The Voyage: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Jason Fry

  That seemed unwise, and he clapped a hand over his own mouth.

  “Quiet now,” he said in a whisper. “Don’t disturb whatever else lives down here.”

  But then he shook his head. There was nothing down here, nothing except the unimaginable weight of the rock above him and around him, through which he’d poked a few tiny tunnels, like a worm chewing into something too huge for it to comprehend.

  “Nothing! Nothing! NOTHING!” yelled Stax, his voice booming and bouncing crazily around the tunnel. He laughed, bent over with his hands on his knees. He felt himself unraveling, but rather than dwell on those feelings, he retreated to the headhouse to sleep, with his pickaxe clutched to his chest.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, he gnawed on a crust of bread and drank a little water from the bucket he kept with him while he worked. The water tasted stony and metallic, and left a little grit in Stax’s mouth.

  “Next time I see Brubbs, I’m going to get some milk,” he vowed. “Milk would be good. Maybe I can bake a cake.”

  The idea of baking a cake seemed hilarious, suddenly. He could turn the headhouse into the Overworld’s deepest bakery, selling cakes and pies and cookies to absolutely no one. He was still chuckling about this as he swung his pickaxe into the rock to dig out the first branch tunnel.

  (At this point, you’re probably a little worried about Stax, thinking that perhaps he’s gone a bit crazy, working all by himself in his new mine. I’d like to reassure you that it’s not the case, but I can’t. Because it’s totally the case.)

  Stax had excavated only a couple of blocks of the branch tunnel before he hit a pocket of gravel. Grunting in annoyance, he switched to his iron shovel and cleared it out, frowning up at the dark opening in the rock from which the gravel had spilled. He saw only darkness, so he patched up the ceiling and kept working.

  More gravel. And still more. Stax was starting to hate this new tunnel, which was so far proving a source of additional work rather than wealth. He kept shoveling, plucking out pieces of flint when he found them, and muttering terrible things about gravel and its fundamental uselessness.

  His pickaxe bit through the rock and, once again, revealed gravel.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Stax said. He shoveled the gravel clear, arms straining, glanced into the darkness above him, and reached for some rock to patch this latest gap in the ceiling. Ahead of him, to his disgust, there was more gravel.

  “That’s not a pocket up there, it’s more like a cave,” Stax said.

  He decided to just dig the rest of the gravel out before patching the ceiling. That would save a little time. He could feel the cool air from the cave on the back of his neck and thought that it felt refreshing.

  “Stupid useless gravel,” Stax muttered. “Worst substance in the entire—uhh!”

  The arrow whistled past Stax’s shoulder, clattering off the rock. Another zipped over his head, from the darkness above and in front of him.

  “Oh, you fool, you utter fool,” he said to himself, his voice thick with disgust. He reminded himself not to move, remembering Ramoa’s lesson that skeletons were better at hitting a moving target than a stationary one.

  The skeleton in front of him jumped down into the tunnel with a bony rattle, empty eye sockets fixed on his face. As it raised its bow, Stax drew his sword and knocked it sideways. The tip of the sword scraped across the rock wall, leaving a trail of sparks.

  Pain flared in the back of Stax’s shoulder. An arrow had found its mark. Another slash of his sword and the skeleton in front of him shivered and collapsed into loose bones. Behind him, Stax heard the rattle of the other skeleton jumping down.

  He had done something profoundly dumb, turning his back on a dark place he hadn’t explored. But his enemies had failed to keep the advantage he’d given them, rushing to confront him instead of sniping at him while concealed in the dark. Wincing at the pain at his shoulder, Stax drove the skeleton backward, the blows keeping it unbalanced and unable to fire, until it fell apart into a pile of bones.

  “Gotta patch it up,” Stax said. “Before—”

  He heard a small sound behind him: a hiss. He turned to find himself looking into the face of a nightmare with huge black eyespots and a yawning mouth in green, spongy flesh.

