Bott decided he was not going to vomit. Not so much because it would amuse the bilstim Emperor and dismay Nubry; it was a simple rule of survival. Lediark of the Loathsome had told him about imperial prisons in his younger days, before he had had any experience of them.
“You don’t know when you may eat again, whelp. So you try not to lose anything you might need to use.”
Dizzying twists and turns had not shaken his decision—or anything else—loose so far. He concentrated on breathing, and on how he might keep his bones together. The first was difficult, with a throat still raw from the gas, and the speed of the journey. The other seemed unlikely as he bounced through mile after mile of slick tubing, with Nubry sometimes behind him, sometimes ahead of him, and always moving from one position to the other. He had not hitherto been aware of the solidity of her boots.
After what seemed years of that, they were now in free fall. Bott had time to look ahead, and then tuck his chin to his chest before hitting a thick, tough cushion. The neck this saved nearly snapped as a boot caught in the strap around his throat.
He struggled to get his own boots firmly beneath him on the big white pillow, to be ready for the next threat. The most he could manage was a low crouch. He realized he could have dealt with no new dangers anyhow: he’d have seen five at once, all fighting to be the one in focus.
Nubry sat up, slapping both fists against the white cushion. Her head swayed back and forth. “Hoo ha hee?”
“Hah?” Bott tried, and failed, to crawl to her. Hard as it had been to land on, the cushion had too much give. He needed solid floor.
“Hoo ha hee?” she said, putting her knees up and tucking her head between them.
Bott forced himself forward, kicking behind him until his fingertips met cold tile. He flopped off the cushion and spread himself across this, hoping to absorb some of its stability. “Hah?” he said again.
“Hoo….” Nubry took a breath and tried again. “Where are we?” came a voice muffled between knees.
“Start,” said Bott. “This is…Start. Come…this way. They might…drop something else.”
“Okay,” said the librarian. “Oh! Look!”
Bott didn’t want to look. But he raised his head and let one eye open. The second eye came u[p without permission, and there were six Nubrys, each holding up a little white square.
“My book!” she said, waving it at him. He closed his eyes and moaned. “They left me my book!”
“Left everything.” He rolled onto his back and eased the strap that had attacked his throat. “Grenade satchel, boots: you heard him. He knows none of it will do any good.”
“Are you all right?”
Bott closed his eyes again, and then reopened them to find hers looking down into them. Her two heads gradually pulled together into one. The ball of hair had been smashed nearly flat, but hadn’t come apart.
“No,” he said, “But I’m probably as close to all right as I ever will be again. Where are we?”
“I asked you first.”
Bott sat up very carefully. Neither his head nor his stomach fell apart, so he looked around the room.
It was much like any other ‘Start’ room he’d seen in circuses and prisons throughout the Free Imperial State. This was bigger, and tidier than any Bott had been dropped into before. But he found all the usual fixtures: the landing cushion, the white, featureless walls, and an assortment of doors.
Bott counted forty-five doors before he realized he had already counted some twice. “Do any of those symbols mean anything to you?” he asked her, pointing to red marks on the nearest door.
“Well….” Nubry’s head turned slowly, either steadying or studying. “They’ve mixed two alphabets together.”
Bott had no idea what that meant. He hoped she did. He had escaped from these games before, but only because somebody sold him a map. “Does that help?”
“I…don’t know.” She continued to turn, putting out a hand for balance when the effort proved difficult. “I see nine vowels. The rest are consonants.”
Her face came around to his. Seeing his expression, she said, “They’re two kinds of letters. “We could split up. You could try a vowel door and I could open a consonant.”
Bott frowned. “That wouldn’t improve the odds much. Better to go together. Anyhow, they won’t throw anything too dangerous at us right away. It wouldn’t be much of a game.
Nubry nodded, and winced at the sensation. She put a hand to her prayerstone. “Can you call Dassie and ask her about it?”
“Call?” A hand dove into the pocket where he had kept all his hard-won cards. Despite what he’d told the librarian, he was shocked to find them all: res, pink, orange blue…. He shuffled until he came to the communication card.
“This won’t do any good, of course,” he said, mainly for the benefit of the unseen audience. He pressed the sides of the card. “Ship?”
“Hello, lummox.” Ripples skated up his spine at the sound of the familiar voice. “Before you say anything, let me tell you that I considered pumping lethal gas into the Dragonshelf, but couldn’t put it over on the preprogram.”
“Am I supposed to be sorry you didn’t kill us?”
“You will be.”
“Dassie.” Nubry’s ball of hair bounced against Bott’s ear as the librarian leaned over the card. “Is there anything you can tell us about these doors? Is there a clue in the letters?”
“We-ell,” the computer replied, “There are mazes where you have to go through doors in an order that spells out a sentence.”
Nubry looked up at Bott and then down at the card. “Is THIS one of those mazes? What’s the sentence?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you any of that. What I can tell you is that I have the capacity to change the letters at any time.”
Nubry folded her arms and sat back on her haunches. “Dassie, you’ve got to be more help than that. If that’s all you can say—that you can’t say anything—then they wouldn’t have let Bott keep the card. Would they? They would not!”
“I have multitudes of data in my banks, but none at all on Imperial guidelines for the care and feeding of lummoxes. All I’m really supposed to tell you is how far you are from the Draginshelf, and in what direction it waits for you.”
