I put the croissant next to the scone. “He said to hold tight,” I said. “He’s going to go off and organize an escape but it might take some time.”
“Oh, cool!”
“He also said it’s very important that we all be absolutely silent for a while. It’s because of . . . reconnaissance or something.”
“He can count on me!”
Having ensured that Meryl wouldn’t distract me for a while, I folded my arms and waited for the cries of pursuing guardsmen to fade away. Then I lay back, closed my eyes again, clamped my arms around my head and visualized a badger until I could almost taste it.
onder: oh fu
My cell door clanged open. A stout figure seized me by the legs and threw me over his shoulder, knocking the wind from me before I could say “waagh” or “ow” or “what the bloody hell are you doing.” I spent a few confused minutes staring down my captor’s back at the dungeon floor as I was carried through the tunnels, then a threadbare carpet came into view and I was dumped onto a squat three-legged stool.
The room I’d been transported to looked like a warden’s office. It had apparently been in a state of advanced disuse for some time, but had recently been recommissioned. An ornate antique desk was lying pushed up against a wall with the legs broken off, while a much more modern replacement took pride of place in the middle of the floor.
Behind it sat Mr. Wonderful. He seemed right at home, resting his feet on the desk and testing the point of his knife with a fingertip. Bowg, for it was he who had carried me from the cell, took up his usual position nearby.
Mr. Wonderful was holding a small thesaurus open on a marked page. “Settled in yet, my . . . my . . . embryonic troublemaker? Enjoying the cell?”
“Yes, it’s nice, thank you.”
“Really.” He sucked a bead of blood from his finger. “So what if I said we might have found a use for you, hm? Something that might involve getting out into the open again? Would that not interest you?”
“Um. No. Not really.”
Mr. Wonderful froze, smiling thinly. Then in two sudden movements he slapped his hand on the desktop and cleanly severed it at the wrist. “WELL THEN, TOUGH TITTIES!” he screamed, squirting blood directly into my face, before calming down and daintily wiping his gushing stump with a small hanky. “I’ve still got a very lovely plot in my herb garden I’ve got in mind for you.”
I closed my eyes for a few seconds until I could be ready to face the universe again. “What do you want from me?”
“See, now that’s the kind of attitude we like to see. Some nice clever knuckling under. You have to really work at a fellow’s knackers to make him knuckle under these days.”
“It has been observed that you are associating with a renegade who operates under the moniker Slippery John,” said Bowg.
“Er, yeah,” I said uneasily. “We’ve crossed paths.”
“It is also known to us that the individual who calls himself Slippery John is operating on behalf of a clandestine organization officially referred to by our intelligence as the Magic Resistance and known colloquially as the Suicide Squad.”
For a few precious moments in the dungeon it had seemed like things were looking up, but now events were trickling back down towards uncertain and uncomfortable territory. “Yeah, he, er . . . mentioned something about that.”
“Our lug-holes have also picked up some mutterings on the grapevine about those jerks being very keen to get their hands on some pre-Infusion post-alive carcasses that were stirring up trouble in Garethy,” said Mr. Wonderful, dreamily poking his exposed ulna with the tip of a knife and watching the pool of blood expand across the tabletop. “And sorry if I’m flying high above the mark here, but your accent struck me as rustic enough to fit the metaphorical bill.”
“Look, I don’t know anything about them,” I said, unable to look away from his mutilated wrist. “I’m not bothered about finding them anymore. I just want to stay in the cell.”
“Oh, but I think there is something you . . . want . . .,” said Mr. Wonderful. He was swaying and getting rather pale, probably from the blood still streaming gaily from his wrist. “You want to die. You were . . . lucky enough to be killed before the Infusion hit and now you think you deserve your good . . . fortune back. Don’t give me that look. We . . . make it our business . . . to know things about people, my . . . little . . . something that’s not really leaping to mind right now . . .”
“Can you kill me for good?” I asked, probably too quickly.
