Writing a book would certainly be more fun than battling monsters. The locals’ theories of why the kraken stabbed itself would be hilarious. ‘It came ashore because its eyes itched, and it was looking for something to scratch them with.’
Would Griffith loan him the money to buy a new notebook? He could hardly wait to get started.
Chapter 16.
Finally, three days later, they were able to sneak away to explore Erlan.
Well, not sneak, exactly, since they had permission to go crystal hunting by moonlight, but Emil would tie their feet to the rusty anchor in the dockyard if she guessed what they were doing.
The magnificent city loomed above him like a frozen dream. The stairwell at his feet opened into velvet darkness so deep the moonlight couldn’t penetrate it. Adventure awaited them.
His belly growled.
Dinner had been hours ago. Viper desperately needed a snack. What would Emil feed them for breakfast? Not more kraken, he hoped. Food was food, and he hated to complain, but kraken was the nastiest fish he’d ever tasted. And Kraken had been the nastiest person he’d ever encountered. Would he ever be able to remember one without thinking of the other? At least they were both dead.
“We gotta decide on a plan of attack.” Lorel swung the empty rock-collecting pack and four torches down from her shoulders. “We can’t go running around the place like we did last time. We gotta have a plan.”
He looked up from the dark stairwell. “A what?” His empty stomach and Erlan’s secret depths were far more interesting than Lorel’s ramblings. He scratched at a half-healed circular scab on his arm. As long as they didn’t meet any more monsters, he was ready to go exploring.
“A plan of attack. What we’re gonna look for.”
He blinked at her, and grinned. “I want to look for books.”
“You fall off the Loom? Books? Down there?”
“Why not?” He turned back to gaze down the stairwell. He swore it was calling to him. The sensation was both heady and terrifying. “You never know. We might find somebody’s moldy library.”
“Sure would be moldy, kid. It smells wet down there. How you gonna get books past Emil?”
“Let me worry about that.” Chances were he’d never need to think about it, much less come up with a lie. At worst, he’d claim to buying them in the bazar and hope she didn’t demand to talk to the vendor.
Lorel covered her eyes in mock despair. “You want the strangest things. I wanna look for treasure.”
“Turybird.” He rolled his eyes and turned back to the stairwell. “Let’s just go and look. Worry about what we find when we find it. Waiting around here is giving me the creeps.”
She laughed, and in the moonlight her eyes shined like silver coins. “Here, take these.” She handed him a pair of torches, struck a match, and lit one. Smoke rose in a shower of wax-scented sparks. She lit a torch for herself from his flame and started down the steps.
“Hold up, turybird. With so few torches, we shouldn’t be burning them two at a time.”
“So use one of Trevor’s spells on them.”
He spat into the sand. “You know I never conquered the fire spells.” Something else he’d failed at. He’d failed Trevor in so many ways. “We’ll be wandering around in the dark if the torches burn out.”
“They’ll last, kid. Come on.”
He sighed and held his smoky torch up higher. Movement scurried beside his foot. “Yikes!” He hustled down the steps to catch up with her.
“What’s wrong?” Lorel drew her sword and brandished it over her head.
“A lizard. Sorry.” Now he really felt like an outstandingly witless sandcrab. “Put that thing away. All you’ll catch is me.”
“And I oughta, too. Get your crap together, kid.”
One nice thing about Lorel: the way she protected him, he ought to live forever. Unless she killed him herself, of course.
Down they went. Down, and down, and down. The air grew cooler and damper, and soon Viper wished he’d brought his jacket. He was shivering by the time the stairs spilled into a wide, sandy corridor.
“Three hundred seventy seven steps.” Lorel flicked her fingers at the staircase.
“You counted? Why?”
“A good scout always knows the distance out of any situation,” she misquoted proudly.
He’d read that book. Not that it made much sense, but he had read it. Her quotation was wrong, but he supposed the meaning was close enough. Two could play that game.
