Chapter 19:
The ogress stared out at the trackless wastes east of the Emerald Kingdom, her face twisted in a frown. Six men had died over the course of her rough life for the crime of suggesting she smile a little–that she might be prettier if she smiled. The last had been a boyfriend. The men gathered in the room could feel the mood on her. Things weren't right in her world just now, and she was irritated by things she saw as problems. People died when she was in a mood like this.
For her part, the ogress felt unease. Things were going much too fast. Things were slipping out of her grasp. As fast as she was, the world was moving faster. Chelsea was part of the problem. There was a saying. Never trust a wax-hustler. The wax-folk were notorious flim-flam men–and women. They would cheat their moms or sell their own sister. That was bad enough. What was far more dangerous was a wax-hustler with an axe to grind.
She'd needed Chelsea's connections to mount moves against the west. Those connections seemed to be coming with an intolerable risk. Chelsea's obsession with the last two marks her brother swindled was clouding her judgement and dragging the ogress along for the ride. And Finn the Human was becoming more and more active in her backyard. Chelsea had failed to deliver something they could use to deliver a knockout punch, and Finn was moving quickly to destroy her operation. As her mind pondered what else might go wrong, one of her henchmen entered, announcing, "that witch-doctor wants you, boss."
The nervous thugs shuddered in fear. They had all lived in terror of her the last few days. Mercifully, there was no violent outburst. The Bandit Princess went with the runner without a word. Indeed, the ogress seethed with fear that maybe things were going in the ditch already. She couldn't afford to have the gambit with the witch falter. With Chelsea failing to produce an effective way to deliver her poison-bombs and plagues, she needed access to the Fire-Bleeder to have a chance.
Her fears were seemingly confirmed by the fact that the witch was still comatose when she entered the lair of her hired wizard. "Alright," the ogress muttered. "What's the deal?" "This woman is hanging on the edge," said the witchdoctor. "Edge of what," demanded the evil woman?! "She is at the edge of eternity," the witchdoctor replied. "She's got one foot in Death's realm, but something in the mortal world is holding her here..." Glancing at the dead woman, the witchdoctor remarked, "she's fading. The hold is fading. She's going to cross soon..." The ogress snatched him up by his collar and snarled, "I need that bitch to find my monster! Whatever it is, you fix it, or you'll be crossing over too! Understand?!" He did indeed. Nodding emphatically, he swore to do whatever it took.
Shaking off her rage, the ogress turned and stalked out. She had somewhere else she needed to be. Móguĭ was waiting on her in the hall. "I'm still willing to try," he muttered. She'd been willing to let him until he explained that his method would shred the witch's soul, leaving nothing for a second attempt. If he failed, she'd have nothing. The only other people with the knowledge to find the Firebleeder were far more dangerous. "If he fails," muttered the ogress.
The pair walked out to a heavy wooden wagon already loaded with the ogress's possessions. She had business in the east. Finn was raising trouble, and her agents were getting nervous. She was thinking about more drastic action. Móguĭ wanted to test himself against the man who'd defeated Death. Trouble was his sister was far less certain of the outcome than he was.
The ogress climbed aboard the wagon and took the reins. The battered work-house wagon was a symbol of her ugly past. She hated the thing, but Móguĭ needed it for his magic. Climbing aboard, the evil fiend settled himself. For a long while, nothing got said. When he made no move to open the portal, she demanded, "well?" "You're afraid of him," the fiend rumbled. "I can still help you..." He'd offered to make her mightier several times. His help came with a severe price. Her soul. She'd have to offer her soul as compensation for mortal power. Trouble was, she didn't trust Móguĭ or his master. If she sold them her soul, what urgency did they have to come to her aid? They won if she got killed! "You can help me by taking me to Taían," she muttered. Her half-demon brother let out a bitter chuckle. She trusted her only living relation no more than that. Their mother had been a vile bitch indeed to give birth to the pair of them.
