Gasp! Choke! Wheeze!
Gigglegigglegiggle.
He’s in Even Worse Hands
Than me! Gasp! Choke!
Thattaway.
So off we went, before the CEO of the Infernal Regions and his minions could stop laughing. True, he’d pointed us to the door himself, so by all rights he could hardly object to our following his directions. But they don’t call him the Archdevil for nothing.
According to the Guide’s Rules, I can’t describe the door itself which led to the Place Even Worse Than Hell, but the inscription over it is within the guidelines:
Abandon All Hope
Ye Who Enter Here
And This Time We’re Not Kidding
I was so relieved when the door closed behind us that I practically collapsed. I paid no attention to my surroundings. Some kind of huge grotto, glittering with light from what seemed like thousands of veins of peculiar minerals, glowing from within.
“Wonder what faces us next?” mused Greyboar.
“Don’t care!” I gasped. “At least it’ll come at us in prose!”
Chapter 27.
Moments, High and Low
But my gasping didn’t last for long. Not two seconds later I was right in the wizard’s face. Clutching the lapels of his sorcerer’s robe in my hands and shaking him the way a terrier shakes a rat. Well. Small terrier; big rat. The terrier actually does most of the moving around part.
“What’s the big idea, Zulkeh?” I demanded. “What are you doing getting into a wrangle with the CEO of the Infernal Regions—the Archdevil himself!—over this damned Joe business? You were just supposed to ask him about Benny!”
Oh, I was hot—hot.
“Bad enough we get hauled down here in the first place! For any reason! But at least Gwendolyn’s family so we got that excuse!” I took the time here to bestow a share of my furious glare on her. “Such as it is. Screwy, you ask me, chasing after an ex-boyfriend.”
Gwendolyn glared back. Normally, that would have shut me up—she’s such a scary woman—but not this time.
Hot—hot.
“That damned Joe business! I’m sick of it! Want no part of it! None, d’you hear? None!”
Alas, browbeating a wizard is easier said than done. Before I’d even finished, Zulkeh was spluttering his own outrage.
“Do I hear me aright? Is this midget jackanapes presuming to question me on the pursuit of my science?” Spittle, spittle. “Outrage! Impudence!”
Fortunately or otherwise, Greyboar interposed himself between us. It was so undignified. Greyboar’s version of “interposing himself” involves scruffs of the neck and large hands and sundry hoisting operations. I leave the coarse details to the imagination.
I tried to keep hollering even suspended in midair—so did the wizard—but Greyboar gave us both a little shake and that pretty much brought silence. Hard to holler when your teeth are clattering together.
“Shuddup,” he growled, after he set us down. “Both of you.”
To add insult to injury, Greyboar’s ensuing reproof was all aimed at me.
“And you’re supposed to be the brains of the outfit!” he snorted. “What in the world did you think Zulkeh was doing on this little expedition, numbskull? You think the mage came along because he gives two fiddles about a revolutionary agitator’s artist ex-boyfriend?”
“Preposterous!” spoke the mage. “Offensive—nay, insulting! Would any scholar allow himself to be diverted from his science for such a paltry and mundane purpose? Much less such a savant as myself?”
I goggled at him. Then, cursed myself.
What an idiot I was! Of course Zulkeh wouldn’t have come along on this insane expedition for the normal reasons that grip your workaday lunatic. Ever since he decided that the weird dream of a now-dead king of Goimr portended some awful and unknown disaster for civilization, he’s been a monomaniac about that damned quest of his. And since he was a maniac to begin with, you can just imagine what he was like once he got rolling.
That realization brought another. I swiveled and bestowed my glare on Magrit.
“And what about you?” I demanded. “What’s your angle on this thing?” Here, a big sneer. “And don’t bother telling me that you’re doing this as a favor to Gwendolyn. You wouldn’t cross the street to piss on a man dying of thirst unless he paid you in solid coin or—”