"You breathe a word of this, Fraidy, I'll make sure that the Chittering Cat Eater snuggles up in your cashmere fortress under the bed tonight."
Ok, so maybe she had a ways to go before she hit warm 'n' fuzzy.
Back at the scene of Millicent’s death, Mother Nature and man-made machine had both been very thorough on cleaning the site of clues. Between the comings and goings of the lively tide, Gideon’s windy helicopter landing and the heavy winds and rains that had pounded Crystal Beach, every physical trace of the murder had been utterly scrubbed from sight. Still, I fancied that I felt a wispy buzz of death energy as we landed.
Fraidy’s shivers got worse when we touched down. “These black diamonds, man, they're creepy. ” His fluffy head darted in every direction possible, seeking out the scariest of the glittering stones.
While he was busy detecting evil geology Gloom had padded behind him, an almost casual swagger to her rear. “Boo!”
Fraidy bolted into the undergrowth at speeds that would put Jet to shame.
“As entertaining as this is,” David said. “I’m still not convinced we’re going to find anything here that we didn’t scoop up the first time. Air and water have pretty much done a number on this place as far as any remaining evidence is concerned.”
“I agree, let's get outta here.” Gloom said.
I was about to answer when I heard a familiar sound: Shush. Shush. Click, click, click.
Fraidy gave a frightened meow from his place in the underbrush. “Tell me you guys heard that too.”
“Not for the first time either,” I said, going in the direction of the noise.
A sudden skittering made the bushes just above us rustle as the creature who had been making the peculiar noise fled up the hill, using the undergrowth as cover. I checked over Millicent’s map. Whatever that thing was, it was heading in the direction of our theoretical cave.
Gloom trotted ahead of us into the low-lying sea-shrubs, muttering under her breath the whole way. She caught the scent of whatever it was we were following, and her head lowered to the ground so she could thoroughly sniff her surroundings as she led the way.
“Considering a career as a bloodhound?” David jibed as we tailed our intrepid cat.
“You wanna catch up with this thing?'” Gloom snapped back. “Fraidy, if you want to be useful, put your own nose to the ground, would ya?”
“Y- y-you promise not to pull any mean tricks while I’m, you know, working?” Fraidy asked as he took his position at his sister's flank.
“I might if you DON’T get to work.”
That was good enough for Fraidy. He sniffed left, Gloom smelled right. David and I didn't sniff. But we did a whole lot of looking and listening. That’s when I noticed some minuscule tracks on a small patch of open ground in between the undergrowth.
David kneeled down to cast a critical eye on the miniature footprints. “Judging by these tracks, I’d say we’re looking at a biped creature, no more than two and a half feet tall, weighing in at about ten pounds.”
“Spends a lot of time in the dirt too,” Gloom said, muscling her way past the chief. “This thing stinks like a coal shaft.”
“Or maybe a black diamond mine,” I said, tapping my chin. “Can you follow the trail?”
“Do we have to?” Fraidy asked between sniffs.
Gloom gave him an annoyed growl.
“Okay, okay, just asking.”
We followed the scent all the way to a level plateau at the base of the Glimmer Mountains. We could hear the Whispering Bay waterfall just off to the right, splashing its rumors into a deep green pool below its cascade. Gloom marched ahead of us keeping her nose low and wound up facing a steep, black rock face.
“Whatever this little pest is, he went up the cliff,” Gloom said arching her neck back to take in the towering view.
I pointed up the cliff. “That’s actually about where I thought I saw a face. The day we found Millicent. " I craned my neck. "Way up there.”
“So, maybe he got so scared that he went to some hidey-hole up there?” Fraidy asked, apparently feeling a connection already to the as yet seen creature.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said, getting my broom ready for the ascent up to the critter's hiding spot. “Hop on, Fraidy boy.”
I hadn’t gotten more than a foot off the ground before the broom started going crazy. It started jerking around to the left and then the right. I barely missed running into a tree before I crash-landed back into the mercifully soft ground. David and Gloom weren’t so lucky. I heard both of them yelp as they hit a more stable patch of earth with a thud.
“So much for Plan A,” Gloom said. “I guess no one has a Plan B here?”
David ignored her comments. “Did that idiot governor put some sort of magical protection on—“
“And make it harder to transport their most precious resource off of Cathedral?” I asked, shaking my head. “No, I’d say this is probably one of the side effects of having this high a concentration of black diamond in one area. The electromagnetism is likely off the charts. The control of my broom felt too random and herky-jerky for it to be anything else.”
“Maybe, you know…maybe it’s for the best,” Fraidy said. “This way, we can all go home and not follow that beastie up the rope and—“
Fraidy shut his mouth all of a sudden. Gloom groaned again with a disgusted “Blabbermouth.”
“Rope? What rope are you talking about, Fraidy?” I asked, taking my 'mom' tone with him.
“Well, you can’t really see it, and you’ve kind of got to know where it is to find it at all but—“
“Oh, quit delaying the inevitable!” Gloom snapped.
She walked over to the cliff face. Climbing a little bit, she smacked a piece of it just above her head. I could just make out a cleverly concealed twine, buried underneath who knew how many years of shale erosion.
