Gregory frowned. “That was quite the run-on sentence.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“It had a lot of meat to it, a lot of things to discuss and think about, and perhaps ask for more explanation about, but right now I believe the more pressing matter is to find out where we are, and why the scrawny mage sent us here. Cat, move.” He nudged the cat, which had decided to plop its butt down on his shoe.
“Aw, don’t be mean to the poor kitty. It clearly likes you.”
“It can like me all it wants so long as it stays out of my way.”
“Not a cat lover, eh? I am.” I bent down to pick it up. The cat gave me a long look, unsure of whether or not it approved of this action, and finally, after some deliberation, sank its teeth into my hand. “Ow! You little monster! Fine, I won’t pet you, then.”
The cat jumped out of my arms, gave me a scornful look, ignored Gregory, and marched over to the nearest bench, where it attended to some grooming of a highly personal nature.
Gregory took my hand and examined the bite.
“Little beast has sharp teeth.” I shot a glare at the cat. It paid us no attention.
“You’ll live,” was all Gregory said before he herded me to a door on our right. I had to admit, I didn’t mind his hand holding mine. His thumb stroked over the bite a couple of times until it stopped stinging. What that simple touch did to my stomach was another matter. “Come. We will find out who is in charge here.”
He flung open the door. It was a bathroom. A man sat on the toilet, holding a computer gamer magazine. He looked up in surprise. Two cats emerged from the room and twined around Gregory’s legs.
“Whoops!” I said, turning around quickly.
“Our apologies,” Gregory said, and closed the door.
“Well, that was embarrassing. How about I get to pick the next door?”
“More cats!” His tone was disgusted. “No, I do not want to pet you. Go away. What did you say, Gwen?”
“I offered to pick the door we open next. Those cats sure do like you. Here, kitty, I’ll pet you if you’re not bitey like Snowball over there.”
The white cat, now sitting with its front feet tucked under it (what Mom Two always called “meat loaf mode”), glared at me.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Gregory said, shooting the cat a dubious look.
This cat, which was mostly white with some orange splotches on it, didn’t seem to mind being picked up. He purred amiably as I rubbed his ears and neck. His buddy went over to fling himself down in a pool of sunlight that glowed on the marble floor. “I told you that I like cats. Dogs, too. Actually, all animals, and they like me as well. I think it’s because my moms are Wiccan. They know that we’re animal-friendly.”
Gregory made a noncommittal noise. We crossed the hall to open the door opposite. It was locked.
“Guess we try the big ones,” I said, tucking the cat beneath my arm so I could gesture to the far end of the room, but before we could reach it, the sound of flushing and water running reached our ears.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the man who emerged. He was in the process of wiping his hands on a towel, which he flung to one side as he stalked forward. He was a little taller than Gregory, had curly black hair, dark eyes, and one of those dashing narrow mustaches that make me think of Errol Flynn and swashbucklers.
“We were about to ask you the same question,” Gregory said in a haughty tone that I had a feeling wasn’t going to go over well with Mr. Mustache.
“I live here. I get to ask questions first. Are you tourists?” He narrowed his eyes at us, answering himself before we could. “No, you’re not mortal. You’re also not deceased, and therefore you have no right to be in Anwyn. You can have that cat, though. Make you a present of it. Be glad to get rid of the beastly thing.”
“We don’t want a cat—”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, chucking the cat under his chin. He purred louder and kneaded my arm. “My moms love cats, and they just lost one to liver disease.”
“—and before I explain myself to anyone, I desire to know to whom I’m speaking.”
The man, who had been making a face at the cat, snapped to attention. “I am Aaron, lord of Anwyn, king of the Underworld, and ruler of these lands. Now, non-mortal, who are you?”
“Aaron?” Gregory asked.
“It’s actually Arawn, but no one but pesky people call me that anymore. I’ve gotten with the times,” the king answered with an air of being well-pleased with himself.
