Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Read online

Reynard peered through the air vent in the ceiling of Room 304 of the Toy Box, Peridor’s swankiest brothel. On the silk-sheeted bed below, a stocky male dwarf was being orally serviced by a morbidly obese human woman, thus validating the well-known stereotype that dwarves harbored a BBH (Big Beautiful Human) fetish.

  Alas, Reynard wasn’t as amused by this spectacle as he might have been, because the duo’s position was such that the dwarf was lying on his back with his hairy face pointed straight at the vent. Currently his eyes were squinched shut in ecstasy at the prostitute’s clearly expert ministrations, but that could change at any moment. And if it happened to be the moment that Reynard’s body was moving over the vent, then a truly monstrous shitstorm would ensue.

  But Reynard couldn’t wait. He checked his watch. The pulsed interrupt signal he had sent into the brothel’s security system would disperse in less than three minutes. If that happened before he reached Room 310, the system would reactivate, the currently dark sensors stationed every ten feet along the duct would glow red once again, and the presence of a foreign body in the ventilation duct would be detected. And then one more person in the brothel would be getting fucked really hard, only this time in a purely figurative sense.

  He took a deep breath and pushed himself across the vent as fast as he could without banging around too much. There were no sudden gasps or exclamations from the room below, so presumably no one saw him. He couldn’t stop to make sure, though.

  As he neared the next vent, about twenty feet farther on, he heard the creaks of a bed being put to heavy use, accompanied by animalistic growls and a woman’s steadily loudening moans. He was pretty sure he knew what he would see before he saw it.

  Indeed, when he reached the vent and carefully peered through the slats, hoping none of the boudoir’s occupants were gazing ceilingward at the moment, he saw that the noisemakers were a chubby redheaded human woman and a wiry, brown-haired kokoroo, one of the bipedal coyote people from out near the Akai desert.

  The kokoroo was most likely one of the brothel’s many male prostitutes. The Toy Box was renowned for catering to every possible sexual taste, and in a world that contained dozens of sentient species of every shape and size, as well as robots, undead, mutants, mages, and a host of other remarkable entities, the possibilities were almost literally endless.

  The kokoroo lightly clamped his fangs on the side of her neck. She squealed in delight. The kokoroo snarled and picked up the pace. He was pounding her from behind, Reynard noted. Doggie-style. Of course.

  Fortunately doggie-style meant that they couldn’t see Reynard, so he wriggled on his way.

  The next room in line, number 308, was currently being used by an older silver-haired gentleman who was chugging away at a rather plain-looking woman whose vacant gaze and pale skin and complete lack of movement suggested she was a zombie. Though the woman’s glassy eyes were pointed roughly in the vent’s direction, they clearly weren’t seeing anything at all. Still, it was with some trepidation that Reynard crawled over the vent. Thankfully nothing happened.

  With his watch informing him he had only slightly more than a minute left, he arrived at the vent for Room 310. When he peered through it, he was confronted with the sight of Optimo Bargeillian, chief of the Peridor Watch, vigorously ass-fucking Prestin Blush, the pouty-faced lead singer of the flux-pop band Upsy-Daisy.

  Or at least it looked like Prestin Blush. It was actually Reynard’s friend and occasional partner-in-crime Zezora Miglia, nicknamed Zezzy, an adult human female metamorph who put her talents to extremely lucrative use as a prostitute here at the Toy Box.

  Zezzy/Prestin’s tanned and slender legs were draped over Bargeillian’s fat, hairy shoulders as the Watch chief pumped away, Zezzy having maneuvered the fascistic bastard into anally drilling her in the missionary position, as planned. This allowed Zezzy to watch for Reynard in the overhead vent.

  When she spotted him, she let go of her client’s sweaty red arm long enough to flash Reynard a single finger, signaling him to wait a moment.

  Wait? Was she mad? There wasn’t time to wait. He glanced at the still-dark sensors in the air duct’s wall, then checked his watch again. He had forty seconds left. Stupid bitch.

  Bargeillian stopped thrusting and let out a low groan. It wasn’t a groan of orgasm, though. No, this was one of those little troubled groans people make when they’re suddenly not feeling well. Bargeillian swayed back on his knees, his penis popping out of Zezzy/Prestin’s anus, which briefly gaped in accord with the size of Bargeillian’s fairly average member before slowly sliding shut.

  Reynard rolled his eyes. He really hadn’t wanted to see that.

  “Whoa,” Bargeillian said, his voice thick and woozy. “I don’ think…”

  Whatever it was he didn’t think, he didn’t have time to articulate it before letting out another, louder groan and keeling over sideways hard enough to make the bed’s baroquely carved black walnut headboard bang against the pink-painted wall.

  “It’s clear,” Zezzy called out. Her trim young man’s body was swiftly growing less trim and less mannish as it morphed into her usual form. “You can come out now.”

  He hadn’t had to be told; the moment Bargeillian’s fall began, Reynard had pushed open the vent cover and started to maneuver out of the duct, feet first. He hung from the open vent a moment, then let go. Then he immediately leaped back up and swatted the vent cover hard enough to make it snap back into place.

  His watch beeped, which meant that inside the vent the sensor lights had started glowing red again.

  “That was fucking close,” he growled at Zezzy.

  She shrugged. She had fully reverted to the form she adopted most often when she was in Reynard’s presence: a short, chubby young woman with pale skin and long blue hair. He suspected this really was her true form (except perhaps the blue hair). After all, if it were an assumed form, why wouldn’t she make herself look stunningly beautiful? He knew he would.

  “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I slipped him the chimmin over five minutes ago. I’m not exactly happy about it myself, you know. I was really kinda hoping to avoid anal with the fat little turd this time around. Besides, everything worked out okay, right? You’re in one piece.”

  “For now.” Reynard grabbed Bargeillian and propped him upright against the headboard.

