by Nina Smith
The woman whirled in his direction. “Who the hell are you people?”
Badora got to his feet. “A human,” he said. “Congratulations, Muse King, you have granted my dearest, longest held wish. The only thing I like better than fairy is the taste of human. You’ve just given me back their world.” He motioned to the one remaining vamp. They both leaped, clung to a ledge high on the wall and leaped again.
Hippy thought they were going to go through the hole in the roof and be burned up by the sunlight, but they veered off another way and disappeared. She said a bad word, bent to scoop up Fluffy Ducky, ran for the wall and scrambled straight up it.
The human yelled in fright. “How is she doing that?”
“Hippy!” Pierus yelled. “Get back here!”
Hippy clung to the wall and looked over her shoulder. “We can’t let them get into Dream!”
“My dear girl, you are no match for Rustam Badora!”
“You’re just going to let him go?” Hippy’s voice rose to a squeak.
“No you silly little fairy, we are going to get the Apple of Chaos and deal with all of the vampires at once!”
“But I want to fight the vamp king.” Hippy let go, dropped through ten feet of air, landed lightly on both feet and pouted at him.
The human yelled in fright again. “How did you do that?”
“What?” Hippy scowled at her, then walked over to one of the piles of ashes. She removed the slender metal arrow from it and placed it in her pouch.
Why were vamp spies killing vamps?
“Hey!” The woman’s voice rose an octave. “Don’t ignore me little girl! I’ve got a gun here! What the hell is going on? What are you people doing at my dig site?”
Pierus made a deep, disgusted noise. “Young woman, do you have even the vaguest conception of what you have just done?”
The woman pressed some kind of button on her metal thing. A loud click echoed through the cavern. “I’m asking the questions here.”
“Come here Hippy,” Pierus said.
“Don’t you call me a hippy!” The woman turned her metal thing on Pierus.
Hippy stared at the thing. “What does that do?”
The woman aimed it at the hole in the roof. Her finger moved and an explosion came from the metal cylinder. “That’s what it does.”
Hippy’s eyes shone. “It goes bang.” She took several steps forward. “Can I try?”
“Are you people completely insane?” The woman went red in the face.
“I think you need to calm down, young woman,” Pierus said.
“Stop calling me young woman! I’ve got more grey hairs than you have, sonny!”
“You mustn’t mind him,” Hippy said. “He’s three thousand years old.”
The woman rubbed her head. “This must be the most absolutely ridiculous conversation I’ve ever had.”
“You’re right, it’s a complete waste of time, which I’m afraid is a precious commodity now you’ve allowed the vampire king to escape into your world,” Pierus said.
“You’re insane.”
“And you’re wasting our time.” Pierus peered intently around the cavern. “I’m sure the Apple was hidden not far from here.”
“Apple?” the woman said. “You’re here for an apple?”
“You, human woman, where are we?”
“At my dig site.” The gun, which had been dropping, raised again. “Clear off.”
“She’s worse than a fairy,” Pierus muttered.
“Hey!” Hippy scowled. “If you want my help you can just stop fairy bashing, alright?”
“Who’s bashing fairies?” the woman’s voice rose on a note that hovered somewhere between panic and disbelief.
“Pierus,” Hippy said.
“Pierus?” The woman tilted her head. “Funny, I came across that name a while back.” She gave Pierus a stern, hard look over the rim of her glasses. “Rather an obscure Greek myth. King Pierus had nine daughters and went around saying they were better than the nine muses. Ended badly.”
Pierus sniffed. “I never heard such rubbish. I assure you, nothing of that sort ever happened.”
She glared for a bit longer. Hippy began to fidget and wonder if she should let Fluffy Ducky sort it out when the woman abruptly lowered her weapon and returned it to her pack. “I suppose we really should calm down and remember our manners.” She grabbed Pierus’s hand and shook it. “Poppy Praeconius, archaeologist. Pleased to meet you.” She took Hippy’s hand. “And you are?”
