Tap and Die is a 90’s action story full of characters 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.

This is the second free chapter. Click here to start at Chapter 001.

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The Hollow Needle did not rise above the horizon, but sank into the great peak of Weststool, steam and smoke heralding it in a great circular halo. One of five new taps in Gergia, the opposite of towers, it drilled down into a too-wide hole. Seven carriage bridges—long stone pathways lit by gas lamps—led from the ridge of the hole to a midair platform, and that platform formed the base of a great spire that sank down into the hot airy heart of an active volcano, the bubbling lava a mere sixty feet deeper than the tap’s lowest basement, the observation deck. Gravity had been inverted around the outside of the tap building so that the heat close to the building’s surface would first vent down toward the lava while heavier things went up toward the surface. But once outside that ring of gravity inversion, the steam would vent up once more, farther away from the tap. The result was a ring of steam and smoke around the outer rim, but a sort of a dead-air protective circle the closer you got to the tap’s walls and entrance.

Inside the tap’s combined fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second floors, the various ambassadors from around Ivria and most of Mostyn (and isles and antics) had gathered. They banqueted a new year of new staff and new policy initiatives, but really it was an excuse for well-connected wealthy people to get together and celebrate whatever culinary and aesthetic discovery one of their member realms had drummed up. (That, and negotiate terms of various deals, both aboveboard and under the table and backhanded.) 

This year, the new delicacy was a sort of bowl made of a star-shaped grain called sfensü (named after the local word sfen for “vintage” and the ablative case: something extracted away from the vintage). Sfensü grew on mile-long vines with leaves so massive you could build a house on them, vines that now draped down into the Old Quarry through the remnants of the Sicilian that had been mined out of the planet’s heart. In addition to the sfensü base, the delicacy used wild Imperial Crescent skyhog for the protein, and the entire affair was garnished with shaved pomace from some off-world persimmon and then topped with a Blazing World molasses. Sort of a culinary incarnation of the principle of Common Realms.

That was why most of them had come. 

That, and the backdoor deals. 

Frey had brought her daughter, Dövë (named after the Aruöfian word for ocean as well as the earthbound term for a bird of peace, a compromise she’d made with Jack). Dövë attended her mother to the main table, but Frey soon retreated to her office overlooking the landing on the forty-third floor, which in turn overlooked the banquet. From here she could see the folks in great flamboyant headgear and the most spartan skin-colored suits you could imagine moving around the cosmopolitan panoply of ambassadors. The main color present was a dark grey, but that only tended to offset the other colors all the more vibrantly, city sidewalk and holiday style. 

A man rose from the table from where Frey had left Dövë and went up to Frey’s office. “Why don’t you come dance with me?” he asked Frey.

“Sfòne.” She blushed every time she was forced to say his name, but she hid it better each time. She refused to translate it for her colleagues. “No thank you.”

“Ask again later,” he said. “Got it.” He returned to the table.

Dövë watched him descend one of the many open and white marble spiral staircases that connected some of the floors. She watched him descend the whole way. 

When he returned to his seat, she said, “My dad’s coming.” 

“Oh?” Sfòne said.

***

Dövë had been precocious from a very, very young age. By her eleventh month, she was speaking full sentences. By the fifteenth, two languages. By her second year, she could read by herself. By herself, alone in a room, two languages. An incredible mind for most children, though others might have beaten her. 

By the age of four, she had read all of the children’s books in her local library, the regional library, and the capital library—and she did it systematically so as not to overlook any cultures, any voices, any intellectual “foods” she didn’t like. After that, she decided that the best of the adult world would be her oyster. So she moved on to the classics. 

Her parents, however, ignored her. Both Jack and Frey. They seemed so preoccupied with themselves and their debate about… well, to Dövë it seemed like some complicated form of flirting. So she decided to pull pranks in order to get their attention. Once she glued her father’s belt to his pant loops and buckle so that he couldn’t pull them off. Jack struggled and struggled against it until he wet his pants. She giggled in secret over that. Her dad’s urine weaving skills could dry his pants quickly, but she had been delighted as a young girl to see him struggle and rage.

For her mom, Dövë hid a cockatiel in the oven, and the bird talked to her mother and drove her nuts in the kitchen. Days of that, days of laughing over that. Quite hilarious—until Frey lit the oven and murdered the poor bird. 

That was what Dövë had come to this ball with: a slew of pranks.

She didn’t hate her dad. She adored her dad. And seeing him descend the stairs made her love him even more, want to see him even more. 

Her dad was coming. 

Her dad was here.

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