  “Muggle muh…” Bargeillian mumbled. His eyes rolled whitely, unseeing. A saliva bubble expanded at the corner of his thick lips. He wasn’t unconscious but at the same time he wasn’t aware either. Chimmin, the drug Zezzy had slipped into his wine, turned people into suggestible automatons, little better than the zombie the old guy in Room 308 had been screwing. Anyone under the effect of chimmin would answer any question truthfully, perform any action requested of them, and not remember a single thing if you told them not to. Naturally, a drug of such potency was a Class A Restricted Substance, and the illegal usage or ownership of it had penalties so severe even the Cagliostro Cabals wouldn’t touch the stuff. To get some, Reynard had had to go straight to the source: Maxipettle, the South Seas island that was home to the chimmin plant. And when he got back, he had had to spend the better part of a week sweet-talking Zezzy into going along with his plan. Despite her initial flat-out refusal, he finally managed to convince her that the scheme’s potential rewards so far outweighed the drawbacks that refusal to do it was tantamount to insanity.

  Which wasn’t to say she still wasn’t apprehensive about the whole thing.

  “Let’s hurry this up,” she muttered, glancing at the door. “He only paid for half an hour, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. He looked her up and down, then gestured at the old-fashioned archer’s outfit she was now decked out in, complete with green tights, a green leather vest, and a green peaked cap with a hawk feather in it. It wasn’t real clothing, he knew. It was her own body morphed into the appearance of clothing. “By the way, what’s the deal with the outfit?”

  “I don’t know. I just like it. You
got a problem with that?”

  “No, I mean, why make yourself appear clothed? You were naked just a minute ago. What’s the matter, you don’t want me seeing you naked?”

  “I was naked as Prestin Blush. It’s not the same thing.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No!”

  “But—”

  “Besides, we do not have that kind of relationship.”

  “What if I were to pay for your services?” he asked with a smug smile.

  “Then I would refuse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I would. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Have it your way, Ms. Modesty.” He looked at Bargeillian. The Watch chief’s porky form was slumped against the headboard, his arms limp and heavy at his sides, his head drooping forward, his chin on his breast. A shining string of drool now connected his lower lip with his bloated belly. Farther down, nearly concealed beneath the rolls of gut-fat, his limp penis glistened with lubricant.

  “Mr. Bargeillian,” Reynard said. “I want you to sit fully upright.”

  Instantly Bargeillian’s back stiffened, his shoulders squared, and his head rose, snapping the string of drool. He now sat as erect as a teacher’s pet on the first day of class.

  “Good.” Reynard glanced at Bargeillian’s flaccid penis, then with a frown grabbed one of the bed’s robin’s-egg blue pillows and placed it over Bargeillian’s crotch. Big improvement.

  “What’s the matter?” Zezzy asked with a playful smirk. “Penises make you uncomfortable? You got some issues you need to deal with, maybe?”

  He scowled. “Knock it off. Maybe you like seeing fat guys’ ugly dicks waving in your face, but it’s not something I particularly care for.”

  “Hey, I don’t like it, okay? It’s just a job, that’s all.”

  Reynard returned his attention to the Watch chief. “Mr. Bargeillian. Optimo. Can I call you Optimo? Tell me I can.”

  “You can call me Optimo,” Bargeillian said in a voice so clear and lucid it was startling.

  “Pick your nose and eat it.”

  “Oh, come on!” Zezzy said.

  Bargeillian inserted his right index finger into his right nostril, twisted it around a little, and withdrew it with a clot of snot on the end. He pinched the snot off with his teeth and swallowed it.

  “That’s disgusting,” Zezzy said.

  “More or less disgusting than seeing his shriveled little dick with ass-tainted lube on it?” Reynard asked.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be getting on with this? We have a time limit, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Reynard grabbed the pink velvet–upholstered chair in the corner, set it next to the bed with its back to Bargeillian, then sat down straddling the chair’s back, his arms crossed atop the headrest. After studying Bargeillian’s still-rigid form a moment, he shook his head with a marveling grin. He had never used chimmin before, but damn, this shit was incredible. The chief of the Peridor Watch, one of the toughest, gruffest, most feared men in the whole city-state, had been reduced to a witless puppet. It was a beautiful thing.

  “Now, then, Optimo,” Reynard said, “I have a few questions I need to ask you. First of all, you recently confiscated a shipment of black-market ISR bots, correct?”

  Bargeillian’s mouth opened but nothing emerged except a thin squeaking sound.

  “Optimo?”

  The squeak was replaced by a low, buzzing voice, which issued from Bargeillian’s open mouth without his lips and tongue moving so much as a millimeter: “Unauthorized tampering of subject detected. Countermeasures activated.”

  Reynard frowned and glanced at Zezzy who was likewise frowningly glancing at him.

  “What does—” she began.

  Bargeillian’s head exploded, showering Reynard and Zezzy and everything else in the room with blood, wads of skin, and blobs of brains. A small shard of the Watch chief’s skull thwacked Reynard on the cheek.

  Reynard tried to scramble to his feet but got one foot tangled in the chair’s legs, and he and the chair crashed to the gore-spattered carpet. Meanwhile Zezzy was backing toward the door screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  His eyes flew wide when he saw her extend one hand behind her for the doorknob. In her panic she was going to stumble out into the hall, still screaming, and bring everyone—the Toy Box’s employees, the customers, Bargeillian’s bodyguards waiting downstairs, and ultimately the Watch itself—down on their heads.

  “Zezzy, don’t!” he shouted, thanking Vävel that the Toy Box’s bedrooms were soundproof.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. Her groping hand found the doorknob. Her fingers closed around it. She started to turn toward the door.

  He kicked the chair aside so hard one of its legs snapped off, and then started to spring up. His left foot skidded in the blood with a short sharp sound that reminded him of a zipper zipping, and he crashed back down to the floor.