He began to chant. The awful sound had once chilled her to the bone. She'd become comfortable with her half-brother's awful magic. The only thing that still bothered her were the faces. As Móguĭ's chanting reached a crescendo, the thin barrier between the mortal world and hell began to fade. The faces came to them. She could remember each of them as if it were yesterday. The young man who'd raped her–his face shredded by the machine she'd pushed him into. The factory manager's horrific burns from the night she'd burned the factory–with him inside.
As she whipped the two horses into motion, newer faces crowded the line in hope of getting at her–the police chief with his shattered skull and his wife with her raw flesh. She'd learned to ignore them. She'd been told they would try luring her off the path and into hell itself. The important thing was to focus on steering her terrified horses.
Those damned souls chased them. They chased the wagon through the outskirts of hell down that road that stank of brimstone and death, chittering in her ears. They wanted her. They wanted to taste her terror. They wanted to drink her agony. Some day they would, but that day was not today. Whipping the horses to more speed, she shut out that awful cacophony and squelched the terror in her heart. Her brother's song began to peter out now, and, when she let herself look up from the road, she found they were in familiar surroundings. Her lair beckoned from the top of a bleak mountain.
She gave the horses a few moments to recover, and then she whipped them on their way once more. Her brother withdrew into himself, sulking at her insult to his pride, though he scarcely knew how close he'd gotten to having her soul at last. The terror had been worse than before. The terror was still there. A voice from somewhere inside, where she feared to look, whispered a dark thought. Finn the Human was coming for her. Arriving at the lair, the angry ogress went straight to her sanctum and shut the door. She was going to drink. She did that when she was going to drink. Men made themselves scarce. She was hell to be around when she was drunk.
Back in the west, the Bandit Princess's erstwhile partner was doing everything to justify her worry. Bill was nodding in and out in the jump seat behind Lina's seat. The cyborg-woman was plugged into the console and multi-tasking just now–surfing around in the matrix while she drove them north and east towards the ruins of Elbonia. It was one of those disconcerting things that tended to drive Pedersen straight up the wall. It was an odd relationship on its face. Leo Pedersen, the straight-laced soldier, hailing from the odd little corner of Ooo called the Frozen Yogurt Kingdom. On the flipside you had pacifistic Elina Yuvchenko, who was more machine than human and completely unashamed of that fact.
Billy had no problems at all with her. He honestly wouldn't have hesitated to bang the shit out of her himself, if she was his lady. She was almost as stacked as her Princess, and she had a lovely personality. Pedersen was a little creeped out that his wife could easily be found rummaging around in a hatch in her leg for some missing gadget that she needed. Tom had been chiseling away at that, and Billy had told him to quit it or risk getting his ass frozen. The elemental was jonesing for the cyborg, which was nuts on its face since he was the untouchable man–made literally of fire–and at risk of burning anything he touched.
As the strange eight-wheeler crept around a curve in the road, bumping and wriggling over ruts and knots of tree-roots in the dirt, the window suddenly shattered, and a speeding dart slammed into Lina's body. Billy was instantly awake as the distant roar of a dart-gun shattered the stillness. The strange machine's brakes immediately slammed full-on, dragging the vehicle to a halt, as Billy dragged the cyborg out of her chair.
Pedersen was at her side immediately, pushing Billy out of the way, but the Ice-Prince shoved him back. He knew what the sight of someone you loved laying on the ground did to you, and he needed Pedersen to keep his wits. "Talk t'me, Lina," Billy growled! The pretty woman burbled something unintelligible. Unfortunately, he didn't speak Russian. In spite of the steel dart jammed into the spot where her heart should be, she wasn't bleeding, at least not much. That was something. More darts were starting to hit the truck. It was pretty heavily built, but Billy feared it wasn't that heavily built. If they lost the tires, they might well be screwed. Focusing his mind on the outside, he conjured walls of ice from the cool air.