  The creeper’s flesh seemed to pulse. Stax smelled something acrid and burning. Then everything went dark.

  * * *

  —

  The first thing Stax saw was a light, but it was faint and far away. He was lying facedown, surrounded by loose rock. He shoved the rock aside and wondered why it didn’t make a sound.

  Stax sat up, blinking and confused. His face and chest felt burned. He was sitting on the lip of a pit blasted into the rock by the creeper’s detonation. Above him was the black mouth of the cave.

  “Gotta seal it up,” he said, but he couldn’t hear his own voice, just a ringing in his ears.

  He forced himself to his feet and trudged down the branch tunnel, stepping over a torch that had been blasted off the wall and lay extinguished on the floor. He stopped once he was in full torchlight, breathing hard.

  “Seal it up,” he said again, still unable to hear the words, and watched himself move cobblestone into place, until the cave and the pit had been walled off. By the time he was done he could hear the scraping of his pickaxe. Little by little, his hearing was returning.

  Stax stared at the blank wall of mottled cobblestone and let himself rest against it. If anything else had been hiding in the gravel cavern, he would have been killed. Fortunately, the creeper had been the last monster lurking in the darkness.

  But it had been close. Far too close.

  Stax walked slowly back to the headhouse and sat on one of the equipment chests. It took him a minute to realize the redstone torch was lit. Something was at his gate.

  “Another pig,” he said in disgust, shaking his head.

  It was all too much, suddenly. He was a careless miner who had nearly gotten himself killed, digging at the rock below a horrible little house made out of dirt, and his fancy doorbell didn’t even work. He stalked up the narrow stone stairs, muttering with each turn, threw open the trapdoor at the top of the mine, and climbed out into his yard.

  “Get lost, you useless pig!” he yelled, and then stopped in disbelief.

  Ramoa was standing at the gate, her mouth a shocked O.

  “Gosh, Stax,” she managed after a moment. “It’s nice to see you too.”

  Of Ramoa’s wanderings * Reunited with Hejira * Lessons in the art of war

  “Ramoa!” Stax cried out. “Sorry! There’s a pressure plate, and it activates a…but I didn’t…and there was this pig…and, and I’m glad to see you.”

  “I’m not sure I followed all that, or any of it, in fact, but it’s better than being called a pig,” Ramoa said. “But what’s happened? You’re hurt. Your face and hands are burned.”

  She unlatched the gate and hurried to him, poking at his blistered cheeks.

  “Ow!”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Of course it hurts, that’s why I said ow,” Stax said. “But I’m okay, really. And I really am glad to see you. You know you’re supposed to meet Hejira Tenboots, right? In some jungle.”

  “Heji was here? Oh good. I asked him to check on you, but you never know what that crazy code of his may make him do. So I figured I’d better come see how you were doing myself.”

  Stax ushered Ramoa into his cabin, though a moment later he wished he hadn’t. It was small and dark and dirty, and he could tell Ramoa felt the same way.

  “I spend most of my time down below, mining,” he said. “I haven’t really kept house much.”

  “Or at all,” Ramoa said, and her eyes narrowed. “What’s happened to you, Stax? Brubbs told me you’d done well at the mining company
but then gone off on your own. He warned me you’d maybe gotten a little strange, out here by yourself, but I wasn’t prepared for this.”

  “For what? Like I said, I’ve been working. And I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “When I met you, you had been marooned and were wearing nothing but rags, and you looked better than you do now.”

  Stax started to object that he’d just survived a close encounter with a creeper, but he knew that wasn’t what Ramoa meant. His shirt was stiff with dirt and sweat and his hair and beard were filthy. He hung his head as Ramoa’s gaze took in the cabin, jumping from his unmade bed to the chests along the wall.

  “What have you been doing out here, anyway, Stax? I hope you’re at least killing yourself for some reward that’s worth it.”

  So Stax told her about the Champion and his plan, hoping it would make her understand and stop looking at him like he’d done something wrong.

