At the end of the similarly cramped hallway was another large room, albeit much smaller than the circular chamber. The light inside was soft but bright enough to make out its contents.
And they were absolutely bizarre.
Every last fixture of the room shone in garish gold, from cabinets and beds to little round chairs and storage boxes, all reflecting the light in equal measure. Even from this distance, I could feel it penetrating my eyeballs to the back of my head.
A plethora of toys in every size was scattered all over—in some cases spilling out of—this furniture. Most were stuffed animals in bold primary colors. There were dolls with button eyes and yarn hair, familiar animals like pets and livestock, even some hideous monsters I couldn’t begin to identify, heaped into piles all over the floor and beds. There were building blocks, a wooden horse, instruments—like the entire stock from the District Five toy maker had been dumped here.
And sitting half-buried in them, facing away from us, was the voice’s owner.
“Hoooooo!! Hooooooo!!” it screamed, over and over. This figure, too, had a bizarre appearance.
It was round, almost a perfect sphere of a torso, with a round head on top, like a snowman. But rather than being white, the body was clad in a clown’s outfit, with the right half bright red, and the left blue. The short-armed sleeves had red-and-blue stripes, as well. It was making my eyes hurt.
The round head was completely white, and from the rear it looked no different from the senators’, except that the skin was oily and shiny. Resting atop the head was a golden cap the same shade as all the furniture.
I leaned over Alice’s ear and whispered, “Is that the prime senator…?”
“Yes, it’s Chudelkin,” she whispered back, but with an audible loathing. I stared at the clown’s back again.
The prime senator was a kind of counterpart to Bercouli the commander of the knights, the greatest caster of sacred arts in the Axiom Church and one of its chief officers. And yet, he seemed totally defenseless. Whatever was in his hands, it had his entire attention.
From what I could make out beyond his very round back, Chudelkin was gazing into a large crystal ball. With each flash of color inside, he flopped and kicked his little legs and shrieked, “Haaa! Hohhh!”
I’d been expecting a tense and uncertain lead-up to a spectacular battle, like with Deusolbert and Fanatio, so I had no idea how to react to this. But while I wasn’t sure how to proceed, Alice had no such hesitation. She raced toward him, not even bothering to sneak.
But her feet hit the ground only five times. She easily brushed me off and raced like a golden gust into the toy room, and by the time Chudelkin’s fat head started to turn, she already had the frilly collar of his clown outfit clutched in her fist.
“Hooooo?!” the round object howled. Alice yanked him out of the sea of plushies and held him high. At last, I caught up to her and, glancing around the entire room, looked for any sign of Eugeo—but wherever Chudelkin had brought my partner after the Great Bath, it wasn’t here. Disappointed, I turned back to the middle, where the crystal ball that had so enraptured the strange little man caught my eye.
A somewhat three-dimensional image wreathed in swirling light was projected in the center of the large glass ball, which was about a foot and a half across. It displayed a girl sprawled on her side atop lustrous bedsheets. Her face was hidden behind long silver hair, but it was clear from a glance that she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.
Both disappointed and fulfilled that this was what Chudelkin had been exclaiming over, I then noticed that there seemed to be someone else with the girl. I tried to lean in for a closer look, but the spell vanished, the images inside the ball abruptly flashing into whiteness.
Alice had no interest in the crystal ball to begin with. With her free hand, she thrust the tip of her sword toward the dangling man and threatened, “If you try to start chanting an art, I’ll cut your tongue out from the root.”
The little man clamped his mouth shut before any complaints could arise. Given that all sacred arts in the Underworld had to begin with the System Call prefix, the caster was essentially at our mercy now. Still, I paid close attention to his stumpy arms for any movement and glanced up quickly to get a view of Prime Senator Chudelkin.
I couldn’t imagine a more enigmatic human face. His bright-red lips dominated the lower half of his round face, with a large bulb of a nose, and eyes and brows as curved as an iconic smiley face.
Those beady eyes were bulging now, though, the small, dark pupils jittering as they stared right at Alice. Eventually he relaxed his heavy lips from their trumpeter’s sour pucker and screeched in tones of rusted metal, “You…Number Thirty…What are you doing here? You fell out of the tower with the other rebel and plummeted to your death!”
“Don’t call me by a number! My name is Alice—and I am not Thirty any longer,” she snapped, her voice freezing air. Chudelkin’s greasy face twitched, and for the first time, he looked at me. His crescent-shaped eyes bulged out to half-moons, and he gurgled a series of gasps.
“You…Why—what is this?! Number Thir…Alice, why do you not attack this boy?! He is a rebel against the Church…an agent of the Dark Territory, as I warned you!!”
“He is indeed a rebel. But he is no soldier of the dark lands. He is just like me.”
“Wha…? Wha…?”
Chudelkin’s stumpy arms and legs flopped around in midair like the toys that filled the room. “You—you would dare to rebel against us, you little piece of shit!!”
His round white head instantly turned beet red, and his scream reached an even higher register than before, the sword pointed at his throat entirely forgotten.
“You Integrity Knights are nothing but mindless puppets!! You don’t move until I command you to move!! And now you have the gall to rebel against our glorious leader, my lady Administrator herself?!”