Chapter 22 of 35 · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

Chapter 22 — Mrs. Ghazi

Book: The Gate of the Feral Gods · Previous: Chapter 21 — Ghazi · Next: Chapter 23 — The winding box explained · Floor: Floor 5 — The Bubbles · Series: the series

Opening

I peered down the stairs, and I examined the slow-moving ooze.

Summary

The ooze's card — Mrs. Ghazi, Sand Ooze, level 52 Borough Boss, a minion of Psamathe — is a morose essay with no jokes: a creature made to love a man at someone else's command, who knows the feeling is not returned, and cannot even die because her master brings her back. 'I think the AI is smoking weed.' The core lies under the recliner in front of the television, and Ghazi forbids explosives in the glass basement. The plan: a bass-heavy banger-sphere alarm trap rolled down the stairs (Jump Around, 1992, which bounces on its own beat and slips the ooze's grasp), clockwork Mongos and junk from Katia's inventory as bait, Donut's Hole through four feet of sand from the fountain room's corner, and Carl on the ceiling upside down with Sticky Feet — dexterity times two seconds, seventy-odd once his daily buffs top up a dexterity of 32 — carrying a shopping bag of burn gel in a funnel like a cake-decorator. Mordecai: an ooze will pour sand into every orifice 'until you explode', and Carl is in boxers. A half-ton chunk of dwarven automaton anchors the rope. Carl pipes the gel onto the recliner and drops a torch: white fire, the chair rocketed into the ceiling where he had been, the gel spread over the exposed yellow core, the ooze folding in on itself and sparkling as it burns. Then the roof of the chamber gives way — heat, or design, 'because fuck you' — and Carl is buried upside down with sand in his mouth. The boss is declared defeated — not fully, it turns out — and the quadrant opens. Donut, who also fell through, drags him out by the foot.

A sliver of space under three storeys of sand, propped by the automaton chunk. Katia flees with Ghazi, who is laughing or crying over his doll; the door is flickering; oxygen is low. Carl has Gwen open the drain — 'Congrats. Now get out of there' — and tells Donut to take a water-breathing scroll and Mordecai's Special Brew; Donut protests, 'I would rather be buried alive than…' Katia, outside, kills Ghazi in a small fight (so the system says; she is not certain) and loots a note that explains the winding box; his body turns to sand. Tran opens the valve part way and the necropolis's water blasts the castle away like a garden hose on a sandcastle and them with it: a dozen baseball bats, the automaton's spar through Carl's leg, a glass shard through his hand into Donut, who did not take the invulnerability potion Carl suggested and goes limp, bleeding, healed twice as they spin, 150 metres down in the water quadrant among falling corpses that trail blood. The scroll gives Donut two and a half minutes and Carl fifty-four seconds. The elevation gauge says which way is up. Something large and long crunches through the sinking bodies below. Donut wakes in his arms, underwater, and 'freaked the absolute fuck out.'

Characters

• Carl — Upside down on a ceiling with a bag of fire; buried; pierced; counting scroll seconds.
• Princess Donut — Hole through the floor; drags Carl out by the foot; no potion; a shard through the stomach.
• Katia Grim — Bait from her inventory; will not leave; kills Ghazi outside, she thinks, and loots the note.
• Mordecai — Every orifice; 'Have you been keeping your hair short?'
• Mongo — Put away before the sand; 'He's just going to sit in his pet carrier forever!'
• Ghazi — Forbids explosives; killed by Katia, it seems; turns to sand.
• Gwendolyn Duet — 'If you'd simply let me open the valve in the first place'
• Tran — Opens the valve part way.

Locations

• The sandcastle — Washed away; its basement collapsing on the pair who took it.
• The water quadrant — 150 metres down, dark, full of falling dead and something that eats them.

Motifs

• The sand ooze — A boss card about unrequited love; burned at the core; dead until Psamathe says otherwise.
• Carl's bare feet — Sticky Feet in combat: seventy seconds on a ceiling.
• Explosives — Burn gel from moonshine and paste; a song in a metal ball; no bombs allowed.
• The System AI — A floor built to fall as the boss dies.
• The Gate of the Feral Gods — Ghazi's note on the box, looted from his corpse.
• 'Goddamnit, Donut' — 'They're called water breathing, not sand breathing, Carl.'