***
We crowded the center of a shrinking platform, which fell a block at a time into molten lava fifty feet below. We had another few moments to figure out the glowing cube if we wanted to live.
“No, you oaf,” Eliandra shouted, trying to pry the Rubik’s cube out of Dak’s hands. “This is clearly an intellectual puzzle. You’ll kill us all with your brutish thinking!”
He held it over her head and glared until she stopped jumping for it. “I’ll try not to drool all over the controls, princess.”
“Queen.”
“Whatever.” He spun a facing on the cube a few times, turned it over, and spun another. “The first row is easy.”
Once the colors aligned, blocks momentarily stopped trembling loose from our platform. There was only fifteen feet of platform around us on each side, so we clustered with our backs together while Dak worked.
“The middle row’s pretty easy, too,” he said while twisting it through various patterns. “Basic algorithm solves it.”
“Algo-what?” Eliandra asked.
“It’s stupid orc math, you wouldn’t understand.” A few more clicks. “Last row.”
A block rumbled loose from our platform and I listened to the silence as it fell, then the wet smack when it hit lava. It hissed while melting. My sweat turned needle sharp and I tried not to think about the temperature of molten rock. “Anyone know if lava kills instantly or, like, slowly and painfully?”
“No one’s melting,” Dak said. “I’m just trying to remember whether to use the Fish or the H algorithm.”
I glanced at Ronin and she scowled openly at me. Was she really that mad about my not trusting her? What right did she have to be angry when she clearly didn’t trust me? I pushed the self-righteousness down, figuring I’d like to be on better terms with her. “You okay?” I asked, waiting until Eliandra and Dak were bickering too loudly to notice. “You seem upset. At something besides the lava, I mean.”
“Merely disappointed.”
Where did that come from?
“Fish! It’s Fish!” Dak spun the glowing cube one more time through a complex series of motions I couldn’t track. Eliandra fretted the entire time, worried that Dak had reversed all his progress. Yet the final three clicks of the cube matched every colored square to its appropriate facing. Each side glowed brilliantly and the cube shattered, leaving a silver key hovering over Dak’s palm.
The platform shuddered, reassembling itself from thin air, stretching to the exit. There was a door with a lock matching our key.
“You’ve done that puzzle before,” Eliandra accused.
“You have the most adorable jealousy face,” Dak said, and marched ahead of us. “Oh, and Isaac? Still bored.”
***
We stood arrayed on a giant checkered board with man-sized statues of pawns, knights, and bishops facing us from the opposing side. The enemy’s obsidian pawn was a chiseled behemoth whose joints scraped stone-on-stone as he marched two squares, coming to stand directly in front of Dak.
“Is there a Monopoly room next?” Dak asked. “Maybe we could play Boggle. Or Clue.”
“Shut up,” I said.
Dak was a knight; I was desperately trying to figure out a move that didn’t put Eliandra—our king—in check. I was way better at chess than Dak, who hated any game that didn’t have good death animations.
“I got a move.” Dak stroked his enormous green jaw. “I’m the white horsey-guy, right?”
“The knight, yes.”
“White horsey-guy takes black king from across the board. Done.”
“That’s not even close to a valid move. And don’t step off your square. There are explosive traps.”
Dak rolled his eyes, glancing at a hovering orb that listened to our moves and gave instructions while simultaneously controlling the golems on our team or the other. “White horse-guy takes black king,” Dak told the orb.
“Invalid move,” intoned the floating ball of light.
Dak reached into the space of the pawn in front of him and snagged its axe. The golem resisted, but Dak head-butted him. His dense orcish skull cracked a fissure into the enemy’s stone cranium and the pawn staggered back a square. The second its foot touched the surface, it detonated in a deafening blast that nearly tossed me off my own space. I glanced over in time to see my friend hurl the axe across the board. It whirled through the enemy’s ranks, and crack!—sank into the black king’s forehead. The force knocked the mighty golem flat on its back, where it, too, exploded in an eruption of powder and smoking rocks the size of my fist.
