by Robert Bevan
“I have eyes again,” said Basil. His voice was deep and slow. “I'm hungry.”
“I know,” said Katherine. “I'm going to get you some more rat. But first we have to get out of here. I need you to close your eyes. Can you do that for me?”
“I use those for see. Long time have no eyes. Can't see. Not fun.”
“Your eyes turn people to stone.”
“I'm cold.”
“Basil! I need you to focus. Can you close your –”
“This place no good.”
The sound of crashing ice echoed in the room.
Two questions occurred to Katherine simultaneously. Had the Ice Queen's curse been broken? Had Denise considered that before feeding Basil the Potion of Regeneration?
The first question was easy enough to answer. Katherine let go of Randy's head with her right hand and gripped one of the icicle bars at its thinnest point. It was slippery and wet to the touch. She gave it a good hard yank, and a chunk of it snapped off in her hand.
Randy gasped. “Wha... What happened?”
Time would be running out on Katherine's Speak With Animals spell. She could explain what still needed explaining after she got as much as she could out of Basil.
“Can you break the other ice walls?”
“What's that weird sound you keep making?” asked Randy. “You almost sound like...” The confusion on his face loosened up like an unknotted string of Christmas lights. “Basil?”
“Yaya?” said Basil. Katherine guessed that Yaya was the name Basil had given to Randy. The next sound she heard was his normal reptilian groan. The spell had timed out.
“Keep talking, Randy,” said Katherine. “But don't look at him. Denise grew his eyes back. See if you can get him to break down these ice walls.”
“Basil! It's me, Randy! Come on over here, buddy.”
Katherine could see the rough form of the basilisk through the translucent ice wall well enough to make out that his head was near Randy's window, so she could take a safe peek through her own.
Just as she'd suspected, the Ice Queen was now a statue, her arms raised too late to cover her face, which betrayed the last feelings she would ever have. A cocktail of anger, confusion, and terror.
The only part of her that wasn't gray stone was the gem at the end of her scepter, which still glowed dull and blue, its own magic too powerful to be affected by simple basilisk eye magic.
Basil groaned loudly as he reared up on his four hind legs and lay into Randy's ice wall with his four forelegs. The wall was sturdy, but that was a hell of a lot of lizard. It only took a few pushes and stomps before Basil smashed through the wall.
Katherine dropped to her knees, wrapped her arm around Butterbean, and covered both of their eyes.
“Fuuuuuuuuck!” said Denise from outside the cell room. Basil must have broken the bars of her cell as well as his own. Was she deserting them? “It's slippery as shit 'round here now. Randy, wrap these over Basil's eyes and tie 'em off at the bottom.”
“Ow,” said Randy as whatever Denise had thrown hit him. His eyes would also be closed. “Is this what it feels like? Denise, where did you get these?”
“I found them in another room. The Ice Queen had all Katherine's shit from the Bag of Holding spread out on a table. Looks like she's profiling a serial killer or something.”
“That is such an invasion of my privacy,” said Katherine. “And it's not like it paints an accurate picture of who I am. It's not like I collect dehydrated giant rat corpses as a hobby. Most of the stuff in there is –”
A distant crash and a closer series of loud cracks brought Katherine's attention back to more immediate concerns.
“Hey, remember how big and impressive this ice palace looked when we saw it from outside?”
“Yeah,” said Denise. A hint of worry in her voice suggested she had some idea of where Katherine was going with this.
“The Ice Queen's magic is gone. We're inside a giant structure of regular-ass ice that's melting in the heat of the tropical sun. All of it is going to come crashing down on our heads at any moment. We need to get out of here. Now.”
“How's that blindfold comin' along, Randy?”
“Al...most...there... Got it! Sorry, Basil. This is only temporary until we can figure something else out. Y'all can open your eyes now.”
Katherine opened her eyes and saw what looked like her own legs and ass straddling Basil's face. “My jeans?” She frowned at Denise. “Do you know how hard those are to come by around here?”
