“I’ll keep that in mind,” he growled, his lips almost touching my skin. My body shivered all over.
“What about the sauce?” I breathed.
“Oh, the sauce. Rich and creamy, or hot and spicy. Your choice.”
“That’s a hard choice.” I looked over my shoulder, and saw green eyes laughing at me. “Half ‘n half?”
“Half and half sounds good.” He got up and tossed me my clothes. “Get dressed.”
I got dressed in record time, grumbling all the while about the lack of room service. But the hobbit hole really wasn’t made for eating in. And HQ was basically a buried army base, and didn’t do a lot of frills.
As it turned out, they didn’t do a lot of crowd control, either.
“What’s going on?” I asked Pritkin, as we got buffeted this way and that as soon as we left his room.
“Dinner time for an invasion force,” he said grimly, holding my hand. And taking the brunt of the jostling from the crowd now clogging the corridor.
It didn’t get any better on the way to the crossroads, which seemed to be where everybody was headed. Pritkin paused to knock some sense into a couple of misbehaving recruits, who’d magicked a fake donkey’s head onto a poor janitor, stopped a fight between two others, and left a third plastered to the side of the women’s locker room, where the ladies had doused him in some sticky white stuff and fixed him in place, like a piece of wall art.
“Are . . . are you sure you want to do that?” I asked, looking at the desperate face on the guy as we just kept walking.
Pritkin shrugged. “He’ll figure out how to get down eventually. But he’ll probably miss a meal, which might teach him something.”
And then we hit the main event, and I felt my stomach sink. It looked like we were all going to miss dinner. Because the usually wide-open space was packed.
The crossroads were already shoulder to shoulder, with more people pouring in every minute. All the body heat made the place hot, muggy, and claustrophobic, despite the size. The top of the great cavern had been magicked to reflect the view outside, which was a star covered sky peering through some trees, I guess to make it feel roomier. But it only did so much.
“We’re not getting any pizza, are we?” I asked Pritkin, when the crowd threw me into his back for the third time.
He’d stopped to break up fight number two, because rank has its responsibilities. But I guess it had its privileges, as well. Because a moment later, he pulled me into a bare rock face, which turned out to be an illusion covering a set of steps. Which we took up to a stone-cut corridor and then—
“Oh,” I said, looking around.
The corridor had let out onto a landing, with another set of steps going down into a restaurant. Only, despite what Pritkin had said, it didn’t look new to me. It could have been a pub straight out of Tudor times, with a forest of wooden tables, a floor of thick oak planks, and a high, heavily timbered ceiling. There were white plastered walls, iron candelabras casting puddles of light here and there, and even more light spilling out of a huge fireplace of stacked stone.
It was a big room, but despite the size, there was not a tiny bit of free space. A crowd of people were clustered around the door, waiting for tables, even more were piled up around the periphery or leaning on the bar to eat, because they’d decided to do without one. Meanwhile, a bunch of harried looking waitstaff were almost running to try to keep up with demand.
There was nobody on the landing where we were standing, however, or on the balcony branching off from it on both sides, probably because it was being used as a supply room.
A guy in stained chef’s whites passed us carrying a crate of tomatoes, with a hurried “pardon,” and Pritkin caught his arm. “Is Tobias here?”
“Can’t you tell?” the guy grimaced, just as a pot came flying out of an open door on the other side of the balcony. Followed by a rant that would have done Gordon Ramsey proud.
“Oh, good,” Pritkin said, and headed that way.
I followed, since he still had hold of my hand, and we ended up in a cramped kitchen with too many chefs and a mass of waiting order slips like fluttering wallpaper. Yet the sheer amount of food being loaded onto a trio of dumbwaiters to be sent down to the bar below was staggering. They were whizzing up and down like elevators on steroids.
Meanwhile, cooks were muscling in the door with crates of raw materials, because I guessed the day’s prep had been used up a while ago; more cooks were trying to clean some spills before anybody broke their necks; and even more were yelling at the chef, at each other, and at a poor waiter, who had shown up with a pizza that some goofball had sent back.
“For what?” the chef demanded. He was a tall, rotund, florid faced guy with gray-streaked red hair peeking out from under his toque, which clearly matched his temper.
“H-he says it’s a bit burnt ‘round the edges,” the waiter said, looking like he’d enjoy disappearing into the floor.
“It’s a wood fired pizza, you dolt! It’s supposed to be burnt! Tell him he can either eat it or I’ll personally come down there and shove it up his—”
“Tobias!” Pritkin called out, and the chef glanced our way.
And, suddenly, he was all smiles. He strode over and grabbed Pritkin’s hand. “John, you old bugger! Good t’see you. And who’s this, then?”