  Just then Zezzy paused in her turn, blinked three times, then leaned to the right and vomited.

  Reynard scrambled to his feet and rushed toward her before she could recover enough to open the door. By the time he got there, he saw he didn’t have to; when she turned to face him, her eyes were scared but free of the panic that had held her in its grip a few seconds earlier.

  “What the fuck just happened?” she said.

  “His head exploded.”

  “No shit! But why?”

  “I don’t know. That voice said something about unauthorized tampering.”

  “It sounded like a robot. Do you think he was a robot?”

  Reynard turned and studied the wet red meat that crowned the ex-Watch chief’s shoulders.

  “No, but maybe he had an implant or something. I know the URWA’s been experimentally implanting some of their agents with tracking devices and stuff like that.”

  “What the fuck are we gonna do?” Zezzy asked.

  Good question. Reynard looked around. From the costume cabinet next to the door to the ornate gilt-framed mirror on the wall beside the bathroom, the entire room was spattered with bits of Bargeillian’s head. There was no way they could clean or cover this up in the fifteen minutes they had left before the session expired. Besides, what would they do with the body? There was nowhere to hide it. The only option was to flee. If they could get themselves cleaned up in time, he and Zezzy could stroll right out the front door. Sure, Bargeillian’s guards had seen her when she led their boss upstairs, but she could transform herself into anyone, so…

  Wait.

  “Could you transform into Bargeillian?” he asked.

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then glanced at the gory mess on the bed.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Her body swelled up and out, her features shifting, her blue hair shortening and turning brown, her archer’s outfit morphing into a black business robe with a Peridor Watch logo on the breast. The blood and bits of brains remained, but their relative positions shifted as they rode the transmuting flesh like bits of debris on ocean swells.

  “Hold on, it’ll take me a couple seconds to get his voice right,” she said, her voice starting out as a deep manly rumble then slowly modulating as she spoke, coming closer and closer to Bargeillian’s more raspy tones. “Is this about right?”

  “A touch higher.”

  “What about now?”

  “Perfect.”

  She spread her hands. “What good will this do, though? We’ve still got a body, and it’s not like I can start a new career as the chief of the Peridor Watch. So what now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She goggled at him. Or rather Bargeillian goggled at him, an effect that looked weird and dissonant; it was an expression Bargeillian would never have made, except maybe when he was a child. The man had been totally unflappable and tough as troll hide.

  “What the hell does that mean, you’re not sure?” she said, reverting
to her normal feminine voice, which, coming from Bargeillian’s fat, jowly face, was even more dissonant than the goggle had been.

  “It means I’m considering options.”

  She rolled Bargeillian’s beady brown eyes and flapped his flabby arms. “Well, shit, I don’t think we really have much time for fucking consideration of all our lovely fucking options.”

  “Stop getting hysterical.”

  “I am not getting fucking hysterical!” she shrieked.

  He ignored her, then eyed the corpse on the bed.

  “Does that look like Bargeillian to you?”

  She blinked at him, her eyes morphing back to her usual green ones though the rest of her stayed the same. Then she turned and studied the corpse.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “But would it if you’d never seen him naked?”

  “Well, the body type’s the same…”

  “Lots of older men have bodies like that.”

  She shook Bargeillian’s head. “What are you suggesting, exactly? It’s not like we can sneak the body out of the room.” She paused, frowned. “Can we?” Before he could answer she forged ahead: “And if we leave it here it’ll be found by Lorelei.”

  “Lorelei?”

  “Yeah, the next girl. Bargeillian was my last client of the day.” She folded her arms across her chest with a doleful sigh. “Probably my last client ever.”

  “Now, now. We’ll find a way out of this.”

  “How?”

  “I’m working on it. But whatever the plan, I need to clean myself off first.” He turned and made his way toward the bathroom, trying not to step on any of the larger clots of brain matter as he went.

  “Yeah, me too,” Zezzy said, heading after him.

  He paused in the bathroom doorway and turned toward her. “No, actually, you should stay just the way you are.”

  She stopped in mid-stride and glared at him, her body swiftly morphing back to her own. “Excuse me? What in Nün’s name is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you might need to keep the…” He gestured at her crimson-spattered body. “The evidence on you. You might need it later as an alibi or something.”

  Her glare collapsed into a gawp. “Oh.”

  “But like I said, I don’t actually have a plan yet. Or at least not…uh…”

  He stopped talking, stopped thinking, able only to stare at what was now transpiring on the bed behind Zezzy. Seeing his reaction, Zezzy whirled, then screamed.

  Emerging from Bargeillian’s neck stump was an eight-legged mechanical creature that vaguely resembled a large metal scorpion. Its long, spidery forelegs gripping Bargeillian’s clavicles for leverage, it pulled itself up and out through the meat and sinew with a thick, wet tearing sound. On its front end was a small pulsing red light.

  “What the fuck is that?” Zezzy screamed.

  “I…I have no idea. Some kind of robot, but…”

  But what was it doing inside the chief of the Peridor Watch? Was this the origin of the weird robot voice they had heard right before Bargeillian’s head blew up? It seemed more than likely. Unless, of course, there was a whole nest of those things in there.

  When it had pulled itself free of Bargeillian’s neck, it perched atop the stump a moment, front end slightly raised as if sniffing the air.

  Reynard had a sinking feeling he knew exactly what was going to happen next…

  Indeed, the creature swiveled toward the duo in the bathroom doorway, its ominous blinking light pointed straight at them.

  Zezzy swallowed. “Is it—”

  Fast as a centipede, the creature raced down Bargeillian’s corpse and streaked across the bed toward them.

  Zezzy screamed again, this time so loud Reynard’s eardrums throbbed with pain.

  Reynard grasped her shoulders and yanked her with him into the bathroom even as the scorpion-thing launched itself off the bed straight at them. The moment the two of them were fully inside the bathroom, Reynard flung out a leg and kicked the door shut. A millisecond later something slammed into the door, then dropped to the carpet.

