The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy
Page 28
“And the largest thing?”
“That is Mab’s house.”
“… Dwarves live in great mechanical crabs?”
“Not all of them. But Mab did. Like I said. It is a long story. And I cannot wait to tell it to you…”
Epilogue
Four Months Later…
Rustle padded along the moist ground beside a small lake not far from his home pond. It had been a long, long time since he’d visited this shore. In all measurable ways, this lake would be a wonderful improvement as a home for him and his people. It was quite a bit larger. The fields surrounding were dense with winter-hardy foliage, plenty of delicious nectar and more than enough cover to hide them from predators. But it had its downsides as well. Those downsides were significant enough that no fairy had come to this place alone. Not until today, that is.
Today the elder had decided Rustle was the one to see if maybe the time had come to see about readying the lake to be their new home. Though their home wasn’t very deep into the north, there were still many plants that bloomed only for a few weeks a year, and for several months the surface was frozen solid. They were in the depths of the warm season. The forest was blooming with more food and more shelter than there would be for the rest of the year. If they were planning to move all of his people, now was the time.
He slowed as he approached the water’s edge. The cool soil beneath his feet felt strange. He seldom set foot on the ground so near to a body of water as large as this. A ripple along the surface reminded him why.
A slick gray form dragged itself from the water. A toad, large enough to make a meal of a fairy as small as Rustle. He buzzed his wings and began to weave his mind into complex shapes. The creature blinked its bulging eyes one at a time. Rustle took a breath.
The toad made its move. Its maw flipped open. A lethal tongue lashed in Rustle’s direction. The fairy spat a single word and thrust his hands forward. A swirl of magic lanced from his hands and swept over the predator. The air crackled. Frost and glimmers of light filled the air. When the settled, the toad was encased in ice, its tongue a mere whisper from touching Rustle’s face.
He took a shaky breath and buzzed over to the frozen creature, knocking on its head.
“There. Not so scary anymore, are you?” he said.
Rustle took to the air and looked over the lake in satisfaction.
“Good,” he remarked. “If we keep our eyes open, and a few more of us learn the ice spell, then we won’t have to worry about the toads anymore.”
Over the last few months, Rustle had been meeting with Eddy regularly to swap stories, trade goods, and practice magic. Eddy was slow to pick up the more complicated spells, but Rustle was beginning to get the knack of stripping away all but the absolute essence of spells. Fairies were very well suited to magic, and he’d found that a tiny nudge from the original spell mixed with his own instinct was often enough to get what he needed from the merfolk magic. At first, he’d not expected very many of the sea-centric spells to be of much use to him in the woods, but among his other talents, Eddy was peerless at finding unintended applications for the spells in his book.
Rustle looked to the sky.
“The toad showed itself more quickly than I’d expected. I’ll have time to make my meeting with Eddy after all. I can’t wait to tell him about this!”
#
Barnacle was a very different place these days. Gone were the shabby, tumbledown homes that had endured so many quakes. The town had been rebuilt from the ground up, and though it was still small, it was glorious. Four months isn’t much time to rebuild a city, but then, most cities don’t have the help of machines built by demi-gods. It turned out that diggers, if given the proper instruction, were equally good as builders.
A pair of children swam up to a gong beside the doorway of one of the humbler but better-built homes of the city. The gone was a curious one, made from a shiny metal gear.
“One moment,” called a voice from within.
Eddy swam out from the home. He had a few more scars, a few more notches missing from his fins, but he was otherwise none the worse for his adventure.
“What is it, children?” he said, his eyes sparkling and his smile wide.
The pair whispered amongst themselves, awed by his presence. Finally, one worked up the courage to swim a bit closer.
“Can we see the hammer and chisel?” asked the little merboy.
“Of course!” Eddy said.
He led them inside to something akin to a shrine set up in the entryway. It held the hammer and chisel of Dua. The mergirl swam up and gawked at them.
