queen’s powered flight. But we managed to make it to the mist, which fortunately was thicker than it looked. Soon we were hidden in fog. I heard the queen zooming back and forth through it, searching for us. Our luck would not hold long.
“Now get down to the ground and densify,” I called.
We densified, and that brought us to a landing on the shore of the lake. But now the mist was clearing, and I knew that all too soon the queen would see us and attack. This time there would be no miss-nice-girl foolishness about her. I’d soon be dead and Jewel would be worse off.
“Keep densifying,” I said. “We have to find some bedrock to stand on.”
“Why not just go underground?”
“Because the queen will be tracking us, and Zeyn will bring the heavy catapults to bear, and blast us out of the ground. We need to deal with her now.”
She considered. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“To let her try to breed you, only you’ll be impenetrably dense.”
“A fitting finish,” she said with satisfaction.
We found an outcrop of bedrock and stood on it while we rapidly gained mass.
The queen emerged from the mist and spied us. She looped about and zoomed in close. “Prepare to meet your doom!” she cried.
We both did a marvelous imitation of fear and despair, which were surprisingly easy to emulate. We tried to flee, but Jewel managed to fall, landing on her back. The queen landed beside her and didn’t hesitate. She held Jewel down, oriented her stinger, and plunged it in.
“What’s this?” she demanded, exactly as before, with me.
“I’m dense,” Jewel explained helpfully. “You got only a little way in, and now you’re trapped. I am closing around you like stone.”
The queen tried to yank her stinger out, but the tip of it was indeed caught. All she succeeded in doing was to move Jewel’s body a little. Jewel now weighed far more than the queen did, apart from being imperviously hard.
“Oh, are you stuck?” Jewel inquired solicitously. “Let me help you with that.” Her knife appeared; somehow she had managed to keep that with her. She plunged it into the queen’s belly and carved. In moments she cut out the stinger by its softer base.
The queen was mortally wounded. She rolled on the ground, bleeding black ichor. I couldn’t help it; I felt slightly sorry for her. Jewel had effectively gutted her just as she did men who tried to rape her.
Jewel got to her feet, reached down to grab the dangling stinger, and yanked it out of her. She scornfully tossed it down beside the queen. Then she looked at me. “Where to, friend?”
“Now we need a new plan,” I said. “Zeyn will be waiting to ambush us at the bridge to the mortal realm. We have to find another way.”
“Maybe Lamprey will know of one.”
“Great idea!” I took the lamp from her and rubbed it.
Lamprey emerged in the form of a cloud of smoke. “I thought you’d never call,” he said gruffly. He also sounded weak. Normally he would have appeared as a bearded, healthy djinn, vaguely resembling a man, if a man had been nearly eight feet tall. The fact that Lamprey had only appeared in a half-state suggested he
had been weakened considerably by Zeyn; no doubt, my djinn had endured much torture to ensure his cooperation.
“How can we get out of here without getting caught?”
“There is another route. But it’s awkward and dangerous.”
“We’ll risk it,” I said.
“You remain the foolish mortal I know.”
“I don’t need a lecture! Where is it?”
“It’s in the catacombs beneath Zeyn’s fortress. But beware: wiser men than you—and I say this with considerable euphemism—have fallen prey to their hazards. Very few ever emerge from them, and virtually none do so sane. There is, however, little danger of being permanently lost in the labyrinth, because the swimming monsters will find you and consume you.”
“Swimming monsters?”
“Did I forget to say? The catacombs were flooded eons ago. You must navigate them underwater.”
“Oh, great!”
“Will we be able to breathe there, in our dense form?” asked Jewel.
“Aye, lass. But you will not be able to remain dense throughout; there’s a bridge you must traverse.” The djinn paused. “PS, woman, thanks for rescuing me, in your fashion.”
“You’re welcome, I’m almost sure,” Jewel said. “I’ll be calling in the credit the moment we return to the mortal realm.”
“To be sure.”
She turned to me. “What are we waiting for?”
What, indeed. It was time for the dread catacombs.
Chapter Fifteen
We left the queen where she lay and followed Lamprey’s directions to a stone portal in the woods behind the fortress. Unfortunately, Lamprey only knew of the entrance into the catacombs but not the way through them. The ultimate destination was somewhere in our own world, wherever that might be.
We had diffused enough to walk comfortably over the soft earth, knowing we were vulnerable to attack. Lamprey had assured us that he felt Zeyn would be waiting for us at the bridge to the mortal realm, as no one in their right minds would have braved the catacombs. Lamprey had emphasized the words right minds, before slipping back into his lamp to rest and recover from the torture he had endured at the hands of Zeyn. I knew Lamprey to be a powerful wizard in his own right. I suspected that Zeyn was just that much more powerful; at least, mighty enough to overcome Lamprey and force his cooperation. Lamprey was bound to me in all aspects, even loyalty, and it would have taken a powerful spell—or a lot of pain—to break my djinn down.
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