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The guards didn’t answer They wore somber, funerary versions of the Whitespire uniform, and that’s what it ith their eyes: their pupils were really dilated, like they were on drugs Which you couldn’t really bla down here When Josh approached them they didn’t salute him or even come to attention, but they did move: they crossed their halberds in front of the door to bar his way

“Oh, come on,” he said

They lowered their weapons in his direction Josh backpedaled

“Got left!”

An ice axe froht in the forehead, sticking in his skull like it would have in a stuht between his eyes It was a beautiful throw He dropped his weapon with a clatter and sank to a kneeling position but by some quirk of anatoh, the dark flood pouring over his face and spreading out across the stone floor

“Or,” Poppy said, “we could try diplomacy”

Josh and Poppy both cast kinetic spells on the one on the right, lofting hi like a lost balloon at a birthday party He dropped his halberd, and it clanged and bounced once on the floor Janet felt a little embarrassed for him

“I can’t believe you killed yours, Janet,” Josh said

“Please I don’t even think these guys are human They don’t make any noise, did you notice?”

“Bleed though”

“Your mother bled when I—”

“Shh!” Poppy peered into the darkness the guards had been protecting She held up a hand

“—when I popped her cherry,” Janet finished in a whisper

“That doesn’t even make sense!” Josh hissed

“Shh!”

They shushed In the silence, the dry, irregular sound of trotting hooves on stone With souard’s cloven head, Janet rocked her axe back and forth till it came free

—

A half hour’s worth of not very dignified hide-and-seek followed It was hard so froet a fix on it, cocking their heads and whacking each other on the shoulders and pointing and accusing each other oftoo much noise in heated whispers

Every once in a while they could hear a voice along with the hooves, :

“Yes, yes, just along here Up we go Right this way Carefully now”

Who was He talking to? It was annoying

The voice didn’t sound at all like Ember’s Olympian baritone One time they realized they could take a shortcut, and they nearly headed Hi haunches disappearing up a spiral staircase

“A close shave!” they heard Hiht!”

This was followed by a weird high quavering moan

The three of theallery they knew fro with sunlight Here they looked out the s into depthless blackness They could see the bright ring of water far below them, the surface of the upside-doa Once in a while a few upside-down fish skittered past the s

The hooves started again, closer

“I don’t get this,” Josh said “Dude is a god If He really wanted to get away from us He would just apparate or whatever Either He wants to be caught or He’s leading us into a trap”

“Let’s find out,” Janet said

Now that was soht there

“I think He’s heading up to the solarium,” Poppy said

“Great, then He’s stuck No way out”

“So we’ve got Him trapped”

“We could even just stay down here,” Josh said, “and not go up there”

“What, and starve Him out?”

Even Poppy rolled her eyes

“Let’s get this over with and get out of here This place is creeping me out”

“Yup” Janet was coht even start getting along Janet unslung her axes, her Sorrows, and took the stairs at a sprint You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium She heard Poppy whoop and head up behind her

That quavering ain

“Goodness!” the voice said, up ahead, a genteel English tenor, not in its first youth, with a wee bit of a chuckle in it It was an Edwardian comedy voice “Alarums and excursions!”

It pissed her off The fucking Chalk Man was down on his hands and knees You think this is a joke? Alaru up the steps, right behind Hiot a whiff of His divine oily wool, weirdly sweet Even she was feeling the burn in her legs She should have stretched

“Stop! Jesus! We just want to talk!”

We just want to talk about how fucking dead You’ll be after we kill You

Topside the solariuloouttered in its four corners Uood look at hi ribbed horns swept back from his brow like they’d been brilliantined, except that where Eray

“Off we go!” He called

One of the s lit up with sunlight; after an hour under the swaht into an arc lamp Umber had opened up a portal to the world above

He surged forward, h the , did a half barrel roll in ? No, it was just grass Up there the gravity was flopped the other way He stuck the landing