The Case of Firebane's Folly

by Liam O'Donnell

  “Are those fish?” Tank asked.

  “They sure are,” Howzin said. “The lava lakes are bursting with life. Flaming flounders, cinder eels, searing pike and more. Each lava pool is a world of living creatures.”

  Howzin steered the sub through the lava, past schools of mysterious fish and deeper into the mountain we all called home. Firebane’s words ran through my mind. If I could find the Crown of Peace, I would be saving all those lives from destruction. That was worth risking a ride through fire in a sinking metal ship, wasn’t it?

  Suddenly a dark shape, larger than the others, moved across the sub’s front window.

  Howzin steered the sub away from the hungry lava shark. I shuddered as its long body disappeared in the red gloom of lava. If the burning magma didn’t get you, the lake’s hungry creatures surely would.

  I pushed thoughts of sub-eating sharks from my mind and tried to focus on what lay ahead. All we had to do was sneak into Bramgrum’s hideout, find the most powerful artifact in all of Rockfall Mountain and sneak back out with it. What could be easier? The craziness of the plan rushed in around me like the sub had sprung a leak. There was no way three kids could sneak past a pair of seasoned criminals like Bramgrum and Hagnar. My scales stood on edge. This was all a big mistake. We had to turn back. I opened my mouth to demand we stop the sub, but nothing came out. Firebane’s words swam into my head like a passing lava shark. Greatest detective in Rockfall Mountain. Everyone would call me that. That’s what I wanted. Wasn’t it?

  The sub pushed through the surface of the lava. Thick magma dripped off it like cleaning slimes chasing a tasty piece of garbage. Dim light spilled through the sub’s window.

  We were in a cavern deep under the lake. The low ceiling was spiked with hanging rocks ready to fall into the small lava lake below. Our sub bobbed across the surface toward the docks on the rocky shore.

  “There it is!” Howzin called. “Get ready to dock, little monsters.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Beneath the Flames

  Bramgrum’s hideout was as empty as my folder of finished homework.

  After Howzin disappeared under the lava, we hurried from the deserted docks. Hugo led us toward a large tunnel in the wall of rock that surrounded the cavern. The sandy ground leading into the opening had been trampled smooth by many passing feet. Now, however, the tunnel loomed dark and silent in front of us. Behind us, the small lava lake bubbled and boiled like it was ready to erupt. I guess lava is always like that. There was no sign of Howzin or the Leaky Bucket in the fiery liquid. Hugo scurried up the wall of the tunnel.

  “Wait here. I’ll scout ahead.” He looked back down at us from the roof of the tunnel. “Spiders are good in the dark.”

  He vanished in the shadows. Beside me, Tank studied the tectonic-frequency tracker. The machine’s light flashed more quickly down here under the lava lake.

  “The docks might be empty,” she said, “but the crown is definitely close. I’m picking up a strong signal down that tunnel.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why steal the crown and then hide it down here? You would think Bramgrum would be demanding a mountain of gems for its return before the resetting in a few hours. Hiding it down here guarantees the mountain is going to be destroyed.”

  Tank shrugged. “Maybe Bramgrum isn’t as smart as everyone says.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Tank said. “All I know is, we need to get the crown back to the braces very soon, and this machine is telling me it’s down that tunnel somewhere.”

  “Hopefully, that’s all that’s down the tunnel.”

  Hugo appeared from the shadows. He crawled along on the roof, then zipped down to the ground on a thread of thin web.

  “It’s really quiet in there—too quiet,” he said. “I went as far as the end of the tunnel and didn’t see anyone. It’s strange.”

  “It’s very strange,” I said.

  “Let’s just get in, find that crown and get out of here.” Tank stepped into the tunnel. Her eyes stayed glued to the tracker as she went.

  Hugo zipped back up his thread and scuttled along the tunnel after the troll. I gave the deserted dock one last glance and followed them both into the darkness.

  The spider captain rose up on his legs. He rushed from the room. He pushed past Tank and jumped onto the big table, sending the maps scattering to the ground. His eyes darted around the room.