  “So that’s what’s in those chests, gems and ore? The stuff you’re hoping to use to hire this Champion?”

  “Yeah,” Stax said. “I’ve done all right, but I don’t have enough yet.”

  Ramoa lifted the lid of the nearest chest to peer inside. She looked questioningly at Stax, then opened the next chest, going down the line until she’d seen inside all of them. Then she turned, her hands on her hips.

  “Stax. There’s a fortune here. Forget ransoms on princes, or whatever that story was you told me. With this stuff you could become a prince yourself.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t think what? Just look!” And Ramoa took Stax by the hand and dragged him over to look with her. At the stacks of gold bars, and the piles of lapis, and the containers of redstone dust, and the mounds of emeralds. At the blocks of coal and gleaming iron and at the diamonds, glittering icy blue in the dim little cabin.

  “It is a lot,” Stax admitted. “I guess I kind of lost track of how much I’ve found. But there’s more to excavate—”

  “I’m sure there is,” Ramoa said. “And there always will be. And you are not going down into that hole to bring more of it up. Because it’s making you crazy. Your goal was to go home. Remember that?”

  “Of course I do. It’s just…” And Stax trailed off, no longer sure what he’d been going to say, and stared at the dirt floor beneath his boots.

  And then he looked up at Ramoa.

  “I hate it here,” he said quietly, the words surprising himself. “I hate the color of the grass, and these horrible trees that are basically big thorns. You can’t see the ocean, or smell the salt in the air. There aren’t any sheep or cats. Cats…”

  Ramoa put her hand on his shoulder. “Come with me, Stax. Come with me and meet Heji in Jagga-Tel. You need to see something other than this awful place, and do something other than bang away at rock. Come with me, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Stax hesitated, thinking of the mine far beneath his little yard, and everything he had to do there. Ramoa had stepped back, breaking their embrace, and was waiting for his answer.

  She was right, he realized. He had become so focused on finding gems and precious metals that he’d lost sight of why he was working so hard to gather them. His goal had been to amass enough wealth to hire the Champion, see Fouge Tempro brought to justice, and find his way home. He’d reached that goal weeks earlier, probably, but continued obsessively pursuing it anyway. He wasn’t quite willing to agree with Ramoa that he’d gone crazy down in his mine, but it was obviously and embarrassingly true that his quest had become something unhealthy.

  “You’re right,” he told Ramoa. “I’ll come to Jackbell.”

  “To where? Oh, you mean Jagga-Tel. Good. Though there are some things we have to do first.”

  Stax nodded. He’d already been thinking about that.

  “Yes. I need to bury my gems and ore, and my equipment. And—”

  “And before any of that, you need to wash. Because, wow, do you stink.”

  “I do?”

  “Stax, you smell like a dead cow. No, like a dead cow that’s been covered in clay dug up from the bottom of the ocean. And left to rot in the desert. At noontime. On the hottest—”

  “Okay, Okay,” Stax said, throwing up his arms in surrender. “I get it!”

  “All right then. So you take a bath in that pond out there, and find some shears for that hair, and put on something you haven’t been wearing for a month. And then we’ll go from there.”

  * * *

  —

  It was dusk by the time Stax had finished bathing and shaving, harvesting the crops that were ready and burying several chests beneath his front gate. That meant it was too late to set off for anywhere, let alone some distant jungle. He gave the bed in his little sod house to Ramoa and slept belowground, in the headhouse. It was cool in the mine, and for a moment Stax’s thoughts crept to ore veins and branch tunnels. But no, he was finished mining here, beneath these strange grasses and trees. He’d go with Ramoa, and clear his head. That idea felt good, and Stax realized he hadn’t felt good in some time. He closed his eyes and was asleep instantly.

  In the morning he emerged from the trapdoor leading to the mine and found Ramoa standing in the yard, peering at the sun and then at the gray line of the mountains. She was between him and the rising sun, and the morning light seemed to touch her black curls with fire, creating a halo of radiance.