  “What the hell is going on?” Zezzy asked in a choked whisper as they watched the creature’s shadow move back and forth along the narrow gap under the door.

  “Well, this scorpion robot thingie came out of a corpse whose head just exploded—”

  “I fucking know that, dumbshit!”

  “Well, I don’t know any more than you do. I guess the chimmin activated something that was already inside him. But I don’t have the slightest idea what that something is.”

  “Well, then, what the fuck are we gonna do?”

  Good question. Reynard glanced around the bathroom. No other doors. No windows. There was a fan above the queen-sized tub, but it was way too small for him to climb through. If they could get the grille off, Zezzy might be able to shrink small enough to get inside, but there were no doubt motion sensors in there, and in any case, he didn’t trust her to come back for him, so he didn’t even mention the idea. What else was at hand? Toilet. Towels. Wastebasket. Mirror. Broken glass? No, sharp objects usually didn’t work so well against metal. But the tub! Water! Maybe they could short-circuit it.

  A series of cracking sounds from the door made him whirl back around. The shadow had stopped moving, and judging by the noises and the way the door was vibrating in synch with them, the creature was now tearing through the wood.

  Reynard grabbed the wastebasket and started filling it with water from the faucet in the tub.

  “When I give the signal I want you to open the door, fast,” he said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  There was a louder crack, and the door jolted violently. Several smaller shadows fell around the main one as chunks of wood from the door came loose. At this rate, the creature would be through in less than a minute.

  “If you can think of a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” he snapped.

  “Okay, okay!”

  The wastebasket nearly full now, Reynard shut off the water and took up a position to one side of the door, one hand gripping the wastebasket’s rim, the other supporting its bottom. With his head he motioned for Zezzy to open the door.

  She laid a hand on the knob, winced when the door trembled again as the creature tore out another hunk of wood, then took a deep breath and pulled the door open, staying behind it as if it were a huge wooden shield.

  The instant the door began to open, the creature darted inside. It paused for the briefest instant before detecting Reynard to its left and swinging toward him, but a brief instant was all Reynard needed to unleash the whole wastebasket’s worth of water upon the creepy insectoid robot.

  The force and weight of the water sent the thing flying back against the open door, and that impact, combined with the sudden surge of water pouring under and around the door, made Zezzy yelp in surprise. The creature caromed off the door and spun into the center of the bathroom, underbelly up, legs crooked and stiff like those of a dead spider.

  Reynard suspected the creature had been short-circuited, but he wasn’t about to hang around to find out for sure. He slammed the wastebasket upside-down over the creature’s still slowly spinning form, trapping it (though if it was still alive, or activated, or whatever, the wastebasket wasn’t even remotely heavy enough to hold it for more than a second or two), then grabbed Zezzy and fled the bathroom, slamming the door as hard as he could behind him.

  For a moment the two of them just stood there, panting, watching the door, surveying the deep, wide gouges in its base and the heaps of splinters on the carpet before it. No sounds came from the other side.

  “Did you get it?” Zezzy asked.

  “I guess so. It—”

  Two short, faint beeps sounded from the bathroom, followed by a third, longer beep.

  Reynard and Zezzy looked at each other.

  “Do you think that means it’s shutting down?” she whispered.

  He shrugged. “I—”

  There was
a loud whoomp from the bathroom followed by the sound of the wastebasket banging off the edge of the tub.

  Reynard and Zezzy slowly backed away from the door, eyes fixed on it all the while. Dimly Reynard could make out the faint clicks of the creature’s metal legs on the bathroom tiles as it skittered about. It seemed to be turning this way and that, as if assessing its surroundings.

  The clicking paused. Reynard and Zezzy froze, not even breathing.

  There was a rapid series of clicks as the creature scuttled to the door, and then the door trembled and the sound of splintering wood resumed anew.

  Reynard grabbed the heavy oaken table that stood near the bathroom door, flipped it on its side, and rammed it top-first against the door.

  “That’ll keep it busy a little longer,” he said.

  “What do we do now?” Zezzy said.

  “Personally, I think leaving would probably be a good idea at this point.”

  She looked at him as if he were insane. “How? They’ll see us! If the Toy Box’s security guards don’t, Bargeillian’s bodyguards will.”

  “What are you whining about? You’re a shapeshifter. You can morph into the friggin’ owner if you want.”

  “I’m covered in blood, dumbass!”

  “So morph into the owner wearing a blood-colored costume…”

  Costume. Of course.

  He strode to the costume cabinet and flung open the doors. Inside was a dizzying array of fetishwear: rubber suits, maid outfits, man-sized diapers, butcher’s aprons, military uniforms, mage robes, mummy wraps, and dozens more. But the one Reynard selected, partly because it would cover his whole body and partly because it amused him, was a full-body GO GO DREAMY costume. The creation of Acme Enterprises, GO GO DREAMY (always spelled all in capitals) was a white cartoon elephant that had somehow become the most popular cultural icon in the United Realms, its round white face with its little black oval eyes, floppy ears, and short, stumpy trunk (it had no tusks or mouth) gracing every object imaginable, from notebooks to cars to vibrators (adults loved GO GO DREAMY just as much as, if not more than, children). GO GO DREAMY was a multi-billion decan industry. Some people half-jokingly said it was the most powerful entity in the history of the United Realms.

  Grinning, Reynard pulled the costume off the rack.

  “What are you doing?” Zezzy asked.

  He scanned the hanging outfits for something for her, something that wouldn’t take her long to put on.

  Another crack sounded from the bathroom door, this one the loudest yet.

  “Here,” he said, grabbing a multicolored mage robe and a mask that resembled a fat, rosy-cheeked baby. “Put these on.”

