Another crunching boom makes the building rock. The floor, where Pip’s feet touch it, begins to crumble away. So, too, the sofa under her hands. She jumps up, takes a step away, but each step leaves a flaking crater in it’s wake.
“Get her up!” Bevel shouts. “Get her off the ground!”
“Don’t touch me!” Pip says, even as Kintyre lunges for her and scoops her up like a sack of flour, his wide shoulder under her stomach, her feet by his face.
“You don’t touch me,” Kintyre says, and I can see the logic in his choice of carry, even if it is undignified.
“Elgar, move!” I shout at our creator, and the man lurches into motion, following along beside Ahbni as we all make for the door. Bevel swings it open, and then halts so abruptly on the threshold that Kintyre has to twist to keep Pip’s knees from hitting the back of his head.
“What’s—?” I begin, as I cannot see around the height of my brother and the width of our creator.
“The hall’s gone!” Bevel says.
“What do you mean, gone?” Ahbni asks, straining to see around everyone. “You can’t just make a hall not exist!”
Bevel and Kintyre both move out of the way, and around Elgar and Ahbni, I see what they mean. There’s just a blank, black void beyond the jamb. A sucking wind screeches in my ears now that they are not blocking it. It is cold, and endless, and frightening. Ahbni reaches out and slams the door shut on the horrifying, howling nothingness.
“Right, the window, then,” Kintyre says. “Bev, rope.”
Bevel nods and pulls a coil of rope from the bottom of his quiver. I didn’t know Bevel carried rope there, but Elgar had Written it so that they were both fully outfitted for war.
“Wait, the window?” Pip wails, as Kintyre carries her over to it. “You’ve been in the Overrealm for five goddamn minutes and you’re making me crawl out a window?”
Kintyre laughs and pinches Pip’s bottom. Pip boots him in the rib, but it is quick and sharp to keep from dissolving any part of him.
“You deserved that,” Ahbni says when Kintyre makes a small, pained noise.
In revenge, my brother grabs Pip’s ankle and presses the sole of her boot against the glass. It begins to crumble and dissolve at once, and I must commend Kintyre for thinking of it. The glass in these rooms is always double-glazed, and thick enough to prevent all but the most deliberate destruction. The crumbling, while effective, stops spreading almost immediately, however, and the resulting hole is only big enough for one to put an arm through, not a whole person.
“Wait, let me try my hands,” Pip says, craning over Kintyre’s head to see. He obligingly turns her around. Placing her hands on either side of the hole widens it, but only barely. “Shit, outta juice,” she says, and Kintyre drops her back to her feet. The carpet remains intact. Her eyes are no longer glowing.
“Stand back,” Bevel says, and everyone jumps out of the way when he hefts one of the chairs over his head.
“Okay, then,” Elgar says, looking bemused as Bevel knocks out the loose glass around the crumbled edges, until the hole is big enough for even him. “And now what?”
Bevel drops the chair, and with a quick and practiced motion, he ties one end of the rope coil to the shaft of an arrow. Wordlessly, like the well-practiced team they are, Kintyre grabs the buckle of Bevel’s belt, steadies him as his trothed leans backward out of the hole and chooses a target above him. Bevel looses the arrow, and it catches.
On what, I’m not sure, but I decide that when trading on the narrative convenience of being “rescued” by a Main Character, one ought not question the logistics.
Kintyre pulls Bevel back inside and to his feet, and then my brother-in-law grins cheekily at me and gestures grandly for me to go first. “After you, my lord Shadow Hand,” he says, and I shoot him a dirty glower as I wrap a hand in the rope.
“Wait, what?” Ahbni asks. “Shadow Hand?”
Pip jerks her thumb at me, smirk widening into a high-wattage grin.
Ahbni blinks, looking back and forth between us, and then sits back, mouth a perfect O.
“No,” she gasps.
“Yes,” I say.
“I put it in the books!” Elgar grumbles. “I don’t know why everyone’s so surprised. I put in the clues!”
“But Forsyth Turn.” Ahbni frowns.
I wonder when she realized that I was not, in fact, merely Syth Piper. Probably right around when she saw Kintyre Turn and Bevel Dom appear in a flash of light in a hotel bedroom.
“Forsyth is so much more than his tropes,” Elgar defends, a bit shamefaced. “He was supposed to be—you’ll forgive me, my boy, for being brutally honest—the craven, envious sibling. The, ah, the one who might betray the hero out of greed or guilt. The Edmunds and Wormtongues. I even thought, for a time, that you might secretly be Bootknife,” he says with an introspective chuckle, while I grab the rope and wrap it around my foot the way Rupin Pointe the Elder taught me.
“Bootknife?” I echo with horror, and touch the thin scar on my left cheek, covering it with my fingertips as if afraid that it will suddenly sprout limbs and give birth to the villain if I say his name too loudly.
“Turns out, you’re a Hufflepuff hero instead,” Elgar chuckles. “You talk people down instead of hurting them.”
“Oh goody. Lucky us,” Ahbni says, and sends a glare out toward the rope, where it’s clear she wishes I had been more a man of action.
“Stop stalling, Forssy,” Kintyre says, and slaps my back hard enough to send me swinging out into the open air.
“Elfcock!” I yelp back at him over my shoulder as I scramble to grip the rope tight.
Luckily, the con suite was only three floors up, and
