Even though Baco is my new summon, my bondling, the fat jerk keeps hunching along in front of us. I run up to him grabbing the rudimentary leather collar he came pre-summoned with.

  “Baco.”

  He looks at me.

  “Sit.”

  He does not.

  I reach for his rump and carefully urge the sit command while pushing him down.

  “Good. Got it? Sit. Now, Baco, stand up. Up.”

  Not a twitch.

  Sadie is standing behind me, biting her lower lip.

  “Go ahead,” I tell her. “You’ve got something to say. Say it. I open the floor to suggestions. We can’t have him slobbering off in front of us. He’s got to stay behind us while exploring.”

  “Your summons all come with memories,” she says.

  Memories of being a war boar. A trained war boar. I don’t have to teach him commands, he already knows commands. The minor problem here is I have not been trained as a war boar handler.

  “How do I get him to heel, sit, and stay?” I ask.

  Sadie grins. She prances between me and Baco, hooves tapping excitedly. Holding out her hand, palm up, she gives a short lift to the ceiling with it.

  Baco stands. I swear, he’s standing at attention, chin up, shoulders square, eyebrows down with a piercing stare that practically screams ‘sir, yes, sir’. I nod. This is good. I needed to learn Baco language. It makes tactical combat sense. You don’t want to shout commands and give away your position. She goes through a series of hand signals which have him crouch, walk, sit, stand, and the final wiggled fist movement of ‘Follow’. On ‘Follow’, he trots his lardiness right behind her and waits. When she walks, he walks. It’s like Seal Team 6 hand signals, but for porkers.

  “Like I said,” she explains, offering me to do the next command. “We satyrs train war boars.”

  I give the command for sit. He does. Stand. Crouch. Finally, Follow. I now have a remote-controlled pig. We then turn our backs to Baco so Sadie can teach me the signs for Charge and Bite, so he doesn’t suddenly run off hunting, thinking he’s been commanded.

  “Sadie, that was great,” I say, patting her shoulder.

  Her little grey poof of a tail wags.

  Walking through the strange corridors of the labyrinth, I quickly learn that giving the karate chop command for ‘stand’ also works as ‘stop’ or ‘stay’. I quietly say the words each time, hoping Baco will pick up a little English while we’re at it.

  I say strange corridors because under the dimly glowing ceiling of crystal moss, something is wrong. I thought we were travelling in a loop, several right-angle turns, and that we would make our way back to the conduit that we took from the main chamber and return through the opposite side from the first intersection. In case the minotaur was in pursuit, I think going straight back would be dangerous, so I decided to loop around. I do not tell this to Sadie, but I’m pretty sure we’re lost.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Who do you think built all this?” I ask, spear in one hand, fingers of my other hand grazing the rough stone.

  “King Minos,” she answers. I knew that. It’s extremely comforting that I knew that. He was the ruler of Crete who commissioned the labyrinth be built to imprison the Minotaur. In legends. And apparently here.

  “I meant more who did the labor. How did they hollow out this maze? There are no bulldozers. Had to be manual labor. How? Where did all the rock go?”

  “Neither of us are builders, craftsmen or architects,” she explains. “But I’m guessing it was done with magic of some sort.”

  She says it like it should be obvious. Considering I have summoned two creatures, seen fire burst from her hands, and watched a monster enchant another with impossible speed, I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t already think of it. Wherever this is, wherever this really truly is—magic exists. I have to keep my mind on that and not dismiss it. Since the concept of momentum worked when I impaled Baconator Prime, I had brazenly assumed all physics here was what I was familiar with. That may be a bad assumption.

  We approach an intersection. It shouldn’t be there. I swear we made three ninety-degree right-hand turns, each hall about fifty meters. There’s an intersection that has a slight incline to each side, or we can continue straight. I examine each side. The one to the right should lead to where we’ve been. The corridor I’m scanning at has green moss on one wall, and a pale pink glowing moss that looks like long hair that we haven’t seen before.

  There has been no sign of sky and no day-night cycle. My phone hasn’t worked since I got here. I have no idea what time it is, but it’s been a long day.

  We aren’t lost. We’re super lost. This place isn’t playing fair.

  Baco snorts a distinct sound which translates in my mind to ‘hey, guys, look at this’. Kind of.

  We turn to our rotund companion. He’s staring back the way we came. There’s something moving on the floor.

  “Is that a rat?” I whisper. More the size of a small dog, but I don’t think we will encounter many Yorkies here.

  Sadie nods. Here we go. War boar practice. I give the signal and say, “Charge.”

  The resulting vile carnage that follows as Baco tears off and then shreds the poor rat into bloody confetti is disgusting and terrifying. There’s snarling and I swear Baco barked before the rat’s head smacked into the ceiling. And it stuck there. Baco turns.

  He’s got what I can only describe as a tusk filled grin, with the bloody back half of a large black rat dangling off one twisted tooth out the side of his mouth, dripping bits of organ. I look to Sadie. She is making no attempt to hide the fact that she is completely grossed out and near puking. Baco trots merrily back to us, back rat-half bouncing on his tusk. He proudly sits and awaits a new command.

  “Yeah, buddy,” I say, trying to not wretch at the tiny piece of intestine he has hanging off his chin. “That was… Well, that was great. You. You, um, kind of have a little something stuck to the side of your face there.”

  I point. He eyes his own jowls and violently shakes his head like a dog that got wet, spraying Sadie and me in undigested rat bits. I grimace at Sadie and flick what I think was a front paw off her cheek.

  “Sorry about that,” I say, wiping unknown wet off my own face. “Charge command works great, though.”

  “I saw,” she says, staring at me, teeth gritting, not moving.

  I swipe another meaty little chunk off her shoulder. I look from her small form to the bulk of Baco. “Let’s rock, squad. I think we’re ready to take on whatever this labyrinth holds for us. You feeling good about this? Because I’m feeling good about this. Let’s go find us an exit and move on out of this place. Surely nothing can stand in the way of this power trio.”

  I reach to lower the volume on my phone to stop the music.

  As soon as I touch my phone, I realize there’s no way that sound was coming from my non-functioning hardware. Was I hit on the head during the fight? There is some odd melody happening.

  “Hear that?” I ask.

  She nods, points, and heads up one of the side halls.

  “Wait. Sadie?” She’s never walked in front of me. I thought she had a built-in follow command as well.

  I give the ‘Heel’ command to Baco and head after her.