Once everyone was firmly in the digger’s grasp, it stopped, whirring merrily. It had no further orders. Above, one of the tunnels had begun to spew the thieves. There seemed to be no end of them, and the heroes had the very good fortune of clearly being of no concern to them. They scrabbled and scrambled over each other in their frenzied bid to be the first to tear into the Great Ancient. It was the task for which they had literally been created.
“Go! Go, go, go!” Mab urged.
“Take us up, Borgle,” Eddy said. “Let’s finish this.”
Borgle obliged. Driven forward by the thrusts of its mechanical tail, the group surged upward, weaving between an endless horde of mindless creatures flooding the scalding hot chamber. They would either be heroes or be the first victims of a second rise of these titanic threats. But regardless of how it turned out, they would fight until the very end.
Chapter 20
Mira swam beside Cul, matching his steady speed. It was all she could do to keep from dashing forward as fast as her tail could carry her, but she’d learned that the Nomads knew how to get from here to there far faster than she could. The water around them was still filled with the cacophonous rumble of the ground heaving beneath them. The people of the town had evacuated, hanging in the water above their homes to watch helplessly as one by one they succumbed to the quake. That was several minutes ago. If anything, the quake had grown stronger. Mira’s home would be gravel by now. She didn’t care about that now. The quakes always hit the rift harder than the town. And Eddy was still out there somewhere.
“It’s never gone on for this long,” Mira repeated to herself, almost as a mantra. “The quakes have been getting worse, but they’ve never gone on for this long. Something is happening, I know it.”
“Don’t think about what is happening now,” Cul said. “You can’t change what is happening. You can only change what you will do. Think about what you will need to do when you reach your brother.”
“Right, right,” she said. “I need the spell. So I can swim as deep as you and Eddy.”
She pulled a thin spell book from her bag, a newer version of the one she’d unwittingly loaned to Eddy.
“It’s too dark. I can’t read it,” Mira growled in frustration.
Cul wrapped an arm around her to steady her swimming, then leaned close so that the subtle glow from his spines and eyes fell upon the book.
“Yes, that’s good. Thank you,” she said.
She murmured words carefully. As frazzled and worried as she was, she couldn’t afford a misspoken syllable. When the spell completed, she felt a sensation sweep over her, one she’d not felt in years. Not since she was a young girl and her father had taken her to the rift to see where he worked.
“Come on. Let’s go deeper,” Mira said. “I want to see the ground. I want to follow it, so that we can follow the rift just as soon as we reach it.
He nodded and released her waist. The two swam side by side. Mira shrugged off the strange feeling of pressure squeezing uncomfortably upon her as she dove. The spell had done its work. The pressure was unfamiliar, but it was not unsafe. Waves and ripples caused them to bob and waver in their journey, the trembling earth transmitting its motion to the water around them.
“This is no normal quake,” Cul said.
“I know. It doesn’t seem to end,” Mira said.
“It isn’t just that. I’ve felt quakes before. Only one or two. But they were never like this. Quakes are constant, steady. This is different. Sudden, halting. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel natural.”
Mira shook her head. “This is how they are in Barnacle. Now tell me. Bult might still be down there in the rift. What would he do in a situation like this?”
“If he was hurt, he would sound the trumpet.”
“But no one is near enough to hear.”
“The whale would hear. The trumpet can carry a long, long way. Even if we can’t hear it, the whale can. And the distress call is one that no nomad drift will ignore.”
She looked to him. “Make the call?”
“We don’t know if we are where we need to be. They will go to where the call is sounded. If we are far from where your brother and Bult are, precious moments—”
“My brother is in the middle of this. Make the call!” she insisted.
He hesitated only for a moment. Cul produced an ornate and well-used shell and put it to his lips. A long repeating tone blared out. The tone was urgent, radiating the tone of emergency. When he was done, he stowed the shell and they continued to swim downward.
