22. How to Sell a King #2
When the Way Stone crumbled to dust between our hands, the world snapped back into being. Wet heat struck my face, and I opened my eyes to find the incredible and admittedly intimidating sight looming ahead of me.
The Gorgon King’s fortress rose up before us.
Towers of dark stone twisted toward the sky, their walls wrapped in flowering vines and thick, black-rooted creepers.
Massive roots coiled through the stonework like veins through flesh.
Strange silver flowers bloomed from cracks in the battlements, their petals opening and closing in slow breaths, despite there being no wind at all to move them.
The whole place felt alive. Not in the warm and comforting way of a forest, but in the way of a thing that watches you from the dark and weighs up, very carefully, whether you might be worth the trouble of eating.
And given that I am irresistible to absolutely everyone, I was almost certainly on the menu.
“Cheerful place,” I muttered, brushing the dust off my hand.
Beside me, Aster finally released his death-grip on my arm, his face gone a sickly grey.
“Hate…. Fucking…. Portals,” he muttered, smacking his lips together like a man deciding whether to be sick.
“Not overly fond of them myself,” I admitted, as my stomach felt as though it had been left behind in The?kós.
“We’ve only the one stone left now. So, whatever happens in there…”
“We come out with Theron,” Aster finished. “So. How are we doing this exactly?”
“I reckon a good old-fashioned snatch and grab,” I murmured. As for Aster, he shrugged his big shoulders and said,
“Works for me.”
We came in low, off the road, picking our way through the strange wet jungle that crowded the fortress on every side.
Past trees that wept sap the colour of old blood, through undergrowth that seemed to lean in toward us as we passed.
We found our cover at last in the gap of a crumbling outer wall, half-buried in flowering vines, with a clear line of sight to the gates and the courtyard beyond.
I crouched there, studying the fortress, the guards, the rhythm of their patrols. Aster crouched beside me, doing the very same. For all his complaining and his terrible jokes, the Minotaur had been bred for the battlefield every bit as much as I had. As much as Atlas had in leading armies into it.
“…fifty-eight, fifty-nine.” I pointed toward the front wall. “That one’s back is turned for exactly fifty-nine seconds at a stretch.”
Aster followed my finger.
“Hm.”
“Second guard changes direction fifteen seconds after.”
“Yeah.”
“The third vanishes behind that tower every forty seconds. Like clockwork.”
“Hm.”
I glanced sidelong at him. “Man of many words this evening. Makes a refreshing change.”
He narrowed his eyes, his gaze never leaving the wall. “I’m concentrating.”
“Ah. Of course. Not quite enough brainpower spare to manage watching and talking at once. Typical Minotaur.” I rolled my eyes and pointed toward the gate, ignoring his fake laugh.
“So., We get down to that section of wall, scale it before guard one turns back around, cross the courtyard unseen and…”
“Two.”
“Two what?”
“Two courtyards.”
Of course, the Gorgon King had two courtyards, because one was not enough, clearly.
“Fine, we cross two courtyards unseen by guard number two, get inside without being spotted by guard three, locate the single most dangerous ruler in all the Badlands…” I spread my hands. “Piece of cake.”
Aster nodded slowly. “And then?”
I looked back at the fortress and sighed. “Then we pray to every god there is that he’s not standing there sharpening his blades but somewhere soft and vulnerable instead so we actually have a chance at grabbing him.”
“That’s the plan?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a plan, exactly.”
“Then what would you call it?”
A flower on a nearby vine, startled by his deep voice, swayed toward him as though it meant to taste him, and I yanked him away before it could take a bite.
“I would call it a strong opening suggestion,” I said, eyeing the thing warily.
“An optimistic one. But unless you’ve a better one to offer, then it seems mine wins by default.
” And with neither the time nor the patience left to argue it, I started forward, ignoring the colorful stream of curses that followed me.
Unfortunately, getting in proved a great deal harder than I had hoped.
The first wall was easy enough. The second courtyard was anything but.
We spent the better part of ten minutes pressed flat behind statues whose eyes followed us as we moved.
Then we spent equal amounts of wasted time crouched among decorative hedges that grew, I noticed with deep unease, straight up through the bones of some creature I very much did not want to identify.
Then something large and scaled and possessed of entirely too many teeth caught our scent. Fortunately, it took a liking to chasing Aster, who led it a merry dance through the corridors before shutting it neatly inside a room somewhere down a deserted hall.
So, not a piece of cake. No, more like a piece of a cook’s roast after a three-day bender.
Another delightful slang word I learned recently from Aster that I would definitely be using often.
Especially when this was all over, as I planned to spend a great deal of time in an alehouse sampling the local beauties and catching up on time missed… or should I say, time stolen.
Bastard.
Weapons drawn, we moved through the fortress with all the stealth of trained assassins, hunting a Gorgon King I was beginning to suspect did not exist at all.
And then a long, mournful wailing drifted toward us.
“By the gods,” I hissed, “what in all the realms is that? It sounds like somebody is torturing a Harpy.”
We followed it down a corridor, the sound swelling until it was very nearly deafening. We reached a solid, unremarkable, rather plain-looking door.
Steam curled out from beneath it. Somewhere behind it, running water cut suddenly silent. The wailing went on, lurching up and down in pitch every few seconds.
“Wait,” I pressed an ear to the wood. “Wait, wait, wait…”
Aster pressed his ear beside mine.
“Is that him?” I asked, and Aster frowned at me.
“How the fuck should I know? He didn’t exactly try serenading me last time we met,” I smirked and looked him up and down and said with a snigger in my tone,
“No, I don’t suppose he would.”
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean, huh?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, are you offended that I don’t think he would want to serenade you or that he didn’t?” I asked, making him scoff.
“Good point.”
“Yeah, the very best… now, should we at least go check?” I asked, making Aster shrug.
“It’s a risk of being caught.”
“Okay, what about this? If it’s not him, then we just drown the bugger instead… How about that, more to your liking?” I offered making him grin.
“Yeah, works for me.”
“Excellent, would you like to do the honors… Gods, alive, he’s fucking awful.” I breathed, needing to clamp a hand over my mouth to smother the hysterical laughter clawing its way up my throat.
Aster sniggered. “Sounds like a real toe-tapper.”
“Ready to face the tone-deaf beast?” I asked, but before Aster could so much as object, I shoved the door open.
I had braced myself to storm in, blades raised.
Instead, the both of us stopped dead in our tracks.
The room beyond was vast, steam drifting lazily through the warm air. Hundreds of candles flickered along the shelves and in the alcoves, filling the place with the scent of some sweet flowering forest. Petals drifted across the surface of an enormous bath carved from a single block of dark stone.
And there, in the very middle of it all, sat the most feared ruler in all the Badlands.
And apparently, he was also…
Taking a bubble bath.