by Ron Miller
“Anyway, that night there was an odd thumping sound against the bottom of our wagon. I thought it was only a dog and tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t stop. Besides, I wa finally awake enough to realize that it was too regular to be a dog; it was like someone knocking at a door, except that it was against the bottom of the floor. I went outside to see what was going on, I now thought it was probably just some children and I was going to chase them away. When I looked under the wagon, there was no one there. I looked around and there wasn’t a soul in the alley we had parked in, either.
“There was, however, a big rock lying under the wagon and it looked like it had something tied to it. I crawled underneath and got it, and sure enough it was a rock with a note attached. I didn’t particularly pay any attention at the time, but later I recalled that we’d parked over a manhole cover.”
“What did the note say?”
“I don’t remember the exact words, but it told us to wait where we were, that Thud was going to be brought to us the next day. There was no signature. It was pretty crudely written, as though by a child or a foreigner. Well, the next day, sure enough, Thud popped out of the manhole. We hustled him into our wagon and the rest is more or less history.”
“Sounds like something the Kobolds might’ve have a hand in.”
“So it would seem. Anyway, Thud was determined to get back to Blavek, and I was more than willing to help him. My uncle, however, couldn’t leave his new circus, now that it was more than half-formed. He gave me leave to help Thud get to Blavek, since it was fairly obvious that he’d never find his way there on his own. And here we are, almost to Blavek.”
“I don’t quite know what to say.” The princess fumbles witb her words. “I don’t know if I can thank you enough for what you’ve done for Thud, and me, too.”
“What else could I have done?” says Rykkla. “I love him.”
Bronwyn lapses into speechlessness, not certain exactly how Rykkla meant that nor what to make of it, however it had been meant, so Gyven deftly steps in. He briefly and succinctly summarizes his own story and that of the princess.
“It’s all almost over,” he concludes. “Payne Roelt and Bronwyn’s brother have taken refuge in that castle over there, Strabane, and we’ve only just been trying to figure out how to get inside it, since arriving here yesterday evening.”
Thud turns to look at the looming stone block.
“That shouldn’t be so hard,” he says.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LIQUIDATION
“Have you seen anyone?” asks Payne, who has been asking the same question or some variation of it every minute on the minute for hours.
“I haven’t seen anyone at all,” replies the king, who actually had seen Bronwyn and Gyven arrive and then disappear into the distant copse. He had been told to expect at least a small army and had automatically dismissed anything less. He had also seen Thud and Rykkla as they had been walking down the road. They, too, he also dismissed as no danger, since they had been heading south toward Blavek. Since they had been going away from Strabane they were surely of no interest. He had been proud of that deduction.
“Praxx is the only person who knows where I was going,” Payne continues. “He’s not here. If he’d been captured, I don’t doubt for a second that he’d tell where I am in order to save himself. Therefore, given that we haven’t been pursued, he’s either escaped or he’s dead. Frankly, I hope he’s dead.”
Payne paces the stone-flagged floor of the highest tower room, a low-ceilinged loft surrounded by windows, hands clasped tightly behind his back. There is a broad band of cigarette butts marking the circle he has been endlessly tracing, and the air is blue with the smoke that the lifeless air has failed to remove. The chamber forms the top floor of the central tower of Strabane and the windows on all four sides overlook all the surrounding countryside. Access to the room is through a circular hole in the middle of the floor and a spiral staircase from below.
“Less than half,” mutters Payne. “Less than half! That’s all I was able to get here!”
“Half of what, Payne?”
“Half of my money, you idiot, half of my money. The rest is still in the courtyard back at the palace. Or, more likely,” he adds with a low snarl, “scattered all over the city.”
“Isn’t half enough? It still fills most of the dungeon here.”
“No, half isn’t enough! Half is never enought! Half cannot be enough! That’s not even logical. I’d rather have lost it all.” This last remark is only insincere melodrama; both he and the king know perfectly well that he’d rather lose a lung than as much as a single poenig.
“What’re we going to do?” asks Ferenc. “We can’t stay here forever.”
“I know, I know. I never planned to, so I never thought that it might be necessary to put in any stores.”
“Stores?”
“Food. Drink. Cigarettes.”
“Oh. I was thinking that there isn’t a single crossword puzzle in the place.”
With an inarticulate growl, Payne throws himself toward the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to count my money!”
“Again?”
“I debated whether it’d give me more pleasure than throwing you from that window. It was a close decision. Do you want to change my mind?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then just keep watch. If you see anything at all, you let me know immediately.”
“Anything?”
“You heard me.”
“It doesn’t have to be an army, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I thought that I was just keeping watch out for an army.”
“What have you seen, you idiot?”
“Nothing much, really. Just some people.”
“People? What people?”
“Yesterday, there were a couple of people on horses, but they rode into those trees over there and I haven’t seen them since, and this morning there were a couple more people, but they were heading in the wrong direction, so how could they have been important? They didn’t have horses, either.”
“Where’d they go?”
“They went into the trees, too.”
Without another word, Payne flies at the king, his slight body knocking Ferenc from his chair, his hands clutching at the king’s pimply throat as though ten piano wires were being tightened around that fleshy column.
