Chương 12: Part 12

"Hey, come downstairs, you have a customer!" Jill sighed. Really? At this time of day? Who was that desperate? Still, a job was a job, so she plastered on her work smile and went to greet her client. She had been expecting some ugly, hopeless old man, and was therefore rather surprised to find herself faced with a beaming girl, in an absolutely stunning black dress and without a single blemish visible on her body. Why the hell did she feel the need to pay people for sex?

Surely men and women alike would be falling over each other for her. Was there some sort of horrid disfiguration hiding under that dress or something?

"Jill!" the girl exclaimed, running up and squeezing her in a far stronger hug than her thin arms should be capable of. What? Did the girl know her? Jill was pretty sure she'd never seen the girl before in her life. This had better not be one of those scams where someone tried to claim she was their long-lost mother. She looked over at the madam, who uncharacteristically just shrugged. Odd; she was normally pretty strict about this sort of thing.

"Here, your share," she said, before tossing over a diamond. Jill just stared, completely slack jawed. A diamond?! What the actual heck? She stared down at the girl, who was still wearing a big, dopy grin, and shrugged in turn. For a diamond, she could tolerate a lot of weirdness. She brought the girl up to her room, but still needed to sate her curiosity.

"You're acting like you know me," she commented, "but I'm pretty sure I've not met you before. What's going on?" The girl's smile vanished briefly, before reappearing in a reduced form that suggested a touch of sadness.

"It's okay. I'll help you remember. But first..." The smile reappeared in full form, but this time, despite the friendly facade, Jill felt a sudden chill run down her back.

"Since I've already paid for your time, and now that I actually know what I'm paying for, I'm going to take the opportunity to teach you the eel trick all over again. Slowly and carefully. And probably several times." A couple of hours later, the madam again left the front desk, but this time for a completely different reason. Rather than packing her suitcase and fleeing, she simply made a note to see what could be done to improve the building's soundproofing.

She was used to some amount of noise, but whatever was going on in Jill's room today was... distracting. Keri watched on as a couple of porters loaded up her carts with barrels of wine and boxes of dried fruits. The wine in particular was a big risk; the weather up north had been dry this year, but while the grape crop was looking like it might fail, there was still plenty of time for it to be rescued by a last-minute shower. If that happened, demand for imported wine would drop through the floor.

If it didn't, she would be the first one there with bulk wine for sale right at the point where it became certain that their own crop for the year would be useless. If the weather held, her gamble would pay off big time, but a gamble it was. No-one could accurately predict the weather. Sometimes she wondered why she'd taken on the life of a travelling merchant, but it wasn't as if new opportunities dropped from the sky.

"Keri!" She looked around for the source of the voice, spotting a girl in an utterly ridiculous black dress, beaming and waving manically at her. Standing next to her was a rather resigned-looking girl who looked like she should have long since frozen to death, as undressed as she was.

"Hi Keri. I'm Jill, this overenthusiastic one is Anya, and yes we do know you." She glanced around at the porters, and suspicious looking guards, before adding, "but I suggest we go somewhere private to talk about it." The closest guards frowned, one putting a hand on his sword.

"Do you know these two, miss?"

"No," Keri replied, shaking her head.

"Then I'm afraid I must ask you to leave."

"What?!" exclaimed Anya, incensed, but Jill put a hand on her before she could say more.

"Leave it. You have to admit we look ridiculously suspicious right now. Keri would have to be a fool to go anywhere alone with us."

"But... the bandits?" Now even Keri was frowning.

"What bandits?"

"There are bandits active in the forest before Slightly-Newer-Than-Evennewerport-Port. If you head that way, you'll be attacked."

"And how would you know that?" asked the guard, as some of the others started making motions to surround the two.

"Time travel," shrugged Jill.

