In my experience, transportation spells weren’t painless, but they weren’t spectacular, either. I shrugged. If he said he’d help, then I was happy to let him.
“Thanks,” I said. “We really appreciate it. By the way, everything is delicious. Thanks for inviting us.”
Again Wince paused, as though he expected a stronger reaction.
“You sure you’ve never heard of me?”
Aahz shook his head. “Sorry, but I still can’t place you.”
Wince seemed taken aback by that. He dashed his palm against his forehead.
“Man, just when you think you’ve made it to the top, when you think the world’s your oyster, someone comes along and knocks your feet out from under you. You’ve really never heard my name? Wince?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, no,” Wince said, with his hand to his forehead. “I’ve got to thank you. A humility lesson’s good for you once in a while. No problem.” He pointed at me. “Thanks for trying to make me feel good. I really appreciate that. I’ve got to prove myself. Trust me, all right?”
“Uh, all right,” I said. I exchanged glances with the others. What choice did we have?
I stuck my fork into another piece of meat, and a heart-rending howl rose to the ceiling. I jumped back, my fork clattering to the table. More howls joined the first, and I realized it wasn’t coming from my food. Outside the castle, I could hear baying and shrieking sounds like thousands of damned souls, or a typical day in the Bazaar at Deva.
“Uh, what’s that?” I asked.
Wince smiled and sprang from his seat.
“It’s just the villagers gathering. Come and take a look.”
He strode to a set of iron-bound shutters that were as sturdy as the doors and flung them wide. We followed him and gazed down.
Outside, I saw countless small fires blazing and spitting. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I realized they were all torches being shaken by people milling around in the courtyard. Six-legged animals that resembled Klahdish dogs or wolves prowled among the crowd, snarling. The villagers were chanting furiously. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“What does the mob want?” I asked, horrified. “What are they angry about?”
“Oh, they’re not angry!” Wince laughed. “They’re all here for the spectacle. The torches are an old custom. You wave the fire around to show that you approve of the music. I’ve got the most amazing backup band. You’ll love them. But they’re all here to see me!”
“In my dimension, concerts are usually held in the daytime,” Markie said. “Why wait until after dark?”
“We have a really short day,” Wince explained, “so most of our activity is at night. All the major entertainment comes on after the sun sets. The nightlife here is pretty good. It keeps people’s spirits up, you know? There are some other popular performers, but I think I draw the biggest crowds.”
“You must be some kind of rock star,” Markie said.
I looked around. Apart from the stones that made up the castle walls, I saw no rocks but thought it better not to ask. Wince lowered his eyes modestly.
“I am, in a manner of speaking.”
“So, what kind of ax do you play?” Aahz asked.
Wince smiled. It was a triumphant, yet sad smile. He pointed to the wall.
“Not usually an ax, but a sword. It’s traditional, you know. Still, I don’t like to limit myself. You never learn if you don’t try anything new. My favorite’s the one in the middle.”
We all turned to look. I felt my skin crawl.
I had seen the wall full of weapons while we had been dining, though I had not paid much attention to it. I had been in plenty of castles since I started hanging around with Aahz. The deadly cutlery that most castle dwellers put on display was usually only for show, though there was almost always a piece or two that the lord high master favored as the last line of defense in case of sudden invasion. The rest was almost always dusty and rusted in place. Wince’s collection, on the other hand, seemed to have been well used, and recently. Every piece, and there were hundreds, was sharpened and well oiled.
To either side stood ranks of pole arms, each with a different, deadly-looking head. I had had a number of weapons pointed at me. These looked as though they were meant for more than just skewering an opponent. The six-pronged spiraling monstrosity appeared designed to inflict the maximum amount of pain before it dispatched its victim.
Within the brackets of spears were axes. My father had had a number of different ones on our farm for different purposes, such as cutting wood, butchery, and breaking ice on the pond in the winter. Wince had all those plus a dozen more, ranging from a little hand ax that I’d have used for chopping straw up to a massive curved blade that could have sliced through a rain barrel in one swipe. In between the larger hardware were arrayed steel pincers, wrenches, knives, corkscrews, probes, and all sorts of horrible things I could never imagine anyone making, or using. Some the items had their own power. A knife with a curved blue blade like a wriggling snake leaked magik like a cloth sieve. At the center, the sword that Wince had indicated was long, heavy-bladed, and squared off at the tip, a design I had never seen before. I shuddered.
“That is a lot of heavy metal, my friend,” Aahz said.
“It’s my milieu,” Wince said, with a modest shrug.
The service door creaked open, and an elderly minion with shriveled skin and a painfully misshapen back limped in.
“Tradition,” Aahz said. I was baffled, but then didn’t seem the time to ask what tradition he meant.
The ancient man bowed deeply to Wince.
“The band’s here, Master.”
“Thanks, Needles. Is my stuff on stage yet?”
“It will all be there, Master.”
“Hey, set up five more places near the band, okay? These guys are going to be with us tonight.”
Needles bowed again. “Of course, Master. I will instruct the roadies.”
“Thanks, man.”
