Fluff Dragon

by Platte F. Clark

  “Sitting in a tub of tepid water that’s filled with your own dirt and filth? Of course we don’t have to subject ourselves to that,” Loki said, cringing at the very thought of it. “We may be on an adventure where we will be required to do many hard and unpleasant things, but we don’t have to sink to that.”

  Moki nodded, liking the answer. “Baths are not great,” he purred. “Not at all.”

  Ratticus had been right—the entire city of Jiilk had decided to join the celebration. Max and his friends had arrived late and left early. They had bathed and were wearing clean clothes, and it was tempting to dive into the various trays of food being circulated throughout the king’s hall. But Ratticus had told them to eat light—looking Max up and down when he said it. They needed to be nimble while the rest of the city got good and stuffed.

  Dwight had truly been the dwarf of the hour. He channeled his claustrophobic fear into eating and drinking, and by the time he was carried back to their chamber he was out cold and snoring up a storm. The dwarf high mage had been there as well, and her gaze fell on Max more than he liked. So when it was time to excuse themselves, Max was more than happy to go.

  In the early hours of the morning, they left their room and made their way to the heart of Jiilk. It was similar to He’ilk in many ways: large streets and high ceilings, with homes and shops expertly carved out of the dense rock. But unlike the bright flames that were channeled throughout He’ilk, Jiilk had an intricate pattern of designs carved into the walls that gave off a warm light. Since it was night, however, the yellow light had been replaced with a cold blue one, and that gave the city an eerie feel.

  “Dwarf ants,” Loki said, noticing Max looking at the light pattern on the wall. He and Moki were riding in Max’s backpack.

  “Excuse me?” Max replied.

  “The light,” Loki answered. “The first dwarfs carved the patterns long ago. Most assume its filled with some kind of glowing stone or magic. But actually there are billions of dwarf ants in there.”

  “Dwarf ants?” Sarah asked.

  Loki shrugged. “You know, like regular ants, but shorter, grumpier, and—”

  “Let me guess, they have beards,” Sarah interrupted.

  “The kind that just go under the chin,” Loki continued. “Otherwise they get stuck in their mandibles.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Max said, picturing a chin-bearded ant in his head.

  “Each dwarf ant carries a backpack filled with a fluorescent stone.”

  “That means it glows,” Sarah said, anticipating Max’s question.

  “Oh.”

  “Millions and millions of the ants march through the rock patterns with their backpacks. Then at night they change shifts with the new color.”

  “Huh,” Max said, trying to imagine millions of little ants with glowing backpacks. “In the Techrus, we mostly just step on ants.”

  “Big mistake here,” Loki replied. “The ant unions have one of the more powerful lobbies. And ant lawyers can lift more than fifty times their own body weight in legal papers.”

  “The streets are surprisingly empty,” Ratticus said. “But it won’t be long before we’ll need my magic cloak.”

  They continued through the city. Max paid special attention to Ratticus, watching as the thief moved.

  “Ratticus,” Max whispered. “How do you walk so quietly?”

  “Years of training,” the thief whispered back. “Plus, I’m wearing powerful magic: Boots of Skittish Scampering, Leg Warmers of the Dandelion, Breeches of the Underfed Ballerina—”

  “Okay, I think we get the point,” Sarah interrupted.

  “Even my mustache is waxed to be more aerodynamic,” Ratticus said.

  They continued past the occasional set of guards, all asleep with their hands on their bellies and their helmets pulled over their eyes. Then they rounded a corner and found themselves on an empty street leading to a heavy circular door carved into the stone. Two guards stood as still as statues, obviously not having indulged in the celebration like the others. Ratticus put his hand up and backed the group around the corner. He began unwrapping what looked like a folded blanket from around his waist. He laid it on the street and began unfolding again and again, until it grew in size so that it was big enough to cover all of them.

