“Oh. Well, I can share mine. I’m sorry about the llamataur, everybody,” Poltro said. “When I was young, they ate my parents when we were trying to cross the Llama Drama. Me and my brother, Morvin, watched them do it, too. Still have nightmares. They were going to eat us for dessert, they was, but we got saved by a nice caravan of Qul people, and we got sent to Borix for adoption, where we were lucky enough to have Lord Toby take us in.”
Toby sniffed and turned red. “You never told me about the llamataurs,” he mumbled, then turned his gaze sharply to the unconscious man slumped nearby. He pointed at the sleeping form in the concert T-shirt. “Who,” he demanded, “is that?”
“Oh, bother,” Argabella murmured, then spoke up louder. “That’s my da. We should probably go before he wakes up. Especially since he’s still got bongos. He used to be okay, but after my mom left, he went a little barmy. He was yelling at me in the earl’s castle when everyone fell asleep, and it’s like I’ve been waiting all these years for him to wake up and continue the castigation. He can be quite…Nagful.”
“I think you mean emotionally abusive,” Gustave said.
“Now that I think about it…”
Before she could get too deep into the past, Fia pressed on. “What about your mom?”
“She’s dead. Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Fia asked.
“We haven’t been in touch for quite some time. On account of her leaving my da to run away with a halfling CPA and getting awards for being great at doing taxes. But I received a small sum in the mail a few years back, along with a receipt for a frugal but tasteful funeral, so I think she might actually be dead.”
Hearing this, the mighty Fia frowned down at Argabella, whose head rested on her lap, and then she felt her expression soften because everything inside her went gooey. She realized that even more than roses, even more than a proper set of armor, she wanted to be kind and generous and the whole range of happy adjectives to this truly unique woman for a long, long time. She felt luminous and certain about this but equally afraid that perhaps that moment, when she was light-headed from blood loss and Argabella was probably concussed, was not the right moment to say everything out loud. So she confined herself to saying, “You know your da was wrong about everything, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was right about some things.”
“Oh, no. Like what?”
Argabella grinned through a bloody mouth. “I’m never going to find a decent man. Not the way I am.”
Fia laughed, delighted. “Okay, okay. He was right about that one thing.”
“Not to rush anyone,” Gustave said, “but why don’t we rush along now?”
“How is Grinda going to rush along,” Poltro wondered, “if she can’t move?”
“Hmm.” Fia gently helped Argabella stand and then clambered to her feet, feeling somewhat dizzy. She needed NyeQuell and fumbled about for it before remembering that they had used it all to heal themselves from the acid leeches. “Well, perhaps the healer that Yör spoke of can help with that. And with everything. I’ll carry her.”
“What about those tongue things he talked about?” Gustave asked.
“That’s right. We need to watch out for them.”
“What’s all this?” Lord Toby asked. He’d missed much of it since he’d been the first to fall. “Something about a nice tonguing?”
Fia pointed to the open door. “That’s the way out, and supposedly there’s a healer near the exit if we can live long enough to get there. Yör seemed to doubt we’d survive the tongues, whatever they are.”
This comment finally tore Poltro’s attention away from her headache. “Cor, there was a sign warning us about them, remember? All the other signs have been true so far, so I guess we’d better watch out.”
“What are they going to do, lick us to death?” the Dark Lord sneered.
Fia nodded at him. “We’re all messed up, Lord Toby, except for you and Gustave. So I think it’s up to you two now to save us from a licking.”
“What? I gotta work with him? He wants to kill me,” Gustave protested.
“If he does, he’ll answer to me,” Fia said. She pointed at her eyes with two fingers and then pointed them at Lord Toby. “I’ll be watching, although I wish you two would make peace. We’ve fought together against an impossible enemy and won, and that means we are a legitimate dungeon party. We can join the union and everything.”
