I slowly surveyed the slew of lethargic bodies. “We need a miracle,” I said out the side of my mouth to my cats.
“I hear dynamite’s pretty miraculous,” Gloom quipped, giving my zoned-out friends a severe case of stink-eye.
“Gloom!” I hissed.
“Well, look at them, they’re like washed-up zombies. Goddess, they make Hector Muerte look like a spring chicken.”
I looked at the Witch Fearwyn. “Portia, where’s Millie and Dilwyn?”
She shrugged. “What does it matter now? We’ve lost.”
My jaw dropped in disbelief. “Portia Fearwyn have you lost your mind?”
“I have not!” She snapped. She turned away and muttered: “Just my hope.”
“But David and his men are out looking for the Wyrmrig!” I protested. “Are you all seriously just going to sit here and give up?”
Portia sighed and wiped her face with her pale hands. “Hattie,” she said softly. “It’s now ten after eleven, and there’s still no sign of the dragon. What hope do we have?”
I snapped my head toward the faeries. “Hinrika? Vee?” Verdantia shook her head and closed her eyes. Hinrika just stared blankly at the ceiling, her licorice stained lips slightly parted. I noticed she was wearing the same exquisite lemon-yellow gown from yesterday. If ever there were an omen of deep despair, it was this. Hinrika not changing her evening attire on a daily basis was akin to the sun suddenly deciding not to rise one morning.
Warm fur stroked my ankle, and I looked down to see Fraidy tiptoe gingerly into the middle of the apathetic group. He sat down and looked at everyone. “You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?” Reverend Peacefield hoisted himself to a more upright position and opened one eye.
“The Chief is out there on his own!” Fraidy shouted. “He’s out there fighting the good fight. He’s not lying on his side somewhere bemoaning his lot, no, CPI Trew is taking the battle to the end. Which is what we should be doing.” Fraidy’s head swerved from face to face, his eyes ever-widening at the lackluster response from his Custodian friends. Inexplicably, my kitty stomped out of the room.
“Is… is that the frightened one?” Portia said. She sounded exhausted.
“Yes. It is,” I said, my voice heavy with resentment. I felt the fight draining from me by swift degrees. “But it looks like he’s the bravest of all of us so far.” The scene before me got the better of me, I guess. I pressed my back against the wall and slid down, so I was sitting on the floor next to Portia. “It can’t be all over ... can it?” I whispered. The Witch Fearwyn didn’t answer. Not even Grandma Chimera chimed in with her two-cents worth of worldly wisdom. Was it? Was it all over for us? I closed my eyes to ponder our fates. How did we get here? How did we back ourselves into such an impossible corner? A corner with no obvious escape route.
A dragging sound interrupted my end-of-days thought commentary. Something brushed past my leg, and I heard a soft clattering of metal knocking metal. My eyes flipped open. Fraidy dragged a sack across the floor with his teeth; all of the Infiniti’s dragonsteel helmets resting on top of the cloth vehicle.
“Suit up,” my scaredy-cat barked to his brother’s and sister. “We’re going dragon-slaying. Just because the bipeds have given up the fight, it doesn’t mean we should.” Fraidy reached for his too-large helmet and slipped it on over his tiny head. The headgear slipped down over his eyes almost immediately.
“Dufus, you’re not going anywhere,” Gloom said, watching her brother.
“No, it’s you that’s going nowhere, Gloom,” he said, lining up all the helmets. The little guy had to keep pushing his up so that he could see what he was doing. “And you’re going nowhere fast. Me? I’m going to try and save the world from the Warlock Chief and his fire-breathing pet, that’s where I am going. Nobody’s gonna tell me that I did nothing to stop the menace.”
Jet got up and stood by his brother. He pawed at his own helmet, engraved especially with a flashy ‘J’ on the front. A bolt of lightning erupted from behind the letter in a playful gesture to Jet’s speed. One of Orville’s inspired moves. “Jet’s gonna deal with the menace too, yep, yep,” he said, tossing his headgear on. “ Yep, I’m catnipped up, and I’m raring to go, yep, yep. Yep.” One by one, before the Custodians and friends of the Custodian’s eyes, my kitties stepped up to the plate to don their dragon-steel lids. I felt my breath hitch in my throat. It was beyond touching.
