Chapter 32 of 74 · Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

Chapter 32 — Minge

Book: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride · Part: Havana · Previous: Chapter 31 — The corridor behind the shops · Next: Chapter 33 — Vorpals · Floor: Floor 8 — The Ghosts of Earth · Series: the series

Opening

After securing the second wall, I crept back down the passage, stopping at the third door

Summary

The third back door is a closet with a hole up to the employee hall — Astrid's shortcut — and her office is a vent at the hall's end. The plan: Samantha, drunk and unremovable at the bar, forces the guards to summon Astrid; the fairy comes through the closet into the IED, and Katia waits with her deck to finish her and collect. Four strangers are dancing: Zeynep, a level-52 Boring Ol' Mage; Emir Akbas, a drunk Zebani Ghazi with a curved sword; and two younger women, one crawler-number family. Astrid flies out and takes the main stairs instead, and the plan is already hosed.

Then a real alarm: a containment breach on the middle level, all security to the Hunting Grounds Level Casino. The generated NPCs blink out, and Emir attacks Carl for keeping it all to themselves; Zeynep mutes her own teammate before he can cast, and he leaves threatening Carl with Burcu, a top-ten Turkish porsuk swashbuckler and one of the crystal fighters. Samantha went into the casino, which holds doors to the Nothing, and a harem sister got out. Katia refuses to abort: 'I’m not going to give up on you and Donut, either. This is it.'

Down the bathroom stair in red emergency light is Minge, a level-225 Minor Feral Demon, pink and corpulent and crammed to the ceiling, twenty twig-thin arms with kite-sized claws throttling guards, screaming at Samantha that her mother, not she, killed Slit. The Sai charge — steampunk samurai rhinos, ex-firefighters who do whatever they are told. A dead Sai carries Carl through the kitchen doors; the guards pour into the secret corridor, the teleport traps fire, and the IED activates.

Astrid arrives panicked and protective: there has been a breach of the Nothing and she had to unleash the vorpals, and if her husband is seen he should be told she did it to keep him and her children safe. Her husband is Hamed, the Night Wyrm, who hired them to kill her. She regrets not taking Orren's advice to ban Carl permanently. Katia's squad flag shows Hekla and Eva with eyes crossed out and a player-killer skull; her totems are a moss-robed troll crone with a spoon and a crow with an infant's skull. Invisible and shapeshifted into a spiked metal canine with a human face, Katia seizes Astrid — and is frozen a millimetre short, her face sure it cannot end this way after all they did. Carl tears Astrid's wings off and the crow takes her eyes. 'Save my children. I was almost done. I would be free soon.' A spike through the head ends her, and Katia, in an ogre face, flees into the bar so the NPCs will take her for a monster, not a crawler; Carl follows.

Characters

• Carl — Pea soup and rhino blood; pulls a fairy's wings off; hears her last words.
• Katia Grim — Frozen mid-kill, then the spike; a flag of Hekla and Eva.
• Astrid — Cosmic Sense, the vorpals, a husband and children, 'I was almost done.'
• Samantha — Goes into the casino; a demon comes out of the Nothing calling for her; refuses to turn the music off.
• Minge — Level 225, Slit's sister, crammed into the restaurant.
• The Night Wyrm — Hamed: the target's husband who ordered her death.
• Emir Akbas — Drunk, jealous, bootless.
• Zeynep — Mutes her own man; joins Carl's chat.
• Burcu — Named as a threat.
• Charles — Carried, complaining.
• Walter — A Sai, level 101, examined as the guards charge; his own fate goes unrecorded.

Locations

• The Desperado Club — Alarm, red light, the kitchen, the Hunting Grounds Casino as a door to the Nothing.

Motifs

• The Guild of Suffering — The job done in a demon's shadow; the client is the widower.
• The Nothing — One-way doors; Carl wonders whether Samantha's presence changed that.
• Samantha's power — 'YOU CAN'T EVEN FIGHT YOUR OWN BATTLES'
• Waking the NPCs — 'I would be free soon'; children; 'They told me not to.'
• Explosives — Teleport traps, an IED, Material Girl.
• Sheol — Not named: a feral demon out of the Nothing, and the vorpals Astrid unleashes against it.