  “You shouldn’t have come here!” Scorn shrieked.

  You’d think I’d run away from Scorn as fast as my green feet could take me. But I didn’t. There was something about the way the spider captain was acting that made me stay. He hopped around nervously on the table with a wild look in his eyes.

  “Captain Scorn? Are you all right?” Hugo approached the spider slowly. “It’s me, Hugo. It’s your son.”

  My scales nearly fell off.

  “Y-your son?” I stammered. “Hugo, what are you talking about?”

  The young spider raised a leg to silence me.

  “Father, it’s me. Hugo. Something has come over you.” Hugo took another step closer to Scorn. “You are ill—that’s why you betrayed the queen. But I’m here to help.”

  Scorn’s eyes locked onto Hugo. Confusion flashed across the captain’s face. He wasn’t the only one at a loss. All this time, Hugo had kept his connection to Scorn a secret. No wonder the spider was willing to sneak away from his home. He didn’t go into that swamp to rescue us. He was searching for his father.

  Tank’s voice came from the other room.

  “Fizz! Get in here!”

  I left Hugo with his father and joined Tank in the smaller room. It was some sort of storage closet. There was barely enough room for both of us.

  “You won’t believe what just happened!” I said.

  It was Tank’s turn to silence me with a raised hand. The tracker in her hand was pinging like it was going to pop.

  “It says the crown should be right here.” Tank’s ears flopped down the side of her head. “But I can’t see it anywhere.”

  A small grate sat in the floor at her feet.

  “You think it’s in there?” I said.

  “Why would the crown be stuck in a drainage grate?” she said. “It makes no sense.”

  “There is very little that makes any sense right now, Tank.”

  I pried open the grate. Something glittered at the bottom of the hole. I reached in and picked up something small and heavy. When I pulled my arm out of the hole, I held a purple rock the size of a choco-slug cookie. Tank’s phone went into pinging overload.

  “That’s not the crown.” My friend’s ears perked up and then sagged again. “Something’s not right.”

  Tank’s tracker continued to ping like it was sitting right on top of the crown. But all I had was a purple rock, a growing headache and no idea what was going on. And then I did.

  “Do you think this rock is actually made of pan-whatever-you-call-it?”

  “Panzantium? That’s it!” Tank’s ears returned to wiggling. “The tracker wasn’t looking for the crown. It was looking for the jewel in the crown, panzantium.”

  “But Firebane said panzantium is really rare,” I said. “What are the chances of a piece just sitting in a drain for us to find?”

  “Pretty slim.” Tank turned off the tracker, and the pinging stopped. “Who would put an incredibly rare gem in a hole down here?”

  “Someone who knew you’d be looking for it,” I said.

  “Scorn will know,” Tank said.

  I stopped her at the door. “Yeah, there’s something you need to know about Scorn.”

  I filled my friend in on the family reunion happening in the other room. Tank peered through the door and frowned.

  “Um, what is Scorn doing now?” I asked.

  The spider captain had climbed to the highest corner of the room and covered it with sticky web. He zipped from one side of the web to the other,
adding more threads of webbing to his creation. Hugo watched from the ground, shaking his head sadly.

  “He is not well,” the young spider said. “He doesn’t recognize me.”

  “But he’s your dad, right?” Tank said.

  “He is,” Hugo said quickly. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t think you would trust me if you knew I was related to the spider who left you in the swamp.”

  “No need to apologize,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Tank put her arm around Hugo. “Families are complicated.”

  “Thanks.” Hugo wiped a tear from one of his eyes. “He is under some kind of spell.”

  Scorn continued to dart around in the corner, weaving his web.

  “Hopefully, he can still answer some questions.” I held up the panzantium. “Captain Scorn, who hid this in the other room?”

  Scorn turned at the sound of his name. His eyes doubled in size when he saw the stone in my hand.

  “You found it!” He zipped from one side of his web to the other and back again. “We’re doomed. Why did you take it?”