Portia kept her eyes on the scene, sinking ever further in her already slouching position. The Witch Fearwyn remained unmoved by the Infiniti’s bravery.
“You’re wasting your time; you fool cats. You don’t even know who the Wyrmrig is. How can you follow something that hasn’t even presented itself?”
“Typhon Jydrar will make his move soon, you’ll see,” Fraidy said, helping Carbon get his helmet adjusted.
“But you don’t even know if the drifter IS the Wyrmrig,” Portia argued. “What if Jyldrar just stays in hiding? What if he doesn’t make his way to Burning Peak? What then?”
“Hey lady, can it, why don’t you?” Shade said, quite unexpectedly. He stood next to Fraidy and put a paw on his emboldened brother’s shoulder. “Talk about being a dampener,” he said, shaking his head in evident disappointment. “Fraidy’s right, we can’t let the chief do all the work on his own. He needs us because without us he’s vulnurble.”
“Vulnerable, , bro,” Carbon corrected.
I sank back against the wall and stifled a yawn. Weird, I know, when my system should be spiking on cortisol. It was a peculiar feeling this defeat. It almost felt like a warm blanket. And I must admit it was kind of nice not to be running around and worrying where our next bit of life-saving intel would come from. I thought it might be nice just to close my eyes for a second or two …
Onyx’s dulcet tones came to my ears. “There is something rather unsettling about what’s going on here,” he said to his siblings.
“I can almost see the hope oozing out of them,” Gloom said, stepping next to her brother while donning her dragon-steel hat.
“What’s the matter with them all?” Fraidy gasped. “Have they been hexed? Have they?”
Carbon guffawed. “Well, something’s going on. Look at them.” Carbon didn’t need to add anything. Our postures and expressions said it all.
“Yep, yep, thought I sniffed a dirty rat too, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.” Jet grunted. My excitable kitty pressed his nose to the floor and sniffed. He sunk low, and keeping a low profile, Jet slinked across the room, his nose just above the floor sniffing, sniffing, sniffing. He followed a warm lead that turned cold. “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” It was almost a mantra. Jet turned, jumped up onto a stainless steel trolley and sniffed around the low-slung windows of the basement. He pawed at the cobweb-covered casements. I watched, listlessly from my seat on the floor, and hazily wondered why my kitties were making such a fuss over a lost cause.
“It’s getting stinkerier up here, yep, yep,” Jet said, sniffing furiously around the draftiest window in the room. “Yep, oh man, yep, stinkerier and stinkerier by the second.”
Gloom took a step toward her zippy brother. “Be careful, bozo,”
“Yep, yep.” Jet pushed his face into the corner of the drafty window and withdrew it gingerly. He held, between his teeth, a pebble-sized piece of glowing black gem. The glow the stone emitted was a sultry gray. Jet jumped carefully down to the floor and set the item down slowly.
“Bet you One Million Sols that that thing there is a Warlock Warlord Tachyon Killing Black Diamond Device Thingy.” Midnight said, taking a step backward.
“And I bet it’s creating this ….” Eclipse flung a paw toward my defeated friends and me. “... zombie affliction too.”
“Why ain’t it affecting us?” Shade asked, staring at the pebble.
“Maybe the governor doesn’t see us cats as a threat?” Carbon suggested.
Gloom eyed the gem warily. “Shields thinks we’re a joke.”
Eclipse pulled on the faste
ner under his chin to tighten his helmet. “Well, who’s up for showing the governor the joke’s on him?” He said, tugging at his own chin-strap. “We need to get the bipeds on their feet and ready for action. And I think it starts with getting away from that stone.” Eclipse pointed at the black gem.
“Let’s kill it,” Shade said, taking one step closer to the pebble.
“No. We don’t know what it can do,” Onyx said. “We mustn’t threaten it or place it under any kind of attack. I’ve no doubt it’s rigged with some scrupulous security systems, and the last thing we want to do is antagonize it.”
Shade shrugged. “Well, let’s just beat it up real bad then.”
“We could try some cat magic?” Gloom suggested. “Something that wouldn’t hurt it, but would stop whatever it’s doing to the silly people over there.” She nodded at my fallen crew and me.
“I think we shouldn’t mess with this stone at all,” Eclipse said. “I suggest we just let it sit there and do its thing. We all know what happened to Orville.”
