by J. R. Rain
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 kee
p 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.
And broken down he had; after all, Zeyn had found me, and had his man convince Jewel to hire me. For that, I might just be grateful to Zeyn.
With Lamprey recovering in the lamp, we were on our own. At the portal, we pushed aside some hanging vines and moss and strange, pinkish spider webs as thick as the heaviest of threads. I did not want to meet the maker of such webs.
The passage down into the catacombs was fraught with slippery moss and more spider webs. I pushed through the sticky stuff, cursing under my breath, until Jewel reminded me to densify, as she had already done. Indeed, she was passing through the webs and over the slippery stones as if neither had existed. Smite me for an infidel!
I densified and we continued on. The stone beneath was cut straight from the bowels of the earth, and it led ever deeper down. Lamprey couldn’t do much, but he did provide us with a flickering light that emerged from the lamp’s opening. I held the lamp before us as we descended ever deeper.
* * *
“Why did you give up the throne?” asked Jewel.
We had been descending for some time. The tunnel had long since narrowed considerably, and had we been less dense, I suspected the air would have been quite cold. As it was, we were comfortable enough.
It was a topic I dreaded, and one I had not spoken of in many years. After all, outside of Faddy and Lamprey, no one knew my true identity.
“My wife and son were killed. Assassins. I searched long and hard for the killer or killers, but they escaped. The killings ripped my heart out. It is difficult to mourn the loss of those you love and run a kingdom.”
She made sympathetic noises, and I knew she was no stranger to loss. After an acceptable period of silence had passed, she said, “Have you ever thought to consider that your family was killed to remove you from the throne.”
“The killer or killers couldn’t have known that.”
“Perhaps not, but there was a high probability of it happening. In the least, you might have done something foolish enough to lose the throne.”
“So you are saying I played right into their hands?”
“I am not saying anything, my king. I am only suggesting something that, in your grief, you might have overlooked.”
A very old and very deep wound seemed to have opened all over again. I set my jaw and led the way deeper into the dark depths. Jewel was wise enough to keep any further questions she might have had to herself.
We rounded a long bend in the tunnel and stopped abruptly. The tunnel dipped down into a pool of dark water. We stood at the water’s edge and considered our situation. Breathing underwater should be no different for us in our present dense state, a state that was impervious to the encompassing elements. Indeed, the surrounding world was presently nothing more than a ghostly representation of it.
I led the way forward into the water. Indeed, there was hardly a ripple. Jewel followed behind and I was pleased and relieved to see that the water had no effect on the lamp, which had densified right along with us, perhaps because we were holding it. Strange magic indeed in this world, but it did make some semblance of sense. It was an odd sight holding a flickering flame under water, one that I would not soon forget.
The water itself might as well have not been there at all. Less dense than the ground we had covered upon first entering Djinnland, the water offered no resistance.
We continued along the tunnel floor, which had widened considerably. The surface was now far above and we came upon glowing little fish with scaly wings. They saw us and darted away, flapping their wings. I could only wonder when we would meet the swimming monsters.
I did not have to wait long. One such creature appeared from the murky depths, a long sinewy, snake-like creature with the head and mane of a lion. It saw us and growled ferociously, its mouth opening impossibly wide.
We had no weapons, but I knew that in our current high-dense state, a creature of lesser density should pass through us, as the worms had done earlier.
Mercifully, I wasn’t wrong. Longer than a team of horses, the creature’s huge jaws snapped down on us...and through us. I shuddered and the sensation and the creature seemed perplexed as well. It tried again and again, and each time the result was the same.
Finally, it regarded us, lifting its great head. “You are not from this world,” it said, its voice deep, reverberating off the tunnel walls.
“What gave you that impression, devil fish?” snapped Jewel. Boy, she did not suffer fools lightly
, even if they were fifty creatures of nightmares.
It glanced at her, rolling eyes as big as my head. “No matter. You will need to de-densify soon. And when you do, you will be mine. I merely have to wait. That is, of course, if you ever find the exit. Probably you won’t. In that case, I will have to wait longer for you to go mad, but either way, you will eventually de-densify and I will have myself a nice meal or two.”
The creature’s knowledge of our situation was shocking, until I realized we were surely not the first outsiders it had seen. Like the Queen, its knowledge of our language was another matter, entirely. I suspected, perhaps, that Djinnland was imbued with a magic that permitted many of the creatures to communicate.
Or not. Perhaps I was simply mad.
It was disconcerting at best to continue along and have such a monstrous creature follow in our wake. The beast seemed patient, and that would surely be our downfall. And as we took turn after turn in the maze-like tunnels, often ending up in places I was certain we had seen before, the creature simply chuckled behind us.
This continued for some time. We resorted to marking the tunnel walls, digging our nails deep into the stone, and often we came upon the same marking. In our high dense state we also grew fatigued much faster. We sat on a ledge and looked out into the depths and a deep sense of hopelessness settled over me. Jewel, too, because she reached out and took my hand and rested her head on my shoulder, and I wondered idly what it would feel like to be bitten in half or even swallowed whole.
And as we sat there quietly, I heard something curiously coming from the lionserpent. A slight whimper, perhaps. Sometimes, mixed with the whimper, came the sound of true agony.
“We understand that you will be killing us soon,” I said. “You do not need to mock us further.”
It swam a little closer, flicking its great muscular tail. “I am not mocking you, my future lunch. I am in great pain.”
And now it turned its face to one side and I saw the source of his pain. A great and rusted hook projected out from its cheek. A thick cord flapped in the currents.