They retreat through the tunnel. The heat has made them sluggish, moving forward with methodical, plodding steps. Even Lima’s cheer seems to be flagging. No songs from her anymore.
“How is this possible?” Gogi calls, up ahead.
Sky and Rumi turn a corner to see a wall of stone. Hot dust fills the air, curling Rumi’s nose.
“This was not here before,” Chumba says.
“No,” Mez says, “it definitely wasn’t.”
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” Lima says, her voice rising into an unintelligible squeak at the end.
“One of those rumbles we heard while we were far below must have been this cave-in,” Rumi says, turning in circles as he looks for a way out. “The ants are changing this underground landscape so rapidly.”
“What do we do?” Sky caws. “It’s not like there were any other passageways down here.”
“We’re not stuck, are we?” Lima chirps, her voice briefly lowering to an intelligible level before squeaking off again.
“Let’s try not to panic,” Rumi says. Even as he says it, the shadowwalkers are doing just that, bumping into one another in the near darkness, their breaths quick and terrified.
The only one who keeps calm is Auriel. He unfurls from around Gogi’s shoulders, his glowing yellow body cascading to the ground. He licks the hot and dusty air, woggles his head one way and then the next.
He holds perfectly still.
Then he leaps!
Rumi would never have thought that a snake could do such a thing. Auriel springs at the wall of rock, glowing ever brighter as he arcs. Once he hits the stone wall, he passes into it like it’s a puddle of muddy water, the stone smoothly parting around his body. It doesn’t re-form behind him, but splits for good, the splash of Auriel’s impact leaving a passageway sloping upward through the rock, wide enough for a panther.
“Go now, everyone,” Rumi says, “in case it closes up again!”
While the rest of the companions hang back, girding themselves, Sky is the first to try the sudden passageway, bringing Rumi right along with him. They clamber into the black tunnel, and Rumi risks peeking his head out from Sky’s wingpit so his inky black eyes can watch the smooth surface of the passing stone. It’s marvelous, reflecting the many radiances that come off Auriel’s scales. It’s also terrifying, and he has the feeling that at any moment the rock could turn liquid again and drown them all.
Despite his academic interest, Rumi can’t wait for this journey through narrow hot rock to be over. He was entombed in rock once, back when he was the Ant Queen’s prisoner, and would rather not do it again.
“Are the rest of you getting along okay back there?” Rumi asks, directing his words behind them.
“Mrph, I just want out of here,” comes Mez’s muffled voice.
“I know the feeling. Just keep pushing through!” Rumi calls back.
Sure enough, the tunnel slopes sharply up, then broadens to show a circle of starry sky. Auriel’s glowing body slips into the rainforest, Sky staggering after. Rumi drops out of the wingpit and whirls once he lands, just in time to see two panthers, a monkey, and a very harried-looking bat come after. “Ack, that was awful,” Lima says. She taps her nose experimentally with the tip of a wing. “I’m pretty sure all of my mucus crisped away.”
“It comes back,” Gogi says cheerfully.
“Gross.”
“You’re the one who brought up snot in the first place, and I’m the gross one?”
“Yeah! You are!”
“Look!” Chumba says. The edge in her voice shuts Gogi and Lima right up, bringing their attention to the line of jungle trees.
Auriel has slunk halfway there, and then paused before the looming darkness. A ring of nightwalkers faces them, glowering at the bright yellow snake. These are not like the daywalker admirers. Claws and talons are out. Two owls, a dwarf crocodile, a chinchilla. “Is this the one?” one owl says to the other.
“Yes. The yellow snake. The sworn enemy of the Elemental of Darkness,” says the second owl.
“Excuse you!” Lima says hotly. “Auriel is no one’s enemy. He just saved us from a stinky hot cave. And he’s going to stop this volcano explosion somehow.”
“Auriel! That’s his name!” trills the chinchilla. “Attack!”
“Lima!” Rumi mutters, shaking his head.
Caught off guard, the companions work to set up their battle positions while the nightwalkers streak toward them. Gogi readies licks of flames at his palms, Mez blinks invisible, and Rumi takes in a big breath, to get as much as he can out of his wind powers.
