by Marc Secchia
The Lurk examined the door, disarmed three traps, and then motioned Kevin to proceed. He palmed the Key-Ring lightly in his hand. Good thing he had added the ruby key to the rest, although his pocket barely held all the keys now. Telling himself he would far rather be facing those poisoned spikes next to the doorway than a Fire Elemental, he gingerly inserted the key, took a deep breath, and turned it. Nothing happened.
“Keep turning,” Alliathiune whispered.
“Good Lurk,” Kevin frowned, “what manner of magic has the power to entrap an Elemental Dragon for thousands of Leaven seasons?”
The Lurk shook his head. “I know not. Perhaps Ozark the Dark uncovered an ancient knowledge.”
“How did the Magisoul come here? Who hid it here?”
“We know not–perhaps Elliadora, perhaps another. Zephyr said the Dark Wizard trapped the Dragons, using them to protect his treasure.”
“So why did he not use the Magisoul for evil?”
“All good questions,” said the Lurk. “I have no answers.”
Kevin nodded. “Then I will open the door.”
Four turns, and the door swung open silently on a smooth tunnel which curved gently away to their left. Kevin let out the breath he had been holding.
Then the floor of the tunnel tilted.
The Lurk let out a bellow of dismay as his great bulk plowed into the Human and the Dryad, and swept them all away down the steep, glass-smooth tunnel. He tried to use his huge palms and splayed pads to create friction, but the surface was too slippery. In a moment, the threesome shot out into a volcanic wasteland and came to rest in a bowl-like depression in the middle of a cavern of similar size to the last.
A pillar of fire confronted them. The blazing mass was perhaps a hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter, although it was hard to be sure because of the intense heat. Flames licked slowly across its surface with an obscene kind of hunger. Kevin’s quick glance at his surroundings confirmed that they were surrounded by ponds of lava and glowing red cracks amidst black, glassy rocks laced with spits of fire. A stench like rotten eggs greeted his nostrils–sulphur, no doubt, although his knowledge of volcanism was sorely tested by the pillar before them. Perhaps it was molten rock? Heat seeped through the soles of his boots. It must have been excruciating for Alliathiune, who was barefoot, and Snatcher, who as a swamp-dweller was sensitive to heat.
He offered to hold the Dryad.
“I’ll survive,” she replied tartly, and he was not sure if her face was glowing because of the pervasive rubescent light or for other reasons. “Besides, you have more pressing concerns–like that!” Her voice rose to a squeak of horror as the pillar expanded toward them.
The second Dragon! An Elemental of Fire! No time now to pack away the Key-Ring. How could he oppose fire? With water? Ice?
A furnace blast of heat seared his skin and blistered his lungs. Kevin was sure his hair was crisping at the ends and that his clothes would soon begin to smoulder. He stumbled backward, fearful, and saw how the fire matched their movement. Snatcher gathered the wincing Dryad into his arms and raised Kevin by his backpack, intending to flee, when walls of rushing, hissing flame gushed up all around them.
The heat escalated. They were lit a scorching red, the tiny Dryad, the pale Human, the towering dark Lurk. There was no escape!
“Do something!” Alliathiune struck Kevin on the arm. “You must do something or we will burn!”
But Kevin nearly throttled himself with horror as he saw the keys–his precious Key-Ring–tumble out of his bad, blue hand at the force of her strike and disappear into the fringe of the fiery pillar. His eyes registered accusation and betrayal; Alliathiune bit her tongue in speechless remorse. The prospect of burning must be horrific for a Dryad, he realised, gripped by a vision of the great Mother Forest consumed with fire rather than weeping at the Blight. They must fear fire more than anything else.
“Trust me,” he said. Peace and lucidity cleared his mind–or was it an onset of sudden madness? He wriggled loose of the backpack and dropped two feet to the ground.
“Kevin?”
He rolled back his sleeve to expose his blue hand, ruined by defeating the Dark Apprentice at Elliadora’s Well.
“Good Kevin?”
