For A Few Minutes More
Page 15
I oriented myself by my bubbles, placed my newly shod feet against my still-lit rock, timed the contracting and dilating mouth of the anemone, and jumped as hard as I could.
I outraced my bubbles as I rocketed towards the distant ceiling. The purple tentacles writhed towards me, but this time I knew them, I knew their patterns, I knew what they wanted, I knew their blind spots. I made fins of my hands and friends with the water. It was easy, really. Just like Wind Stance, only with water as my medium.
I intercepted the ceiling with a four-point landing on my hands and feet and clung there, just out of the reach of the anemone. Lacking my rock, I put another Light spell on my dagger—
[Daily Mana Cast: 2/3]
—and held it between my teeth as I crawled along the rocky cave, moving slowly against the current, avoiding the spiky black urchins and smaller anemones, until everything sloped upwards and finally broke the water’s surface.
I took my dagger out of my mouth and emerged into what looked like another world. The walls of the vertically rising cave dripped with stalactites and waving sheets of rock as delicate as the finest satin, lit by the blue moss from the sewers, a few sporadic clusters of Lucerna Nanorum, and the rippling light of my own still submerged dagger. Everything glistened and sparkled with a fine coating of mist produced by the thin waterfall cascading from a wide opening about twenty feet above me.
For a moment I just tread water and breathed real air, happy to bask in more subtle shades of blue and green than I had names for. But while the cave was beautiful, it was not warm, and I was feeling the need to get out of this water. I swam over to the waterfall, and tried to see the opening it came from, but my light didn’t reach that far.
I had to concede this logic. I almost took a deep breath, then remembered that buoyancy was not a diver’s friend, and let out all my air instead. Past the churning bubbles at the base of the falls, the cave floor was deeper than I expected. I had to stop and take a couple of deep breaths before reaching the bottom.
[Swim11 check: Success]
There was some stuff down here. It mostly looked like rocks, sand, and various debris, but there were quite a few goblin beads (which usually only came out of goblin’s stomachs), a few coins, and, wedged beneath a femur --almost as if they were clinging to it-- the Gloves of the Ossian Puppetmaster.
[Perception check: Success]
“We could just leave the evil things down here.” I suggested, remembering how they felt on my hands. “And let them rot.”
I supposed they would. I tucked them into what was left of my belt, and followed my sigh upwards.
The wall behind the waterfall did not look less daunting for my side excursion. It still looked ethereally beautiful, and fiendishly difficult to scale.
I made it halfway up the wall before my numb fingers grabbed what I thought was a nice rocky outcropping but which was in fact a dead mushroom.
[Climb12 check: Failed]
I was still staring in betrayal at the lump of unilluminated Lucerna Nanorum as the wall fell away from me and I fell into space, and then down, and then into the water with a stinging splash.
“Not mine!” I grumbled around my dagger as I made my way back to the wall. Still, no way forward but up.
Despite a few scares, I made it all the way to the top this time, now at least warmed up a bit from my efforts. The cave led away from the falls for another ten feet, and then branched into a pitchfork of tunnels that twisted away, the trickling stream winding amongst them.
Now finally on dry land (or the closest equivalent to be had), and away from the mocking eyes of other people, I shrugged out of my sea-saturated clothing and squeezed out as much water as I could. I then dunked it in the fresher water of the stream and rinsed out the salt and leftover bits of tentacle goo, and as I wrung it dry again, I noticed an earring glinting on the cloth, its post snagged on the loose fibers. Aha! My sirenstone!
Thus inspired, I quickly unrolled the rest of it and checked the folds I used as pockets. Please let them be here, please let them not have come loose… There!
To my delight, the sirenstones were still tied up in a neat little knot that was now officially worth about ten times as much as everything else I had ever owned put together.
I unrolled my wraps the rest of the way, a sinking feeling in my stomach, but even with the whole silken length laid out, there was no sign of Cynric’s Goggles.
I managed an outfit out of the remains of my silks and acid-laced uniform, which, among other things, now had no sleeves. I tore my silks in half and used them to at least wrap my forearms and give me a place to stash my daggers.
“Well, let’s see if he does.” I took my earring, steeled myself for the pain, and pushed it through my earlobe, which was once again whole after my Resurrection. A single drop of blood fell into the cool water at my feet.