  She stared at the proffered outfit for a moment with an almost disgusted look, as if one or both of the items held unhappy memories for her, but then with a sigh she snatched them and started to put them on.

  There was a loud sharp bang from the bathroom door. With only one leg inside the pants of the GO GO DREAMY costume, Reynard twisted around and saw that the bathroom door was split nearly all the way up its middle. The table he had shoved against the door had been knocked an inch or two out of place.

  “Shit,” he hissed. He jammed his other leg into the pants, then hurried to the bathroom door, having to take long, high strides in order to run in the suit’s big puffy feet. As he passed the bed, he swiped the blood-soaked sheet from it, careful not to let it touch the outside of the suit.

  Peering over the edge of the upended table, he saw the creature’s forelegs poking through a narrow hole near the base of the door. As he watched, the legs prized free another chunk of wood, widening the hole, revealing a glimpse of the robot’s sleek silvery body on the other side. He stuffed the sheet into the crevice between the table and the door, then slammed the table against the door again. After a brief pause, the splintering sounds resumed. By then, Reynard was halfway to the costume cabinet again.

  Already fully disguised, Zezzy waited impatiently, her nervous breaths muffled and echoey inside the baby mask, while Reynard pulled on the top half of the GO GO DREAMY suit, then buckled the large, round mask into place. The moment it was on, he realized this might not have been the best choice of costume after all. Not only was he already starting to sweat, but his range of vision was reduced to a pair of narrow ovals. Alas, it was too late to change.

  “Now what?” Zezzy asked. “We just run out of the building? You think no one’ll ask what we’re doing and why we’re dressed like this? By Vävel, this was a stupid plan.”

  “Now, now. Don’t be so negative. We could always—”

  There was a loud, sharp bang, and the overturned table juddered half a foot across the carpet.

  “Uh-oh,” Reynard said.

  The creature scuttled into view around the edge of the table.

  “Shit,” Zezzy cried. She whirled around to open the door while Reynard tensed, ready for the creature’s advance.

  But it didn’t advance. Instead, with a complex series of high, quick whirs and clicks, each section of its jointed legs telescoped to an incredible degree, lengthening and lengthening until the creature’s body was suspended six feet off the carpet by an angular network of needle-thin rods.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked,” Reynard said. Beside him, Zezzy glanced back over her shoulder as she pulled open the door, and let out a yelp at the sight of the new-and-improved robot monster.

  A compartment beneath the blinking red light on the creature’s front end popped open, revealing a row of tiny silver pellets inside. An instant later one of the pellets shot out straight at them.

  “Down!” Reynard hollered, flinging himself atop Zezzy and sending the two of them toppling out the open door and onto the elegant red-and-gold carpeting of the hallway beyond.

  The pellet sailed over their falling bodies—missing Reynard’s back by centimeters—streaked across the hallway, and struck the opposite wall, where it exploded with enough force to leave a hole in the plaster the size of a man’s head. Reynard stared at the hole through the haze of dust and smoke, and muttered, “Oh, lovely.” A direct hit from one of those pellets would probably be an instant kill-shot even for an immortal like himself.

  Reynard sprang to his feet, pulling Zezzy up with him, and galumphed down the hall as fast as he could in the ridiculous, ill-chosen costume.

  Already doors up and down the corridor were opening and frightened faces were peeping out to see what all the noise was about. A naked elf girl stepped out of Room 305, a quizzical frown on her face, which along with her hair and chest was coated with a pearlescent film of semen. Drops of it oozed off her and plopped to the carpet.

  “What’s happening?” she asked Reynard and Zezzy as they raced past.

  “We’re under attack!” Reynard cried, deepening his voice so as to eliminate any possibility of a positive vocal identification during the now-inevitable police investigation. “Get to cover!”

  As if to underscore this, there was a loud crash down the hallway behind him. An instant later a woman screamed.

  The elf girl gave one terse nod and ducked back inside. You had to love those unflappable elves.

  They came to an intersection. Reynard paused, unable to recall which way the main exit was.

  Zezzy knew, though, and not bothering to wait for Reynard to recollect correctly or ask, she veered right, yanking him after her, he stumbling and nearly falling in the GO GO DREAMY costume’s huge feet. As he rounded the corner, he chanced a quick glance down the corridor they were vacating and saw the scorpion-thing scurrying after them thirty feet back. About fifteen feet behind it, a man’s nude body lay in a spreading pool of blood. Judging by the body’s white hair, it might have been the corpse-fucker from room 308.

  This new corridor, Reynard saw with dismay, was long and straight. They would be sitting ducks (or rather, running ducks) if the creature fired any more missiles. Even if it didn’t, at the rate it was running it would catch up with them long before they reached the hallway’s end.


  But what else could they do? Fight it? Duck into one of the rooms? None of the rooms on this floor had windows, and as had already been amply demonstrated, doors and walls offered little protection against this thing.

  Screams rang out behind them. A door slammed. Reynard heaved a frustrated sigh, wishing the costume allowed him to turn his head so he could keep periodic tabs on the creature. He hated not knowing what was happening.

  Thankfully Zezzy was keeping tabs, and the next time she glanced back, her eyes went huge. She threw herself against Reynard, driving him toward the right wall just in time to avoid another missile, which went zipping on down the corridor straight at the team of silver-suited, heavily armed security personnel who had just rounded the corner at the corridor’s far end.

  Reynard missed the ensuing calamity because Zezzy’s shove had sent them hurtling straight toward a door marked 329, a door that just happened to open as they hurtled toward it, with the result that the two of them crashed into the red-haired woman in the chainmail bikini who had opened the door. The three of them tumbled to the floor in the room beyond.

  Down the hall there was an explosion, then screams and the bark of small arms fire. Bullets whicked past the doorway. As soon as he had gathered his wits Reynard disentangled himself from the women and pushed the door closed.

