But: “I said to retreat!”
I eyed them. There were at least eight boxing me into this room—more than enough to subdue me. Given the wounds we’d inflicted, as well as the three Heidi had surely killed, there was no question: they wanted to subdue me.
But not a one moved. And so, with nervous steps to the hole through which Heidi had disappeared, and a continuous sweep of Decidian’s Spear to ensure my personal space, I said, “Better luck next time.”
Then, in one movement, I condensed the spear back to its umbrella form, and leapt into the hole after her.
At first there was a short drop. Then it turned into a curve, like a slide. I rode it, up and down and around in darkness—and then finally it swerved upward, and carried by sheer momentum I was thrust back out into the light—and into the maze again.
“Great,” I muttered, dusting myself off. “Can’t just bring me right to the exit.”
More to the point: where was Heidi?
“She’s already gone.”
I tensed. Then I realized it was Carson. He teetered on the wall above me, apparently having taken a flying leap to get here.
“She has a name,” Heidi called from somewhere out of sight.
“She also abandoned me back there!” I shouted back.
“You got out all right, didn’t you?”
“You’re going the wrong way,” Carson called to her.
“Whatever.”
I sighed. Massaged my eyes. “Lead me out, please.”
Carson began to walk the route back. Apparently we’d both been deposited close enough to where we’d come in that we didn’t need to pass through another of those annoying buildings. So it was just a case of taking the turns Carson instructed, as he himself made them—and took perilous jumps that made me probably about as nervous as him.
“Where’s Borrick?” I asked.
“Gone,” Carson said, looking back over his shoulder. “His new army is still making its way out though.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, I, um … I didn’t mean to … when I mentioned the Tide of Ages in Benson’s, that is …”
“It’s fine,” I said. Although it wasn’t, really, and if it had been just the two of us, I would have told him so. But our trio was completed by Heidi, who I was currently exceedingly angry at, so for now if forced to choose, I would be Team Carson in a heartbeat.
“How did you get farther into the maze?” I asked to change the subject.
“I don’t know. There was, like, an invisible wall or something at the start. But once you got to each of those buildings, it kind of … moved in a bit, you know? I could get closer to the center each time. And once Heidi picked up whatever was in the middle, it seemed to release completely.”
“Huh. I guess as security systems go, it’s not actually so bad then.”
“I guess.” Then: “You should take that left, by the way,” Carson called to Heidi. Then: “What are you doing? I said left.”
“And I’m going right.”
“It leads to a dead end that way.”
“I’ll find that out myself, thanks.”
I huffed. “Just follow Carson’s instructions, please.”
Heidi didn’t answer. It was a silence I took as a flat “no.”
Carson soon brought us to the entrance. He crouched at the edge of the stone wall, turned, and let himself down so he was hanging only by his fingertips. Then he dropped, landing with a heavy thud that sent him into an awkward stumble.
I helped him up.
“Thanks,” he said.
“We’re out front!” I called to Heidi.
No answer again.
Now it was Carson’s time to huff. “Let’s go guide her from above.”
We clambered back up the slope to the entryway where we’d first set eyes on the maze. Walls as high as they were, combined with our fairly low vantage point and Heidi’s stature, there was no way of seeing her.
“Stick the cutlass up so we can see you, okay?”
No movement.
After a moment, I asked, “Are you doing it?”
“Nope.”
“Why? We’re trying to help.”
“I can get there myself, thanks.”
“Come on, Heidi,” said Carson. “There’s no need to be childish about this.”
“I am not being anything.”
I bit off a very profane assurance that she most certainly was.
After some time, Carson said quietly, “You know, we could just leave her here.”
I could not begin to describe to him how tempting that was, but I held my poisonous tongue instead, regretting it with every tick of the seconds away as Heidi stumbled about the maze.
Finally, finally, long after the last of the marachti had made its way out of the maze on the opposite side, Heidi barreled into view. She had a harried look on her face—but then, seeing me and Carson opposite her exit, she slowed to a saunter.
Up the slope she came.
I marched down to meet her.
“You,” I started, picking up from the central room and knowing exactly what I was going to say this time, “are being a selfish, abrasive—”
Heidi’s nostrils flared. “How am I selfish?”
“You left me to deal with the marachti by myself!”
“No, I didn’t. Two of them followed me.”
“You didn’t tell me you were going anywhere! You just bolted, leaving me by myself with three of the things. I took punches.”
“So learn to dodge better.”
I fumed. On the brink of giving her something to dodge, I changed tack.
“And why are you suddenly not listening to anyone?”
“I’m not listening to Carson,” said Heidi. “I’m perfectly capable of navigating a maze by myself, thank you.”
“Yeah, it really looked like it from where we’ve been waiting the past ten minutes.”
“I got out, didn’t I?”
“And how many times did you hit a dead end before then?”
“Who cares?” Heidi responded.
“You know, you’re not very consistent,” I said.
“And what does that mean?”
“For someone who calls this Tide of Ages thing ‘your chalice,’ you’re hardly acting like pursuing it is of tantamount concern—especially now that we know Borrick is after the same bloody thing, again.”
