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

by Robert J. Crane

  Borrick assessed his orb once more. Then he shook it again, a harder twitch that came from the wrist this time, and it was a glassy orb of sand again.

  “Well. Let’s begin proceedings, shall we?”

  He turned to the door. As with the door guarding the Chalice Gloria, two holes were etched into it. Those had been specifically cut for the keys’ glamoured forms—a fact which Borrick had been similarly mystified by. I suppose I would have too, had I not been wrapped in the embrace of an orc who could have torn me limb from limb at the snap of Borrick’s fingers.

  Borrick placed his orb into the lower hole. The bottom of the cavity, I noticed, was bowl-shaped, so it sat in place perfectly contently.

  A low green light illuminated it from nowhere.

  “Your turn,” said Borrick to Heidi.

  She exchanged a glance with me—I nodded back; a silent, “I’ve got your back”—and then she stepped for the door, making a point to brandish Feruiduin’s Cutlass. The marachti, to their credit, pressed themselves back. Heidi had cut down quite enough of them these past twenty-four hours.

  “You want to step aside too?” she said to Borrick, stopping just shy of him.

  His face fell. “I told you I’m being fair now.”

  Heidi death-stared him down.

  “Fine,” he said, and stepped away. “The thanks I get.”

  Heidi waited until he was a distance away that she deemed safe, some five or six feet. Then she glanced at me over her shoulder—another unspoken message, this to confirm that I had my eyes on him while she prepared to turn away—and then, she stepped forward, and pressed her orb into the remaining cavity.

  A green light flickered on around it too, turning the twisting ice in its core alien.

  No sooner than she had done so, the grinding of rock on rock split the air. Reverberating to near-deafening levels in the small space, it grew to a crescendo as the door split, a seam conjured from nowhere down its middle—and then the entire thing dissolved, vanishing away entirely.

  The marachti surged through the gap into whatever chamber lay beyond.

  “So much for ‘ladies first’,” Heidi muttered to Borrick.

  “How do you know they aren’t ladies?” Borrick countered.

  “Because none would willingly spend time with you, whatever the species.”

  “He’s paying them,” I reminded her.

  Carson tittered in the background. Bub made a noise too, something I interpreted as a chuckle.

  Borrick just kept his mouth shut, and headed in after his marachti. And the four of us followed.

  We came out to—

  “Whoa,” Carson gasped.

  A vista extended ahead of us, of waters so wide and far-reaching that we might be looking out to sea again. Somehow the space had ballooned to a hundred times its regular size, like we’d stepped into the alien pyramid equivalent of a TARDIS. From above streamed sunlight, brilliant rays dancing in the air and shimmering across the softly undulating surface of the mass of water—

  Water that was perfectly clear. Within, far below our feet, was a city.

  And somewhere in that city rested the Tide of Ages.

  27

  The marachti spread along the edge. I figured there were still a good two dozen left after Heidi’s assaults; more than enough to give the city a good going-over while Heidi and I struggled to keep pace. Plus there was that whole matter of the riddle still to figure out—and now, on its doorstep, a bolt of panic crept into my chest. We might have had a fighting chance in the last temple if we’d been able to drain it and wrest water control from Borrick. Here, with nothing to even the odds, we might be bang out of luck.

  Borrick strode the ledge, eyes scouring the water. One of the marachti chittered. “Patience,” Borrick said. “It’s only fair that we all leave the starting line together. What say you?” he asked me.

  A bone. Small, but right now I’d take it. “Fine.”

  He squinted. “How do you plan on getting down there, anyway?”

  “I could ask the same of you.”

  “I am not going anywhere.”

  “Oh, right, because you’re a supervisor, not a Seeker.” That prompted his eyes to narrow. “It means our new orc friend can keep an eye on you while we take care of business.” To my companions: “Tactical chat. Follow.”

  I led them away in the opposite direction, skirting the wall—or at least, the lower portion of it. As it rose to infinity, it seemed to fade out, like someone had gone in and erased it away in a gradient that gave way to clear blue skies. And that sun!