  “The Cloak of Seeing Is Bee-Leaving,” Ratticus announced. “It’s magic—a prize won when we cleared out the Caves of the Bat Demon.” Max remembered playing that particular dungeon. The bat demon bit him and turned him into a bat minion.

  “So what does it do?” Sarah asked.

  “Whoever hides beneath it will disappear!” Ratticus said, his French accent adding a nice bit of showmanship. “Well, not disappear entirely. We will look like a swarm of bees.”

  “A swarm of bees?” Max said.

  “How is looking like a swarm of bees helpful?” Sarah asked.

  “I thought the same thing at first,” Ratticus said. “But then I realized that people don’t like bees—at least not in swarm form.”

  “Anything that swarms should be avoided,” Dirk agreed. “That’s, like, a basic survival rule.”

  “And bees trapped inside your armor?” Ratticus continued. “Very bad.”

  “Remember,” Glenn suddenly piped up from Max’s belt, “if you want the honey, you have to get past the bees. Unless you just buy it in a jar. So yeah, there’s that.”

  “I see you have your own magic,” Ratticus said, looking at Glenn.

  “Yeah.” Max sighed. “Do you want to trade for those ballerina pants?”

  Dirk scowled. “We’re not trading Glenn, dude. He’s been with us since the beginning.”

  “Plus, he did stab that orc,” Sarah reminded him.

  “Okay, fine,” Max said. “Let’s just get going.”

  Ratticus nodded, and Max and his friends got under the blanket. From the inside, it appeared as if nothing at all had changed. But from the outside, the group had taken on the appearance of a swarm of bees hovering in the air.

  “I don’t understand why you’d come up with a magic blanket that makes you look like bees,” Sarah said. “Why not just turn everyone invisible or something? Wouldn’t that just make things easier?”

  “Nobody goes on adventures because they’re easy,” Dirk said. And with that the group set off across the street. One of the guards noticed the blurry object moving toward him at a distance. He rubbed his eyes, assuming he was just getting tired.

  “You see that?” the other guard announced, leaning forward. The first guard rubbed his eyes again, this time hearing a strange buzzing sound.

  “You ever been outside?” the first guard said.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “I did once. Went to pick a flower for my mom and got stung.”

  “That’s why I’ve always hated flowers,” the second said.

  “But it wasn’t the flower, it was a bee hiding inside of it.”

  “That’s an interesting story and all, and don’t take this the wrong way, but who cares?”

  “Well, it was just one tiny little bee, and it sounded a whole lot like that black cloud coming toward us. I mean, if you took that one and added a thousand or so more.”

  They both watched as the cloud of bees drew closer, the buzzing definitely louder in the early-morning quiet.

  “Yep,” the first guard finally confirmed. “What we got here is a whole cloud of flying, stinging bees.”

  “So what do we do?” the second guard asked. “I didn’t take this job just to get stung by a bunch of bees.”

  “First we don’t get to go to the party. Now we have to stand here and get stung by bees. I’m starting to think this job isn’t for me.”

  “Well, I could have told you that. I’ve been wanting to go to the tavern all night.”

  “Good idea,” the guard announced. And with that they dropped their axes and walked off.

  Max and the others made it to the large door, guard free.

  “Bees,
” Ratticus said with a smile. He turned his attention to the large lock, studying it for a moment before producing several lock picks. He deftly inserted the small metal shafts into the mechanism, using his fingers to feel his way past the various pin tumblers inside. After a moment he nodded, then turned the handle with a satisfying click.

  “Voilà!” Ratticus announced. He pushed on the door as it swung open on huge, silent hinges.

  “Well, that wasn’t too hard, was it?” Max said hopefully.

  “Oh no, my chubby little friend,” Ratticus answered, peering into the room. “We haven’t even started.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  GUESSING GAMES

  THEY STOOD IN A SMALL room with two heavy doors. On either side of the doors, the bearded face of a giant dwarf guardian was carved into the wall: one looking down with clenched teeth and a furrowed brow, as if it was about to go into battle, the other with a large smile as if he had just come across a great treasure.

