The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island Page 26

  “Well, think of a plan B during the flight. Now, let’s get this over with.”

  She pulled on the goggles Mungo had given her. Clink pulled out the cigar Thud had given him, stepped well back from the powder barrel and lit it with a cantrip. He took a puff or two then handed it to Leery. She clamped it in her teeth. She gave a tug on the straps holding the pack on the other side of the barrel, then checked the straps attaching her to the barrel. Deep breath, grab on tight. She nodded at Clink and he pulled the lever.

  Clink watched as the Leery-barrel became a dot and then a memory in the space of a second.

  The ship began to turn.

  Clink looked toward Laughing Larry. It was obviously an intended maneuver. The oars were stroking and counter-stroking the turn, Larry spinning the wheel, watching the edges. Probably wise, Clink thought. Having the ship facing out was going to make getting out of here faster once everyone was aboard. All the barrels were lined up in the camp below, escape pods waiting for occupants. He nodded at Durham to follow and they started across the deck toward Larry.

  “You have a choice, gentlemen,” Laughing Larry called down to them and then paused awkwardly. “And gentledwarf.”

  Clink’s chest hairs bristled. Something was up.

  “We stayed long enough for you to implement your absurd plan with the catapult, on the off-chance that it will work, but now we’re leaving. You can either come with or you can get back in your barrels and we’ll toss you over the side.”

  “Ye’re s'posed to wait,” Clink snarled. “This ship is the escape plan.”

  “Yes, my escape plan. I don’t intend to wait around in hopes I can escape later.”

  The ship had completed the turn. The pirates on deck began gathering, wandering over, encircling. Their hands were on the hilts of their blades and gold sparkled in their intermittently toothy grins. Clink was one of the Vanguard and Durham had recently been a city guard but there were too many for the two of them to handle.

  “How many of your crew are you leaving to die as well?” Durham called up to Larry.

  The pirate crew paused, thoughtfully. This was a question they were curious to hear the answer too. Was Durham trying to spark a mutiny?

  “Anyone who would like to stay behind to find them in that frogdemon maze out there is welcome to join you,” Larry said. “Provided you have a positive merit balance.”

  The pirate pause persisted. No one wanted to give the appearance that they were volunteering for anything of the sort.

  “Fine,” Clink said. “Back in the barrels it will be.” He spat on the deck. He had a brief bad moment when it occurred to him that Durham might decide to stay but the man headed grimly toward the barrels as if the thought of choosing otherwise hadn’t even entered his mind.

  He was a good lad for a human. Clink hoped they both lived through this.

  ***

  The acceleration of the catapult barrel was astonishing and the plan immediately went awry when Leery’s jaw clamped and bit through the cigar. The lit half dropped but, fortunately, was caught rather than falling. Between her cleavage and the powder barrel, which wasn’t quite as fortunate.

  She soared through the darkness, water skimming by below. The soon to be be pressing concern was that the barrel was slowly rotating her upside-down and her arse was now pointed in the direction she was flying. She could see the ship, already distant enough to be no more than a few distant lanterns in the black. A chasm in the sea flashed by below her head and then she was over water again.

  She grabbed for the cigar first, for obvious reasons, as well as out of concern that it would fall free. Burning through the barrel would take more than the few seconds the flight was scheduled for and the fuse was on the side. Her cleavage would survive. Hopefully her chest hair wasn’t smoldering.

  Cigar back in mouth she wrenched her weight around, trying to turn the barrel mid-air. It worked, albeit badly and awkwardly. Her efforts plus the barrel’s own rotation now had her sideways, her back to the ship. Just in the right position to see that she wasn’t going to make it. The barrel’s trajectory was going to bring them down into the sea, just past the next chasm and just shy of the edge she needed to clear.

  One chance.

  She threw her weight again, rotating the barrel once more. It hit the water along its length, flat and fast. They skipped off of the sea like a thrown stone, rising back into the air. The final edge went by below and she was over the heart of the maze. She almost opened her mouth to cheer but then remembered the cigar. It would have been premature in any case. Now came the hard part.