“Fine,” I shouted over the ringing in my ears. “But that’s not chess.”
Dak was entirely too pleased with himself. “It’s orc chess.”
“Admittedly clever,” Eliandra conceded. “And skillful, to hit the golem with an axe from that range.”
The orb announced our victory; we stepped off the board and gathered at the far end of the chamber, where a passageway opened. “The secret was hard work and training,” said Dak, flexing a bicep.
“Bull,” I said. “You filled in boxes on a character sheet with particularly high numbers.”
“And I filled them in like a champ.”
“Why are you two even bickering?” Eliandra had eased off on Dak’s species since discovering he was a former human. Now she hated him for better reasons.
“Because this jerk didn’t invite me to his stupid world,” Dak said, thumbing back at me.
“Ah! You’re angry because Magister Grawflefox could have cured you of your crippled spine, but chose to leave you bound to your chair.” She nodded. “This makes sense.”
“Uh, it totally doesn’t,” Dak said. “I’m mad because he knows I’d rather be here helping him than stuck with reporting his demise. For the record, though, being dragged from home and family isn’t worth the use of my legs. I made do just fine with my chair. I could do basically anything I liked.”
“Anything?” Eliandra teased. “I can spelunk, rock climb, hike, travel widely, dance—”
Dak’s face soured.
If she even noticed, it didn’t stop her. “—duel, play calbur-ball, not to mention the diversity of sexual positions and—”
“Okay, I get it.” Dak cut her off with a motion of his hand. “You love your legs. But I love my family, and it’s not about what you lose so much as how you adapt. You can’t do thing x, so you learn to do thing y instead. You adjust. I played sports, and yes, danced, and yes, there’s all kinds of sex I could have.”
“Theoretically,” I added.
Eliandra smirked.
“Oh yeah,” Dak said. “I’m sure the cloistered princess is just rolling in available men.”
“Did you miss the part about traveling widely and knowing how to climb walls?” Her eyes glittered with mirth.
“Maybe you could use your legs to walk away from me,” Dak said.
“Maybe you could use your magnificent powers of adjustment to get over it,” said Eliandra.
To me, he said, “I’m going to twist her pretty little head off.”
“How did you lose the use of your legs?” Ronin asked, interrupting us. It was the only personal question I could remember her asking, which made me wonder.
Dak swung his arms in a show of nonchalance. “Same way most people do. Saving orphans from a burning building.”
“Orphans?” Eliandra asked.
“That’s only half true.” I managed to infuse my voice with sorrow. “They weren’t orphans, technically, until after the fire.”
The Queen snorted. “Did he set the fire?”
“Boy, has she got your number, Dak.”
“Nah, I was in a car accident.” The joking was gone from his tone. “That’s like a horseless carriage, except really fast.”
“But he did save my life,” I said.
Eliandra’s eyebrows rose. “How was that?”
I frowned. “It was our junior year of high school and we were coming home from a movie. Dru
nk guy came around a bend on the wrong side of the road. Dak tried to get around him—no good—and at the last second he swerved our car. He took it on his side. Cops said he saved my life. Guy’s pickup would have gone over the hood and killed me.”
“It was brave.” Ronin glanced at me and I saw something there I didn’t like: judgment.
A flash of irritation worked through me and I narrowed my eyes, not sure why she was upset at my cowardice all of a sudden. So dragons make me defile my pants. What of it?
“It wasn’t brave,” Dak said. “I wasn’t trying to save Isaac. I just swerved so I could try to inertia-jump through the side window and head-butt the other driver. Forgot I had my seatbelt on.”
***
Our only way across the fetid pit was over a spinning log that bridged from our side of the chasm to the other. Above the rotating bridge, a gauntlet of different-sized guillotines swished to and fro.
Dak seemed unenthusiastic. “What’s in the pit?”
“It was sharks,” I said.
He sniffed. “Decomposing sharks now. Once again, large predators need to eat.”
“It might be less fatal to swim than deal with the rolling log of death.”
