The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island

by Jeffery Russell

  “Shine the light as bright as they can and bring their god through.”

  “Which will take how long?”

  “It depends on how much blood they can get hold of.”

  Thud grimaced. “What is it with these ritual things and blood? Why is it always blood?”

  “It’s sort of a shortcut. In some ways, blood acts as distilled magic. It also provides a bit of a barrier between the energy and the caster. A proxy for life.”

  “So if the ritual goes wrong it’s the blood that burns for it?”

  “I think, in this sort of situation, that it also serves a role as a lure. The demonic equivalent of the smell of bacon cooking.”

  “They captured a fair amount of pirates in that attack.”

  “Yes, they did. I imagine that they don’t intend to use their own blood in a ritual.”

  Thud rubbed his hand back and forth across his face. It made a bristly sandpaper sound.

  “We gonna have to rescue ‘em, ain’t we?”

  Ruby shrugged. “Many would consider that the moral thing to do. Not all. Save them or not, the merfrogs need to be stopped. Recovering the book would accomplish that as well as being why we’re here in the first place. As long as they have it then stealing their sacrifices now would only mean someone else gets sacrificed later.”

  “Well, in that case, I reckon it’s time to get everyone back on the hourglass. We need to find out where they scarpered off to.”

  There was a shout from below. They looked to see the giant, Rend. He’d climbed down from the upper deck and was stomping away in the direction the merfrogs had retreated. He still clutched his shipwheel, minus a few spokes. The deck-door strapped to his arm had lost half of its width at some point.

  “Going after them,” he yelled in response to whomever had shouted. His voice boomed. “Don’t reckon they’re dead until I lay eyes on them.”

  Thud let out a puff of breath that made his mustaches dance.

  “Well, one more to rescue.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thud sat at a table inside the ship as the activity of clean-up bustled around him. He was studying Durham’s map. Ginny and Nibbly were looking over his left and right shoulders, respectively, while Mungo was looking under his shoulder.

  The map was somewhat crude, which was to be expected. There were bits crossed out, other bits drawn over, a variety of odd symbols employed with an attempt at an explanatory key wedged in along one side. However, enough of it was drawn out that, along with the knowledge that they were inside some great creature, it began to make a bit of sense.

  “That explains the rope,” Mungo was saying. “The edge of the island is the dimensional rift. It can be passed through but prolonged occupation of the transition point exposes you to the variances of the dimensional shifting.”

  “Think of it as a big starfish,” Thud said. He traced his finger across the lines. “One of them ones with a whole lot of arms. All these passages are a bunch of long squiggly arms, extending out and branching off.”

  “The patterning looks more akin to rivers,” Mungo said. “Or tree roots. ”

  “They’re radiating out from one location,” Ginny said. “It has a center.”

  “Aye. Right about there.” Thud jabbed with his finger.

  “You think that’s where them frog folk gonna be?” Nibbly asked.

  “Yep,” Thud said. “Right smack in the middle. No one sticks a temple out on some arm when they can build inside their god’s head. Stands to reason. We need to get a scouting team together and go take a look. Main priority is not letting them get a look back. Dunno when they’re gonna start with the book but we gotta assume it’s already underway and that we’re against the sand here. While the scouts are out we’ll have everyone else prepping to move.”

  “Who’s on the scout team?” Ginny asked.

  “Who do we have left standing on Vanguard team?”

  “I think it’s down to just Max that ain’t got some part or other in a sling.”

  “Max?” Thud scratched at his ear. “What exactly does he do on Vanguard?”

  Ginny shrugged. “I see him carrying things around a lot.”

  “Yeh, seen that too,” Nibbly said from Thud’s other shoulder. “Saw him lookin' at an owl once. Not sure if that was work related, though. Mighta just been, y'know, lookin' at an owl.”

