A MEETING IN THE
TUNNELS
Miss Feng’s plan was
certainly everything you could ask for. One might even suspect her
of black ops training, but experience has taught me that it is best
never knowingly to underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently
determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about
the nature of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high, I
was prepared to work to any plan, however rare.
However, we had to
wait until after midnight before we could start. That was when the
guards opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated
Edgestar and a thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company.
“Pip Paaarrrrrp,” Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in
the middle of the floor: his cortical turret spun round with the
force of the belch, and his lights strobed down through the
spectrum and went dark.
“Am being pithed,”
said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and collapsing onto two
legs. “Huuuurk!”
“Let me help you with
that,” I said, stepping forward to relieve him of his camel-hair
coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had secreted
beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite
an armful, especially when it’s bottled up in corrosion-proof steel
behind biohazard warning stickers.
“Aaah, that’s
better,” mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a hiss of
hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. “ ’M tired.
G’night.”
“Quietly,” Miss Feng
reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to the tiles.
“Excellent. I’ll take care of this.” She rolled it on its side,
directing it toward the door, as she palmed a preemptive sober-up.
“I’m sure it will be quite the hit at the squishie servants’
party,” she added, with something very like a shudder.
I tiptoed away from
the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my room to hide as
the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better chance of
avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for which
Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well suited. And so I
swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and
approached Toadsworth.
“Excuse me, old
chap,” I essayed, “but are you up for a jolly jape?”
“Bzzzt—” The cortical
turret turned toward me and I confronted a red-rimmed eyestalk.
“In-ebriate? Par-ty?”
“Jolly good show,
Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first, what?” I flicked
the sober-up at him. “Don’t want to let the side down, do
we?”
There was a muffled
explosion, his cortical turret spun round three times, and steam
hissed from under his gasket. “You unspeakable bounder!” he buzzed
at me. “That was below the belt!” His lights flashed ominously.
“I’ve a good mind to—”
“Whoa!” I held up a
hand. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll happily demonstrate the depth
of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can imagine afterward,
but we need to rescue Laura from the harem, then we need to make
our escape from the evil vizier and his mind-control
crabs.”
“Really?” The
Toadster froze in place for a moment. “Did you say evil vizier? With crabs? My favorite
kind!”
“Top hat, old boy,
top hat!” I waved my hands encouragingly. “All we need to do is get
old Edgy awake—”
“Some’buddy mention
nominative identifier?” With a whine of overstrained hydraulics,
Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap on the floor. One
foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling around the
skirting board. It barked furiously until the Toadster shot it to
death with his inebriator. “Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of
orientation?”
“That way,” I said,
pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to quiver and fold
in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels
extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.
“Vroom,” he said
uncertainly. “Where to?”
“To the harem! To
rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss Feng poisons the
squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s Bragote,” I
explained. “If you’d be so good as to follow me, chaps . .
.”
I pulled on the black
abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent down to tap on the
robot servitors’ hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss Feng had
acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch deigned
to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly
grateful.
The servants’ tunnel
was built to a more-than-human scale: not all the bots were small
bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and hurried
along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in
remembering to download the map. I don’t mind admitting that I was
sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with
Edgestar whizzing alongside like a demented skate-board and the
Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty
inebriator raised and ready to squirt.
Miss Feng’s plan was
clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly be languishing
under lock and key in the harem. Moreover, the harem’s main
entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly chaperone
bots. However, she speculated, the servants’ passage would still be
open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back door. We
would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting
misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of
palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back
inside. Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle
Featherstonehaugh’s tipple should have taken effect . .
.
Something moved in
the tunnel ahead of me, and I froze, knock-kneed in fear. I don’t
lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my
breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem.
“What is it?” he buzzed, quietly.
“I don’t know.
Shh.”
Holding my breath, I
listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a breathy whistling,
then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a twisty little
side passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I
sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something
else, something familiar—then I blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed
orbs brimming with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness
toward me.
“Jeremy!” The
delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks drunkenly in my
face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow a
betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for
it—I reached out and grabbed. “Hush, you silly old thing! If they
hear you, they’ll kill you, too!”
Grabbing a mammoth by
the trunk—even a hungover miniature mammoth who’s three sheets to
the wind and tiddly to the point of winking—is not an adventure I
can endorse if you value a quiet life. However, rather than
responding with his usual murderous rage at the universe for having
made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me tipsily and
sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would pass
without upset—but then the gathering toute came out suite,
and the foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of
beer-smelling spray in my direction. I let go instinctively: he
struggled back to his feet and began to reverse shambolically into
the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed over my left
shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short
by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. “Dash it all,
men, follow that mammoth!”
With a brain-rattling
crash, a fiendishly stealthed black chaperone-bot jumped over my
suddenly stationary form, slipped on the snot-lubed floor, tumbled
head over heels into the far wall, and crashed to the ground in a
shower of spiked armor and vicious knives. I nearly jumped right
out of my skin—indeed, I believe separating me from my integument
had been the sole purpose of its acrobatic display.
Before I could gather
my disguise and my wits and run, Edgestar revved up to speed and
whizzed past me. Vrooming like a very vroomy thing, he jumped on
the bally bot in a most unfriendly manner! It was a sight to see, I
can assure you. The chaperone-bots of al-Matsumoto look a lot like
Edgestar in humanoid form, only less convivial and disinclined to a
discreet afternoon tipple when they could be out and about, briskly
ripping unfortunates limb from limb. But being bots, they lack the
true elan and esprit of a clankie, and even a hungover tea trolley
of a posthumanoid is a fearsome thing to behold when it gets its
cricket box on. Jeremy scampered off into the bowels of the palace
honking tunelessly; meanwhile, old Edgy bounced up and down on the
combat robot’s abdomen, squeaking furiously and spinning his
wheels. They had cute little cutting disks on their inner rims! The
chaperone-bot lay on its back, stiletto-tipped legs curling over
and inward to stab repeatedly at the assailant on its abdomen, but
Edgy was too fast for it. Presently it stabbed too enthusiastically
for its own good—and Edgestar yanked hard, pulling the stinger
under the edge of a gaping inspection panel. With a triumphant
squeal of brakes, he leapt off the chaperone-bot, transforming back
into humanoid form in midair as sparks began to fly and an acrid
smoke poured from his assailant’s joints.
“Jolly good show,
that transformer!” I exclaimed.
“Pip-pip!” said the
Toadster, regaining some of his joie de vivre.
I consulted my map
again. “The back door to the harem is just around the corner! I
say, old chap, I think you’ve cleared the last obstacle. Let’s
shuftie, shall we? If we’re to be home by tea, it behooves us to
get our move on.”