‘They won’t be far from one of the doors onto this courtyard,’
Kana said. ‘They’ll be bringing slaves up from below and taking them to the arena. I doubt they want unnecessary corridors in the way of that.’
‘Valid point,’ Constance said, ‘but there were at least two doors. Which do we go for?’
‘No clue. We will need to get past the lock, however.’ Constance turned her gaze toward Aneshti.
The elf sighed. ‘I’ll make some more acid. Is there a bucket around here?’
~~~
Things went downhill as soon as they got in through the door they had, by virtue of guessing, decided might be the closest to the basement access. Aneshti did her acid-tentacle trick with the lock and they slipped inside. No problem so far.
Two seconds later, a man appeared through a door, appearing to step up into the corridor they were in. He was holding a candle in one hand and wearing a robe of sorts, loosely belted around his waist. The view was not one anyone wanted to see; the man was fat in the manner of someone who massively over-indulged. He had rolls of fat just about everywhere which gave him jowls, four chins, and small, piggy, bloodshot eyes which seemed too dark to be just brown. He was also bald, but it looked like the kind of bald you got from shaving your head rather than a sign of age. He was looking pleased with himself until he spotted the four women who had invaded the building.
‘Thieves!’ he roared. ‘Thieves in my home!’ Presumably, this was Radekar. He pulled a dagger from somewhere behind his back – the robe’s belt did not seem like the kind of thing to hang a dagger from, but there was a dagger – and started forward, raising the weapon. The blade of the thing glistened as though coated in something. A poisoned dagger…
‘Shut up, you walking stereotype,’ Kana snapped. She jabbed her staff into his chest before he could get close enough to stab anyone. The blow did essentially nothing except maybe leave a bruise, but Kana had already charged the weapon with a fire spell. Flame burst across Radekar’s chest and he staggered backward, flailing and dropping his candle. The flailing did not last long.
Two burly guards appeared almost immediately. They were big and, in one case anyway, bearded and carrying short swords suitable for use in the confined space of a house. They were also some three metres away and unsure of what they were dealing with. One of them never got to figure it out as he was hit in the chest by a sphere of rock which broke ribs and knocked him off his feet.
Dead or alive, he did not get up. The second charged forward, raising his sword, and Aneshti threw her bucket of acid at him; the bucket was starting to leak anyway. The acid began to eat into his leather armour almost immediately, but the bucket possibly had more effect since it hit him right in the codpiece.
He stopped in his tracks, his face contorted in pain and what looked a lot like confusion. He dropped his sword just before he dropped to his knees clutching his manhood.
‘Go to sleep,’ Constance suggested to him, and he promptly fell the rest of the way to the ground, still looking pained. ‘That was a really nasty thing to do to someone, Aneshti,’ Constance said. She was smirking.
‘I wasn’t aiming for his privates,’ Aneshti protested. ‘I actually hoped the acid would splash him in the eyes.’
‘I’m not sure that’s better,’ Kana replied. ‘To me, it looked like fatso came up when he came through that door.’
‘Me too,’ Constance said. ‘I’m hoping no one down there heard Radekar screaming like a girl. It’s likely that there are people at the bottom of the stairs.’
Kana began charging her staff again. ‘We’ll be ready for them.’
The stairs led down to a small room with various corridors off it, all of them lined with barred cells. The room held a table, three chairs – one with a busted leg – and a sweaty-looking man who ‘did not get paid enough to deal with this shit.’ He handed them the keys and, only because Constance insisted, sat down to wait for things to be done with.
Kana was busy unlocking doors on one of the corridors – they had decided to open things up and let the occupants do what they felt like – when she heard a voice from the cell behind her which was both familiar and not.
‘Kana?’
Kana looked over her shoulder, frowned, and then finished unlocking the door in front of her. ‘You’re free,’ she said to the woman inside, a tall blonde with more muscle than you’d generally see on a woman. If she had responded in a thick, barbarian-like accent, Kana would have marvelled at the cliché, but there was no response. Then Kana turned around to start on the next cell, the cell with the woman in it who seemed to know her name. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked, pausing with the key in the lock.