“Oh, dear,” I said, unsure of how to greet a real, honest-to-Pete king, no matter how hip he was. Did people still curtsy? I wondered if I even knew how, or if he’d be offended by a bow?
“Gregory Faa.” He bowed, making me swear at myself because I wasn’t quicker off the mark. Now if I tried to bow, it would look like I was copying Gregory, plus I didn’t think I could pull off the move with quite as much panache. Especially not with a cat tucked under my arm. “This is—”
“Gwenhwyfar Owens, Your Majesty,” I said, making a little bob that I hoped would pass for a courtly curtsy. “We were evidently sent here by a mage.”
“Ah?” The king crossed his arms and gave us a considering look. “You can drop the ‘Your Majesty’ business. I’m a man of my people. Why did a mage send you here?”
“That is a very good question,” Gregory said.
I peeked at him out of the corner of my eye. He hadn’t mentioned being with the Watch . . . that was odd. If I were a policeman, I would mention it, whether or not I had authority in that place. And he certainly hadn’t had a problem telling Douglas that. Hmm.
“I’m sure I’ll get a message about it,” the king said, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about machines, would you?”
“Machines?”
“What kind of machines?” I asked, tucking the cat more firmly in place as Aaron strode to the door, obviously expecting us to follow him. “I know a little about computers.”
“Such things are unreliable. They are always breaking down.” He must have noticed Gregory pulling out his cell phone, because he added, “I believe you’ll find that your mobile device will not work here. It’s something to do with the static in the air. Now, about your experience with machinery . . .”
“I’m a Traveller, Your Maj—er—”
“Aaron.”
“I’m a Traveller, Aaron,” Gregory said as we left the hall and blinked at the bright sunlight flooding the grass bailey before us.
“Ah? Oh, I see what you mean. Your kind does not do well with machinery. Just so,” Aaron said, nodding, then cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you a Traveller, too?”
“No, I’m an alchemist.”
“Hmm. Alchemist. Hmm. No, my newest weapon, the Piranha, has no use for that. Now, if you had some way to smooth out a balky gearshift, I could put you to work. But as it is—oh, lord. This is all I need.”
Irritation flitted across his face as a woman strolled out of a small outbuilding. She was dressed in a Victorian artist’s idea of medieval wear, a long silken white gown known as a kirtle, touched with gold shimmering in the slight breeze. Her hair, the same color as the gold trim, hung down to her waist in waves that would have made a shampoo-commercial producer fall over in a swoon. Two orderly lines of mostly white cats followed her, tails standing tall like so many furry staves.
“What do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?” Aaron snapped before the woman and her feline escort stopped before us.
“No, I do not see that you’re busy. You’re never busy. You simply amuse yourself with a variety of toys and pretend it’s work.”
Aaron bristled. “I am the king of the Underworld! The king of the Underworld does not have toys! He has vitally important machinery of war.”
The woman pursed her lips and tapped her chin. “So that thing you’re always hunched over on that computing device wherein you construct villages and towns isn’t a game?”
“SimCity is a highly intelligent computer simulation. It is a tool, woman, not a game. With it, I can plan out the next stages of development of Anwyn to ascertain the best allocation of funds and labor without having any negative impact on the indigenous population, souls in transit, or the wildlife native herein.”
She smirked. “Which explains why you have statues of yourself dotted about the simulated town and cackle loudly when you send a giant lizard monster to destroy the townspeople?”
“They are virtual townspeople. They aren’t real.”
“But you enjoy destroying them with monsters and tornadoes and virulent venereal diseases.”
Aaron made a disgusted noise. “There are no venereal diseases in SimAnwyn, virtual or otherwise. That’s another program.”
“The fact remains that you enjoy destroying the people of your town.”
“Your facts are erroneous. I reject them. Begone. I am busy talking with these fine people.”
The woman turned lovely, if cold, greenish-gray eyes upon us. “Who are they?”
“I have no idea. Someone that one of the mages at the front sent out. It matters not.”