“...and then I said, ‘Darling, if you want something on my resume besides that tight ass of yours, you’re going to have to put it there yourself’.”
“Oh my God, Blaze, you didn’t!”
“You’re damn straight I did! And then he said something even I won’t repeat about my mother, and THAT’S when I hit him. I retrospect I shouldn’t have gone to the interview drunk. On the plus side, the rest of my afternoon is free for raiding, if anyone’s up for a quick Hound-Vod-Shroud...”
I practiced drawing my weapons as I listened to Blaze’s rant, but while I hadn’t forgotten how to use them, they didn’t quite fit into my katas. Everything I knew was based around a flat palm or a fist, and when I tried any version of a ki strike, I seemed to fumble my daggers. My dagger was also still the best light source, unless I drew more magic and lit something else, but didn’t have the mana for more than one more spell, and I’d rather save it. Oh well. One problem at a time.
All three branches of the cave fed the stream that fed the waterfall, so which one had my gear come from? Holding my dagger low to the ground, I bent over and examined the places where the streams came together. All three were of roughly equivalent water flow, but only one had the silt on the bottom of it recently disturbed, as if by a pile of clothing rolling downstream.
[Hunting13 check: Success]
<
The middle tunnel it is.>
The stream twisted and wound its way through a narrow tunnel of natural stone that eventually became a half-finished utility tunnel of sorts, its pipes and levers long since corroded away. My feet splashed through water and crunched on small bones and my bright dagger gave temporary shadows to glowing mushrooms, until I came to a cylindrical metal door rusted and set askew of its no longer cylindrical metal frame, the victim of some long ago seismic activity.
The stream poured out from under the off kilter base from a wide, smiling crack too narrow for me to fit through. Probably. Safely, anyway. I went up to investigate.
The door was more a hatchway, designed to fit anything up to a human and then some, and swing outward toward me on some spectacular, no-nonsense hinges which might once have been brass but were now a bluish green alloy of their own devising. The bottom one had snapped completely. Hmm. I grasped the edge of the doorway, braced my feet on the frame, and heaved outward.
[Strength check: Failed]
The door shifted a crack, but not much more.
I glowered at the immobile lump of metal in front of me. Once upon a time, this piece of engineering had probably been so well balanced it would have swung open at a touch, unlocked. What I needed was a lever, but my daggers weren’t long enough. I idly flipped my lit one into the air, catching it by its handle, making the shadows dance.
Back when there was no corrosion impeding its opening. I looked at my dagger. I looked at the hinges.
Ignoring Voice, the non-existent time machine, and all philosophizing on divine contract theory, I climbed up on the once brassy hinges and began picking and scraping away the corrosion with my dagger, focusing on the sliding joint of the metal.
[Trapsmithing14 check: Success]
When I figured I had it pretty much cleared, I crawled back over to the far side, set my feet again, and heaved it open. It swung about halfway out before stopping with a final sounding skreee-thunk! noise that left it set halfway open in the tunnel. I swung down one handed and landed lightly in the room beyond.
The room was long, low, rectangular, and stank. The stream ran in a gutter through the middle of the room, and all around the sides were…
…cages. Improvised, ramshackle cages of every description; vertical wooden slats looked like a hastily repurposed fruit box, which sat on top of a very professional looking birdcage for ostriches, which was next to a lobster trap, and so on. The only thing each one had in common was that it looked old, and was accessible from the isle.
The stink was coming from the cages. Dagger held in front of me, breathing shallowly through my mouth, I advanced on the nearest one. Inside was a dead dog, long decayed, a few scraps of fur clinging to a complete skeleton.
“What are you talking about?”
Each cage held the remnants of some poor creature. Not all of them looked like pets; I saw a few raccoons, one pig, and a bird cage of ten recently deceased red squirrels, minus their tails.
“But who would do this to a bunch of animals? Just lock them up to starve and die down here? Why?” One very well-made cage in front of me was empty, and locked. Scratches around the keyhole suggested that the thieves hadn’t bothered to steal the key, thus accounting for its empty status. Not all of the corpses were animals, either. I passed a coffin, grave dirt still clinging to the outside, containing a well dressed, elderly corpse and a bouquet of flowers.