  “Let’s walk,” she said, opening the gate and inclining her head for Stax to go first. “It’s four days to the jungle, maybe five. Quicker on a horse, but I never ride them. I always wind up more concerned with the horse than with the land around me. Heji said he was going to travel via the Mortimer Gap, probably because there’s an innkeeper there who makes a roasted chicken he likes. But I’ve been that way too many times, so I figured out an alternate route. And anyway, I never quite trust Heji’s math, seeing how every step he takes is two steps for a normal person.”

  “You and Hejira are good friends,” Stax said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Ramoa said. “He’s helped me out of some bad spots, and always seems to show up when I need him most.”

  “Are you two…?” Stax wasn’t sure how to put it and let his voice trail off with a little flurry of hand gestures.

  “Are you making little smoochy motions with your hands?” Ramoa asked, grinning. “Like in a puppet show? The puppets are mashing their scrunchy felt faces together and all the little kids in the audience are going ‘ewwwww’?”

  “No!” Stax said. “No, not at…well, maybe. I don’t know what I was doing, to tell you the truth.”

  “Ha! To answer the question you couldn’t figure out how to ask me, no, Heji and I are not smoochy puppets. I don’t think he’s interested in that sort of thing, if you want to know the truth. He’s more like my big brother, or maybe my best friend. I met him years ago, when I was traveling with a caravan that got ambushed by bandits. I was hurt pretty bad, and he brought me all the way back to River House to recover.”

  “What’s River House?”

  “My home,” Ramoa said. “I built it out of birch wood, above the sea, at the mouth of a little river that winds through a forest. I go back there every couple of months, to rest and think about the places I’ve seen.”

  She frowned, studying the hills ahead of her, and shook her head.

  “Every time I go back, I tell myself that this time I’m going to stay,” Ramoa said. “And it works, for about a week. Then I feel myself getting…I don’t know, restless. I’m thinking about the lava falls I saw in the moonlight, pouring into a steaming sea. Or the flower forest with bees the size of apples, where the air was so thick with the scent of pollen and honey that I thought I could float on it. Or a hundred other places I’ve seen. And then I think about all the places there must be like that, only I haven’t seen them yet. I ask myself how many there must be. Thou
sands? Millions? And then a day or two later I’m packing up my gear.”

  They said nothing for a few minutes, walking side by side through the tall grass.

  “My house was on a little peninsula, on the edge of what I guess was once a forest like the one near your house,” he said. “Right off the coast there are ice floes, and towers of ice that gleam at night.”

  “Oh, that sounds beautiful,” Ramoa said.

  “It is. And if I get back there, I’m never forgetting that again.”

  By the afternoon, they’d reached the hills. It was cooler on the higher ground, with birches and oaks instead of acacias, and Stax smiled to see bright green leaves and white bark again. That night he and Ramoa made camp in a little cave that Stax hacked out of the hillside with his shovel and his pickaxe, evening off the walls inside out of habit.

  After two days of walking, the hills came to an end. Standing on their edge, Stax and Ramoa looked down at a riot of green. Massive trees rose from the vegetation, so high that clouds drifted below their crowns of dark leaves. Long strings of vines hung from their limbs. Stax wondered if those trees were as tall as the spires of ice by the Stonecutter estate. He spotted brilliantly colored birds flitting through the vegetation, and the air was filled with the song of birds and the hum of insects.

  “Is that Jagmell?” he asked.

  “Jagga-Tel,” Ramoa said, laughing. “Honestly, Stax. If you could remember the names of places, maybe you’d be home by now.”

  “That’s not funny,” Stax said.

  Ramoa raised her eyebrows, but kept quiet as they walked down the hill.

  “All right,” Stax said. “Maybe it’s a little funny.”

  * * *

  —

  The Lost Fane sat in a low valley, on a grassy plain dotted with pools of clear blue water. The valley was ringed with stalks of bamboo, standing like sentinels. They made a hollow thunk when Stax rapped on them.