The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island Page 14

  “No,” Durham said. “I’d run into the mirror.” He hoped he’d gotten the answer right. His nervousness had shifted from the elf to the needle darting back and forth just above his skin.

  “Sensible enough answer,” the elf said. “I’ll tell you why you’re here.”

  “You will?”

  “There’s another elvish saying. ‘Our golden memories are of our interesting choices.’ You’re here for the same reason I am. Adventure!”

  “Elves have interesting sayings.”

  “Probably,” Catchpenny said. “I’ve not met many elves so I’m not sure what their sayings are. I said those things and I’m an elf so I figure they count. I’m right, though, aren’t I?”

  Durham considered this. While it had been the most interesting of the choices available he didn’t think that was something he’d spent any time factoring in. He shook his head. The motion of the elf’s hands was almost hypnotic. They flickered back and forth over his trouser leg with the speed and precision of hummingbirds.

  “I made the decision based mostly on career options,” he said. “They have dental.”

  “Yes, dwarven dentistry is known and feared throughout the lands. So that’s why you chose to be here. Why do you think Thud has you here?”

  “I’m the cart…”

  “No,” the elf said. “Not that again. You think dwarves don’t have cartographers? Do you think Thud hasn’t had the opportunity to hire one in however many years he’s been running this team? Everyone else here is a professional with years of experience, some even with years of education preceding. You’re still figuring out how to draw mountains that don’t look like harpy tracks. A dungeon isn’t a good place to run an apprentice program.”

  “I don’t know why he made the offer,” Durham said. He was trying to decide if he’d been offended by the elf’s frank appraisal. Maybe that was the norm with elves and taking offense at it would be insulting.

  “How has your first few weeks on the job been?” the elf asked, grinning. He made a grand sweep with his arm at the thirty yards of landscape. “Is it everything you hoped?”

  “I admit I could do with less of the sea monsters and catapults. Sailing off of cliffs, you know, that sort of thing.”

  “But you’re alive to tell about it! As long as you keep that the case then you’ve come out ahead. You’ll be far more interesting to talk to at bars. Strangers will always want to hear about your latest dungeon escapades. Lot of drinks and winks to be had. That’s another elvish saying that I just said.”

  “I think that might already be a dwarvish saying. Anyway, Thud tries to minimize the adventure aspect.”

  “Yet they do seem to keep happening to him.” He smirked. “Maybe he’s fonder of adventure than he thinks.”

  “Don’t say that where he can hear you.”

  “There, done!” Catchpenny straightened from Durham’s leg. “I expect you have some mapping to do so I’ll leave you to it.”

  Durham examined the stitching after the elf left. The elf had neatly sewn along all of the tears comprising the rip and then gone on to add more stitching to turn the whole mend into an artistic tree. He’d also bandaged the wound beneath in the process and left the needle and thread tucked neatly in Durham’s pocket.

  ***

  Weather had come as a surprise to Cardamon. The dwarven realm of Kheldurn was almost entirely underground and weather was just something that they didn’t tend to get much of. Dwarves raised near the surface got to go on occasional field trips to the outside but Cardamon had been born and raised in The Deep where the surface was at least a two week journey and field trips were to the local mushroom farm. They told you about weather, of course, before you left. Even simulated some of it by means of a bucket of water and a rather large pair of bellows. What they couldn’t prepare you for was the one thing that all weather had in common: the sky. One could say the sky was large but this wasn’t quite right because there wasn’t anything there to BE large and that was the crux. The emptiness. The nothing. He’d heard of dwarves that couldn’t quite manage it, as well as some who had adapted by means of carrying an umbrella everywhere so they had a ceiling wherever they went.

  Seasons were what had taken him the longest to come to grips with. It had been a sunny day when he’d first left Kheldurn. As he’d stood there, realizing that this was a heat that you couldn’t simply walk away from, he’d been informed that it was the start of summer and that there would be three more months of it. Dwarves had their own concept of seasons, more as a way of registering time passing than anything else. The dwarven calendar was based off of bats and tides. They could observe tides in cavern pools in the North and South sea districts. High tide to high tide was a single day and ten days made a week. A year passed every thirty-five weeks when the whirling swarms of brown bats returned to the guano mines to hibernate. The Feast of the Bats was the highlight of the Dwarven New Year.