“If they have heard, they will come as swiftly as any of them can swim.”
“It was hours to reach the rift from where you were before.”
“They have been heading south. They will be closer now. And you’ve never seen a whale swimming with purpose. They will be here sooner than you might imagine. But we’ll need to call again when we reach the rift so they know where the true emergency is.”
Mira gazed into the murky distance.
“I think they will know where the true emergency is…”
Though it was subtle, hidden and layered among the endless rumble of the shaking ground, there was a new wound. It was sharp and tumultuous, a sound like boiling water, hissing steam. Something more was happening than a simple earthquake.
#
Borgle reached the head of the Great Ancient and the adventurers tumbled down to it. Eddy quickly pulled both the chisel and the hammer from his back. Mab snatched the hammer.
“Borgle! Dig down on the head! And if we fall, catch us!” Eddy ordered.
Borgle gave a delighted whir and clamped its claws onto the armored hide to begin rattling against it. Mab set about hammering the chisel with all her might. Eddy repositioned it between each blow, keeping its tip in the place where it would do the most good.
“What do I do?” Rustle asked.
He buzzed about, eyes wide and trying to look in a dozen directions at once.
“I don’t know. I have my hands full now,” Eddy said.
“I’ve got to be able to do something.”
“You are a smart fairy,” Eddy said
The Great Ancient tried to shake them away. Eddy held tight to the now embedded chisel and caught Mab’s leg to keep her from being thrown free.
“You can think of a good thing to do, I am sure.”
“Uh… Uh…”
Rustle looked around him again. The thieves had finally finished flooding in. They were slashing and clawing at the Great Ancient, and moreover, he could feel them drawing upon its dark well of power. All around them, the walls were fracturing and crumbling. Lava poured in in great gushing black tendrils. From the cries and struggles of the Great Ancient, the rising level of the stuff had reached its tentacles. The whole, mountain-sized beast thrashed and yanked at its chains. With each motion they gave just a little bit more. If the thieves and the hammer and chisel didn’t do their job, there was the very real chance that it would pull free of its bindings. The fairy weighed this into his mind, seeing what if anything he could do. A tiny fairy against a beast that had once threatened the entirety of the sea.
“I can’t help you fight these things!” Rustle said.
“Then help for after!” Eddy said, yanking the chisel free and setting it in a new spot. “We will need to escape. Help us do that!”
“But how can I…”
He trailed off. The walls were sloughing into the chamber all around them. Great faults split the walls. With each new struggle, he could feel the paths around them opening. Finely trained intuition, the very thing that had allowed him to navigate first by the winds, then by the currents, drew and redrew a map in his head. There were paths to the outside now. And more by the minute. But with each one that appeared, others closed. Tumbling stone had thrown their surroundings into chaos. No path to the outside would last for long. They would need something to help clear the way.
Rustle turned to Borgle. The thing was visibly frustrated, still rattling a
nd slamming its beak against the Great Ancient’s hide and achieving little more than a shallow divot compared to the deep gash the divine hammer and chisel had achieved.
“Borgle! Follow me! I need you to dig this way!” he ordered.
The digger paused briefly, aiming its two functional eyes at the fairy to consider him before turning back to its present orders.
“What orders should I give? It only speaks my language,” Eddy huffed, clearing some unspeakable gunk from the chisel before putting it to work once more.
“I don’t know! I just… Teach me some words!”
“What words?”
“Um… Dig, and follow! And up, down, all of the directions…”
“They are very easy. Listen close.”
For a few harried minutes, deep in a chamber at the bottom of the sea, merman alternated between positioning a chisel for a dwarf woman to drive into the skull of an ancient horror and giving language lessons to a fairy. Rustle absorbed the words as best he could, then turned to Borgle.
“Borgle! Follow me!” he intoned in his best approximation of Eddy’s language.
The digger paused again, plinking and clacking as it considered the words, then released the ancient’s head and drifted up to wait obediently await further direction.