“Hmmpf.” The Dark Lord had no retort to make, so he straightened his robe and inspected himself, brushed some clingy croutons away, but still missed the moth in his beard. Argabella checked on her lute, strummed an experimental chord, fiddled with the tuning, then sang the new, improved version of “The Ouchie Song” for them all. It helped ease their pains somewhat, and Fia’s wound clotted. Encouraged by that, the mighty Fia picked up Grinda and draped the witch over her injured left shoulder like a sack of barley, keeping her sword arm free.
“If we get in a fight, I might have to drop you,” Fia said, “but I’ll do my best to protect you. And your glass wand. I’ll just slip that gently into my scabbard. I keep it oiled and ready. Ah, look at that! A perfect fit. Now I’ll just keep my sword handy should we need to rub out any obstacles as we venture down the tunnel.”
“Um. So we’re just leaving those bodies there and you’re all cool with that?” Gustave said.
“Yeah. They’re not real,” Argabella said.
“They bled real blood and behaved like real bodies,” he pointed out. “Worstley and the llamataur did, anyway.”
Fia shrugged. “So? Wizards can do some amazing stuff. Right, Lord Toby?”
The Dark Lord swelled with pride. “That is correct.”
“Then please proceed to be amazing and get us out of these catacombs.”
Gustave and Toby led the party this time, both of them going slowly, alert for an ambush. Argabella and Poltro backed them up, albeit with woozy steps as they still felt unsteady from the beatings they’d received. Fia brought up the rear with the sand witch over her shoulder, and from that position no one could see her face as she struggled to deal with the facts: She had been the one who insisted they take the fork that led to Ol’ Faktri, where they’d almost died; she’d been the one who’d insisted on coming through the catacombs, where they’d almost died. Only a sneeze and disorganized teamwork from at least some of the party had saved them from certain death. She wondered if she had been cursed in the past, unawares, to be a mortal danger to her companions. The opposite of a Chosen One, maybe—an Unchosen One. That would almost be a relief, because then she wouldn’t be responsible for bringing those closest to her to such harm. Or bringing accidental murder to literal innocent bystanders. Or—now her worst fear—causing harm to Argabella. She longed for the day when she would be a mortal danger only to the aphids on her roses. Fighting no longer held such an appeal, for all that the sword felt hungry in her hand. She shook her head, willing that feeling away. Before, she’d been running away from something. Now, perhaps, she was running toward something even better.
Fia dwelled in a prison of regret for an untold while, her thoughts weighing her down far more than the dead weight of the sand witch on her shoulder. But when the dimensions of the hallway changed and she saw skeletons on the floor, she knew yet more danger was ahead.
“So…these bones?” she said, but she didn’t actually have to say anything. Everyone was already tense and on the lookout.
The width of the corridor instantly doubled, always a sign that something particularly horrid was about to appear. The rock walls were stained with dried blood, which Lord Toby’s algae covered but did not hide, making everything glow brown. And the ceiling had doubled in height.
“A bit of extra illumination might be wise, I think,” the hedge wizard said, touching his hand to either wall and encouraging his algae to grow up and spread down the len
gth of this new space. Scattered bones will make a person cautious that way.
“I don’t see any tongues,” Gustave said. “Just an awful lot of dead folks.”
“They didn’t all die of natural causes right here, though,” Toby said. “Let us proceed, but keep looking around, including above. The height of this chamber makes me suspect that an attack may come from overhead.”
Twelve whole steps into the expanded chamber and the Dark Lord was proven right. A wet slithering noise was the only warning before something slimy and pink bungeed down from the ceiling and plunged into a soft bit behind Gustave’s right shoulder. He screamed an outraged goat scream, and the thing retracted, tearing out a chunk of his flesh as it did so.
Everyone followed the trail of the muscular weapon and saw that it was indeed a tongue being retracted into the greedy maw of a toothsome red thing crouching on a hidden shelf near the ceiling. Possessed of cruel yellow eyes and a huge mouth that must’ve largely served as tongue storage, it could safely take bites out of them from a distance and seemed, in fact, perfectly designed to do so. And it was not alone. There were many more of them appearing all along the tops of the walls, drawn by Gustave’s scream, and some were even approaching down the hall on the floor, gurgling in their hunger for fresh meat. They were utterly like frogs in all the ways that are terrible—and weaponized.