There was no sweat on his body, for it had been evaporated by the rising heat. But he mopped his forehead anyway, summoning his formidable reserves of mental strength for an act of complete cowardice. There was neither water here, nor moisture in the superheated air. One could not make ice from a furnace, even if that was the logical opposite.
“What are you planning to do?” the Dryad pleaded.
He deliberately shut her out. He shut out everything–Alliathiune, Snatcher, the Elemental Dragon of Fire, the tightening of his skin as it began to resemble a roast crisping in an oven, and the crackling energies that would incinerate him in a millisecond if he did what he was planning to do. He focussed on shutting down the feelings of fear, the paralysing inability to act, the conscious recognition of what he was about to do. When there was only one thought left in his mind, he acted.
Holding his blue hand before him like a sleepwalker, he stepped away from his companions.
“Kevin!”
Alliathiune’s scream hardly registered on his consciousness. She must think him insane. Was he sacrificing himself? Kevin did not know if that was his intention or not. He bucked these thoughts like a surly mule feeling the sting of its master’s crop. There must be no thought.
Kevin had learned from Elliadora’s Well. To unleash the magic he had to disassociate his conscious mind from the process of summoning, forming, or controlling it. Having set his rational barriers aside, he could find the necessary freedom. He could find a oneness with the elemental forces raging about him, without seeking to confront or calm them. Kevin allowed the fire to pass around him. That space became a depression in the towering wall of flame, then a hollow, then a tunnel. Some little of it leached into him–he could sense it, an unavoidable excess that seeped into his ruined hand, making it tingle like an unbearable attack of pins and needles. Partway, he bent to retrieve the Key-Ring, and saw his companions following him into the haven of safety he had created. Five steps, ten steps, fifteen, and they were through.
Fresh, cool air filled his lungs.
The elemental collapsed in on itself, perhaps attempting to engulf a prey that was no longer present, and this allowed the companions to slip away into the surrounding wasteland.
Kevin looked to Alliathiune. “Are you … uh, feeling alright? You’ve gone pale.”
“If I am pale,” she replied, not meeting his gaze directly for the first time that he could remember, “then it is with good reason. Good Kevin, I cannot abide you acting as you did–without word and without warning. I swear by Elliadora’s Peace that you will be the death of me!” Her ire rose along with her volume. “How can I stand by when Driadorn’s chosen champion chooses to barbecue himself in a Dragon’s fire? What was I to think?”
“But, well … I just–”
She flared as hotly as the lava surrounding them, “You just didn’t think, Kevin!”
“Yes, but–”
“But nothing, you insensitive, uncaring fiend! You are the most foolish and impulsive creature ever to walk the Seventy-Seven Hills! Why, a simple word and we wouldn’t have been standing there gaping like bullfrogs when you entered the fire!”
Kevin vented his exasperation. “I wasn’t sure I could do it, Alliathiune. The magic never does what I expect!”
“That’s my point exactly!” she howled back. “You don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t ask for help! I could just shake you sometimes, you make me so furious!”
“Well it worked, didn’t it? Tell me I didn’t just rescue your sorry green hide back there! Tell me that, why don’t you?”
Kevin glared daggers at Alliathiune, who burst into tears and flung herself into his arms. “I was so scared,” she sobbed, clutching him so tightly he could hardly br
eathe. He glanced over her head at Snatcher, who he could have sworn wiped a grin off his face and pretended a suspicious level of diligence in searching for the next door.
He patted the Dryad’s shoulders tentatively. “Uh, I … come along, Alliathiune.”
She sniffed fiercely.
“Gosh, Alliathiune. I’m sorry … um, you know.”
He was sure her fingernails were digging bloody trenches into his shoulder blades. Frighteningly strong sometimes, vulnerable at others; he would never make any sense of her moods.
Alliathiune mumbled something into his shirt. Doubtless wiping her snotty nose! He said, “What is it?”
She stiffened in his arms. “You must be the most awful hugger in the world, is what I said!”
“Huh?”
“You’re such a man sometimes!”
“Whatever do you mean by that?”
