Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  Even better was a clutch of eggs I discovered in a corner. I did not know if they came from a lizard or a bird, but they were three times as large as a chicken’s. Protected inside the cave, the shells had survived, but had cracked at some point through the millennia. And inside had formed perfectly egg-shaped opals, one the same blue-green as the creature near the entrance, one a deep, rich red, and one solid black with flecks of seemingly every color in the rainbow.

  I looked at them for a long time before finally moving on.

  The light dimmed as I went deeper, becoming murky. Especially once I found a narrow area, like a tunnel, branching off from the main cave. But that was easily remedied.

  I switched to night vision, and everything abruptly brightened.

  Now I could see glints of crystal throughout the stone, white bits that sparkled like ice. And small, furry creatures, looking more like voles than rats, which scurried into their hiding places as I passed, only to peer out at me with bright, black eyes. There was also a surprising amount of driftwood, with its smooth, silvery fingers stretching toward the ceiling in a great mound.

  There were no more spectacular, opal-like fossils. In fact, I almost turned back, because there did not appear to be anything of interest down here at all. It was more like a cave I would have expected to find on Earth, with a faint smell of mildew, a fainter odor of mineral water, and the distant but sharp reek of guano, or something very like it.

  The voles weren’t the only things that lived in this cave, it seemed.

  But something kept me going. Perhaps it was just the contrast: the outer cave so flamboyant and interesting, almost as if designed to make this little detour seemed drab by comparison. I’d seen spells on Earth that functioned much the same way, wards created to hide something, not by making it invisible, but by making it seem so boring that people automatically turned away.

  There was no magic here, or if there was, it was of a kind I could not detect.

  But my instincts told me there was something.

  I pressed on.

  It was another few minutes before I saw anything of interest, and even then, I wasn’t sure what it was. It was more than half buried in the dirt, but what I could see looked man made. Fey-made, I corrected myself, and squatted down to dig it up.

  It wasn’t easy. It separated from the ground reluctantly, as if it had been there for a while, with limestone-like secretions having all but glued it in place. But it finally came free, and after brushing off the sand and knocking away the limestone by smacking it on a rock, I found myself holding something strangely familiar.

  It was a wrench.

  I frowned in puzzlement at it. It looked a little different than Earth wrenches, being longer and heavier, I supposed to fit the feys’ bigger hands. But it was recognizable nonetheless.

  I liked the heft of it. It would make a good cudgel. I decided to keep it.

  And then I wondered the obvious question.

  Why was there a wrench in the cave?

  There were a few other items scattered about that could have been flotsam, washed here during a flood: part of an old wooden bucket, fuzzy with black mold and serving as a house for a vole; a tattered bit of cloth that might once have been part of a sail; and some bones that could have come in on a flood or been brought here, still struggling, by a predator. But they were lighter in weight. I did not see how—

  I had managed to miss that, I thought, staring at something right in front of my face.

  I had been pushing through the enormous pile of driftwood, to see if there were any more potential weapons to be found, moving slowly and looking at the ground more than ahead. Which was why my new find surprised me. If it had been a fey—

  Well, if it had been a fey, I would have bashed in his skull in with my wrench.

  But it was not.

  I did not know what it was.

  I moved some of the driftwood, which was beginning to look like it had been piled up deliberately. There was a great deal of it, and it was woven thickly together, so it took a while. In the process, I ended up knocking much of the surrounding dirt away from the object, enough to see a gleam of metal.

  With patience, more of the crusty covering came off. It was odd, because it looked like it had been there for years, perhaps centuries, until the accumulated dust of ages turned into a good facsimile to stone. But the more I chipped away, the more prefect, gleaming metal met my eyes. Until I finally found myself looking at . . .

  Well.

  I stood there for a moment, doubting myself. I had been through a good deal recently, and I did not have Dory to help ground me anymore. Perhaps I was having some sort of episode?

  Either that, or I had to explain why what looked like a spaceship was doing in a cave in Faerie.

  Or part of a space ship. It reminded me of the capsules that astronauts used to splash down in. It was big enough to hold perhaps four people, had metal sides, and had some sort of writing on the side that I couldn’t—

  It lit up.

  I stepped back abruptly, which turned out to be a good thing. Not only had a circle of lights suddenly flashed to life all the way around it, but part of the side had fallen outward. I just stood there for a moment, nonplussed.

  Then I cautiously peered within.

  There was a central pole, going up to the top of the structure. There were padded benches covered with a silvery looking fabric surrounding the pole, which almost matched the tunic I was wearing. There were squarish windows in the remaining sides that were bigger at the bottom than the top to accommodate the shape of the capsule. They had metal shutters covering them on the outside, which had raised up slightly when the door came down, but were prevented from going any further by the thicket of driftwood. There was even something that looked like a spy glass affixed to the pole, standing out from the strangely modern looking interior by the fact that it was in a leather pouch.

