by Robert Bevan
“The bard? I don't remember. Wasn't it something like Steve?”
“Yeah, I think it was Steve. Do you think it's possible that they could have survived that fall?”
Stacy shrugged. “Anything's possible. We survived.”
“We survived because you built a hang glider with bamboo, bedsheets, and your extremely high Intelligence score. They didn't have any of those things.”
“Cooper's tough as shit, though. Physics is kind of wonky in this world. Maybe he had enough Hit Points to survive the fall.” Stacy frowned. “That being the case, I wouldn't hold out much hope for Steve.” Her growling stomach reminded her that there was probably food at the Whore's Head. “No point in all this speculation. Let's go and find out.”
They guided their horses as fast as safety and courtesy on the busy Cardinian streets would allow, which wasn't very fast at all. They probably could have made better time walking.
The Whore's Head Inn was barely in view when Stacy spotted Ravenus diving down at them like a black feathery Tomahawk missile.
“JUUUULIAAAAAN!”
Stacy wiped a tear away from her right eye. The reunion was as touching as a man hugging a bird could be.
“I didn't think I'd ever see you again,” said Julian. “You wouldn't believe what we've been through since we got separated.”
“Ha!” squawked Ravenus. “You think you've been through some strange and unpleasant circumstances. Just wait until I tell you about our little adventure.”
“Our? Does that mean that Cooper and Steve are alive?”
“Steve, sir?”
“Holy fucking shit!” said Cooper, stepping out the Whore's Head entrance.
Stacy screamed and clapped her hands. “Cooper!” She ran up to give him a big hug, then slowed down once the smell hit her and raised her hand for a high-five. When she got a few feet closer, she settled for a wave. “Hey!” Then she waved at Steve, who'd just come out to join Cooper. “Hey, Steve!”
Steve frowned. “It's Chaz.”
“Oh, that's right. Sorry.”
“I'm glad you guys made it back,” said Cooper. “I thought you might still be on the Crescent Shadow. I was about to start heading back that way to look for you.”
“I think we would have been long dead by now if we were still in those cages,” said Julian. “But thanks for the thought.”
Cooper and Chaz stood aside to let them inside. There weren't as many people around as there were last time Stacy had been in there. The ones she knew by name, Frank, Rhonda, and Tony the Elf, nodded at her and Julian over their drinks. Stacy hadn't been expecting a ticker tape parade, but she was once again disappointed at the amount of enthusiasm her arrival provoked from these people.
“I knew you'd gotten out of the cages,” said Cooper. “I figured if Dave could get out, the rest of you surely could.”
Stacy stopped thinking about food for a second. “Dave? What do you know about Dave?”
Cooper pointed his thumb back toward the group at the bar. “Frank said Dave was here about a week ago.”
“A week?” said Julian. “How could Dave have gotten here before we did? Dave never gets anywhere first.”
“Dave has undergone some changes recently,” said Frank. His tone suggested he was even less excited about Dave's arrival than he was about theirs. “I don't expect he'll be returning here anytime soon.”
Julian put his hand over Ravenus, who was tucked into his serape. “What are you talking about? What happened to Dave?”
“He's a wererat. He arrived here with some old wizard, lost control of himself under the full moon, and ripped the poor old bastard's throat out.”
Stacy gasped. This was all sounding too familiar. The last time she'd come here, she'd arrived with Julian, who had recently reunited with Ravenus. She'd been greeted coldly by people who'd witnessed one of their own commit a murder. Were the similarities even more specific?
“The old wizard he killed. Was it a Mordred?”
Frank shrugged. “I don't think so. At least, that's not how he introduced himself.” He glanced at Rhonda and Tony the Elf, who shrugged and nodded in response. “But speaking of Mordred, we may have captured another one.”
“We brought him back,” said Cooper. “It's totally him.”
“Are you serious?” said Julian. “Did he identify himself?”
