Forty-Two || Distraction

"That wasn't an attack," Mint said. "That was practice."

Belle looked up from her drink. "Yeah? How d'you figure?"

"Pretty simply." She leaned on the barroom table, her hands pressing down against the edges of the island's map. "If they could've used those puppets any time since they got here, they would've. Doll Master was trying to be sneaky about this, but if you've got an army of those things there's no need to be sneaky– they could've charged the ruins, flooded the town with monsters, forced Prima out of our hands and used those things to guard the lake while they do whatever needs to be done to break the seal. Sneaking failed, so now it's time for them to try force."

"But why do you figure practice?" Belle pressed. "Practice for what?"

"For controlling them," Rue said. "Those things are..." He took a moment to mull over the words. "They're animated by broken souls. They barely function on their own. They need direction. The ones in the cathedral were probably being commanded by that... that monster."

He shot a quick glance at Duke, waiting for corroboration. Duke nodded. "Makes sense to me," he said.

"Which might be why the ones that were at Elroy's atelier weren't animate," Mint said. "Maybe they just weren't... you know, complete, but I'll bet even if they were they need something to control them."

"Direct them," Rue corrected. "I'm not sure it's necessarily direct control."

"Whatever," Mint said, shrugging him off. "The point is..."

"The point is," Belle interrupted, "that you're planning on getting to the source to figure out what's going on."

"Before they can get all their resources together," Rue said. "If they're planning on mobilizing these things for a reason... we can't fight them. Not all of them. There's just too many."

Belle took a long swig from her drink. It wasn't exactly the kind of drink you were supposed to take long swings from, but she wasn't terribly concerned with social construction right there. When she was fortified, she set the drained glass on the table and looked between the two of them. "Tell me you're taking into account more than just yourselves," she said.

"Well," Mint sniffed, "pretty-boy and I are basically the brunt of our offensive forces. I guess you two can help, but..."

"Even if we accounted for the entire town," Rue said quickly, cutting Mint off before she could go too far, "the sheer numbers we're dealing with are staggering. And I don't want to account for the entire town. They shouldn't have to get involved in this anymore."

"Which is why you're talking to us," Duke said.

Mint nodded. "Yep." She leaned in to the map and pointed. "We're going to set out and look into these tonight." Her finger trailed up to Old Carona. "Pretty-boy's already been to the cathedral, so he'll handle getting through it again."

Duke looked over to Rue, his neutral expression faltering slightly. "You sure you're okay out there?" he asked.

"I'll be fine," Rue said.

Duke looked dubious, but nodded again, just once, quick and curt.

Mint didn't acknowledge them. Her hand moved across the map, cutting a line into the forest. "Which leaves me heading into Elroy's atelier. Which is gonna be a pain in the ass, but at least I know his labyrinth is a thing that's going to happen."

Belle tilted her head. "Labyrinth?"

"Yeah. Or... I guess it's not technically a labyrinth. It was a big... magical... not maze exactly, it just looped on itself if you got it wrong, wasn't too complicated, exactly, it just pissed me off."

Belle stared at her, eyebrow cocked, and then jerked slightly. "Oh, right, yeah. Just go in the back."

Mint opened her mouth to speak, jerked to a stop, stared at her. "Just... what now?"

"The back," Belle said. "Out in the forest there's a teleportation array, right about... here, I think." She indicated on the map and looked up at Duke. He nodded. "Shoots you right down to the atelier."

Mint stared at her.

"It's veiled," Belle said. "And broken. I had to re-weave almost half of the damn thing to get it to start up, and when it did it wasn't exactly a smooth ride."

"So... I see," Mint said testily. "That's why we got separated in the labyrinth." She looked at Belle levelly. "You jerk."

"Like I had any idea you were in there."

"Like you wouldn't have done the same thing if you had."

Belle thought about it. "Point granted."

"Well, that'll save a lot of time," Rue said. He looked to Belle and Duke. "So you know why we're telling you this."