  “Well, best leave him here to make sure that whatever he does gets done,” Thud said. “I’ll head the team. Mungo, you’re coming. I don’t expect any traps but there may be problems that you can lay some direct eyes on for strategizing and I want Ginny here running the prep. We’ll bring Durham to map what we scout and because he’s good at noting things and makin' sense of ‘em. The elf too on account of him bein’ a sneaky bugger.”

  “If you’re not taking anyone from Vanguard then you should take Leery too,” Nibbly said. “She can take a spear as well as a shield can.”

  “I’d prefer having her along for reasons other than something to hide behind,” Thud said. “But aye, we’ll bring her. Don’t know what we’ll find but there’s always the chance that it’ll need climbing or falling off of.”

  He rolled the map back up and stood, Nibbly and Ginny stepping back in unison to avoid his ascending shoulders.

  “Round ‘em up,” Thud said. “We’re gonna go take a look at the heart of the problem.”

  ***

  The shipwreck debris thinned into non-existence as they moved toward the center of the echo of Gr'bl-Neb'gthrb. The negative space of the passages was too great for ships to have reached this far in before meeting their doom elsewhere. There were still bones. Creatures of the sea that had made poor navigational choices. It made mapping a great deal easier as Durham’s shipwreck mapping technique involved inking in a rough outline of the space it covered plus a bit of creative perspective work in order to indicate the relative height and condition of the wreck. This as opposed to his map notation for bones which was a little line with some crosshatches through it. He had started adding in some fish skeletons here and there to maintain visual interest. Lacking shipwrecks, Leery had climbed up a whale rib or two of her own volition but gave it up after it became evident that it wasn’t accomplishing much. Thud was at the fore, darting from rib to rib, using them as cover. There was no sign that there was anything watching them but, as Thud had pointed out, when you had a wall of water and enemies that could swim, they could pretty much watch you whenever they liked if they knew you were there. Durham suspected that some of it was Thud trying to put on a good show to impress Catchpenny. The elf strolled along, glancing about at the walls of water as if he were in a park. At least he wasn’t whistling. The only indication that he was in an area of potential peril was the nocked arrow he held in his bow. Mungo trotted along next to Durham. He was wearing what Durham thought of as his ‘dungeon goggles.’ They had a dozen or so lenses on arms and dials that Mungo continually swapped in and out, apparently gleaning all manner of hidden information. Or, at least, did so in order to give that impression.

  Up ahead Thud had come to a stop and was looking around, sniffing the air. Then the smell hit Durham. It had a fair degree of kick behind it to be noticeable over the pervasive atmosphere of decomposing sealife. It seemed a very old smell. A smell that had acquired layers of complexity over the centuries, like a whiskey aged in a hundred different midden barrels.

  “Seem to anyone else like the mist is getting thicker?”

  Durham heard a gasp from the vicinity of his hip where Mungo’s head was located.

  “Look!” the gnome said, pointing at nothing.

  “What ain’t I seeing?” Thud asked.

  Mungo was manipulating the levers and wheels on the sides of his goggles. Lenses were whirling in and out like planets in an orrery.

  “There,” Mungo said. “Floating in the air.”

  “It ain’t a thumbprint on your goggles again, is it? We were damn near performing an exorcism last time before you tracked that one down
.”

  “No it’s there,” Mungo said, still pointing at nothing. “And there’s another.” He frowned and sent the lenses whirling again. “They’re shifting. Cross-dimensional!”

  “I don’t like hearing ‘they’ and ‘cross-dimensional’ so close together. What is it you’re seeing?”

  “They’re kinda of blobby looking,” Mungo said. “Like a jelly with no fruit. They’re shifting again! Look!”

  There was a ripple in the air where he was pointing. Or, rather, a ripple behind it. A distortion of the light caused by something floating through the air. It became more visible as it moved. It was about the size of a tuffet. It didn’t show any means of locomotion, other than sort of…blobbing forward, as best as Durham could describe it. It was if it were moving through a liquid that only it was aware of. And there was, indeed, more than one. Whether they were shifting into view or whether it was now knowing what to look for, Durham wasn’t sure. Regardless, he was now seeing the ripples of light almost everywhere he looked, crystal clear globs, undulating their way through the mists.