Frank swallowed back some beer, still not looking nearly as enthusiastic as he should with that kind of news. “He seems like the real deal. But there's no point in getting all worked up about it. Until we have one of those dice, he's just a liability in a coma tied to a chair in the cellar with a bag of shit over his head.”
Stacy and Julian looked at each other. Stacy was curious about the bag of shit thing, but felt it could wait until after she revealed her own bit of news. She pulled the chain out of her pocket and let the die hang below her hand.
“Cheer up, Frank. We didn't come back empty-handed either.”
She could practically read the thoughts going through his head by the changing expressions on his face.
What the fuck do I care about some souvenir trash piece of jewelry.
Then again, I'm curious if it has any magical properties.
Holy fucking shit! Is that one of the dice?
The last stage was punctuated with a spray of beer from Frank's mouth.
“I can't believe it,” said Rhonda. “Where did you... How did you...?”
Stacy brushed her fingernails on the front of her tight leather top as she approached the bar. “A little bit of detective work, a little bit of asskicking, and a pinch of seduction.”
Julian cleared his throat. “I seem to recall there being some teamwork involved.”
Tony the Elf reached out tentatively for the die.
“Please,” said Stacy, thrusting the chain into his hand. “You don't know how thrilled I am to hand off the responsibility. And now that we've got Mordred, we should be all good to go, right?”
Frank shrugged. “We thought that once before. It proved a little more complicated than that, as you may recall.”
“I have Suggestion,” said Chaz.
After a tense moment of silence, Frank spoke up. “Yes? We're listening.”
Chaz rolled his eyes. “No, I meant I have the spell Suggestion. Remember I mentioned it before? One of the pixies gave me a magic lute which casts the spell. I think I can coerce Mordred into saying our names while we force him to hold the die.”
Frank nodded. “Very good. That just might do the trick. Now, how do we go about waking the fat son of a bitch up?”
“I have a suggestion,” said Chaz.
Everyone glanced away from him like they were embarrassed for him.
“Dude,” said Cooper. “I know you don't get to feel useful very often, but –”
Chaz stopped him with a middle finger, which he then displayed to everyone else until he had their attention again. “I meant an actual suggestion on how we might wake Mordred up.”
“That, um...” Tony the Elf cleared his throat. “free-spirited dwarf woman who arrived with Randy beat the shit out of the last Mordred we captured, but didn't get so much as a whimper out of him.”
“Pain isn't going to do the job. That's why Mordred was able to let the Green Mother penetrate him.”
Rhonda cringed. “Maybe you can skip this part?”
Chaz turned to Cooper. “Do you remember what caused Mordred to wake up?”
Cooper shrugged. “I figured he had some kind of Contingency spell set up to wake him if somebody was trying to pull the Green Mother's... um... appendages out of his... um... orifices.”
He seemed to be trying to choose his words carefully, but the images forming in Stacy's head were almost certainly worse than whatever the reality had been.
“Wrong,” said Chaz. “If that was the case, he would have woken up as soon as you started chopping at the wood pumping life force up his ass.”
Frank and Tony the Elf winced.
&nb
sp; Frank pushed his beer glass to the side. “Seriously, is this leading to a conclusion of some sort?”
“You said Mordred didn't wake up when Denise beat the shit out of him. Do you know if she tried suffocating him?”
“No,” said Frank. “And I'm going to have to stop you there. We're not proud of how we handled things before, looking the other way while Denise tortured a guy in our cellar.”
“Maybe suffocation was too strong a word. I'm just talking about pinching his nose and lips closed for a minute to see if that forces him awake. When he woke up in the forest, it was right after the tunnel caved in on us.”
Frank, Rhonda, and Tony the Elf looked at each other and nodded their consent.
“Fritz,” said Tony the Elf to someone in the small crowd which had gathered around them. “See if you can pry the die loose from the dragon claw.”
“Not a problem,” said the elf who enthusiastically accepted the task assigned to him.
“Be careful with it.” Tony the Elf seemed uncharacteristically giddy. Even Frank had a spark of hope in his eyes.
