The Tide of Ages (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  And if taking her on had been a mistake, how much more of one was taking on Bub, an orc I only knew from one encounter where I fought him and another where he rescued me?

  What did this all mean for Carson, too? Was I just better off alone, like I had been before these lot had come along? I didn’t like to think so; I’d come right around on Carson after some initial … problems, let’s call them. He was a nice guy, and braver than he appeared, and despite some little hiccups from time to time—the incident in Benson’s, for example—he was often the voice of reason, calm. Surely having that on my side couldn’t be a mistake, could it?

  Yet I circled back around again and again to the reason I had run away in the first place: to prove myself—me. My skill and grit. Not to lead a band of not-so-merry adventurers.

  “I’m listening,” I said carefully.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Heidi said flatly.

  “Just one?” I muttered. She was apparently more charitable in her assessment than I was.

  “Letting an orc in on this is madness,” she went on. “I guarantee he leads us into trouble.”

  “You don’t know that. So far, if I were keeping score, he’s led us out of trouble more times than led us in. By a 1–0 margin. And since that trouble he led us out of was seemingly inescapable, even if he leads us into further trouble, I’m hard-pressed to find fault with him if it’s minor or even middling trouble. Fatal trouble? Yeah, I could start getting irritated if he did that—”

  “This isn’t funny.” Heidi huffed. “You fought him before, when you claimed the spear, right? So he was with Borrick. He still could be with Borrick.”

  The ripple of unease in my stomach intensified. At least before I’d been able to keep it to myself. Now someone else was speaking that very same concern …

  “He might not,” I said.

  “Come on. You’re stupid sometimes, but not that stupid. One of Borrick’s old band of orcs shows up in the same world, on the same day, in the same place? Pull the other one.”

  All right, a big coincidence, I knew. And I should answer it. But Heidi had come on the attack—and after today, after the past month, I was not going to stand for it.

  “Who are you to call me stupid?” I rounded on her, catching myself from jabbing her in the chest lest a fight broke out and we spilled into a stretch of stagnant water. “You’ve been acting like an idiot all afternoon.”

  Heidi folded her arms. “Still on the temple again, are we?”

  Yes.

  “Not just the temple, no. Back there, with the vines. We told you to stop freaking out, and did you listen? No, not until the thing probably choked half the other half of your reason away. I say ‘the other half’ because I’m feeling like the first half slipped away before now.” I shook my head. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

  “Well, that’s my problem, isn’t it, not yours.”

  “It’s my problem too, because you are traveling with me.”

  “Oh, of course, forgive me. I wouldn’t want to go dying and bring ruin to your famous name by my failure,” she sneered.

  I clenched my teeth. It was that or slap her.

  “We’re falling behind,” I said, and marched off.

  Bub and Carson had almost disappeared. Only slices of them came in and out of view through the trees. I jogged along the path Bub had cut, littered with dying vines and fronds sliced to tatters, until I’d caught up.

  Sadly for me, Heidi did the same.

  After long, tense minutes, she started up again.

  “I don’t trust orcs.”

  At least she kept her voice low.

  “Yeah, well, neither do I, having recently fought through a pack of them with you,” I conceded. “But this one saved us. We owe him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “We don’t owe him anything. That we didn’t cut his head off where he stood is payment enough.”

  I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure I changed my mind. You’re the last person I want having that cutlass.”

  “You want it, you can take it off me.”

  I looked at her through narrowed eyes for a long moment. Sorely tempting. Then there’d be a few less casualties—like the three marachti she’d slayed in the maze. But whereas I would at most incapacitate rather than kill, Heidi apparently followed a different set of rules. Looking at her now, I was fairly willing to believe she would stick to them even in a scuffle with me, if it came to it.

  Or maybe that was my growing irritation.

  I pushed it down, away.

