Happily Ever Awkward

by T. L. Callies

  “Trust me,” he said, returning his attention to the storm dancing around his sword. “This is for the best.”

  “Whose best?! Not mine!”

  “Let’s not split hairs, shall we?”

  Realizing the spell of her eyes had been shattered, Princess Luscious dropped all attempts at seduction and poured all her remaining effort into escaping her chains.

  39

  URRRs AND ARRRs

  Sandwiched between parallel rows of pirates and Zombies, unable to advance or retreat, Jack and Paul understandably felt their options quickly diminishing. They scanned the cavern around them but saw nowhere they could climb and no place they could hide.

  “Well, this is going to sucketh,” Jack said.

  “Wait! Over there!” Paul ran to a section of the cavern wall where a rope had been tied to a cleat. The rope stretched up to the ceiling, looped through a pulley, and held aloft a huge iron chandelier covered with fat lumps of wax.

  Reaching over his head, Paul grabbed the rope up high.

  “Jack, come on!” he called. “Hold on!”

  Jack did not need to be told twice. Keeping a wary eye on the approaching hordes, he grabbed the rope down low as Paul swung the Singing Sword. The blade easily sliced the rotted, old cordage.

  The chandelier plunged.

  Paul jerked into the air, soaring from the dangling end of the rope up to an overhead ledge…

  …while Jack remained standing on the cavern floor. Tragically, he had taken hold of the rope below Paul’s cut. Jack stared at the limp end of rope in his hand before some instinct told him to look up, at which point he noticed the massive chandelier plummeting straight at him.

  With no time to move, Jack squinted his eyes and braced himself for the sucketh.

  CRASH!

  The dust settled.

  Somehow, amazingly, Jack was still standing. Slowly, he peeled open his eyes and realized a gap in the chandelier’s crossbeams had passed harmlessly over him.

  “I don’t believe it,” he gasped. “I’m safe! I’m safe!”

  Overjoyed, he turned to the right.

  A wall of snarling pirates leveled a wall of gleaming sabers at him.

  “Arrr!” they said.

  Underjoyed, Jack spun to the left.

  A wall of red-eyed Zombies bared a wall of rotting teeth at him.

  “Urrr!” they said.

  No-joyed, Jack glanced overhead.

  Paul shrugged helplessly from the safety of his ledge.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Left completely on his own and hopelessly outnumbered, Jack did the only thing he could do.

  He picked a side.

  Snatching the tricorn hat from the head of the nearest pirate, Jack jammed it on his own head and spun about to face the Zombies. Waving his arm at the other pirates, he growled, “Arrrr! Let’s get ’em, me hearties!”

  “Arrrr?” said all the other pirates, confused by the curious dynamic that had just been introduced to the fight.

  As one, the Zombies turned their teeth from Jack to include all the pirates as well.

  “Urrrr!” said all the Zombies.

  Too late did the pirates realize what was happening. “Wait!” cried the one who had lost his hat to Jack. “We’re not with ’im—”

  But the Zombies had already begun their shambling charge, moving surprisingly quickly for shamblers. As sabers and teeth clashed, Jack slipped away amid the confusion.

  Almost immediately, though, several groups of pirates and Zombies cornered Jack against the rock outside the cave. Casting his sword aside, Jack threw himself upon the irregular outcropping of stone and scrambled upward as if his life depended on it — which, of course, it did.

  Paul, meanwhile, saw none of this. “Good luck, Jack,” he whispered before sprinting to the door at the top of the stairs from which the Zombies had emerged.

  Here I come, he thought as he plunged into the darkness.

  40

  EXQUISITE TENSION

  Laura struggled against the terrible tension of the torture device.

  Demog watched for a while, enjoying her discomfort, then tapped a long, wooden lever so he might add to that discomfort.

  A huge, ponderous weight dangled from a length of chain beside the mechanism. With the tap of the lever, the weight dropped a notch, the gears turned, and the cords and the chains around Laura’s body strained. Laura gritted her teeth against the pain, refusing to cry out.