Rhonda watched Fritz walk back to his table with the die, then stared down into her nearly empty beer glass. “We might still have a problem.”
“Shit,” said Frank, like he knew it was too early to start getting his hopes up. “What is it?”
“What if we need the same die that brought us here to get us back? We've only got one of the dice. Does that mean only one-sixth of us get to go home?”
“It's better than nothing,” said Stacy. “If that's the case, those of us who get left behind can start an expedition to go find the other dice. Sure, it'll take a little legwork, but it's not impossible. It's certainly no reason to not celebrate a small victory while we've got one.”
“That's right,” said Julian. “And it's also nothing to get all gloomy about until we know if that's the case or not. Let's work with what we've got, then go from there.”
“Got it!” cried Fritz, holding up the die, now unmounted from the pendant.
Frank gulped down the rest of his beer. “Fuck it. Let's do this. Somebody go downstairs and drag that tubby piece of shit up here.”
A solid-looking dwarf pointed at Cooper. “You, let's go.”
Cooper followed him down into the cellar. When he moved out of the way, Stacy noticed Chaz scribbling something on a piece of paper.
“What's wrong?” She asked Julian, whose face was showing less excitement than the current median excitement level at the Whore's Head Inn.
“You know I can't go back yet.” Julian stroked the feathers on Ravenus's back.
Stacy genuinely felt sorry for him having to make a choice between keeping his bird friend and returning to his real life, but also a little frustrated that it was actually a choice at all.
“Yet? What's your plan? Are you going to hang out here until Ravenus dies of natural causes? That could be decades. And in the meantime, who knows how much of your real life you'll have let waste away? I don't want to sound callous, but you need to say goodbye.”
Julian was staring at her like he had something to say the whole time but was waiting to let her finish speaking her mind.
“Ravenus. I need to speak with Stacy alone for a minute. Would you mind waiting outside?”
“Of course, sir.” Ravenus hopped onto his forearm, then launched himself into the air and flapped out the still open front door.
“I'm not going to tell you that saying goodbye to Ravenus isn't going to be difficult. But I can't leave here without the people I arrived with. What about Dave and Katherine? For all we know, she could have even had Tim resurrected. And then there's Randy... and Denise, I guess.”
Stacy nodded. “You're a good friend, Julian. I'll stay back and help you gather everyone together. But...” She really didn't like how vulnerable what she was about to say made her feel. “Will you promise me that you'll come back after we get everyone? I've been doing some thinking, and it's going to be tough trying to form a serious relationship with a man who hasn't had this experience. There would always be this part of my life that I'd either have to keep to myself, or sound like a crazy person for talking about.” Now that she'd actually spoken it out loud, it sounded less vulnerable and more heartlessly pragmatic. “And there's also the fact that I really like you, of course.”
Julian smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes. “The Horsemen had no memory of their time here. I'm probably not even going to remember having met you.”
Stacy's chest tightened. She didn't want to forget her time here, and she certainly didn't want to forget Julian.
“At least I won't have to worry about that sounding like a crazy person thing.”
Julian shrugged. “You were still normal you when you saw me and Goosewaddle trash your boss's office with a horse and a giant scorpion. You'll probably still remember that.”
“Shit, that's right. How am I going to explain that?”
“Or your sudden disappearance just after the fact. I bet you're a person of interest.”
A few short moments ago, Stacy's biggest concern was how she was going to reconnect with Julian back in the real world. That seemed frivolous now that she was looking at being unemployed and wanted by the police.
Before she could think up anything to respond with, the crowd at the cellar door parted to let the strong-looking dwarf through. He held the back of a sturdy wooden chair as he backed carefully up the stairs. Sitting in the chair was another dwarf, this one naked but for the ropes that tied him securely to the chair, glowing crystals on hempen twine tied to his wrists, ankles, and around his neck, and a splotchy brown cotton bag covering his head. The facial expressions on the crowd which was now backing further away suggested that the aforementioned bag of shit was not a metaphor for something else.
