The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island

by Jeffery Russell

  “Well,” she said. “It isn’t instantly fatal it would seem.”

  “Not to pixies, at least,” Leery said.

  Grott gave a small wiggle to the oars, bringing them closer. Ginny reached out a gloved hand, letting her fingers just touch against the edges of the black mist. She still had fingers after, which was a promising sign. She dipped her hand in and then out. Still ok. She took a deep breath and gave Grottimus a nod. With a pull of the oars the boat slid silently into the darkness.

  The fairy lamp was enough to give them about five feet of visibility, a bubble of light in the fog. They stopped just inside, listening, sniffing, scrutinizing. The boat moved forward, foot by foot. The fog tasted of rank seaweed and left a slightly greasy residue on their skin.

  “Stop!” Leery said. She pointed at the water to starboard. “Do you see it?”

  Ginny did. A line in the water. Dark ripples this side of the line, complete darkness on the other. It was the edge of a hole in the sea. A dark pit in the water. She blinked a few times, thinking it had to be a mirage, some sort of illusion.

  “D'ya think there’s a wall or something down there, holding it back?” Leery asked. “Why would someone do that?”

  The question on Ginny’s mind wasn’t the ‘why?’, but the ‘how?’. Some sort of structure in the water? None of the undersea races were prone to much in the way of construction projects, as far as she knew, and building something that would account for what she was seeing would be the undersea equivalent of building the Kadenthar dam. She gestured and Grottimus maneuvered the rowboat closer. There was no wall. At least, none she could see. The water simply stopped. She reached into her pack and pulled out one of her iron spikes. Rule #16: Always have something you can throw. She gave it a toss.

  Followed by several seconds of silence.

  “I didn’t hear anything, did…?” Leery started to ask but then they all heard it. The distant clink of the spike landing, somewhere far below.

  “All the way down,” Leery said.

  “That seems a pretty solid answer to the mystery o' disappearing ships.” Grottimus said. “They sail or drift in here and fall in.”

  Ginny was thinking hard. Her engineering knowledge didn’t seem applicable. Mungo, however…

  Some of the dwarves suspected there was a bit of rivalry between Ginny and Mungo. Mungo often coyly pointed out any mistakes Ginny made or phrased his observations in a way that made it seem she’d overlooked something. Some even suspected he was trying to work his way into Ginny’s position. Ginny, in turn, seemed hypersensitive about any perceived shortcomings on her part, making it seem she was nervous about the same thing. The truth was, at least in Ginny’s mind, that she and Mungo had fundamentally different approaches. She was all about the nuts and bolts. Mungo was about the science and the process. Ginny felt both approaches were needed which was why she had Mungo on the trap team. She wasn’t concerned for her job. As long as the gnome thought he was a dwarf and wore a cat-fur beard around she felt he could safely be ruled out of obtaining any command positions. His insights were valuable, however, and this looked right up his alley.

  More data first, however.

  It wasn’t just a pit. The line of darkness stretched away to both sides. They were sitting on the edge of a chasm, as if the sea had been parted by great hands and never put back.

  She held the lantern up and squinted in at Wink. She hadn’t told anyone she’d named him. She’d never hear the end of it. His flowing tuft of hair, physique like a chiseled marble, wings that glittered in a rainbow of colors like…yeah, never, ever mentioning that she’d named him seemed wise. He was geared up, wearing a tiny little helmet she’d made from a thimble and carrying a stickpin sword. Not much as far as weapons went but he seemed to like it and he enjoyed practicing against the mosquitoes she trapped for him.

  “You ready?” she said. The pixie saluted. She extended the pole out over the edge of the hole, the pixie lantern dangling from the end. She began turning the reel, lowering him down. There was fifty feet of line on the pole. Not enough to get to the bottom, certainly, but hopefully enough to get a glimpse. The angle was wrong for them to be able to see it themselves, unless one of them wanted to try leaning over the edge, an option that no one had seen fit to even bring up. They were going to have to rely entirely on the pixie for information. The difficulty with pixies wasn’t in their observation skills but with their utter lack of long term memory. The length of the reel line wasn’t so much determined by engineered capacity as it was by pixie attention span. She reached the end of the line, counted to twenty then began reeling him back up.

