“But the turn-wheel is on the outside,” said Ichneumon.
“Exactly,” said Charops. “Why?”
“Something dangerous inside,” said Ichneumon. “To which they wanted access, and which they didn’t want to get out. Don’t slip. Viscera.”
“Right,” said Charops. “A treasure guardian? What’s your information say about it?” she asked the poet.
“Ah... It’s dead now!” announced Loron. “It must be. If there even is an it. Which I very much doubt. And if there is an it, an it besides the awesome and fabulous treasure that we know is here, because” — he slapped his map tauntingly. “I feel confident you can kill it. Just open this grate, will you? I’d do it myself but I don’t have your… brute strength.” He leered.
Charops turned the wheel. It cracked, black rot puffing out from the joins. She added a bit of strength and the spokes all snapped at once, like a kicked ribcage. The whole contraption came falling off the beam, swinging uselessly in a tangle of rusted chains.
“Hell!” said Loron, leaping backward like a young goat. “What’d you do that for!”
“Are you curious why I haven’t insisted already on seeing your ridiculous map?” asked Charops. “It’s because I think you, and it, are equally full of shit.”
Loron smiled, bug-eyed. “Of course I am. But the map is accurate.”
“Don’t tell me about your map.”
“The map was drawn and annotated by an Imbian exile a decade ago,” said Loron. “He found this hall, having recently been abandoned, so quickly that the owners could not take —” He pursed his lips. “Very sneaky.”
“I said don’t,” said Charops. “Do I look like the kind of person who would say the opposite of what she really wants? A cheerless sour cherry like me?”
Loron dropped his satchel and searched frantically through it for several seconds, then stopped with a hitch and leaned casually against the grating.
“Jokes, my dears. Silly, foolish japery, nothing more. Satire! No offense intended. Now, how are we going to get... through... here?” He pinged a yellowed fingernail against the metal.
The Hall
Ichneumon crouched beside the grating and whispered a curse that made the stones and bars forget that a ninety-degree angle was square. Wavering on her hands and knees, her face pale and flushed in blotches, she found an impossible gap between the angles. She forced the gap wider, like feeding medicine to a wolf. Sweat dripped from her fingertips. Ask her just then what was ten times twelve and she couldn’t produce an answer.
“Hurry, you rancid old rutabaga,” Charops told the poet. “No offense intended.”
After Ichneumon rolled last through the gap and shakily regained her feet, the world slunk back into place. Charops averted her eyes; it was always embarrassing to see the world ooze back, like it was ashamed, after such a casual denial of its immutability.
“This is it,” said Loron. “The Hall of the King of Snails.”
A sour empty room, beneath the cliff. The roof was supported by an octagonal column that split into innumerable vaults, up in the shadows. There was a bracket for a torch, so Charops put hers into it and lit another. The walls were lined with boxes and crates, decayed apart to reveal... not much of anything. Charops kicked through what was basically trash. There was nothing heavy, and heavy meant valuable when it came to treasure.
She turned to Loron: “There’s nothing here, now are you hap— ” But Loron wasn’t where he had been. She turned further and saw the old goat running across the floor toward the still-shadowed rear of the room. The hall was bigger than she had thought on first entering. She followed him, the flicker of flames casting poor light ahead of her. It felt like she was tracking something in a bad dream it would have been wiser to wake from. Glancing back, she marked the red of Ichneumon’s robes, where the Weird was still slumped against the central column, looking likely to collapse at any moment.
A bark of laughter emerged from the darkness. What was that hateful old man up to?
The Snail King
Charops found Loron at the far end of the hall, climbing up into a throne carved from a soft gray-green material like soapstone. Its lines were curved and its substance slippery, and Loron was having trouble getting into it. Charops saw little harm in letting him sit there for a few moments, before yanking him down and beating out of him what, exactly, he had expected to find here.
Loron finally seated himself, his thin legs bouncing like a child’s. From his satchel he pulled out a flimsy crown. The metal was either green itself or was scaled with verdigris. Loron placed it over his greasy white curls and faced Charops with a nasty smile that snapped into existence like the springing of a trap.
It was a ridiculous little crown, with two bulbed horns at the temples like, ah, thought Charops, yes — like the eyestalks of a snail.
Loron pointed at Charops, opened his mouth. Say something stupid, Charops commanded him silently, and Loron’s false teeth flashed in the torchlight.
“Bow down before the Snail King!”
Charops blinked. She looked behind her, a faint smile on her lips. She could picture Ichneumon rolling her eyes, but where was the Weird? Ichneumon had shinned up the column, like a child going after a coconut, a ball of flickering light around her from the torch she was holding between her teeth. There were further hieroglyphs up the sides of the column. Nothing like hieroglyphs to drag the Weird out of a muddled stupor.
“Bow down!”
Charops gave her attention to Loron, cocked an eyebrow.
“You heard me! You would not want to test my powers, Strategist!”
What powers?
“Master,” cried Ichneumon, “over the flow of time!”
Weeks later, after Charops and Ichneumon had made it back to Zend, unaccompanied by their ward, they were finally able to untangle the confusion. They tracked down the Imbian exile who had visited the Hall of the Snail King, whose map and account Loron had stumbled upon. Loron had misunderstood the matter terribly. The Snail King was not master, but sacrifice.
Craquelure
The grinding of a stone slab, snapping up and open in a second. From behind it came a squelching sound. It grew louder. Loron faced the opened slab, face and neck frozen. Shadows pooled out, and with them a rotten odor. Charops tried to snatch up her knife. Her arm flopped like a dead thing. She released the torch from her other hand, saw it flick down toward the floor, strike the stone, then bounce back up, revolving like a spinneret. A black hump presented itself in the shadowed doorway, then pressed out beneath the slab. A bulging snail shell, half again Charops’ height, came gliding over the stone toward Charops and Loron.
Shell Oak, inexorable. Two soft, sticky horns, long as Charops’ arm, guided its way. On the end of each was a bulbous black eye. It wanted Loron first. Its shell swayed as its foot, a glistening mat of black and yellow muscle, propelled it over the uneven floor. The snail was moving without speed, but Charops found that she had no speed either. The flow of time had turned to mire, all that was frantic and alive, all the hop and squiggle of the “atoms” spoken of by the Weirds, leached away in the presence of the giant snail.
There never was any treasure to be found in the hall. No kind of treasure, except that coveted by a glacial alien mind. Fear, flesh, souls; all three, churned up into a piquant slurry.
A few months later, Charops and Ichneumon lay on adjacent couches, the air stratified in the pleasure den like sedimentary stone: at the bottom was a layer of clear air, above that, a smoky haze, and above that, a glittery, crystal-hued gas. It was the kind of evening where Charops kept crouching for clarity, and Ichneumon craning up toward oblivion.