Fia realized she had heard tell of these creatures before. The Dread Necromancer Steve had mentioned them once during a particularly bad attempt at seduction. “These are hooktongues!” she cried. “The only way out is through! The longer we wait, the more concentrated they’ll become! Go! We have to charge and hope they don’t eat us to death one lick at a time!”
The goat, at least, knew what it meant to charge. He lowered his head and ran straight at the hooktongues coming for him. Not to be outdone, Lord Toby was only a step or two behind, throwing up his hands and shouting “Leet na logah!” as fast as he could, and with each repetition of the chant a loaf of incredibly dense ciabatta shot forth from each of his fingers, which he waggled around to make them arc through the air in as many directions as possible. And thus, while every member of the party suffered unwelcome tongues creating new bloody orifices in their flesh and then ripping out succulent bites of it, at least they were spared far worse by the random protection of loaves of bread flying through the air. The hooktongues speared through the dough and retracted, giving the creatures an unexpected carb load instead of a bloody protein snack and completely destroying any ongoing ketogenesis.
Fia knew that poor Grinda was suffering an inordinate amount of tonguing, but since the witch was still frozen, at least she couldn’t complain. The best thing Fia could do for them both was to get the heck out, and if the sand witch lost massive chunks of buttock, at least she knew how to dress to hide her flaws.
Gustave’s horns proved impregnable to the hooktongues, and several squishy bodies deflected off his head as he charged into the hideous monsters that were foolish enough to stand in his way. When he plowed through them and trampled their bodies, they stayed down, unable to recover in time to do any more damage. Fia was able to slice through a few of the tongues coming for her by sheer luck, but she still felt them stab into her and steal away her vitality every few steps. Poltro was in much the same situation, hacking away as she ran, confidence restored in her knife, but poor Argabella had only her butter knife, no defense against the creatures at all, and she simply ran as best she could while chunks of her neck, shoulders, and chest were sheared away and gobbled up by hungry mouths.
Were it not for the goat plowing the path ahead and the bread wizard protecting them from above, they never would have lived to bleed to death on the other side.
But after some distance that seemed interminable but truly wasn’t, Gustave had no more hooktongues to ram and the ceiling went back to being a normal height that didn’t promise hidden monstrosities. Poltro barely made it out, crawling the last few steps, but Argabella fell down before she could get there, bleeding from so many wounds.
“Toby!” Fia shouted. “Help me!”
The Dark Lord turned, bloodied and frenzied, his fingers extended, forming a veritable ciabatta umbrella over them as Fia carefully picked up Argabella under an arm while still clutching her sword; she couldn’t use her scabbard because Grinda’s wand was still in there. She carried two women now as her strength waned and she could barely move. Every step was an eternity, and her muscles quivered with exhaustion.
Behind them, hooktongues plunged into breads with thaps and fwaps and retracted without penetrating the party. But Fia had lost so much blood. They all had. Groaning and growling, she staggered forward, past Lord Toby, past the wounded rogue and goat, who stared at her all forlorn as if she were stepping into the grave, and then her knees would no longer bear all the weight she carried and they buckled, sending her crashing to the ground with her burdens forgotten. Her eyelids were so heavy, heavy as the world. At last, even they fluttered closed.
Something soft and cool caressed Argabella’s forehead, and she sighed in comfort. Or, more accurately, she attempted to sigh in comfort and ended up throwing up in her mouth a little, as sighing requires that one breathe in deeply, which forces one to smell anything in one’s particular vicinity. In this case, with her eyes still shut, Argabella had to assume she was being licked across the face by a troll with gingivitis who’d recently partaken of fresh garlic and sardines and possibly eaten another, even sicker troll for breakfast.