‘Yes. A-and no.’ That voice really did sound familiar. The occupant of the cell was a little shorter than Kana, or would have been except for the block heels on her boots. She was decked out in what Kana would have described as a fantasy warrior woman outfit if it was not real and on a warrior woman. It was Wonder Woman before she left Themyscira. Sort of. There was a bronze breastplate with a leather corset beneath it. A single, diagonal, leather strap held the bodice up and an asymmetric skirt of black cloth was attached at the bottom. There were bronze guards around
her forearms and bronze greaves attached to her boots to protect her shins. It made a good gladiator outfit, Kana guessed.
The woman herself was a redhead, her hair a lustrous red-orange wave which fell down past her shoulders. She had a slim waist and a not insubstantial bust. Her eyes were an amber sort of hazel, and she had a cute nose, pointed chin, and moderately full lips.
And it began to dawn on Kana that she knew those eyes. And now she looked there were other things about her that…
Kana’s eyes widened. ‘Rain?’
‘That’s my name,’ Rain said, grinning rather timidly.
‘Rain?’ Kana repeated. ‘But you’re– Did you wish really hard or something?’ Deciding that she was stalling, Kana unlocked the cell. Rain did not immediately attack her, so that was a good sign. One had to consider weird doppelgangers in a world where magic existed. Correction: in a world where magic and horrible clichés existed.
‘Wasn’t me,’ Rain replied, following as Kana moved down the corridor to check the other cells. ‘They wanted a female gladiator. Obviously, I wasn’t. Apparently, that wasn’t stopping them. The cost of the ritual was going to be worth it for the pay-out.’
‘Uh, does that mean you’ll be changing back as soon as Radekar has checked your teeth, or whatever?’
‘No. It’s permanent. They wouldn’t risk it with Radekar. He’s got some sway in this city.’
Kana grimaced. The rest of the cells were empty, and Kana turned to start back to the jailor’s room. She paused. Rain was looking at her a little funny. ‘That might be a problem then. I killed Radekar on the way in here.’
‘You did? I’m not going to say I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘No… He, um, didn’t do anything to you, did he?’
‘Anything? Oh, that. No. One of the guards told me he likes to break in new girls the night before their first match. I wasn’t due to go into the arena for another week.’
‘Good. Come on, let’s get out of here. Everyone’s going to be pretty amazed to see you. Especially since it’s, uh, a new version of you.’
‘Yeah… Radekar left me alone for the night, but I have a feeling Constance is going to want to deflower me as soon as she can.’
‘I’m glad to see that being kidnapped and enslaved and turned into a woman hasn’t broken your sense of humour.’
‘I wasn’t joking.’
‘Well, yeah, she’s going to want you in a bed before we leave Sintar, but it sounded like you were smiling when you said it.’
Sintar Forest.
Constance did not immediately express a desire to take Rain to bed. In fact, she seemed a little sullen along with being happy to see her friend safe and with boobs. Mostly, she was concerned that they should be out of Sintar befor
e anyone official found the bodies.
They stopped running, or at least walking at a brisk pace, around dawn in a clearing in Sintar Forest. It happened to be on the shore of a small lake and Kana really wanted to try bathing, but the water was freezing. Rain was the most rested of the group and said she would stand watch while they slept, so they slept, waking up in the late afternoon. Kana made some food, and the team sat down around a small fire to work out what they should do next. Of course, there was also some catching up to do…
‘They basically chained me in a circle and did two rituals on me,’ Rain explained. ‘The first one turned me into, well, what I always wanted to be.’
‘It turned you into what you would have been if you’d been born a woman,’ Constance said, a little sullenly. ‘I’d heard rumours, but I’ve never come across anyone who claimed they’d actually undergone the ritual. It’s one of the secret spells taught to the highest-ranking slavers. It can do it the other way too. If they need a man but they’ve got a woman, they can do the same ritual to swap genders.’