“Huh?” Carbon said. “We can’t just let it sit there, goofball. These sacks of potatoes will never get up if we don’t do something with this thing.”
“Yes. We can let it sit there, and we will. What we need to do is move everyone away from it.”
Shade looked stunned. “What, like, on our backs?”
“No, you idiot. We can rig up the Shadowgate charm. We’ll get everyone out that way.”
Midnight’s ears pricked up. “Can we do that? Like, seriously, can we? How?”
Onyx looked at his mysterious brother and then to the slumped Portia. “How do you propose to do this, brother? Portia’s magic-making faculties are supremely impaired right now, I would imagine. And even if she were cogent, I can’t picture her letting anyone inside her head to steal her spells.”
“We only need everyone to grab onto each other,” Eclipse said. “I have the rest covered.”
Shade slapped a paw to his forehead. “Bro, you got into the Witch Fearwyn’s head, didn’t you? When we had to Shadowgate out of Cathedral, you hopped a ride on Portia’s shoulders.”
Eclipse nodded. “Correct, and I happened to have had a paw on her head at the time.” He looked at his siblings. “I absorbed the magic she used to transport us.”
Gloom glared at her brother. “What do you mean ‘absorbed?” Her eyes collapsed to slits. “You went sniffing for it, didn’t you? You went sniffing for that spell while we were all falling into Shadowgate. Portia’s magical channels were wide open to your hack.”
Enigma kitty smiled and said nothing.
“You can really pull off the Shadowgate charm, ‘Clipsy?” Fraidy said, his small eyes discs of liquid hope.
“I’m almost certain I can,” Eclipse said. “I can feel the magic of the spell, so I say we take a chance and try and get the heck out of here.”
Fraidy wasted no time. I saw him trot over to us, the heap of bipeds, and start joining our hands. I smiled weakly as my neurotic cat joined me to my fellow Shadowgate passengers. Portia got my right hand, Maude Dulgrey got my left. I giggled when I saw the little guy lift Horace’s giant fist with both of his front paws and his mouth. “You’re funny,” I said.
Fraidy only dropped Horace’s hammy fist into Reverend Peacefield’s accepting, upturned palm. The other cats helped in the joining of hands ... until the fallen were all linked together.
“Hop on,” Eclipse said, from his place on my lap. The cats took their brother’s advice, and each found themselves a lap.
“Where are we going, though, bro?” Midnight queried, tucking his head under Hinrika’s chin.
“To the chief,” Eclipse said.
I let my eyelids fall shut again, and just before I hurtled into the nauseating spin of Shadowgate, I heard my cryptic cat say: “To the Mwyrden Cliffs.”
CHAPTER 14
Our landing at the bluffs brought us to our anxious senses immediately. Untangling myself from Maude’s bony arm, I looked over the faces of the other Shadowgate transportees. I could see from their expressions that they looked how I felt. Or they felt how I looked. I opened my mouth to ask about everyone’s well being when a flurry of activity and a burst of shouting broke out behind me. I turned and saw a handful of uniformed men from GIPPD stampeding, brooms in hands, toward the edge of the cliffs.
David’s voice zig-zagged along the crosswinds that buffeted these bluffs. “There!” I heard my friend shout. “He just dipped below the cliffs, don’t let him get away. Disable him if you have to.”
I stood up on feeble legs. “David?” I called weakly. The chief spun toward me and the jumble of Custodians, and friends. “Hat? What … what are you doing here?” He ran toward me.
I still felt a little out of it. “We … we were hexed, I think. Shields …he must have--”
“Hat, no time, I’m sorry,” David said, out of breath. He pointed toward the bluffs. “Jyldrar’s just made a break for it.” The chief bit his lip. “It’s happening, Hattie. It’s really happening.”
I finally snapped out of my stupor. “Oh my Goddess, okay, okay … oh my Goddess, we have no brooms!”
David whirled toward his men running at the cliff’s edge. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll get my boys to surrender a few. Follow me.” The chief started off but turned back almost instantly. “Vee, Hinrika, Portia, come on, let’s go. We’ve got a dragon to tame.” My friends dusted themselves off, and with grim faces, they followed me, the cats and the chief to their chariots.