  The water at the edge of the hole began glowing an eerie green as the lantern approached the top. She swung it back into the boat once it cleared the edge, beginning the questioning quickly before the grain of rice that passed for Wink’s brain wandered off somewhere else.

  “Could you see the bottom?” she asked.

  Wink gave a single nod, then removed his helmet and flipped his hair back with a flourish. His chest glistened with pixie dew. Ginny swallowed.

  “Were there shipwrecks?”

  Wink turned sideways, put his hand on his hip, looked back at her and gave another slow nod. Maybe she should make a tiny little pair of underwear for him? Naw.

  “Did you see anything dangerous?”

  He shook his head no and puffed his chest out. Ginny puffed her cheeks out.

  “Did you see anything moving?”

  But she was too late. Wink was scratching his butt and no longer paying any attention. She dwelt on that for a few extra seconds before lowering the lantern.

  “Take us out of here,” she said. “Mungo needs a chance to see this hole.”

  “I’m all fer distance ‘tween us and that,” Grottimus said. He looked back over his shoulder and tugged on the oars, moving them away from the yawning gap in the sea.

  “I got more questions now than I did when we came in,” Ginny said.

  “If there’s an answer it will be in one of two places,” Leery said. “Either there’s something in the middle and we’re going to have to navigate our way through the fog and holes in the ocean to find it…” she trailed off.

  “…or?” Ginny asked.

  “…Or we’re going to have to figure out a way down to the bottom. Other than falling in.” Leery left the rest unspoken-she would likely survive falling in. Ginny was never a fan of any plan that started with breaking Leery. She knew the falls hurt. Maybe a lot if she landed on some broken piece of a ship. It might be a necessary fall for Leery to take, however, depending on what scheme they came up with to descend. The dinghies weren’t stable enough to support the weight of someone descending on a rope. Maybe they could be modified somehow…

  “Thinking we might have a problem,” Grott said, interrupting her line of thought.

  He’d stopped rowing and was frowning at the dark mists surrounding them. “I reckon we shoulda cleared the fog a couple rows ago.”

  “Did we get turned around somehow?” Leery asked. “I’ll pull us out with the rope.”

  The rope was tied to the stern, trailing down limply into the water. Leery lifted it and began pulling it in, waiting for it to go taut.

  “Only a twenty foot rope,” Grottimus said. “Should…”

  His voice trailed off as the end of the rope came into view, slithering across the surface of the water like a snake as Leery pulled it in. She examined the end of it.

  “Wasn’t untied or cut. Looks kinda melted.” She handed it to Grott. He gave it a brief look, snorted through his mustache and handed it to Ginny.

  “Oi!” Grott bellowed. The shout was muffled by the fog, as if they were in a small room with thick curtains.

  They listened in silence, ears straining. Ginny was staring at the end of the rope without really seeing it, her mind preoccupied.

  “Hallo!” came the reply. It was distant, thickly padded.

  “Over there,” Leery said, pointing.

&nb
sp; “It sounded to me like it was that way,” Grottimus said, pointing in a different direction than Leery was. Ginny frowned. Neither of them were pointing in the direction she’d heard the shout from.

  “Keep yellin!” she called.

  There was a response, even fainter, hard to hear over the gentle slap of the water against the boat’s hull. It was followed by a steady string of thumps. Someone, presumably Keezix, banging an oar against the rail. The sound was like the fog. Everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. Grottimus pulled one of the oars free and started thumping back.