‘Is she going to change back?’ Aneshti asked.
‘It’s a curse. Basically. If they did it as an enchantment, it’ll stick around until someone uses Remove Curse to remove it.’
‘Which I’d rather they didn’t,’ Rain said. ‘Seriously, this is like a gift. I got kidnapped and enslaved, but they made me into what I’ve always wanted to be.’ She looked down. ‘Might take me a little while to get used to these though.’
Kana giggled. ‘Did you spend the first couple of hours feeling yourself up to see what it was like?’
‘No!’ Rain went red, then scarlet. ‘It wasn’t more than half an hour.’
‘Yeah, it’s the classic joke when someone gets gender swapped in an anime. Well, male to female. It’s funny that way. I’m not sure how hilarious it would be the other way around. Uh, you said they did two rituals.’
‘Enslavement?’ Constance asked.
Rain nodded. ‘They cast Enslavement on me and then changed the owner to Radekar when they sold me.’
‘But Radekar’s dead,’ Kana said. ‘So you’re free now, right?’
‘It… doesn’t work like that,’ Constance said. ‘Enslavement isn’t a spell I know much about, but I know it’s another curse and Remove Curse is the only way to remove it.’
‘So… So, she’s owned by a corpse.’
‘Uh, no. Ownership passes to the person who kills her previous owner.’
‘She… What?!’
‘It means that you’re–’
‘I got that. I don’t want a slave! We have to remove the curse.’
‘Could be a little difficult,’ Constance said. ‘To remove a curse, you need to know what you’re removing.’
‘I know that.’
‘I figured you would. Well, the number of people with experience of Enslavement is… not huge. It’s another secret spell. That means that if we went to, say, one of the temples in Alabeth–’
‘They might remove the gender curse by accident. I get it.’
‘It won’t make much difference,’ Rain said. ‘You’re not going to start ordering me around or telling me to do unspeakable acts. I have to defend you if you’re in danger, but I’d do that anyway.’
‘Right… This is going to end in tears.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Constance said. She still sounded rather sullen.
‘Okay, what’s up with you?’ Kana asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have been… sulky since we got Rain back,’ Mimi said. ‘It’s all good. Rain’s even got what she always wanted. Why are you acting like someone drowned your favourite cat?’
‘It’s… nothing. It’s stupid.’
‘Give, Constance. I’ve known you long enough to know we have to find out what’s bugging you now rather than later.’
Constance glowered. Then she gave in. ‘It’s Rain.’
‘What about me?’ Rain asked, surprised.
‘You’re gorgeous! Look at you. I just want to sink my face between your breasts and other places.’
‘I’d have thought that would make you happy,’ Aneshti said.
‘But she’s better looking than me!’ Constance wailed.
Chapter Twelve: The Dragon’s Heart
Ice Peaks, Skonar Island, 27 th Nekarte 6024.
It was still cold in the Ice Peaks. It was always cold in the Ice Peaks. Spring just meant that the days were a little warmer and the clear nights tended to be freezing. The journey out to the search area had not been pleasant.
The cave they were searching in was, if anything, a little warmer than the landscape above it, but it was hardly the Great Forest at this time of year. Cadorian was wrapped in enough fur to swallow a bear and he still felt cold. That was not stopping him, of course. They had been hunting through the caverns, excavating where needed, for a week and he knew they were getting close. The others could feel it too and it was having varying effects on his men. Some, most of them the cultists from Sintar, were excited.
Others, most of them the workers brought from Skonar, were nervous, wired, even scared. There had been a couple of cases of people vanishing. All of them had vanished along with their possessions, so it was not some supernatural event; these men had run, deciding that braving the mountains alone was safer than staying in the caves.
