The good thing about being half god is that you get a second chance. Gods, of course, are omnipotent and immortal, and humans are not. Therefore, a demi-god either lives a long long life, at least twice as long as a human, or dies and comes back to life for a second chance. So Sammy was not all that worried when the world around him faded to black. Angry, yes. He felt it was very unsportsmanlike to stab someone in the back. But he knew he wasn't permanently dead, so it didn't seem worthwhile being too worried about what would happen. He just let death take over, and closed his eyes so he didn't have to look at the blood.
When Samueus Rufus Pegasus stopped moving, his murderer stood with one foot on his back and raised his fists in the air. The crowd cheered. A little half-heartedly, to be admitted, as they had all wanted the glory and did not like seeing someone else triumph. But soon, they recovered themselves and found celebratory ale in the nearby buildings. The murderer, an unpleasant, burly man with a permanent glare and much scarring, began to drag his magnificent kill away. The giant was younger than he had thought, and quite a handsome specimen. He was considering having it stuffed. In the end, the giant was too heavy to be dragged by one man, but no-one would help him. The murderer wasn't in anyone's gang, because no-one really likes someone who stabs people in the back. So the body would have to stay where it was until the crowd cleared and he could move it in a cart, or cut it up or something. So he sat on the body of Sameus Rufus Pegasus, and took a mug of ale.
Sammy had left his body. It didn't seem like he had though. When he looked down, he could see it. He was lying in bed. The bed was soft and warm and hung with gold curtains. He pushed back the curtain and looked out. The room was shiny and clean, with a golden sofa and a dressing table with a large mirror. He almost leapt out of bed right then. He hadn't had a mirror for a long time. Looking in the mirror was something Sammy liked nearly as much as bellowing and being heroic. But he didn't move. The bed was blissfully comfortable. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a beautiful serving girl stood beside the bed. She held a plate of juicy grapes and fed them to him one at a time. Sammy smiled.
The door slammed open. "Get up, boy! That's enough lazing in bed!" Sameus Rufus Pegasus's father burst into the room. "I'm a busy God, you know! Don't waste my time!" He liked to bellow too. Sammy got up. He thought it was a bit tough to be out of bed this soon after dying, but didn't like to say so, in case his father decided he didn't deserve his second chance, and let him die properly. His back didn't hurt at all. He felt it. There was no hole. He was all healed up. He stood straight and tall in front of his father.
Sammy's father was even bigger than Sammy. The ground thundered and shook as he walked, and the whole castle moved. Underneath the clouds the castle was built on, rain fell. When angered, he was a truly terrifying specimen. And he was not happy with his son.
"FIGHTING IN THE STREETS! PIRATES! BEASTS OF THE EASTERN REACHES! COMPOSING SILLY LOVE POEMS IN YOUR HEAD! YOU HAVE NOT HONOURED YOUR MISSION! YOUR SECOND CHANCE IS A PRIVILEDGE! DO NOT WASTE IT! FIND THE SHOE!"
He went on and on. It crossed Sammy's mind that it was slightly worrying that his father knew he had been composing poems for Celia in his head (Barney wasn't the only one that had decided to win Celia's love with a letter). He would have to watch what he thought from now on. And go back and find that stupid sparkly shoe, wherever it was. But what about his friends? He had lost sight of them in the fight, and they couldn't survive on their own. Barney was so useless, and Celia was a girl. He put on an expession of contriteness and nodded every now and then as his father bellowed:
"STABBED IN THE BACK! NEVER HAVE I HAD A CHILD DIE THIS WAY! ASHAMED OF YOU! TEMPTED TO TAKE AWAY YOUR SECOND CHANCE!"
Sammy did get his second chance though, as he had always known he would. He had a short time left with the Gods, and then would return to his body, which would recover immediately, returning to immaculate condition, or better. So he made the most of it.
He ate grapes and lay in bed and got up and looked in the mirror. He bathed and washed his hair, and brushed his golden locks in front of the mirror. He looked very handsome, he thought, as he admired his reflection. Celia would not be able to resist him. No, no, he was not meant to be thinking about her. He must find the sparkling shoe so he could spend eternity in a golden castle in the clouds with beautiful serving girls that fed him grapes.
Sammy's murderer had had a lot to drink. He must have had more than he realised though, because two things happened in quick succession. First was the appearance of two large multi-coloured water monsters in the middle of the square. None of the other revellers seemed to think anything of it, or even notice anything unusual. There must have been something funny in his ale that was making him see things. Secondly, and more worrying, the murdered body he sat on was beginning to move. Just slightly, the chest was rising and falling. He leapt up, reaching for his dagger. His hand had not even touched the hilt when he was thrown violently from his perch. The giant was rising from the dead! The murderer screamed and ran away like the coward he was. The drunken crowd parted in shock as the body jumped to its feet and began to chase the murderer. They could not believe their eyes and simply stood, rooted to the ground in shock.