  He’d been told that humans had forty-five different words for rain. His favorite was ‘drizzle’, at least as far as the words went. Actual drizzles were not that great. Mist won hands down in the ‘actual weather’ department. Fog was pretty good too. You could almost imagine yourself in a cave when the fog rolled in at night.

  Now, sitting in a shipwreck at the bottom of a trench he was rethinking his position on mist and fog. Unnatural ones, at least. If the fog making up the island far above had been a proper gray it wouldn’t be so bad. As it was it looked more like coal smoke. And the mist down here? There was no reason for it that he could determine. The walls of water rippled but didn’t splash. The surface far above had been calm. Yet here they were in a blue-green haze that stank of elderly fish.

  Another puzzle was the light. There shouldn’t have been any of that either. And, unlike the mist, there wasn’t even a plausible source to fill in as a ‘maybe’. It almost seemed to come from the mist itself which didn’t make Cardamon any happier about either of the two. Every breath he took was filling his lungs with unnatural stinking glow-mist and that didn’t seem the sort of thing that should be countenanced.

  He stood and made his way through the camp and the debris, picking up a splintered yard of board as he went. The wall of water was pitch black, its surface swirling with tiny currents. It curved in a few feet at the bottom, as if thickened at the base for support. This close to it he could hear the faint splash from the eddies and ripples on the surface stretching above him. It made the wall seem to whisper and giggle. He raised the board.

  “Are ye sure that’s a good idea?” came Thud’s voice from behind him.

  Cardamon pointed further up the chasm. One of the shipwrecks lay in such a way that its mast protruded into the water wall.

  “It don’t seem to mind havin' a hole poked in it,” he said. “Just trying to get a notion about it.”

  Thud nodded silently and waited, watching.

  Cardamon poked his stick into the water. Nothing happened. He swished it around a little bit then pulled the stick out. The end was wet. He stuck it back in.

  “Might be a natural cause,” Thud said. “Side effect of somethin' else going on. Some sort of creature, mebbe, catching prey for food.”

  Cardamon had considered that but discarded it because he didn’t want to think too far along those lines. If this was some sort of spider web it implied that, somewhere quite nearby, there was some sort of spider. One that could make fifty yard wide swaths through three hundred feet of ocean with its web.

  Cardamon considered sticking his hand in. He wasn’t sure what benefit this might be though he’d heard that the deeper you swam the heavier the water became until it felt like you were wrapped in a fist. Were they deep enough that sticking his hand in would crush it? Was it better to find out now than later, when fleeing for his life and jumping into the wall of water was the only way to escape? Perhaps he could find something that crushed easily that wasn’t his hand. He pulled the stick back out. The end of it was gone. A cut with no singe or saw grain; just sm
ooth woodring as if it had grown that way.

  Something that glowed flickered past on the other side of the water wall. A blue light in the black depths. Some sort of eel or snake, maybe. Or a tentacle. That thing up above had tentacles that had glowed. Cardamon stepped back from the wall and licked his lips. The stick had firmly decided the question of sticking his hand in. And whatever that had been swimming by had clinched it. Maybe they should have the ballista ready to fire at the wall. Rasp was up on the top deck of the wreck, doing his best to both repair it and unmount it from the ship so that they could bring it along when they started out. Normally this was Clink’s job and Rasp was compensating for his lack of expertise by adding in more kicks than Clink typically employed. The Diplomat was one of their reliable problem solvers, applicable in a surprising number of situations. Useful for everything from opening doors to clearing halls, punching through walls to hanging towels after a swim.

  His line of thought was interrupted by a large mackerel. It dropped out of the sky and landed just to his left with a loud slap. He blinked at it. It stared back with its fish-eye. Another fish smacked against the sand at his feet.