  There was a soft thrum of a bowstring as Catchpenny let loose. The arrow passed through the jelly he’d targeted as if it wasn’t there, then did the same to another couple beyond that before coming to rest in the sand with a thunk. The jellies reacted, however, twisting and spinning around where the arrow had passed through them. The three that had been hit began following the flight path the arrow had taken, slowly but deliberately. Others gathered around them as they moved, until they finally arrived at the arrow like a swarm of laid-back jelly bees. They clustered around the arrow where it was stuck in the sand. The feathers went first, curling and blackening. Then the wooden shaft dissolving away as it if were made of sugar. The flock of jellies rose back into the air, no trace of the arrow remaining. Durham was willing to bet money that the arrowhead had been melted away as well.

  “Well,” Catchpenny said. “They seem friendly in the sort of way that makes you not want to invite them over.”

  “What are they?” Leery asked. She was watching the nearest one suspiciously.

  “More dimensional bleed,” Mungo said. “It’s coming through. More of it in this world now.”

  “You mean these things are something inside of it?” Thud asked. “And they dissolve stuff?”

  “Some sort of defense,” Mungo muttered, as much to himself as anyone. He was stroking his beard, causing it to hang several inches below his chin.

  “Creatures swimming around inside you that just eat things that aren’t supposed to be there.” Durham asked. “That sounds like something that would come in handy.”

  “They didn’t seem to notice anything until the arrow damaged them,” Catchpenny said. “I’m guessing they aren’t very aware of much. As long as we don’t touch them we should be alright.”

  “That may be but there’s a lot of ‘em and they’re moving all which-ways,” Thud said. “I’m not sure how far we’ll get before brushing into one. They’re starting to get a bit thick around here too,” he said, stepping back as one wiggled its way past his nose.

  “And once one sticks to you and you stop to shake it off but another comes then another…” Leery shuddered. “That would not be a great way to die.”

  “We’ll try fire first,” Thud said. “It’s pretty reliable as far as scaring off the local wildlife goes. I’m guessing those things would make quite the sizzle with a torch underneath ‘em.”

  “Don’t sizzle ‘em too loud,” Leery said, “or Gammi will have them in the stew tonight.”

  Durham stepped politely out of the way of a glob floating toward his midsection. It was hard to see, a blue shimmer flickering now with orange and yellow as Thud’s torch caught and flared. Mungo and Gryngo had conspired to come up with an improved torch for field use. They were not dissimilar in appearance, a stick with a rag-wrapped ball on the end, but the new torch had the addition of a length of string hanging from the rags. Pull the string and the torch would spark and ignite in almost any weather or environmental conditions apart from liquid submersion. Light the string and it acted as a fuse, resulting in a more explosive lighting event, preferably after one had flung the torch somewhere else. The wisdom of having an instant-light sparking mechanism and a flammable coating as a component of a bomb on a stick had been the subject of some discussion around the campfire. Of chief concern was what happened when the torch flame worked its way through the rags and found the explosive bit. Mungo and Gryngo went into a lengthy explanation involving chemical primers, undercoatings, accretion layers, firing chambers and particle physics that most of the dwarves promptly stopped listening to, save Gammi who made a few notes to try in some recipes. Mungo avoided using words with less than five syllables where possible and Gryngo seemed of the opinion that syllables could be mixed and matched at whim and will. So far the torches had worked as advertised though the users had a tendency to fling them somewhere when they’d only burned halfway, just in case.

  Although they were fading from view, Durham could see an immediate reaction to the torch. All of the shimmers of light near Thud began moving toward his torch, the reflected flame seemingly casting its light in an aura of glimmers before the globs faded completely from view.