“You remember that time you had bad tuna?”
I shuddered. “Hard to forget.”
“You evacuated your bowels so hard I think you lost your appendix. You’re a skinny guy. One mouthful of that rotten shark soup and I’m worried you’ll crap yourself out of existence.”
My head still throbbed too hard to even think about chancing another mental image.
Dak rummaged through a heap of cobweb-crusted bones in the corner, found a femur, and jammed it into the exposed gears powering the log’s rotation. It ground to a halt and, because the mechanisms were connected, so did the guillotines.
The stench over the pit stung my eyes and crept into the back of my throat until I gagged twice, gulping at bile and the memory of half-digested tuna. It was so bad I hardly noticed when my heel came down on a knot in the log. The knot clicked and slid mechanically inward. A trigger!
I remembered too late the second wave of traps—a poison dart launcher on the wall puffed and a dart streaked the air. I flinched, too slow to avoid it, but Ronin’s hand flicked into its path. The dart’s wicked barb gleamed six inches in front of my nose.
“Be more careful,” she bit off.
“Wait,” I shouted, snatching the dart from her hand and trying to toss it away. Too late—the timer ran down and it burst, coating my hand in chartreuse oil. Venom needled into every pore, wet-hot agony burning through my forearm so that the bones tingled to my elbow. I tumbled backward, but Dak’s huge fist seized my shoulder. He dragged me across the log to the other side of the chasm.
“What happened?” Eliandra asked.
“He broke the dart,” Ronin muttered.
“No, he didn’t.” Dak laid me on the cavern floor and cinched something tight around my elbow—a tourniquet to control the poison.
Is he going to cut off my drawing hand? No!
“Isaac, being an asshole, puts his poison darts on an explosive timer. We had a… disagreement once.” Dak grinned faintly overhead. “I played a monk and stood on a trap panel catching poison darts every turn for twenty turns, running it dry. We used the combined poison to kill a dragon. He’d spent hours planning the dragon fight—spell lists, multiple encounter rooms, pages of dialogue. We killed it before it got a chance to act.”
“Hate you so much,” I croaked.
He bit his wrist, opening a vein with one tusk. Red blood dribbled across his callused palm. “Drink up, moron.”
“What the hell?” I spluttered.
“Ew,” Eliandra said, clapping a hand over her mouth.
“I did a massive write-up on orcish culture and biology,” Dak said. “I made it really long and dense because I knew Isaac would never read anything more than five pages or that included three or more scary science words. I hid a line in there about how orcish poison immunity can be transferred through blood.”
“You son of a bitch,” I said. He tilted my head to his wrist and I gagged, managing to work a teaspoon of salt-iron blood into my throat, my stomach threatening to toss it back up. “God!” I spat out what remained in my mouth. “It’s salty.”
Dak snickered.
I knew what he was thinking and narrowed my eyes at him. “Bastard.”
“Think of it as research for your Twilight fan-fic.”
“You couldn’t include one freaking sentence about it being cherry-flavored?”
“I specified that orc blood tastes disgusting. Wards off predators. C’mon, one more hit.”
“Eternal hate. This is all I feel for you.” I drank again and didn’t barf.
Over the next ten minutes, my veins turned into fire. I curled into a shivering ball and sweated through my clothes, finally blacking out.
When I came to, Dak hovered above me, Ronin over his shoulder with a look only slightly sharper than her sword. Eliandra lounged on a rock like a bored teenager, an arm draped over her face and both heels kicked up against the wall.
“How long was I out?” I struggled to a sitting position, stomach curiously empty, an explanatory pool of vomit nearby. Someone had loosed a toddler with two mallets inside my skull.
“Not that long.” Dak patted my back. “It worked fast. Must be ’cause I’m so high level.”
I didn’t have much talk left in me, so Dak helped me to my feet.