“Payne!” gasps the king, his words given a staccato rhythm as tbe chamberlain beat his head against the stone floor, each impact leaving an oily imprint, “Payne, stop, for, heav, en’s, sake, stop! you’re, kil, ling, me!”
Payne considers this to be positive news but suddenly leaps to his feet, his face as flat white as a plaster cast. “You appalling idiot!” he shrieks. “You drooling, wart-brained, simpleminded moron! I should kill you, I really should. And maybe I will! Why haven’t I already? What’s stopping me? Who’ll stop me? Who’ll even care?”
“Payne!” croaks the king from the floor where he is massaging his bruised larynx. “How can you talk like that? I tbought we were friends!”
Payne merely laughs. He meant it to sound cruel and ironic, but the brittle edge of hysteria spoils the effect a little, though it is a good deal more frightening.
“Don’t do that,” pleads Ferenc. “It sounds scary.”
“Not half so scary as will be a courtyard approaching at terminal velocity.”
“Payne!” cries the king, understanding the tone of voice better than the convoluted reference.
“Payne Roelt!” comes a distant, apparently creative echo.
“What is that?” the chamberlain asks, dropping the cigarette he was shakingly attempting to light.
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“But . . . “
“Payne Roelt!” comes the faraway cry again.
“Someone’s in the castle!” Payne shrieks. “Where are the damn Guards?
”
He leans from one of the windows and shouts, “Guards! Guards!” Then, looking straight down he sees an appalling sight: there are his Guards, being thrown around the courtyard like handballs. In the midst of a kind of radiating spray of bodies is a huge figure that, from Payne’s perspective, appears to be an oblate sphere two or three times larger than any one of his men. The giant wreaking this havoc must be, comes the chill revelation, that monster Thud Mollockle of whom he has been all too aware. And if that creature has managed to penetrate his stronghold, who else has? Bronwyn herself, Musrum forbid?
“What is it, Payne?”
“It’s your damned sister, that’s what!” He can’t take his eyes from the sight below, fascinated by the almost supernatural grace, a kind of impromptu choreography that possesses a dreamily ballet-like quality.
“Bronwyn? She’s here?”
“She must be, though how she got past the outer wall is beyond me.”
“We’ve got to get out of here!” squeaks Ferenc.
“Go ahead, but I’m not leaving without the treasure. A twenty or thirty percent discount on all of my work is the most I’m going to accept. I’ll not let anyone deny me a poenig more, least of all that bitch sister of yours.” He rushes to the head of the spiral staircase and begins to descend.
“But, Payne . . .” whines the king; then: “Where are you going?”
“To the dungeons, I told you.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?” is Payne’s only reply as his head disappears below the level of the floor. He runs down zigzagged stairs from floor to floor of the tower, into the main body of the castle, a cavernous stone hall, and then to the cylindrical well where cast-iron spiral stairs lead to the treasure dungeons below.
What is this? he thinks, coming to an abrupt halt, as a sinuous tendril of smoke curls around his legs. All he can manage to envision is an image of his vast horde of wealth in flames with a demonic Princess Bronwyn dancing gleefully around the molten pyre. “The rotten bitch!” he snarls aloud, and plunges down stairs. He has not descended a dozen steps when he meets the object of his wrath and loathing coming up. It is an apparition from his most fervid nightmares. He has not seen the princess for more than two years and his only recollection of her (like the late General Praxx’s) has been of a rather spoiled, vaguely pretty child (or so he had been told at any rate; he had always found her much too boyish for his tastes, which ran to very large women with vast, nourishing, encompassing bosoms and tiny, stupid, forgiving faces) in her later teens . . . he thought of her as a brainless, willful child, though of course she is in fact only a few years younger than he. But then, underrating his fellow humans always has been Payne’s great failing. Though he recognizes her immediately, it is as a kind of demon Bronwyn, dressed in a ragged uniform of nondescript color that barely covers her decently, splashed and smeared with dried blood and dirt, her furious face marred by a still-livid slash on one cheek and framed by a nimbus of smoky red hair that streams and waves around her face like the ruddy flames of burning oil.
“Payne Roelt!” she cries, with an unholy glee that turns his spine to gelatine. He is suddenly aware that he is weaponless. Without another second’s hesitation, he retreats as quickly as he had descended, regaining the landing in a single bound that clears the top three steps. There is a heavy wooden door, which he slams shut behind him, but it has neither lock nor bar, an omission he does not fail to curse. He can clearly hear the approaching clatter of Bronwyn’s bootheels.
A Guard comes running across the hall toward him and Payne dashes to meet him. “Give me your gun!” he demands, wrenching the weapon from the man’s holster before the startled soldier can respond. “Sir?” is all the Guard can say before Payne shoots him dead. He takes the man’s saber as well. Idiots, he curses. They’re all idiots. I can’t trust anyone but myself!
Behind him he hears the wooden door crash open. He fires a shot wildly, without turning to see who or what he is shooting at and bounds to the far side of the vast, empty hall. The sound of the shot reverberates endlessly, like someone hammering on an iron drum.