Alliathiune patted his back just as cautiously as he had hers, and a naughty quirk touched her lips as she gazed up at him. “For your information, good Human, that gentle pawing motion you attempted is as far removed from a real hug as we are distant from Driadorn. You need to put your arms around the person and hold them like you mean it.”
“Sorry.” His mouth twisted and bitterness crept into his voice. “I haven’t had much practice, Alliathiune. My dear family, as you’ll recall, would rather have struck me with the business end of a chunk of wood.”
She swallowed and said, contritely, twiddling her hair with her fingers, “I’m very sorry I stirred up those horrible memories, good Kevin. Will you forgive me?”
Kevin was so dumbstruck that he just stared at her with his mouth hanging open. Good grief, at a mere word she could touch him like that?
Alliathiune took his arms and put them around her. “This is a hug, good Kevin. And when you forgive someone, it’s as simple as saying ‘I forgive you’. As long as you mean it, you don’t need to say more than that.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you try it?” she murmured into the crook of his neck.
The Dryad’s breathy request very nearly undid him. And she slapped him for a kiss? Who was flirting with whom now? “Of course I forgive you, you silly girl.”
Out there, the fire blazed up anew. Whirlwinds of flame spun off from the main body–hunting them, he realised. Perhaps a Fire Elemental had no eyes. As Alliathiune thanked him, he said absently, “Though I was sure you were about to slap me again.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“My cheek still hurts.”
“By the Hills, that’s the cut, you rude man!” Alliathiune stamped her bare foot down on a sharp stone and yelped in pain. “Ouch! There, see what you’ve done now?”
A whirlwind roared across the barren landscape. Lava spurted out of the ground nearby. Alliathiune hopped from one foot to the other, gasping. Kevin felt the heat burning his own soles, despite his protective footwear.
“Quickly, on my back.”
He gave the Dryad no choice. Alliathiune had barely grabbed his neck when Kevin galloped after Snatcher. They should not have tarried, he castigated himself. Somewhere behind them his companions were probably fighting hundreds of Trolls, and all Kevin Jenkins wanted to do was to flirt with a pretty Dryad. He skirted a pool of molten rock at a dead run. The Lurk beckoned urgently. Pause. Wait for a whirlwind to roar by. Quickly, now.
They dashed into a short tunnel, and found a new stone door.
* * * *
The third door yielded its secrets to a key that Kevin had already owned when he had arrived in Feynard, one that Great-Grandmother had collected during her travels. She must have been a fascinating woman. What a shame that Father had kept them apart for so long, he thought.
Snatcher gave a trill of surprise and pleasure when the third cavern was revealed to them. It was a grey and misty realm, so soggy underfoot that Kevin soon found his boots sinking deeper than his ankles in a layer of slimy mould and other disgustingly organic materials. He held his nose. But the Lurk tested the breeze with his snout at considerable length, gurgling and singing to himself in Lurkish, until Alliathiune grew impatient and demanded to know what was amiss.
Snatcher turned his luminous orbs upon her and said, “I wish I could be certain, noble Dryad, but such a thing cannot be. I detect the smell of Lurks hereabouts. That would be strange and wondrous indeed.”
“Did the old woman who lived beside the Utharian Wet not intimate that Ozark the Dark had brought the Lurks here, to the dungeons of Shadowmoon Keep, to guard the Magisoul?”
“Quite so, little one. But how is it possible to live deep underground like this? Does every creature of Driadorn not require Indomalion’s eye, however briefly, to light their ways?”
“If not by magic?”
“By the laws of biology,” Kevin interrupted. “Some creatures do not require light in order to live. Perhaps you photosynthesize, Alliathiune, or you, Snatcher, feed upon plants that depend on Indomalion and Garlion for nutrients, but there are other creatures who generate their energy in a variety of amazing ways.”
The Dryad gulped. “I photo–what did you say?”
“Your Dryadic patterning,” he said, running his finger along her arm.
Alliathiune snatched her arm away. “Don’t.”
“One prominent theory holds that Dryads have little requirement for ordinary sustenance due to the Sälïph-sap ingested once a moon, and the ability of their greenish skin to capture and process Indomalion’s energies.”