  A safe distance clear, I said, “We need a battle plan, and fast.”

  “Battle plan is, we swig these—” Heidi waved her flask “—and take a flying leap.”

  “At least it’s not a blind leap,” Carson said, keeping a wary distance from the edge and eyeing it all the while. “Still … that’s a long way down.”

  “The riddle, people,” I said, trying to focus them. “We can’t leave this to blind luck. Not when we’re so far outnumbered.” Looking from Heidi to Carson and back again, I begged, “Hasn’t anyone had an idea?”

  Carson murmured the words back, eyebrows knitted.

  Heidi frowned.

  Bub was quite blank. Of course, none of us had shared it with him. I wondered if he’d be of any use if we had.

  The sum of it was that no one had an answer. So I turned, peering into the water, face downturned in a frown of my own.

  I ran over the words again.

  Beneath the ceaseless rays of light,

  The endless sea in frozen time,

  Two must turn—

  Two must turn.

  Ceaseless rays of light; accounted for. Endless sea, certainly present to the horizon. Frozen time? That made sense too, I supposed; we’d been coming up on dawn when we arrived. This blinding sunlight, from so high overhead, was more like midday.

  I shook my head, rattling the thoughts loose. Of course all that stuff was here. The riddle hadn’t been lying to me.

  ‘Two must turn,’ though? I imagined Heidi and I doing a little synchronized swimming routine in the waters – nope, probably not that. I was ungainly in the water anyhow.

  “Are you ready to go?” Borrick called.

  “Hold up!” I yelled back.

  He grumbled something, but it didn’t make its way to me in a fashion I could understand beyond tone.

  I squinted into the depths, eyes poring over the city, and ran over the second verse.

  The fallen kingdom lieth drowned,

  And where the king and queen were crowned,

  Two must turn—

  Two must turn.

  Where the king and queen were crowned? How was I supposed to … know …

  I stared, eyes bulging widely.

  The city was built up, densest in the center, the tallest buildings of all there. But out at the edges, among two smaller stone buildings, reared two, at opposite sides of the city, with craggy roofs. Roofs like—

  “Crowns,” I whispered.

  “Huh?” Heidi asked.

  “There’s a mechanism,” I breathed, whirling back to her, eyes glittering with fire. “At least, I think so. To get to the Tide of Ages. It’s not just housed somewhere in those buildings. Or maybe it is. I don’t know yet.”

  “Mira, maybe you should slow down,” Carson said.

  I tried—but it was hard, damn it, so hard when I was certain that this was it, that this was right.

  “There’s some kind of lever, maybe, or something like that. Two of them—housed in outbuildings toward the city’s edge. ‘And where the king and queen were crowned’—there’s a smaller one down there, see? With a roof like a crown? Don’t point,” I warned, under my breath, as Heidi, Carson, and Bub leaned forward to see.

  “I think I see it,” Heidi said at last. “And the other?”

  “On the opposite side.”

  She squinted, scouring.

  “I’m not seeing it.”

&n
bsp; “That’s fine; I’ll take that one.”

  “We’ve got to go to these things alone?”

  “I think so. That’s the ‘two must turn’ thing. The mechanism, whatever it is—I think we need to be in the same place, at the same time, when we activate it. That’ll let us through to the Tide of Ages.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Heidi asked, face tense.

  “No. Not at all. But it’s all I’ve got, based on the riddle.” That last part almost came out lame, low—but determination burned in me like fire. This was it. I was so, so sure of it.

  “All right,” she said at last. “So I’ll swim down there, you go to the other, and we just … turn what?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’ll be obvious. Or I hope so, anyway.”

  “And how do we know when to do it? If we have to at the same time—how am I supposed to know when you’re ready, and vice versa?”

  I hesitated, at a loss here. How were we going to do that?

  “Carson.” My eyes lit on him. “I need your wristwatch.”