"'Cuz if you two are wrong, and they're already prepped for this, you being gone leaves the town in a bit of a bind. You want us to stay back and watch for anything."

He nodded.

Belle leaned back in her chair. "Can do."

"Just be careful," Duke said.

Mint flashed him a smile. "Please," she said. "When are we not?"

Belle snorted. "Always. All the time. Constantly."

Rue nodded. "Hard to argue that. Thank you." He stood up from the table and rolled up the map, then handed it to Mint. She accepted it, and he looked back to Belle and Duke, inclining his head in a semi-bow. "We shouldn't be long, but..."

"We got it," Duke said.

"Hey," Mint added, "anything happens around here, I'm gonna be pissed and you're gonna be the ones to blame for that."

"We got it," Belle said. "Just go, we know how to hold down the fort."

Rue nodded to Mint; she nodded back. They left the tavern and made a fast track out of the back alley and to the service gate. It was well into the night by then; almost everybody had retreated to their homes, although by the lights burning in the windows very few of them were getting any semblance of sleep. Hard to blame them; the past few days had been quite unkind to the town.

They were most of the way to the service exit when Mint snarled; "This is nuts."

"I know," Rue said.

She didn't even acknowledge him. "I was never a big fan of Doll Master, but the man's gone nuts! And his cronies are even bigger assholes. Next time I run into Trap Master, he's grease."

Rue nodded.

"I want this Relic pretty bad, too," Mint said. "But I wouldn't try and kill an old guy for it. Or his family. Or his town."

"Klaus is only forty-eight," Rue said quietly.

"You know what I mean."

Again, he nodded.

Mint's seething quieted down, although the grinding of her teeth was almost audible. "Insane," she growled, and looked over to Rue. She studied him for a moment, her expression drawn, and exhaled something between a chuckle and a sigh of exasperation. "Sorry."

He blinked. "For what?"

"I'm off calling him out for being a class-A jackass and he's your brother or something, right?"

Rue faltered slightly, although his misstep was lost in the darkness and he caught himself quickly enough. "It doesn't matter," he said stiffly. "I never knew him, and there's no– blood loyalty. I don't care, anyway. What he's doing is madness, and we need to stop him."

"Sticking to your guns?" Mint asked. "Not planning on feeling a flush of brotherly love and changing your mind?"

"Why should I?" He sounded almost offended. "You and your sister don't exactly get along, and you two actually know each other."

They arrived at the door. Mint took the lead and pushed it open, and together they stepped out of the town and to the edge of the forest.

"Well," Mint said, "that is part of the problem. I'm sure we'd get along just fine if we never saw each other." She flashed him a smile. "I don't doubt you," she added.

He frowned at her.

"I don't," she insisted, her smile fading.

"It's not that," he said. "I just realized– Maya."

"What about her?"

"When we ran into her in the bar."

"Yeah?"

"You two... you don't really get along–"

"Figured that out all on your own, did you?"

"–but she's not a bad person."

"That's debatable."

"I'm being serious," Rue said.

"So am I," Mint responded.

"No. Listen. Mint. She didn't know what was going on."

Mint looked at him curiously, but after a moment her curiosity turned to consternation. "What are you on about?"

"I asked her about that attack. She had no idea what I was talking about. And what she said in the bar, about working for Ruecian, she had no idea–"

"Ruecian?"

He paused, a little surprised at himself. "That's, ah... Doll Master's name."

"Ruecian."

"You didn't know?"

"Rue."

"What?"

"No, just... seriously?" She blinked. "Seriously?"

"I was making a point, Mint."

"And you can get back to it. I'm just floored here. Who the hell were your parents that they named their kids Rue and Ruecian? You have any other long-lost siblings? Bet you good money they're just as creative–"

"Stop it."

He said it quietly and softly and with an undercurrent of simmering fury that reminded her distressingly of his elder brother, and without any further protest she stopped. He waited a moment to see if she would rebound, but Mint regarded him levelly, waiting for him to speak again.

