“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.
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 le
vel. “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 diamond. 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 Fifteen
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.
Horace spotted us as we approached and offered one of his most alluring grins. He turned immediately, presumably to rustle up our favorite concoctions. We took our places on two vacant bar stools, made available only because there was some kind of jig going on on an empty patch of carpet in front of the bar. The music was live, coming from a table of talented, albeit drunk, musicians. An accordion, a banjo, and a pennywhistle could be heard over the stomping of enthusiastic feet and whirling fabrics. Horace turned to face us once more. The alcohol fumes coming from him were a little less intense than usual. Maybe he’d gotten a late start on his daily product sampling.
“Hattie, me girl, it’s been—hic!—been ta long,” Horace all but bellowed. “And who should be escortin’ ya but the goo—hic!—good chief a’ police hisself?”
I tried covering up my wince with a pleasant smile. At least I hoped it was pleasant. Maybe coming in for a drink to the center of the Glessie gossip universe wasn’t such a smart idea.
While everybody stared at us sitting down at the bar, Horace teased, “So now…when can I 'spect the weddin’ date?”
“Shut up and pour the drinks, Horace,” David said, giving the man-mountain a playful punch in the arm. “You know which ones.”
“Aye, tha’ I do,” Horace said with a grin as his massive hands grabbed a pair of mugs.
I glanced around the room while Horace poured our lovingly prepared brews. The bar was made up to look like a Mainland English pub with a few modern concessions like electric lighting in the lamps and a plumbing system that was actually from this century. The mahogany bar and oak tables around it were nearly all packed, the patrons watching other patrons closely and whispering to the people they were with about what they knew. Whispers, loud shouts, raucous laughter, the Moon had it all. Add in Horace having the uncanny ability to somehow eavesdrop on every meaningful conversation; the Fingernail Moon had always been a great place to glean information.
A tankard of my usual Griffin’s Beak landed in front of me while a Johnny Walker and a side of water slid just within reach of David's folded hands. Neither one of us hesitated to gulp down the beverage in front of us.
After taking a minute to make sure that no one else was needing his attention, Horace leaned in close and stage-whispered, “Awright, now…tell yer Uncle Horace what’s the matter wit’ the both a’ ya.”
David's defenses sprang to action. “I’m afraid a great deal of it is sensitive information, Horace. The kind that, if in the wrong hands, could interfere with an active police investigation.”
“Mine’s not so top-secret,” I chimed in, covering for David. “Carbon’s been…sick for a couple of days. Had to bring him to the vet.”
“Awwww,” Horace said with genuine sympathy. “That poor wee fella. Is he gonna be alright?”
“I hope so. After I had got done with an…errand I did for David today I gave Carbon a treatment that I’m hoping will get what’s bothering him out of his system.”
I took another swig of the Griffin’s Beak as Horace said, “Then let me add me own hopes ta tha’ outcome, dear girl. Say, this errand ya’s mentioned…that wouldna ha’ anythin’ ta do wit’ the Chief’s ‘sensitive information,' would it?”
David slammed his side of water with an emphatic bang. “You are relentless, man.”
<
br /> “Eh, I likes ta knows what’s goin’ on on me home turf,” Horace said with a shrug. “’Sides, maybe there’s—hic!—there’s some way I coul’ give ya's a helpin’ hand.”
“Unless you know how to speak to Rock Grumlins, I’m afraid that there’s nothing.”
Horace gave David another shrug. “Ne’er know ‘til ya ask…’fraid I’s got trouble ‘nough tryin’ ta speak ta tha’ brain-dead assistant a’ Maude’s. Good man, Hector, but a little…dense, ya know?”
“So you and Maude are an item?” I asked, hoping it would do the trick of keeping him from asking many more questions.
Horace gave me a little laugh. “Well…I wouldna go tha’ far as yet. Jus’ the same, we—“
The crash of a mug and a raised angry voice at the back left corner table interrupted the great barman's flow. Horace turned toward the sound with an almost excited expression before looking at us. “If’n ya’ll both ‘scuse me a minute…?”
He didn’t wait for our responses. He just came from behind the bar and marched towards the corner. With incredible dexterity and speed for a man of his size and drunkenness, Horace reached the offending table in seconds. I glanced at David. “You’re not going to do anything to take care of this public disturbance?”
“Why bother with the paperwork when a few stern words from Horace and being thrown out of the Moon can do the same job with less fuss? Besides, I’m off-duty.”
“But people like us are never really off-duty, are we?” A familiar voice asked from two seats to my left.
Dilwyn saluted us with a mug of what smelled like Mercury Ale before taking a gulp from it.
“So who’s minding the farm right now, Dilwyn?” David asked, shifting in his stool to face him.
“Or, for that matter, your boys?” I asked.
“Answer’s the same for both,” Dilwyn said. “My farmhands…they’re making sure the boys are eating the dinner I cooked them before I took off. They ought to be in bed by the time I get home.”
The Black Diamond Curse (Hattie Jenkins & The Infiniti Chronicles Book 4) Page 15