“Are those really the tools of the Left Hand of Tria?”
“No, no,” Eddy said. “The Right Hand. These are the hammer and chisel of Dua.”
“And, and, and they are the things that Eddy and his friends used to defeat the Great Ancient!” the boy said eagerly.
“That is right!” Eddy said.
“What ever happened to them?” the girl asked. “Wasn’t it Mad that had the hammer at the end of the story?”
“Her name was Mab. And she gave it back,” Eddy explained.
“Because she is gentle and kind, right?” the boy said. “She wouldn’t need the hammer.”
Eddy reminisced about the moment. Mab’s exact words were, “I can’t keep this. If the others find out a dwarf had to rely on something made by fish, I’d never live it down!”
He grinned a bit more. “Yes. Very gentle, and very kind. But fierce when circumstances demanded it.”
“And what about Rustle?”
“He went back to his home pond. Much more learned and powerful than when he left. He visits the shore every few weeks, and I go to meet him.”
“And what happened to the wizards?” The girl asked.
“… The wizards?” Eddy said.
“Yes! In the story, you say that they both woke up. And their power was being used to keep the thieves and the Great Ancient trapped. And now the Great Ancient and the thieves are dead. So what are the wizards doing?”
“Oh, yes.” Eddy paused for a moment. “They are back asleep.”
The girl looked relieved. “That is good to know.”
“You two should run along now,” Eddy said. “Soon I have to go back to the glowing pools and tend to my new farm.”
They merrily swam back out to the city square. Eddy swam a bit deeper, to Mira’s study.
Presently, the room was a bit bare. When the house collapsed, a good deal of her skull and bone collection was damaged or destroyed. She’d taken it in stride, though. For one, the important thing to her was that she got her brother back, safe and sound. And now that the quakes had stopped and her and Eddy’s home was more stable, Mira could begin rebuilding her collection and displaying it more elegantly. The centerpiece—unlikely ever to be dethroned—was a carefully cleaned and bleached skull from one of the thieves.
At the moment she was at her work bench, tapping at her latest piece of jewelry by the light of a netted jellyfish.
“Mira? I am going to go to the farm. Do you need anything?” he asked.
“If you are going to swing past what is left of the mine, see if you can find any more of that good white stone. The last necklace I made with it fetched us three amber gems in return.”
Eddy scanned a nearby shelf until he spotted the book he was looking for.
“I certainly will. I know just where to find some,” he said, subtly slipping a brand-new spell book from the shelf.”
“I may be a little late. I have some ideas for how to better prepare the farm for using the glowing pools more effectively.”
“Take extra food, then,” Mira advised. “Remember the stomach ache you got when you ate nothing but snails last week.”
“I will. See you later.”
He slipped back to his own room and swiftly packed his things, including the purloined spell book. When his pack was filled with food and equipment, he slung it over his shoulder and swam out the door.
After a moment, he darted back in and fetched Dua’s Hammer and chisel.
One never knows when one might need such things…
###
From The Author
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Discover other titles by Joseph R. Lallo:
The Book of Deacon Series:
Book 1: The Book of Deacon
Book 2: The Great Convergence
Book 3: The Battle of Verril
Book 4: The D’Karon Apprentice
Book 5: The Crescents
Other stories in the same setting:
Jade
The Rise of the Red Shadow
The Redemption of Desmeres
The Big Sigma Series:
Book 1: Bypass Gemini
Book 2: Unstable Prototypes
Book 3: Artificial Evolution
Book 4: Temporal Contingency
The Free-Wrench Series:
Book 1: Free-Wrench
Book 2: Skykeep
Book 3: Ichor Well
Book 4: The Calderan Problem
Book 5: Cipher Hill
Collections:
The Book of Deacon Anthology
The Big Sigma Collection: Volume 1
The Free-Wrench Collection: Volume 1
Other Stories:
Between
Fallen Empire: Rogue Derelict
Structophis
The Other Eight