***
The fungus room was gorgeous. Glowing mushroom caps the size of treetops bathed us in soft shades of green. The air was filled with silence and floating bioluminescent spores, and while most of the ecosystem had sustained itself, we did wander through the skeleton of a giant snake. We passed under the arches of its ribs, each festooned like a wedding trellis in moss and pale flowers. Dak and Eliandra marched in front and bickered, Dak insisting Northern Spine orcs were different from Dracon’s.
I glanced sidelong at Ronin, who studied things in the room too far into the dim for me to see. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
She snorted. “I’m to accept this apology because you saved me from a poison dart?”
“I doubt the poison would have killed you.”
“Correct.”
“Please. Tell me why you’re so upset. Was it because I thought you might be lying?”
“No.” She stopped at the base of a mushroom stalk and faced me. “Testing your boundaries is wise. I’m upset because you tested them by trying to flee.”
I frowned. “You mean the portal?”
“When you tortured yourself over the state of this world, when you battled alongside the Akarri, and when your cleverness again and again frustrated those who would contain you, I started to hope. You seemed strong in unexpected ways. But I should have known the allure of your Earth would be too great. If you’d successfully fled, it would have strengthened Dracon. I don’t hate you for what you are, Isaac Myers. But we come from very different worlds; and in mine, you are soft.”
“I am,” I said. “I didn’t realize how bad it would get. How difficult the everyday suffering would be. And I totally thought about going home. But I didn’t, and not because I’m ‘hard.’ Because my ‘softness’ makes me feel for people. For you, and Eliandra, and all the people Dracon hurts. So long as my head is on straight, I’m not going anywhere.”
Ronin glowered. “You tried. Had the portals been open, you would have.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say. I wasn’t planning to go home. I put my hand against it to check whether you were lying. I wanted Dak to toss me a pillow and some food, because, again—I’m not exactly used to hunger, or to hiking through the dark with a head injury. But I couldn’t abandon your world to Dracon.” I saw realization dawning in her eyes, and it made me feel like a braggart, so I added, “Not that I’m going to sword-fight him. I’m not that guy. When it comes time, that’s your job. But I’m not going home until it’s finished; I’ll s
tick around and draw stuff for you, because that’s what I’m good at.”
She stared—hard, as if searching me—and seized my shirt-front in her fist. My back thumped into the mushroom’s enormous stem. Glowing spores descended from its cap, drifting like snowflakes into Ronin’s gleaming black hair. Pinning me, she said, “Say it again.” She put two fingers over the pulse in my throat.
Lie detector, I realized. “Aren’t you supposed to establish a baseline?”
“I have one.”
“You know this is inadmissible in court.”
“Say it again.”
I looked her in the eye. “I wasn’t running away. I’m not going to.”
“You’re telling the truth.” She seemed even angrier, somehow.
“It’s an old habit of mine. Yet to kick it.”
“Don’t expect an apology,” she snapped. “I couldn’t have known.”
“No apology required.” I glanced down. She had me suspended about a foot off the ground, held fast to the stalk. How is she so strong?
She lowered me, seemed to mull something, and touched the side of my face. “I’m sorry.”
Her touch made me intensely, but wonderfully, nervous. “Boy, you change your mind quickly.”
“My anger outlasted my reasons for it. Rather, I realized the person I should have been angry at was myself. I’m very old, Isaac Myers. I’m not used to being surprised by someone so often.”
“Uh. Thanks?” Her hand hadn’t moved and I didn’t want it to. My heart was kicking against my ribcage and I was terrified, because I knew for a fact she could sense it as surely as she had my pulse.
Ronin finally stepped away. Through the soft gloom ahead, I saw the cat’s-eye gleam of Dak’s reflective eyes. He’d seen the encounter and my cheeks blazed.
***
In the ruins of an abandoned underground city, we chanced upon a fat treasure chest directly in our path.
“Hey, that’s not suspicious,” Dak said, continuing straight past the chest.
I followed.
“Hold on,” Eliandra said. “What if there are valuables locked inside? There may be something that will aid us in our journey.”
Mistakes Were Made (A Pygmalion Fail Book 2) Page 9
