Bob the Mage, ch. 2.

[Author's Note: It's Fiction Friday! again, and here we have the continuing saga of Bob the Mage, a fantasy novel I wrote many years ago and am cleaning up for your reading pleasure. Chapter 1 ran last Friday, here if you missed it, but if you just want to plunge in, this is what you need to know: Bob, a poor excuse for a wizard, and not much better as a thief, was arrested, forced into the army of the Kingdom of Tegora, and has been sent on a secret mission under the command of homicidal maniac. When we last saw Bob he was trying to magically open a hidden door, or rather trying to escape the army while pretending to open the door, and suddenly found himself falling...]

Bob the Mage

By Frederick Key

(Although He Probably Regrets It)

Chapter 2

Had you worried?

No, your humble servant did not wind up as an all-you-can-eat wolf pancake breakfast. I only tumbled about thirty feet down a rough incline, which hurt enough for one fall, enough to assure me I was still alive.

I looked around and saw nothing. The nothing was everywhere, far as the eye could see. I had either knocked my eyes out or sunset had come extraordinarily fast—or I had mistakenly fallen through the hidden entrance we’d been trying to open. It had not been magically sealed at all, just covered by an illusion of rock face. We could have walked through. And fallen down a thirty-foot slope, yes, but walked through.

Then someone else did. I heard a huge scream coming toward me. Just in time I rolled to one side, and something heavy smashed on the spot where I’d been lying. It cursed several shades of blue streak, so I assumed it was one of the party. In fact, it cursed so fluently that I knew it had to be Chokolost.

“Mage!” he screamed after he’d run out of other, more colorful nouns.

I stopped breathing.

“I know you’re here, mage. I can hear your bones creaking.”

I stopped moving.

“Now I can hear your lips chapping. Speak up!”

“Nobody here but us ogres,” I growled.

“When I put my limbs back in their proper positions, you are a dead man.”

Hoping he was mortally wounded, I said, “Don’t take it so hard, Mighty One. It could have been worse.”

“Worse? My mule fell off the cliff! And maybe the soldiers too. And I’m lying here in great pain, in total darkness, having fallen thirty feet. How could it be worse?”

“It could have been forty feet.”

There was a quick rattle of armor and a hand clamped around my neck. He wasn’t hurt so bad after all, the big faker. “Do something constructive now or I’ll squeeze until your head pops like a pimple.”

So motivated, I felt for my shard of quartz in my pocket and did a little mumbo-jumbo, which caused a small sphere of light to appear overhead. This spell is supposed to light up an auditorium, but you do the best you can. It enabled us to get a pretty good idea of the shaft we were sitting in, shaft being the operative word here.

“So you did open the door,” said Chokolost, dropping me and looking around. “We’re in the secret cavern.”

“My magic smoke spell did the trick,” I lied, rubbing my neck. I had no idea how to keep him on my good side, but that’s where I needed him. “We can probably climb out of here if we’re careful.”

“Chokolost does not give up!” he cried. “We’ll find it, mage, even if we’re the only ones left of the party.”

“Find it? What’s it?”

“The reward will be great.”

“Good! I like rewards!”

“You?” Chokolost’s swordpoint was at my nose in a flash. “You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang you for killing a government mule. Not to mention the soldiers of the king!”

“Hey, I didn’t kill anyone!” I whimpered. “It wasn’t my idea to run amok when my, uh, Cloud of Disspelltion went off. Anyway, the soldiers might not be dead. Just very, very hurt.”

“As good as dead to me,” said Mr. Soul of Compassion. “All that matters is the success of the mission. And what’s important to me right now is exceptionally important to you, so let’s get moving into the Labyrinth of Misery.”

“The LabyWHAT of WHAT? Labyrinth? Who said anything about labyrinths?”

“Weren’t you paying attention during the briefing?”

“Well, M.O., no one actually—”

“The king of Tegora, Maximo the Seventh (long may he reign, may his teeth never decay), hand-picked this unit to search for the lost Labyrinth of Misery, therein to recover the legendary—dare I even say it?—yes, I dare—Gallstone of the Gods!”

“The Gall… Oh… Uh… Well, okay. Then there must be a passage out of this area.”

My ball of light was weak, but it’s pretty easy to find a passage when you know there is one. While magic concealed the outer door, a fake stone concealed a lever that had to open an inner door. Chokolost pulled the lever and it snapped off in his hand.

“Maybe I should have pushed it,” he grumbled.

There was just enough left of the lever to push, and then a priest-hole on the opposite wall opened. Fearless Chokolost shoved me through first. My little glow globe followed dutifully. The hole led to a tunnel. Aside from about 30,000 human bones, there was nothing of interest. The spiders didn’t look poisonous. The tunnel ended in a cave-in about forty yards in, and I tried to turn around.

A dagger poked my heinie. “Start digging.”

“But it’s—”

“DIG!”

Well, I started shoveling with my bare hands, tossing the smaller rocks and rolling the larger ones, and an eon or so later the dirt gave way to: more dirt. As I continued, Chokolost finally explained what was going on.