In the mean-time, he took hold of the dart, sending a preternatural chill down through it, freezing the surface in a layer of glacial ice to stabilize it. And then he pulled. Pedersen was at the front window now, crouched behind the control console, rifle in hand. "A dozen of them," he said. "Maybe bandits." Bill turned to Tomas and Olesia. "On it," said the princess. Shrugging off the asbestos blanket she wore in Lady Lina's conveyance, the elemental woman stepped up under the roof hatch. Pedersen clacked the control to cycle it open, and then Olesia was gone. Shaking his head, Tom headed for the side door–to go out the hard way.
Olesia soared up high over the trees to get visibility. She couldn't stay aloft for long–she wasn't the Flame King–and she focused on finding where the gunfire was coming from. Flashes of light and terrifying bangs announced the locations of the gunmen. Alighting in a rush in the midst of three of them, the elemental woman fried the first man she saw. She had to be careful. She had to be careful about burning the forest. There were live flesh-creatures here.
One man ran immediately. A second leveled his rifle and let fly, striking her square in the chest. The surprised woman stared down at it as it slowly grew hotter and hotter. It sort of tickled. Two more men made haste to disappear as Olesia felled the man who'd shot her. They ran straight into Tomas, who made quick work of them with a bolt of fire. "Be careful, you idiot," shouted Olesia! "You'll burn the forest!"
Behind the vehicle, Billy stepped out as a pack of men came slipping through the forest to hit them from behind. Eyes blazing with a cold fire, the big man laid into them, chilling the air down to a near-liquid state and suffocating the four of them. Pedersen entered the fray from the roof-hatch wasting two men who'd been coming up from Billy's right. "Thanks," Billy offered. Silence reigned once more. The big man returned to the interior of the vehicle to find Lina sitting on one of the couches with her jumpsuit hanging open. "Thanks for getting that spike out of my solid-state storage unit," she offered. Averting his eyes from her knockers, the young man replied, "no prob, bob." Pedersen looked torn between being disturbed by the bits of wiring hanging out of her chest, and gratitude that she didn't seem badly hurt. Billy shoved him towards her before going back outside.
As he arrived outside, Olesia and Tom strolled up. Upon peeping the dart sticking out of Olesia's chest, Bill opined, "ok, that's creepy." She gave him an embarrassed grin. It was stubbornly hard, and she hadn't been able to melt it. It was no longer tickling. It was actually becoming unpleasant. With a sigh, Billy went into Lina's toolbox and grabbed a set of tongs. Tossing them to Tom, he said, "get that out, while we chat. If I do it, it'll hurt." Taking the tongs, the thief began wrestling with the bolt protruding from the plump girl's chest, while Billy quizzed them on what they'd seen.
The dudes that had ambushed them were pretty thoroughly slagged. There weren't even pockets to loot, just ash. Billy turned and headed back along the road to the men he'd killed himself. He found them laying there in the woods, eyes wide and staring. As he squatted for a closer look, he felt rather than saw Olesia come up. "Go back," he said. "You don't need to see this, princess." Honestly, he liked the plump girl. She was brave and plucky–a lot like his stepmom–but he wouldn't have wanted anybody to see what a corpse looked like. Moving past his own revulsion, the big man started rifling pockets.
The men were dudes out of Emerald Kingdom, suggesting that there was a connection with the men who'd jumped him in Muscle Kingdom and possibly suggesting maybe there was a connection to the guys who'd snatched Blargetha and Maja. He was really starting to think that maybe Princess Aysun was up to something. She'd tried to rebel in open council, suggesting she'd go it alone. His dad had squashed that, but it didn't mean she wasn't still trying. Aysun had been friendly with Yolanda the Muscle Princess and on the outs with Alexia the Laurel Princess. It was quite possible that maybe she'd lured the current princess to come to her kingdom. Or maybe Nieve was playing the same game as her aunt.