Next to the coffin was a giant, rather open bird cage big just enough to hold a human, provided the human didn’t want to stretch or turn around or move in any way.
Voice identified.
At the bottom of the gibbet, though, was not a pile of bones, but a scrap of blue cloth, and a pair of selenite and opal encrusted goggles, last seen on my hastily abandoned corpse.
I settled Cynric’s on my head with a sigh of relief that was one part having-all-my-gear-back, and at least two parts not-having-to-worry-about-how-weird-it-would-be-to-find-your-own-corpse.
“I thought the little goblins were going to eat me.”
“That’s just strange. Goblins are always hungry.” I countered. “You really think they could resist a feast like this?” I waved at the corridor of cages.
“Scared of wha-aaaahh!”
One of the things in the cages moved. I jumped backwards about ten feet into the air before realizing my inevitable motion would land me on one of the other rotting cages, dropped into Wind Stance, and then twisted out the rest of my momentum in a new kata I was naming Going Over Waterfall Backwards While Avoiding Being Scalped By A Barracuda, which is what I probably looked like. I managed to land back in the open gutter that passed for the stream, and did not knock over an entire row of precariously balanced cages.
[Dexterity check: Success]
I brandished my dagger the cage, illuminating the thing inside of it.
But the zombie blinked two blue eyes at me, the color of faded indigo, and made a pathetic little meeping noise.
I’ve seen those eyes before, somewhere. I pulled down my goggles and looked closer. The blue eyes sat in a mop of matted feline fur, the cream and white swirls hardly recognizable anymore under the filth and grime, but the regal stare I had last seen in a portrait in my bedroom at La Baleine was utterly unmistakable.
“Pequod?”
[Lost and Found: Quest update!]
[New objective: Nine lives, save the cat]
“Mrowr!” He demanded, pushing his nose against the bars of his oversized cage, squeezing as if this time either the bars or his bones would give way to freedom. By the rubbed raw skin around his face, this wasn’t the first time he’d tried it.
“Ok, ok!” I told him. “It’s ok, I’m going to get you out.”
The cage had been designed to hold something big but not dexterous; spring loaded latches sat on either corner of the front side, the entire section of which would then swing up and out. A long armed human or elf could probably work a latch with either hand and then lift the gate with both arms; I, however, could not reach both latches at once.
I cursed as I fiddled with the second latch, making the first one (that I had oh-so-delicately shimmied into its unlock position) snap closed yet again.
[Trapsmithing check: Failed]
I paused and listened, and heard a repetitive sound that might have been distant footsteps. Must work faster.
&
nbsp; There wasn’t enough flex in the door to open the latches one at a time, and my every attempt to keep one open while I messed with the other hadn’t worked. If I had something to brace it with, maybe I could jam it open, but I didn’t.
The distant sounds of footsteps came closer, now accompanied by squabbling goblin voices.
“This is dumb job. Why can’t we eat it? Dead squishies not fight back!”
“’Cause Shaman says so. You remember what happened last time someone ate bodies.”
“But he only wants bones, not guts! I just wanna eat squishiest bits. Not bones.”
“No eating! Or else WE get to be the dead body.”
“Yeah.” said yet another voice. “We just get some more bones and come back. Then we get shinies and not dead.”
“… dumb rule. I could eat the squishy bits AND still give bones back, no problem…”
“Hurry up! You have sack?”
“…bone farming is dumb. Worms eat, goblins hungry… not fair…”
I stepped back. What I really needed was longer arms, pronto. Or someone else to hold one end. What I had was an impatient, mostly starved cat, a glowing dagger, and roomful of stinking bones.
Bones…
As quietly as I could, I broke open one of the wooden cages and sorted through an unidentified pile of decay for a couple of vertebra, which I carved out so the hole was just able to be wedged over the each latch on Pequod’s cage, then stepped back and put on the Gloves of the Ossian Puppetmaster.
The greasy, creepy tingle walked up my arms as soon as my fingers slid into their slots. My sense of touch seemed to expand away from me, poking and prodding where it shouldn’t, violating the physics of flesh. I swallowed against the rising nausea, grasped each newly placed vertebra with the shadowy projections of my hands that only I could see, concentrated, and flung my hands up and over my head.
The vertebrae snapped the latches up and out simultaneously, flinging the cage door open—