The merfrogs clambered along the walls above, some leaping into the tangle and using a plank to spring from again, or a rope to swing with their momentum. Each jump caused the structure to shake and creak. Things shifted, tightened or loosened, groaned as the pressing weight shifted, testing. A broken plank dropped, clattering back and forth on its way down, spinning and wobbling to finally making a loud thunk when Keezix deflected it away with her shield.
The spears came next.
***
Catchpenny clung to a barnacle with one hand and sucked the thumb of the other. The tower was a melding of roughly worked stone, sea-stone and coral all the way up. It was crusted with barnacles and seaweed, starfish and urchins. And a key thing about dead forms of encrusting sea-life, Catchpenny was realizing, was that they tended to be very sharp. He’d had a decent set of leather gloves once that someone had given him as payment for collecting ingredients for a pie. He’d cut them up to make a strap for his quiver. It wasn’t a decision he’d had cause to regret until now. He pulled his thumb out of his mouth and examined the wound. Fortunately, when it came to archery, the thumb was mostly just along for the ride. He scanned the tower above him, looking for a climbing route. The smoke was making it difficult. Occasionally an eddy would reveal a bit of what lay above but most of the climbing so far had been determined simply by the location of the only grips he could see. The pressure of time weighed on him. He had no idea how the fight inside was faring but he had only as long as the dwarves inside were able to maintain their assault.
He jumped to the side, fingers latching into a vertical seam in the cyclopean stonework of the ancient structure that had been there. Was it something that had come through from wherever this sea god was from? Or had something, somehow, built a worked stone temple at the bottom of the sea? Had there been a time when the ocean hadn’t been here?
He worked his way up the seam, gingerly. There were plenty of prior occupants here and every fresh grip came with sharp pain. He had cuts on every finger now, making his earlier concern seem somewhat mundane. Now his hope was that there was enough left of his fingers when he got to the top to hold the bow in the first place. Was it smarter to stop and correct his error by taking the time to tear strips off his shirt to wrap his hands? Or would the time that took be what caused them to fail? And if he arrived in place faster but unable to fire the bow? That would be equally problematic. He wedged an arrow into the end of the seam and used it as a foothold to jump up and catch onto a bit of masonry overhead.
He’d reached the top of the worked stone of the enigmatic ruin. The root of the tower. There was a small opening in the side. A window once, perhaps, now a hole lined with broken brick and draped with rotting seaweed. He could hear the sounds of battle inside. He was tempted to go in and execute what would undoubtedly be a brilliant flanking maneuver. But no. He had more important places to be. He sprang up, catching a knob of stone over the opening, the ground spinning far below now. Upwards and onwards. The sizzling green light from the portal overhead cast dark shadows down the tower’s face. The sound may as well have been a fuse.
Fortunately not many spears made it all the way down. The ropes and walkways were as much of an impediment to missile fire from above as it was for those below. They raised their shields overhead in the classic Dwarven ‘Iron Tortoise’ defense. All save Keezix. She used the cover of the shields to dart back outside.
“Hold!” she yelled as she disappeared.
“Hold, she says,” Grottimus muttered. His face was in shadow, save a thin stripe of pale blue light from a gap in the shields. He flinched at a loud thump from his shield.
Thud grunted in a manner suggestive of a chuckle cut short at both ends. “Hope she’s hurryin'. The froggies are bound to think up something new to try when they run low on spears.”
“Got it!” Keezix yelled.
Thud looked over, trying to determine what it was. This was mostly a challenge due to the sudden billow of smoke. It was the ballista round, still spewing smoke, fuel not yet spent. How long was left? Thud thought that they lasted a couple of minutes and that had to be an amount of time of which only a sliver remained. He grabbed on and helped Keezix hold the bolt overhead, pushing it up through the shields, letting the smoke begin to fill the interior. The dwarves separated, breaking the tortoise, making for ropes and planks to try to climb up as the smoke rose. The clouds allowed them to advance but put them in an even worse position than before. Climbing up through a swaying garbage heap, clinging to ropes and hoping that the support you were about to jump to was going to hold were not the ideal conditions to meet a frog coming the other way. Especially after seeing some of the jumps they’d made. It had put a stop to the spears, though, so at least they could be fuddled without being skewered.
“Ideas?” Thud yelled.
“There,” Ginny said. “In the floor.”
He looked where she was pointing. A crude raft of planks among the debris on the floor, and darkness beneath them. An opening. Another chamber below. The obvious problem was that it led down, the opposite direction from where they were currently trying to push. They were here on a rescue mission, among other things, and down now looked the most likely place for prisoners to be. If not, maybe there was something of use in there. He was hoping for rockets but decided to temper his expectations.
Thud and Ginny scrambled across the floor, each grabbing an edge of the cover. They slid it aside. Ginny gagged delicately, Thud less so. The smell from the hole managed to rise above the pervasive odor of rotting sea-life in a stunning expression of individuality. It was not a smell that suggested rockets. Thud was about to mentally write the hole off as being the merfrog midden pit and was going to be happy to do so when a face appeared in the darkness below, staring upwards.
Rend.