Heidi’s chest swelled. But she didn’t have much of a retort to bite back apparently, because instead she said, “Yeah, well, you’re one to talk, leaving me behind like that.”
I was taken aback. “What?”
“You heard me. You left me behind back there, after that poor man’s rollercoaster ride back out here.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was she actually serious?
I blustered, “What do you mean, I left you behind? You ran off before I even had come out the other side of that slide thing!”
“Yeah, well, you should’ve found me then, shouldn’t you?”
Okay. I really was going to give her something to dodge in a minute.
Carson, as if sensing this, stepped in. In his calmest voice, he said, “Can we just focus on the positives instead of bickering like this? You got the—whatever it is.” Then, after a pause: “What is it?”
Heidi didn’t look as though she wanted to show. But begrudgingly she opened her hand to reveal the orb she’d snatched. About the size of an orange, it was glassy on the outside, while the interior glimmered with a crystalline fragment of ice. The beautiful pale blue of an iceberg, it grew and receded before our very eyes, almost like a beating heart.
“What does it do?” I asked.
Heidi shook her head. “Don’t know.” And some of her iciness was leaving now, replaced by the sort of intrigue she should have had all along. “As best as I can tell: nothing. Other than glamouring itself, of course.”
“What’s its glamour?” Carson asked.
“Something you’d like.” She shook it—and the orb transformed
into a baseball.
“Inconspicuous,” Carson said. “Also, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but in spite of it being our national pastime, not all Americans are baseball fans.”
“More inconspicuous than a Bluetooth speaker, at any rate,” Heidi said. She rotated the baseball in her hand, and then stuffed it into a pocket that was not designed to carry something of that size: it bulged out from her hip like the sort of ridiculous tumor TV shows were made about.
“Right,” she said sniffily. “Let’s go, shall we?”
And off she went, back the way we’d come.
Carson and I exchanged a look that bordered on despairing, and followed. I could sense his objections, and he surely knew mine, but of these, we said nothing.
Fortunately, our mutual frustration with Heidi was very shortly driven from our minds by the near endless staircase we now had to make our way back down. On the plus side, descending it was much easier than ascending. Our retreat from the temple was conducted in relative quiet.
Once we returned to the beach, however, that quiet was broken by Carson.
“Is that a boat?”
I squinted in the direction he pointed.
The distant sea was a painful glare of reflected sunlight. But breaking its surface, a half-mile or more out, was indeed a boat. And rendered very small around it, climbing up its hull and onto its deck, were hordes of spindly yellow things.
The marachti.
“It’s Borrick,” I said, stomach feeling suddenly hollow. “He’s going for the second key.”
And this time, I realized in horror as we watched sails extend and the boat begin to edge away, he had a very definite lead on us.
12
My first urge was to shout at Heidi again; remind her that dragging her feet and refusing to take instruction now meant we were gunning for the second key in absolute last place. And with no boat of our own, we had no way of gaining on Borrick, that weaselly little snot.
But it was time to lead by example. I could easily rail at Heidi for wasting precious time, and in doing so waste even more of it.
So instead I said, “Which way is it going?”
Carson squinted. Heidi did too, an edgy look on her face.
“That way,” Carson said, pointing ahead.
I consulted my compass, ignoring the picture on its face in rare favor of the needle.
“West.”
“Looks like they’re keeping close to the coast,” said Heidi.
“Right. West then.”
I led the charge. Carson and Heidi hurried in my wake.
“What happens when they pull out to sea?” Carson asked.
“We hope to have found a boat of our own by then.”
“And if we haven’t?”
I didn’t have an answer for that, given that all I’d seen thus far was a terribly abandoned coast. But the silence was clear. If we couldn’t at least keep pace with Borrick, couldn’t follow him out to sea, if (more like when, knowing our luck) he terminated his coastal crawl, we were well and truly out of luck.
Fortunately, Borrick continued to creep along the sea’s edge. Unfortunately, the boat had much more speed than the three of us, so its lead quickly widened. To add insult to injury, the blazing sun only seemed to get hotter as the afternoon progressed, and that plus our rapid pace quickly drenched us in sweat. Carson stripped his sweater off at one point, tying it around his waist, and tucking his glasses into his manbag. Said manbag also received frequent adjustments: the heat had pressed a thick line of sweat into his white shirt wherever the strap fell.
Eventually, the boat disappeared. Rendered an increasingly smaller smear as we half-jogged to follow, it came to a stretch of swamp that replaced the sun-baked silt underfoot almost in a stark painted line. The brackish mires edged right out to the sea, and where the coast changed from a gentle curve to softened crags of in-out land the waters bled into, Borrick’s ship was disappeared around the edge of a lush blotch of green.
“No!” Heidi cried. She surged forward.
I was with her. The growing distance between us had been one thing. But to have lost sight of the ship completely, knowing Borrick and his marachti were practically toeing the finish line already? If the heat ramped up anymore, I’d be on the verge of a breakdown.
Carson wiped his forehead dry. “They’re still hugging the coast, right? So we just head through—that.” He pointed at the endless mire ahead, the spindly, otherworldly trees sticking out against the yellowed sky.
