“Ah?” The king crossed his arms and gave us a considering look. “You can drop the ‘Your Majesty’ business. I’m a man of my people. Why did a mage send you here?”
“That is a very good question,” Gregory said.
I peeked at him out of the corner of my eye. He hadn’t mentioned being with the Watch . . . that was odd. If I were a policeman, I would mention it, whether or not I had authority in that place. And he certainly hadn’t had a problem telling Douglas that. Hmm.
“I’m sure I’ll get a message about it,” the king said, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about machines, would you?”
“Machines?”
“What kind of machines?” I asked, tucking the cat more firmly in place as Aaron strode to the door, obviously expecting us to follow him. “I know a little about computers.”
“Such things are unreliable. They are always breaking down.” He must have noticed Gregory pulling out his cell phone, because he added, “I believe you’ll find that your mobile device will not work here. It’s something to do with the static in the air. Now, about your experience with machinery . . .”
“I’m a Traveller, Your Maj—er—”
“Aaron.”
“I’m a Traveller, Aaron,” Gregory said as we left the hall and blinked at the bright sunlight flooding the grass bailey before us.
“Ah? Oh, I see what you mean. Your kind does not do well with machinery. Just so,” Aaron said, nodding, then cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you a Traveller, too?”
“No, I’m an alchemist.”
“Hmm. Alchemist. Hmm. No, my newest weapon, the Piranha, has no use for that. Now, if you had some way to smooth out a balky gearshift, I could put you to work. But as it is—oh, lord. This is all I need.”
Irritation flitted across his face as a woman strolled out of a small outbuilding. She was dressed in a Victorian artist’s idea of medieval wear, a long silken white gown known as a kirtle, touched with gold shimmering in the slight breeze. Her hair, the same color as the gold trim, hung down to her waist in waves that would have made a shampoo-commercial producer fall over in a swoon. Two orderly lines of mostly white cats followed her, tails standing tall like so many furry staves.
“What do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?” Aaron snapped before the woman and her feline escort stopped before us.
“No, I do not see that you’re busy. You’re never busy. You simply amuse yourself with a variety of toys and pretend it’s work.”
Aaron bristled. “I am the king of the Underworld! The king of the Underworld does not have toys! He has vitally important machinery of war.”
The woman pursed her lips and tapped her chin. “So that thing you’re always hunched over on that computing device wherein you construct villages and towns isn’t a game?”
“SimCity is a highly intelligent computer simulation. It is a tool, woman, not a game. With it, I can plan out the next stages of development of Anwyn to ascertain the best allocation of funds and labor without having any negative impact on the indigenous population, souls in transit, or the wildlife native herein.”
She smirked. “Which explains why you have statues of yourself dotted about the simulated town and cackle loudly when you send a giant lizard monster to destroy the townspeople?”
“They are virtual townspeople. They aren’t real.”
“But you enjoy destroying them with monsters and tornadoes and virulent venereal diseases.”
Aaron made a disgusted noise. “There are no venereal diseases in SimAnwyn, virtual or otherwise. That’s another program.”
“The fact remains that you enjoy destroying the people of your town.”
“Your facts are erroneous. I reject them. Begone. I am busy talking with these fine people.”
The woman turned lovely, if cold, greenish-gray eyes upon us. “Who are they?”
“I have no idea. Someone that one of the mages at the front sent out. It matters not.”
“It matters to us,” I said, smiling politely when the woman glanced at me. “I’m Gwen. This is Gregory.”
“You are not dead,” she said, as if making a profound judgment.
“No. Although I did die earlier in the week if that makes you feel any better.”
“Hmm,” she said, then turned to consider Gregory. She seemed to like him better than me, a thought that made me narrow my eyes. Did she have to ogle him so obviously? We weren’t a couple, but she didn’t know that. What if we had been?
I glared at Gregory when he smiled in a friendly fashion at her. He caught the edge of my glare and raised his eyebrows. I resisted the urge to kick him in the shins.
“Introduce us, Arawn,” she said, pronouncing his name with a heavy Welsh flourish.
“This is my ex-wife, Constance,” he said with a martyred sigh. He gestured toward the double line of cats behind her. “And her hell-spawn creatures.”
“My cats are beguiling furry little beasts of wonder and delight, although technically they are hell-spawned, but only because this is what many mortals think of as hell. And I am
“Only because you live in your own little fantasy world that in no way resembles any form of reality. No, no,” he said, raising a hand to stop her even though she hadn’t responded to his comment. “Far be it from me to interrupt you on your daily torment of the poor, hapless souls who reside here. Stay and talk to the strangers all you like. I have important things to do. The Piranha calls.” And with a curl of his lip (and the slightest hint of an obscene gesture to the feline honor guard), he left.
“You really do have piranha here?” I asked, glancing at the cats. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous for them?”
“It isn’t a real piranha,” she answered with another assessing ogle at Gregory. “It’s what Arawn calls his Velociphant.”
“Do we want to know what a Velociphant is?” Gregory asked.
“No,” she said, then pinned me back with a look that had me straightening my shoulders. “Why did the mage send you to us?”
I slid a look to Gregory. He slid it right back to me, leaving me to stammer, “Uh . . . well . . . you see . . . that is . . .”
She turned to Gregory. I could see that he was struggling with an answer that wasn’t an outright lie, and yet shielded the truth a bit.
“I see,” she said after a few seconds of silence. She waved imperiously at a couple of men who were hauling in giant bags of what appeared to be kitty litter. “You there. Take these two to the captain of the guard and ask that they imprison them in the deepest, darkest part of the dungeon.”
“What?” I shrieked.
“I should inform you that I am a member of the Watch—” Gregory started to say, but the woman said nothing as the two men dropped the bag of kitty litter and approached us. She simply lifted the hem of her gorgeous dress and delicately moved away, the double line of cats following her.
“No,” I told Gregory. “I’m not doing this again. I’m simply not doing this.”
The fight that followed wasn’t pretty, nor was it even fair. Just about the time Gregory declared, “Touch one hair on her head, and I’ll pound you into the ground, Watch or no Watch,” a handful of other men appeared from the depths of the nearest outbuilding and joined the fray, the bulk of which was centered on Gregory.
And when I say “on Gregory,” I mean just that. He started swinging the second that one of the men grabbed my arm in the same familiar, “imprisoning innocent women is my middle name” sort of manner that I had experienced the day before, and it only took a couple of heartbeats before Gregory went down under the onslaught of several pissed-off cat-litter toters, or whatever their respective job titles were.
Naturally, I did what I could. I screamed, I bit, I kicked, and I punched. I tried to flip several men over my hip this time, too, but in the end I was ignominiously hauled off yet again to forced imprisonment.
The men had a harder time with Gregory. Once the bulk of them peeled off the pig pile, he came up fighting again. I winced in sympathy when, as I glanced over my shoulder to where he was being carried by six men, I