  My gut tightened like I had just eaten a pile of stale fungi fries. Questions poured through my mind, each one stickier than Scorn’s web.

  “Who put the stone in the grate, Scorn?” I said.

  “They did!” Scorn moaned. “They said you would come, and no one must touch the stone. But you did. And now we’re doomed!”

  “Who are they?” Tank said. “Who knew we were coming? Bramgrum the dwarf and Hagnar the ogre?”

  “Ogre? Silly troll, there’s no ogre.” Scorn scurried around his web, adding more sticky thread as he went.

  “No ogre?” I said. “Maybe Hagnar didn’t come down here. But where’s the crown?”

  “The crown is gone!” Scorn shouted. Then he whispered, “And it’s never coming back.”

  “But it was here before?” I stepped closer to the spider.

  Scorn nodded quickly. “They did experiments on it. Improved it, they said.”

  “Improved the crown?” Tank said. “How?”

  If Scorn knew, he wasn’t telling us.

  “Now only the shiny stone is here,” the spider said. “They wanted you to find it. And you did!”

  “Who wanted us to find it?” Hugo asked.

  “The dwarf and his boss. Who else?”

  “The dwarf ’s boss?” Tank tugged her ponytail. “Firebane said Bramgrum was in charge.”

  Hugo nodded. “He called him the ringleader. Maybe Scorn, er, I mean Dad, is mistaken.” My brain felt like it was swimming in lava. Scorn was either talking nonsense or the complete truth. How would Bramgrum know we would be down here? The only other monster who knew we were coming was Firebane. This whole thing smelled like a setup. Had Bramgrum spied on Firebane to learn his secrets?

  The screen on the wall above the control panel crackled to life. The static cleared to reveal a scarred face we knew all too well.

  “Bramgrum!” Tank said.

  “Greetings!” The dwarf waved into the camera. “It’s so good to finally meet Tank and Fizz, the famous detectives.”

  Tank turned to me. “Why does everyone know us down here?”

  “We’re onto you, Bramgrum!” I shouted at the screen. “We know you have the crown. Return it before Rockfall Mountain gets sucked into the Abyss.”

  “That’s a funny one, Fizz Marlow!” Bramgrum laughed so hard his beard nearly fell off his face. “For a detective, you’re clueless. You’re not living up to the stories I’ve been forced to listen to. But you did find the panzantium, right? Fresh from the scaly one’s vault, that is.”

  Tank held up the stone. “We found it in your little hidey-hole.”

  “Well done!” Bramgrum cheered. “That hidey-hole should be filling up nicely right about now.”

  “Filling up? What are you talking about, Bramgrum?” I snapped.

  Before I got my answer, the screen went blank and Bramgrum was gone. What did he mean he had been forced to listen to stories about us? Who would make a known criminal sit through tales of a fourth-grader like me? And what was this talk about the panzantium coming from the scaly one’s vault? My tail froze in midswing.

  “Firebane!”

  “What about him?” Hugo asked.

  “He set us up,” I said. “Bramgrum isn’t the ringleader. Firebane is. There’s only one scaly monster rich enough to have a vault filled with rare gems like panzantium.”

  “Firebane told Bramgrum all about us.” Tank’s ears wiggled. “The old dragon bragged that he tells all his friends about the detectives who saved his loot. Remember?”

  I nodded. “And Firebane sent us all down here with that pinging machine. He knew it would lead us right to the hidden panzantium stone.”

  “And that’s how Bramgrum knew we would be here,” Tank said.

  Hugo scratched his head with three of his legs. “But why would Firebane send us to an empty room in the bottom of a lava lake? I don’t get it.”

  My tail started swinging again. “I’m still working on that.”

  Captain Scorn’s head popped out from his webby nest.

  “Here it comes!” he shouted. “You sprung Bramgrum’s trap.”

  I turned to the spider captain. “What trap?”

  Scorn pointed a leg toward the room where we had found the panzantium. Lava bubbled up from the grate in the floor and spilled through the doorway. As I watched, the trickle of lava turned into a gushing fountain of fire.