  Demog ran his hand down a pillar that stood alongside the weight. Fifty notches grooved its length, and a scarlet-painted skull marked the final notch at the pillar’s base. The weight hung high in the air, still beside the first notch.

  “Can you feel it?” Demog purred. “Building the tension, notch by careful notch, balancing the stresses until we finally reach the crimson climax… and snap every bone in your body at once. Exquisite, is it not?”

  This was definitely a Class Three Confrontation.

  “Unhand her, knave!”

  All heads whipped toward the door. Paul stood beneath the arch, silhouetted against the stair’s torchlight, having delivered his line with absolute confidence. His father would have been proud.

  Demog squinted at him. “You? I’m impressed. I thought two buckles would be enough to kill you.”

  “I said, let her go!” Paul repeated, advancing into the torture chamber with his Singing Sword leading the way.

  Upon seeing Paul still alive and there to save her, Laura’s fierce eyes brimmed with tears.

  “I guess I need to kill you harder this time,” Demog said, reaching for his chest. “Perhaps three buckles—”

  “Fight me yourself, you coward!” Paul said.

  The Terror made no move other than to curl the corners of his mouth into an amused half-smile as Paul charged and swung a savage blow. At the last possible moment, Demog caught the blade between his palms with an effortless clap of his hands.

  “Very well,” he said. “If that’s how you wish to die, I can accommodate you. But why don’t we make it interesting? Let’s give you some incentive. If you want to rescue her…”

  He kicked the lever forward as far as it would go. The weight began clacking down, notch after relentless notch, grinding the machine into overdrive. The straps creaked and groaned and finally wrenched a cry from Laura’s throat.

  “…you’d better hurry!”

  Demog hurled Paul across the room with a flick of his wrists.

  Paul rolled to his feet and raced for the lever, desperate to stop the machine, but Demog intercepted him with a ferocious sweep of his sword. Blades clashing, the Terror steered Paul farther and farther away.

  Demog attacked like a swirling tornado of swords — a swordnado, if you will — and his technique had killed countless enemies down through the years. Curiously enough, it did not seem to be killing Paul, not very much at all.

  Something had awakened in Paul’s blood, something more than just the years of battle training with his father. Those skills had long been lost inside him, buried under his doubts and fears, but now that they had shaken free of their restraints, they were shaking something else free as well.

  Paul’s heritage.

  Generations of barbarian blood coursed through his veins. It fueled him now, driving him to fight with a frenzy he had never known. He countered Demog, blow for blow, attacking with the fury of a screaming horde of barbarians. No, even more than that, he attacked with the fury of a screaming horde of barbarians riding on a tornado — a hordenado, if you will.

  Thus, the swordnado and the hordenado careened around the torture chamber, sparks erupting between their endlessly crossing blades, each flickering SPANG illuminating their path through the shadows along the edge of the room.

  Laura, meanwhile, fought against the power of the machine with every single ounce of her strength. She flexed her muscles and held her body rigid, trying to resist the relentless pull of the straps, but the weight never stopped its descent. It clacked low
er and lower, nearing the crimson skull at the bottom of the pillar, and the straps squeezed tighter and tighter. If she relaxed even for a moment, she knew her body would come apart.

  She couldn’t hold out any longer. She just couldn’t.

  She wanted to scream, to make her voice heard one last time, but even that was denied her because the straps had crushed the breath from her lungs.

  Still the weight descended.

  She watched her breaking point near. She could hear it. She could feel it. She could see it.

  And then she saw Jeremy the Zombie sidle around the back of the machine. He reached for the lever that could end her nightmare, stretching out his arm with achingly slow Zombie precision.

  In spite of the pain, Laura felt a smile squirming behind the web of straps.

  Then Jeremy’s arm fell off.

  “Oh, bother,” said the Zombie.

