Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

Van fished out a large silver pocket watch and looked startled. “Is it that late already?” He stood up. “It’s time for us to take this conversation somewhere more quiet.” All around them, servers were efficiently scooping up mugs and plates, some still full, dumping them into narrow three-wheeled carts and heading for a bank of swinging doors as quickly as they could.

Mamma waved her hands. “Hokay lads, leesen op! Efferboddy knowz dot dere’s beeg tings afoots, yah? Ve gunna hav to get beck to vork.”

There was a guffaw of laughter from the room. Mamma smiled. “Bot not yet. So iz time for heveryboddy to blow off sum schteam, hey?”

Gil realized that he was sitting alone. He stood up and spotted Vanamonde, Zeetha, and Krosp quickly weaving through the crowded room towards the doors. He wasn’t sure why, but something told him to take off after them. Around him, the Jägers at the tables were still and silent, leaning forward with a palpable air of anticipation.

On stage, Mamma made a show of fishing a glittering silver whistle out from her ample décolletage. She held up a clawed finger. “Vait for de vistle, now!”

If anything, Van increased his pace through the crowd. Gil noted that he was obviously worried about something.

Gil caught up to the three. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Mamma raised the whistle to her lips and blew a single clear, pure note.

Van flinched. “It’s the evening bar fight.”

Pandemonium erupted around them. Jägers howled and leapt about, swinging, clawing, and smacking Jägers that they had been laughing with just seconds ago (although, to be fair, they were still laughing).

Gil had been caught in several bar fights around the Empire and had to admit that this had to be the jolliest he’d ever been in. A Jäger tumbled back screaming with laughter, with another Jäger latched onto his ear with his teeth. Jollity aside, it was definitely time to go.

Suddenly a furry bundle of claws enveloped his head. After a second, he realized that it was a panicked Krosp, who, as cats are wont to do in times of danger, had scaled the tallest thing in sight. “Evening bar fight!” the cat yowled. “They do this every day?”

Van ducked beneath a thrown chair. “They’re Jägers! What did you expect?” He staggered as a tankard bounced off his head. Gil caught his arm and kept him from falling to the ground. Van nodded his thanks and pushed forward. “Just be glad it’s not Thursday,” he shouted back. “That’s poetry slam night.”

The inevitable finally happened and a Jäger was thrown towards them. Gil grabbed the creature in midair, swung him about, and let him slam into another churning pile of combatants.

Van went white and clutched at his arm. “Don’t do that again! At the moment, we’re still considered noncombatants!” Suddenly he paused and glanced around. “Where is Miss Zeetha?”

All it had taken was a single misstep and Zeetha had found herself separated from the others. Initially she had been all-too-willing to leap into the fracas but had quickly discovered that she was garnering undue attention as an exciting novelty.

“Woo!” yet another admiring monster yelled at the sight of her. “Fight mit me, varrior gurl!” A boot to the face knocked him into another melee, but Zeetha found herself getting pushed backwards towards a corner, which was bad news.

Suddenly, she felt no pressure on her back.

She turned and stared. She had been pushed into a small pocket of calm. At a corner table sat a slim, rawboned man. His hair was a golden brown, twisted in the back into an airshipman’s queue and extending forward in a pair of lovingly maintained muttonchops. Incongruously, he was wearing a Wulfenbach airshipman uniform. Apparently while the fighting had raged all around him, he had, with a rather sleepy-eyed look on his face, been quietly nursing an enormous tankard of beer, smoking his pipe, and, Zeetha realized, with an uncharacteristic jolt of annoyance, gazing appreciatively at her as she fought.

“Hey!” she yelled. The man blinked, and shifted his focus up to her face. “Wake up, you fool! We’re cut off! Aren’t you paying attention?”

The fellow removed his pipe. “If you want to make any headway towards the door, you’ll need more than just your fists,” he advised her.

A large Jäger with flapping ears reached for her, and Zeetha gave him a right cross that caused him to spin twice. When he stopped, he was facing in a different direction, and with a laugh, he launched himself into another fight.

“Well I’m not going to use my swords in here,” she declared, “Agatha wouldn’t like it.”

The man nodded and took a pull from his tankard. “Of course not. No weapons. You want to keep it friendly.” He unfolded himself from his chair. “Hold on.” He then snagged the chair he’d been sitting on and threw it into the face of a Jäger who had been about to tackle Zeetha from behind.

Zeetha looked puzzled. “You just said: No weapons!”

Although his eyes remained half closed, the man looked surprised. “That wasn’t a weapon, that was a chair,” he explained.