Rumi assumed Auriel would flee back to the shelter of his allies, but he’s holding perfectly still. Auriel is so calm that Rumi goes from being worried about his welfare to worrying about that of the nightwalkers. Although they’re attacking the shadowwalkers, it could be over a misunderstanding, and they might lose their lives for it.
Rumi lets out a powerful wind, to slow their enemies.
But all that comes out is a slight breeze.
What in the world? Rumi hops forward, hoping against hope that he’ll produce a bigger wind when he tries again.
As the nightwalkers streak toward Auriel, an unexpected ally comes forth.
The line of jungle parts again to reveal a panther, slightly smaller than Mez and Chumba. It races after the nightwalkers.
The new panther reaches the dwarf crocodile first, pouncing onto its backside, raking its claws into the beast’s scales as the two go tumbling. Once it’s got the ambushed crocodile on its back, the panther bites hard into its belly. The end is quick; the reptile goes still.
Rumi maximizes the surprise generated by their unexpected ally to target a tight cylinder of wind at the owls. It’s far weaker than he hoped, and doesn’t have much impact on the birds’ silent flight. Something is wrong with his power!
Luckily, Gogi had a similar idea, and his fire power doesn’t seem to be suffering from the same cramp that’s afflicting Rumi. His bolts of flame strike the owls midflight, and they go from smoothly soaring to tumbling to either side of the night sky. “Thanks, Gogi!” Rumi cries.
“No problem, buddy,” Gogi says. He scans about for the owls, who are now nowhere to be seen. Rumi hangs his head. There’s something definitely wrong with him.
With the crocodile dead and the owls pitched off to the side, that leaves only the chinchilla to oppose them. The courageous little rodent approaches Auriel, long front teeth gnashing the air, then seems to realize it’s all alone. It looks behind it, then up, then back to Auriel, floppy ears wagging. It wiggles its nose, then turns and bounds into the night.
The only stranger here now is the unfamiliar panther that came to their aid.
“Thank you, friend!” Gogi calls out.
Panting heavily from its assault on the dwarf crocodile, the panther staggers toward them.
“Is that . . .” Mez says.
“It can’t be!” Chumba says.
Lima squeaks. “Yerlo?”
“Lima,” he says. The exhausted young panther looks at the rest of the companions in turn. “Mez, Chumba! And you must be Rumi and Gogi.” Yerlo looks last to the scarlet macaw, head cocked.
“This is Sky,” Lima says. “We, um, might have bad talked him when I stayed with you that year, but he’s really not such an awful guy.”
“Thank you for the lovely introduction,” Sky says.
The fronds of a nearby fern fold down. “And I’m Banu . . . I’m often very . . . late to arrive . . . thank you . . . for your help back there.”
Yerlo nods, for the moment too exhausted for words. He just stares wide-eyed at Auriel’s glowing yellow body. Once he’s caught his breath, he speaks again. “And that is really the one? The Elemental of Light?”
“We just call him Auriel, cousin. No need to stand on ceremony,” Mez says. Her tail thrashes with worry. “Why are you here? Has something happened at home? Not—the lava?”
Rumi’s eyes flit to the night sky. “It sounds
like we have a lot to talk about,” he says. “Might I suggest we do it somewhere else, where there aren’t murderous owls swooping about?”
“Getting away from murderous owls sounds like a good idea,” Lima says, shivering as she holds her mouth open to echolocate any enemies. “I can’t detect them now, but owls are infamously stealthy.”
Mez gives Yerlo a ferocious headbutt, which startles Rumi at first, until he sees Chumba do the same thing and then hears the thick sound of the cats’ combined purring. Felines are weird. “Yes,” Mez says, “let’s get into the underbrush. My cousin and sister will be in daycoma soon, anyway. Whatever the reason, it’s good to see you again, Yerlo. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too,” Yerlo says, tears in his voice. “You have no idea what’s been happening.”
Mez nods. “I know you’ll tell us as soon as you can.”
Chastened, the companions slink off into the brush.