  “Oh, that trap,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fiery Escape

  Lava roared around us.

  Molten rock gushed, splashed and poured into the cavern. The Leaky Bucket had vanished under the waves of magma. Bramgrum and Firebane had booby-trapped the whole cavern. And we were the boobies. Pulling the stone from the grate had released a floodgate of lava.

  My scales burned, and it wasn’t because of the burning liquid surrounding me. I had been duped. We all had. Firebane had played us for fools. He had filled my head with dreams of being a hero when he knew he was leading us to our doom. We were right where he wanted us, trapped and far away, with the resetting of the braces happening very soon.

  “There’s no way out!” Tank moaned.

  “Maybe there is.” Hugo shot a web into the ceiling above us. “Dad, follow me. Tank and Fizz, hang on!”

  Hugo zipped up the web and into the air high above me. Something sticky smacked into my back, and I was pulled into the air.

  The sub was a mess, but it was better than swimming in lava.

  The seats were missing. The flashing lights and switches were gone. Wires sprouted from large holes in the command deck where the controls had been. Tank stood in front of the controls. She pressed an important-looking red button several times. Nothing happened.

  “There’s no power,” she said. “I can’t pilot this thing anywhere.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear,” I said.

  Another wave of lava crashed against the rusting hull. The sub rolled with the wave, sending us all to the floor.

  “We need to get to the surface,” Hugo said.

  “That’s going to be hard if I can’t get the engine to work.” Tank was on her knees in front of the command deck. She grinned suddenly. “Hello there. Be right back.”

  She squeezed into a gap under the control deck and vanished.

  “Where’d she go?” Scorn snapped.

  Outside the front window, a churning soup of molten rock burned and raged. All that separated us from extreme crispiness was a wall of welded metal a little thicker than my tail. The sub lurched again, but this time we stayed standing. We were being tossed around like a dodgeball in gym class.

  Tank crawled out from under the control deck. Grime covered her face.

  “The engine looks like it’s in good shape,” she said. “But the slick tanks are empty. We have no fuel. That’s why nothing works.”

  “We can’t get back to Lava F
alls without fuel,” Hugo said.

  “And we can’t stay down here for much longer,” Tank said. “The rear wall panels are cracked. They’ll be letting in lava pretty soon.”

  “We’re at the bottom of a lake of lava, trapped in a submarine that’s falling apart and has no fuel,” Scorn said. “I liked it better when I was stuck in that room.”

  Something solid slammed into the sub.

  “That didn’t sound like a lava wave,” Tank said.

  Hugo skittered up the wall of the sub. “Did we hit a rock?”

  A dark shape drifted past the window. A second shadow followed behind it.

  “I think we hit a shark,” I muttered. “There’s a swarm of lava sharks out there.”

  “I knew coming in here was a bad idea!” Scorn climbed to the ceiling of the sub and frantically started spinning a web. “They won’t stop hitting us until the sub breaks apart.”

  Another lava shark slammed into the sub, sending us to the floor again.

  “You see?” Scorn wailed.

  Tank got to her feet and stared out the window. More sharks gathered around the sub with every passing second.

  Tank’s shoulders slumped. “I’m out of ideas.”

  “It’s okay. You tried.” I stood by my friend. A wisp of dark smoke traced a path between us. “Tank, why is your tool belt smoking?”

  Tank’s hand went to the pocket on her belt. She pulled out a glowing stone. “The panzantium!” She tossed the stone from hand to hand. “It’s hot.”

  “It burned a hole in your belt,” I said. “How did it get so hot?”

  Hugo zipped along the control panel and peered at the glowing stone with all eight eyes.

  “It’s the lava,” he said. “Panzantium can get hot from just being near fire.”

  I looked at the swirling sea of lava beyond the window. “There’s no shortage of that.”

  “The dwarves say if panzantium gets hot enough, it can power a whole city,” Hugo said.

  “Did you say power?” Tank’s eyes lit up. She turned to me and pointed to the red button on the command deck. “When I shout, push that. Be right back.”