CHAPTER SEVEN

Disclaimer: I don't own Jing King of Bandits

Water was everywhere. Jing and Kir stepped into an antechamber that smelled of damp stones and mossy growth. It was set up so that when you exited the landing from the stair leading to the ground floor, you had to close the door behind you before the door leading out of the antechamber would open. It was an airlock of sorts.

Now Jing and his trusty bird companion were treading slowly up the shallow stone steps of a staircase walled on both sides by water kept back by thick glass plates, which rose up to the top of the high ceiling of the room. The room was at least two if not three stories tall. They were now at the part of the tower that rose above the palace's rooftop. The reason Jing knew this is because of the rectangular patches of light that shone through the water, and the rectangular windows at the very top of the room, half submerged by water themselves.

Where there were windows there was light. It was a watery, diffused light, but it was enough to light their way up the staircase that rose right up through the center of the room.

"Er, Jing, was that a fish?"

"Where?" Jing asked, trusting his friend's instincts. The water was murky, like seawater, and in constant motion. If Kir saw movement that looked like a fish, then something had moved within the water.

"There." Kir pointed with his wing at a spot on the right hand side glass wall, all that was keeping the water away from them.

Jumping five steps, Jing stood at the spot Kir indicated, pressing his hand against the cold glass as he peered through it into the watery depths beyond.

At first he saw nothing. Then he noticed that the light from one of the windows in the wall on the far side of the water wasn't constant. Something was swimming in front of the window, obscuring the light as it passed before it. It was something big, too.

"So Jing, did ya see it?" Kir landed on Jing's shoulder and pressed his beak to the glass, eyeing the water with a worried expression. "Was it a…?" The bird's voice trailed off in shock as a face appeared suddenly in the glass.

It was twice the size of a normal human face, with green skin, darker green hair, moustache, and beard that fanned out in the water. Its eyes were a vibrant shade of jade, and it stared coldly through the glass. Broad shoulders led to a well-sculpted torso and weight lifter's arms. It clutched a three-pronged trident in its right hand. Its lower torso's green flesh turned to scales right at what should have been its belly button, as human features became fishlike, the body terminating at the end of a long eel-shaped tail with fins. It should have looked ridiculous, but the way the creature's long tail snaked about and rippled suggested that the muscles of its fish half were just as intimidating as the muscles bulging from its arms.

"Merman!" Jing said the word like an epithet, and jumped back from the glass. Glancing behind him, he saw two more mermen staring at him from behind the glass walls on the other side of the staircase.

Then he heard it, a sharp ringing sound.

Glancing back at the first merman, Jing saw that he was tapping his trident against the glass, the metal's impact on the thick glass creating the noise. It was echoed on the other side, and turning, Jing saw that the other two mermen, now joined by a third, were copying their leader's gesture, tapping their own tridents against the other wall of glass. The noise became a cacophony.

"Jing, I got another bad feeling about this!" yelled Kir, and flapped himself aloft.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Jing took off running, leaping up several steps at a time, but it was too late. He'd known it was too late from the first moment he'd seen the merman. Why create a mer-monster who fought best underwater if you never intended your victims to be in the water with it?

The glass walls shuddered then disappeared, drawn upwards by an unseen mechanism triggered by the vibrations from the mermen's tridents. The water flooded in, catching Jing and throwing him around like a ragdoll in its angry current. He could hear, vaguely, Kir's voice squawking at him, but it took him a while to swim his way to the surface.

As his head broke out of the water, he had just a second to gasp in a breath before he saw it. One of the mermen was treading water with his fish tail, his human-like torso fully out of the water as he stared at the water, searching for Jing. Jing dove back under just as a trident skimmed the surface right above him.

His best bet was to swim as far away from where he'd just been as he could, to keep his attackers from finding him easily. However, Jing reckoned without the other three mermen. He saw movement from out of the corner of his eye, but when he swiveled his body to look, a fishtail caught him in the side and sent him hurtling through the water to land with a thump against the stone wall.

Jing's heart chilled. Landing against the wall hurt, and he was lucky he hadn't broken any ribs, but worse yet was the realization of exactly how powerful the merman's tail had to be to propel him halfway across the massive room like that, and underwater too.

Coughing, Jing surfaced again.

"Jing!" Kir squawked from where he was flapping, four feet above the water, his wing tips practically touching the ceiling. Flooding the central stair area had lowered the water level enough to give Kir room to fly between the ceiling and the water's surface, but it didn't give him much room to maneuver. Regardless, Kir began to make his way over to Jing.

Jing opened his mouth to shout a warning as a merman surfaced directly behind Kir and aimed his trident. Before Jing could shout, the trident was loosed. Luckily, Kir's instinct for self-preservation kicked in. Sensing the movement behind him, he backpedaled midair and flapped to gain altitude. The trident shot under him, catching a few tail feathers and causing Kir to shriek an epithet in outrage as the loss of the feathers and the airstream of the trident's passing caused him to spin backwards, beak over claws, to land in the water.

