Chapter 8 of 35 · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

Chapter 8 — A yam from the pacifists

Book: The Gate of the Feral Gods · Previous: Chapter 7 — The frog con · Next: Chapter 9 — Ruckus · Floor: Floor 5 — The Bubbles · Series: the series

Opening

» Time to Level Collapse: 13 days, 13 hours.

Summary

Thirteen days and thirteen hours. The mushrooms from the basement are Mairmei Mushrooms — 'These little guys are quite the trip' — a strain Mordecai has never seen. The Valtay's bronze box is a second pill, Neural Enhancer #275: current elevation and airspeed. The pacifists' silver box is a Toraline Root, a rare lava-soil tuber whose card says it tastes like dogshit and 'fuck you for wasting my time with this'; Mordecai has seen it in salves for scaled creatures and will search his recipes, Carl the Cookbook's. 'Thanks for the yam, mystery aliens.' Mordecai has never known an anti-crawl group send a box at all. The elevation gauge, once tamed, says the tomb's top is 8,932 metres above the water quadrant's sea level, about the height of Everest, and ninety-two kilometres below the planet's surface. Hump Town is a city under siege now: guards at the gate, anti-air all round, interrogations about toads, the sails left up; the bombs are perhaps five hours off. Four modified missiles from a level-four sapper's table wait to be tested. Katia has given Morris and Bobby a general map and a path to a halfway town, and calls them train wrecks under too much stress; Bobby is their only trap-finder and the people sent ahead of him die (needles that inject flesh-eating beetles into the sinuses). She lied to them that the air castle will not fall until the end. Ruckus, per Juice Box for a coin: a giant cyborg buzz-ard, a leftover from the gnome wars or the '“treasure hunter” era', which roosts nearby every night after the storm and which a third camel city once tried to shoot down.

Characters

• Carl — A second pill; elevation and airspeed; 'Thanks for the yam.'
• Mordecai — Never heard of a pacifist box; the toraline in scaled-creature salves.
• Katia Grim — Maps for the tomb raiders; a feather boa from the Penis Parade.
• Princess Donut — Eight more visits for a free dance from Anaconda; a bronze from D'nadia.
• Mongo — A boa on his collar, snapping at it.
• Juice Box — Sells the story of Ruckus for a gold coin.
• Langley — Reports the guards and the AA defences.
• The tomb raiders — Bobby the only trap-finder; the others die ahead of him.

Locations

• The Royal Palace of Princess Donut — The sapper's table at level four.
• Hump Town — Under siege: gate guards, anti-air, sails up.
• The Necropolis of Anser — Nine kilometres tall; ceiling-and-floor rooms in its lower half.

Motifs

• The Valtay Corporation — Neural Enhancer #275: elevation and airspeed.
• Sponsorship — A silver box from the pacifists: a yam.
• The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook — Pages of potion recipes to search for the root.
• The two suns — A premature dark under the sails.
• Ruckus — The buzzard that roosts after the storm.