  “Move!” Thud yelled. He grabbed Cardamon’s arm and yanked him into a run as more slaps began coming from around them. He spared a quick glance up as they ran.

  The sky was full of fish.

  A school of mackerel had hit the side of the trench.

  Chapter Twelve

  Fish dropped all around them in a deafening staccato. Some bounced when they landed, wriggling and twisting in the air. Others exploded in a pink spattery of meat. Cardamon heard a yelp from the side and looked to see Dadger Ben taken down by a fish to the head. Dadger grabbed it and rolled over, using it to try and shield himself against the torrent of fish following after. Breaking noises came from all around as the mackerel smashed down onto the freshly sorted piles of gear. One landed in Gammi’s pot in a splash of boiling water even as another pounded the fire into an explosion of sparks and coals. Something wet and heavy (probably a fish) punched into Cardamon’s shoulder, sending him sprawling into a stack of crossbows. More fell on top of him, weight piling on, thump by thump.

  It ended as it began, a last fish or two plummeting down to signal the tail end of the school. Cardamon struggled to his knees, pushing fish off of himself. He felt like a racetrack. Not in the ‘round and dirty’ way but in the ‘dozen horses galloping about on you for a day’ way.

  There were fish everywhere. Dwarves were popping up from beneath them like groundhogs, blinking blearily about. They were groaning like they had the morning after Gammi had tried making Temalian pudding. Thud popped up from beneath a mound of fish nearby.

  “Please tell me we ain’t got no fish fatalities,” he said. “Head-check!” He grunted as the answering calls began coming back. “I ain’t ever had to call so many of those so close together before. This ain’t been an ideal start to things.”

  Cardamon nodded in agreement. He’d once proposed another dungeoneering rule: ‘Don’t say it can’t get any worse because it can. Don’t say it could be worse because we already know it will be.’ Thud had vetoed it at the time, saying it was more a personal philosophy than a rule. After this, however, Cardamon was thinking Thud might be willing to revisit the topic.

  Gammi, his head-check partner, was fishing around for his cooking pot. “Well, food supplies is sorted,” he said. “Mackerel and cheese for dinner!”

  Cardamon grimaced. Gammi was fond of yak cheeses as they had the shelf-life of a clay brick. They had the texture of one as well and were usually consumed by chiseling pieces off and sucking on them for several hours. They were multi-purpose in that they could also be used as building materials for emergency fortifications which had cemented them as the dungeoneer cheese of choice. Wheel stops on the wagons, target practice for the crossbows, paper weights for maps…pretty much anything that you’d use a brick for, yak cheese fit the bill. Gammi considered them viable comestibles even after they’d been used for these other purposes and it was usually best not to ask the origin of any smears of color present on any cheese he presented to you.

  “We’re making camp in the Squiffy.” Thud said. “I’ve lost track what time o' day it is but I think we could use a few hours to pull ourselves back together, eh? Inside to get out from under these fish and in case the next thing that falls is a whale-shark or somethin'.”

  This was not a thought that had crossed Cardamon’s mind yet and now he had a new worry. He squinted up suspiciously. The dark fog swirled high overhead and the walls glittered in the green light.

  ***

  “Magic,” Mungo said. “We’re practically swimming in it, would be my guess.”

  “You’re guessing?” Thud asked.

  They’d built the fire on the ground in the crack between the halves of the ship. The seating area around the fire was all unpredictable angles but it had the distinct advantage of a deck or two between their heads and any gravitationally challenged sea life. Thud had asked traps-team to “gather ‘round and toast some sausages”, his favorite euphemism for a meeting. It would have been better had they any sausages. Hunks of mackerel were a dubious substitute.

  “Need to see more to be certain,” Mungo said. “But this portion we’re occupying shows no sign of design or purpose which suggests that it’s some sort of supernatural phenomena.”

  “You don’t think it’s a deliberate ship trap?” Ginny asked.

  Mungo shook his head. “If it were a trap why not a single big hole? Why interconnected canyons?”