He pulled a piece of yellow chalk out of his pocket and waved it under her nose. “Here’s the other part of that adage.” He drew a large, six pointed star on either side of stairwell entry.
“I got a perfect sense of direction.” Lorel tossed her head. “I don’t need that.”
“Well, I do. Call it my thread on the Loom. If you like.”
“You ain’t no thread, kid. You’re a speck of dust on the Shuttle. A born traveler.”
“That’s truer than you know. My people are nomadic.”
“They ain’t your people no more. You’re on your own, Loom lint.” Lorel glanced between the passageways. “Left or right?”
Viper looked at her sideways, but shrugged. She couldn’t have intended to be as insulting as she sounded. She probably didn’t know what nomadic meant. “Let’s go right.”
She marched down the corridor – to the left.
Why did she bother to ask? He hastily drew an extra star on the wall and followed her.
A large, empty archway caught Lorel’s attention. She thrust her torch inside and was rewarded with a spacious courtyard. An intricately-carved fountain graced the center of the square, its beauty unmarred by the dust and sand that shackled it.
“How lovely it must have been,” Viper whispered. “Can you imagine this fountain with water sparkling and shimmering all around it?”
“You’re a poet at heart, kid.” Lorel wrinkled her nose. “All I see is a dead, dry water spigot.”
“You’ve got bahtdor breath for brains, turybird. I want to see what’s in there.” He pointed to a half opened door across the courtyard.
She nodded and strode across the square. “It smells funny in here.” She thrust her torch into the room.
He peeked under her extended arm. The room was laid out much like Emil’s home. It appeared to have been someone’s living quarters.
Now it was home to three startled, angry bobcats.
“I think we’re intruding.” Viper took a slow step backward.
The biggest cat arched and yowled. The other two settled for furious hissing.
“I think you’re right.” Lorel backed away from the door. When she was completely out the opening, she turned and gave him a hard push.
They beat a hasty retreat out of the courtyard.
Why were bobcats living so far underground? Did mice and rats live down here, too? Bats? He thought he’d seen a bat fluttering around earlier tonight. A pale gray one. Too bad he hadn’t brought Trevor’s wildlife atlas with him. No, that wouldn’t help. The only one he remembered seeing didn’t cover Kresh.
To settle his ruffled dignity, he drew a star on the wall outside the archway. The longest point aimed back toward the exit.
“I wish you’d point them all the same way.”
He shrugged and drew a circle in front of the point.
Lorel snorted and stalked down the hallway. At the next arch, she pointed straight ahead. “No turns on this trip. One thing at a time. Ain’t no point in getting lost.”
He couldn’t quarrel with that. They passed many more archways, but they didn’t explore them. Viper faithfully marked the walls at every intersection.
Eventually the arches changed, becoming immense openings in the wall, entries into vast chambers.
“Storage rooms,” Lorel said curtly.
Viper nodded. There was a stillness here, a silence eons old. He didn’t like the sensation that his voice might be captured by these ageless spaces.
; He glanced over his shoulder and wondered what lay in the darkness.
They passed two more of the great chambers before the corridor ended into a vast cavern. Their torches lit only the nearest corner, for the far walls were so distant the light didn’t reflect. Even the ceiling was out of sight. The dirt flood was lined with huge parallel grooves that extended beyond the flickering torchlight.
“It looks as though it’s been plowed, flooded, drained, and baked,” Viper whispered. A sad echo of his words drifted back to him. He shivered. “This place makes me nervous.”
Lorel snickered. “That’s your torch is going out.”
He pulled the spare torch from his belt and lit it. “Yours is pretty low, too.” He discarded the dead stump.
She nodded absently and traded torches. “I wish I knew what all this meant.”
“Me, too. Especially why the whole city is empty, and so dead. And when. And–”
“Enough, already. We should go back.”
Lorel’s torch started sputtering long before they found the staircase. “What’s wrong with this fraying thing?”