“Maybe you’d dig faster, weakling, if I told you (stop throwing dirt in my face) why Maximo (may he be fertile in dotage) wants the artifact. I’m sure you’ve heard the legends.”

“You mean, about the Kidney Stone of the Gods?”

“Gallstone.”

“Yes. No.”

“Well. In the times of the Great Kings of Old, whom some say were descended from the gods themselves, there were (cough, watch the dirt) many artifacts of ancient lineage that were said to possess great protective powers to the kingdom that (spit) harbored them. One such was the Gallstone, the only such artifact whose location is known. It is buried deep in the Labyrinth of Misery, and is supposed to be guarded by the most fearsome monsters imaginable. (Ptoo!) Those sent to recover it have never returned.”

I stopped digging. “You mean we’re just the latest of a long line of suicide missions?” I looked back at the bones that lined the tunnel, which glowed an eerie green in the light of my spell.

“Thrilling, isn’t it?”

“Insane is more like it! Look, Mighty One, ask yourself, what are we doing here? More important, what am I doing here? People know where this Gallstone thing is and yet no one has been able to get it—what does that tell you? It tells me that this is a quest for imbeciles!”

“You’re here because I’ll kill you if you try to run away, and I’m here because I have sworn to protect my city and serve my king. And I must avenge those who have lost their lives for this quest.”

“Avenge? Look at these bones, will you? This poor sucker bought it maybe a hundred years ago at least, and he’s one of the more lively ones! How many other parties have been sent from Tegora in your lifetime? They didn’t die, they ran away! We’re the first saps dumb enough to get this far in a century!”

That stopped him for a moment. I didn’t dare glance at him, but his rustling told me he was looking around. Then, after a minute, he said, “This army used to be about honor, before we had to start recruiting out of prison, you know. Before— You know what? It doesn’t matter, spellboy. We have a mission and if we have to die doing it, that’s what’s going to happen. Meanwhile, guess what these are in my hand?”

My eyes bugged out. I didn’t have to guess.

“They belong to you, they’re spherical, and if you don’t get us through this dirt pile they’re going to be very unhappy. Now shut up and dig.”

Making a note to invest in iron underpants, I continued to dig. After a while Chokolost actually began to help, moving some of the material behind us, over the spiders and ancient bones. When we broke through the dirt at last, I didn’t know whether to be relieved or expect instant death, but either way I could finally stop the digging.

I laughingly call the room we entered a chamber. It stank enough to wake the dead, and I think some may have been roaming in the vicinity. It was about thrice a man’s height, thrice a man’s length, I mean if he laid down, and—oh, it was a slimy eighteen-foot cube. From the looks of terror we got from the white wormlike things with huge pupils and moldy skin that gurgled up at us, I think my dinky globe was the first light they had ever seen. In a moment they would see the first human puke they had ever seen.

“Onward,” said Chokolost.

The worms just stared as we entered a tunnel so narrow we had to squeeze between the evil-smelling walls. It was like a very long, narrow outhouse. Thoughts of buried alive kept teasing my consciousness. We would occasionally come to a branching of the ways, and Chokolost would shout out a direction. We did not bother to mark the walls or draw a map. “Left!” he would call, and we would as soon walk into a wall as anything. I became convinced the man could get lost in bed. But can you really be lost when you have no idea where you are going anyway?

We stopped once in a while for a short rest, and I even dozed off for what seemed like five minutes, but he soon had me back up and through the squeezy halls again. I didn’t really want to sleep. There were little horrid things in those tunnels, things that squealed beneath one’s boots. I would have avoided hurting them if I could. I didn’t want them getting even while I slept.

“We’re almost there,” Chokolost muttered at one point. “I can practically taste it.”

Sure enough, we came upon it maybe five hours later. We burst out of the tight tunnel into a domed room that looked like an amphitheater for midgets. Big in a small way, if you get me. And there, on a tiny pillar in the center, covered in a film of dirt, was the Gallstone of the Gods.

Don’t get all worked up. It wasn’t much to look at. About the size of your head. Mottled. We could only tell what it was by the words on the pillar in an ancient tongue, of which I remembered enough from the Famous Mages School to translate: The Gods’ Stone of Gall. Do Not Touch.

Oh, and I ought to mention that right behind the pillar with the stone was this huge monster, which looked up from the grubs it was eating to grin at us.

It might have only been twenty feet tall, big enough to fill the back of the room. Its arms were about the size of a human being, which made me think of that old truism that you are what you eat. Its four elephantine legs shook the earth when they stomped, dislodging showers of dirt from the cavern roof. It opened the enormous mouth of its leonine face to reveal three rows of glistening, razor-sharp teeth. It didn’t smell like roses, either.

“Stand by me, mage!” Chokolost yelled, whipping out his sword with one hand and clenching my shoulder with the other. “We’ll do battle with the beast for the glory of Tegora!”

“Yeah.”

And, naturally, just then my light winked out. 

[Oh, no! Looks like Bob will become Monster Chow -- or will he? Come back next Friday for Chapter 3!]