princess.
Glancing down at the compass, the needle no longer pointed at the spiders. Instead, it faced the wall to his left. He was both relieved and frustrated. He had been terrified of coming around that pillar and finding Mariko's body, half devoured, enshrouded in spider silk. At least he knew that wasn't her fate.
At the same time, he'd been following this compass for a long time now, and it always seemed to point into walls. You would think someone could invent a magic that could take physical barriers into account.
The Claw stepped up to the wall and pounded on it with his palm. 'Lazy wizards,' he grumbled. The wall was completely solid.
He scanned the bricks from ceiling to floor. There were deep scratch marks in several locations, as if something tried to dig its way out of this room. But there were no secret passages or hidden doors that the princess might be hiding behind.
Then something caught his eyes. Bending down, he pushed aside some of the spider guts and lifted a silvery chain with a pair of interlocking circles dangling from the end-the locket he had given to Princess Mariko. The compass had taken him right to it.
'Damn!' The Claw shouted, kicking the wall. His words echoed through the chamber.
Finding the princess just became a whole lot tougher.
He had a way in. He had a way to find the locket. But that was all. He was out of tricks, and time was not on his side.
The edge of a sharp dagger pressed up against his neck. 'That'll be enough shouting,' said a woman's deep voice. 'Put your hands out where I can see them.'
The Claw straightened up and did as he was told.
'Well now,' said the woman. 'It's not every day that you see something like that, now do you?' She slapped one of his bladed gauntlets with a second dagger. 'Must be kind of rough, you know, if you need to scratch your eye or something.'
The Claw nodded. 'I was just thinking that myself.'
'Were you now?' The woman started frisking him, feeling around his waist, his calves, and near his boots, but keeping her other blade firmly against his neck.
The Claw started to nod yes, but the sharp edge of the dagger bit into him. He could feel the sting as the metal separated his skin, and he decided it was better to hold still.
'That's a good boy,' she said, clearly noticing his discomfort. 'No moving till I say so.'
The Claw let her continue her search. In the pouch on his belt she found the compass that had led him to the locket, three small healing potions, and two flasks of alchemist's fire.
'You're pretty well armed,' she said. 'You weren't sent here as a prisoner, were you?'
'No,' replied the Claw, trying his best to not move his throat much.
'Judging by the make of your clothes and the magic on them blades, I'd say you work for someone with a lot of coin. Perhaps even the king himself.'
'Impressive,' said the Claw. Whoever this person was, she reminded him of Princess Mariko-smart, sharp tongued, and dangerous.
She stopped her search and placed her second blade on his neck. 'Now listen real good,' she said, whispering in his ear. 'I'm gonna release you. And you're gonna turn around. But before you get any bright ideas about sticking me with those pointy gloves of yours, just know this-I can cut off your manhood from thirty paces with just one of these.' She wiggled her daggers on his neck. 'If you want to know what I can do with two, just use your imagination.'
The blades slipped away from his neck, and he could feel her step away. She didn't make any noise as she moved.
'Turn around,' she said, 'and keep your back to the wall.'
Doing as he was told, the Claw turned around and finally got a look at the woman who had held him at knifepoint. She was tall, almost as tall as him, with ragged blonde hair. Her slim half-elf build was accentuated by a suit of black leather armor, fitted tight against her frame by a series of straps and buckles. Her outfit would have been quite impressive, had it not been worn thin at the knees, elbows, and neck, and its snapped buckles retied with bits of leather. Tattered sleeves and torn seams on a woman this capable could mean only one thing: she'd been down here for quite some time.
The half-elf stood in front of the destroyed spiders, one dagger pointed at him, the other poised above her shoulder, ready to throw. She looked him over, sizing him up, but every few moments she would look behind her, scanning the room, like a burglar watching for guards.
'Well now,' said the Claw, 'it's not every day you see something like that.' He indicated the intricate strap and buckle system on her suit of armor. 'Now do you?'
She looked down at herself and chuckled. 'No,' she said. 'I suppose you don't.'
'Must be kind of rough,' he said, breaking a smile. 'You know, taking it off and whatnot.'
'Don't flatter yourself,' she said, an evil smile on her face. 'Just because you're the first man I've laid eyes on in half a year doesn't mean I'm going to rush into your arms as soon as you look at me all sideways.'
The Claw blushed under his mask. He hadn't meant that the way it sounded.
'What's your name?' he asked, trying to change the subject.
'Evelyne,' she said. She looked him over once again. 'And what do they call you?' 'They call me the Claw.'
'The Claw? Well, that's catchy. So listen, Claw, now that we're all friendly, why don't you go ahead and take off that mask of yours, so I can see your face?'
'Why would you want me to do that? You don't know me.'
Evelyne smiled. 'But of course I do. You're the Claw. King Korox's personal assassin.'
'Well, you have me at a disadvantage then. Since all I know about you is your name.'
'Oh, you're at an even bigger disadvantage than that. If you haven't noticed, I've got you at knife point. And even better, I know my way around, and I'll bet both my blades that you don't have a single solitary notion about where you are right now.'
He nodded. 'You got me there,' he said. 'So now what?'
'Now you take off your mask, so I can see your face. Or we go back to where we were, and I kill you.' She cocked her arm even farther, getting ready to throw her blade.
'Wait. Wait.' The Claw dropped into a crouch, ready to defend himself. 'I've caused you no harm. You don't want to kill me.'
She took a step closer. 'A girl can tell a lot about a man by looking at his face. So I want to see it now, if I'm going to parley with you. If not, you can die.'
'You're making a mistake-'
His words were cut short by a tremendous hiss. Then the room erupted in sound as a pair of nearby pillars were torn from the floor and ceiling and hurled across the chamber. Three greenish tentacles appeared from behind the pile of spider muck. Each was capped with the head of a serpent or drake-long slithery tongues and mouths full of teeth. They sniffed at the air, focusing in on Evelyne with their white eyes.
Beside the heads, three more tentacles appeared. Thick and round, they had the suction cups of an octopus on one side, and the scales of a snake on the other. They tapered to a point, and one of them held in its grasp a shattered piece of stone, wielding it like a club. The other two stretched out, reaching over twenty feet, to grab hold of another pillar with their soft suction cups. They contracted, pulling into view the creature's rubbery sphere of a body.
The beast's round, gray-brown mass must have been at least twice the height of a man. A dozen smallish stalks protruded from the creature's surface-clear white eyes attached to the ends. It held itself suspended over the floor with just the two large tentacles wrapped around the pillars. The other tentacle and the three heads converged on Evelyne, surrounding her from all sides.
'Get back!' she shouted, waving her daggers at the snapping, hissing heads. 'You know I don't taste good.'
The tentacles came at her, all at the same time. She managed to bat one away, and slice another, but the other two were too strong, and Evelyne became quickly overwhelmed. A hissing serpent head clamped onto each arm, biting down and immobilizing her.