  Everyone stood up. At least everyone who had been in the doorway stood up; the skinny naked middle-aged man on the bed merely struggled against his manacles and made squealing noises through his gag.

  “What the heck’s going on out there?” asked the red-haired woman, her nervous, whiny voice somehow at odds with the chainmail she wore and the rack of whips and canes next to the bed.

  “There’s a killer scorpion robot-thing on the loose,” Zezzy said.

  The redhead peered at her. “Zezzy? Is that you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is there any other way out of this room?” Reynard asked, once again deepening his voice.

  “Um, no,” the redhead said. She stared at Reynard’s masked form a moment then turned to Zezzy. “Who’s this? I thought you had Bargeillian.”

  “She did,” Reynard said. “But we lost track of Mr. Bargeillian in the confusion. We believe the robot was sent to assassinate him and anyone associated with him. Which means we have to get Ms. Miglia here to safety.”

  “Oh, I see.” The redhead nodded, her doubts quelled and her fears eased by his confident, authoritative manner. She probably assumed he was with Bargeillian’s bodyguard team or the local Watch or the URWA or some other lawful agency. Sooner or later she would wonder about the GO GO DREAMY costume, of course, but by then he hoped to be long gone.

  The man on the bed shrilled against his gag. Everyone ignored him.

  More gunshots rang out. Reynard tensely watched the thin shadows of the robot’s legs moving about at the bottom of the door. Every now and then the legs clicked and scritched against the door itself, though it was hard to tell if the robot was probing the door for access or simply seeking purchase against the hail of bullets.

  “So what do we do now?” Zezzy asked.

  “For now, wait and see,” Reynard said.

  The man on the bed shrilled again.

  “Shut up, Herman,” the redhead called over her shoulder.

  The gunfire intensified, more guards having apparently joined the others at the end of the corridor. The creature advanced against the onslaught, and the spindly shadows passed out of sight beyond the right side of the door. A moment later there was another explosion down the hall, followed by more screams, some of which lingered on and on. After a brief lull, the gunfire resumed, less intense now, though not by much. The door to the room shuddered as a stray bullet thwacked into it.

  Suddenly there was a high-pitched whining sound from the corridor, a sound that reminded Reynard of an overloaded machine that’s about to burn itself out. He hoped that was what it was—that the robot had been damaged or had exhausted its power and was now seizing up.

  But then one of the guards shrieked, “Holy fucking shit! What the fuck is it—”

  The succeeding cacophony of mechanical squeals, groans, and whirs drowned out the rest of his statement. The cacophony sped down the hall toward the guards, many of whom screamed in what was clearly horror rather than pain. Some of the screams swiftly decreased in volume as the screamers took cover or ran away.

  “Let’s go,” Reynard told Zezzy. “If we go back the way we came, we can still get around to the exit, right?”

  “The long way, yeah, but—”

  “Well, I’m going. You can stay if you want.”

  Ignoring her protests, he opened the door and peeked out in the direction the scorpion-thing had gone. The end of the hallway was thick with haze amid which faint shapes moved. The largest and strangest shape resembled a cross between a giant tumbleweed and a Thüselanyan torture device. This could only be the robot. It had sprouted dozens more wiry appendages, which with frightening speed and precision flailed, stabbed, and slashed at the shadowy shapes of the few guards still standing upright. Now and then gunfire flashed bright orange amid the murk, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good.

  “Come on.” He grabbed Zezzy’s wrist in one fat, three-fingered GO GO DREAMY hand and pulled her down the hall in the direction they had come.

  At the intersection they turned right and joined the stream of panicked whores and johns who had likewise chosen to take the longer and currently safer route toward the Toy Box’s main exit.

  On every side naked breasts wobbled. Penises bobbed. Flabby asses jounced. A purple-haired male gnome covered head-to-toe in whipped cream raced along shrieking loud as a tweenage girl, specks of cream flying off him to spatter the walls, the floor, and the faces of everyone in his wake. The morbidly obese woman Reynard had seen through the vent in room 304 puffed along as best she could, the dwarf she had been servicing clutched so tightly to her ample bosom it was a wonder the little fellow didn’t get smothered amid the rolls of pink flesh. At one point Reynard collided with a middle-aged human woman who wore only a leather harness and a collar with a leash trailing behind, and it was only after the woman had mumbled a distracted apology and sprinted away that he realized she had been Derry Kellio, the Kansian ambassador to Peridor.

  The stream of evacuees turned right, then left, then right, then right again, and finally came to the wide marble staircase leading down to the Toy Box’s grand lobby with its crystal chandeliers, burgundy chaise longues, and gilt-framed erotic art. Trying to make their way up the stairs against the frantic tide were six of Bargeillian’s bodyguards and a dozen of the Toy Box’s security personnel.

  Across the landing at the top of the stairs, another corridor stretched away. This was the last stretch of the route he and Zezzy had originally planned to take, the route down which the creature had stormed toward the security guards.

  It was also the route the creature was close to the end of, judging by the screams, gunfire, and smoke coming from a side-corridor that met up with the main corridor about fifty feet past the staircase. As Reynard watched, wondering just how close the creature was, the top half of one of the guards, loops of intestines trailing behind him like the world’s worst prolapse, shot into view from the side corridor, slammed into the wall of the main corridor, leaving a huge expressionistic blotch of blood and viscera on what appeared to be an original Zogodogo oil painting, and tumbled to the floor.

  This gruesome spectacle sent everyone on the staircase into more of a frenzy than ever. Shrieking louder than banshees, they stampeded forward, driving the bodyguards and security personnel back toward the lobby.

  Reynard and Zezzy were almost halfway down the stairs when a mechanical whir grew audible behind them, and the screams of the crowd’s rearmost members rose several notches, shifting from fear to pure pants-shitting terror. Reynard twisted around as best he could in the clumsy costume just in time to see the creature emerge from the main corridor and step onto the landing.