  “This is bad,” Ratticus said as they shut the main door behind them. “I’ve heard of these locks before, but I’ve never seen one.”

  “Face locks?” Dirk asked.

  “No,” Ratticus answered as he stroked his mustache. “Dwarven probability locks.”

  “Probability locks?” Sarah repeated, looking at the two doors.

  “Yes,” Ratticus continued. “The only lock that can’t be picked.”

  “I don’t understand,” Max said.

  “Let me explain,” the thief said. “We have two doors in front of us. If we pick the correct one, we will enter the vaults. If we pick the wrong one, we will die instantly. They are both unlocked.”

  “It’s like a puzzle,” Dirk said, looking around for clues. But the only thing in the room besides the large carvings of the dwarf heads were the patterns in the walls giving off the subdued blue light.

  “It doesn’t seem like a very effective lock,” Sarah said. “I mean, you have a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right one.”

  “Or picking the wrong one,” Loki said, poking his head out of Max’s backpack.

  “And that’s just it,” Ratticus said. “A lock that is always open—there is no challenge to a thief here. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of locks you’ve picked before. You choose correctly or you die, and those are not the kind of odds a well-trained thief accepts.”

  “It’s simply luck,” Sarah said. “Anybody could do it.”

  “So nobody does,” Max said, starting to understand.

  “Unless there’s a key to it all—a pattern of some kind,” Sarah said, slightly annoyed that she might be agreeing with Dirk.

  “Exactly!” Dirk exclaimed. “Like counting the number of teeth on the mad dwarf’s face and then dividing by two.”

  “Or following their eyes,” Loki added, staring at the carving of the happy dwarf. “Maybe they’re looking at the right one?”

  “Can you touch them?” Max asked Ratticus. “Maybe one is warm and one is cold?”

  Loki scratched at his ear. “Or if you listen closely, you might hear something on the other side.”

  Ratticus shrugged. “It’s all quite possible.”

  “Oh, oh, I know!” Dirk called out. “It’s not either door! They’re both fakes, and the real one is triggered by a secret latch or something.”

  “Here we stand before two unlocked doors,” Ratticus said, “and we are no closer to knowing which to open.”

  Max had read a million fantasy books with puzzles like this, or played them online with Dirk. There was always a key somewhere. And then Glenn spoke up, as if reading his mind. “The key to a locked door is always found in the last place you look,” he said. Everyone stopped and turned to the magical dagger.

  “Glenn, do you know the answer to this?” Sarah asked. “Do you know where the key is?”

  Glenn shrugged his tiny, ivory shoulders. “I’ve got no idea. I’m just saying the key’s in the last place you look because once you find it you stop looking. I mean, who’d keep looking for something after they found it?” They all groaned and returned to studying the room.

  “We are going to have to make a choice soon,” Ratticus said after they had spent several minutes looking for clues. “Eventually the dwarfs will notice the guards are absent. Somebody is going to have to decide.” Everyone looked at Max.

  “Why are you guys looking at me?” he said, shrinking under the weight of the attention.

  “You’re the magic user,” Ratticus said. “You have . . . intuition.”

  “What I have is a stomachache,” Max replied.

  “You’ve got magic feelings and stuff,” Dirk said to Max. “You have to use those to tell us what door to open.”

  Max turned to the two doors and stared at them. “So one opens and one wipes us out?”

  “If we keep studying the room, we may find the answer,” Loki said. “The dwarfs are tricky like that—they love their puzzles.”

  “Instant death?” Max asked, still not liking what he had heard.

  “More or less,” Ratticus replied. “The ceiling may drop out and smash us, the room may fill with water, or fire may shoot from the dwarf’s mouth—it’s hard to say.”

  Max swallowed. “You know, maybe Sarah was right all along. We could go get Prince Conall and have him tell his father about what’s going on.”

