Gil tried to step forward but Agatha was striding ahead and Zola was too much of an anchor. He ground his teeth. “Well excuse me! I can help you, you know,” he snapped.
Agatha was unimpressed. “Yes, that’s what he said, too.”
Gil narrowed his eyes at this. “Well, I can’t wait to meet him.” And possibly kill him, kill him, kill him, he thought.
“He’s a sneaky, manipulative, fast-talking smoothie,” Agatha said tartly. “You’ll like him.”
This conversation was proving extremely unsatisfying. But then, what did she want to say to Gil? That she still dreamed of him at night? That she never wanted to see him again? That maybe they could work out something in the dark?
She cut that thought off with a savage inner snarl. She mentally braced herself to speak, and found she couldn’t look straight at him.
She began hesitantly: “Look…Gil, I really—”
“EEEEE! GIL!”
The scream made her jump. Zola had been ensnared by a rusty set of mechanical arms that had descended from a set of holes in the ceiling. They were dragging her toward a gaping pit in the floor.
“HELP!” she squealed.
Gil jumped on cue. “Coming!” With the aid of an old iron curtain rod, he pried the arms apart and dragged Zola to safety. He then left her to walk by herself while he returned to Agatha, brushing broken pieces of machinery out of his hair.
“Sorry about that. You were saying?”
Agatha was torn. She didn’t like the way he leapt to Zola’s rescue as though it was his sole purpose in life. The idea that the two apparently shared a long history of adventures together before she had even met him annoyed her. On the other hand, watching him in action had perhaps been worth the interruption. The evident strength and speed he displayed sent a shiver down her spine.
She carefully examined the tips of her boots while she tried again. “Well, it’s just that—”
“GIL!”
This time, Zola had ventured too close to what looked like an elaborately framed picture of a large fanged mouth and had been pulled halfway inside by some unseen mechanism. Once again, Gil dashed away to pull her out, leaving Agatha in mid-sentence.
By the time Gil stumbled back, Agatha had been examining a large painting of Mechanicsburg’s Red Cathedral long enough to count all five hundred and fifty one gargoyles on the façade, none of which dared return her gaze.
“You were about to say?”
Agatha turned away from him. She couldn’t do this now, after all. It was too ridiculous. “Oh, never mind,” she said.
Then Gil’s hands were on her shoulders. He spun her firmly around and glared directly into her eyes. His voice was intense. “No. No ‘never mind.’ Listen, you—”
“GIL! HELP!”
One of the many clocks in the corridor had unfolded itself into a vaguely human-shaped clank and had grabbed Zola with one great, articulated hand. Zola thrashed and squealed in terror. Professor Tiktoffen was pulling on one of her legs, trying to get her free but had only succeeded in removing her boot.
Agatha was on it in an instant, ferociously smashing it to bits with a heavy wrench. She reminded herself that this…whatever it was… was her property and part of the Castle, but she didn’t care. It felt good to smash something. Zola dropped to the floor and stared wide-eyed. Agatha thrust the wrench savagely back into a loop on her belt and stalked back to Gil.
They came to the end of the corridor. Agatha recognized the area.
“Um…I’d have…” Gil began.
“Oh, no,” Agatha snarled back. “It was so very much my turn.”
Gil nodded approvingly. “Mm. Good job. You’ve been practicing.”
“Well, the place is all full of monsters and traps—and if I stood around looking all pink and pretty and squealing for help, I’d never get anywhere.”
“Agatha—” Gil gently tilted her chin upward. They looked at each other for a long moment. “You—”
“AIEEEE!”
Both of them sighed.
Gil held up a hand. “No, no! Relax! I’ll get this one.” He turned towards the noise and froze.
Agatha came up behind him, and there was Zola, pressed into a corner, shivering and hugging herself in fear. Advancing toward her was brightly colored spider, easily as large as an adult hand. When Gil and Agatha arrived, it paused long enough to make a small lunge toward them, audibly snarling, before turning back to its original prey.
Gil stepped back. “Wow. You know, on second thought, you go ahead.”
Agatha shook her head. “What? No way. She’s your…um…your whatever she is. This one’s yours.”
Gil made a face. “Are you kidding? Look at that thing! Anyway, it’s in your house—”
“Yesterday you took out a whole army of clanks!”
“That was a small army. This is a big spider!”
“Well, those things’ll jump on your boots, run up your leg, and bite your butt!” Agatha shuddered. “You get it!”
“No way! When you stomp one that big, it makes this horrible crunching noise—”
“Ugh! Stop!” Agatha went pale. “That’s disgusting!”
Gil nodded. “I know!”
During this exchange, they had recoiled away from Zola and the spider and closer and closer to one another. Now, their shoulders were pressed up against each other, which both seemed to find reassuring. “Well…” Agatha whispered, “We’ve got to do something.”
“I know,” Gil whispered back. Zola’s eyes were now staring at them from within a silk cocoon. The spider was brandishing something that looked unsettlingly like a knife and fork.78 “This is just embarrassing everybody.”
At that moment, Moloch von Zinzer walked in through a door carrying a sturdy pole with a trigger mechanism built onto one end. The other end sported a large mechanical hand. This he closed hard upon the shrieking arachnid with a sickening crunch.
“Ooh, nice.” A small woman dressed in shades of grey and purple had followed him and was admiring his work.
Von Zinzer shrugged as he retracted the mechanical hand-on-a-stick. He examined the green slime that now coated its palm and tossed it away. “Yeah, you don’t want to touch those things.”
“Poisonous?”
Von Zinzer shook his head. “Nah, just really, really icky.”
Zola had fainted, apparently from sheer disgust. Gil decided to leave her tied up for now. He turned back to her rescuer. “Von Zinzer! You’re the patient?” Gil beamed, relief flooding through him. He had known the mechanic briefly back on Castle Wulfenbach and was confident that the man was no rival. “Well, that’s—”
Von Zinzer blanched. “What? No! Am I changing color?” He examined his hands.
Gil drew back. “Changing—is that what this is about?”
“Well, yeah.” Von Zinzer and the purple girl nodded.
“Sweating? Fever? Delusional?”
“Yeah.”
Gil rubbed his jaw. “Vericus Panteliax’s Chromatic Death,” he pronounced. “Interesting.” “Chromatic Death?” the girl looked alarmed. “As in dead death?” Gil waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it, it sounds worse than it is. Did the patient get anything weird into an open wound?”
She nodded. “Yeah, he was poisoned. Someone tried to kill him with a dart while he was in the Great Hospital. And then we knocked over a whole rack of stuff and he fell on the broken glass and then—”
Gil frowned. “Poisoned in the hospital? Sifu is going to love hearing that.” He thought for a second. “Chromatic Death seems a bit…”
“Flashy?”
“No, actually, it’s a bit of an imprecise choice for an assassin. It’s too easy to spot and cure, especially if you’re already in a hospital. Do you have any open wounds? Swallow anything? Hold still, you.” Gil took the girl’s hand and checked her fingernails, then pulled up her eyelid to get a close look at her eyes.