Geek Fantasy Novel (11 page)

For practice, she cleaved the teapot neatly in two. It didn’t shatter; it merely parted for the razor edge. The contents, however, spun out in a hot globe, scalding Fuchsia and Vermillion and the prone Inexorable Pulse. They gave fairy gasps and fled to the ceiling.

Ralph struggled, but each spasm only served to clamp the plank of wood down harder.

Chessie leaped about the carriage, swinging the axe. She cut loose great pennants of curtain that fluttered to the bumping floor; she sliced an unfortunate fairy guard in two on a backswing.

Meanwhile Ralph continued to struggle, and the plank continued to press down harder, until he could no longer breathe. His vision turned gray at the edges as he gasped against the floor. Soon he could see only the most colorful things in the room — the flashing silver of the axe, the wings of Vermillion and Fuchsia hovering near the window. Maybe it was his vision slushing as he passed out, but he saw them begin to beat their wings very oddly. Vermillion held Fuchsia’s hand, but flapped twice as fast; they bobbed with the irregular pitch of their flight. He was lulled by the pattern as he fell into unconsciousness — red, red, pink, red, red, pink. Then he saw Fuchsia peer searchingly out the window. At the very moment that Chessie whipped her hair out of her eyes and approached Ralph with Ten P.M. Black held high, there was a great neighing chaos and the carriage came to a screeching halt before creaking, listing heavily to one side, and finally tumbling through open air.

As any aeronautical engineer will confirm, fairies do remarkably well in unicorn-drawn carriage crashes. Their strategy is simple: Keep to the center of the carriage and fly with equivalent speed against the rapidly decreasing velocity of the vehicle.

Prisoners magically trapped beneath planks of flooring do moderately well. The otherwise death-hastening wood serves like the lap restraint on a roller coaster.

Axe-wielding duchesses, however, make out substantially worse. And unfortunately, an axe-wielding duchess careening about a carriage is a problem for everyone.

The ceiling became the floor, then it was the ceiling again, and then it was back to being floor. Ralph, pinioned beneath his restraint, had a comparatively stable vantage point from which to catalog his repeated brushes with death. Ten P.M. Black whizzed before his face uncountable times. Ralph scrunched his eyes and waited to lose an arm or a nose, but his closest shave with the fairy axe resulted only in wisps of his hair joining the tumult.

Chessie clawed at him with her painted nails whenever the carriage’s tumble thrust her close enough. She would near and then be hurled away, fairies and candles and cloven teapots beating around her.

The carriage eventually made its final bounce and came to rest on its side. Those fairies who were able to flew out immediately, and as their great thrashing flock rose into the air, Ralph realized there had been more of them in the carriage than he’d first thought. Fairy feather dusters, fairies whose wings had served as doilies, fairy platters, and fairy forks all swarmed from the wrecked carriage.

Ralph struggled against his restraint and gasped in pain. The wood was leaving deep abrasions on his chest, and he had begun to sniff his own blood. Then there was a heaving sound at the carriage’s door (now its roof, incidentally), and the wood splintered as it was lifted off its hinges. When light flooded the suite of rooms, Ralph saw a figure he recognized silhouetted against the blue sky.

Cecil lowered himself into the carriage and set to work releasing Ralph from his bonds. The plank came away easily in Cecil’s hands. “Thank you,” Ralph said, before promptly plummeting to the bottom of the carriage. “Ouch,” he concluded.

Cecil dropped to Ralph’s side and boosted him to a bookshelf handhold. “We’re not out of this yet,” he said as he raised another gloved hand to push Ralph up to the door.

It hadn’t occurred to Ralph to determine Chessie’s whereabouts, and he realized his error as he emerged from the carriage and heard lightning bolts popping about his head. He rolled over the side, landing in a ravine. Cecil plopped next to him soon after, his knee landing on Ralph’s chest and knocking Ralph’s breath out for the third time in as many minutes.