“What about us?” Carpathia queried from underneath her bandaged mouth. “What shall we do?”
I looked back. “I - I don’t know, Carpathia,” I confessed. “But Millie and Dilwyn still haven’t shown up, so maybe go look for them? It’s probably best you all stay together anyway. We’ll let you know if we need any help, okay?”
“Go!” Maude said, heaving herself up using Horace’s enormous knee as leverage. “And may Goddess be with you.”
I blew a kiss to my friends and ran after my cats and the Custodians so we could follow the Wyrmrig to his fate in the heart of Burning Peak.
David threw me a broom. “Here,” he said. “If you don’t mind I think I’ll ride along with you. I need to …. catch my breath.” My friend’s pale face looked drawn and tight. I noticed his eyes looked different, somehow. A simmering light seemed to dance beneath the pale blue of his irises. Shields hold was getting stronger.
“Hop on,” I said, watching the chief’s men, Verdantia, Hinrika and Portia swoop downward from the cliff face.
“Shift over, kitties,” David said, swinging a leg over the broom, and pushing the cats further down toward the thatch. Once the chief was aboard, I pushed off and free-fell for about twenty feet or so from the edge of the Mwyrden bluffs.
Almost as soon as we descended, David’s arm shot out past my ear. “There!” He shouted. I followed his finger to a point about four hundred feet ahead of us. Typhon Jyldrar, no more than insect size from this distance, flailed around on his broom, making a wonky path toward Cathedral.
“Is this it, do you think?” I said, glancing back at the chief. “You think we’re following the real Wyrmrig?”
I couldn’t see my friend’s face as he replied, but his words had an edge to them. As if the Chief were wincing as he spoke. “Jyldrar’s the best lead we’ve got, Hat. We’ve gotta follow it through, I guess.”
I nodded. “Well, I mean, he does seem to be heading toward Cathedral, at least,” I said. “If he takes us to Burning Peak, I think it’ll be a miracle …. but, yeah, you’re right … he’s the best we’ve got.”
“He’s the only lead we’ve got, you mean,” Gloom said, bringing a heavy dose of reality to the conversation.
Carbon tiptoed toward the front of the broom, resting his paws on David’s shoulders behind me. “What’s he doing?” He said, watching Jyldrar’s bizarre moves as he flew in a jerky line across the Sea of Mages.
“One of my men hit his broom,” David said, his vo
ice weary. I felt the man I loved slump against my back, pushing my body alarmingly close to the front of the stick. I turned my head but couldn’t see David’s face. I felt his head fall heavy on my shoulders. “Carbs?” I shouted back. “Is the chief okay?”
A moment’s silence.
“Carbs? Is David alright?”
“Um,” my heat-seeking kitty said quietly. “Not even close.”
Oh, my Goddess. Oh, my Goddess. I tried turning again but only succeeded in making the broom veer violently right.
“Boss!” Shade called. “Keep the broom true. We’ll make sure the chief doesn’t fall off, don’t worry.”
I was utterly freaked out.
I licked my lips. “Okay, okay,” I breathed. “I’ll keep heading toward Cathedral,” I said, trying to calm myself down.
“Just keep following the drifter dude,” Carbon said, nudging an encouraging head into my back.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. You’re sure David’s secure?”
“He’s not goin’ anywhere, boss-lady,” Midnight advised. “We’ve got him covered.”
“Okay.”
I took a deep breath and narrowed my eyes on the flailing target, and with a newfound determination, I swooped down to get closer to the drifter with the Elder Code and the rest of the pursuing Custodians, catching up with Portia almost straight away. The old witch looked across the expanse of sky between us. “We’re going to land down at the back of Burning Peak. Understand?”
I nodded across to her. “Even if the drifter doesn’t land there, we are going to stay toward the rear of the mountain.”
I nodded again.
“Hattie, are you sure you understand …. You look … wait, what’s wrong with CPI Trew?” She eyed the chief with a hard stare.
“Take a guess,” I shouted across.
Portia nodded. “He’ll get worse the closer he gets to the governor.” And with those comforting words uttered, the Witch Fearwyn swooped downward to pass on the intel of intended landing spot to both Hinrika and Verdantia. I kept my altitude, and with David slumped behind me, I followed the drifter and the rest of my crew from above.
Moggies, Magic and Murder Page 74