  I had started forward to see if my guess was right, when someone grabbed my arm. I spun, brandishing my weapon, then stopped partway through the swing. And all of an inch from Raymond’s forehead.

  His eyes crossed, staring up at it.

  “Oh.” I lowered the wrench. “You startled me.”

  “I startled you? What the fuck?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because he looked genuinely frightened. I patted his shoulder, which did not seem to help, so I stopped. “I found something.”

  “Of course, you found something! I can’t leave you alone for five minutes without—” he stopped, finally looking past me. “What the hell is that?”

  “What I found.”

  “Shit!” Raymond went into a crouch. “Where are the fey?”

  “What fey?”

  “The fey from the thing!” he gestured at it.

  “There are no fey in the thing.”

  “Are you being sarcastic again?”

  I looked into the small space. There was nowhere for a fey to hide that I could see. The benches would never have accommodated anyone so tall, even assuming they opened up.

  “No?”

  “Then why is it all lit up like that?” He gestured at the lights shining down from near the top of the capsule, and at intervals around the outside. They appeared to be some kind of liquid suspended under domes of glass, so I wasn’t sure how they turned on.

  Until I stepped closer, and they abruptly became even brighter.

  “Okay, what did you do?” Ray demanded.

  “Nothing—”

  “Don’t give me that!” He appeared a bit stressed, which was understandable. But no one was attacking us, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for concern.

  Until more lights suddenly lit us up—from behind.

  The lights were coming from outside the cave, but they didn’t stay that way. Ray and I crept up to the shadow of a large, protruding rock near the entrance to the tunnel, and watched them slowly get closer, like the eyes of some fell beast. And then breech the watery curtain, pushing through as if thousan
ds of gallons weren’t pelting down on top of them.

  Neither of us said anything, because neither of us understood what we were seeing. We just pulled farther back into shadow as something streaming with water came into the cave, stopping beside the remains of our shield.

  There was no way that the wreckage could have been seen from the outside. The rocks that had trapped it were the only things that extended beyond the falls, and then only barely. The shield itself, now cracked like a giant egg, bounced back and forth behind them as it slowly filled with water.

  They did have some way of tracking it, I thought, as Ray’s grip on my shoulder became painful.

  I pried his fingers loose before he cracked a bone, and he shot me a startled look. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

  I nodded, and went back to staring at the intruder.

  Now that the water had mostly streamed away, I could see that it was similar in design to the craft we’d just found, with a slightly rounded top and a capsule-like body. But this one was made entirely out of polished wood, although it otherwise copied the metal version exactly. Right down to the wooden “rivets” in the sides and the indistinct, foreign words on the door.

  Only this one was floating through the air.

  It slowly rotated, the bluish lights on the sides strobing the rocks and sand, but missing us when we drew back behind the ledge of stone.

  The flood of light reached past us, extending halfway down the little tunnel. But the craft didn’t seem to find the tunnel very interesting, either. After a moment, it withdrew, and when I checked again, peering out from near the bottom of the rock where the shadows were the thickest, I saw that it had settled onto the wet sand near the shield. The door lowered, and a contingent of silver haired fey poured out, their boots splashing on the waterlogged sand.

  “What now?” Ray mouthed.

  That was a good question, I thought, watching the fey. They looked eerie in the strange blue light, even more so than normal. It striped their faces and tinted their hair. But they seemed to see just fine, as some of them were already stripping off and wading over to the empty shell of the shield.

  They appeared to be having trouble seeing the bottom, as it was partly flooded and the churning action of the falls was keeping it moving. They could probably tell that there were bodies in there, but not how many or what kind. But that would not last long.

  Their craft was larger than the one we’d found, and there were a lot of fey. I counted fifteen, and there could be more inside. And unlike the ones who had taken me, these were well armed. While all Ray and I had was a knife I’d taken off of one of our attackers, a broken, tourist-grade scimitar, and a wrench.

  “We shoulda taken that shin bone,” he whispered, and I silently agreed.

  And then my eyes widened.

  “Look,” I whispered to Ray, and pointed.

  “What? I don’t—oh. Oh, shit.”

  I seconded the comment. Because our footsteps were clearly visible on the wet sand, tracking first up the beach and then across the cavern. They would have been even more so, but the black color of the sand blended them into the shadows somewhat, and there were patches of rock here and there that broke them up. The fey had also landed on top of some of them, putting down on the biggest section of sandy soil.

  But any moment now, they were going to be noticed. They had filled up with water, and the bluish light coming off the fey’s craft was highlighting them perfectly from this angle. That would likely be true from other vantage points as well.

  As soon as one of the fey noticed, we were going to have to fight.

  I tensed up, preparing—and then another capsule breeched the falls. It was as big as the last, and its shutters were down, exposing the interior and allowing it to immediately begin spewing forth fey. They leapt from the windows before it had even landed, calling out to their fellow warriors, although whether instructions or questions, I didn’t know.