"Go on," she said irritably.

"Look," he said, trying to settle himself back into the conversation. "In the bar she was talking about helping Ruecian achieve his goal, right? When we spoke in the Book, Maya had no idea he had been doing anything beyond their apparent instructions. She didn't know he had an ulterior motive. She didn't know he or his Masters were doing any of this. She didn't know anything about what happened in the bar."

When he finished, Mint was quiet for a few seconds.

"So... what did happen in there?" she asked finally.

"I don't know," Rue said. "There's just something else about this we're missing." They came to the fork in the forest path, and Rue turned off the main road and started off on the branch leading to Old Carona. "Just be aware of that. We don't know everything we're dealing with."

Mint snorted. "Please," she said. "At what point have we known exactly what we're dealing with?"

Rue stopped for a moment and considered the question. "Point," he said.

. . .

Mint dove off the beaten path and made her way through the forest, her rings ignited to provide her with light. She wasn't worried about turning them too bright: in this darkness, with the moon and stars mostly blotted by cloud cover, any light would have been too much to hide. There was no point crippling her senses in a vain attempt at stealth.

Fortunately, it turned out to be unnecessary. The monsters stayed clear of her, she saw no more puppets traversing the forest, and there was no other human presence in her neck of the woods. She made her way through without incident, and eventually came upon the location Belle had pointed out on the map.

It blended in with the rest of the forest, especially with her limited light, but Mint reached out to the magic in the area and found a tight knot of energy coiled near the roots of a tree. It was an odd combination of old, latent power and something recently untangled, and she recognized it for exactly what it was: Elroy's ancient spell, forcibly re-activated by modern intruders. Belle had done a nice job getting it to work again, although her tactics were perhaps even less refined than Mint's; when Mint approached the spot, the side of the tree that hugged the old spell was scorched, and the grass nearby twisted and blackened.

Without that disruption, though, Mint could see that, if she hadn't known what to look for, she would have passed right by it. The teleport point Belle and Duke had used was an old, weathered stone. Designed had been carved and painted on its surface, but the wear of time – rain and wind and dirt and overgrown vines – had scraped it clean and smoothed out a significant part of the surface. Mint could only tell it had once been marked because of a few grooves and unnatural discolorations.

The original spell was woven with the same intricacy and care she had felt on the way to the atelier itself, and other than Belle's brute-force intrusion into its entanglements she couldn't feel any other disruptions to its pattern. That meant Belle had been the last one to use it, which in turn meant that Doll Master and his entourage hadn't found this way of getting into the atelier. She took a little bit of pleasure from that; if they were culling some of the puppets from anything that was down in the atelier, they'd had to tromp back and forth through the labyrinth, both heading down in the first place and getting the puppets back out. That must've been fun.

She canvassed the area one last time, listening for any other signs of life – something waiting, something following – but as far as she could tell she was alone. She turned back to the stone marker, drew in a long breath, and stepped through.

In an instant she was awash in energy, and an instant after that she stepped suddenly onto hard stone floor. The forest had disappeared behind her, and she was now in the caverns beneath the island, little bright flits of magical energy trailing away from her. She looked over her shoulder and saw that she had emerged seemingly from the wall. Another stone marker, in far better shape than the one outside, rested in the floor, its burning faintly with magic.

She looked forward.

She was in a little room, something dug out of the rocky walls, and directly in front of her was a short hall that emptied out into another room. The luminous lichen bloomed around her, outlining the path in spiraling blues and greens; meanwhile, the room ahead of her had some amount of light, and she could hear the sound of running water. She stepped out of the room, down the little hall, and found that it opened out into the atelier chamber.

The apex of the pyramidal structure stood before her, its point just a little lower than where she was standing. She had to take a moment to figure out exactly where that was, at least in relation to how she had originally entered the room, and after a moment of peering in the damp gloom her eyes adjusted and she saw, down below and to the left, the broad tunnel entrance that led out of the labyrinth. She only saw this because something else drew her attention, a large, pale lump of something emerging like a small hill from the water. She squinted, trying to get a better idea of it, and the shape coalesced.