“Good! Take it and find a way out!” Eddy said.
The fairy buzzed off toward one of the walls.
“And if it goes to sleep, put blood on the mark over its eyes,” Eddy called after him.
“What are you doing? You buffoon!” Mab cried. “That thing is supposed to catch us if we fall!”
“So we should not fall! Easy!” Eddy said.
One of the thieves clattered up along the side of the Ancient’s head. Eddy darted back from the gash they had been digging and pulled Mab along with him. The insect-like creature seemed to ignore them, aiming instead for the weakened point in the Great Ancient’s armor.
“Out of here, you wretched thing!” A firm swing of Mab’s hammer knocked the squealing thief away like it was nothing. “No one steals my hard work!”
“You see? We can do this!” Eddy said. “Keep at it. Every hit keeps the monster righting to reach us and failing to knock away the thieves. Eventually it will fall.”
Mab gritted her teeth. “It’ll jolly well fall when I make it fall!”
#
Rustle held tight to Borgle as it darted up along a jagged new fissure opened into the wall of the chamber. It was a little difficult guiding the digger when it could actually swim faster than he could, but the thing seemed to do well with simple directions punctuated by the mer word for “stop.” They punched through weakened walls, cleared mounds of fallen debris, and gradually left the stifling heat of the Ancient’s Chamber behind.
“Stop!” Rustle ordered as they tumbled into a reasonably clear section of a larger tunnel.
He shut his eyes and tried to work out the best path forward. The ever-shifting layout of the collapsing tunnels meant that the path he’d been hoping to carve when they’d started was now far from ideal.
“I think… there’s a big space that’s fairly open. It’s this way! Dig. That way!”
Borgle chimed and hurried to comply. A few good hard bashes of its hard nose punched through to something Rustle hadn’t been expecting. Light. It was a faint golden glow, a bit like the dawn sun.
“It’s impossible! We haven’t reached the surface yet, have we? Go! Follow that light!”
Borgle’s grippers clutched stones and heaved them aside, gradually revealing the source of the light. It was most certainly not the surface. The glow came from thin stalks drifting in torn-free tufts and clumps of mushroom-like growth hanging in the water around them. It was the chamber that Eddy had stumbled onto, and that Mab had called home for so many years. Sure enough Eddy’s awakening of the big digger had destabilized it. The place was mostly collapsed and entirely flooded. Rustle buzzed about, probing the place with his slowly improving mystic powers, trying to find a way out.
“We’re close…” he said. “We’re close to the main tunnel. It’s right above us. We’ve got to dig upward. Dig upward, Borgle!”
The digger faithfully swam to the ceiling and clamped on. Unfortunately, the weakened stone had already come raining down. What remained in the ceiling was good, thick stone that slowed the digger terribly. He turned to look where he’d come. The ease of reaching this place was tempered by the fact that much of the digging they’d done along the way had already been closed in again by further collapse. On one hand, they were nearly to a tunnel that could lead them out of the tunnels. On the other hand, he’d have to do nearly as much digging to get back to them as he’d done to get here. And as the rumbling intensified, it was only going to get worse.
“Think, Rustle. Think,” he muttered to himself.
One of the glowing stalks drifted nearby. A bit of the fluid within had seeped out, giving the water around him a wonderfully sweet flavor. He darted to the stalk and sampled some of the fluid directly. It was nourishing. Far more so than Eddy’s sweets. After a few grateful swallows, he noticed something else in the dimly lit cavern. Something was shiny. He flitted down to find what looked to be a second Borgle. Not far away there was a third, and a forth.
“That’s it!” Rustle proclaimed. “Let’s see. They’re fueled by blood, right?”
He nicked himself with his borrowed claw and smeared a bit of it on the mark near the glass globes of the inert digger’s eyes. It shuddered and flickered but did not awake. He tried a second one. It shifted a bit more but seemed unable to move. One after another he dabbed blood onto the marks. Eventually he found a second digger able to pull itself from the rubble. Then another. One by one he stirred them to life and gave them their orders.
