Page 32 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Where is Sally?” he asked.

“Indisposed,” I replied. “Can I see your polearm, please?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t arm strangers.”

“Kinda think you do, though,” I said, and punched him in the throat. Not the most subtle introduction, but absolutely an effective one—again, especially when the person being punched doesn’t see it coming. I’ve never been much of a brawler, she says, while assaulting people left and right. I prefer my fighting to happen on the other end of a bullet or a blade. Thomas used to despair of teaching me to throw a punch without telegraphing it.

But I’ve improved enough over the years to stay alive, and I can still hit with sufficient force to get my point across when I feel the need. People who aren’t expecting to be punched in the throat don’t care about your form, they care about their tracheas. Tracheas are crunchy when you hit them hard enough. The guard staggered backward, gasping, and I snatched the fauchard out of his hands, bringing it up to shoulder level and holding it like a barrier between us as I kicked him between the legs.

That maneuver works better when I’m not barefoot, but again, the element of surprise was on my side. Dainty, sweet little harem girls aren’t supposed to start whaling on the people assigned to protect them, and maybe I shouldn’t have been doing it. Maybe I should have stayed polite and demure and let him lead me to the Autarch like an offering, but right now, all I felt like “offering” to their Autarch was fifty years-worth of extreme disapproval. I’ve always found disapproval easier to express through violence.

Rubina recoiled, visibly shocked by my actions, as the guard stumbled into the wall and sank slowly down to floor level, pulling his knees toward his chest. I didn’t know whether his genitals were in the same place a human’s would have been, but whatever I’d hit seemed to have been an effective target. I whacked him in the side of the head with the butt-end of my new fauchard, before spinning to point it toward the rest of the room, turning in a slow arc to make sure every single person there saw that I was armed.

“All of you stay where you are, and I won’t have to knock any more of you down,” I said. They blinked at me, some more slowly than others, and didn’t move. Guess this Autarch wasn’t as good at inspiring loyalty in his people—or his “wives”—as he probably assumed he was. Well, that worked for me.

Sally probably wasn’t going to be as passive when she stumbled out after me in a minute or two, and from the musculature I’d felt when I hit her, she wasn’t as soft as this guard had been, either. I’d won only because I’d surprised her. Yeah, I had a weapon now, but here’s the thing about most weapons: you shouldn’t use them unless you’re willing to kill the person you’re using them against. Sally was complicit in this system. She was also trapped here and may not have had any choice in the matter. As long as she stayed out of my way, I didn’t really want to hurt her. What I had done to her could be pretty disorienting, so hopefully she’d stay down long enough for me to get out of here.

“I’m going to be leaving now,” I said, loudly and clearly. “None of you are going to stop me. You won’t like how things play out if you try.”

They continued to watch me, saying nothing. I leaned over and grabbed Rubina by the arm, careful to grip below the point where the thorns stopped.

She whimpered, and I immediately felt terrible. I’m not normally in the business of terrifying people who can’t defend themselves. It’s not kind. That didn’t stop me from pulling her toward me like a hostage, and hissing, voice low, “Which way to the Autarch?”

“You don’t have to do this!” she said, voice rapidly approaching a wail. “We were going to take you to see him!”

“Yeah, well, I prefer to take myself,” I said. “Just get me pointed in the right direction.”

Not surprising me in the least, she pointed to the leftmost archway, one of the ones too small to be used by some of the women. The guards on that door were holding a boar spear and a voulge. Whoever was in charge of their armory needed to get a little consistency into the program.

I wanted that voulge. A fauchard is nice, although it’s not much of a stabbing weapon, but it’s not as nice as a voulge, which has a longer cutting edge and a better spike at the bottom, making it ideal for hooking things that don’t want to be hooked.

“Thank you,” I said. “You did nothing wrong.” Then I let her go, giving her a little push away from me to make it clear that I wasn’tgoing to grab her again, and walked toward the door she’d indicated, giving my fauchard a spin as I walked, like I was completely unconcerned about what was going to happen next.

I paused when I reached the door, getting a little closer than was probably wise, close enough that either of them could have tried to hit me if they’d had the presence of mind to do it. Also close enough that they would have been fighting against their own weapons in the process. Never let it be said that we aren’t limited by our tools.

“Hi,” I said to the one with the voulge, holding out my fauchard. “Wanna trade?”

He looked utterly nonplussed, taking a step backward. “I am loyal!” he snapped.

“Never said you weren’t. I have a weapon, you have a weapon, I’m not asking you togiveme your weapon, I’m asking you to do an equal exchange, at the end of which, you’ll still have a weapon, and so will I.” The other guard, with the boar spear, brought it down to level with my gut.

Boar spears are a bitch if they break the skin. They’re designed to disembowel more than anything else, and I don’t approve of them. I spun my fauchard in my hands again, pointing the butt end of it at that guard, and whacked his fingers before he realized what I was about to do.

The sound of his weapon clattering to the floor was beautiful. I put a foot on it to stop him picking it up again and drove the butt of the fauchard into his stomach, eliciting a loud “oof” as he staggered away from me. They were all going down so easily, I was starting to feel bad about it. These people didn’t seem like very good guards. Only Sally had presented any real challenge, and one kid from Maine was never going to be enough to protect this many people.

If they could have shaken off their passivity and swarmed me, it would have been over in minutes. I wasn’t willing to really hurt them, and sometimes there’s not a way to win a fight without really hurting people. I whacked my current playmate again, this time on the head, and pointed the blade at the one still holding the voulge.

“Trade, or I take it away,” I snapped.

He held his weapon out toward me, cringing.

“Thank you,” I said brightly as I plucked it from his hand, replacing it with the fauchard. The weight on the voulge was much more balanced to my liking. I gave it a spin and smiled at him, bright as anything. “I really appreciate it. Now, you want to get out of my way?”

He stepped to the side, staring at me like I was all his nightmarescome to life and rolled up into one perky blonde package. I smiled at him and stepped through the archway, into another long, featureless white hall.

I’d made it about fifteen feet before someone sent up the alarm. Awesome.

Time to party.

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