"Yikes," she said. "They really did a number on that thing."

Or at least somebody had.

It was the skeletal dragon that had guarded the atelier before, beaten and broken and left in a heap in the water. Even from her distance she could see that something was uneven about its form, something that had made it difficult for her to put the pieces together in the first place. Was that from when Belle and Duke had fought it earlier? It didn't seem right. She and Rue hadn't been able to do much damage, and she couldn't imagine Belle and Duke would have had much more luck.

Trap Master, then. Or Psycho Master. Maybe both. Hopefully both.

She looked away and focused on where she was standing.

It was a path of sorts, several feet wide and protruding from the wall. She saw that the edge seemed raised, and there were a few thin spires of rock rising at almost even intervals along the length of it; the weathered remains of a railing, most likely. The path dropped off to her left, but continued along at a decline to her right, snaking its way along the wall until it came to another drop off at the back of the pyramid.

Mint followed the path, listening for any sound beyond the dull, distant rush of water, but only heavy silence settled in the room. The air was thick with humidity; by the time she reached the end of the path, she was breathing harder than she had any right to be. And still she heard nothing else; the roar of water in the walls, her own breathing.

She looked at the pyramid.

A thin bridge, impossible to see when she had been further away, stretched from the edge of the platform to the back of the pyramid, emptying onto a balcony and leading to a door. This must have been where Belle and Duke had come in. This must have also been why they had started their search on the second storey rather than the ground floor.

She made her way across the stone bridge and stepped onto the far balcony. She reached for the door, then stopped herself short.

A strip of darkness along the door's edge revealed to her that it was slightly ajar, swung inward. Mint stared at it for a moment, and then through it, looking for any signs of light from within the building. She saw nothing. She stepped forward, eased the door open, and walked inside.

The upper floor, of course, was not flooded as the lower one was, but trapped water and dampness had gathered and made the air even heavier. Humidity and mold clogged the room, and Mint had to raise her shirt over her nose to block out the smell. She could only imagine how bad it had been in here before the treasure hunters had opened it before; the rot of five hundred years hung heavy inside.

Why so bad, though? The lower room had been sealed just as long. It was a much larger room, granted, but–

Oh. Much larger.

She raised her ring and ignited it, casting a glow through the room, and saw that she had stepped into what could only be private chambers. The room was very constrictive, its ceiling sharply sloped by the pyramid's overall shape, and it felt crowded for such a small room, dotted with bits of furniture and moldy books and rotten wood. The fungal invasion that marked the labyrinth and dotted the atelier had taken solid root here; the floor was slick with mold, the walls marbled in dark green, and even through the fabric of her shirt Mint had to bite back the urge to gag.

What the hell was that smell?

Something had gone badly off in here, and the last few days of airing out – assuming the open door was from when Belle and Duke had first walked in, and Mint was just going to keep on assuming that – had done little to help. Whatever had been in here had years to putrefy inside the seal, and as she moved further through the little room the smell just got worse.

She shoved the opposite door open and staggered out into the atelier itself, crashing into the second floor railing and inhaling a long, gasping breath. She coughed, swallowed, and filled her lungs with cleaner air. It was still hot and humid, filled with mold spores, but compared to the private chambers she had never tasted anything so pure.

She looked over her shoulder.

Sensibility told her to stay out, but curiosity got the better of her. She shifted a few feet away from the room and concentrated, drawing clean air around herself and forming a bubble of fresher oxygen. It wouldn't last long – she wasn't used to holding spells like that, not without the aid of both Dual Halos – but she didn't plan on being in the room for more than a moment. She dove back inside and looked around, using her ring for illumination as well as to sift through some of the rotten clutter that had accumulated.