 
; The robot had changed so much Reynard thought at first he was looking at an entirely different entity. Its body was now larger than an adult man and bristled with a scrotum-tightening array of deadly appendages, including jointed arms tipped with blades, flexible whip-like rods, a pair of huge metal lobster claws, and over a dozen gun barrels that could swivel about to point in nearly any direction desired. What’s more, the aperture below the blinking light (which had turned purple, oddly enough) was still there, only now it was the size of a Rottweiller’s open mouth and contained a row of missiles the size of cigars.

  “Oh, come on!” Zezzy cried. “How can it have gotten that much bigger? Hasn’t anyone told this thing the laws of physics?”

  The guards down below opened fire. Some of the evacuees on the stairs wisely ducked. Others, too panicked to notice the gunfire, continued trying to flee and wound up tripping over those who had ducked. A few also got hit by friendly fire and collapsed limp and bleeding onto the stairs. Their fallen, twitching bodies of course tripped up still others, and so on and so on until all progress was brought to a halt.

  After hunkering down with Zezzy against the stairwell’s railing, Reynard dared another glance back. The creature, seemingly oblivious of the bullets denting its metal hull, had paused upon the landing and was sweeping its front end back and forth across the crowd. Suddenly it froze, and the purple light blinked faster, as if in excitement. It was pointed right at Reynard and Zezzy.

  “Fuck!” Reynard seized Zezzy’s hand. “We’re out of here.”

  Without even bothering to look over the edge to see where they would land, Reynard hopped the railing with Zezzy in tow.

  And not a moment too soon: As they plummeted toward the lobby fifteen feet below, gunfire strafed the section of staircase they had just vacated, filling the air with blood and screams and chips of marble.

  Reynard landed feet-first on a chaise-longue. Zezzy missed it by inches and crashed to the floor with a pained yowl.

  “Fuck!” she screamed, rolling back and forth on the gold-and-green Briéskan carpet and clutching her left shin. “My fucking ankle!”

  “Can you move at all? We kinda need to hurry.”

  “No shit. Help me up.” She stretched out a hand. He took it and pulled her to her feet. Or foot, rather, since she kept her injured foot in the air.

  Reynard glanced up at the staircase, half afraid he would see the creature clambering over the railing toward them. There was no sign of it. The guards’ gunfire had intensified, he noticed. Perhaps that was distracting the creature. Perhaps the guards would continue distracting it long enough for him and Zezzy to make their escape.

  Half a second after he had entertained this hopeful thought a massive explosion rocked the bottom of the stairs where the guards were. Chunks of marble and bits of people showered down all over the lobby. A hand still clutching a gun hit the ground a few feet away from Reynard and Zezzy.

  Reynard took a quick look around, assessing his options. The Toy Box’s main entrance faced the stairwell, so that was definitely a no-go. More promisingly, behind the stairwell, at the rear of the lobby, hallways extended to both the left and the right. People were fleeing down each of them in equal numbers.

  “Where do those hallways go?” he asked Zezzy. Behind them, the remains of the security team resumed firing at the creature, while far away in the distance the wail of Watch van sirens grew audible. “Is there a back exit?”

  “Um, yeah,” Zezzy said, her voice thick and slow. “We come into work that way. We, uh…I think…um, I think I’m not…uh…” She swayed on her foot. Through the eyeholes of the baby mask, he saw her eyelids flutter and her eyes roll up, then she toppled sideways. Somehow he managed to catch her before she cracked her head open on the marble floor.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. This just got worse and worse. He stared at her limp body in his arms. He supposed he could just leave her here…

  But no. She could finger him. Besides, he kind of liked her.

  He slung Zezzy’s limp body over his shoulder and made his way as fast as he could to the rear of the lobby. There, he waffled a moment, torn between the two hallways, which appeared pretty much identical: wood paneling, brass lamps, numerous doors, and a right-angle bend about fifty feet down. He finally chose the left-hand hallway for no particular reason, and joined the press of bodies therein.

  While the lobby continued resounding with explosions, gunfire, and screams, the bottlenecked evacuees advanced slowly down the corridor. Too slowly for Reynard’s comfort. Unlike the rest of the cattle in this chute, he knew exactly what the creature was after, and hence knew it was only a matter of time before the damn thing made its way back here. Alas the cattle were too tightly packed in the corridor for him to be able to shoulder his way through, so he just glowered at the witless heads in front of him and silently exhorted them to move faster. In doing so, his gaze fell upon a woman a few feet ahead of him and to his right. She had shoulder-length black hair and light brown skin, and wore a pink-and-white outfit reminiscent of a nurse’s. Though he could see her face only in one-quarter profile, he was sure it was Solace, a surety that was confirmed a few seconds later when she glanced back, clearly worried about the creature’s current whereabouts. Her eyes settled for a moment on Reynard—or rather, on the GO GO DREAMY costume, for she had no way of knowing who was inside it—and her eyebrows rose a fraction in surprise. Then her eyes moved on, and she turned back around.

  Reynard, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring at her. What was she doing here? Was she a prostitute? A client? More likely the former, given the cute little nursey outfit she was dolled up in.

  Damn! He never would have imagined her working a job like that. If this place stayed open (an admittedly dubious prospect at this point), he would have to return for a private session.

  The crowd inched forward. The right-angle turn up ahead drew closer. A gust of cool fresh air blew through the GO GO DREAMY mask’s eye-holes, stirring the stuffy air within and partly drying the sweat on Reynard’s face. At the same moment, he heard clear, unmuffled sounds from outside—shouts, Watch sirens, passing traffic. There had to be an open door not far past the corner, then. Thank the Twelve.