While David grabbed the cable, I gave Gloom an angry stare of my own. “So you knew about this too?”
“Of course I did,” Gloom said.
“And why didn’t you tell me before Fraidy let it slip?”
“I’ve got my reasons.”
“I’m sure. What are those reasons?”
Gloom turned her nose up at me and sauntered off, her tail swishing a menacing 'don't even go there, sister' message to me. David gave the newfound guideline a few experimental tugs.
“Looks like it’s robust enough to support our weight,” he declared. “Just the same, we’ll need to be careful going up.”
Fraidy looked at him as if he’d said that swimming in a lagoon full of sharks was a good idea right about now. “You sure about that, Chief? What if it breaks or comes loose and—“
“We’ll be fine, sweetie,” I said, scratching behind his ears. Sure, I was still a little irritated at him for keeping this from us. But freaking him out more wasn’t going to do anybody any good.
“Assuming you two can get up and down as easy as you seem to think you can,” Gloom said. “The Fearless Wonder here and I will keep an eye on the brooms until you get back.”
“You’d better go ahead of me, Hattie,” David said, handing me the rope.
“What, so it can be my fault when the line breaks?”
David looked a little hurt at my crack. “If it DOES break, I might have a decent chance at breaking your fall.”
I felt a stir of something as he said that. Gods, why he couldn’t just tell me he loved me and be done with it? Then again, with all that overly-concerned-talk about Mari earlier? Bast! I so wanted this to be another case of magical love poisoning, rather than him having actual feelings for the tall woman.
But I kept all that to myself, and we started climbing. A quarter of the way up, my arms were already burning from the exertion. So were my legs. And my back. Ok, and my shoulders. I didn’t consider myself to be terribly out of shape, by any means, but I definitely wasn’t in the kind of physical condition to handle something like this on a regular basis.
<
br /> About halfway through the ascent, the rope suddenly bent a certain way under my fingers. “No...”
But my hand wasn’t lying. A quick, careful pat around the area above the rope confirmed that we were literally at the end of this one.
“What’s going on, Hattie?” David called out from below.
“This is as far as it goes,” I called back, looking around.
“That makes zero sense. Why would it stop here of all places?”
Playing a hunch, I opened myself up to the Faerie Sight. The camouflaged rope suddenly started glowing like it was one of Rapunzel’s hair extensions. That wasn’t the only thing that was gleaming. Just to my right was yet another previously concealed twine. This one within easy reach.
Very carefully, I shifted over to the new rope. I don’t think I started breathing again until both my hands were firmly gripping the new purchase.
“Let me get up this one a little bit, and I’ll give you a hand crossing over,” I told David.
David looked unhappy as he climbed. “You know…me being behind you seemed the best way to make this easy on you.”
“Oh, quit acting like one of my cats,” I said with a chuckle, holding out my hand.
The weight of David’s (absolutely perfect) body felt like it was going to tear my arm out of its socket for a minute. But then he got his own grip on the guideline, and we were back to trudging the steep incline.
This time, the cable terminated a couple of feet up away from the mouth of a very black cave. If it hadn’t been for the Faerie Sight, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the opening and the rock around it. It was a seamless blend of darkness. I heard the crash of the waterfall coming from deeper in the cave, the cavernous acoustics carrying the cascade into unknown passages beneath the mountains.
I gave David one last helping hand to get him up on the ledge. We were both huffing and puffing like an old school locomotive from the climb. We took a minute to rest.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a water bottle in that bag of yours,” David said between deep breaths.
“Just herbs,” I confirmed. “What I’m really concerned about is how we’re going to get back down.”
“Well, assuming the ropes can handle our weight, we could always rappel back down the cliff and—“
I winced at the thought. “Let’s…see if there’s an easier way out of here once we figure out where ‘here’ is.”
David nodded. “So…did you ever go to that dinner with Shields?”
He WOULD pick this moment to ask that. I turned the question back to him. “Exactly how friendly are you and that Amazonian, Ms. Falk, getting?”
He gave me an irritated look but didn’t say anything. Which actually felt worse than outright denial. Because, let's be honest, it could mean anything.
To distract myself, I scanned the cave with more of my Faerie vision. I was surprised by what I found. There was more glowing rope that lined the left wall of the cave.
I forced myself to my feet while I picked up the line. David saw and followed me to the wall. “How deep does this thing go?”
“Can’t tell from here,” I said, telling the truth. “Looks like it’s some sort of guide rope to help travelers find their way, though.”
“Like Hansel and Gretel?”
“Or Theseus and Ariadne if you want to get classical.”
David lit the tip of his wand. “Think I’ll take the lead this time.”
I didn’t argue, just lit my own wand and followed him.
It didn’t take long to figure out why someone had laid out that rope in the first place. The caverns were full of all sorts of twists and turns. After a while, I wasn’t sure I could have found the way back on my own without the thoughtfully placed twine. But I did notice that the passage the line was taking us down was unusually smooth. There were fewer stalagmites on the ground around us, and I noticed peculiar holes bored into the rock walls on either side. They looked like they could have just been the right size for the creature we’d tracked to this cave.
