Lex Trent: Fighting With Fire

by Alex Bell

  When they were only a few feet from the entrance they had to stop. It was too dark to proceed any further, and it certainly didn’t take a genius to work out that wandering around an abandoned mine without light was not a good idea. Never mind the danger posed by the dragon, they could fall down an uncovered shaft, or have a ceiling fall down on them, or anything.

  ‘Don’t even think about lighting a torch,’ Jesse said.

  Lex rolled his eyes. ‘I know that,’ he replied.

  Lighting any kind of match down there would not be a good idea at all seeing as they didn’t know what gases may be present. They would need some other source of illumination but, fortunately, Lex had just the thing in his bag. The enchanter’s bag was huge inside but Lex could usually find the things he’d put in there himself without too much difficulty − perhaps because they were near the top. Every now and then, however, rummaging around he would discover something he’d never seen before. Last night on the ship he had had a good old rummage and found a caged glow-canary. The yellow bird shone like a beacon and had traditionally been used in mining because it could detect the presence of gold. When it came within ten metres of the stuff, its glow changed from white to yellow.

  No one entirely understood glow-canaries, for it seemed that they did not need food and water in the same way most species did. Indeed, they periodically seemed to go into a state of hibernation, and would only come ‘alive’ when someone woke them up again. There were several ways of achieving this. Saying ‘wake up’ in a loud voice usually did the trick. Poking also worked. Lex had owned the enchanter’s bag for several months now and he had never come across the canary before. But once Lex woke it up, the little bird seemed quite happy, stood on its little perch and cocking its head this way and that in an alert, curious manner.

  If it had been any other bird that had been in the bag without access to food and water for all those months, Lex would have discovered a dead, rotting corpse in its place but, as it was a glow-canary, it was alive and well, and now it was going to come in extremely handy.

  Lex took the cage out and, instantly, pure white light shone all about them, illuminating their way perfectly.

  ‘What else you got in that bag?’ Jesse asked, staring.

  The truth was that there could be any number of things left by the enchanter in there but, because it was Jesse asking, Lex shrugged and said, ‘Nothing of any value.’

  They moved on. The narrow path that was cut into the rock led downwards. When they got to a certain point, it branched out in three directions. Lex chose the middle one because he had a feeling about it − and when you’re a person who’s as lucky as Lex, you never ignore your gut feelings.

  They walked for some time through a twisty, turny corridor. It was an adrenaline-pumping walk, going deeper and deeper into the mines when they knew that somewhere in there lurked a terrible, ferocious, murderous monster. Lex wasn’t over keen on monsters because they tended to eat first and ask questions later. You couldn’t really scam a monster. Or talk it out of killing you. Or trick it into killing itself, instead. Lex, therefore, vastly preferred humans, for his silver tongue was not wasted on them. Still, he did experience something of a thrill in going into a highly dangerous mine that no one had been inside for more than a hundred years.

  So far, though, the only odd thing Lex had noticed were the holes in the ground. They didn’t look like they had appeared there naturally and yet they obviously weren’t anything to do with mining. Lex decided there must be moles down there, and thought nothing more of it.

  Until a rabbit popped its head up. On first appearances it was a perfectly ordinary white rabbit, but something about the look in its pink eyes stopped Lex dead in his tracks. He recognised that look. He had seen it before, back on the enchanted ship. And he had seen it later on at the farm, just before the crazy animal burnt the barn down. It was a mad, rabid, evil look that you weren’t likely to forget in a hurry.

  ‘Shit,’ Lex breathed. ‘I think that’s a—’

  But before he could even finish the sentence, the rabbit opened its mouth and shot a plume of fire at them. Lex and Jesse both jumped back but, before the rabbit could emerge all the way out of its warren, Jesse drew his pistol and shot at it. He missed, but the sound was enough to send the rabbit back down into the hole.

  ‘Jeepers, I hate those fire-bunnies,’ the cowboy said.

  ‘You’ve seen them before?’ Lex asked.

  ‘You get ’em out in the desert sometimes. Nasty little buggers they are. Dying out now, thank the Gods. Ain’t seen one in years.’

  ‘Let’s hope there aren’t too many more of them,’ Lex said as they went on. He knew from past experience just how much damage one fire-breathing rabbit could do and he did not fancy being stuck down here with one, let alone more.

  ‘Are they carnivorous?’ Lex asked, remembering that first time he’d come across one on the enchanter’s boat and it had tried to chew through his boot.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Jesse replied. ‘They’d gladly make a feast of you if you let ’em.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Lex said, a horrible, terrible, awful suspicion suddenly occurring to him. ‘What if . . . What if there isn’t any dragon?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Jesse asked, frowning. ‘It killed all those men, didn’t it?’

  ‘Did it? No one ever saw the attacks, did they? They only found the charred bodies later.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . . those bodies were blackened to a crisp. Half eaten most of the time, too. No way one little bunny could do that, even if it could breathe fire.’

  ‘Not one perhaps,’ Lex replied. ‘But if there was a pack of them . . .’