It took a little searching, but eventually she found what she was looking for. It was lying on the floor near the remains of the bed, bundled up in rotting fabrics and the slimy remains of a bed-sheet. The sheet was where most of the smell was coming from, and as she stared uncomprehending at what she was seeing she couldn't quite figure out why. It took her brain several seconds to actually catch up to and describe the scene before her.

Then it clicked.

There was a skeleton there– a tiny mess of bones, the size of a child but malformed and ill-proportioned. She stared at it for a while, utterly perplexed, until her sluggish thoughts finally came back to full speed and encouraged her to step slowly backwards out of the room. She dismissed the barrier of clean air around her, shut the door, and decided that it wouldn't hurt too much to take the scenic way back to the surface.

She turned away from the bedroom-crypt and back to the rest of the building.

Still there was silence.

Nobody's here, she thought.

And then, just to be sure, she cleared her throat and shouted, "HEY!"

Her voice echoed heavily in the chamber, rebounding off the stone walls before drowning in the flooded ground floor. She waited until the ringing stopped, and then waited a little longer. Nothing stirred.

She crept along the balcony of the second storey, her eyes raking the floor below, her ears pricked for any odd sounds around her, her whole body tense. She cast a few quick glances back to the door she had just come through and wished she'd had the sense to seal it somehow. She could do so now, but she really didn't have much of an inclination to go back near that room. Instead, she made her way to another door and stepped inside.

She and Rue hadn't had any chance to investigate the upper floors, and there was nothing out of the ordinary to them. They were dark and cramped and filled with the remains of a magician's workshop; crumbling tables, splintered chairs, the disintegrated memory of books and papers. It also looked ransacked; while the room had clearly not been in good shape from the wear of time, pieces of it had been cracked and flung about wildly, old books scattered at random, pieces of furniture strewn oddly.

The same was true of the other rooms. Time had already been unkind, but somebody else had seen fit to come through and rampage. She should have recognized it in the disheveled state of the bedroom; there was no reason for it to be quite so much of a mess. Rotten and falling apart, yes, but under the heavy seal of the door it should have remained undisturbed. Somebody had been through here, and far more violently than her and Rue– or even, she suspected, Belle and Duke.

She found the set of stairs leading down to the ground floor and made her way down, careful not to slip on the slick stone. She stepped out onto the ground floor and touched water, and slowly worked her way through the flooded floor into the nearest room. Large and spacious, at least, but empty as when she'd last seen it.

She left that room and looked across the way, and stopped for a moment.

She hadn't intended to, but she had managed to avoid the final room completely up until that moment, and she realized that she had no further choice in the matter. She stared at the door, apprehension clawing its way down her spine. That had been the room where they had first seen the puppets. If there was anything in the atelier, it was in there.

She stepped forward, stood in front of the door, and froze.

Warm light was flickering under the opening, dancing as it filtered through the water. Mint stared down at the small light well, then back the door, and steeled herself. She gripped the halo in her hand, allowing it to burn brighter, and pressed her hand against the stone door. She shoved, and the door swung inward and rested against the wall.

The tables and chairs had been thrown and strewn around the room. One of the puppets lay draped over the table, face-down, its clothing frayed, the fabric of its body torn, its whole form grossly deflated and warped. Above it was a lantern, held in place by a fine, almost invisible string, its magic illumination pulsing bright, then soft, then bright again.

Across from her, standing against the wall, was another puppet, propped up through clever use of the fractured remains of a table. Its arm was twisted around, making it appear as though it were flourishing toward the wall. Rather, the message scrawled on the wall.

Rather, the message burnt into the wall.

A series of concentrated explosions across the stone had left a sequence of scorch marks in an arrangement of letters. Even now, Mint could smell the edge of their burning, feel the fading remains of magic in the air. This had been done only a short while ago– a very, very short while ago. The message couldn't be more than a couple of hours old.

"Son of a bitch," she snarled.

Then the full meaning of it settled over her.

"No, shit! The town!"

She wheeled and tore out of the room. Behind her, the light continued to pulse, playing against the words written on the stone.

MADE YOU LOOK