Tap and Die is a 90’s action story full of characters like the Redcrown who use wands and staves instead of guns on the set of an epic fantasy world. I’m releasing it serially over the course of 6 months — the first 25% is FREE and the rest requires a subscription: if you subscribe for at least 3 months, I will send you a hard copy before the book releases even if you don’t finish the story.
Upstairs—or down, depending—the man at the front desk in the lobby looked up. A group of men dressed in outfits identical to himself and the rest of security were approaching, but he did not recognize a single one of them. For a group so large, this could not be a shift change. Something at the back of his mind stirred.
“Good evening, sirs,” he said.
“Good evening, officer. I wonder if you could help me with something.”
The desk guard cocked his head.
The man in the blue uniform and double-breasted brass buttons pulled out a long, slender stylet—what had once, it seemed, been a skewer for holding slabs of meat. His lips moved to some unknowable tongue, and a great static yellow thread snaked up from his backpack, attached to the handle of the meat skewer, and shot forth from the tip as lightning.
It blew a smoking hole clean through the desk guard’s chest.
The storm of new arrivals pulled swords and ran to meet the suddenly onrushing crowd. Bolt after bolt was sent at them by the guards of the Common Realm’s tap, and a couple of the newcomers found themselves cut down before they could get off any lightning. But others among them called up full sheets of that yellow stuff in a great warp.
One called up water from a wineskin at his side. A web string attached to the end of a three-hole punch (though most there had no idea what the purpose of the three-hole punch was). He used the hole punch as a needle and wove the weft of water into the warp of the yellowness. Then he poured liquid electricity into the cracks in the floor, and all the lights not run by gas or other fuel began shuddering.
A second man, an oily-haired type they called Oily Oscar, wove oil into lightning and gathered it up into buckets, then painted the innermost walls with the stuff, creating a sort of makeshift electric fencing on the things they didn’t want anyone to touch.
Still others met blade for blade. The captain of the Common Realm’s guard—who towered seven feet, three hundred pounds of brawn and bastard sword—charged at a newcomer with red hair pouring from his crown like a waterfall of blood. Steel met steel—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—and on the ninth the redcrown gutted the captain in a flash of red.
The redcrown giggled.
The captain died.
A comrade of the redcrown finished off the captain with a flash of lightning.
The bell from the descenders rang just as the oilweaver finished painting the floor. An entire platoon of reinforcements emerged from all eight doors to defend the tap—a truly massive quantity of Common Realm guards.
They stepped onto the oil-lightning weave…
And lit up like smoking, lightning-struck evergreen trees.
They dropped to the floor. Dead.
“Sewing kit?” the redcrown asked the now-calm brimstone weavers. “I seem to have nicked my nips.”
“Propriety, Krif Luwof. This is a house of diplomacy,” said a man in black while rifling through the pockets of a smoking corpse, searching for spare change.
Fetch, the driver, was deep in his novel. He heard shouts outside his carriage, but why would that concern him? Tons of men were moving around. The stables had closed so that carriages couldn’t get out. Someone had blocked off the exits so that none could leave.
That must be awful for those drivers.
But not for Fetch, who went back to reading on the clock.
The redcrown, Luwof, and his boss, the man in black—both disguised as Crescent soldiers, like the rest of their contingent—had taken control of the lobby, and now they descended to the lower floors. They de-enchanted and re-enchanted the descenders so that they wouldn’t bring people to the surface, but would work only between the fortieth floor and the viewing window down near the end tip of the tap, in the belly of the volcano. On the way, they dimmed or extinguished the lights in the windows that could be seen from the seven bridges and the edge of the crater.
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