  “Uh …”

  I was already pulling it from him. “Heidi, you’ve got one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it works underwater?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This one does too?” I asked Carson.

  “Um, I mean I haven’t tested it. It’s new; I got it after the Chalice Gloria—”

  Good enough. Slapping it to my wrist and buckling it tight, I said, “Sync your watch to mine. This one’s at 4:17.”

  Heidi fiddled. “So’s mine.”

  “Right. At 4:47—that’s exactly thirty minutes—we activate … whatever it is we’re here to activate.”

  “Got it.”

  Borrick called to us again. “I’m going to die of skin cancer if you don’t hurry up!”

  “It’s all right,” I called back, “we’ll send you a nice fruit basket while you’re ailing.”

  He favored me with a look of pure irritation. “Can we please go?”

  “Hold your horses!” I yelled back. Then, to Heidi: “At least you got your wish about making him wait a little longer.”

  “I’d suggest we camp out here all morning if I didn’t think he’d send his marachti in sometime in the next two minutes regardless of us,” she said. Then: “You think the marachti know what they need to do?”

  I hoped not, and I told her as much. “But if they do—make use of your cutlass, I guess.”

  “What about the spear? It’s not so great underwater.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said. Though Heidi was right. Maybe taking the long swim for the farther building, and thus having more time to draw the ire of the marachti, was a poor move on my part.

  But Borrick’s patience was wearing thin, going by the harrumphing noise wending its way over to us. So we needed to get a move on.

  I fished my flask out. Still intact, fortunately, despite the great deal of jostling it had been through this past day—through temples, captured by strangling vines, not to mention just enduring the violent motion with which Bub rowed.

  Uncapping it, I clinked with Heidi. “Bottoms up.”

  And I upended it.

  This was the first spell I’d swallowed—and like whatever Carson had swallowed that one time (I’d make a point of asking him about it later), it was not pleasant. Neither liquid or mist, it coagulated into something lumpy and unpleasant as it passed my tongue and disappeared down my throat. It took a lot of effort to hold back a gag.

  Once it hit my stomach, the feeling intensified—

  I felt some vast contortion happening inside of me. My organs seemed to be rearranging of their own volition of because something had plunged a great rod inside of me and given them a spin. For a terrifying second I thought I would burst, the way I’d squashed slugs, stepping on them so their innards erupted in a sick projectile from their heads or tails.

  Then the feeling was gone. I was … fine.

  But my throat was dry.

  No, scratch that. My lungs were dry. Like they wanted water. And even though I could still inhale up here, was still able to breathe in the same way I always had, I felt as if, for the next sixty minutes, it would feel much, much better if I were to just dunk my head into the water and take a great long gasp of it, feel that invigorating, rejuvenating fluid fill up my chest …

  “Oh, this is weird,” I said.

  “I’m so glad to be doing it a second time,” said Heidi. “Thanks, Carson.” Then: “See you on the other side.”

  She leapt in.

  Borrick roared—

  His words were cut off as the marachti plunged in too, drowning him out.

  “Keep a close eye on him while you’re up here,” I told Carson—and Bub, for whatever good it might do given his code of honor.

  “Will do,” Carson said. “See you in sixty.”

  I turned to dive—and then caught myself. Turning back one last time, I reached for the silvery coil of elvish rope peeking from Carson’s manbag, slinging it over a shoulder.

  “Why are you—?”

  “Just in case,” I said. “Latas, yo.”

  And then I dove.

  I was right: that first inhalation of water felt glorious. There wasn’t even a moment of panic at the sensation of fluid filling my lungs, no second guessing that maybe the spell wasn’t going to work as intended. I just sucked in as much of the cool, clear liquid as I could … and allowed myself one moment of bliss.

  Then I breathed it out, and refocused on the matter at hand.

  Heidi was already making good headway. Swimming straight down, she’d make it to the first mechanism in no time. It meant a good long wait—but it also meant less opportunity to draw the attention of the marachti.