Randy tried to turn Basil around, but the melting floor was crazy slippery now. Basil's eight legs were slipping out from under him in every direction.
Katherine wrapped her hand around the Ice Queen's scepter and gave it a yank. The elaborate design was no doubt better suited to metal than stone and snapped off easily.
“You guys figure out how to get him going,” she said to Denise and Randy as she admired the glowing gem atop the broken scepter. “I'm going to go grab the rest of our shit.”
Denise pointed out the door to the hallway leading right. “Second doorway on the left.”
Katherine and Butterbean slipped and slid out the doorway, bouncing from wall to wall as they made their way to the second doorway on the left.
As promised, there was all of her shit laid out on a large ice table. Like most of the furniture in this place, and much of the place itself, it appeared to have been designed with invulnerability in mind. The massive slab of ice making up the top looked really heavy for the relatively delicate legs holding it up.
Katherine only needed it to hold together long enough for her to collect her belongings and get out of there. Spreading her arms out wide to keep her balance, she shuffled carefully toward the table an inch at a time until she reached the Bag of Holding. The Eye of Rasha was indeed a beautiful thing to behold, but she felt great relief shoving it into the bag and out of her sight.
Prioritizing items by proximity rather than usefulness, she scooped as much into the bag as she could reach, including a permanently enchanted Light stone, two dead dire rats, and some clothes. Her next priority was her scythe on the far end of the table. She shuffled sideways until it was within reach, guided it handle-first into the bag, then started loading up the shit nearest it.
“Okay, Butterbean,” she said when she'd finished shoving everything she could reach into her bag. “We probably shouldn't press our luck anymore than we – Butterbean, NO!”
Butterbean whined at her, no doubt wondering why he was being reprimanded for simply taking a piss.
It was too late. With the structural integrity of the table leg compromised by hot and steamy wolf piss, the corner of the massive ice slab crashed down hard on the floor. Fortunately, Katherine was able to get her toes out of the way by the time the other three legs buckled and shattered.
Just when she thought she could afford a sigh of relief, she saw and heard the expanding crack in the floor caused by that first table corner dropping. A sudden realization occurred to her. They were on the second floor.
“I'm really angry!” Denise called from down the hall.
Shit!
A crazed roided-out barbarian was the last thing this situation needed. Every square inch of ice making up these walls was keeping the entire palace from crashing down on them. They needed to move as calmly and delicately as they could toward the exit, praying that they made it out before –
CRAAAAAAAACK!
The break in the floor splintered out like bolts of lightning, the gap near the fallen table widening so much that Katherine could see the foyer below them. She grabbed Butterbean and rolled onto the table slab. If they were going through the floor, she wanted to be sure they weren't crushed under it. Three seconds later, after a deafening crash, she and Butterbean were sitting a good fifteen feet below where they had just been. The table slab fell unevenly, absorbing some of the impact as each of its corners hit the floor beneath them. Except for a cold, wet, and sore ass, Katherine ass
essed that she and Butterbean were no worse for the wear.
Katherine looked up and saw that the rooms on the other side of the hallway hadn't yet collapsed. She tried to figure out which one of the doorways was the entrance to their cell room. The question was answered when Basil crashed sideways into the doorway.
“One more time,” said Randy from further inside. “We just need to aim a little straighter, and keep his head pointed at the –”
CRAAAAAAAACK!
The floor had suffered all of their hillbilly antics it could stand. It spiderwebbed with cracks, then shattered into a bazillion sparkling fragments and dumping Randy, Denise, Basil, Gabrok's one-armed and probably dead body, and the gray stone likeness of the former Ice Queen of the Damned onto the ground floor. The brittle stone smashed hard on the floor, exploding into a cloud of dust and collapsing into a pile of semi-recognizable chunks.
“Is everybody okay?” asked Randy.
Basil groaned, but didn't appear to be harmed.