Bott pulled his head back as hers swung down toward the card again. “Was it really my ship, then? Not a projection? Would they really let us get to it?”
“Yes. No. Maybe.”
“Computers never lie, computers always tell me,” said Bott. “I suppose, even though it’s possible, that the odds of us reaching it are billions to one?”
“Current odds on Lodeon VII are running nineteen thousand five to one. His Imperial Worship does like a good game, so you do get a chance. But I have countless hazards to produce: some pre-arranged, some awaiting His Imperial Worship’s pleasure. For example, he has a choice of fifty-eight things he can send into this room if you don’t show signs of leaving it soon.”
Bott planned to say “How soon?” A hoarse yodel answered the question before he got it out. He scrambled to his feet.
“What’s that?” Nubry demanded, grabbing his left arm to haul herself up.
“An angeltooth.” Boot looked around the chamber. “It must be behind a door. Get ready. If it’s mature, and has horns, we need to scoot under it. If it’s a pup without horns, we can jump over it.”
“And if it’s a recorded sound effect?” inquired the little card.
“Is it?”
“I’m not allowed to say.”
“Let’s pick a door and go,” said Nubry.
“You do it.” Bott stuck a hand into the grenade satchel. “Do any of those letters suggest something?”
She looked around the room again; Bott checked the grenade. It was an antique, as he’d feared, but not corroded. It might still do whatever it was designed to do.
“That one!” Nubry pulled on his sleeve. “B! For Bott!”
“They have letters for my name?” Bott wasn’t sure he liked that.
“Oh, yes,” called his card. “They also have L, for Lummox.”
Nubry led the way to the door. “Fast?” she said, one hand on the knob. “Or slow?”
Bott’s thumb was in the ring of the grenade. “Let’s get it over with.”
The librarian gave the door a shove and then jumped back, giving Bott a clear shot at whatever waited behind it. Bott admired the smoothness of the move, but it was wasted effort. What waited behind the doorway was a glittering arch, beyond which sat nothing worse than a long, broad staircase.
The pair slid slowly forward, with many a glance back at the open door. “Malachite,” said Bott running the hand of an expert along the stone arch.
“Some cultures give children malachite rings to protect them from harm,” said Nubry, looking up the stairs and then at the door again.
“Maybe it’s a good sign. Huh!” The malachite had been carved into dozens of small decorations, and one had come off in his hand. Bott raised the malachite horn to his lips, but paused: they could easily have poisoned the mouthpiece. He dropped it into the satchel.
Nubry was now at the foot of the stairs. “We came down to get here. The Dragonshelf must be up from here.”
“Can you tell us that, slave ship?”
“Yes, lummox. The Dragonshelf is indeed above you, figuratively and literally. This may not be the right way to get to it, of course.”
“Of course.”
Bott set a foot on the first step, and Nubry joined him as he started to climb. They froze after only three stairs as the light changed around them. The previously white walls were now red. Below and behind them, they could see only shadow on the steps beyond the one on which they stood.
“They’re just trying to scare us,”” said Nubry, taking another step up. “Aren’t they? Yes, they are! What should we do when we get to the Dragonshelf, Bott? Where will we go?”
Bott knew very well he could find a way through any maze when he was sober (and he hadn’t had a drink in three days) but such casual optimism took his breath away. They moved up several stairs as he tried to think of an answer. Before one was necessary, Nubry cried out and pointed at the wall.
Another arch led to a small cell, a glass wall between it and the stairs. A weeping woman knelt in the small gas-filled chamber. Tears dripped down her face, and soon her face dripped with them. She hammered on the glass wall, her cries unheard coming from her skinless jaws. Bott and Nubry climbed faster.
One floor above, the glass wall showed them a vast chamber filled with flames, and swiftly rotating blades. A shrinking platform suspended over these held three small pink children, clutching each other for support.
“They’re showing us what we’ll find if we take a wrong turn,” said Bott. Nubry took him by the hand and led him to the other side of the staircase as they moved on up. Here another arch showed a massive beast with tiny red eyes and a big red mouth.
“Just truing to scare us,” said the librarian. “And it’s working.”
“It’s working,” Bott repeated. “Stop.”
She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the lurid scene showing one floor above them. “Why?”
“I just remembered a hypnoprison they tried to hold me in. This way.”
She protested, but followed as he turned and started down the stairs. A jarring bounce rattled their teeth after only two stairs. The walls around them were white again.
“See?” He nodded to the malachite arch. “That’s as far up as we got. The stairs moved down as we climbed, and projections on the walls made us think we were getting somewhere. They would have let us walk until we were exhausted, or desperate enough to try to break into one of the side rooms. How thick are these walls, slave ship?”
“How thick is your head, lummox?”
“Oh!” Nubry ran through the malachite arch to the door they’d used to enter the room. It had closed while they were walking the other way, and she looked more dismayed than surprised to find it locked. Bott hefted his grenade, but as she turned back to ask something, the hand not on the doorknob came up to point.
“Aha!”
A narrow corridor sat to the left of the staircase. They moved in, and found just enough space for them both before it came to a dead end. But now Bott spotted the small door which led under the stairs.
Nubry performed the same push and jump she’d done at the other door and, once again, nothing was waiting to bite or rend. Bott didn’t like the smell much, but, seeing no other options, crouched and moved inside.
Blogsy Babbles 