Cadorian was taking turns at helping the excavation work. Aside from anything else, it was a way to keep warm. He was, however, taking a break when the call went up. He heard someone yell
‘We’re through!’ and got to his feet quickly, heading for the current excavation site to see whether ‘through’ meant anything useful this time.
What he saw when he got to the cleared rockfall they had been working on was something quite extraordinary. The cave was formed within a sedimentary inclusion into basaltic rock. The world had been turned on its side at some point in the distant past. Or perhaps Soansha had just made it this way. The white rock of the caves was surrounded by grey and there were huge columns of slick, creamy stone which seemed to have been formed as the stone melted both upward and downward. Cadorian knew little about geology, but he found the spikes of stone which grew from floor and ceiling, sometimes meeting in the middle, to be quite fascinating.
But in the cave beyond the rockfall, the world seemed to have decided on trying something entirely new. The white limestone was
black. Not the grey of the other rock the mountains were made of, but an unnatural, too dark black which seemed to swallow the light from the spells being used to light their way. The light spells were, however, glowing brighter here than they had been, as though some power fed them with more magic. From the black stone, crystals had grown. Huge, geometric slabs of varicoloured crystal which might have been some form of quartz had been extruded at all angles. It might have been quartz, but Cadorian doubted that it was. This was something else. This was something…
Soansha had certainly had no hand in.
A sound echoed through the unnatural chamber and several of the diggers – big, fierce men of solid Skonari stock – stepped back as though shocked or scared. It was a dull thump and Cadorian realised that he had been hearing that sound for several days, dulled by the rockfall and the stone around them. He pushed forward rather than stepping back, ducking beneath a crystal the colour of a winter sky and winding his way through others of green and red and purple until he reached what seemed to be the middle of the new cavern’s floor.
There, suspended within a cage of iron which had done little to suppress its nature, was the source of the sound, the strange crystals, and the blackened rock. Few would have said that it really looked like a heart since even those who had seen the heart of an animal or a man knew that hearts were not supposed to be jet black and apparently carved of obsidian. Cadorian had seen this heart before and knew what it looked like. He had cut it from the dead chest of Serpens himself. Even he was not expecting what came next, however.
With a convu
lsive lurch, the smooth, black organ seemed to shrink and then return to its usual size. The action was accompanied by that same, dull, echoing thump they had all heard before. Dead for millennia, the heart of the dragon was still beating. There were a couple of screams from the mouth of the cave, and then the sound of running feet.
But Cadorian Dragonbane just smiled.
Chapter Thirteen: Family Drama
Hillock, 30 th Nekarte 6024.
‘I’m not sure whether to bathe or eat first,’ Aneshti said as they walked through the gates of Hillock once again. It was approaching midday, so lunch was an option. In truth, had they pushed on the night before, they could have got to the town the previous day, but it would have been late and they would have been hunting a place to stay in the evening. Not the best of ideas.
‘Bath,’ Mimi said. ‘I can wait for food, but I want to be clean.
It feels like weeks since I last bathed.’
‘It’s not weeks,’ Constance replied. ‘Well, technically, it might be more than one week, but I still think you’re exaggerating.’
‘The question,’ Kana said, ‘is whether Rain will join us if we have a bath.’
‘That’s a good question,’ Rain said, her cheeks colouring. ‘And the answer is that if you go straight there, then I won’t.
Because I really do have to take care of Ranulf. If you go this evening, you might get a different answer. I have to do it sometime.’ They had, in fact, not travelled all the way from Sintar without bathing, but they had not found a place along the way with public baths, so Rain was yet to join the party or get to openly use the female baths anywhere.
‘Food then,’ Aneshti said. ‘Ranulf will be happy with a nosebag outside the Sword and Staff, then we can find lodging while you sort out our brave, four-legged warrior. And then we hit the baths.’
‘That sounds like a good–’ Constance began, and then she came to an abrupt stop as four armed men barred the way further into town. There were, in fact, five of them, but the last was in robes and standing back from the others. They were all elves.
The Girl Who Dreamed of a Different World Page 26