“Dig up! Open the way to the tunnel!”
Rustle worked his way deeper into the cavern until he found a particularly tall mound of stone with a gleaming bit of metal beneath. He swam between the cracks in the stone, following the curves and shapes of the thing until he finally found an appropriate mark. He smeared it with blood.
Instantly the whole mound of stone seemed to lurch around him. He swam to the relative safety of the open and watched as the device he’d awakened started to shed the debris. As it revealed itself in full, he smiled.
“You are coming with me,” he said.
#
Eddy and Mab had been hard at work. They were both doused with whatever purple-blue goo it was that flowed through the Great Ancient’s veins. The thing had ceased to do anything but try to shake them free. With each successive wound they opened, the ancient diverted more of its efforts ridding itself of them. It was no longer clawing at the thieves. It was barely trying to keep itself from the rising lava. If not for them, it might have escaped by now, but they’d succeeded in eclipsing every other threat. It wanted them dead. Nothing else mattered.
“I think we’re about to hit a rich vein on this one, Eddy,” Mab said, heaving the hammer for another blow.
Despite their terrible predicament, she seemed almost gleeful in her wielding of the hammer, as if she was a fish who for the first time in ages had been allowed to swim in the open ocean. She raised the divine hammer high and brought it down.
There was no telling what exactly they’d managed to pierce, but the moment they did so, the ancient released a deafening, shrill roar. All four of its arms heaved at their chains. The motion drove the beast down into the lava, completely immersing its tentacles, but also tore it free of its shackles. The four arms raised high and thrust at the pair of adventurers.
“We go now!” Eddy cried.
He grabbed Mab, coiled his ailing tail, and sprung from the thing’s head just as it raked its hideous claws over where they had been.
Eddy hadn’t had much time to recover, so he still lacked the strength to keep the pair afloat, but he was at least able to drag them toward the walls. The rising lava had forced the thieves that hadn’t been destroyed to cluster all the more thickly. Th
ey still couldn’t care less about the merman and the dwarf. He caught their legs, bounced off their backs, and otherwise used them as stepping stones to keep himself and Mab from falling to their doom.
The now-freed limbs of great ancient slashed and swatted at the horde of creatures around it. It was too far buried in the lava to free itself, but it was dead set on ensuring it wasn’t the only thing to succumb to the molten stone. It bashed the walls and gripped thieves by the handful. The mounting damage to the chamber caused the ceiling to fail. Boulders rained down. Eddy flopped and bounced between them just as he had between the thieves.
Finally, amid a hail of crumbling roof, he spotted a section of wall that seemed to have given way to one of the many natural tunnels. He heaved himself toward it and worked his tail for all it could give. They reached it just as the stones raining down became a full landslide. Eddy threw himself over Mab and held her close against the wall of the alcove the section of tunnel they hoped would hold strong. For what seemed like an eternity, the thundering rain of stones continued. Jagged pebbles and stones rattled and bounced off Eddy’s back, mounding up. Then, gradually, the rumble ceased. Not just the tumble of the stones, but the quaking motion of the creature’s struggles and his attempts to escape.
“Mab?” Eddy asked, pulling back and allowing the heap of debris atop him to sprinkle way. “Are you hurt?”
“I’ve been better,” she coughed.
He rolled aside and the pair surveyed their situation. The tunnel both ahead and behind were utterly and hopelessly blocked with fallen stone. A few large chunks of the ceiling had dropped down around them as well.
“We are very much lucky!” Eddy said. “Any of these big pieces could have crushed us.”
“Yeah,” Mab said, climbing to her feet and brushing herself off. “I’m not convinced we are all that lucky.”
“We could be dead!” Eddy said. “And the shaking is done, so the big monster is dead! That’s how an adventure should end.”
The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy Page 26