Jing swam quickly over to the bird, who was flapping along the surface of the water while trying to examine his tail to assess the damage. At any other time, Kir's vanity would be amusing, but with four mermen out to get them…it was time to get serious.

Jing grabbed Kir by his clawed feet and shouted, "Give me a Kir Royale."

Kir obliged, clamping onto Jing's arm and transforming into a weapon, just as his comrade dove beneath the surface.

Underwater it was quiet, eerily so, but the danger was still all around even if they couldn't hear it. The only warning was movement, and Jing began to concentrate all his attention into his eyes.

There! A flash of tail, going inordinately fast through the water, caught his eye, but before he could aim there was another, closer movement, this time from behind. Jing barely got his feet out of the way in time as a trident whizzed beneath him. Figuring out the trajectory, Jing aimed and fired his Kir Royale energy burst, but the merman was too quick. Another merman dove from above, intending to take Jing and Kir to the bottom of the room, pinning them to the floor with his trident.

Jing twisted, avoiding the trident, but not the tail that whipped around and caught him in the side, causing him to lose the breath he'd been holding.

Frantic for air, he clawed his way to the surface, and gasped in oxygen as he treaded water, his movements somewhat hampered by the bird clamped to his right arm. A merman popped up in front of Jing, so he aimed, yelling his customary command, "Give me a Kir Royale!"

He missed. The merman submerged too quickly. They were all too quick. There was just the barest suggestion of movement and then they were somewhere else. The water was their home, and in it Jing was the fish out of water.

There was an enormous surge in the water below him. It was the only warning Jing had before he was thrown up and out of the water by a fishtail that seemed determined to slam him against the ceiling. With little time to spare, Jing twisted midair so that it was his feet and not his head connecting with the ceiling.

He shoved off the stone ceiling quickly, and aimed for the one place the mermen wouldn't think he'd go, towards the window set at the top of the wall a few feet away near the ceiling.

The windows were rectangular, and too narrow for a merman to do more than wave an arm out of them if they were so inclined and if the windows even opened, which Jing doubted. However, Jing wasn't a merman. He was small. It was a useful quality in a thief. He also had the remaining momentum from the merman's blow on his side. He hoped it was enough to break the glass.

Jing careened through the window, raining shards from the shattered window on the roof of the palace below. There was the sound of wind rushing past Jing's ears as he fell towards the ground, grateful for his photographic memory of building layouts. Grabbing his knees, he somersaulted, changing his path so that he'd miss the roof and land beyond it.

Thud! The welcome feel and rustle of straw met Jing's back as he landed in the hay wagon he'd seen coming into the palace. He shook Kir off his arm and the bird sneezed, rolling off to come to a stop against the high wooden side of the wagon. Kir got to his feet and leaned against the wagon's planks, huffing and puffing.

"Mermen?" he huffed angrily. "You've got to be kidding me! They were all men! There wasn't a babe in the bunch. Who creates mermen without creating mermaids to go with them? It's cruel, I tell ya!"

Jing smiled and lay back against the sun warmed hay, relishing the feeling of the sun's rays on his face. Only Kir would be angry because the beasts out to kill him weren't cute. His smile faded as he processed exactly what their defeat meant. The tower was going to be a tougher nut to crack than he'd thought.

o-o-o

Jing ran through the streets of Zenithria's capitol, Kir flying along behind him. It was nearly evening, and the dusk shadows lay heavily across the streets, blanketing them in gloom. Jing's feet made scraping noises across the cobblestones as he ran, more concerned with speed than secrecy. The doors of shops and apartment buildings on either side of the street were closed and locked already.

At the octagonal fountain, Jing swerved into a side street and put on a burst of speed towards the only structure that still had a light in its front room, Grappa's bar.

Grappa had just swept the last bit of dust off the front stoop and laid his broom against the wall to fumble in his pocket for the key to lock up.

"You got room for two more in there?" Jing asked with a smile as he skidded to a stop in front of the astonished barkeep.

Grappa's mouth fell open and he gaped as he surveyed the damp thief before him. Kir dropped down and landed with a spray of water droplets on Jing's shoulder.

"Yeah, and you got any more of that rabbit stew?" the bird asked hopefully.

Grappa frowned and grabbed Jing, shoving him quickly inside the bar before glancing up and down the street, then closing the door and locking it firmly behind him.

Inside the bar, three men looked up in bleary astonishment at the addition to their party, for it was a party, judging by the shreds of wrapping paper and packages on the table before them. There were also the remains of a small cake, and lots of bottles and glasses littering the wooden surface.

"Someone having a birthday?" asked Kir, eyeing the cake crumbs greedily.

The man in the center, a tall guy with a long face, smiled drunkenly. "S'me! S'my birthday!"

The other two cackled and slapped the table, then began singing 'Happy Birthday' for what was obviously the hundredth time.

Grappa strode into the room and led Jing and Kir to the bar.

"What happened?" he asked bluntly.

Jing glanced over at the table of happy drunks, still well within earshot.