  Dwarven mining language was, like the Dwarven language itself, something that was known to exist by the non-Dwarf world but wasn’t even slightly understood. Centuries in the mines had created an intricate system of communication via the sound of picks and hammers on rock. Great Dwarvish epics had been told and retold, poetry composed, updates on what Glorin said that Ginfel had said about Morginna’s mother’s casserole, all entirely via clinking noises. Were those Dwarves simply banging on their shields before battle or were they communicating shifts in tactical positions? Is the dwarf at the bar tapping his pipe on his mug along with the music or is he telling the Dwarf across from you that you’re holding a pair of threes? Dwarves never taught their language to non-Dwarves and, as their tapping was not only communicating in their unknown language but also utilized a base eleven encryption code, it remained a curiosity.

  “FOG BUGGERING SOUND,” Grott tapped out. “DISORIENTED”.

  The distant thumping ceased as their message was considered.

  “Follow the current out,” Leery said after a bit. “It was pulling us in. Stands to reason rowing against it will take us out.”

  A silence fell over them, as if sound might disrupt discerning the direction the boat was drifting. Grott stuck one oar in the water and gave a slight pull, reorienting the boat. He started rowing again. They waited, straining for a glimpse of anything that wasn’t fog.

  “Couple possibilities spring to mind,” Grott said, after a minute of rowing. “Either the current is stronger and all we’re doing is sittin' in the same spot or else it changed direction on us once we came in and we’re just rowing deeper. Either way I’m gettin' the notion that we strolled straight into the same trap as everyone else that went missin' in here.”

  “I don’t think we’re going deeper,” Ginny said. “We’d have come across the hole agaAAAHHH!”

  This last bit was not what she’d originally meant to say but came in response to the sudden appearance of a ball of flame that went streaking past just over their heads.

  “That was one of Mungo’s flares,” she said from her new position lying prone in the bottom of the boat. “It came from that way!”

  “Yep,” Grott said, pulling on the oars. “Got a line burned across my eyeballs showing me the way now everytime I close me eyes.”

  The fog parted before them seconds later, as if they’d been just on the edge all along, mere yards from safety. For all Ginny knew they had been. She took a deep gulp of fog-free air and exhaled it up at the glittering array of stars overhead. Mungo was grinning at her from the other boat, eyes gigantic behind his goggles, smoking launch tube still clutched in his tiny hand. She looked back over her shoulder at the wall of blackness. She thought about the deep chasms in the water, the shifting currents, the thick, oily fog. She considered the tangle of rope with the melted end. She looked back at Mungo and raised her eyebrow.

  “This one’s going to be rough.”

  ***

  The command team clustered in the captain’s cabin along with Skulk, Catchpenny and Mungo. After being told of what the expedition had found Thud had briefed the entire team then called the smaller meeting. Thud knew the value of many ingenious minds mulling a problem but he also knew the value of limiting the number of heads at a table. If any bright ideas popped up among the rest of the dwarves they’d let him know.

  “…detach the mast and mount it over the side with a block and tackle-” Ginny was saying.

  “We’d need to be able to hold the ship still in the current for that to work,” Skulk interrupted.

  “Attaching two rowboats together to form a submersible compartment would be superior,” Mungo said. “It could descend and allow the occupant to swim a short distance. The ship could be further away.”

  “That still don’t be solving the problem of the current,” Skulk said. “That’s me pressing concern, not how to get down into your hole but how to keep the entire bloody ship from getting down there. Rest of the topics be moot ‘til we’ve got that sussed.”

  There was silence at the table.

  Thud rested his hand on Skulk’s shoulder.

  “I don’t think that’s a problem we can solve, lad. We got lots of tricks up our sleeves but generating wind ain’t one of ‘em. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s…” Skulk began, then fell silent. He bowed his head.

  “And that’s the problem we should be working on,” Thud said. “Not how to get ourselves down from the ship, but how to get the ship itself down. Because we’re likely gonna still be on it when it reaches the edge.”

  “We could abandon ship and row,” Catchpenny said.