There are some phenomena narrators consider difficult-to-near-impossible to describe for readers who haven’t already had direct experience: childbirth, for example, or being flayed by dragonbreath. Similar is an aerial battle in which the two forces are a telegenic lightning-spouting duchess and a gaggle
of fairies. Chessie’s lightning didn’t move in streaks but rather in spheres, globes of sizzling energy that engulfed anything careless enough to be flying within a few yards of their trajectory, then impacted the ground in dramatic explosions of light and soil and fairy parts. The fairies had numbers on their side, yes, but the sum potency of their offensive power was akin to a box of matches igniting. No matter what their volume, when foot-tall creatures battle an angry superduchess, the battle can only have one outcome.

Cecil unsheathed a wooden sword. “Fight me, not them!” he shouted.

Chessie paused in her lightning hurling long enough to scrutinize Cecil. “You hope to take on a duchess, boy?” she screeched.

“Do you refuse?” Cecil called.

Chessie replied by yelling at Ralph. “You,” she howled, “are not supposed to be alive.” And with that she hurled a lightning dart at his face.

Ralph cringed before what quickly became a searing heat, until Cecil flashed out with his sword and parried the sphere of light.

Chessie conjured a flaming shield to sizzle the half-dozen fairies who had thought to take advantage of her distraction. Charred, winged husks raining about him, Cecil yelled out again, “Do you yield?”

Chessie laughed and continued to incinerate fairies.

Cecil ordered the retreat.

He, Ralph, and the handful of surviving fairies fled to the cover of the trees.

Maintaining decorum is essential to any royal’s self-respect. It’s one thing to engage in a little firefight on a country road, rising above the masses like a demigoddess, simultaneously showing off your figure and your magical talents. It’s quite another to scrounge through the forest grubbing for little boys and fairies.

So when Cecil and Ralph plunged headlong into the woods, they were unaware that Chessie had turned her energies to summoning a new magical coach, one that wouldn’t do anything so improper as be attacked and fall down a ravine.

That said, quivers of lightning bolts exploding around one’s head tend to elevate one’s fight-or-flight response. When Cecil and Ralph led the charge into the cover of the forest, it was with the gusto of children fleeing punishment.

“Run as fast as you can for two minutes,” was Cecil’s screamed order to his compatriots.

It wasn’t a terribly sensible command, for a number of reasons. Among others: The remaining fairies were flying, not running; at that precise moment Chessie was picking mud from beneath a French-manicured nail; fairy watches all ran at different speeds; and two minutes of fleeing would lead
most of them out of Chumpy Wood and into the Water-Warlock Dragonhunter-Damselfly Coven.

Of course, Ralph wasn’t aware of any of these pitfalls. All he knew was that Cecil barked his command very forcefully, and having one’s life nearly taken by a unicorn stiletto, a fairy axe, and a ball of lightning in rapid succession makes one highly susceptible to the suggestions of anyone who isn’t confirmedly intent on one’s own death.

So Ralph ran like he hadn’t run since fleeing Johnny Keenes in fifth grade. He ran like he hadn’t run since the New Jersey GameCon Festival was giving away free
Campaign Quixotica
demos. In short, he ran like he was fleeing a witchy duchess.

Trees whizzed by. The ground was alternatingly firm, soft, wet, and dry, but he never felt it. He kept seeing pulsing lights, but was unsure whether they were from Chessie’s lightning, some local ambient magic, or the blood pounding through his veins. He burst through spiderwebs and giant lichen. He ran heedlessly through a nest of Invidious Centipedes (thankfully the non-electric kind), and easily outran the centipede guard dispatched to prevent him from squashing through the second nest, which he promptly did. He shook centipede juice from his shoes, then jumped a lava pit and splashed through a puddle of Gnomefreeze, which would definitely hurt later. He ran until he was a good hundred feet deep into the Water-Warlock Dragonhunter-Damselfly Coven.

He stopped short, not because he spotted a Water-Warlock or a Dragonhunter-Damselfly (though there were plenty about), but because his lungs felt gashed. He bent over and heaved in air. It was then that he noticed the ground. Or rather, noticed that there wasn’t really any. There were only wiggly larvae, each no bigger than a fingertip. The grubs blindly thrashed about each other, and about the soles of Ralph’s sneakers. He shook off the
larvae that had climbed onto his socks, and started walking in place, listening to the squishing sounds until he could make up his mind what to do.