  Demog whirled beside him, having momentarily abandoned his duel with Paul to slice Jeremy’s arm off at the shoulder.

  “Jeremy, what has gotten into you?!” Demog demanded, sounding almost exasperated.

  Jeremy raised his rotting head in defiance. “I can stand by and grunt no more,” he said. “I may be nothing but a reanimated corpse, but I still know what’s right.”

  “You are a disgrace!” Demog spat.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jeremy replied. Then he added, “Watch your head, please.”

  Instinctively, Demog ducked as a whirl of steel flashed by, a whirl of steel that sang an aria so soaring it would send tingles down a strong man’s spine.

  While the Terror had been distracted with the business of dismembering a rebellious Zombie, Paul had seen an opportunity. He knew it would be impossible to reach the lever, but the torture machine itself was unprotected. So, Paul had hurled the Singing Sword straight into the heart of the mechanism.

  Before Demog realized what was happening, the Sword had spun across the chamber and sliced the weight from its chain in a burst of sparks.

  The machine relaxed with a monstrous groan.

  Laura gasped in relief.

  But Paul stood helplessly, for although he had saved Laura, he had left himself completely defenseless.

  Demog strode around the frame of the lifeless torture device, heading straight for Paul. The Terror’s face looked more like a skull than it ever had before.

  “Well,” he said. “What a noble sacrifice.”

  Then he reared back to deliver the death stroke.

  41

  3… 2… 1…

  Jack scrambled up the side of the Shadowkeep, wedging his fingers and toes into cracks between the shiny stone blocks. Swarms of enemies surged up the wall below him, and he kicked at any who got too close.

  Because pirates were used to climbing unsteady rigging, it was easy for them to climb the irregular stone wall with daggers clenched between their teeth.

  Because Zombies were used to being creepy, it was easy for them to scuttle up the stone surface like a wave of pale spiders.

  Because Jack was scared out of his mind, it was easy for him to climb so fast that no one could catch him.

  “Damnation!”

  Captain Head lowered his telescope. He stood at the bow of a longboat surrounded by his handpicked pirate bodyguards. They were the meanest of the mean, the bloodthirstiest of the bloodthirsty, the snarlingest of the snarly.

  “Bravado’s on the tower!” he bellowed with such fury that his jaw scraped shavings of rust from his cannonball cheek. “The scurvy coward’s trying to get away from me! Open fire, you mangy dogs! Blow a breach in ’im big enough to sail a ship through!”

  As the pirate bodyguards rowed furiously for shore, the cannons spread along the side of the Bloody Vengeance began to fire, belching sheets of flame over their captain’s head.

  Explosions burst across the side of the Shadowkeep, jolting loose stray clumps of pirates and Zombies. Jack barely hung on amid the firestorm.

  Shaking his fist at the Bloody Vengeance, Jack yelled in exasperation, “Oh, come on! Don’t you think this is a little overkill?!”

  As if in response, hundreds of puffs of smoke materialized over the mouths of the countless cannons ranged along the Vengeance’s deck as well as those protruding from the checkerboard of gun ports along its hull.

  Apparently not.

  Jack scurried higher as the barrage of explosions leap-frogged up the side of the tower, closer and closer, somehow just missing him as they passed by, but blasting the wall directly above him.

  Ducking his head, he dug his fingers into the cracks and struggled to hold on as an avalanche of rubble cascaded over him.

  42

  …BOOM!

  When the wall of the torture chamber exploded inward, Demog was understandably surprised. And when a section of the ceiling collapsed on top of him, he was understandably crushed. By the time the rubble finished clattering and the dust finished swirling, only his right hand remained visible, thrust between two rocks like a stubborn, demonic weed.

  His fingers twitched for a moment then went still.

  Jeremy the Zombie’s face, which always wore a generally slack-jawed look of surprise due to the degenerative effects of his undead condition, took on a look of actual surprise, his eyes literally popping out of his head.