  She could see the tower at the center. She had twice its altitude, making it look like a toy. The glowing orb didn’t look like much from here. The hundreds of merfrogs streaming from the sea, leaping their way toward the tower, now, those were more of a concern.

  What she was looking at all suddenly snapped into place, a puzzle you didn’t know was there until you looked at it from above. The circle of blackness of Blackfog Island. The spiderwebs of glowing light. The chasms in the sea. The great hole in the darkness above.

  The entire labyrinth, the island, all of it. It wasn’t an extra-dimensional god.

  It was just the thing’s eyeball.

  And her, the tiny mote of dust in its eye.

  She pulled the cord on the pack strapped to the other side of the barrel. Mungo had made it and sworn it would work. If it did, it would be the first part of things that actually went to plan.

  The top of the pack opened and a ball of cloth flew out, attached by ropes. The wind of their flight caught it and whipped it open into a smaller version of the sail-chute. It caught the air, yanking the barrel hard enough to make Leery glad for the harness. The barrel swung crazily, spinning her stomach for a few laps around her ribs, then settled into a slow, swinging descent, momentum mostly sapped. They floated across the sky, closer and closer to the tower.

  Leery wondered what would happen if the eye blinked.

  ***

  It was a common joke, on any given subject, to say that an elf had forgotten more about it than a human ever learned. It was not necessarily a funny joke so much as a reasonably accurate statement of truth. Elves lived for thousands of years and even the most fanatically devoted to a hobby eventually got bored with it after a few centuries and moved on. Possibly sooner, depending on the hobby. Elvish stamp collectors moved on often because they’d collected all of the stamps.

  The great Elven weakness was that, as a whole, they had no large ambitions. Give humans a castle and a town and a thousand years later they’d have talking wristwatches. Give the same thousand years to the elves and they’d have written a few songs and added filigree to the castle stones. But it would be the most amazing filigree you’d ever seen.

  This caused no shortage of resentment in the other races. Elves were routinely banned from cooking contests as they’d worked out to the grain the precise amount of spice to use in a dish to hit perfection. The Elvish author shelf at the bookstore had works of staggering emotional impact, poetry that could make your thoughts and heart dance like a puppet whose puppeteer had just been electrocuted, prose that could start revolutions, shatter industries, create religious movements. Fortunately, from the royalty perspective, most of it was in Elvish, a language that took at least a century of studying to achieve a baby-talk level of proficiency. Few works were translated as the elves felt that other languages were inadequate to convey the scope of the literature.

  Pick any skill and there was a cliche of an elf being better at it then anyone else. But even still, whenever Catchpenny was asked what he was best at, he still received an eye-roll when he answered “archery”.

  Catchpenny knew archery. He knew how the bowstring changed with the temperature and the humidity. He could tell the range of an arrow almost to the inch by testing the springiness of the shaft, looking at the cut of the feathers, feeling how smooth the arrowhead was. He’d spent twenty years just practicing ricochet shots, firing into
stone corridors to deflect into unseen targets. He could fire three arrows at once and hit three different targets. He’d managed four once but the fourth one had missed, so he was still practicing that. He could fire arrows backward, sideways or, if he had to, use the tautness of the string to launch the bow at someone’s head.

  It was a tricky shot to attempt, even by elven standards.

  The parachute came drifting in slowly, canopy glowing blue with reflected light from the portal. It looked like a giant jellyfish. The barrel beneath it, or, at least, that he hoped was beneath it, was almost invisible against the dark sky, appearing only in silhouette as it swung across his view of the sail above it. They should have attached a light of some kind to it. Maybe next time they tried this plan. It was coming in high, wobbling, indicating Leery was still on it, perhaps jumping up and down trying to get it to descend faster. The rope would be serious drag on the arrow and placed a very precise limit on the range as the other end of the rope was wrapped around his waist.