Her eyes burst open, but everything was dark and fuzzy. She soon realized that this was because she was staring directly into someone’s extremely furry armpit. She gasped, and that only made it worse, as some of the long hairs sort of wafted toward her open mouth.
“Help?” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Ah, darling, you’re finally awake!”
The voice was nearly a purr, sensuous and womanly and the sort of voice one generally hears only when drinking reddish liquors in the darker corners of the more sultry sort of halfling bar. The tuft of black hair disappeared, replaced by the face of a beautiful woman whose thick eyebrows and rippling hair were of the same dark black. She was in her early thirties, maybe, and she had the sort of smile that suggested you were somehow already sharing a delicious secret with her. Despite the fact that her entire body hurt and her nostril hairs were singed, Argabella had no choice but to smile back.
“I’m Belladonna, and this is my love shack. Welcome. You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”
“A…love shack?”
“Yes. Just outside the Grange.”
“But where are my friends? We were looking for a healer—”
Belladonna smooshed a finger to Argabella’s lips, the long, red nail pressing in. “Shh. So many questions. You’re still weak.” The finger left Argabella’s lips, leaving behind the flavor of dirt and vanilla. “Your friends are here and safe. I am the healer you sought, and my apprentice and I have been lovingly tending to you all. You’ve been sleeping for some time, and you are the first one awake.” Belladonna stood, her white healer’s robe slithering around her ample curves. The garment had holes cut out in the shoulders and a deep, drooping neckline, but the red cross Argabella was looking for was right there, stretched across the woman’s voluptuous chest.
“You’re the healer? But I thought healers were…” Argabella couldn’t quite find the right word. Clean seemed insulting, but prudish and nerdy and yes also clean seemed a bit too on the nose.
Belladonna smiled from beside the table where she pounded herbs with a grimy mortar and pestle. “Sensual? Yes, the Order of Erotonia is a rather unique branch of the healing arts, but our goddess is just as powerful and goddessy as any other goddess.”
Argabella sat up a little to get her bearings. She’d expected the usual sort of healer’s hut, spotless and spare, painted white and well swept with plenty of sunlight and scented with gr
owing green things that looked healthful if bitter-tasting. What she found was a crowded, jumbled room edged in dead plants and stacked dishes buzzing with flies. Buckets were everywhere on the ground, full of dark liquid that gave off a briny sort of smell. The beds weren’t in neat rows at all, just haphazardly placed and tangled with sheets of burgundy silk. That seemed rather convenient, as bloodstains would totally disappear as they dried. As Belladonna ground her herbs, moving her arm up and down and heaving her bosoms, her body odor billowed into the room as if driven by a bellows. Yet despite having little faith in the healer’s outer appearance, Argabella knew that she had been very near death and now was well enough to mentally complain about a lack of deodorant on the part of her savior. The chunks taken out by the hooktongues appeared to again be smooth, slightly furry skin with nary a dimple to poke.
“Where’s Fia?” she asked.
“The tall, curvy one with the muscles? Still out cold. Carried you and the frozen glamour granny out of that cave like a hero. She’ll look a bit rough just now, but I promise, my cures work.”
Belladonna pointed to a red-swathed cot in a dusty sunbeam by a dirty window, and Argabella nearly screamed. She was accustomed to seeing Fia’s body, or at least the parts of it not concealed by her chain-mail bikini or the more recent partial armor, and so it wasn’t the massive topography of flesh that threw her off. She rather liked that bit. No, it was the dozens of purple octopuses spread over Fia, their tentacles curling this way and that in ways that made Argabella feel like she should cover her eyes.
“What is happening to her?” Argabella wailed, struggling to untangle her legs from red silk sheets that smelled of roses and funk.
Belladonna hurried to Argabella’s side with a kind smile and gently pressed her back down onto the pillows. “I told you—my medicine is unusual. Some healers use leeches.”
“Ugh! No.” Because Argabella remembered the acid leeches and wasn’t anxious to revisit that cure. “I’m allergic to leeches.”