“It matters to us,” I said, smiling politely when the woman glanced at me. “I’m Gwen. This is Gregory.”
“You are not dead,” she said, as if making a profound judgment.
“No. Although I did die earlier in the week if that makes you feel any better.”
“Hmm,” she said, then turned to consider Gregory. She seemed to like him better than me, a thought that made me narrow my eyes. Did she have to ogle him so obviously? We weren’t a couple, but she didn’t know that. What if we had been?
I glared at Gregory when he smiled in a friendly fashion at her. He caught the edge of my glare and raised his eyebrows. I resisted the urge to kick him in the shins.
“Introduce us, Arawn,” she said, pronouncing his name with a heavy Welsh flourish.
“This is my ex-wife, Constance,” he said with a martyred sigh. He gestured toward the double line of cats behind her. “And her hell-spawn creatures.”
“My cats are beguiling furry little beasts of wonder and delight, although technically they are hell-spawned, but only because this is what many mortals think of as hell. And I am not your ex-wife. I do not recognize your divorce proceedings; thus we are still very much married.” She bit off the last few words in a manner that reminded me of the piranha that Aaron had mentioned earlier.
“Only because you live in your own little fantasy world that in no way resembles any form of reality. No, no,” he said, raising a hand to stop her even though she hadn’t responded to his comment. “Far be it from me to interrupt you on your daily torment of the poor, hapless souls who reside here. Stay and talk to the strangers all you like. I have important things to do. The Piranha calls.” And with a curl of his lip (and the slightest hint of an obscene gesture to the feline honor guard), he left.
“You really do have piranha here?” I asked, glancing at the cats. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous for them?”
“It isn’t a real piranha,” she answered with another assessing ogle at Gregory. “It’s what Arawn calls his Velociphant.”
“Do we want to know what a Velociphant is?” Gregory asked.
“No,” she said, then pinned me back with a look that had me straightening my shoulders. “Why did the mage send you to us?”
I slid a look to Gregory. He slid it right back to me, leaving me to stammer, “Uh . . . well . . . you see . . . that is . . .”
She turned to Gregory. I could see that he was struggling with an answer that wasn’t an outright lie, and yet shielded the truth a bit.
“I see,” she said after a few seconds of silence. She waved imperiously at a couple of men who were hauling in giant bags of what appeared to be kitty litter. “You there. Take these two to the captain of the guard and ask that they imprison them in the deepest, darkest part of the dungeon.”
“What?” I shrieked.
“I should inform you that I am a member of the Watch—” Gregory started to say, but the woman said nothing as the two men dropped the bag of kitty litter and approached us. She simply lifted the hem of her gorgeous dress and delicately moved away, the double line of cats following her.
“No,” I told Gregory. “I’m not doing this again. I’m simply not doing this.”
The fight that followed wasn’t pretty, nor was it even fair. Just about the time Gregory declared, “Touch one hair on her head, and I’ll pound you into the ground, Watch or no Watch,” a handful of other men appeared from the depths of the nearest outbuilding and joined the fray, the bulk of which was centered on Gregory.
And when I say “on Gregory,” I mean just that. He started swinging the second that one of the men grabbed my arm in the same familiar, “imprisoning innocent women is my middle name” sort of manner that I had experienced the day before, and it only took a couple of heartbeats before Gregory went down under the onslaught of several pissed-off cat-litter toters, or whatever their respective job titles were.
Naturally, I did what I could. I screamed, I bit, I kicked, and I punched. I tried to flip several men over my hip this time, too, but in the end I was ignominiously hauled off yet again to forced imprisonment.
The men had a harder time with Gregory. Once the bulk of them peeled off the pig pile, he came up fighting again. I winced in sympathy when, as I glanced over my shoulder to where he was being carried by six men, I caught sight of not only an eye that was quickly swelling and turning a deep crimson purple but also a fine spray of blood across his dark blue shirt.
We were hauled down smooth-cut stone steps into what I assumed was going to be a dark, dank, rat-infested dungeon.
