Death by Cliché (5 page)

The two warrior types cleaned their weapons, and Damico did likewise. Then he stared around the room and spotted the door on the other side. He left the dwarf to loot the bodies and walked over to it. Kneeling, he did what every good thief was supposed to do. He pressed his ear against it and listened.

Great heaving gusts of wind roared in the next room. It was a terrible snorting sound as if from the unholy union of a bull, a wind tunnel, and the brass section of the London Philharmonic.

Damico straightened and stepped away from the door. Gorthander had a handful of gold that could have funded the takeover of Saudi Arabia. He frowned as if it were a pittance.

“Hardly worth dividing,” he grunted. The others nodded their heads.

“The corridors in this dungeon haven’t branched, have they?” Damico asked.

“No,” Lotianna said. “Why?”

“Well, a dungeon is so popular as an adventure structure because it’s essentially a flowchart. You go from here to here to here, and although there are branches, they order everything neatly. You can’t
flank
a dungeon crawl.”

“So?” Omar’s voice practically yawned with boredom.

“So, this flowchart has only one
branch
.”

Gorthander scratched his beard. “What does that mean?”

“It means Carl has no imagination.”

“I didn’t catch that,” Gorthander said.

Damico nodded. He’d expected that. He was starting to figure out the rules of this madness, and one of the core conceits was it behaved exactly as if he were in Carl’s game. As if the boy had gone back to the table after stuffing Damico in his trunk. Damico now lived in the game, but the others thought he was a Non-Player Character, a character run by Carl to flesh out the party. A thief-type because the party seemed to lack stealth.

It made a strange, beating-your-head-against-the-wall sort of sense. If he said something to the characters, Carl had to repeat it to the players. He wasn’t going to repeat stuff that made him sound foolish. He wasn’t going to repeat anything…

“Gorthander,” Damico said. “I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

“All right,” the dwarf said.

“Carl shot me in the head. I’m in his trunk. Call the police!”

Gorthander stared at him, confused. “I didn’t catch that.”

Damico sighed. “Never mind. Let’s go meet Sir Snortsalot.”

He faced the door.

Chapter Six

“All right, fine. I lied.”

—Bob Defendi

amico checked the door for traps and then threw it
open. If he had to live in a madhouse, he might as well do
it with a certain style. He’d heard of polishing the brass on the Titanic. This was more like headlining at ground-zero Hiroshima.

On the other side of the door stretched a wide room lit by little dishes of fire hanging by chains from the ceiling (braziers, but don’t tell Carl). The room lay bare, and Damico only then realized he hadn’t seen a single stick of furniture in this damn dungeon.

But that was of lesser concern. In the center of the room stood a minotaur, but not just any minotaur. It had a great bull’s head and a muscled torso like, God help him, like a
bulky
super hero. The thing stood twelve-feet tall, was lightly furred like a fat Italian, and wielded an ax with a blade the size of a dinner table.

It wore only a harness of a green leather that was probably tanned orc hide. Metal rings excised holes from the leather bands giving them a vaguely kinky look. Fredericks of Crete.

Damico sidled sideways (because sidling forward is just plain silly). Meanwhile, the dwarf went the other direction and Omar charged straight up the middle.

“At least take a red cape!” Damico shouted, but matador humor was a little beyond the great lummox. Omar raised that ax of his and hacked with everything he had, but the minotaur just blocked. Omar staggered backward. If the thing had hit the ax any harder, Omar’s moles would have flown off.

Gorthander charged in from the side; Damico cursed and did the same, angling for a Back Stab, hoping the thing would lose him in all the confusion

The minotaur smashed Omar and the man took air, flying backward and landing with a thunderous crash, like a bag of pans rolling down a flight of stairs—or a dramatic reading of a Chinese phone book.

Lotianna let loose with another volley of white-hot darts, and Arithian dove in to grab Omar. Meanwhile, Gorthander charged, his ax transcribing a silver arc in the air.

The minotaur parried the attack and slapped him with the blade. Gorthander staggered there, shaken like a James Bond martini.

And Damico froze.