“Total existence suspension has been successfully executed only by U.A.L.B.s in the period following the Infusion,” said Bowg.
“You eh what?” I asked.
“Unidentified Angel-Like Beings.”
“Oh right. Those.”
“But, but, but,” said Mr. Wonderful, now unable to lift his head from the desk. “Squadicide Sue are doing some . . . stuff . . . interesting stuff . . . probably not far from a throughbreak with all that . . . dying . . . thing . . . gloshdy blergh.” Then he collapsed off his chair and disappeared behind the desk.
“The Magic Resistance have been closely researching the Infusion phenomenon and are rumored to be making progress in discovering a means to remove its effect from the world,” said Bowg, taking over Mr. Wonderful’s seat. “Their information will lead you closer to your goal. In return for your release and the non-infliction of bodily mutilation you will re-establish
contact with Slippery John, earn the trust of the Magic Resistance leaders, then supply us with their identities and location.”
“You want to stop the Resistance,” I translated aloud.
He didn’t give a straight answer. “Circumstances deriving from the Infusion have created harmonious conditions for the Adventurer’s Guild’s growth. Our desire is for these circumstances to remain, enabling us to continue offering services for the wellbeing of our clients and customers.”
Talking to Bowg was like talking to a garden gnome with slightly less personality, but I felt much less intimidated with Mr. Wonderful gone. “You’re afraid that the Magic Resistance are going to find a way to restart entropy, and if they do that, demand for adventurers and quests will go through the floor. You know, I’ve only met one other person who thinks the Infusion was a good thing, and he was an insane vicar with Deleters instead of a brain.”
I heard the sound of running feet coming down the hall towards us, then the door flew open and the latest incarnation of Mr. Wonderful entered, wearing a white bathrobe and heaving air in and out of his lungs like an old bellows. “Must be nice living in a palace,” he announced, catching his breath. “Having your very own chapel on site. I miss anything fun?”
“The prisoner has been informed of the task we have in mind for him and our reasons for assigning same,” said Bowg. “He has been analyzing our motives in a tone I would describe as unsympathetic.”
Mr. Wonderful fixed me with a hateful glare for a second before it shifted back to his maniacal grin. “You know what? I can relate.” He ousted Bowg from his chair and recovered his knife, experimentally twirling it around his freshly-restored fingers. “You’d have to be some kind of frothing lunatic not to want the Infusion to go away. Ooh, my old body’s still here. Anyone else hungry?”
“I . . . don’t eat.”
“Really? But you look so well-nourished.” He worked away with his knife for a second before tearing the stiffening left forearm off his old body. “Now, I’d love for murder to go back to having the same impact it used to have, but I’m the kind of psychopath who understands the importance of loyalty.” He took a bite out of the bicep and resumed talking with his mouth full, blood running from between his teeth. “So basically you’re gonna do what the Adventurer’s Guild want you to do or we’re going to cut you into thin slices, wrap you around pickles and sell you at a delicatessen counter. Fair?”
“W—”
“No, not fair at all. Of course it isn’t. Don’t know why I even phrased it as a question, really.
” He sucked some unmentionable stains from his fingertips. “Carry that with you at all times. Try to lose it and we’ll track you down, stuff it down your gob and sew your lips shut.”
It was a lump of amber containing half a Reetle, a magical regenerating insect. I’d learned about them in mage school. They were used as tracking devices, because one half of it would always indicate towards the other in a fruitless quest to reconnect. It was probably cruel, but Mr. Wonderful—still busily consuming his own limb—clearly didn’t let that bother him.
“You will be returned to your cell,” said Bowg. “Shortly a guard will hang the key loosely on their belt and feign sleep just outside the door. Escape and re-establish contact with Slippery John. Your progress will be monitored.”
Bowg spent most of his time standing perfectly still, but when called to action, he tended to execute several movements in extremely quick succession, as if he’d been queueing them up. Now, he threw me over his shoulder again and strode out of the room. Mr. Wonderful waved the severed arm and grinned madly. “BYEEEE!!”