When a demigod gets a second chance, they come back bigger, stronger, and more beautiful than before - one step closer to the Gods. You would think it would be the other way around, because they have been killed and that should make them weak. But that is just how it is. So Sammy rising from the dead was a magnificent spectacle. Where he had been thought a giant before, he was now a particularly large giant. Where he had been strong enough to fight off ten armed men with his bare hands, he could now fight off twenty. If he had been handsome before, he was breath-taking now. He seemed to glow. The square fell silent.
The murderer had not noticed Sammy's beauty. He was too busy running away. It is very frightening to see someone one has murdered rise from the dead. His head was spinning with thoughts of Gods revenging themselves upon him, of ghosts, of monsters, and zombies. He ran as fast as he could, and of course did what all extremely frightened people do when running away - he fell over.
Sammy reached him in two seconds. He lifted his killer from the ground with one hand and held him at arm’s length. He shook him and glared. The murderer whimpered. "Where are my friends?" growled Sammy.
At length, Sammy got a vague direction out of the man, who sneakily did not tell him about the street he had seen the girl taken down, but told him the street the multicoloured water monsters had turned down. Sammy dropped him and loped off in the direction indicated to rescue his friends from the water monsters (deducing that any situation involving monsters or suchlike would also involve Barney). The murderer went home to change his trousers.
Sameus Rufus Pegasus had every intention of doing what his father had told him. He was going to forget all his distractions, stop fighting in the street, ignore damsels in distress, and return to the mission assigned him. He would find the shoe. Just as soon as he was sure Celia was alright. And Barney, he supposed. He should really save him too. But mostly Celia.
The sky was darkening as evening approached, although it was difficult to tell this in the alleyway. The buildings on either side shadowed the street so much that it was permanently chilly and never quite light. The rickety buildings seemed to trap the smell, concentrating it until it was almost solid. Sammy forced himself to continue down the street. A skinny animal that may or may not have been a cat chewed on a dead rat. It looked up and snarled as Sammy ran past. It had unexpectedly large teeth.
A few minutes later, something colourful caught Sammy's eye through the half-open door of one of the buildings. By that I mean that he saw it and it seemed odd, not that a colourful animal leaped out and grabbed it, or someone in colourful clothing was doing a spot of fishing out the door and Sammy ended up with a hook in his eye. Anyway, something colourful caught his eye and he pulled up short. He turned around and went to investigate.
The door was not open far, but Sammy didn't bother with things like squeezing through sideways. He pulled it off its hinges. This was fun. He like his new strength. Pulling doors off their hinges was nearly as fun as bellowing. He would have liked a good bellow just then. When he stepped through the empty doorframe, he saw piles of coloured cloth in the dark, dirty room. He picked up one pile. It was a multicoloured water monster costume. Next to it was a trapdoor, wide open, which he narrowly avoided falling down.
Sammy dipped a foot into the hole. There were no stairs. He searched for something to drop down it. He settled on ripping the foot off one of the water monster costumes. It didn't make a noise when it landed. He found a chair instead. That made a noise when it hit the pile. It sounded like an avalanche hitting an assortment of heavy duty machinery. Sammy deduced that there had been a pile of junk beneath the trapdoor, and now there wasn't. It didn't sound too far down. Not more than five German Shepherds lined up nose to tail. There was nothing for it. He swung down into the hole, momentarily forgetting his paralysing fear of heights in his determination to rescue his friends.
When he was hanging from the edge of the hole in the floor, with nothing but dark empty space beneath his feet, Sammy's fear of heights returned with a vengeance. He began to have difficulty breathing. He could not move to pull himself back up through the hole. He could not let go. The floorboard he clutched creaked ominously. Eventually, he recovered enough to reach out to the side with a foot. A bracket that had held the stairs in place jutted out from the wall. He rested his weight on it. It held. He shuffled his hands along the mouth of the trapdoor until he was next to the wall. His other foot found a bracket. He slid his hand from its white-knuckled grasp of the floorboards, and ran it along the wall until he found a hole. And so Sammy overcame his fear of heights in his desperation to save his true love, and crept down the wall like and extremely large slow-moving spider with four missing limbs.
When he reached the ground, or actually the top of the pile of collapsed stairs, Sammy released his terrified grip on the wall and slid down the pile. He sat for a moment, waiting for his legs to stop shaking enough to hold him up.
And so Sammy stood in the tunnel that Barney and Elfin had just spent several hours squelching in, and prepared to rescue his friends, realising suddenly that he had no idea where they were, who had them, or how to rescue them. He had no food, no water, and his clothes were covered in blood and full of holes. But those small problems are of little consequence to one as magnificent as Sammy, and he set out confidently down the tunnel.
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