Denise, now out of her Barbarian Rage, stood up and rubbed her ass. “Goddamn, that hurt. I feel like I just got jumped by a pack of Randys.
As if to remind them of the danger they were still in, a microwave-sized block of ice crashed through the ceiling about fifty feet away and sent cracks radiating out on the floor.
Katherine looked around. Water was dripping and flowing from cracks and holes in the ceiling and down the walls.
“We've got to get out of here. The whole palace is going to come down any second.”
She squinted through the falling debris. The grand entrance was only about fifty yards away, which would have been an easy sprint if the floor weren't so slippery.
“How we gonna get Basil out?” asked Randy. “He's used to walkin' on sand. He can barely stand up on all this ice.”
Given more time, Katherine was sure she could have come up with a less terrible and disrespectful solution to their problem than the one lying at her feet, but time wasn't currently a luxury she had.
She picked up the Ice Queen's head and looked her in her cold stone eyes. “I'm really sorry about this.” She hurled the head as hard as she could toward the entrance. It landed about halfway and smashed into dust.
“I don't reckon she's gonna get any more deader,” said Denise.
Katherine picked up the most throwable chunks of stone she could find and threw them so they formed a path of gritty stone dust footholds that they could push off from.
Digging her feet in hard on the dust of the initial impact, Katherine grabbed Basil by the tail and started pulling. The big bastard actually moved.
Randy and Denise took the hint and followed her example. They weren't moving as fast as Katherine wanted as more and larger chunks of ice came crashing down around them more frequently, but they were moving.
As they got into a rhythm, they picked up a little speed. By the time they reached the halfway point, Katherine thought they might be able to slide the rest of the way out with one final push off the Ice Queen's powdered head.
She was wrong. They only managed to slide another ten yards before coming to a stop with nothing around them but smooth flat slipperiness.
“Welp,” said Denise. “We done the best we could. Thanks for breakin' us out, Basil. You done good.”
Randy gawped at the suggestion. “I can't just leave him here to die. Not when we're so close.”
“I'm sorry, Randy,” said Katherine. “I don't think we have a –”
“MY QUEEN!” cried a gruff voice from behind them. “You killed my queen!”
Katherine rolled her eyes. Like she didn't have enough shit to deal with right now. She turned back and was surprised to see Gabrok staggering toward them. He was pale and leaving a crimson trail of blood in his wake as it continued to drip from the gaping hole in his shoulder where his arm used to be attached. Even more surprising was the fact that he still had enough blood in his body to maintain his erection.
“Goddamn!” said Denise. “That's some kind of dedication. Was you a virgin before today?”
Gabrok glared and pointed at Denise. “You are to be my bride. The Ice Queen promised you to me!”
“That's not how relationships work,” said Randy. “Denise ain't the Ice Queen's property to give away. You can't just lay claim to a woman and expect –”
“Holy shit, a yeti!” Denise pointed past Randy.
Katherine, Randy, and Butterbean whirled around. The southern wall of the grand foyer was conspicuously lacking in yetis. When they turned back to face Denise, they found her pulling Katherine's jeans back down over Basil's right eye. Gabrok was now an angry one-armed statue.
“Sorry 'bout that, Gabby. I kinda hoped we could finish what we started.” She wrapped her hand around Gabrok's stone dick and snapped it off. “Come to think of it, maybe we can.” She grinned up at Katherine and Randy as if holding the petrified dick of a dwarf she'd just murdered was the most natural thing in the world. “I found some more stone.”
Randy's paladin code might have caused a problem if Denise hadn't pulled the yeti trick, but he didn't make any objections to making use of Gabrok's body now that the deed had been done. They made it the rest of the way out of the collapsing palace on the dead dwarf's smashed and gritty remains.
Katherine was surprised she could actually feel the sun's warmth. She thought this might be a neat place to visit in a month or two once all the ice was gone and the indigenous vegetation had a chance to reclaim the island.