When Cooper, who was carrying the bottom of the chair, reached the top of the staircase, he and the dwarf brought the prisoner to the middle of the room and set him down. Cooper placed his hand on the bag.
“Ready?”
Frank nodded eagerly, rolling the magical die between his palms.
Cooper lifted the bag, revealing the horrified face of a dwarf who had seen better days. He was asleep, but his parting expression, still frozen in place, suggested it had been an emergency evacuation. His bushy beard, mustache, eyebrows, and hair were all caked in a dried brown substance which Stacy doubted very much was mud.
“Would you mind doing the honors?” Frank asked Cooper. “I mean, since you're right there already.”
Cooper scowled at him. “Fine.” He pinched the captive dwarf's nose with one hand and pressed the other hand firmly over his mouth.
Stacy counted in heartbeats. She didn't make it to ten before the dwarf's terrified eyes popped wide open.
Cooper let go of the dwarf's face and backed away.
“How do you live with yourself?” cried the dwarf. “I'll be doing you a mercy when I destroy you!” He struggled with his ropes, seeming to only now realize that he was tied to a chair. He scanned the room, sneering at everyone. “You're all the same fools I sent here. I thought a taste of reality might toughen you up, make you respect the game more. But all you've done is cower here in your little tavern, wishing to go back to your dreary ordinary lives and squandering this opportunity for greatness that I've given you.”
“Holy shit,” said Frank. He was breathing hard and fast. “It really is you. You twisted son of a bitch. We've got you.”
“You've got nothing.” Mordred nodded toward Cooper. “This idiot saw me move tons of earth with my new powers. Do you honestly think you can contain me with simple ropes?” He closed his eyes, turned up his palms, and began chanting.
Most of the Whore's Head gang started backing toward the door, but Cooper moved behind Mordred and held the bag of shit ready to bring down on his head.
Mordred opened his panicky eyes. “What's wrong? What happened?”
Cooper grinned and lowered the bag. “Those pixies didn't fuck around. I told th
em the shitbag was keeping you under control, but they insisted on putting a bunch of anti-magic crystals on you.”
“If I have to abandon this body, my others will only grow stronger faster, and when I come for you I promise my vengeance will not be swift.”
“You can't really abandon it now. We know how to wake you up.” Cooper rubbed his stomach. “Your threats are fucking with my insides though. I only wiped with the bag before. Next time I think I might just fill it up.”
Mordred's sneer disappeared. He was not taking Cooper's threats lightly.
“What do you want from me?”
Stacy looked at Frank. He seemed as impressed as she was that Mordred was finally compliant.
“You know what we want,” said Frank. “We want to go home.” He turned to Chaz. “Let's see what you've got.”
Chaz nodded and pulled out his lute. It appeared to be made of still-living tree branches, but it sounded surprisingly musical when he began to strum the strings.
“We found you underground
with tree roots up your keister.
I suggest you make no sound
until I tell you, Mister.”
Mordred's eyes said “What the fuck?” and though his mouth tried to do the same, no sound came out.
“Ha!” said Chaz, obviously very proud of himself. “What do you think of that?”
Everyone shifted uncomfortably.
“That last rhyme was a little on the weak side,” Frank finally said.
Chaz's shoulders dropped. “I had literally five minutes to come up with something. It worked, didn't it?”
“Oh, sure. As far as that's concerned, it was fantastic. I thought you were looking for honest critique on its artistic merit.” Frank held up the die for everyone to see. “Who wants to go first?”
“I nominate you, Frank,” said Tony the Elf. “We've had our differences in the past, but you've carried us through some hard times. I think you've earned the honor.”
Frank shook his head. “I know many of you are in a hurry, but I wouldn't mind taking a few minutes to say goodbye to this place. Stacy, why don't you go first? You brought the die back.”
“That's nice of you, Frank. But Julian and I are going to go round up the folks we came here with.”