"It's a long story. We'll just rescue you after you get kidnapped, like last time, if we can't convince you here." It wasn't like either of them particularly cared about keeping secrets. The bigger problem was that Anya trying to perform a delicate operation on Keri's brain while surrounded by hostile guards and the general public would lead to a ridiculous number of complications, and Jill really couldn't be bothered trying to sort them all out. Actually, speaking of kidnapping... Why wait?

"Actually, Anya, change of plan. We're going to kidnap her ourselves instead. Don't injure the guards!" A very busy ten seconds followed, starting with eight guards drawing swords and charging forward, and ending up with Anya, Jill and Keri standing on a spectacular golden beach, with the sun shining overhead in a cloudless, emerald-green sky. A floating eyeball that happened to be in the area spotted the new arrivals and bobbed over to see if they were interesting. Keri screamed.

Then Anya started doing her thing, and Keri screamed louder. A few minutes later, Keri was sprawled on the beach, panting.

"That was mean," she muttered.

"Surely there was a better way of handling that."

"Well, we could have waited until your caravan got raided and your guards murdered, like last time," Jill answered pragmatically, "but I figured that since we could skip that part, we probably should."

"Fine, whatever. Let's just get back to my caravan before your faces end up on wanted posters across the whole kingdom." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Wanted posters?" asked Anya.

"People would want me? What's wrong with that?"

"That's... not what they're for. But never mind. Why don't you scrape up some of the beach, to pay off Keri's guards and stuff?"

"I can just make gold though. And don't we normally use diamonds?"

"True." Keri, still prone on the floor, burst out laughing. The general of the Rudellian army was confused. He had been on his way to Glimmerhome, along with twenty thousand men, and they'd set up camp in a forest. To keep the element of surprise for as long as possible, they'd been avoiding roads and clear plains where they could be spotted from a distance, even employing expensive illusion magics where there wasn't any natural cover available. So far, so good.

So why then, after falling asleep in his tent in that nameless forest, had he woken up in his own bed, back at home? Did he end up in a battle, suffer from memory loss, and have to be repatriated? That would be embarrassing. At the least, he hoped he managed to win the battle in the process. But he didn't hurt anywhere, and a bit of quick self inspection revealed no injuries, healed or otherwise. It was a mystery, and he hated mysteries.

If there was any consolation, it was that twenty thousand more men were currently sharing exactly the same mystery. The bandit leader was dead. As were the bandits. Really, what did anyone expect? Anya's little group wasn't going to let them off the hook, especially with Keri still in the party. Anya did at least hold back a little this time, resulting in the bandits merely being 'dead' instead of 'minced', a small detail that the pair of captives they'd already collected greatly appreciated.

"Excuse me, master." The mayor of Glimmerhome yelped and jerked, but just barely managed to keep his balance.

"I swear, one of these days I'm going to get a chair with a seatbelt. What's happened now, and how many people died?"

"One of the mages from the III has summoned a Creature of the Void again, master." The mayor looked out of his window at the building in the distance. It continued to look distinctly building-shaped, with no signs of the smoke, destruction, craters, screaming, or other paraphernalia that should accompany that declaration.

"Are you sure? It still looks intact to me."

"One of the staff didn't show up for work this morning, and when the faculty investigated his room, they found the summoning sigil. It was drained, having already been used. There was also some amount of flesh, blood and bones coating the walls and ceiling, which when scraped off and collected together, proved to weigh about the same as the missing researcher.

Eyewitnesses also reported a humanoid figure leaping the walls of the facility, and the guard captain confirms a breach in the barrier at a time matching the eyewitness reports." The mayor considered that. His servant wouldn't be bothering him with this information if he didn't have confidence in its veracity, but even a small Creature would be a hundred metres in length, and be rather too well endowed in the tentacle department to be described as humanoid.

The mayor would have suspected the mad mages of the III of confusing their sigils, and it being a demon summoning or something, except that a demon wouldn't have been able to escape the barrier. But... The mayor glanced out of the window again, at the peaceful scene playing out below. It probably wouldn't stay that way for long, Glimmerhome being what it was, but if there was a Creature out there then it shouldn't be that way now.