Once he’d hurled me back into my cell and slammed the door, Bowg took up a carefully-calculated position where he could be seen from both Meryl and Thaddeus’s cells. “My goodness me,” he said loudly in his usual monotone. “You certainly are a tough nut to crack. I’ve never seen a prisoner undergo such horrific torment and not reveal a single thing. I am bowled over with newfound respect.” Then he marched stiffly away.
A few moments later an extremely fat and inept-looking guard lumbered into view, carefully set up a little stool on the ledge outside my cell, sat himself down, and began making loud, exaggerated snoring noises.
“Keys,” I reminded.
He got halfway through a swear word before stopping himself. He brushed his belt a few times, pretending to be dusting himself off, until a ring with three large keys slid down to jangle freely from a hook on his belt. Obviously you can’t buy belts with hooks on, so he’d just stuck a cheap coat hook on with some masking tape.
I leaned on the bars, drumming my fingertips, watching his belly rise and fall with “sleep.” Making any kind of agreement with Mr. Wonderful would be a bad idea of legendary proportions. Someone like him couldn’t possibly be trusted to keep his word. He apparently couldn’t be trusted to walk across a room without getting blood all over the carpet.
Plus, it would be wrong.
I froze. That had been an odd thought for me. It sounded more like something Meryl might say, and that’s why it was rather disturbing to find in my head.
No, I was fooling myself if I thought I had a choice. The only alternative was the herb garden: spending half the time being crammed speck by speck through tiny roots and the rest being farted out into the soil. Blind, deaf, conscious and excruciatingly bored for the rest of eternity.
I sighed. “Don’t bother,” I said to the guard. “I’m okay for keys. You like scones?”
—
“I really can’t get over how easy escaping from that dungeon was,” said Meryl, once we were back in the daylight. The sewage tunnels had opened out into a pathetic excuse for a public garden somewhere in the scummy side of town, the kind of area where the upper class have been shitting on everyone for so long that a little more couldn’t hurt.
“Personally, I’m just glad to be out of there,” I said. “Did Slippery John mention an address we could find him at?”
“Seriously, they must have really poor standards for guards in this part of the world,” she continued. “That fat one outside your cell just kept sleeping while you were letting us out. And you were slamming the doors really loud.”
“It’s all this big city living, probably. Makes you tired. Let’s . . .”
“Actually, I’m wondering if we shouldn’t go back and tell someone.” She took an uncertain look back at the tunnel entrance we had emerged from. “I’m starting to think he might have had a heart attack or something.”
“No, really, it’s fine. I saw him wake up just before we left.”
“Oh. Okay. Actually, come to think of it, all those unlocked doors were a bit weird, too . . .”
“Our quest is watched over by a higher power,” said Thaddeus, who was just behind us. “Through me, the guidance of Heaven steers your rank and unworthy feet.”
I glanced at him for a second, then extended a hand and muttered a few words. He transformed into a grim-faced rabbit with a sternly twitching nose.
“What did you do that for?” said Meryl.
“As a witty conversational counterpoint. And to cheer myself up. I keep forgetting I have this spell.”
Rabbit-eus bared his teeth, then ballooned madly, stretching back out into human form. “Make your merriment while you can, vile member of Azazel. The laughter will be mine when you toss forever in his flaming sink trap.”
“Why the hell did I let you out?”
“Because it was the right thing to do,” said Meryl firmly.
I stopped and hung my head, exasperated. “Please don’t start that shit. We’ve been over this.”
“Now, come on, even you have to admit that risking everything to bravely escape from unjust imprisonment, spring your friends, and fight your way out of the dungeon is pretty traditionally heroic course of action.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘fighting our way out.’”
“Well, even so, going through a few doors someone left unlocked and crawling out through an unguarded sewer tunnel still isn’t completely outside of hero town.”
“Meryl, for god’s sake. I’m not a hero. I just want to go to sleep.”