After emptying the pockets of the dead men, the big man gathered up their rifles and turned to rejoin his crew, finding Tom standing there at the stairs to Lina's vehicle. "What now," asked the thief? Billy replied, "I think we're going to Emerald Kingdom." "Better than a place where I can't touch anything," the thief said, as he turned to go back inside. "Tom," Bill rumbled. "Yeah, boss," the thief replied. "Lay off Leo and Lina," Bill rumbled. Nodding, the thief said, "yeah. Will do." They found Pedersen sitting on the couch, holding a seemingly irritated Lina on his lap. Billy gave her a smile, as he headed up to the control console. As Olesia and Tom put their asbestos blankets back on, the big man shut the hatches and put the vehicle back in motion.
Out in the forest, a couple of puzzled faces turned to their boss. "Ok," said the werewolf on the left, "we jump these stiffs with a bunch of dudes who didn't stand a chance... Why?" Petrov replied, "because I don't have a wizard in Purple Kingdom, dummy. If we jumped them ourselves, we'd get slagged by those two elementals, and that's before popsicle-boy gets into the act. I have two wizards waiting in Emerald Kingdom to jump these stiffs. We have the prince in our pocket. We can jump them in the old tunnels where we have all the advantages. We just need to get them there." It was important that the trail not look like a trail. This ambush–with just enough of a clue to send them to Emerald Kingdom–fit the bill.
In the far east, the King of Ooo sat in a car outside a raucous casino and public house. The town was the fifth place they'd been told to go, and it was clear that somebody, somewhere, was playing with him. He wanted to be back home–looking for Maja. He wanted to be with his family. And yet he was here in this fucking place. It made him prickly, and he'd been short with Orzsebet rather a lot the last few days.
"I don't agree with this," rumbled Orzsebet. Which she'd said twice now, and which Sybil had spent half the night telling him. He was loopy and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. His body still thought he was in the west in Bonnie's place, and Sybil's efforts at harassing the shit out of him had done little to help that. "I've fucking heard it," he muttered. She grunted something irritated. She wasn't saying it for his health. He knew she was very much afraid of his family. Six wizards, a Fire Elemental, and the King of Vampires were all waiting to make her life a living hell if anything happened to him. That said nothing of the host of princesses who would make her unwelcome in any and every kingdom. And, if that wasn't enough, the Committee would have the space they needed to simply make her disappear. Damien would get his wish to be Prince of Spies.
Angrily, she growled, "ok, let's do this." She popped open the door and climbed out from behind the wheel. Finn waited nary a moment before following. It wasn't sexy-spy-girl today. It was angry, hostile, vindictive bitch mode, and it was actually kind of a refreshing change for him–a lot like when Nadia dropped the act and quit pretending to be sweet and innocent. Indeed, Orzsebet was all business, as she went striding up the street towards the entry. Finn fell in at her back. "Walking normally," he rumbled. Her face whipped around. "You try too hard," he said. "You don't have a big butt, so you should just walk normally." She didn't have much to wiggle. Her jaw came open, and her face went red hot. Then, coldly, she said, "we're working." Finn nodded. Indeed.
The skinny spy-girl gave the doorman a winning smile, declaring, "my companion and I are in town with a little time on our hands. We'd like to play..." The bouncer gestured for them to go on into the casino, but he insisted on checking them out for weapons. The spy-girl opened her purse to them, showing the usual collection of feminine junk. The bouncer and his buddy flicked a heavy magnet over her front and around her legs, finding nothing. Finn got a full pat-down, with both men getting more friendly with him than some of his old girlfriends.
Shaking his head and muttering curses, the big man followed his spymaster into the casino. He found his mind going back to the day they'd met. It was a place like this, and he was a young, naive kid. He'd lost a pile of cash that day and then some. He'd taken it in stride as a lesson well-learned and never gone in again. Orzsebet had gotten very pissed. She'd wanted to burn the place to the ground, customers or not. "Remember that mob casino east of the Grey Forest," he murmured. The spy-girl stopped in mid-stride, her back going stiff.