Rend grinned. “Well, that explains that bit o' noise up there.”
“Still a lot o' frogs up here,” Thud said. “Didn’t want you to feel left out.”
“I’ll be up directly. Found the others, by the way.” He turned to the side and called out. “We’re out! Who’s first?”
Moments later he clasped his hands as a step and hoisted a pirate up through the hole at a high enough velocity to give him a few feet of clearance. Thud and Ginny were pushing him over the floor before he landed more than they were catching him. Another pirate followed quickly after. They were still fussing about trying to stabilize the first pirate and missed him. Fortunately for the second pirate, however, he was knocked to safety by the impact of the third pirate coming up. The third pirate was relaunched moments later, now holding on to his head and looking sour-faced.
“We’re running out o' smoke!” Keezix yelled. She knocked a spear aside with her shield. “All we did was add more targets!” Behind her the rest of the group struggled to help pull Rend out of the hole. They were making progress in an awkward sort of way that involved a lot of grabbing in places no one on either side of the situation wanted grabbed.
There was a searing flash of light from above, bright enough to leave spots in Thud’s vision even though he’d been looking down. It was gone in an instant, followed by a skull ringing crack of thunder. Splintered planks began falling down around them, some of them smoldering. The lightning bolt had come from the top of the tower, blasting its way through any obstacle it encountered on the way down. Thud was having trouble focusing on anything other than the large scorch mark in the stone a few feet away. Had that been someone a second ago? His ears were ringing louder than he could think and each of his eyeballs seemed to be looking from the bottom of a deep well. He let his neck roll back to flop his head into a position to look up.
Obiya was there, high above, the dark rings and spots in his vision swimming around her and framing her against the searing light of the orb floating overhead. Thud wasn’t sure how long it was going to take her to send another one of those bolts down but he wasn’t too interested in finding out either, come to think of it. She’d joined in with the frogme
n? Not the outcome he’d hoped for from them meeting. Their shared interests must have outweighed their exclusive interests. Or, at least, that was what the archon had convinced the frogs of. Thud guessed that she was either in charge or planned to be at the moment that it mattered.
“Retreat!”
They’d never even laid eyes on the book. But they’d rescued the pirates. Some of them. More importantly, they’d kept an entire tower full of frogmen occupied for a minute and had even managed to grab Obiya’s attention. Mission accomplished.
“Drop it on three!” Thud yelled. As the others scrambled for the hole leading out of the tower, Thud and the Vanguard dwarves quickly scattered, shields over their heads to fend off the spears as they began falling again in the wake of the lightning.
“One!…” He pulled his mace from his belt as he ran.
“…Two!” Thud cocked his arm, mace in hand. The others did likewise.
“…Three!”
They all swung, bashing at some of what looked to be the key supports for the rickety infrastructure above. It creaked and shifted, more planks dropping down through the hole the lightning bolt had made. The frogmen were scrambling now which, while possibly of individual benefit, was doing no favors to the group as a whole. Their shifting weight antagonized the tower’s wounds.
A sudden searing pain in his leg dropped him to his knees. An opportunistic frogman flinging a spear while he was swinging his mace, slicing down the length of his calf and into the floor. It was a long cut and he was guessing pretty deep along the middle at least. Then followed the heartbeat-long moment of hope, looking at a fresh wound, waiting to see what it did. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. And then the moment ends and the blood comes welling out at a much faster pace than you’re comfortable with. Yep, that was a bad one.
Thud struggled back to his feet. The first burn of pain from the impact was fading but now the wound was sending out its first throb or two of agony.
“Again!” Thud yelled through gritted teeth. They swung again. There were cracking noises. There was a deep groan from the wooden structures above. Another spear hit him in the back. He didn’t know if it was stuck in him or not. He was on his knees, holding himself up with his mace.
“Out!” Thud yelled. He struggled to his feet and took one running step toward the door which instantly landed him on his face. Keezix was there a moment later, hunched over, a red stained hand clutched to her side.
“Run!” Thud yelled at her. “I’m not…”
“Shut up and hold on to this tight,” she said, handing him the end of a rope she was holding in her other hand. She grabbed on with both hands.
Hmmm, he thought. He’d hoped for maybe at least a little…
The rope yanked tight and they were sliding across the floor on their backs, being pulled toward the exit hole. The rock burns he was acquiring due to his speed told him that it was Rend on the other end of the rope. He could see above him the entire makeshift infrastructure of the tower was twisting and buckling, leaning three different ways at once, tearing itself apart. Was that Obiya up top, arms windmilling as she struggled to stand on a shifting beam or was it just a curl of smoke? The stone floor ended and they skidded out through the sand. Rend scooped them into his arms then ran, carrying one under each arm like potato sacks. They were out in the mists again.