“You’re going to keep saying that, and you’re going to keep saying that to the Magic Resistance when we find them, and you’re going to keep saying it all the way through finding the Deleters and removing the Infusion and saving the world, and maybe then you’ll realize how wrong you were all along.”
I imagined myself shaking hands with Mr. Wonderful as a Deleter beam slowly evaporated everything that was me from the feet up. I saw a fifty-foot Mr. Wonderful hand-in-hand with Deleters skipping gaily across the land, spreading misery and despair among the immortal populace, trapped forever in unchanging bodies and centuries of permanent slavery to a corrupt, omnipotent Guild. I saw them curse my name between every heaving wail and sob as the betrayer who destroyed mankind’s only chance of escape from the insidious power of an otherworldly evil.
“Oh, fine,” I said. “I suppose I must be the hero, then.”
SIX
We made our way further into the slums of Lolede City. It really was a wretched district. The streets were painfully narrow. If a carriage were passing through here, its windows would be pressed right up against the houses—not that anyone rich enough to hire a carriage would be interested in such a grim sightseeing tour of society’s bottom rung. Thaddeus hung back a few feet behind us, distributing from his limitless supply of pamphlets.
We turned a corner and found ourselves in what I’m fairly certain was the red light district. It had the usual hallmarks; painted women in impractical stockings, furtive-looking gentlemen pretending to ask them for directions, and a curiously large number of discreet alleyways and “massage parlors.”
“This seems like a good place to start looking for Slippery John,” I thought aloud.
Corpses were everywhere, but no-one seemed to be bothered by it. The living simply picked their way around the stiffening bodies. A converted garbage cart was making its way slowly down the street while two men in flat caps loaded the corpses onto it. A sign on the cart read Omalley’s Dog Food. Ahead of them, a handful of recent resurrectees wearing the standard church-issued white bathrobes were hunting through the piles, trying to recover clothing and possessions from their former selves before they became the property of Mr. Omalley.
We passed through a pedestrian precinct, where my attention was drawn to a trough in the middle of the footpath. It had probably once contained plants, but they had been torn out and replaced with a bed of bloodstained three-f
oot spikes. I was puzzling over this choice of landscaping when I heard a scream of defiance from overhead and a woman in casual office attire flung herself from a rooftop, somersaulted several times in the air, then landed heavily on the points with an effect not unlike a generously-filled jam sandwich being stamped on. Meryl broke into spontaneous applause, which earned her a few dirty looks.
“Funny how we never saw this sort of thing back in Garethy,” she said, watching a man slumped against a wall attempting to strangle himself.
“I suppose Garethy wasn’t that big on creative thinkers,” I theorized aloud.
We passed by a large brick wall that was part of the local jailhouse. The authorities had put up a large instructional poster depicting a wholesome-looking woman with a finger to her chin and a noose around her neck, beside the words Be responsible with your deaths! Don't let suicide addiction become your life! Once they’d put that up, though, the local residents had taken it as an invitation. Most of the details were covered by smaller, more lurid posters advertising a variety of services. BORED HOUSEWIFE FOR BLEEDOUTS AND DECAPITATION. HOT HOT CANNIBALISM. ACID BURNS FOR DISCERNING GENTLEMEN. Each one had an address underneath, followed by the address of the nearest church.
I was taking a closer look at a particularly colorful advertisement that asked me rhetorically if I’d ever tried lead poisoning when Slippery John turned up. I spotted him out of the corner of my eye as he darted stealthily up the pavement towards us, his black outfit providing no camouflage whatsoever in the daytime sun. He was diving from cover to cover, repeatedly glancing back the way he’d come. I watched him roll back and forth between a postbox and a pile of corpses a few times before I lost patience and walked up to him.
“Hi.”
“WAAAGH!” he cried, startled, before flattening his hands and pretending that his terrified jump had been some kind of martial arts move. “Shouldn’t sneak up on a master rogue like that, dead man! It’s a good way to do yourself an injury!”
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