"A girl matching the description was seen entering a brothel in the marketplace, leaving with one of their courtesans a number of hours later. The proprietress reported that the girl paid in diamonds, and that her employee resigned, claiming they were going travelling together. Examination of the room revealed a number of eels in various states of distress, but nothing else out of the ordinary. There have been no further sightings."

"I think," opined the mayor, after some thought, "that it would be best to pretend this never happened." It was a number of years later, and the group of three were dawdling over a narrow rock bridge. Keri peered interestedly over the edge at the tarry blackness below, which occasionally formed big bubbles that floated up to the ceiling.

There was a time when she was afraid of heights, but somehow the world they'd visited last year that was entirely made out of spiders had made all other fears seem completely inconsequential. That feeling when they'd arrived, of sinking slightly into the floor, followed by the crawling as the floor itself rose up around her legs, still made her shudder at night. Besides, if she fell, Anya would catch her. Probably.

Jill watched one of the bubbles impact a bubble of light that had dripped down from the ceiling, the two annihilating with a loud fooomp, making Keri's ears twitch in surprise.

"I thought it was like a scaled-up version of one of those lava lamps from that world we visited a couple of months back, but I'm pretty sure they didn't go 'fooomp'."

"Nah," Anya answered, "they just used wax. This is actual liquid light and darkness." Jill nodded, it being a long time since she would do such foolish things as complain that there was no such thing of liquid light or darkness, or indeed that darkness was supposed to be an absence of light and not its own physically distinct thing.

"It's very pretty."

"It is," agreed Keri, pulling back from the edge with a little jingle. They finished crossing the bridge, stepping into a massive underground hall. Apparently this had once been the home of an advanced subterranean civilisation, but they'd delved too fast and too deep, unleashing an unspeakable evil that had dwelt far below the surface, forcing them to flee for their lives.

Keri observed the unspeakable evil, cloaked in shadow and flame, curled up around a great pillar and large enough to be visible even from this distance.

"Aww, how cute. Can I pet it?"

"Sure," Anya answered.

"Those things are actually pretty docile. Dunno why the people who used to live here were so scared of it." Keri ran forward, tail wagging excitedly behind her.

"You know, I'm not sure you did that quite right. I don't think cat tails are supposed to wag when they get excited. That's more a dog thing." Anya shrugged.

"I think it's cute, you think it's cute, Keri thinks it's cute, who cares about accuracy?"

"True." It had been Keri's request, originally. She figured that since Anya could perform brain surgery unaided, then replacing her costume ears and tail with real cat-like ones should be child's play. Anya had disagreed; she didn't want to half-arse it, and doing it properly would require careful genetic manipulation.

That had resulted in a trial run on a bunch of humans on some random world they'd found that had a bunch of different populations of humanoids, calling themselves dwarfs, elves, fairies, demons and more. That had resulted in the accidental creation of yet another new race to add to the planet's oversized collection, who had named themselves the beastkin, and who had been busy building a statue of Keri at the time they'd left.

Jill felt a bit guilty over that bit of cultural contamination, but for all she knew, that sort of thing was where all myths about gods came from, so she couldn't get too worked up about it. The three of them had added more friends to their group from time to time, but for some reason they never seemed to stick around long term. They always complained things were too weird, and they couldn't cope any more.

Anya didn't care; she'd worked out that being friends with someone didn't require chaining them to you, and was happy to head back from time to time and visit the acquaintances they'd made over the various worlds they'd explored. So now here they were, the group of three, Jill and Anya watching with smiles on their faces as Keri stroked the shadowy fur of the fifty metre long unspeakable evil, which yawned in contentment, showing far too many teeth and melting quite a large patch of the cavern floor.

"Do you think we could keep it as a pet?" asked Anya. Jill didn't dignify the question with a response. However hard she tried, there were still some areas of common sense that Anya had never quite grasped.