Paths led in two directions:

To the right, the larvae thickened in quantity, forming dunes and drifts to the side of the trail. Distantly he could spy the cheerful colors of damself ly wings.

To the left, the grubs gave way to clear, rocky ground. He could glimpse at the turn of the path, however, a loose length of dirty cloth flapping eerily at the entrance to a cave. From far down the path came muted howls and the snapping of bones.

He glanced back the way he came. Chessie was undoubtedly still hunting him down. What should Ralph do?

If he should head down the safer (if gross) Dragonhunter-Damselfly Path,
click here
.

If he should investigate the Cave of the Water-Warlocks,
click here
.

Ralph had never been particularly squeamish about bugs. And he figured a known danger was better than one ominous and unimaginable. So he decided to head down the Dragonhunter-Damselfly Path.

A potentially offensive note: Here you are, with a chance to finally find out what a Water-Warlock is, and you choose to read about damselflies.

Your
cat
catches damselflies.

But I’m being unkind. Especially since you’ll soon see that the path you chose for Ralph is actually far more perilous. Honestly, I’m not a prudish narrator — I hope you know that — but going into what happened to him would require more delicate use of language than I’m capable of. Bear in mind that Ralph wasn’t wearing a shirt or pants, and that his skin tone happened to be the same color as a damselfly female in estrus, and that the particular Dragonhunter-Damselflies you’ve decided to force Ralph to contend with are eight-foot-long males with poor vision, as I quote from
National Geographic
(April 2006):

THE END

Ralph decided that increasing quantities of larvae could only mean bad news, and headed instead for the Cave of the Water-Warlocks. He figured he’d only get the chance to be in Cecil’s wish once, and who wouldn’t be curious to find out what a Water-Warlock looks like? Sure, he might brush with death, would probably end up strapped on some Warlock Gurney and experimented on, but he’d undoubtedly find a clever yet self-effacing means to outsmart his foes.

Ralph crept into the forbidding cave and surprised the Water-Warlocks precisely as they were sitting down for sausages and ale. Since it had been a rainy spring, they had plenty of grog to mix from their distillery (the distant howling he had heard at the crossroads was escaping steam, the crunching the settling of giant grog barrels), and were delighted to invite Ralph to join them. They were even more delighted, afterward, to point Ralph toward Cecil’s base camp with their watery, warlocky fingers.

It’s a very sensible decision for fairies to live in trees. Any creature who flies should consider it — you’re safe from land predators, you have a good view of the surrounding countryside, and don’t underestimate those consistently breezy evenings. For obscure reasons known only to the race, however, fairies prefer to live
between
trees. Their houses are constructed of four different varieties of lumber and carefully suspended between trunks by lengths of Invidious Centipede silk. These tree-homes are lovely to look at, but so intricate that fairies spend almost all of their waking hours building and maintaining and getting lost in them. Which is a shame, really, since that leaves them so much less time for gamboling about meadows, visiting wishing wells, leaving money in return for teeth, and such.

The fairy village, normally a setting of great cheer, was almost silent as Ralph passed through on his way to Cecil’s camp. The only sound he heard was the mewing of orphaned fairy young.

Ralph, for his part, couldn’t have been less concerned with the sociology of fairy tree houses, or, frankly, the horrible events that had led to the piteous crying. He shambled through the forest, willing himself to ignore the centipede juice that had dried on his ankles like lacquer. He was also, now that
the adrenaline of his flight from Chessie was fading, concerned that this royal wish-quest was going to lead to his rapid demise.

He checked his phone again, and found he still had no reception. Though — yes — at some point there had been enough that his emergency message to Beatrice and Daphne had been sent.

Adventure was well and fine, he decided, when there was a way to break away at any time. Video games could be powered off, after all, which is why their errand missions were more pleasure than drudgery. He could think of nothing better, right then, than shutting this particular quest down and sitting at his New Jersey kitchen table, leafing through Sunday advertising inserts or peeling string cheese.