Hippy shook her hand vigorously, since that seemed to be expected. “Hippy Ishtar.” The woman was only a little taller than her, so she didn’t have to crane her neck like she did with Pierus to see her face. Poppy looked as though she were in her forties. She had a few lines around her grey eyes, and otherwise rather stern features, which were currently smudged with dirt. Her glasses were crooked and her long, sandy, grey-sprinkled hair was pulled back into a severe bun. She wore the most curious trousers and tailored dress, all in khaki. “You’re the first human I’ve ever met,” Hippy added.
“Really? You’re the first lunatic I’ve ever found in a cave. I’m sure we’ll get along famously.” Poppy shouldered her pack.
“What’s a lunatic?”
“Someone who believes in fairies.” Poppy scanned the cavern.
“But I am a fairy.” Hippy’s lower lip trembled.
“Of course you are, dear.”
Pierus put a hand on Hippy’s shoulder and bent down to her level. “Humans don’t know about us,” he said in a low voice. “Try and be a little more circumspect, my dear.”
“Circum what?”
Pierus sighed. “Never mind. Come along, we’ve wasted enough time. If my calculations were correct, we shouldn’t have far to go. You, human, bring me your bright light, would you?”
“Why not?” Poppy picked up her light and followed him to the walls.
Hippy trotted behind while Pierus studied the rock. She was far more interested in the human. Really, she could have passed for a fairy if she was shorter, or a muse if she was a lot taller. But something bothered her. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.
“Here,” Pierus said.
The light stopped over a series of markings on the wall. Next to the markings, a tunnel branched away.
“These are fascinating.” Poppy leaned forward. “This is a Greek script, but I’m not familiar with it at all.”
“Of course you’re not, women have no place reading the ancient texts,” Pierus snapped. “Would you keep that light steady?”
Poppy glanced over her shoulder at Hippy. “Is he always this pleasant?”
Hippy barely heard her because underneath the unfamiliar letters, she saw an etching of a lady with snakes on her head. “Hey, that’s like the statue in your tent! The little one. I smashed the big one over a vamp’s head.”
“You broke my statue?” Pierus scowled.
“That’s Medusa,” Poppy said. “She could turn men to stone just by looking at them. You’re very small to be smashing heads, aren’t you?”
Pierus strode down the tunnel. Hippy hurried to keep up. Poppy walked beside her, her light bobbing around their feet.
“He your boyfriend?” Poppy whispered.
“Ew! He’s way too old.” Hippy screwed up her nose in disgust.
“Your dad?”
“No, he’s a muse. My dad’s fighting vamps.”
“A muse?” Poppy flashed her light at Pierus’s silhouette. “In what respect? Are you an artist?”
“Don’t be silly, I’m a Bloody Fairy.”
“No need to snap dear, you could be a bloody garbage collector for all I care, I’m just trying to understand how a pack of lunatics came to be in a cave that’s supposedly been sealed off for thousands of years.”
“We came through the rip.”
“Through the what?” Poppy’s question was cut off when they followed Pierus around a bend in the passage and almost stumbled into him.<
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“You, human woman.” Pierus motioned her forward.
“Call me Poppy,” Poppy said. “It makes you sound less like an ass.”
“How many years have elapsed since the sorcerers separated the dimensions?”
“How many years since who did what now?” Poppy pushed her glasses up on her nose and shone the light on Pierus’s face.
He put a hand up to shield his eyes and squinted. “Would you stop that, you dreadful creature?”
“Didn’t you say she doesn’t know anything about Shadow?” Hippy said.
“Oh, yes of course.” Pierus sighed. “What number do you put on the lapsing of time?”
Poppy blinked. “Are you asking me what year it is?”
“Yes!”
“It’s 1982.”
“One thousand nine hundred and eighty two years since what?” Pierus scowled. “I know for a fact Dream is older than that. From which catastrophic event are you counting?”
“The birth of Christ,” Poppy said. “Where are you people from?”
Pierus walked up and down the tunnel. He counted on his fingers and muttered to himself.