“You presume to know all too much about Dryads!” she said, coolly.
Kevin flushed. “It’s just a theory. Don’t get your knickers in a knot, old girl.”
“Humph!”
“The Acid Dragon should be found in this cavern,” said Snatcher. “I mistrust this place. This swamp is like no swamp I know.”
“Nevertheless, we must go through the next door,” Alliathiune said. “Finding the Magisoul depends not on our feelings. Lead on, noble Lurk.”
For turn upon turn, the Lurk led them deeper into the swamp. This cavern was far more extensive than the others they had encountered so far, vast and trackless, and wreathed in mists that touched their skin with clammy fingers and obscured their path in drifting banks impenetrable even to the Lurk’s deep sight.
At length Snatcher muttered darkly that he was lost, and that was exactly when they became aware of the presence of a great number of Lurks all around them. As a body they pressed inward, filling the space around the companions with hundreds of bodies–they were slighter and lighter than Snatcher’s own, and accordingly more limber and adept with their digits. Each Lurk clutched a weapon, and every one of those weapons was trained on the travellers.
“Greymorral Lurks,” whispered Alliathiune.
“What do they want?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know. Listen, they’re speaking to Snatcher.”
“They aren’t putting their weapons down, are they?”
“Observant as always, good Kevin.”
Alliathiune and Kevin watched the conversation closely, following it by mood and body language as much as anything else. Kevin understood a little, but found the words too fast to follow. Snatcher shook his head a great deal, explaining something which the other Lurks clearly found offensive, for his words made them chatter angrily amongst themselves and some shook their spears and clubs in his direction as if wishing to employ them to tattoo his hide.
Snatcher stepped back and lowered his head. “They are consumed with hatred for my kind, noble friends. Apparently they have been trapped here since the reign of Ozark, somehow frozen in time, or perhaps the seasons have passed more slowly. I cannot explain this.”
“Right.”
“Good outlander, that is their claim and I cannot disprove it.”
“So, what do they want?”
Snatcher swallowed. “My head. Pickled with eels, preferably, and served on a silver platter.”
“Pickled with eels?”
“A Lurk delicacy,�
� he groaned. “They’re most upset to be confronted with one of the Greater Lurks, who sold them to a terrible fate. They want revenge.”
“What about a return to Mistral Bog?”
Snatcher looked startled. “I had not thought of that. Let me ask.”
If the previous exchanges had been strained, this one was positively explosive. The Lurk who appeared to be leading the Greymorral tribe screamed at Snatcher and spat a gobbet of green phlegm at him, which struck his shoulder and smeared down his chest. Several spears struck his body, but his thick hide protected him from anything more than superficial damage.
“Ah,” said Kevin. “Perhaps not the best idea?”
“No,” Alliathiune smiled at him. “A good idea, but not one they like. Let me speak to them, Snatcher.”
“Very well–but they did not want to speak to one from Driadorn, and even less so one who is not a swamp-dweller.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Does this Lurk speak Standard Driadornese?”
“Of course.”
Alliathiune marched up to the leader, bowed, and introduced herself. There followed a very long conversation of which Kevin heard hardly a word, for a sudden weariness had overcome him and he sank into the mud with his head on his arms. He was famished.
A handful of nuts washed down with water and a tangy bit of cheese later, he felt recharged for the fray. The Dryad was still talking, but if he was not mistaken there was something more positive in her body language. He peered up into the mist. Did it ever get dark in here, or was it always the same uniform, dull overcast like an English winter’s lighttime? Was it possible that they had been trapped in a time bubble? If he was not mistaken quantum physics allowed for such a possibility, but only on a microscopic level. Great Scott, there was a lot to learn about Feynard. This world was amazing!
At length Alliathiune returned and helped herself to the last of the waycrust.
“Well?” said Kevin.
“Well I have learned something very curious,” she said. “These Lurks are all female. There is not a single male amongst their tribe, for they were all killed by Ozark the Dark on one terrible lighttime. They are dying, Snatcher. Only twenty-three of their number remain who are of childbearing seasons.”