Shush. Shush. Click, click, click.
The echo of that sound stopped us dead in our tracks. It was strange to me that that noise didn't sound that sinister in the light of day. But, here? In this deep, black cavern? It had the ring of a quiet, yet efficient killing machine. We scanned around to see where the sound was coming from. We heard it again as the source came to us from the opposite wall.
The first thing that got my attention was its eyes, a pair of pale pearls that glistened in the wand light. It was such a contrast to its leathery face, which had stretches of granite around its mouth and the corners of its eyelids. There was a pronounced overbite of fangs from its lower jaw.
There was no hair anywhere on its calloused, rock-like body, which was mostly obscured by tiny overalls that were smeared with the grime of the earth. It held up its hands with those impossibly long, rock-bladed fingers and began to make them dance in the air. Shush. Shush. Click. Click. That’s when I knew for certain that the face in the rock-face that day on the beach had been a Grumlin.
“Hello,” I said, crouching down to the Grumlin’s level. “Can you understand me?”
It opened and closed its hand again. It made a slightly different pattern this time: Shush. Click, click, click. Shush.
“Even if he does, we clearly won't understand what he's saying to us,” David noted of the strange sign language.
The Grumlin made another hand sound sequence: Click, Click. It tilted its head at a slight angle, looking between the two of us.
“I think we’ve just been asked a question,” I said, tapping my nail against the rock.
The Grumlin’s eyes suddenly lit up at my unselfconscious tapping and let loose with a long stream of hand gestures that were so rapid that I’m not sure I would have caught them even if I DID know what they meant.
I held up my hands and shook my head. “No, I was just thinking. I don’t speak your language, I'm sorry.”
He apparently knew how to read body language well enough to get what I was trying to tell him; he slumped his head and shoulders in what appeared to be disappointment.
“You know, I’m actually feeling sorry for this ugly little garden gnome,” David said.
“David!” I said, kicking him in the shins in an uncontrolled impulse.
“What? I said I felt sorry for him. He wants to talk to us. We want to speak to him. Neither seems like it’s going to happen anytime soon.”
Noting which way the rope was going, I said, “Then maybe the best thing we can do is just keep following the line.”
David had gotten all of two steps before the Grumlin nicked a large chunk of the wall ahead of David at the knee level. The Grumlin followed that up with Shush, Shush! No translation necessary for that one.
“I guess we’re not doing that just yet,” I said. “Looks like we’re going to need a translator to help us out here.”
David cast a rueful look over his shoulder towards the caves we’d just come through. “I am not looking forward to the climb back down, though.”
By the tilt of his head, I knew that the Grumlin had caught David’s expression. He tapped his sharp fingers on the wall twice and pointed down a tunnel to the right. Near as I could tell, that’s where the waterfall was coming from. Not waiting for us to understand, he started walking in that direction.
David was a little wary of this development. “Are we sure that—“
“If you’ve got a better idea on what to do, now’s the time to bring it up,” I said, letting go of the rope to follow the Grumlin. I could hear David muttering as he followed me.
Just before we passed out of sight of the rope-marked passage, the wand light caught something. A small pile of rocks had been gathered on the opposite wall, a picture of Millicent standing on top of the stone structure. The picture had many other offerings around it: wild flowers, what looked like a few precious stones, even a lovingly crafted carving of Millicent made from black dia
mond. It struck me that the only thing missing from this mini-shrine was candles. But what use would a Grumlin have for light? They spent most of their lives in the dark, hence their eyes were so poorly adapted to the spectrum.
My Faerie Sight confirmed that it was just the three of us down that dark, unmarked passage. After turning one last corner, the light of day burst into the rock corridor. I shut off the Faerie Sight to see that we were directly in front of the waterfall. By the time my eyes were adjusted enough to see in daylight, the Grumlin was gone.
We got close enough to the falling water to see the deep green pool below its frothy veil. After a minute of looking down, I said, “You know, I’m not so sure this is an improvement over our other way out.”
David didn’t say anything, just took my hand and grinned. I squeezed his hand for just a second before jumping through the wall of water. I had a mad urge to laugh. And, I did. Real laughter. The laughter of a child, as we tumbled through the wet air and plunged into the deep lagoon below with an almighty splash.
I guess you could say our journey wasn't a total washout.
Chapter 15
Happy Hour at the Fingernail Moon really wasn't my thing. But, here I was, with David jostling for a position at the bar.
We'd showered off and met here to discuss where we were going to find a translator for the Cathedral Grumlins. We needed to get in those caverns that Millicent's map suggestively pointed to. What was there, we couldn't know, but we needed to strike it from our investigations, at least. David had been making calls on the flight back to Glessie. He'd had no luck in finding an interpreter. It looked like we might not get in that cave system, after all.
The Moon was packed and Horace Mangler's booming, jovial voice could be heard coming from the bar. CPI Trew grabbed my hand and led me through the drunken throng of bodies.
Murder, Magic, and Moggies Page 70