  “This is stupid,” I said. “Can we just stop fighting? I’m tired, I ache, and we still have a key plus this Tide of Ages to reclaim before we can get back home. I don’t need arguing with you out near Shrek’s house to top it off.”

  “What’s stupid,” Heidi said, ignoring everything I’d said, “is joining up with an orc. Only a complete bungling buffoon would do something like that. A bungling, stupid, self-involved—”

  Okay. The elastic that was my resolve snapped.

  Turning on her, I snarled, “You want to know what’s stupid? Having your head so far up your arse that you can’t even listen to the word ‘left’ when you’re told you’re going to hit a dead end if you go right. How’s that for self-involved?”

  Black gazes fought. I was glad Carson was out of earshot, because he would saddle himself with trying to defuse this … and right now, I didn’t think he’d have any success.

  Bub might have at least enjoyed the peculiar show.

  At last, Heidi growled, “You’ve got nothing but a famous name. And you’re not a fraction of it.”

  And she strode ahead and past me.

  Then she turned.

  “And another thing. I am not taking orders from him—” she jabbed a finger toward Carson “—any longer. I can make my own way without some stupid Yank’s advice on where to go or what to do. Same to you, Brand.”

  And off she went.

  16

  “This is kind of like hiking, isn’t it?” said Carson cheerily.

  I’d rejoined the front of our group, forming a line with him and Bub. My nagging worries, now amplified by Heidi’s words, had me wanting to take up position between them, so I was the first line of attack should the newly-christened Bub turn. But Carson was taking so much joy in talking to the orc that I couldn’t bring myself to naturally inject myself in the middle. Instead I walked alongside him, keeping some fifty, sixty percent of my focus on Bub should he suddenly turn. Should that happen, I’d snatch Carson clear, and go to work with the spear with much more resolution than the last time the orc and I had parried.

  Heidi tailed us some ten feet back. Not that I cared, or anything.

  “What is ‘hiking’?” Bub asked.

  “You know, a walk through nature.” Bub just looked blankly at Carson, so he said, “Don’t you do that in the orc world?”

  “We venture into nature all the time. It is a part of life for us, so we have no word for it.”

  “Huh.” Carson shook his head. “Well, I used to do it all the time when I was a kid.”

  “You did?” I asked. Was he about to open up about his family?

  The answer was no, but no less interesting.

  “I was in the Boy Scouts.”

  I clamped my mouth shut on the hiss of victory about to come out of me. I’d wondered if he had when he was tying knots in the elvish rope back in London. Those were practiced rather than paranoid hands. (Well, I mean, they were totally paranoid too. But I was right—that was the main take-away from this.)

  “Did you go hiking often?” I asked.

  Bub turned the word over on his tongue again. “Hiking.”

  “A few times, sure,” Carson answered. “Mostly day hikes, you know, but we did a couple of camp outs. Those were my favorite.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “We used to take these little stove things—I mean, I say ‘we,’ I mean the group leaders, because they were pretty heavy. And the pro
pane tanks too, I guess. We’d cook beans—oh, and we also tried some of those … have you seen astronaut food?”

  “Err …”

  “It’s packed in a foil bag sort of thing. Like a pouch. And we’d go out with a couple of those.”

  “Anything good?”

  “I thought so. But I was little, so, you know, maybe not. Mostly beans again. We were supervised, of course … but it still made us feel really grown-up, cooking over a stove like that.” He chuckled to himself. “Only this one kid, his name was Sam … he didn’t think a stove was close enough to nature. So after about a year of telling us in whispers that he was going to do it, he snuck in a book of matches he’d swiped from a drawer or something back home. And he disappears, says he’s going to the latrine—and after about ten minutes, our group leader realizes and says, ‘Hey, where’s Sam?’ And then the smell of fire came—and the group leader, he tore off into the trees near where we’d set up. We followed, of course, because why wouldn’t you? And there he was, maybe forty feet into the edge of the woods, with the most pathetic little fire I’ve ever seen. But our group leader, he—he panicked, must’ve thought it was a huge one; like Smokey Bear was going to come jumping out to eat us all, because he stamped it out, looking absolutely out of his mind as he did …”

  Carson’s steady guffaw had grown through this recounting of his memory. Now he was cut short, laughing flat out and clutching his stomach as he shook.