  ‘But the fire-bunnies are dyin’ out,’ Jesse said, starting to sound a little desperate. ‘Everyone says so. Besides, other miners reported havin’ seen the dragon.’

  ‘Well, of course they did,’ Lex replied dismissively. ‘Down here in the mines, getting increasingly scared, with more and more people dying, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t convinced he’d seen the dragon at some point. Who knows − perhaps a few of them really did catch a glimpse of one of the fire-bunnies. They would probably have been genuinely sure that it was a dragon they’d seen. Besides, if miners were being attacked in the tunnels whilst they worked then how would a dragon even fit into those narrow corridors? How would it be able to move around the mine at all?’

  ‘Some of the descriptions are quite detailed though,’ Jesse pointed out − although he sounded anything but certain.

  ‘But none of them match,’ Lex muttered. ‘Although I suppose it would’ve been dark down here and they would have legged it as soon as they saw anything. Hopefully, there are fire-breathing rabbits and a dragon down here.’ That sounded odd, given the circumstances, so Lex added, ‘Well . . . you know what I mean.’

  ‘I sure do,’ Jesse replied. ‘I don’t much fancy wanderin’ round this old mine looking for a dragon that don’t even exist, and maybe never did.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Lex grunted.

  The problem, though, was that sending players down to an abandoned mine to slay a dragon that wasn’t real sounded exactly like the sort of stupid thing Lady Luck would do. Lex couldn’t help wondering what would happen to the Game if that was the case. How would they decide the winner if the third round was one that couldn’t possibly be won?

  After about twenty minutes of navigating their way through the corridor, Lex was starting to worry that it didn’t lead anywhere useful at all. The mine was unfinished − for all they knew, this corridor would suddenly come to a dead end.

  But then they came out into the cavern.

  As previously stated, there is more than one way to wake up a glow-canary. Shouting and poking will do the trick. But another thing that works like a charm is to bring a glow-canary that’s already awake into close proximity with sleeping ones. Something about the light the awake one sheds will rouse the sleeping ones within seconds.

 
Jesse and Lex, therefore, had to shield their eyes because, after a good half hour spent wandering the dark mine, they were not prepared for the bright light of three hundred or more glow-canaries. The cages hung from the cavernous ceiling far above them and the light illuminated one of the largest rooms Lex had ever seen in his life. It was massive − and it was only because there were so very many glow-canaries that they were up to the task of illuminating it at all.

  The room contained a railway track. Or, at least, the hub of one. The track ran out of the room in several different directions. Presumably, the little carriages had been intended to transport equipment in and gold out. But they had never got very far with the actual mining and Lex assumed that the railway, too, was unfinished.

  He and Jesse moved cautiously into the cavern. They walked past laid and unlaid track, and a couple of steam trains with names like I. M. Daring. A multitude of rusty tools lay around on the gravelly floor, too. There was something a little sad about the abandoned scene − with all that stuff just left down there to rot. When the great gold rush had started, bright-eyed, hopeful people had flocked to Dry Gulch thinking that they were going to make a fortune when, in actual fact, they had met only with disaster, death and destruction before they were finally forced to close up the mine, cut their losses and flee.

  Jesse and Lex passed through the cavern at a brisk walk. The canaries had started to talk to each other and that worried Lex. Whilst they may have only been chirping softly, the fact was that there was at least one fire-bunny down here and, possibly, a dragon as well that might be alerted to their presence by the noise.

  ‘Damned birds,’ Lex muttered under his breath.

  At least the fact that the mine was unfinished meant that it shouldn’t take too many hours to explore it. If they covered every scrap of ground and failed to find a dragon then they would know that it was useless.

  They were about halfway across the cavern when there was a dull rumbling. They could feel it as well as hear it. The very walls and floor seemed to tremble and bits of rubble fell from the ceiling. Now that sounded more like a dragon and this cavern would certainly be big enough for one. From the sounds of it, the thing was gigantic and, suddenly, the thought of attempting to kill it seemed . . . well . . . completely and utterly absurd. Lex was a clever thief, not a warrior. How the heck was he supposed to manage it?

  But then the rabbits came. They poured out of the tunnel from which Lex and Jesse had entered, as well as the other three tunnels alongside that one. Perhaps, back in the days that the mine was being built, there had just been a small pack of fire-bunnies. Now there were hundreds. And hundreds. And hundreds of them. And they were all swarming directly towards Jesse and Lex, some of them even shooting little plumes of fire from their mouths in their excitement.

  ‘Oh my Gods,’ Lex whispered.

  He and Jesse spun on the spot and ran along a line of track towards one of the exits, out of the cavern. A single cart was perched in the dark arch, poised to run along the track sloping downwards into the next room.

  ‘Get in the wagon!’ Lex shouted, leaping in.

  ‘Get in?’ Jesse gasped, aghast. ‘Have you gone barmy? We don’t know where that track goes! It ain’t safe! It might not even hold our weight—’

  ‘Get in here right this second or I’m leaving without you!’ Lex snapped. ‘I don’t care where it goes! We can’t escape those things on foot and they’ll be on us any moment now!’