  He just wished he could see Leery. He drew back the arrow and let loose.

  ***

  Leery was pretty sure she was still on target. Her back was to the tower now but her last glimpse of it had put it pretty close. The new evidence of proximity was the arrow sticking out of her leg. As if she didn’t have enough to do already.

  She grabbed onto the arrow where the rope was tied, twisting and snapping it to free the rope.

  This hurt every bit as much as she’d expected and far more than she wanted. Her vision was swimming and the shout of pain in her brain was drowning out the voices of her other thoughts. She fumbled the rope around the bundle of cord where the parachute was attached to the barrel and tied the fastest knot she could manage. She felt the barrel jerk in the air as the elf pulled on the rope, testing it, removing the slack. They were close. The orb’s light grew more intense by the moment. She felt she could almost see through her hands. The light stripped the depth from the shadows making them look flat, as if made of paper. She pulled the cigar out of her mouth. It was crumbled and bent, bitten in half and had leaked papery leaves all over the inside of her mouth. But it still smoldered. She jammed it against the fuse.

  Gryngo was not a fan of the dramatic tension that could be brought about by a fuse failing to light. It was a matter of professional pride that his fuses lit on the slightest hint of demand, often dramatically. And in this regard the plan went smoothly. There was an instant flare and hiss as the fuse caught. Leery flicked the cigar away and pulled her release cord, freeing her from the barrel, dropping her into the empty darkness below. Her own chute fluttered up from the pack, twisting as she fell. It caught the air but only partially. Half of the chute was still tangled in rope. It had slowed her a bit but she was still descending fast.

  She yanked at the rope. The chute twisted crazily in response, swinging her up and sideways. It hadn’t freed anything but now she was heading toward the tower instead of away from it. Arriving at the same time as a lit powder barrel didn’t seem a great course of action but, on the other hand, at this height and speed a landing atop the tower presented tempting alternatives to shattering her legs on the ground below and having to crawl to safety amid hundreds of swarming frogmen.

  Decision time.

  ***

  The rope seemed like it was holding but the tension in the pull was spongy feeling, as if the arrow were caught in the ropes instead of sunk into the side of the barrel. It seemed to be serving its purpose, however. Catchpenny pulled, gently, not knowing how secure the hold was, and the barrel responded. He began guiding it toward the portal with gentle tugs as if it were a kite, moving around the edge of the tower to get it lined up correctly.

  The rope was a bit of a giveaway to the other occupants of the tower top. As attention riveting as the parachuting barrel was, the rope attached to it and leading to a point behind them was of equal interest. The frogmen on top of the tower all turned and looked at him. He liked to think they were gaping in surprise but it was pretty much their default expression. Aldine still stood at the center, face upturned. Her focus was set.

  Obiya appeared in the midst of the frogs, rising from the tower interior like a slow piece of toast. Lightning crackled in her hands and the tattooed skull on her face was twisted with fury, giving her the look of a wraith. Her eyes immediately found him, in the open on the edge of the tower, rope in one hand, bow still in the other. She raised her hand and the spark hissed and popped as it grew.

  Catchpenny clenched his teeth and braced. He didn’t know how much this was going to hurt but he was guessing a lot.

  It did.

  At the first touch of the bolt his body went rigid, every muscle locked.

  It would have been brilliant if at this moment a helmet-clad pixie had ridden in on an ornery parrot and saved the day. Sadly this did not happen.

  Instead, Leery happened.

  She came in for a feet-first landing, cleverly choosing the back of Aldine’s head as her landing target, shoving her hard into Obiya. The arc of lightning ceased and Obiya let out an undignified yelp as she went back down the stairs, Aldine on top of her, headfirst this time with much thumping and electrical arcing.