  I smiled, rolling my lips inward.

  When finally he quieted, he rubbed the tears out of his eyes.

  “Oh, that was the funniest thing I think I’ve ever seen,” he snickered, wiped again.

  “And then,” he carried on, “we all camped out at the edge of the woods. Two of us to a tent, so I shared with Jamie—he was my best friend when I was a kid, before he moved away. Just being around nature, with your buddies, not a care in the world … it was great. But know what was even better?”

  I shook my head.

  “The view.” Eyes twinkling, Carson said, “I woke up in the night; needed to take a leak, as one does. And I crept out … should’ve woken Jamie; that was the rule, go with a partner … but I went out by myself, just outside the tent door. And maybe ten feet away, the woods turned into a meadow—and the sky was perfectly clear. No moon, so it was just alive with stars.” He was quiet a moment, and I knew he had been taken back there: to the soft twilight, and the dusting of sparkling diamond laid out overhead.

  I wished I could go with him.

  “I must’ve stood out there for half an hour, just looking up,” he said.

  Another pause. Then he finished: “Beautiful.”

  I remembered how mesmerized he had been in the Forest of Glass. It would be hard not to be taken by it … but Carson had been so dumbstruck he had practically lost the ability to walk.

  I was about to ask if he liked astronomy when he said to Bub, “So how close are we to this temple now?”

  Bub pointed ahead, slightly skyward. “Not far.”

  We followed his finger.

  In the course of our trek, we’d pushed closer to the shore. Still stomping through marshy earth, we passed as close as we could to waters spilling in from the sea. Here, the trees were spread thinner. Gaps were carved through the canopy—and through the one we passed under now, cut long and thin like a cat scratch, it was visible: the very tip of a temple carved from dark green stone.

  Just the sight of it was enough to fill me with a burst of renewed energy. I itched to run ahead.

  But the question of doubt lingering in my mind was almost enough to hold me back.

  Carson voiced it.

  “Can we catch up with Borrick?” A nervous quaver edged his words.

  “Hard to say,” said Bub thoughtfully, whom Carson and I had filled in during this push through the swamp—and whose reaction had been veiled. I didn’t know what to make of that.

  “No telling what sort of lead he might have gained,” Bub continued. “A boat is certainly faster than four pairs of legs. Yet it is possible.”

  Possible. It didn’t sound very convincing. Our only real hope of heading Borrick off—no, scratch that: of coming in a respectable enough second place that we might stand a chance at beating him, rather than turning up when the show was already over and he’d made off with the prize—the only chance we had of that was in hoping that Borrick’s ship had sprung a leak and ended up temporarily marooned.

  Or maybe a sudden frenzied gale could have blown him into the mires, churning up enough mud to coagulate into a difficult-to-escape paste.

  I bit my lip. Our time in the sun had been met with nary even a hint of breeze. If it had, we might’ve come away feeling a little less sweltered than we were now. Clothes smeared to our bodies with sweat, clinging damply to the skin.

  But, again, Carson was the optimist. “An hour’s lead is nothing. I bet it’ll take Borrick and his newest army of imbeciles that long to even find the entrance. Uh … no offense,” he tacked on, shooting an alarmed sideways look at Burbondrer. Then, slamming a fist against his palm, he turned to me and said, “We’ve got this!”

  I nodded. Not feeling it, really … but his determination was infectious. I felt it slipping into me the way a crack of sunlight shines a shaft into a dark and dusty room. And it was enough to draw some adrenaline from a deeper part of me, pump it through my legs, make me fill my lungs to the maximum.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Double time!” Carson cried—and off he charged.