MEZ LEADS THEM to the dark hollow of a monguba. It’s not a big tree, but the hollow is wide enough to fit them all, bodies slotted one against the next. It’s soon hot and sweaty inside, but in Rumi’s mind the increased safety is more than worth any discomfort. A warm-blooded animal might have a different opinion, of course. He looks at Gogi inquiringly, but the monkey is busy sizing up Yerlo. Of course—panthers are monkey killers, and though Yerlo almost certainly wouldn’t take a bite out of one of his cousin’s friends, “almost” doesn’t go quite far enough when you’re all pressed together into a tight space.
Without needing to discuss it, Gogi, Sky, and Lima crawl over Mez and Chumba so that the panther sisters are between them and Yerlo.
In the sliver of rainforest that Rumi can see through the opening in the tree’s trunk, the first hints of dawn have started to line the edges of leaves, trunks, and vines. “We have only a few minutes until daycoma,” he says. “Yerlo, you’ll have to fill us in quickly.”
“So sleepy,” he says, yawning. He shakes his head, gives his own tail a nip. “Wake up, wake up, Yerlo. Okay, here goes. Danger, danger, hold on, Mez, you have to come home and rescue Usha and Derli and Jerlo, I—”
With that the Veil lifts, and Yerlo falls into magical slumber, his snores mixing with Chumba’s.
“Feather lice and claw sores!” Sky caws. “Non-shadowwalkers are such a pain.”
Mez’s lips flick from her teeth and back, over and over. Her tail thrashes, smacking Gogi in the head, Sky on the butt, Gogi on the head, Sky on the butt. “Mez,” Gogi says, his words muffled by panther fur, “do you think you could, do you mind—”
“You heard him!” Mez seethes. “Jerlo and Derli and Usha are in trouble. They need rescuing. Usha needs rescuing! Can you imagine that?”
“Sure, sure,” Gogi says. “It sounds serious. In the meantime, do you think you could—?”
Mez’s tail thrashes even harder. “I left them on their own, back when this all started. It’s time to go make things right. I have to go back now—to warn them about the lava, too.”
“But you won’t go without Yerlo and Chumba, of course,” Sky says, doing his best to get his tailfeathers out of the way of Mez’s tail. “So we have to wait until the Veil lifts. Maybe in the meantime, you could—”
“No, I’m going now. Rumi, help me think up some way to transport Yerlo and Chumba.”
“I think I could do that,” Rumi says from his hiding spot under Gogi’s butt. “It would be a sort of litter, with smooth bark on the bottom to cut down on friction. You’d chomp your teeth down on a vine at the front and drag Yerlo and Chumba along. But Mez, while I understand your desire to get home and save the day, it seems to me that, well, in a hierarchy of needs, the fact that this volcano will erupt in three nights and potentially obliterate the entire rainforest—” As Mez bares her teeth, Rumi gets more frantic, waving his suction-cupped fingers in front of him. “—including poor Usha and Jerlo and Derli, wherever they are . . . if we all go off to investigate the panthers, then we’d be losing track of what to do next with the, um, primary task of, um . . . Sky, help me out here.”
Before Sky can interject, Mez growls. “But we don’t have a plan for what to do about the magma. You said that yourself. And Auriel didn’t do anything useful when we were near it.”
“We probably weren’t in the right spot!” Rumi squeaks, looking at Auriel’s blank expression. “And we haven’t even discussed what an evacuation might look like!”
“Fine. We’ll discuss options, then I’ll go save my cousins and aunt,” Mez says.
“That’s not really how discussions are supposed to work,” Rumi grumbles.
Sky caws derisively. “We do have a possible plan. We can join the animals fleeing the volcano, as soon as possible. Maybe the farthest reaches of Caldera will not be destroyed. That is our only option. There is no negotiating with a natural disaster.”
“See?” Rumi says defiantly. “We do have a plan. Sort of have a plan. Almost have a plan.”
“You mean running for our lives?” Mez asks. “Fine. I choose to run for my life in the direction of my homeland.”
“I’d like to investigate the ‘ocean’ we discovered,” Sky says. “When lightning strikes and starts a fire, it’s rain that puts it out. This magma is like liquid fire. We should evacuate as many animals as we can into the ocean. Maybe we could float on a fallen tree? I say we head toward the giant salty puddle.”
“See, even more of a plan,” Rumi says. “And does anyone want to go back down there and see if we can wash out the billions of ants that are trying to expose the magma?”