Wince clapped his hands together and rubbed the palms vigorously.
“So, enjoying your dinner? The last meal in this dimension is always a feast. You’re going to be part of the show tonight. I thought it was just going to be Isha, but since you showed up, you’re going to be part of the act.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “We’d rather watch.”
“Uh, no,” Wince said. “Really, you have to. No choice. It’s the law.”
I exchanged glances with my fellows. “What part do we play?”
“It’s really easy,” Wince assured me. “Just go with the flow. You’ll figure it out.”
“But what do you do?” Markie asked. “Are you a musician?”
“No, they’re my backup. I’m an executioner,” Wince said.
CHAPTER NINE
“Everybody’s dying to get into show business.”
—THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
“You’re a what?” I asked, disbelieving my own ears. Wince ducked his head modestly.
“Executioner. Famous. Throughout at least eighty dimensions. Hey, Needles, are the others ready?”
The ancient retainer shook his head.
“No, Master. One of them is refusing to eat her dinner.”
Wince waved a dismissive hand.
“Fine. Let her stay one more night. Make her comfortable. We’ve got plenty of victims for tonight.”
On his way out, Needles limped on the other side.
“Victims?” I asked, my voice rising to a squeak.
“You’re a what?” Markie asked.
Wince sighed. “There’s always one who isn’t listening. Executioner.”
“Executioner? But I thought you were going to help us get out of this dimension!”
Our host regarded us with hurt eyes. “I never said
that.”
“But . . .”
Wince looked thoughtful.
“No, I’m pretty sure I never said that. Let me think about it.” He put his chin in his palm and drummed his fingers on his face. “Nope. I’m pretty good at remembering what I say. I said I’d make the experience spectacular. I never said anything about letting you get away. Sorry.”
“But we don’t want to die!” I said.
“Aw, man!” Wince exclaimed. “I thought you guys understood! You asked about my ax and everything! It’s the law!”
“But we didn’t know about your law,” I pointed out. “We were sent here against our will.”
“Everyone who comes here comes against their will,” Wince said. “Like I said, I assist law enforcement. I am the final stop on the justice train. People get sent here all the time for torture and death. Normally I send out the invoice first, but like you heard, I’m short of victims tonight. You guys are a blessing for me. I’ll figure out who to send the bill to later. I hate to disappoint the crowd, and now I know I won’t. Five more subjects will flesh out the show really well. Wow, what a range of techniques I can use tonight! You guys are really helping me out.”
I had dealt with insane logic like his when we faced Isstvan,5 but Wince wasn’t insane. In a literal sense we had broken his country’s laws, even if we could not possibly have known about it. It was within his rights to kill us.
“I am going to tear that blue-robed bimbo into little pieces,” Markie snarled. “We’re leaving!”
She sprang up and whipped her finger around in a circle. An immense whirlwind roared up from the floor. It sucked me into the vortex. The gale whipped me around and around until my stomach rebelled. Lightning crashed near enough to me to singe my eyebrows. I bumped into Gleep and held on to his collar. Markie grabbed for Aahz and Haroon as they swept past her, and pointed her finger at the door. It banged open. We were drawn toward it like water pouring down a drain. I knew she was a powerful magician, but I had never really experienced the full range of her talents. Furniture lifted off the floor and caromed off the walls. Even the gilding started to peel off the ornamental carvings. Stones loosened in the walls. The foundation began to rumble.
With the least possible magik, I tried to protect myself and my dragon so we wouldn’t be torn to pieces. The funnel cloud squeezed us together. Aahz’s scales rasped my face.
Though he was flapping around like a scarecrow caught in a thunderstorm, Wince looked unconcerned. With one hand, he patted the air.
The tornado vanished. I had a split second to realize it and tried to use magik to cushion my fall. Nothing happened. I landed with a thud among my friends. In my mind’s eye I could see that my internal tank was full of magik, but I couldn’t use it. Somehow Wince was suppressing my abilities. From the look on Markie’s face, he had done the same thing to her. We were helpless.
The tables and chairs hovered in midair for a moment, then floated back to their original places. Wince smiled down at us.
“Okay, that was fun, but I’ve got a show to get ready for. Minions!”
He clapped his hands.
* * *
“Try again, kid,” Aahz said. He hung by his wrists from iron manacles attached to the dank, stone dungeon wall. I had been pinioned next to him, both of my arms clamped high over my head inside a single metal ring. Gleep and Haroon were nowhere to be seen. I could hear Markie, but I couldn’t see her. She was yelling her head off in a faraway cell. She didn’t sound as if she were being tortured. She sounded as if she was having a tantrum.
“When I get out of here, I’m going to tear you into little pieces, Wince!” she shrieked. “Your reputation is going to be so pathetic that you won’t be able to deadhead daisies!”
If I could free us, we could go get her and look for the others. I summoned up all the magik I could reach. There was more than plenty at hand. The force lines that ran under the castle felt like raging torrents. Normally, I would have avoided ones that looked like these as I would have a Pervish restaurant, but I had no choice. We didn’t have much time left. Outside the single window of our cell, I could hear hammering and banging, alongside the howls and wails of the crowd.