“I have to say that this is the cleanest, most pleasant dungeon I’ve ever been forced to visit,” I told the man who was attached to my left side. “It’s well lit, it smells good, there’s no garbage or people’s bones lying around, and I don’t hear so much as even one little scream of torment.”
“Lord Aaron believes that a healthful dungeon is a productive dungeon,” the guard said.
“That’s quite forward-thinking of him.”
“Aye, but to be honest, he had them cleaned up when the tourists started coming through,” the man on my right commented.
“Tourists?” Gregory asked from behind me. His voice sounded hoarse and muffled. “Did he just say ‘tourists’?”
“He did. That’s probably what that sign upstairs was all about.”
“What sign?”
“The one that mentioned tours.”
“Why,” I heard Gregory ask one of his attendants, “does Aaron run tourists through the afterlife?”
“Why not?” the man said.
“I have to admit,” Gregory called up to me, “that he has me there. Literally as well as figuratively.”
“We wouldn’t be havin’ to carry ye iff’n ye didn’t fight us,” one of his guards answered. “Ye fair on crippled poor ’Erbert.”
“Aye, he did. I may never walk again,” said the man on my left.
I looked at him. He immediately started to limp.
“Poor Herbert, indeed. He tried to kidney punch me,” Gregory pointed out.
“Then there’s what you did to Maltravers,” my right guard said.
“Who’s Maltravers, and what did Gregory do to him?” I asked.
“’E’s the ’ead litter cleaner, and yer boyfriend ’ere broke his thumb. The one ’e uses to scoop!”
“Christos, not the scooping thumb!” Gregory muttered. “Was Maltravers the one who broke my nose?”
“Nay, that’d be Jones, there on yer left calf.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” said Jones. I assumed it was him, but I couldn’t actually see behind me.
I giggled, but felt obligated to say, “Gregory isn’t my boyfriend.”
“And then there’s Wenceslaus,” another man behind me said.
“OK, now you’re just getting silly,” I
protested. “This is Anwyn. We’re in Wales. I’m willing to let ‘Herbert’ and ‘Maltravers’ pass, but ‘Wenceslaus’ isn’t even remotely Welsh.”
“Nay, ’e isn’t, and now ’e can’t talk what with the beating your boyfriend ’ere gave him about the throat. Got a clean left in the Adam’s apple, ’e did.”
“He got me in the bollocks.” A thin, reedy voice drifted up from the back. “With his elbow! I may never have children again!”
“You ain’t had them to begin with,” called my chatty guard. “So don’t you be going on about something what isn’t likely to happen to begin with, Ned Bundy. Not that I’m saying getting a man in the bollocks is right,” he added to me. “A man’s bollocks ought not to be touched excepting by him. And possibly his missus, if she has a light hand to her.”
“In general, I agree, with the firm exception of self-defense. What did Ned do to Gregory?”
“Nothing,” Gregory answered. “He just got in my way when I was trying to keep from having any more of my teeth knocked out.”
“There, you see? Self-defense.”
“Aye,” the guard said, sucking on his teeth as he thought. “That’s as might be.”
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Me mum named me Aloysius, but the lads ’ere call me Al. I’m by way of bein’ the ’ead of his lordship’s guards. When ’e has need of ’em. Othertimes, I does a bit of light tanning.”
“I don’t suppose we could convince you to let us go?” I asked without much hope.
The look he gave me was pitying. “Now, then, what sort of a ’ead guard would I be if I was to be lettin’ you and ’im go?”
“A nice one?”
Al scratched his neck. “That’s as might be, but I can’t see my way clear to it without word from my lord or ’is lady.”
“This really sucks,” I said somewhat pettishly. “I don’t want to sit in a cell by myself, twitching at every sound, and with no one to talk to.”
“Well, as to that, I’m afraid accommodations are what you would call a wee bit tight at the moment.” Al stopped before a solid-looking wooden door. One that I couldn’t help notice was fitted with a small cat door. “What with the tourists and all.”