“I nominate Gogi,” Lima says.
“I nominate that no one goes down and burns themselves up,” Gogi says with uncharacteristic sharpness.
Lima coughs. “Yes, that does seem like a dead end. So to speak.”
“I’m going home,” Mez says flatly.
“I spent a year with the panthers,” Lima says. “If Usha is in trouble, that’s a serious thing. And if the source of the problem is this Elemental of Darkness, it really doesn’t sound good. Like, at all.”
“The panther territory is deep in the interior, unfortunately,” Sky says. “Nowhere near the shore.”
Mez’s low growl intensifies. “I know I’m not being reasonable about this, but it’s not a reasonable thing. My family is in danger. I’m going to help them. Now. Rumi, will you help me figure out how to rig a litter?”
Gogi coughs. “Might I suggest something? We don’t all have to be in one place. Perhaps those best suited to each task could go do that one, and we’ll reconvene once they’re accomplished.”
“Good thinking!” Rumi says.
“Thanks, buddy. I thought so too.”
“If we do that, I’m going with Mez,” Lima says. “I’m an honorary panther, and I’m worried about my new family. She and Chumba and Yerlo are the ones most likely to get into a fight, anyway. They’ll need my healing.” She looks at Mez. “No offense.”
Mez extracts a long claw and smiles. “None taken.”
“Rumi and I are the ones most likely to be able to engineer a craft to travel on this ocean we discovered,” Sky says. “And I can give Mez my directive to communicate with me from afar, so we can tell her and Lima where exactly to meet us in the escape vessel.”
“My water power seems . . . useful for the escape plan,” Banu says.
“And I should go with Mez, to help fight,” Gogi says.
“Actually, Gogi,” Rumi says, “we have no one with offensive magic, and we might need you. I also think we’ll need to temper the wood we use to build any craft that can be watertight on the ocean, and repeated exposure to fire and water is probably our best way to accomplish that. If you’re willing, I’d like you to stay with us.”
Mez nods. “We can spare Gogi.”
“Don’t take too long to think about it first, or anything,” Gogi grumbles.
“Reluctantly,” Mez adds. “We can reluctantly spare Gogi.”
“That’s a little better,” Gogi sn
iffs. “And Auriel? What do we do about our mysterious rapidly growing friend?”
They all pause to take in the length of glowing yellow snake. “Hmm,” Rumi says.
“He stays with the boys,” Mez says, a disdainful look on her face.
“Aww, he’s such a pretty accessory, though,” Lima says.
“That’s final,” Mez says.
Lima gives Auriel a squeeze. “I’ll miss you!”
Auriel licks the air in response.
“I bet that’s how snakes say, ‘I’ll miss you too,’” Lima says.
Gogi gives her a big hug. “I don’t know how I feel about Auriel, but I’ll miss you tons.”
“Well, who wouldn’t miss a superhero healing bat?” Lima says bashfully.
Rumi hops out of the monguba hollow. “Now. Let’s rig Mez a traveling litter.”
Rumi directs Gogi as he uses his agile fingers and toes to tie a liana vine around the edge of a stretch of thick bark, then to use more liana to lash the snoring forms of Chumba and Yerlo to the litter. Mez begins straining against the vine, pulling the contraption forward. Lima adds her own weight, beating her wings furiously to help, but she’s soon exhausted, and rests on Mez’s shoulder instead. “Go, Mez, you can do it!” she cheers.
Mez does impressively well, pushing twice her own weight against the straining liana before releasing the vine to address the rest of the companions. “It’ll be slow going, but I’ll get a head start during the day, and then maybe Yerlo and Chumba can drag me for a few hours while I rest after the Veil drops.”
Sky turns around and offers his backside in Mez’s direction. “You know what to do.”
“I’ll do the honors,” Gogi says. He gets his fingers around one of Sky’s crimson feathers, then yanks. Sky caws as the feather comes loose, and Gogi tumbles head over heels. He rigs the feather so it’s pinned between the liana vine and the bark of the litter.
“You know how it works by now,” Sky tells her. “When you need to communicate with me, hold the directive, and then think of this precise location where it was removed.”
“I’ll make an echomap,” Lima says. “That’s the best way.”
Rumi's Riddle Page 6