  “Don’t fancy our chances there much better,” Thud said. “There’s a lot of water and a lot of tentacles between us and anywhere else. So, there’s yer puzzle. Figure how to survive a month of sea monsters and starvation or solve how to survive dropping a ship a couple hundred feet onto a seabed. We’ve got about three hours. No problem, right?”

  Chapter Ten

  “You’re sure this is going to work?” Thud asked.

  “Absolutely,” Mungo lied.

  The base principle was sound. Sort of. They’d rerigged the sails to the top of the masts. Now they were parachutes. Thud had quite liked the idea of the ship floating its way down, sails billowed overhead. But Mungo knew that the ship was far too heavy. He’d done the math nine times in his head already and was running through it again just to be certain. At best the sails would slow the ship’s decent from ‘crushing death’ speed to ‘probably fatal’. He didn’t think that was going to happen either but calculating the probabilities of what he thought would happen relied on information he didn’t have. On the bright side, he was going to learn it in about sixteen minutes.

  Blackfog Island lay before them, curving up and away. A hemisphere of darkness. A black eye in a sunless sea. The ship drifted toward it. Mungo had gone around and made sure everyone had their bladder-buoys on and inflated. Apart from keeping anyone from drowning he figured they might serve as some sort of fall protection as well. More data that he would receive in fifteen minutes.

  He and Ginny had spent a few minutes speculating on the nature of the hole she’d seen in the water. They’d come to the conclusion that engineering was not responsible. They were sailing into some sort of magical construct. Mungo hated magic. It didn’t answer to reason. It was possible the ship would just float down anyway, perhaps borne on the backs of a thousand birds. He didn’t think that likely but one never knew with magic. At least for another fourteen minutes.

  He felt the melted rope was important. The rope inside the fog, as well as the boat and the people, had been unharmed. The rope outside the boat was unharmed. Yet the rope where the darkness began was destroyed. Not instantly, but over time. It was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit anywhere, and it was a magical puzzle piece. Even magic had rules. Mungo didn’t know them and his brain had been circling around it like a wrapper in a drainpipe, trying to make it logically fit somewhere, knowing that logic was the wrong tool. Another thing to pay attention to in thirteen minutes.

  He glanced around nervously. He was going to have to put part two of the survival plan in motion very shortly. The part he hadn’t mentioned to anyone. There was going to be confusion and questions. The trick was selling it hard enough and fast enough that everyone responded before too many questions were asked. Hence the wait. Twelve minutes might be long enough for questions.
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  He had counted in his head, observing how long it took the dwarves to do what was going to need to be done. He’d taken measures to help with speed. He knew it was cutting it thin. There were going to be risks. Mungo was used to risk. He was, after all, a special agent of the Gnome Intelligence Bureau. At least for eleven more minutes.

  A deep cover agent among the dwarves. Mungo was a master of acting and disguise. The dwarves had never given the slightest hint of suspicion that he wasn’t one of them. The cat-fur beard absolutely sold it. The only person he’d told had been Durham, and Durham was sworn to secrecy. A secret that would last about nine minutes. He silently reprimanded himself. They were going to survive.

  Maybe.

  He’d know in eight minutes.

  It was time.

  “CLIMB THE MASTS!” Mungo yelled. “QUICK! EVERYONE! CLIMB THE MASTS!”

  Thud was moving even before the questions started filling his head. He trusted his team. It was a prerequisite for being hired. He chose experts and then bowed to their expertise. And when one of his team barked a command everyone knew to follow the order and save the explanations for later. If there were reservations about trusting the orders of a barking mad gnome-genius who wore a cat-fur beard and thought he was a dwarf then Thud wouldn’t have had him on the team. Insane or not, Mungo had thoughts and ideas that Thud didn’t even possess the vocabulary to approach. He grabbed Skulk as he ran past, tugging him into motion.

  “Wha…?” Skulk said.

  “Move now, questions later!”

  “VANGUARD!” the gnome yelled. “CHOP THE MASTS! THREE-QUARTERS THROUGH!”