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“The skull…of…a cannibal,” Sharon Rainsworth read, peering down at the file Reim Lunettes had handed her. “How gauche. ”
“That sort of thing does make for a pretty powerful artifact,” said Xerxes Break, leaning over her shoulder. “What’s it for?”
“My master says he needs it for some sort of collection of items he’s putting together,” said Reim. “He gave me the discretion to invite along whoever I pleased when collecting the skull, so—well, I thought of you first.”
Break and Sharon hit Reim with matching grins, and agreed immediately and in perfect unison; though Reim was not one of the people whom Break and Sharon would tease in harmony, some habits would jump out no matter what you did, and anyway, Reim never minded.
It was quick work to get ready to slip back in time, to a place they could get a cannibal and his head would not be missed—so somewhere where there was no chance of the Headhunter, or where the body wouldn’t discovered until there was no chance of the missing head seeming odd at all. Perhaps there would be a whole group of cannibals, Sharon thought as she pulled on her skimpy maid dress and made sure she could still summon the power of Equus easily, maybe somewhere warm and exotic—that was always the kind of place cannibals were found in the novels she loved, after all, and she amused herself daydreaming about her favorite cannibal romance novel, in which the main character was held captive by a rival tribe of cannibals and fell in love with those who were consuming her as they ate her piece by piece. It was a riff off of Romeo and Juliet, and ended with the protagonist gnawing on her own femur as the two tribes made peace over the corpse of her lover, and Sharon had read it ten times, and hoped desperately that the cannibal skull they got would come from somebody like one of the lovers in the novel.
When she, Break, and Reim convened at the Rainsworth Door and stepped through, all in their own tiny maid dresses and high socks, however, they did not step out into a sexy, warm, tropical environment, but rather into a whipping snowstorm. The power the enabled them to keep time moving as it ought kept them from immediately freezing to death, but it was still rather a shock for Sharon, who had expected quite possibly the exact opposite sort of environment.
“Good God,” said Reim, wholly unused to missions and shivering in the whipping wind. “How on earth are we supposed to find a cannibal in a snowstorm ?!”
“Let the cannibal find us first, maybe,” said Break. “I mean, we are sexy enough to attract anyone attracted to women or men our way.”
“Unless they think we’re freaks for wearing little tiny maid outfits in the middle of a snowstorm, ” Reim pointed out. “I don’t know about you, Xerx, but if I were a cannibal or anyone even remotely sane, I would not approach three strange people in tiny little maid dresses out in a snow storm, I would move away as quickly as possible.”
“That’s because you know that that means that someone’s going to die very soon, if there are Pandora agents in the area,” Break argued. “Besides, who says cannibals are sane?”
“I think they’re quite sane,” said Sharon, “and also, quite hot. Shall we go searching for them now, instead of standing around here arguing?”
This suggestion was agreed to—nobody wanted to stay here in the cold any longer than they had to, though it wouldn’t kill them to do so—and they started out through the wind and the cold, walking in a straight line in the hopes that the Door had deposited them straight in front of the cannibal or cannibals they were here for and that by walking straight forward they would reach them easily.
They did not see any other humans by the time the storm ended, but once the sky was clear they found themselves standing on a plain of pure icy white, vanishing into the horizon on one side and dropping off into choppy grey ocean on the other.
“My goodness,” said Break. “I wonder what sort of cannibals we’ll find in a place like this. ”
“I wonder when we are, too…” mused Sharon. “There don’t appear to be any signs of civilization here at all. I had assumed that a cannibal would be civilized…and handsome, and strong, and an experienced lover, the sort of woman to—”
“My lady!” said Break, completely scandalized, and Sharon and Reim snickered.
“I can see the appeal there,” said Reim, and Break gritted his teeth.
“If either of you attempt to seduce the cannibal we’re here to kill, I’m going to personally kick you out of Pandora,” Break said, and Sharon and Reim exchanged delighted grins at getting under Break’s skin.
They walked for what felt like hours, encountering a flock of penguins that they spent a delighted couple of hours playing with before running like hell from a leopard seal and then a group of polar bears, and then they saw the ship.
It was an ancient-looking ship, made entirely of wood with ripped canvas sails, and only a few people visible on its deck. It had clearly wrecked some time ago, but the wood had not even begun to rot, and Sharon realized that they must be in the time, hundreds of years ago, that such a ship was common.
“It’s an Arctic expedition,” she realized. “We’re at the North Pole!”
“Oh, good,” said Break. “I can tell Santa Claus personally if you or Reim attempt to seduce any of our cannibals.”
“I know Santa isn’t real, Break.”
“Damn!”
They made their way to the ship, three scantily-clad dots on the pure white Arctic plain. There was no way they hadn’t been spotted, and yet nobody called out to greet them or even acknowledged their presence. They were not Baskervilles: they could not move about unnoticed in an unfamiliar time period. Typically, someone would have reacted to them by now—and yet nobody did.
When they got close enough to the ship to read the name on its side—the HMS Terror— Sharon, Break, and Reim concealed themselves against the wet wooden boards and slowly snuck onboard, remaining out of sight as best they could.
The few men still alive on the ship moved through it like wraiths, barely speaking, shivering through their coats and wrappings. They were here on an expedition to the Northwest Passage, probably. They would never make it back to whichever country had sent them here (probably England). They were British cannibals, and therefore entirely unsexy, which was unfortunate but sometimes the way things went. They must have been here for quite some time already, too: every one of the surviving sailors was a cannibal—as the trio discovered when they observed the men all dining on the corpse of one of their fellows that evening—and so they could have their pick; they chose the captain, who was still alive and emaciated, and slit his throat in the night, dragging his body off the ship unnoticed and dumping it in the water near where they’d seen the leopard seal, keeping only his head as a trophy. Break was the one to cut off the flesh and remove the brain with practiced ease, dropping bloody bits into the water as he did so. Sharon and Reim didn’t watch—there were penguin chicks that were a far less sickening sight, and they knew that Break would rather they didn’t see how good he was at mutilating corpses.
Once the skull was gotten and cleaned, the three of them reconvened as the Rainsworth Door re-appeared before them and they stepped through, out of the cold Arctic and into the far warmer Pandora, another successful mission completed.