  “Spread out it can cover more ground, so to speak,” Ginny said. “Might also be the nature of the enchantment. Maybe the spell name was ‘Mordenkainen’s Noodly Passages in the Sea’.”

  “Magic on this scale would take considerable effort and require an equally considerable purpose,” Mungo said. “It would take a plethora of wizards to fabricate this. A lot of effort to make a pile of shipwrecks.”

  “We don’t know the purpose yet,” Ginny said. “Maybe this is some big magic knot keeping the world from unraveling, maybe it’s-”

  “Yes, maybe, maybe, maybe,” Mungo said. “The existing data does not adequately demonstrate purpose. Until new data is obtained indicating otherwise we should not assume an intended function is all I’m saying.”

  Thud tuned out of the squabble to think. The sorts of places the Dungeoneers tended to go on jobs were often hard to reach. If they’d been easy then everyone else would already have been there. Lost cities, secret temples, buried tombs; all had the defining characteristic of ‘difficult to go to’. Over the course of his career Thud had rock-climbed, bushwhacked, rappelled, surveyed, traversed, trail-blazed and detonated but this was the first parasloop-drop and it had been particularly tough. They had broken and missing gear and multiple wounded. Plus they were currently sitting in the shattered remains of their ride home.

  Acquisitions team had been out scavenging the immediate area. Nibbly had a sharp eye for anything of any value. Leery had an amazing knack for finding crossbow bolts and bandages just laying around behind rocks and such. Tuft was there for anything heavy and Dadger Ben, well, Dadger was probably mostly telling jokes–his idea of ‘morale enhancement’. Dadger was the expert in the ‘talk people into giving you things’ sort of skill set and not as much in the ‘do anything that might muddy your clothes’ set. Thud had sent the elf along with, figuring that his skill-set of taking things that didn’t belong to him fit right in with acquisitions team’s mission statement. They hadn’t gone far, inspecting only the closest of the wrecks. Until the area ahead was properly scouted no one was going out of sight of the campfire.

  Passage of time was difficult to track. He couldn’t see the sky and wasn’t sure if it was still night or if day had come. What he did know was that over the course of recent events there had been a lot more flying around and screaming than there had been sleeping. Downtime was overdue.

  “Briefing time!” he called. Time to add the rest of
the team to the discussion. There was a general shifting of attention from the others as he stepped closer to the fire to throw some light on himself. “We seem to be here, wherever ‘here’ is. We don’t really know what we’re after or what we might be up against. We don’t even know if this place is an accident or not. Our experts are leaning toward it being some kinda natural phenomena. Well, ‘supernatural phenomena’, I guess. Point is, if that’s the case then it might mean that this place ain’t gonna deliberately try to kill us at every step, which will be refreshing. Somewhere in here is the wreck of the Katie’s Jigger and our target is in its hold.”

  “So,” Nibbly said. The sapphire on his turban glittered in the firelight. “You’re saying that this job is now just wandering around until we find the wreck, grab the crate and then all go home?”

  “We’re gonna have to do some ponderin' afore that last step but, apart from that, sea critters fallin' on our heads looks to be the biggest hazard at the moment. We’re gonna rest up here for five hours or so then we’ll get underway…”

  From somewhere out in the green gloom came a noise. A long, warbling call that seemed to skitter on their spines. Hard to judge distance in the mists but it had been closer than Thud wanted it to be. He arched an eyebrow at Ruby.

  She shrugged. “If we weren’t so far from land I’d say that was a fox. Out here, though?”

  “Don’t think fish yell like that,” Cardamon said. “Would stop eating them if they did.”

  “A person?” Thud asked.

  “Maybe,” Ruby said.

  “‘Cause that’s the next part of the briefing. Them pirates are still around somewhere. Might be they got took out by the Kraquid. Might be they’re up top in a ship trying to figger a way down. Might be they’re already another wreck somewhere else in here. Point is, if we managed to survive gettin’ down here then it’s possible they did too. If you hear any shantying, let me know.”