“It’s OK. It’s just a shock, though I guess it shouldn’t be. We do the same thing to cows at home.” I lift my face from against Gabe's chest watching Flea in the stall, “You seem to be taking this all very much in stride, Flea?”
He shrugged, pulling a hoodie from his bag and pulling it on. “In some ways, I feel like TV and movies have totally prepared me for this point. Like watching Syfy and stuff like that makes this normal. The other part of me is kinda just stunned, got no words, and can’t get my head around it. It might take a while for that part to come back online, but the thing is, what’s important is getting Tess back.”
“I really appreciate your help,” I said. “You haven’t known Tess for long.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to, y’know? When we first walked in there, I was like . . . who’s that girl? Felt like I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I get it, last night was probably just a bit of drunken fun for her, but I guess if there’s a chance for me to play the white knight and ride to her rescue, well, that can’t hurt my chances, hey.”
Gabe and I ended up on a surprisingly comfortable pallet of blankets and sleeping bags and crunchy hay. For a while, I felt like the smells of hay, raw timber and faintly, urine would be enough to keep me awake, but I lay there within the warm circle of Gabe’s arms, listening to his breathing coming in long and slow and eventually dropped off.
“So, talking monkeys huh?” the shopkeeper asked, looking us over with wide eyes. “You sure they are sentient? They
could be just mimicking us.”
“Nope, they’re travellers from another world. I’ve seen it, amazing tech; stuff like you’ve never seen before.”
“In our world, you got fur, you’re an animal,” I said.
The shopkeeper's greenish yellow eyes shifted to me and then narrowed, “That a fact? Well, here you look like some kind of weird baby animal. No fur like decent folks . . .,” he said, turning to package up our orders in paper. “This some kind of thing now? Furless ones coming through? One came into town just the other day. Looked a bit like this one,” he said, pointing to me, “though I must say you all do look the same to me.”
“A girl? Blue eyes, brown hair?” I asked, feeling a surge in my chest.
“Didn’t much notice the gender, but it had a brown pelt like you say.”
“Did she look OK? Happy, sad, frightened?”
The shopkeeper frowned, then shrugged, “Who’m I to say what a monkey’s feeling? Them science folk think it’s pure fantasy to propose monkeys have feelings like higher order creatures.”
“So, where did she go?” I asked, ignoring that little gem.
“Went to the portal on the far side of town. Damned strange thing, Jeseph travels it all the time, taking goods to the citadel, but I can’t abide it myself. The fella who runs it tried to explain it, but it sounds like pure nonsense. Your body disintegrating only to reform again on the other side? Seems preposterous! Jeseph swears it’s not painful or nothing, but his maid has said that sometimes she thinks he might have changed as a result of it.”
“I thought we’d be able to catch her on the way, going via carriage,” Gabe said grimly.
“She must be already there,” I said, feeling my heart begin to race. Some cannibal prince was wooing my sister, laying the ‘misunderstood guy with a heart of gold’ shit on thick. She’d be eating it up with a spoon; she’d spent her whole life waiting for this kind of thing to happen. If we didn’t get there soon. . . .
“This portal, is it multidimensional?”
“No, nothing like that,” the shopkeeper said with a shake of his head, “Just opens the way between the citadel and here. Prince wanted it to the city, but the government wasn’t having none of that. He can’t travel through it himself, but it lets the people who supply the castle come and go quickly. As I was saying, Jeseph the fishmonger–”
“We need to get through that portal,” I said.
“Obviously, but–”
“Unless you have a whole ton of gold, you’re not going through,” Natty said, looking worried. “Portal travel is for the elites only.”
“And people who deliver stuff to the citadel?” I asked. I turned back to the shopkeeper, “Is there anything you want delivered through the portal?”
“Not me, I don’t deliver to the mucky mucks, but you could check the other shops in town. Many of them send deliveries through. Try Jeseph for starters. Not sure how they’ll feel, sending monkeys to do a job that should be done by honest furry citizens, but you might get lucky.”
We weren’t. “Why should I give my goods to a bunch of newborn rats like you?” Jeseph said. “Brill here has been making my deliveries for the past six years. No reason to start using pinkies for anything other than the donkey work and mine don’t talk back, like normal folks.” Brill, a weaselly-looking guy with slick brown fur and a narrow face, just smirked at us from behind the counter. We tried the dressmaker, the baker and the candlestick maker and got nowhere. I tried to tell them about Tess and the prince, but that was a mistake. The proprietors just got more anxious. The prince may no longer be a power in this land, but people’s minds were obviously still catching up to that. No one wanted to piss the cash cow in exile off.
“I give up,” I said finally. It was early afternoon already and we had wasted most of a day trying to get through the portal. My mind was racing, a slide show of all the horrible things that could be happening to Tess was on high rotation. Objectively, I knew that wasn’t likely to be an issue; he had to try and woo her first before deciding to make her the main course, but what if she started being a smart arse from day one, making it clear he was going to get nowhere? What if his ‘wooing’ was somehow coercive, particularly in light of the contempt most people in the world seemed to have for us pinkies. What if he couldn’t stomach trying to seduce what he essentially saw as a dumb animal and had her offed? Gabe must have seen all of this in my face as he came over and surrounded me in his arms.
“It’ll be OK, we’ll find her.” It didn’t help, didn’t make one bit of difference to my persistent fear that something was going to happen to Tess, but there was one small comfort. I wasn’t alone.
“Look, I hesitate to suggest this, but it may be our only option,” Natty said.
“What?”