“We’ve been fooling around too much.” Viper giggled like a tentling. Heat climbed up his neck and engulfed his face. He clamped a hand over his mouth. Thunderdrums. Was he that nervous? He hadn’t giggled in years.
He glanced up at his torch. “Come on, hurry. Mine is flickering, too.”
“There’s the stairs,” Lorel shouted. Her torch died into foul-smelling, smoky embers.
“Come on. Mine won’t last forever.”
He was shuddering when they started the climb, and not only from the cold. The sensation of something following him slithered up his back. That was purely his imagination. Lorel was directly behind him. No monster could get past her without making enough noise to scare a whole herd of bahtdor.
His torch flickered and reeked of lunars-old carrion. The stairs seemed to last forever. His feet grew heavy, but his heart thudded as if it was trying to escape his chest. Why had he listened to the turybird? Two torches each weren’t nearly enough.
They climbed. And climbed.
His torch guttered out with a puff of putrid smoke. Smoldering blackness swallowed them.
“Sixty-seventh step,” Lorel said.
Only sixty seven? They had over three hundred stairs to go?
They both began to run. They ran until their legs ached. They ran until they could only plod up one painful step at a time. And still the stair stretched ahead.
Viper looked up when the air warmed. Moonlight glittered on the sand outside a low window.
“Stop, stop,” he called breathlessly. He collapsed onto the steps.
Lorel continued to plod up the stairs. “Why?”
“You’ve passed the exit, fleet foot.”
She sniggered like a child caught stealing blackberry pies, trudged back down the steps, and folded her long body to sit next to him. Her trembling fingers picked at the sandy floor. “I guess I lost my head.”
“I think you lost count.” Viper leaned back against the cool stone wall. “In the dark like that, everything sounded slippery and slithy. I got to thinking about snakes, and I couldn’t stop running ’til I saw moonlight.”
“I just stopped thinking.” She tossed sand at the wall. “Bad habit, that.”
He cackled, a shrill bark of laughter. Of all her bad habits, she worried about that one? He felt safer when she didn’t think too much.
“Let’s go home, kid.” She patted him on the back. “Next time we’ll bring lots of torches, don’t you fret.”
“The only thing I’m fretting about is finding enough gems to make Emil happy.”
Lorel grunted agreement and rattled the empty pack. Her belly growled.
Viper’s belly answered. Forget the torches. He wanted breakfast.
Chapter 17.
For the next three nights, they made sure to fill their packs with crystals before they headed back to Erlan. Searching on the way home was just plain too tiring. But once the packs creaked at the seams, they hurried to the underground entrance.
Viper stuffed both packs into a corner and covered them with debris. Just because they hadn’t seen anyone didn’t mean they hadn’t been followed. Emil had been watching them suspiciously, and Griffith would think stealing their packs was hilarious.
Lorel stared down the dark stairwell and continued the argument she’d started an hour ago. “We done explored the top levels enough times. I say we go all the way.”
“We don’t have enough torches,” Viper repeated patiently.
“We do. We got six apiece. You can only carry that many.”
“Turybird, if we get lost down there, I’ll hate you forever.”
She laughed and handed him a bundle of torches wrapped in twine and hempen rope.
He shrugged on the itchy improvised pack with distinct distaste. “This thing is going to wear blisters on my poor hide.” His back and chest were still covered with circular scabs that didn’t want to heal right. And he still hadn’t admitted to Emil that he needed a poultice.
He didn’t dare think of what Lorel’s hips and belly must look like. The blasted kraken had squeezed her lots longer than it had him.
She never complained, though, so he swore to stop whining about the scratchy pack.
They clattered down three hundred seventy seven steps and turned right. Near the end of the corridor there was another staircase. Its upward path was blocked, but neither of them gave that a second thought. They tromped down another one hundred seventy seven steps.
“Whoever built this place was perverted,” Viper said when they stopped for a brief rest.