It was a matter of life and death now. No matter what the overload of magik did to us, it was better than having any of those implements on the great room wall used on us. I concentrated harder than I ever had in my life.
With so much power inside me that I felt my eyeballs must be glowing, I threw the magic into the chains holding us. Burst, I thought at them. Explode. Begone!
In my mind I saw the manacles shattering into tiny pieces. My whole body shook with the force of the explosion.
I opened my eyes. The cell was covered with a fine layer of soot. Aahz glared at me. His clothes, already ruined by the night monsters, hung in tatters. I looked down. Mine were in a similar state of disarray.
“Forget it, partner,” Aahz said. “Stands to reason that if magik is so powerful here, the local fuzz would have stronger countermeasures in place than in other dimensions. We can’t affect any of the local dungeon hardware.”
“What can we do?” I asked.
“Wait until we have a chance to make a break for it,” Aahz said. “Then you transport us back to Winslow.”
“Me?”
Despite my fears, I was stunned. While Aahz had taught me the basics, my skill at moving people between dimensions was not one of my best. I was confident in my ability to travel from a place to which I had been taken by someone else, such as Tananda, or by using Aahz’s D-hopper. Aahz had terrified me against trying it myself on a random basis with a series of stories of what had happened to unwary travelers he had known. The list of dangers involved could have filled a library—a very scary library.
“You’ve always warned me against jumping to or from unfamiliar points,” I said. “I don’t know where we are. With the way the magik behaves here, I could blow us out to the very ends of existence. I could kill us all.”
“Do we have a choice?” Aahz snapped. “It’s either you or him.”
“Get away from me, you has-been!” Markie shrieked. “When I get out of here, I’m going to julienne your insides! I’ll show you torture!”
“Oh, yeah!” Wince’s voice said. “Keep that defiance up. The crowd is absolutely going to love you.”
I gulped.
We heard the creak and slam of a door with a lot of metal on it. Eerie footsteps echoed hollowly on stone. I heard a key rattle in the lock of our door.
“Let me do the talking,” Aahz whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth.
“But . . . !”
“Just zip it!”
I had no idea how or what he wanted me to zip, but I fell silent.
Wince came in and looked us over. His long hair looked wilder than ever. He had donned a long brocade coat with tight-fitting sleeves adorned with bright silver buttons. At the cuffs and throat he wore elaborate lace frills. His boots were polished so brilliantly I could see my own reflection in them. It was not a pretty sight.
“I like the smudges,” he said. “Nice touch! The more miserable you look, the better. The programs are all printed up with your names on them. This is going to be a historical night! You guys ready?”
“You bet,” Aahz said, showing all his teeth in a cringeworthy grin.
Wince smiled encouragingly.
“Remember, let it all out. Don’t keep anything back. I promise I won’t. I’ll give you guys the best sendoff anyone’s ever had!”
“Looking forward to it,” Aahz said.
“You guys are going to be great. Thanks a million!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Aahz said.
As soon as the door shut behind Wince, I could contain myself no longer.
“He’s insane!” I said. “He’s completely crazy! We’re going to die!”
“Kid . . .”
“How could we have fallen into a trap like that? He’s going to kill us! He’ll tear us apart!”
“Kid . . .”
“Stop calling me kid! If I’m going to die, I want to be called by my name!”
Aahz shook his head.
“All right, Skeeve. You can stop worrying. The guy’s not going to kill us.”
I yanked at the ring holding my wrists in place, throwing all the magik I could at it. I succeeded only in singeing the hair off my arms. I glared at Aahz.
“You could have fooled me! Talking about sending us off as if he’s waving us good-bye on a trip? What about all those torture devices?”
“For show,” Aahz said, confidently. “You start to believe it, then you’re as crazy as he is. Just play along. I’ll win over the crowd, and we’ll get out of here. You concentrate on getting us back to a dimension we know. It’ll be no problem.”
I stopped pulling at my bruised wrists.
“No problem? How could it be no problem?”
Aahz hung in his chains as nonchalantly as anyone could in that position.
“Trust me. You’ll see.”
CHAPTER TEN
“If the entire city had not turned out, I would gladly have passed on the honor.”
—LOUIS XVI OF FRANCE
I did not share Aahz’s confidence. Within the hour, a troop of Wince’s guards came in and unlocked us from the wall but left the chains weighing us down at neck, wrists, and ankles. Just to add to our state of wretchedness, a female with ink-stained eye sockets came in with a bucket and sloshed mud all over us. The guards pointed their spears at us and prodded us out the door. Squelching in my damp boots, I felt every bit the condemned man walking out to his doom.
Aahz, on the other hand, was as relaxed as though he were going to a dinner in his honor. We were led out of the dungeon and along a gravel path into an enormous torchlit arena lined with tiered seats filled with people and animals, all with gleaming silver eyes. Aahz loped behind our guards, waving and smiling to the crowd.
Robert Asprin's Myth-Fits Page 7