  “What happened to ‘em?” Thud asked.

  “They appear to have dimensionally shifted again,” Mungo said. “The crossing-over is shifting but not in a stable way. It’s fading back and forth. I anticipate that they’ll return presently with greater consistency, perseverance and frequency.”

  “They did seem to like the torch, though, didn’t they?” Thud narrowed his eyebrows at it, a facial expression that reminded Durham of two kittens crossing their tails.

  “It lends credence to the hypothesis of this being an aquatic being.”

  “Wasn’t aware that we was still hypothesizin' about that part.”

  “Perhaps, but this fits neatly with our working model. Fire is naturally antagonistic to it thus presenting a focal point for local area defenses.”

  Thud nodded. “So, these torches. There a way to make them both light and explode? Seems like it might be a good strategy to try if those things get too thick anywhere.”

  “Yes,” Mungo said. “Once the torch has combusted simply light the cord twenty seconds before you wish it to explode. Easy enough to do so by simply poking it into the torch flame.”

  “I begin to understand the team’s preference for the pixie lamps.”

  “I have a variant pixie lamp design that explodes as well. Ginny won’t let me test it, however, until it includes a pixie ejection system.”

  “Well, warn me if that ever makes it to a field test. Not sure I want to eat me dinner by bomblight. Let’s push on afore them things come fadin' in again. We’re close.”

  The mist thickened as they progressed. It seemed almost solid or, rather, liquid as it eddied and flowed around them. It was making Durham’s mapping efforts more challenging. Pacing off the distance between walls was easier when you knew where the other wall was.

  He stopped mid-pace.

  “The mist,” he said. “It changed directions.”

  The others stopped, watching.

  The mist had a discernible current, moving to a breeze that no one felt. A clammy breath against your skin with no one there to blow.

  The current slowed, then stopped. The mist began flowing back the other way.

  “It did it again!”

  “Anyone have any speculations?” Thud asked.

  “Another thing like those blobs, maybe?” Durham asked. “Something inside this gargle-god that we’re only seeing an echo of?”

  “That’s making me feel mighty pressed for time,” Thud said. “Things is gettin' weirder by the minute. Let’s move.”

  Durham put his mapping supplies away, guessing that Thud wasn’t going to want to wait for him to pace off distances.

  It didn’t turn out to be much further. Around a final curve and there it was.

  Durham’s first in
stinct was to immediately crouch behind something. There was a notable lack of anything that would fit the bill, however. The clearing at the heart of the creature was all sand blanketed with tangled and rotted seaweed. The air here was clear of mist, the sudden visibility shocking. Everything was bathed in a sickly green light that came from a giant glowing orb floating high in the middle. The orb flickered and pulsed, magical energy rippled across its surface, buzzing and hissing.

  A curling umbilical of light connected the floating orb to a tower below it.

  It was a tower in that it was quite a lot taller than it was wide but the resemblance to any form of architecture Durham was familiar with ended there. It had been built underwater–that much was obvious. Cyclopean stone, crusted with barnacles and coral made up the base, a large and ancient ruin that a newer spire had been built on top of. A spire reaching high above, twisted and pitted as if grown. Kelp hung from its prominences like bedraggled hair. Irregular openings studded the sides–openings that Durham realized would have functioned as doors were the tower still submerged. Below these openings were oddly bulbous protrusions, like blisters on the surface. Balconies, perhaps. It was narrow with three sides, built against a current that no longer flowed. The leading edge was rounded and smoothed by the water. How long did it take for the sea to wear stone like that? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Durham wasn’t sure. Three stone pillars thrust from the tower’s top, the green glowing sphere suspended between them as if held by invisible chains. Durham felt ridiculously exposed. Surely anything in the tower that looked in their direction would see them. Were there guards watching them from the tower’s heights? Durham couldn’t see any motion or activity anywhere. Just that pulsing orb.