  The marachti were hurtling for the city center, looking like a school of elongated yellow fish.

  I wondered if they had needed to acquire a spell for this too—

  And then I realized: the skin at the base of their necks had flared out, like the leaves of a palm tree, giving momentary flashes of bright pink and purple. And contained within were three dark stripes, opening and closing to the water.

  Gills.

  Perfect. So not only were we outnumbered, but time wasn’t on our side.

  Which meant I better get to it.

  Propelling myself forward, I began a diagonally downward swim. Only a soft angle, mind; enough to keep myself a reasonable distance above the city, and hopefully not give any marachti cause to trace my path to its conclusion. With any luck, they’d be distracted as they plunged through buildings anyway,

  Though time pressed, I couldn’t help marveling. The city had been rendered in miniature from above the water thanks to bending of light. In full size, I was again reminded of the scale of this world within a room. And the buildings themselves—they were like something ripped from a picture book. I was reminded of France or Rome, with expansive architecture and spires rearing heavenward below this sea. Yet these were not brick, not stone like the temples. It was coral, like some great reef carved into a cityscape. Colors glittered, a whole mass of them stitched together with no rhyme or reason, like a young child’s coloring book.

  I stared, awed.

  Then a thought jerked me forward again, the word time on its lonesome.

  4:21, said the wristwatch. Already eating into what I had available. Lugging the elvish rope with me, slowing down and making awkward my movements, wasn’t helping matters. I lamented taking it now. If it hadn’t been expensive, I’d have just dropped it.

  Worse than the erosion of time … now I’d torn myself away from the majesty of the city, I noticed that not all of the two dozen or so marachti had plunged for it. Two pairs lingered—one not too far from me, albeit lower—and the other heading in Heidi’s direction.

  Rats. So we were going to be ghosted.

  Fine. Let them follow us. Heidi could take care of herself. And me … well, unwieldy though the spear might be, I could get the drop on them.

  I
hoped, anyway.

  Putting them out of mind as best possible, I swam.

  My ghosts swam too. They remained below me, and as soon as I’d overtaken them they stayed out of sight, to my rear. I tried not to make a point of craning my head around to keep watch.

  It wasn’t easy going.

  Below, a cluster of marachti took on the largest building. At the very center of the city, from which all the others radiated out, I wondered if it was perhaps a cathedral. Maybe, in the future when all this was said and done and I was one very rich Mira Brand, I could come back here with a whole armful of spells from Lady Angelica and take my time exploring the place, really get to enjoy what had been built for us here.

  Not all of the marachti took on the cathedral, though. The remaining marachti, some six or seven, split off into groups, scouring the other buildings nearby, swimming in through open windows.

  I wondered how they’d ever relay their information to and fro. Sound didn’t travel so great underwater. How did they know who’d ventured where, and whether they’d had success or not?

  I glanced back again at the pair following me. Some forty or fifty meters back, maybe twenty down, they seemed to be keeping pace.

  I pursed my lips. What should I do? Give them the run-around and hope they got bored, figuring I had no idea what I was doing and was thus a lost cause? Maybe I could dip down into the city and try to lose them by weaving in and out of buildings. But they were so lithe, so much more muscular. The only hope I had of making a getaway was crossing my fingers that I could find a pair of openings that would lead me to some other corner of the city out of sight, before they caught up with me or the lingering remnants of my portal.

  My mind went to my pocket; the umbrella waiting inside; Decidian’s Spear.

  I didn’t want to use it … but they might not give me a choice.

  I swam above the city, leaving the center and its overloaded maze of buildings behind. Those remaining shrunk below me, progressively losing stories until only the smallest remained—and the smaller building with the ridged roof, the one I was certain held one half of the mechanism we needed to activate to gain access to the Tide of Ages, approached.

  So close to it, I saw it had no windows. Just the one door, etched in the side, just above a small set of stone steps—utterly useless for anything except for crabs, now.