The tall figure of the princess strides through the blue smoke with long-legged purposefulness, framed by an expanding cloud of blue smoke. She carries a saber with a casual and disturbing nonchalance. He raises the revolver again and fires, but his hand is shaking so badly that Bronwyn did not so much as flinch as the bullet zinged ten feet beyond her. He fires three more times, each time less effectively, and is by this time so shaken by the deliberate and imperturbable approach of the princess, like a mindless clockwork automaton, that he drops the gun, the rest of its chambers unused. He grasps his sword with both hands.
“All right! All right!” he shrills. “What do you want?”
“You can’t be that naïve, Roelt,” she replies in a voice so suavely cool that he is immediately sorry that he had encouraged her to speak.
“Let me go,” he pleads. “You’ve got all of the treasure I left in the city. The rest is in the dungeons. Let me go. Take it. You’ll have everything back and you’ll never see me again, I swear!”
“I don’t even want to think of you again, Roelt.”
“What have you done to the treasure?” he screams, as behind the princess a thick cloud of dense black smoke suddenly bursts through the open door. There is a rumbling from below their feet, a muted, heavy roar, as though hogsheads are being rolled up and down the corridors or a locomotive is passing through a subterranean tunnel. Bronwyn doesn’t turn to look.
“Don’t ask me. It was that way when I got here.” Which is true. She has no idea of the cause of all the smoke and noisome fumes, which had already begun to fill the lower dungeon when she and her companions had emerged from the tunnel that Gyven and Thud had located. She had not for the first time thanked Musrum for the natural talents imbued in Kobolds and those demikobolds trained by them. Gyven had seemed to have had some idea of what the source of the heat and smoke might be though he had not said anything to the princess about it, other than that he needed to continue on below. To the best of her knowledge there is no “below” lower than the level they were then at, but the man is gone before she can either question him further or even give the matter much more thought.
The heat had been intolerable, the stone walls had been steaming and impossible to touch, and the rumbling was so loud that they could hardly hear one another speak. It sounded like huge fists pounding on the ceiling beneath their feet. She and her remaining two companions quickly located stairs leading upwards. At the first level, where the landing gave onto a broad, inclined corridor and a cast-iron spiral staircase, Thud had said, “This passage must slope up to the central court . . . “
“How can you tell?” Bronwyn asks.
Thud looked puzzled. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
“Rykkla and I’ll go that way and take care of the Guards. You go on up into the tower and we’ll catch up with you. Shouldn’t too long.” Before she can reply the pair had disappeared into the side corridor. Just like that, she is left by herself. Without another thought she continued upwards.
Which of course brought her face to face with Payne Roelt.
“Come on, Roelt, raise your weapon. I’d just as soon cut you down where you’re standing, but it’d be far too fast that way. I’d rather slice you up like a pimento loaf.”
Whatever color may have remained in the young man’s face is bleached away by her words, which he knows (with a certainty that only the most profoundly hypocritical possess) are spoken with complete sincerity. She jabs at him with the point of her sword. He jumps away convulsively, even though the saber’s tip have come no closer to his navel than three feet. “Come on, Roelt, defend yourself! Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
He tentatively raises his own blade, which wavers and circles like a windblown reed, when there comes a clatter and crash from tbe far side of the hall. Another heavy wooden door has banged open, spill
ing the chubby figure of King Ferenc onto the flagged floor.
Directly behind him is Rykkla, who is armed only with a short oak cudgel that looks like the leg of a chair, which it is.
“Hello, Bronwyn,” she greets. “Look what I found!”
“That’s my brother, the king.”
“I thought so. There is a resemblance, no offense intended.”
“Ferenc,” says Bronwyn conversationally, without looking away from Payne, “I’d like you to meet my friend Rykkla. She might beat you senseless if I let her.”
“That’d be fun,” replies Rykkla. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Please, be my guest.”
“Keep her away from me!” squeals Ferenc, whose smooth and glossy brain has only just registered the preternatural figure of his sister. “Bronwyn!” he cries, and, with a suddeness and speed that surprises everone, bolts like a rabbit for the main doors. He gets ten yards before Rykkla recovers from her surprise and launches the cudgel at him with a snappy overhand throw and a neat flick of her wrist that resulted from years of practice with Indian clubs and knife-throwing acts. It spins toward the fleeing king, catching him squarely on the back of his head with a hollow plock! that Bronwyn hears clearly. It must have rendered the king unconscious immediately, for he lands face first on the stone floor, rigid as a board, and slides for a dozen abrasive feet before stopping.
“Having a good time?” Rykkla asks the princess, turning to her. “Sorry about your brother.”
“Don’t concern yourself overly about him. I just hope you enjoyed it.”
“Oh yes, indeed!”
“Will you two ghouls stop talking like that?” pleads Paync
“Where’s Thud?” asks Bronwyn, ignoring her enemy’s discomfiture.
“Taking care of the Guards. There’s not many left, but he’s really enjoying it. I was going to help, but I seemed to only be in the way. So I decided to explore a little, that’s how I found your brother. Anyway, I’d hate to interrupt Thud; it’s been so long since he’s really have any fun. What’re you going to do to him?” She gestures toward Payne.