  An explosion boomed behind him. He turned. There was now a smoking hole in the back wall of the lobby with shards of wood and plaster and twisted fragments of broken bodies strewn around it. Other, less broken bodies lay screaming and burning nearby. One of Bargeillian’s black-suited bodyguards backed into view at the end of the corridor, his teeth clenched with determination as he fired round after round at something just out of sight in the lobby. He kept firing even as a metal tentacle tipped with something that looked like a meat cleaver whisked out and neatly lopped off his head. The head and the body toppled away in opposite directions, blood geysering, the body’s spasming hand firing off two more shots, one of which disappeared into the neck of an extremely fit naked man at the back of the crowd in the hallway. Blood jetting from what was likely a severed artery, the man made a gargling sound and sank out of sight. An instant later the robot appeared at the mouth of the corridor and peered down it, its purple light blinking rapidly. The damn thing was now the size of a horse.

  “Shit!” Reynard hissed. He whirled back around and began pushing harder than ever against the evacuees ahead of him. Fortunately everyone else had the same idea, and the crowd surged ahead.

  He was only five feet from the bend when the gunfire started. The hallway filled with screams. Reynard felt a brief tug at the top of the GO GO DREAMY mask and saw a few bullet holes appear in the wall ahead of him. Gritting his teeth, he drew upon some hitherto-untapped reserve of strength and muscled forward, sending heads knocking and bodies tumbling. In what seemed like no time, he found himself at the corner, with Solace right beside him. He seized her around the waist with one puffy white elephant arm, causing her to yelp in startlement, then pressed her to him and continued barging forward, carrying her and Zezzy to cover around the corner.

&nbs
p; Though the gunfire ceased the moment they were out of the creature’s sight, though he was wheezing for breath from the weight of the two women, though so much sweat was pouring off him his feet were squishing in the costume’s boots, he didn’t stop or slow down. He just kept on shouldering forward because he felt sure he knew exactly what the robot was going to do next.

  He had made it to within an arm’s length of the open double doors at the end of the corridor, finally in sight of the outside world—the blue sky, the white clouds, the Toy Box’s green manicured lawn across which evacuees were sprinting away while a crew of Watch officers sprinted forward—when a missile exploded at the bend in the corridor behind him. The resultant shockwave flung the entire mass of evacuees forward, sending Reynard, Zezzy, and Solace straight through the open doorway to collapse amid a heap of others on the sidewalk outside.

  Slowly the mass of groaning, shell-shocked bodies unsnarled themselves and rolled away or rose shakily. Ears ringing, flesh still vibrating from the blast, Reynard pushed himself to his feet, re-slung the still-unconscious Zezzy over his shoulder, then helped Solace up. Drops of blood gleamed in her hair. Thankfully the blood didn’t appear to be hers. She looked back through the open doorway at the heaps of unlucky evacuees who had been too close to the explosion and now lay in mangled bloody piles inside.

  “By the Twelve…” She looked at Reynard. “You…you saved my life.”

  Not wanting to risk speaking even in a funny voice—he wasn’t sure he could pull it off in his current state of spacey exhaustion—he extended one GO GO DREAMY arm and stuck up one fat GO GO DREAMY thumb.

  Solace just blinked at him, looking bewildered. Then her eyes shifted to something over his shoulder and widened in horror. At the same time mechanical whirs sounded from the corridor at his back.

  Not even bothering to look, he shoved Solace as hard as he could into the bushes next to the sidewalk then raced away in the opposite direction. Behind him, the Watch officers on the lawn opened fire. The creature opened fire in return.

  After he had gone about fifty feet, Reynard paused to look back and was relieved to see one of the officers leading Solace and the rest of the survivors away from the melee. The other officers’ fusillade was keeping the creature contained in the doorway for now, and more officers were racing across the lawn to join the battle, many of these newcomers equipped with more powerful ordnance: grenade launchers, zonar cannons, rapid-fire rail guns.

  Reynard turned and ran on, soon ducking behind a row of hedges to get out of sight of the creature and the officers, then following the hedges toward the property’s outer wall.

  On his shoulder Zezzy stirred and moaned.

  “You awake finally?” he said.

  “Uhhh.” A pause, then: “Ow! Put me down!”

  “What about your foot?”

  “It’s not my foot. I just healed that.”

  “You what?” He slipped her off his shoulder, glad to be free of the weight.

  “I healed,” she said, twisting around to look at her backside. “My ankle was broken. I knitted it back together. I’m a Level 4 metamorph, remember? I can do that with my body.”

  “Nice trick.”

  “Yeah. It’s not as easy getting bullets out of my ass, though.”

  “Bullets?” He craned around her body for a look at her rear end. Indeed, in the seat of her red mage robe was a small round hole, the fabric around it stained a darker red. “Sorry. I didn’t even notice that.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, voice tight with exertion. “You got me out of there, so it’s cool. Besides, I can fix it; it’s just not easy. I have to make the flesh sort of harden and flow around the bullet, pushing it back toward the surface and knitting the wound closed behind it as it goes. I did it once before when…” She gasped. “There we go.” She stepped to one side, revealing a bloody bullet on the grass.

  “You’re full of tricks,” he said.

  “You have no idea.”

  There was a deep, reverberating boom powerful enough to make nearby trees shake and Reynard and Zezzy totter on their feet. In the sound’s wake came the roar of part of the Toy Box collapsing. That hadn’t been one of the creature’s missiles. That had been a Crux implosion bomb. Apparently the Watch had felt the situation was dire enough to resort to scorched-earth methods.

  Reynard and Zezzy watched a cloud of gray smoke rise up over the tops of the hedges.

  “It seems kind of soon to be using something like that,” Zezzy said.

  “Unless someone at the Watch already knows what they’re dealing with. That thing came out of their chief’s body, after all.”

  They stared at each other a moment.

  “We’d better get way the fuck out of Peridor for a long, long time,” Zezzy said.

  “Agreed,” he replied. “But first let’s find somewhere to ditch these clothes and get cleaned up.”