Seeing his gaze, the barkeep grimaced. "That's Slivovitz, Gimlet, and Malt. They're cousins. They're harmless. Every year they come here to celebrate Gimlet's birthday away from their womenfolk. I put them up for the night when they're too drunk to make their way home."

"Yay, Grappa!" hooted the drunk on the left, a short pudgy sort with rumpled dark hair and a face filled with boozy cheer.

"He's the man! Down with the Cerberus dogs!" chortled the one on the left, a broad shouldered stocky sort who raised his glass and downed the contents in a gulp.

The tall gaunt man in the middle nodded sagely, then gripped the table as the movement nearly made him overbalance out of his chair. "They can give us a curfew, but they can't keep us from going to work the next day with a hangover!"

"Hear hear!" the other two roared and thumped their glasses on the table, and dissolved into laughter.

Reassured, Jing turned back to Grappa and answered his question. "The tower is going to be a bit tougher to break into than I'd thought."

Dead silence filled the bar.

Jing turned around to find the cousins staring at him in shock.

"Dad, the rooms are ready…" One of the twins thumped downstairs, stopping at the bottom step as he realized he'd broken the silence that fell over the bar. He glanced around inquiringly and saw Slivovitz, Gimlet, and Malt staring wide-eyed at the bar.

Swiveling his head, he caught sight of Jing and his eyes lit up. "You're back!"

"Who's back?" another voice hollered from the top of the stairs as the other twin craned his neck over the banister to look. "Jing!" he yelled joyously as he saw the answer to his question sitting on a barstool with Kir at his shoulder.

Both twins ran forward to greet him, laughing and talking all at once. "We didn't think you'd make it! What was the Tower like? Did you see the Dark Lady? Were there many monsters?"

Jing put his hands up in mock surrender. "Hey, one question at a time," he smiled as the twins kept up their excited babble.

A piercing whistle split the air and the twins broke off their excited interrogation.

The tall man, Gimlet, was standing, two fingers in his mouth. He removed them, shook his head as if to clear cobwebs, and stared hard at Jing.

"You were in the tower?" he asked incredulously.

Jing nodded.

"Impossible!" Gimlet proclaimed.

Kir smirked. "Obviously, you don't know my friend here so well. Jing could steal the stars from the sky if he wanted to."

"He broke out of the mines!" one of the twins said as the other nodded vigorously.

Gimlet put a hand to his head and rubbed it, his eyes practically swirling as he tried to process the information. "Is this true?"

"Yes," answered Jing steadily.

Grappa nodded reluctant confirmation. "He did. I got word he broke Glenlivit out of the mines. He's safe with his sister in Nadiria."

"How?" asked Gimlet.

"Doesn't matter." Jing shrugged. "That's in the past. Right now I'm planning to get into that tower and get rid of the Dark Lady."

Gimlet lowered his hand from his face and leaned forward. "How can I help?"

Jing gave a crooked smile. "Can you figure out how to get past several thousand gallons of water filled with fifteen foot long mermen with tridents?"

"That's what's in the tower?" asked the pudgy drunk, blinking. His other cousin, the broad shouldered one, shook his head in dismay.

Gimlet, on the other hand, merely sharpened his gaze. "I could do it, if the only thing between the water and the outside is that tower's stone wall."

Kir flew over to the table, landed, and looked Gimlet up and down appraisingly. "Sorry to burst your bubble, buddy, but you ain't strong enough to knock down walls."

A self-depreciating smirk crossed the gaunt man's face, creasing the lines around his eyes and mouth. "Maybe not, but one of my siege machines might."

"Siege machine?" asked Jing.

Grappa sighed heavily. "Gimlet was a professor of medieval history and engineering, before the university closed down." Jing raised his eyebrows, and the barkeep continued. "The university closed because so many of the students kept getting sent to the mines. Gimlet is an architect now."

"And a darned good one!" the pudgy cousin said firmly.

"Hear hear, Slivovitz!" Malt seconded, thumping his glass on the table.

"Slivovitz is a clerk in city hall, and Malt works in his family's lumber yard. Every year they'd work together gathering the permits and lumber to allow Gimlet's classes to construct a siege machine for their final project."

"We'll help!" one of the twins said, staring defiantly at his father.

"Yeah," the other twin said, quietly but with determination.

Grappa stared at his two sons, then looked across the room to where Gimlet was standing, gripping the table with both hands as he swayed, trying to shake the affects of the alcohol he'd consumed. The expression in his eyes wasn't that of a drunk though.

The barkeep dipped his head in acquiescence. "Fine. We'll all help."

"Grappa." Jing said wonderingly.

"I know what I said before," the man growled. "But who am I to stand in the way? If my boys want to help build a siege machine, then I'm all for it."

As the twins whooped and hollered with joy, a look passed between Grappa and Jing. The boys were to build the machine, nothing else. Grappa's fatherly instinct to protect his sons was still in full swing. Jing met his gaze and nodded agreement.

Gimlet walked over to the bar on unsteady feet while his cousins slammed their glasses against the table and added to the general cacophony.

"Barkeep, I'm going to need coffee, and lots of it," he said, then passed out cold on the floor.