“What’s he doing?” Poppy whispered.
“I don’t know.” Hippy decided not to admit she’d lost track of the conversation. She wasn’t that good with numbers.
“Ah, religion,” Pierus said out loud. “How like humans to use it as a marker of time. I know where we are now. Human woman-”
“Poppy,” Poppy said.
Pierus made an impatient noise. “Where are we, geographically?”
“In the tunnels under the old city of Thebes in Boetia. At least, it’s where I believe old Thebes is located, even if-”
“And what exactly are you doing here?”
“Looking for my hat.”
“Irritating woman. Why are you here?”
Poppy folded her arms. “You first.”
“We are seeking an ancient treasure with the power to send an army of vampires back into the Darkness from whence they came,” Pierus said.
“That’s fascinating. I’m looking for a herd of unicorns to ride around in the moonlight.”
“What’s a unicorn?” Hippy asked.
“It’s a horse. With a horn coming out of its head.”
“They live down here?”
Poppy groaned. “Honestly, is there something wrong with her?”
“Apparently she was dropped on her head as a child,” Pierus said.
“Hey!” Hippy kicked him in the ankle.
Pierus ignored her. He spoke through clenched teeth, as though dealing with two particularly fractious children. “Now young woman, you strike me as an intelligent sort, who wouldn’t blow holes in caves for nothing. Tell me why you’re here.”
Poppy straightened her back. “Pandora’s Box,” she said.
Pierus went a step closer to her. A tic jumped in his forehead. “Is that what they call it now? What makes you think it’s here?”
Something changed in Poppy’s demeanour. Her eyes sparked. She paced up and down on the spot, using her hands to emphasise her words. “I’ve been following the trail for a while,” she said. “I happened to have the opportunity to read a very, very, ancient fragment of text that led me to believe Pandora’s Box was not in fact an analogy for the dangers of arcane knowledge, or the loss of innocence, or whatever else, but in fact an actual physical object of immense value. According to what I read, the myth about Pandora opening the box was all wrong. It was a cautionary tale. The box was in fact created to hold something the ancients feared, and she guarded it. Of course I searched in all the wrong places, until I found irrefutable evidence that led me to believe Medusa was invoked to guard the treasure. I knew there was a temple to Medusa in ancient Thebes, so naturally I came here. To a sealed cave. And found you two and your acrobatic friends.”
Pierus scowled. “You were nearly right,” he said. “We are in fact in search of the same artefact. And it is indeed hidden here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I helped to hide it. And if I have my bearings right-” he turned in a slow circle. “We must be close. Now tell me young woman, what did you intend to do with what you call Pandora’s Box once you obtained it?”
Poppy straightened her glasses. Her voice was perfectly friendly and even. “It would have to go to the museum, of course. It would be a national treasure.”
Pierus gave a low, deep chuckle and walked on down the tunnel. “Really. So you are not down here for any kind of personal gain?”
“I absolutely resent what you are implying,” Poppy said. “I’m trying to build a professional reputation as an archaeologist here.”
“And what do you intend to do when the fairy and I return to Shadow with it and leave you here?”
“Well seeing as you’re obviously both insane I’m not all that worried about you disappearing.”
“Then you won’t mind accompanying us for the moment.”
Hippy trotted alongside the two of them, only half-listening to the conversation. Somewhere nearby she could hear the unmistakable sound of water trickling over rock. She wandered away from them, seeking the source of the sound. The tunnel dipped down and the sound grew louder. All at once she teetered on the edge of a hole in the path. She yelped and jumped back.
“Hippy?” Pierus called from somewhere nearby.
“I found water!” Hippy dropped to her stomach and looked in the hole. Three feet below, a shallow, dark stream rushed past. She shuddered. She didn’t want to fall in that.
Pierus and Poppy caught up and leaned over the hole.
“Well done my dear,” Pierus said. “This is exactly what we were looking for.”
Hippy beamed.
“We’ll need to go down there.”