  Jesse glanced over his shoulder. And Lex took the opportunity to grab his arm and drag him bodily into the cart. The cowboy lost his balance and flipped into it head first. There was barely room for the two of them and the force of Jesse’s bulk landing inside was all that was needed to push the cart forwards on to the track.

  As it turned out, the next room wasn’t a room so much as another huge cavern, even bigger than the first one. As before, the caged glow-canary − still clutched in Lex’s arms − set off all the rest. There were hundreds of them hanging from the ceiling again. No doubt they had been brought in to illuminate the area so that the workmen could see the monstrosity they were building. It looked like some sort of wooden roller coaster. Tracks on stilts weaved everywhere within the great space, from all directions, branching off this way and that to other parts of the mine.

  Unfortunately, so much track meant that certain routes had to bend and dip rather horribly in order to fit in with the rest of it, and the track Lex and Jesse were on went, almost instantly, into a two-hundred-foot drop. Jesse barely had time to right himself in the cart behind Lex before it was plummeting downwards.

  The two of them screamed their heads off. The rickety little wheels of the cart blazed along, leaving a trail of sparks and making a horrible, tearing, rusty, screeching sound, as if they were about to come right off the track altogether.

  But then, suddenly, it levelled out. Despite the initial drop, they were still astonishingly high. Then they found themselves shooting upwards, carried along by the force of their own momentum. They came to a brief slow at the top of the curve − just long enough for Lex to glance back and see that the rabbits had reached the entrance and, unable to stop themselves, a whole load of them were toppling through the arch like lemmings, freefalling the two-hundred-foot drop to the tracks below. That seemed to kill them, which was reassuring. Finally, they managed to stop themselves and, instead, piled up in the archway, blowing fire out into the cavern. They were far too far away to be able to reach Lex and Jesse, for that brief, frenetic wagon ride had carried them right out to the middle of the cavern.

  ‘Perhaps we oughta try and get out—’ Jesse began, but it was already too late.

  The cart tipped over the top of the curve and then they were speeding off again. This time the drop was not so steep, but the track was long and straight instead, heading directly towards a tunnel on the opposite side of the cavern. Jesse was relieved at first, for this would surely get them off this helter-skelter of death. But then Lex said, ‘Uh oh.’

  When you’re speeding along on an ancient, unfinished mining track, the very last thing you want to hear coming out of anyone’s mouth is, Uh oh.

  ‘What?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘The track runs out up ahead.’

  Jesse looked over Lex’s shoulder and saw that he was right. The track ran out abruptly. Where it should have continued, there was just empty space stretching out ahead − and they were speeding right towards it. Perhaps it had collapsed due to age and damp, or perhaps that part of the track had never been built to begin with. However it had happened, the track disappeared out from under the cart a bare second later and Lex and Jesse found themselves hurtling through the air with a great cavernous drop stretching out beneath them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE DRAGON

  ‘Jump!’ Lex shouted.

  But jumping from a falling cart is actually harder than you might think. They therefore didn’t so much jump, as throw themselves over the edge towards a stretch of nearby track about ten feet below them. They smashed into it, causing it to move beneath their weight in a worrying sort of way, before it, thankfully, steadied. The cart, meanwhile, fell three hundred feet before it hit another piece of track and was smashed to bits.

  Jesse, who was clinging to the track beside Lex, reached over and smacked the back of the thief’s head.

  ‘Ouch! What was that for?’ Lex demanded.

  ‘Dragging me into that cart!’ Jesse growled.

  ‘Oh, shut up. If I hadn’t, you’d have been eaten by the bunnies by now.’

  ‘Yeah, ’cos my position is so much better now, ain’t it?’

  ‘Well, I won’t save you again if you’re going to be that ungrateful,’ Lex replied. ‘Stop whining; it’s not that bad.’

  He slowly got to his feet. His glow-canary had fallen a little further along the track, so he crept forwards and picked it up. The bird appeared to be unharmed and was still shining brightly, as were the other ones hanging from the ceiling.

  �
�Come on,’ Lex said. ‘We can walk to the other side.’

  This was easier said than done, for they were at an incredible height and the track was narrow and had a tendency to shift beneath them. Lex forced himself to keep his eyes on the archway ahead and not to look down. Inch by slow inch, they finally made it to the other side. It didn’t do anything for their nerves that a large part of the track groaned, creaked and then collapsed almost as soon as they did so.

  ‘It’s probably rotten to the core, after all these years,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s a miracle we survived at all.’

  ‘But we did,’ Lex said briskly. He turned away from the cavern as he spoke, though, for it was quite horrible seeing nothing but air where the track you’d just been standing upon seconds ago had once stood. ‘Let’s finish looking for this dragon.’

  ‘What dragon?’ Jesse said. ‘I’d bet anything that you were right and there never was one. It was most likely them bunnies all along. A hundred years ago, there’d probably have only been ten or twenty of ’em but that’s more than enough to roast a man and pick the meat off his bones.’