Finn put a hand to her shoulder. "You learned a lesson, though," he reminded her. "Yeah," she growled. "I learned that Finn the Human is a fucking serial party-pooper." "You need to find better parties," he teased. Her face snapped over to his. "I'm a spy," she said. "I'm usually working." "Girls've been telling me to quit it," he said. "You should do the same. Take a vacation." Without another word, he stepped off.
Falling in at his side, the nasty witch said, "last table on the end. Over there near the corner..." Finn steered for the mentioned table. "Our quarry's in the back," she said. "She's been here for days, or so I'm told." "How do we meet up with her," he asked? With a shrug, the spy said, "we cheat." He barely reacted. That was good. "She has cheaters personally dragged before her," said Orzsebet. "She... disciplines them. It's worth your life to get taken into the back." Finn smiled. They could try.
Settling at the table, the pretty lady called for the chips, and purchased an ample supply. With Finn at her side, they began playing. The name of the game was Pharaoh, the same game that Finn had lost his shirt on so many years ago. Bonnie had admonished him for even going into the casino in the first place, lecturing him a long hour about odds-making and how the house 'always won'. That was the lesson he'd taken home with him. As with most things that came out of Bonnibel Bubblegum's mouth, Finn hadn't understood anything of what she was saying, but he'd figured out just what she meant when she said 'the house always won'. It was like playing a game of Card Wars with Jake. Why would they let you take their money?
Now, with his newly enhanced brain, he understood immediately what he hadn't understood then. The house had any number of ways to win. They could cheat you with rigged cards. They could cheat you with a well-trained dealer's fast hands. They didn't, in reality, even have to cheat you at all. The odds were, as Bonnie had said, already in their favor. It was a lot like life. Maybe Sybil was right. Maybe he was going about this the wrong way. It felt right to be out here getting shit done, but he was risking everything he had on what might be a nothing.
He'd intended to wait on Orzsebet to pull her move and just follow her play. As he watched his companion place her opening bets, his eyes wandered, and that was how he spotted the cheat. It was the same thing she'd bitched about in that casino so many years ago. She'd lost a purseful of money, and she'd sworn the dealer was pulling cards out of his sleeve. Young Finn had no way of knowing if it was true or not. He'd been far more concerned with her burning the casino down while it was still occupied. Now, as Finn watched, their dealer did exactly the thing that Orzsebet had suspected back then.
Maybe he wouldn't have noticed it without the aid of the Quicksilver curse or maybe it was the nano-whatsits in his brain. He saw, with stark clarity, the dealer slip a card out of his sleeve and place it face up on the table. "Bank wins," announced the dealer. "You cheated," Finn blurted. As the man stared at him in shock, the King of Ooo calmly grabbed his arm with one hand and tore the sleeve off his jacket with the other, exposing a mechanical gadget that would have made Bonnie proud.
And that was when the guards came.
Three guards clamped their arms on Finn. Two took hold of Orzsebet. The King put on a little bit of a show of struggling, but this was where he wanted to go, so mostly he went along. Step by step, they got dragged towards the corner, where a door now hung open, letting out into a dark abyss that seemed almost to eat the light. The minute they were dragged inside, that door slammed shut with a finality that even gave the Hero of Ooo a shudder.
The guards spoke not a word, even as they frog-marched the King and his lovely companion down that darkened hallway. Finn got the impression of black stone walls, and he knew he was in a cavern. Things could go very sideways right now. These guys were the kind of pissed that reminded him of Cherry's guys when you'd stepped out of the box. As the thugs dragged the pair further and further from escape, the big man did the calculation and then did it again. How deep was too deep? When did they throw down? He didn't want to miss their chance to get at the Bandit Princess, but he didn't want to check out here either. Still, as the guards kept right on going, moving past one room after another, the big man held his peace, praying the Orzsebet would trust him enough to keep going. One thing stood out in his mind, though. The girls would be really pissed when they found out about this latest adventure.
Well, his hands are dirty. The girls are NOT going to be happy. And Billy? He's walking into another trap.