In a game, he would have charged without thinking, but here he stared at the naked hairy ass of a creature that would tear him to jerky. The pain would be tremendous. The death would take hours. It didn’t matter he was already dying in the real world. He was beyond
fearing
that. That might have been real, but this
felt
real. This was here. This was now.

Gorthander tried to dart in again, and the minotaur smashed him, knocking the dwarf to one knee. Then the minotaur raised that great ax even as more darts of light splattered against its tough hide. Gorthander faced his doom.

Damico moved. He didn’t have any more time to think. He raised that sword in a two-handed grip, point down. Damico leaped, seeking height, searching for the sweet spot in that giant hairy back, looking for the center of the cashmere sweater the thing called a hide.

Minotaurs aren’t supposed to be fast like the bulls they resemble. It wasn’t supposed to dash sideways. Damico wasn’t supposed to sail past ineffectually.

He stumbled as the blade stabbed down into the dwarf’s chest, splitting mail and rending leather, shattering bone. The dwarf looked up into Damico’s eyes, his own wide, uncomprehending.

The minotaur reared behind him, twirling that ax.

Chapter Seven

“This is not the quote you’re looking for.”

—Bob Defendi

ut we don’t really
care
about a fight, do we? They are
so droll.

Instead, we will wheel the camera of our mind up and away from the dungeon, the minotaur, and the butchered dwarf. Up, up, and up we’ll spiral, a leaf on a metaphorical wind. A plastic bag on the updraft of the soul.

Once we reach daylight, we swing around, and there, do you see it? It’s a village placed right next to these ravaging hordes of evil. A village that should have moved long ago even though all the creatures inside have no obvious way to go peasant poaching. A village on the edge of disaster.

Peasant! Is that one down there, under the gaze of our long eyes? Behold him, at the end of a plow, working his perfectly square lot of farmland. We will watch him, and he’ll never know. A peasant under glass, as it were.

He has no name, so we will name him. Bil, for the weapon. Bil reaches the end of a long, painful furrow in the earth. He reaches the end, and he pauses wearily. It’s time to turn the plow. It’s easier to pass an arms budget through a democratic congress than to turn a medieval plow.

But he starts.

Grunting and heaving, cursing the ox that pulls the thing and spitting, he starts the slow, exhausting process. He is low, lower than low. So low that right now you should be terrified that
this
, after all, is the real hero of our story.

Never fear.

It’s not that Carl isn’t unimaginative enough to explore the peasant hero become savior. It really isn’t. It’s just that this particular peasant hero was abandoned. Once, in a game long ago,
he
was the hero. Or at least he would have been if the player hadn’t found sitting in the same room as Carl about as pleasant as an all-day Air Supply concert. There is nothing sadder than a former Player Character after the player has permanently left the game.

And so here he is, abandoned after less than one game session. Evidently, the player’s aunt had been whisked away to the hospital. Which then exploded. You can understand why he couldn’t stay.

He is halfway through this most tortuous of all peasant tasks when he stops and surveys the field. Then he surveys the one next to it. There are six square fields, all in a row. He studies the plow and then the fields again.

Would it not, indeed, be better to have long rows? He could give up all but one sixth of his field to the tillers of the other patches, in return for one sixth of each of theirs. As long as those sixths all lead from one to another in a straight line… yes. That would work.

And yet… wait.

At the end of the day, he’d still have to go home to the wife he’d never loved, the children he couldn’t remember fathering. The horrible, stifling
life
.

He squinted over at the dungeon, uncomfortably close to his field. What had he been thinking coming out here every day? He couldn’t imagine what had brought him to this. He couldn’t remember the details. It was as if he’d just been born.

He didn’t know he stood directly between Damico and the villain’s magical Artifact (not the one he’s searching for… the one I haven’t told you about yet).

Bil looked around and decided he wasn’t going to negotiate the deal for the new fields. He wasn’t going to plow one more row. He wasn’t even going to go home tonight. Bil didn’t care about any of that. He’d
never
cared, but it was as if until now he wasn’t aware of his own feelings, his own wishes, his own
needs
.

Bil let the ox loose, one buckle at a time. Then he walked away from the village, not so much as glancing back.

Now. I
suppose
we should get back to that battle?

Chapter Eight