Ginny blew the horn.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Catchpenny had learned the frame of mind for climbing hundreds of years before. What you’re comfortable doing three feet off the ground can be done with equal confidence thirty feet above the ground, or even three hundred. He was guessing this tower was somewhere in between the two and the principle certainly applied. He puffed his lip to blow his hair out of his eyes as he eyed his next jump. It was a seam in the stone, near the top of the tower. At least, he thought it was a seam. The light streaming out from the orb above made the shadows tricky. His ears were still numb from the thunderclap that had come from inside the tower. There had been a lot of crashing and banging after that which, he reasoned, meant things were going well. Sure enough, there came the horn, just audible over the buzzing of the orb and the echo of the thunder in his head.
Which meant the distraction was leaving the tower and he was running out of time.
He took a deep breath, tensed and jumped. He let his muscles relax in the air. The spring had been made and now it was time to be ready for the grab. His fingers hit the seam overhead and clamped down like a spring-trap, arm muscles back into play. His feet swung and poked delicately at the wall, as if dancing, seeking out toeholds. There and there. One more push, up, one more grab and he was hanging at the top of the tower. He hoisted himself up just enough for a look.
The orb was a swirling kaleidoscope of greens and blues, not so much seeming to generate its own light as it was sucking all of the light from around it and then vomiting it back out into the putrid mists, long shadows cast across the top of the tower, glimmering against the bones of the sea that crusted the ancient stonework. Columns of the same diseased light connected the orb to three pillars, one on each corner of the tower. The columns of light spun and twisted as if they were the throats of whirlpools. The pillars were etched and shaped, obelisks of stone pitted by millennia in the sea. Frogmen crowded the top of the tower, dozens, croaking in unison, a belching rhythm. The orb pulsed in time with it.
Aldine stood at the center, between the the columns of light, her arms thrown wide, face bathed in green, mouth open as if she were screaming. She held the book in one hand and her staff in the other.
Most importantly, to his mind, was that none of them were looking in his direction. He scrambled up and slipped behind one of the obelisks. It hummed with the energy it held and made his hair stand on end. He pulled out the flare that Mungo had given him and the small cylinder that held the glowing coal to light the fuse. A cylinder that doubled as a launch tube. Mungo’s “porta-flare” system. Drop the flare in and it lights itself on the coal. The fuse was fast, the sound of the launch lost in the crackling white noise around him. A moment later and the flare ignited in the sky above, throwing red highlights through the fog around it, glittering, a red star in the wash of viridian light.
The frogmen noticed it right away but none had seen where it came from. They pointed, their croaking agitated, louder. Catchpenny crouched down behind his covering obelisk and waited. He debated picking off a frog or two to pass the time but that would risk giving away his position which would blow the entire plan. He sighed and settled in to watch and wait.
***
“Flare ahoy!”
The look-out high above them waved his arms back and forth in case they hadn’t heard. It seemed a precarious thing to do atop a mast, unless you were Leery, which she was and he wasn’t. Sailor-types did seem to have a knack for catching onto ropes whenever they fell off of anything. A feat helped by the boggling spiderweb of ropes that were required to turn the sails into the giant puppets that moved the ship. They were furled now, however. There was no wind in Blackfog Island. Even if there were, the cliffs in the ocean were mere yards away on each side of the ship. Leery wasn’t sure that wind and sail were predictable enough to sail a tightrope.
“Half-stroke port!” Laughing Larry called from the wheel. The portside oars dipped with a rippling splash. He adjusted the wheel slightly, creeping the ship forward, toward the spot ahead where the seacliffs came together in a point. They’d have to stop well short of it as they’d need space to turn the ship around. She wasn’t sure what the turn radius of an oar-propelled ship was and hoped that was the sort of thing that ship captains knew. For Clink and Durham at least. She wasn’t going to be here.
Durham was standing next to the captain, looking slightly useless. He’d brought his map which had been enough to get them into the right swath of sea but after that dead reckoning became the navigation tool of choice. He stood awkwardly, looking around as if hoping to discover something in need of mapping. Clink was making last a
djustments to the catapult the pirates had mid-deck. Whether he intended them to be last adjustments or not was moot; the flare was up and the time was now.
Leery stepped into the bowl of the catapult.
There was a barrel in the bowl as well, laying on its side. She lay face down on top of it, wrapping her arms and legs around it.
Clink arched an eyebrow at her.
“Ya sure you’re ready for this? More ways this can go wrong than I can count on me toes.”
She grinned. “I’m good at walking away after things go wrong. Plus I’m wearing this thing.” She jabbed at the bladder buoy vest she was wearing. “And this thing,” she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at the pack strapped on her back. Between the two she was almost double-sized.
“Yeah, maybe some things. Maybe other things are harder to walk away from. There’s a lot about this that could make it a one-way trip. There ain’t much of an exit plan.”
“Hard to have an exit plan when you’re not sure what you’ll be exiting from,” Leery pointed out. “I’ll improvise.”
“Well, I hope you survive to the point where that’s a factor. Seems poor repayment. You save my life, now I get to launch you from an onager. Now hold still so I can harness you to the powder barrel.”
“It’ll be fine,” Leery said. “Gryngo knows what he’s doing.”
“Powder barrels is supposed to be the size of a watermelon. You ain’t s'posed to use pickle barrels.”
“The bigger the barrel…”
“…the shorter it flies out of a catapult. That flare is an awful long ways away.”
The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island Page 25