  “Or just abandon this trap and find another way,” Loki suggested. Max sighed and stepped forward.

  “Okay, I’m just going to pick one,” he said. “We can’t just stand around here all night.” He tried to reach out with his mind like he did when he was able to connect to the Codex. But if there were any magical clues, he didn’t feel anything, nor could he sense the Codex beyond. Max didn’t want to get smashed or burned alive, and he certainly didn’t want any of his friends to get hurt. But he knew he had to make a choice. He took a deep breath, looked the two identical doors over, and then pointed at the one closest to the smiling dwarf.

  “That one,” Max said, his voice betraying his uncertainty. But before he could take it back or say he wasn’t sure, Ratticus grabbed the handle and pulled the door open. Everyone ducked out of instinct, but instead of instant death they were met with another room, slightly bigger than the one they were in.

  “Max, you did it!” Sarah exclaimed, running over and giving him a hug. Suddenly Max felt better about things.

  “Yeah, I did,” he said.

  Loki let out an audible sigh of relief and Ratticus turned, patting Max on the shoulder. “Well done,” he said.

  The celebration was short-lived.

  The next room was nearly identical to the first, but as they entered they found that they were facing three doors. The angry and happy dwarf carvings were on either wall as before, but now they were joined by a crying dwarf looking down at them from the ceiling. Ratticus closed the door behind them as they stood and took it all in.

  “Oh no . . . not again,” Loki said. “I don’t think I can go through that again.”

  “Dwarfs and their probability locks,” Ratticus said. “You have to hand it to them—our odds have just dropped again.”

  “One in three,” Sarah said, looking at the three doors. “One in three—that’s not very good.”

  “Not at all,” Loki agreed.

  “But now there’s a new face,” Dirk said, looking up at the carving of the crying dwarf on the ceiling. “There’s a system here if we can just figure it out.”

  “I didn’t use a system,” Max said bleakly. “I didn’t even have a magical feeling. I just guessed.”

  “Oh, great,” Loki said, putting his paw to his head. He was starting to regret his decision to leave the Tree of Woe.

  “I like guessing,” Moki added, looking around with a big smile. “Guessing is fun.”

  “We just need to figure this out,” Sarah said, walking around to the various carvings. “There has to be a clue here.”

  “I still think it has to do with their teeth,” Dirk said. “Look, the crying o
ne has a couple of teeth showing.”

  “There’s no way of knowing if it’s about teeth or not,” Max said, growing frustrated.

  “Then why the carvings?” Dirk asked, turning to him. “Decoration? I don’t think so. When you’ve played as many dungeons as I have, you know that things are put places for a reason.”

  “Dirk is probably right,” Loki agreed. “But how long will it take us to figure it out?”

  “We’re running out of time,” Ratticus added.

  “I’m working on it,” Sarah said as she continued studying the room. “We’ll figure it out—we just have to keep working through the possibilities.”

  “Yep, guessing games are fun,” Moki said again.

  Loki was ready to chastise his companion when a thought hit him. He looked at the group moving through the various carvings, examining the floor, or watching for patterns in the lights. There were plenty of clues all around, but Loki wondered if that was part of what made the probability locks so successful—people spent hour upon hour looking for something that wasn’t there. Overthinking it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  “Just pick a door,” Loki said, not really sure how he felt about his own words. “There’s no system to figure out. You simply play the odds.”

  “You know, the cat could be right,” Ratticus agreed. “Beyond this room may be one like it with four doors, and one beyond that with five. How long can one’s luck hold out? The mind is always searching for something other than luck to see it through—a rational system to make sense of. It will see patterns where none exist, and by accepting that pattern and using it to open the logical door, it will ultimately prove false. This vault uses our very minds against us.” Ratticus tapped at the side of his head. “Here is the lock that cannot be picked. This is why nothing has ever been lost from the Dwarven vaults.”