  Leery landed and her chute came drifting down on top, the vent hole in the center landing neatly around her, the fabric floating down gently to cover the ring of frogmen around her leaving them as struggling lumps in the ropes beneath the sail cloth. She shrugged out of her pack and came sprinting forward, leaping, catching Catchpenny around the waist and carrying him off the side of the tower, twisting to place him on top and her bladder-buoyed back toward the ground. The barrel followed the rope he still clutched tightly in his spasming hand.

  Straight into the orb.

  The fuse reached the end.

  ***

  Raggins ran.

  He had the book tucked under his arm. It was cold and slimy against his skin and seemed to wriggle a bit.

  But it was his salvation.

  This would certainly be enough to wipe all of his demerits clean. Laughing Larry would be so happy. It had arrived from the ceiling high above like a gift from the gods, followed quickly after by two women who, it turned out, the gods should have packaged more carefully before dropping.

  He’d stayed when the others had been rescued. He’d been first out of the pit and it had been simple to duck away. Everyone had been far too preoccupied with other things to notice one man scuttle into hiding amid the chaos of battle.

  Outside the tower there were frogs everywhere, running every which way. He hoped he’d be just another shadow, running in the weird light. How long until they noticed his sprint lacked the characteristic hop to it? He lurched forward, hunched over, trying to think froggy thoughts.

  After five steps those worries became obsolete and were replaced with fresh new ones as Leery and Catchpenny landed on his head.

  Above and behind them the top of the tower exploded.

  The umbilicals of light snapped away from the obelisks as they shattered in the blast, tethers broken free. They whipped through the sky like severed tentacles. The light of the orb became unstable, flickering and pulsing erratically, sending out blinding flashes of light. Faster and faster, each pulse brighter. Then a final moment, the light so fierce that their shadows looked like holes cut in the ground. It was a light bright enough to cross dimensions. It cast other shadows as well, of things unseen. Horrible clusters of twitching limbs and tongues slithering in the air. The white light exploded at the same speed the blue light imploded, making the whole landscape look like it had been flipped inside out. Raggins could see colors in hues he’d never experienced before.

  The sound arrived with a shove of force accompanying it, sending them sliding through the sand, ears ringing with the echoes of the crack of noise. Then the sound too seemed to get sucked back into itself, as if the explosion had stopped and taken a deep breath.

  There was another noise that seemed to come from a distant place yet still made ears ble
ed with its ferocity. The scream of something the size of a world. It cut off as the orb winked out, only its echoes remaining, rolling along the walls of the labyrinth like thunder.

  ***

  Thud heard the boom, even over the dance rhythm Rend’s heart was pounding out through his chest trying to keep his feet moving. It echoed and rolled along the walls of water like a drum solo. He bounced around under the giant’s arm as he ran. Rend had ignored his protests and Thud had finally resolved himself to being carried and was now working his brain, trying to anticipate something, anything that he could use as a focus, something to prepare for and plan for.

  He knew in his head it was only a quarter mile but they hadn’t had very long to run and he had no idea if they had seconds left, minutes or hours.

  The explosion was a good sign, no mistake, but had it been in the right place? Had it had any effect?

  The thunder was his answer.

  A roar from above as if the entire sky were torn. He looked up to see a ribbon of white along the top of the seawall. A ribbon that was widening rapidly, descending like a theater curtain. The white of the foam spread with sickening speed across the wall of water as the entire labyrinth turned into miles and miles of a waterfall in progress. A great burst of spray from the base of the walls as the first of the water arrived, growing and swelling into a wave rushing forward, racing to meet its counterpart in the center.

  Rend covered the last few meters of sand and tossed Thud through the port into the turtle boat, leaping in after him.

  The wan light vanished as the hatch was slammed shut behind them.

  Then the waters arrived with a crash and everything was noise and spinning insanity.

  It would have been an astonishing sight, had anyone been there to see.

  Great geysers of spray soaring into the sky, the sound of a thousand waves crashing together. Bits of shipwrecks shattered and thrown, debris churning in the brown foam, masts tossed into the sky like toys.