“Why’s that?”
“Every staircase we’ve counted down here has either seventeen steps or one hundred seventy seven steps or three hundred seventy seven steps. Now give me one good reason for those numbers.”
Lorel looked at him like she thought he’d lost his mind. “The noodle brain as what built the joint liked them.” She chuckled and stretched until her back popped. “Let’s go.”
Behind the staircase lurked a half-hidden corridor. They chose it above the obvious tunnels and hurried along its path. Many wide archways beckoned with promise of hidden treasures, but Lorel dashed past them all.
Viper, always several feet behind her, peered in briefly. He wondered what they might find if they looked, but he followed as fast as he could. Yesterday the turybird had trotted off without him. Some bodyguard she was.
It was just as well she wouldn’t let him stop. There was only one blank page left in his current notebook. Tomorrow he’d scrape together the coins to buy enough scrap paper to make a new one. That made four short journals for Erlan, one for desert fauna, two for local stones, three for nautical words, and one for Griffith’s swear words. If he could just get the old man to explain what each word meant, he’d have a fascinating dictionary.
They passed another clogged staircase, this one filled with debris going down as well as up. He glanced at it warily and prayed they wouldn’t want it as an escape route.
At the end of the corridor lurked the stairwell they’d been searching for. Viper stopped to light a fresh torch before he clattered down the steps.
Another long staircase ended in a landing with no clogged corridors. They didn’t stop, but instead tramped down the next set of steps to a second landing. From there the steps curved away to the left.
The odor of rotted grass wafted up from the opening.
This is as far as we got last time. I wish she weren’t so thundering heroic. And that I weren’t crazy enough to follow her.
Dark liquid at the bottom of the steps danced eerily in the torchlight. Was it water moving, or the trembling of his gyrfalcon’s torch?
Lorel paused and stared into the gloom for several seconds. “We better slow down, kid,” she whispered. “The steps are awfully slippery.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Shut up, kid. Wait here until I call you.” She crept
down the last few steps, splashed down the corridor, around a bend, and out of sight.
He didn’t bother to argue with her. She’d picked a captivating place to abandon him.
Stone walls shimmered from the damp. Fungi grew in great white ears within niches on the walls. Patches of rock bare of growth seemed to glow from within.
Viper walked aside to inspect the nearest glowing patch. The wall wasn’t bare; it was covered with a filmy layer of mucous.
Using the stub end of the torch, he scrubbed a small section clean.
Soft, warm light poured from the cleared area. How amazing. It was just like the light in the corridors outside Trevor’s Lab. Could Erlan and Zedista be related?
Viper shook his head and turned away. Without Trevor alive to ask, he’d probably never know.
A niche in the opposite wall caught his attention. The hole looked like a letterbox, and it appeared to hold several pieces of paper.
He reached in eagerly and grasped the letters. They fell apart in his fingers, leaving only powder and a flat, fist-sized metal disk.
His gut squirmed with disappointment. Now he’d managed to destroy something else. He released the dust regretfully and held the disk up to the torchlight.
Engraved on both surfaces were webs of lines. “Maps!” he shouted. The disk held a pair of maps. But to where?
“No, we ain’t gonna stop and draw maps.” Lorel’s growl echoed up the corridor. “We been through that already. Come on.”
Viper sighed and tucked the disk into his pocket. There’d be time to study it later, when the turybird wasn’t around to harp at him.
He tiptoed down seventeen slippery steps. The last three treads squished beneath his sandals. I wonder what I’m stepping on, he sing-songed to himself. And I don’t really want to know.
He was relieved to reach the bottom of the slippery staircase, until he took that last step.
Slime oozed around his sandals and between his toes. When it slurped over his ankles, he prayed no parasites lived in it. All he needed was more bug bites. Or monster bites. Could anything dangerous live down here?
Sorcery's Child (The Mindbender's Rise Book 2) Page 18