Her smile vanished. “Down there? Into the water?”
“Is that a problem?”
Hippy scooted back from the edge. “You go. I’ll wait here.”
Pierus raised an eyebrow. “I thought you came to help me, not sit around while I did all the work.”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake, you two.” Poppy put her hands on the edge of the hole and dropped down into it.
“Come along my dear,” Pierus said.
Hippy pouted. “I don’t like water.”
“Now.”
Hippy heaved a sigh, stalked back to the hole and dropped into it. She landed with barely a splash in icy cold water that went right up to her waist. She screamed.
Poppy, just a few feet away, put her hands over her ears. “Would you not do that? It echoes in here!”
Hippy quickly hiked up her belt to keep Fluffy Ducky dry and put her arms out to get her balance. “Yuck, yuck, yuck!”
Pierus swung himself down from the hole and slid into the water behind her. He had to bend his head to avoid hitting the roof of the tunnel. He looked both ways. “In which direction are we from the temple?”
“Just south,” Poppy replied.
“Upstream,” he said, and started walking against the current.
Hippy followed him. Walking against the swift flow of the water was difficult enough to start with. The wetter her leggings and dress got, the more difficult it became. Her bare feet slid on the slick rocks. Poppy’s torch lit up the black water just enough to make it look murkier and more dangerous. Hippy tried not to think about water monsters. Huge fish with sharp teeth. Swimming vamps. Eels with lights on their heads. Dragons. It was harder and harder to keep her balance when she started to shake.
Poppy grabbed the back of her dress and kept her upright when she almost slipped. “Steady on.”
Hippy grabbed her arm and held on tight.
“So let me get this straight,” Poppy said. “You can scale a vertical wall and drop ridiculous heights without batting an eyelash–I haven’t figured those out, but I will–but you’re afraid of water?”
Hippy nodded.
“What are you, a cat?”
She shook her head.
“You
’re an odd one.”
“I’m a Bloody Fairy.”
“Yes, you said that before. What is that, some kind of circus cult?”
“No, it’s my family. We’re all afraid of water.”
“Why?”
Hippy blinked. “I don’t know! It’s just the way things are!” She flinched when the water lapped up to her ribs.
“I think you’re very brave to be facing your fear like this.”
Hippy beamed. “Really?”
“Really. Any idea where your lunatic friend is taking us?”
“No.”
“Wonderful.”
They walked in silence for a few more minutes. Each trickle and drip of water echoed in the tunnel. Pierus forged ahead, bending lower and lower when the tunnel narrowed. “Here,” he finally said, stepped out of the water and disappeared.
Hippy hurried to pull herself onto the rocks, where a set of crooked, dilapidated stone steps wound up into another passage. She took them two at a time to put distance between herself and the water. Poppy followed close on her heels.
They came out in a huge cavern, where a still, glassy lake mirrored tiny glowing lights on the roof. The air was so cold Hippy was quite sure icicles were forming on her wet skin.
Poppy swept her torch over the lake. The beam found a stone bridge so old it looked like part of the cave arching over to the other side. Pierus was already halfway across it.
They hurried after him. Fine granules of stone skittered away under Hippy’s bare feet. Behind her, Poppy’s heavy, wet boots crunched with every step.
Hippy tried not to look at the water below. She focused instead on Pierus’s back. There was a tear in his dark blue coat. When she caught up with him, he put his arm around her shoulders.
“Now is your time to shine, my dear.”
“Good. I like shiny things.”
Pierus stopped at the edge of the bridge. “Light please, young woman.”
Poppy shone her torch ahead over a big, empty sandy floor.
Pierus made the tiniest sound, perhaps a sigh of relief. “Up a little.”
The torchlight moved up and illuminated an enormous stone statue of Medusa. Hippy’s eyes widened in awe. The stone was pitted with age. A chunk missing from her mouth made it look like she was snarling. Her blank stone eyes looked right through them all. Her hands were cupped in front of her. The snakes that curled from her head writhed in frozen fury.