  I weighed my options. I had a stun ability that theoretically could take on this many, leaving them defenseless. But the fey were really spread out, and I needed them bunched into a relatively small area for it to work. And it only lasted about a minute. I could kill this many in that amount of time, but what if there were more?

  The stun tended to wipe me out, leaving me at a disadvantage in any fight that might follow. I usually reserved it for emergencies as a result: for when enemy backup arrived unexpectedly and I found myself outnumbered, or when I ended up surrounded and needed to escape. It was a good defensive weapon, in other words, but not particularly well suited for offense.

  And, of course, there was an even better defense, if we hadn’t yet been spotted.

  “Well, hell,” Ray said. “That’s only fifteen, maybe twenty guys a piece.”

  I looked at him. “Do you think you can take fifteen or twenty well-armed fey warriors?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You do know there’s these things called jokes, right?”

  Yes, but this did not seem like the time.

  But perhaps it would help to ease the tension.

  “I think we should make like a tree,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Leave.”

  He stared at me for a moment, in what appeared to be concern. But he must have agreed. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dorina, Faerie

  There was only one other direction to go, so we hurried back down the tunnel toward the smaller capsule. It was still lit up, with the silvery blue color splashing the driftwood pile and throwing claw like shadows onto the walls. It resembled a bonfire burning with blue flame.

  Ray shook his head in disgust. “That’s not gonna work. We gotta find a way to turn that shit off—”

  The lights suddenly extinguished.

  He and I looked at each other.

  “Maybe . . . it’s on a timer?” he said.

  I had not seen a timer, or anything else that looked like technology, unless you counted the ship itself. But he knew Faerie better than I did. “Have you encountered such things before?” I whispered, as we skirted the thicket of driftwood.

  “Other than for the one we hit, you mean?”

  I paused. “You mean with the shield?”

  He nodded.

  “That was one like this?”

  “Yeah, only bigger. And made outta wood, like the ones back there.” He hiked a thumb at the fey. And then he glanced at me. “Looks like somebody wants you bad.”

  “We should probably hurry, then.”

  We hurried.

  I was afraid that the cave would come to a dead end, which might have had a double meaning in our case. But instead, the opposite proved to be true. The rocky floor stopped abruptly a hundred yards or so past the thicket, but in a cliff, not a wall.

  It overlooked a much larger cavern complex that spread out below our feet. I could not see an end to it, as there was a forest of stalactites and stalagmites in the way, but not like the ones behind us. These were huge, spearing up from the darkness or knifing down from above, that looked as if they had been growing there for centuries. They reminded me of a great mouth filled with jagged teeth, which I did not find to be a happy reference.

  I switched to several different types of vision, but they did not tell me much more, and neither did my nose. The air was cool, almost cold, with a clammy breeze carrying surprisingly clean smelling air, with just a hint of guano. I thought I heard water rushing somewhere, but it was so faint that it could have been an echo of the falls behind us. There did not appear to be a way down.

  Or if there was, we did not have the time to find it.

  A fey voice yelled, far back in the cave, and was quickly echoed by several others. I did not need to understand their words to know the cause: our footsteps had been spotted. Our enemy was coming.

  “Okay, okay. You got a plan, right?” Ray said, bouncing on his toes.

  I looked at him. “I do?”

  “You’re suppos
ed to have a plan! Dory always has a plan!”

  I did not doubt that. My twin was very resourceful. Unfortunately, I had always been strong enough to fight my way out of most predicaments, and thus never needed to develop her skill set. And now we were in a land where my physical advantage was diminished.

  It was a problem.

  “Well?” Ray whispered.

  “I am thinking,” I said.

  This did not appear to reassure him.

  It did not reassure me, either, but I did not see—

  Anything, I thought, as a sudden blaze of light from behind all but blinded me.

  “What the—?” Ray yelled, as we were both knocked off our feet.

  I didn’t answer. I landed on what felt like cold metal, flipped over, and jumped back to my feet. To find myself standing in the middle of small capsule we had found. It had scooped us up and darted off into the void, I was not sure why.

  Even worse, I was not sure who was driving it.

  But that was less of a problem than the line of rapidly diminishing fey on the cliffside. There were at least twenty of them, shooting bolts of some kind of energy at us out of what looked like spears. One of the bolts hit a stalactite and shattered it in a blinding explosion of sharp-edged pieces.

  They did not hit us, though.

  Because our small craft suddenly dove.

  Fast.

  “What the fuck!” Ray screeched. “What the fuck did you do?”

  I didn’t answer, because I was clinging to the floor in front of the small doorway, trying not to fall out as we abruptly plummeted what felt like thirty stories through the enormous cavern. And because I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted it to stop!

  It did so—quite abruptly. Ray and I hit the underside of the roof, then fell back against the floor. It was very hard.