  Bub barely had to lengthen his stride to keep up. Me, though, I quickened to a jog to follow.

  I didn’t look at Heidi; didn’t really care to right at this moment. But in spite of our crossed words, I couldn’t shy away from the fact that we were here for her, we were still trekking through this swamp for her—and I hoped that, whatever her feelings toward Carson, the light he cast was enough to brighten and quicken her pace, too.

  And maybe, just maybe, we’d come out of this one on top—and she would have a change of heart.

  17

  The swamp petered out more gradually than it had started. It was the sort of slow fade that you didn’t notice until looking back in hindsight. At some point, the moisture in the earth decreased until it was a fine peat. The vines had long since sputtered out by then, another realization I only made when Bub sheathed his sword.

  We caught sight of the temple in stripes through trees, hewn in the same green stone. Although I squinted, I could not make out any damage to the structure’s sides that might permit us quick entry. That was a positive and negative rolled into one. Negative because the last one had afforded us a great shortcut; positive because no shortcut for us also meant no shortcut for Borrick.

  “Almost there,” Carson heaved. “We’re almost—”

  Then the three of us burst out, closely followed by Heidi.

  I juddered to a stop, caught for a moment in taking it in. This one was much squatter than the other, and more traditionally pyramid-shaped too. Perched at the very edge of a peninsula, its far walls did not just kiss the edge of the water, but rose out of it.

  Moored at its side was a boat.

  For a fraction of a second, I hoped that it was Bub’s.

  Then I remembered that life does not grant your wishes so readily, and sucked in a breath. Borrick was here. Had been for some time, by the looks: the sails were tucked away, and there was no activity on the deck, or anywhere around it. No streaks of yellow betraying the marachti—

  Which meant they were already inside.

  My moment’s reverie snapped. Surging forward, I drew even with Carson, then past.

  “He’s here,” he wheezed at me.

  “I see that,” I said. Damn it, the bursts of speed I’d put on this afternoon had really sapped me. That I was on the verge of another fight too …

  “Where’s the entrance?” I asked Bub as we powered across the peninsula. “Do we have to climb?”

  “Ground level,” he replied. “Cut in
the stones. There.”

  He pointed, and I squinted. Hard to see, vision bouncing up and down and occluded by drips of sweat making their way down my face.

  I thought I spied the dark smear that Bub indicated though, and charged at it like a bull making for a waving red rag.

  “Anything you can tell us,” I breathed, “about what’s inside?”

  “Haven’t been in before,” said Bub.

  “Well,” I said, feet pounding across the dirty strip of ground, “only one way to find out.”

  We sprinted, closing the last of the distance to the temple. The carved opening widened, darkness within … and then we were through. A bubble of light popped! into being, sending rippling illumination across the square hallway we hammered down, footsteps echoing—

  “They’re definitely here,” said Carson. “They’ve tracked sand in.” He pointed; unnatural track marks dotted the floor in front of us.

  Resisting the urge to bite off a Heidi-esque reply, I just said, “I see that!”

  The tunnel forked … and then we were going down a soft slope, descending into the earth. Down, easily one story, then two as we hit a corner … then the tunnel flattened—and then it twisted one last time, pointing back toward the center of the temple—

  “Whoa, stop stop stop!”

  We swerved, braking almost hard enough to send smoke into the air from our feet, like characters from the Looney Tunes.

  The chamber we found ourselves in was the full width of the temple’s base, if not wider. Way bigger than any football stadium I’d ever laid eyes on, it was rimmed with a ledge most of the way up—the very same ledge whose edge we stood at. A cavity extended from beyond us, high-ceilinged—and very, very low-floored. The drop was a hundred and fifty feet, easy … and the last fifteen, twenty feet of that were water.

  Water that was now rising, gushing from a hole in the ceiling in a great waterfall at the arena’s center.

  I stared, brain struggling to make head or tail of what I was seeing.