“That’s swamp, idiot.”
“Have you got a better idea?”
I was impressed Carson stood his ground. Apparently Heidi didn’t, because she clamped her mouth shut.
“All we do is head there in a straight line,” Carson said, “then start curving toward the coast as we head forward. The water probably hasn’t penetrated all the way, so if we can get as close to the edge as we can, we stand a chance at catching sight of Borrick’s ship again. Simple.” Then, to me, with a sudden look of unease: “Right?”
I patted his elbow. “Good plan. Heidi?”
Her lips were still pursed, and she appeared intent on not glancing toward Carson. But after a moment’s hesitation, she gave the slightest little nod of assent.
“Let’s do this, then,” I said.
Carson leapt into action. Summoning a burst of energy he apparently still had in reserve, his half-jog turned into a flat-out run toward the place where silt and swamp kissed. His manbag bounced up and down at his side, though he fixed one hand on it to keep it as still as was possible.
I dug into my own well of energy and followed. Heidi groaned—but she too came. And under a sky that was not our own, we gave chase.
The swamp’s edge wasn’t quite as sharp as I’d thought from farther out. There was a stretch some thirty to fifty feet where the cracks in the silt diminished, then vanished entirely. Suddenly softer underfoot, bursts of green sprouted, mostly in tufts of fronds. Then, as if we’d been supplanted from one world to another, it was all around us: an endless blanket of trees all rising skyward, mottled bark like obduridium smothered at the base in moss. The floor vanished as creepers smothered it, strangling any new life that might dare try to sprout. Sky, too, disappeared, blocked out by the canopy, so the bright afternoon became a softer diffuse glow.
“Whoa,” I said. “Carson, slow down, would you?”
This edge had not flooded with seawater. But the wet had permeated the dirt. The hard surface we had just been running on became soft—too soft. My boots sank a half-inch. It was like standing on the bank of the Thames all over again.
Heidi, pulling into the rear, passed me in an overzealous burst of speed. Then she too hesitated. Lighter though she was, the ground was more than happy to crater for her.
She turned her nose up. “Eww.”
Carson hadn’t paused. He turned around, still moving forward—or backward, for a moment—and said, “It’s fine. It’s not quicksand. It might feel unpleasant to walk on, but you just have to power through—”
His last word turned into a panicked shriek.
Vine-like grasses sprung up, coiling around the trees. Carson had braced himself on one—and somehow, as if it had a mind of its own, the mass of vines had uncoiled. They struck, pouncing like a predator—
I leapt forward, yelling his name.
Two vines wrapped his nearest leg. Like constrictors, they tightened in a fraction of a second, yanking him toward the tree. Another coil wrapped his chest, two more grabbed his arms—then one was around his neck, his head, tightening.
I jumped at him, grappling.
It was all so sudden, Carson had barely had time to catch his breath. And now he couldn’t speak: the vine around his throat cut off his air, squeezed his vocal cords so no sound could come out.
His eyes bulged—
Then I was there, grappling.
I snagged the vine around his neck, and pulled. It held firm—but then my fingernails sunk into its deep green surface.
Like an animal whose flesh had been pierced, it jerked, a kind of flinch. I pulled back on it, shouting something. It snapped, and Carson could breathe—
And then there were vines on me. Both my legs were caught in half a second. Like snakes, they coiled up my body, climbing far too fast. I tried to dance backward—but I couldn’t move—and then it was slipping around my waist—
I let go, gripping at the fat tendrils, pushing them away—
Suddenly my hand was enclosed. My fingers were all pushed together, tight, incapable of moving.
“HEIDI!”
She hadn’t moved. Fear etched her face, and I realized she was, for a rare moment, frozen. Then my shout came, and it wrenched her out of it. She lurched forward, hands outstretched—
A vine nestled in the creepers underfoot burst skyward. Heidi yelped, dodging sideways in desperation—
Too late. It ensnared her.
Her hand went for her pocket, with the Bluetooth speaker—and then was trapped there. No hope of loosing the cutlass.
It had all happened in ten, maybe fifteen seconds. Pushing forward in pursuit of Borrick one moment—and now the three of us were wrapped with tight vines, climbing our bodies, growing tighter and tighter and tighter—ready to choke us to death.
13
As the vine encircled my throat, I thrashed. This could not be it. Not after how far I’d come.
Why had we let our guards down? Here in this alien place, surrounded by unfamiliar flora and trying—desperately—to catch Borrick as he sailed off to snatch the Tide of Ages from our outreached hands.
“Try—holding still!” Carson cried. The vines were wrapped around him like a dozen manbags’ straps, I thought with a brief titter of amusement in the face of coming death.
“And get strangled to death?” This, from Heidi. “Not today, thanks!” She bucked—and yet still those vines came, wrapping tight around her chest. She’d had one arm free. But then another green cable sprung from out of sight and caught it. It yanked it earthward so it stuck by her hip. The mass of green winding around her chest coiled around again and held it there.
“Sorry, Carson,” I said. “I’m not just lying down when my life is—on the line—oh, come on!”
The Tide of Ages (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 2) Page 9