  Yes, literally.

  He had to push them back in.

  “I don’t believe it,” Jeremy said as he readjusted his eyeballs. “I thought nothing could stop a Terror…”

  Not wasting a moment, Paul raced to Laura’s side and immediately began untying and untangling and unbuckling the myriad straps that bound her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Tears cut through the dust on her cheeks.

  “Laura, don’t cry—”

  “I’m not crying,” she said. “I just… I got dust in my eyes. Paul, I thought you were dead.”

  “Yes. Right. I’ll tell you about it later,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got to get out of here.” He had just started working on the straps around her waist when something behind him grunted like a Dragon in heat.

  Paul scooped his Singing Sword from the floor and wheeled about, thinking Demog had recovered, but the sound hadn’t come from the Terror.

  It came from a dusty figure clawing its way through the hole in the wall. The figure was named Jack Bravado. It heaved itself to its feet, pointed an accusing finger at Paul, and said, “Next time… next time I get to cut the rope.”

  43

  THE LOGIC OF ASTEROIDS

  Holding Judgment over his head, Seeboth pointed the energized sword at the full moon and recited lost words of unspeakable power. Though the power itself might have been unspeakable, the lost words, curiously enough, were not.

  “Ahnataa sabaokt fiat deonon,

  The Unmaking Vortex to this world I summon!”

  At one time conventional wisdom held that the world was flat. It was entirely reasonable for primitive man to have reached such a conclusion, for if the world was not flat, how could a primitive man stand upon it? Somewhat less reasonable was primitive man’s conclusion that his flat world was balanced precariously upon the back of a Giant Oyster. Primitive religions sprang up, teaching primitive man to live in constant fear of the Day of the Great Shucking, an event which, it was said, would unleash the Pearl of Doom. It is worth noting these primitive religions ultimately died out because they failed to grasp the nature of reality in three key respects:

  1. The world was not flat.

  2. No one could take seriously something called “The Day of the Great Shucking”.

  3. They completely misunderstood the actual size, location, and nature of the Giant Oyster and its Pearl of Doom. But do not worry, in another story someone else will eventually figure all that out. And you needn’t worry yourself about the dire consequences that ensued because, as I said, that is entirely a different story.

  These days, all respectable astrologers, stargazers, and wise men agreed that the world was round, al
ong with every other planet orbiting the sun.

  They were only partially correct.

  It turned out that one of those worlds, was, in fact, quite flat — the fifth world from the sun, a vast disk wheeling its way between a small red planet and a giant gassy planet. The disk was called Nimalys by its inhabitants. Creatures composed of pure thought, the Nimalyns spent their days logicking their way across their world, mixing their equations one with another to calculate new integers that would grow up to become even more complex Nimalyns. They encoded the secrets of the universe into the skin of their odd, flat world, transforming the entire planet into a monument celebrating knowledge and discovery. Nimalys held the answers to everything.

  Which brings us back to our story.

  At that precise moment, every planet in the sun’s grand necklace had converged to form a perfectly straight line, and they were all doing something rather strange.

  The strangeness started with the world farthest from the sun. A tiny sphere of cold, dead rock, it began to shimmer in a very unplanetlike way then suddenly blasted a seething bolt of angry, magical energy toward the next planet. The next planet somehow amplified the bolt like a magnifying glass then blasted it on to the next world, and so on and so on. Each time it advanced the bolt became stronger, now passing through a planet surrounded by rings, now a giant planet with a great red eye, and now on to Nimalys, the most oddly wonderful world in the universe.

  Unfortunately, the structural integrity of Nimalys — just a delicate crust wrapped around a smear of molten mantle surrounding a wafer-thin core of gold — was ill-suited to handle such an influx of arcane rage. With a shriek of “E = WTF?” the Nimalyns and the only flat planet in the entire universe exploded. The resulting asteroid belt would serve as a grim reminder of the destructive power of superstition over logic.