The natural terrain provided more traction, and they didn't have any trouble moving again until they arrived at the ice sheet beyond the beach. Fortunately, the beach had more than enough sand to make a path back to the boat, and Katherine had a Bag of Holding to carry it in.
They got their rhythm going again, and it wasn't long before Katherine began to feel uncomfortably warm under her thick cloak.
“The hell we s'posed to do once we get to the ship?” asked Denise, waddling alongside Basil to keep him facing the right direction.
“I've got a spell I think I can fix the ship with,” said Katherine. “But we need to get there before the ice that's holding it up melts.”
“That's all well and good. But I wonder if it might be wiser to stay on the island, where we might be able to find food and shelter, than it is to make for a broken ship don't none of us know how to sail.”
Katherine had come to this island with a specific purpose. She'd die trying to swim back to Cardinia before she spent the rest of her life stranded on an island with Randy and Denise. But fortunately, she didn't have to tell them that.
“Don't even worry about it. I know how to sail now.”
“Since when?” said Randy.
“I don't know. After the Ice Queen turned to stone, I just sort of figured it out.” Katherine scanned the shimmering horizon and found the dark spot she'd been looking for. “There it is!” She allowed herself a sigh of relief. With the tropical heat and the warm seawater eating away at the ice, she wasn't sure they were going to make it in time.
“The fuck you mean you know how to sail now?” said Denise. “It ain't like one of them Soduki puzzles where the right answer can just pop into your head. Sailing is a skill set learned over a period of time through hands-on –”
CRAAAAAAAACK!
“Oh shit.”
Katherine stopped dead in her tracks. The crack in the ice wasn't visible through the slushy top layer, but she'd felt the ice shift below her feet when she heard the ice break. They had passed the point where the ice remained thick enough to hold them up safely, and that point would be moving faster and faster back toward the island as the ice continued to melt.
Even worse, the cracking sound wasn't isolated to where they were standing. Katherine could hear it off in the distance, coming from the direction where her ship was now sinking into the water again.
“You guys stay here,” she said to Randy and Denise. “I've got to go save the ship. Whatever you do, don't m–”
CRAAAAAAAA
CK!
“WRAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Basil groaned as the ice gave out from under him.
Randy dropped to his knees on the edge of the fractured ice sheet, desperately trying to grab hold of Basil's thick scaly skin.
“Don't worry, buddy. I ain't gonna let go. You hang in there. Randy's here.”
Katherine tried to think up another miracle she could pull out of her ass, but poor Basil was just too big for her to make use of her Portable Hole or Bag of Holding. She couldn't waste anymore time thinking about it, or they'd lose both Basil and the ship.
“I'm sorry, Randy.” She looked at Denise. “Don't let Randy die too.”
Denise nodded solemnly, then grabbed Randy in a choke hold.
“Basil!” Randy croaked through his squeezed trachea as Denise pulled him back away from the edge.
“YAAAYAAA!” groaned Basil just before his head disappeared under the water.
Katherine turned and ran for Nightwind. The sinking ship was certainly a factor in her haste, but so was the fact that she didn't want to be seen with tears running down her cheeks for this moron and his pet lizard.
Butterbean ran alongside her, and she shuddered to think about the same thing happening to him.
Poor Randy. But really, there was nothing I could have done.
Every footfall brought forth bigger and bigger splashes of watery slush, and Katherine knew that it wasn't going to be long before one of her feet went straight through the ice. She wasn't going to make it to the boat on foot, so she took off her cloak, shoved it into the Bag of Holding, and braced herself for another cold swim.
“Stay, Butterbean!” she said as she ran.
Butterbean moaned an objection.
“I'll be right back. I promise.” She felt bad for having to take a harsh tone with him, but she needed him to know it wasn't up for debate. “Now STAY!”
Butterbean moaned again, but it grew distant as she kept running and he obediently stayed put.
Nightwind was in some serious trouble. The rear end was only a couple of inches above the water. If it went under, there wouldn't be anything she could do.