The Rivers of Zadaa tpa-6

by D. J. MacHale

  “The way to Kidik.” Note to self: Stop making clever Second Earth references.

  Loor glanced at the map and said, “Here. The first of the strange markings.”

  She showed me the map. I could see the big cavern with the monster water-control device. There might as well have been a note saying: you are here. I could also see on the map where the cavern narrowed down to a small tunnel opening, just as it was in front of us. The odd thing was that on the map there were three X’s across the mouth of the smaller tunnel.

  “Any idea what it means?” I asked.

  Loor shook her head. We kept our weapons ready and began our journey to Kidik, the capital city of the Rokador world. We walked quickly to the far end of the cavern, stopping just short of the opening to the smaller tunnel. After a quick look around I announced, “No X’s here.” I took a step through the opening. The instant I broke the plane, I heard a rumbling sound. I had triggered something.

  “C’mon!” I shouted, and leaped through.

  Loor didn’t hesitate and jumped after me. Her quick reaction saved her life. The instant she entered the tunnel, a series of steel spikes shot down like spears from above, closing off the opening. If Loor had been a hair slower, she would have been skewered. We stood together, holding each other, breathing hard. The opening to the tunnel was now cut off by the spikes that had become vertical bars.

  “Good news-bad news,” I said. “The route to Kidik may be booby-trapped.”

  “Booby-trapped?” Loor said, confused.

  “Full of dangerous surprises like that,” I said. “If we make a wrong move, it could hurt.”

  “And what is the good news?” she asked.

  “Bokka’s map will save us,” I answered. “I’ll bet these odd markings on the map show where the traps are.”

  We both took another look at the map. Those strange markings now took on a whole new importance…and there were a bunch of them between us and Kidik.

  “This may show us where they are, but not what to expect,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is going to be interesting.”

  We weren’t doing any good standing there staring at a map, so we continued on. The map led us through many different-size tunnels and caverns. The more I saw, the more amazed I became at how the Rokador had burrowed out an entire civilization underground.

  “Are these tunnels natural?” I asked. “Or did the Rokador dig them?”

  “Both,” Loor said. “I believe the larger caverns are natural, but the adjoining tunnels were created by the Rokador.”

  “But how? This is, like, solid rock.”

  “The history of the Rokador is best told by a Rokador,” Loor said. “But I am familiar with the dygos.”

  “The huh?”

  “Dygos,” Loor repeated. “Tunneling machines. We will see them on our journey.”

  I decided not to ask any more questions until I had a visual aid. Besides, I was too stressed about running into another booby trap. Fear beats out curiosity any day. Walking through this labyrinth of underground tunnels was strange in that it didn’t feel all that claustrophobic. Sure, some of the rocky tunnels were narrow, but they often opened up into caverns where the ceilings were as lofty as a cathedral. And there were lights everywhere. It didn’t feel anything like we were traveling deeper and deeper underground. To be honest, I tried not to think about that. I couldn’t imagine living down here under multiple tons of rock, unless you were an ant.

  The thing we didn’t find was people. Not a single living soul. We passed hundreds of different rooms that were full of equipment. Some looked like living spaces with cots and furniture. Others were stacked with boxes and tools. There had been people here once, and not long ago, either. The word that kept coming to mind was “abandoned.”

  Every so often the route would take us through a less developed area, where there would be a marking on the map, and another booby trap. One time Loor took a step and felt the ground rumble. She leaped forward and I jumped back a second before the floor caved in, leaving a gaping black hole that dropped down to nowhere. We found ourselves on opposite sides of a hole that went from wall to wall. Unfortunately for me, I was on the wrong side, with no way to get across.

  “There,” Loor said, pointing.

  I saw a thin lip of stone floor that hadn’t fallen. It was no wider than a brick and sticking out from the wall along one side of the hole.

  “You want me to walk across on that?” I asked in horror.

  “Unless you can leap over,” Loor said.

  I couldn’t. It was a thirty-foot jump. I had to go the lip route. Swell. Facing the wall, I tentatively put my right toe onto it and pressed down to see if it would crumble. It didn’t.

  Still, this was going to be tough, even if the lip held. It was only a few inches wide. Gulp. I had to press my chest against the rock wall, with nothing to grab on to, and slide my feet along. It kind of reminded me of the training pit back at Mooraj. Only with this pit, if you fell, you died. I moved my right foot first, then brought my left foot up to it. There was no way I could cross them over. I would have lost my balance for sure. I kept the palms of my hands flat against the rock, carefully feeling for any little crag that I could hang on to with my fingers. My left cheek was pressed flat and I stayed up on my toes-anything to keep my center of gravity forward.

  I tried not to think about how my butt was dangling out over oblivion. My entire being was focused on keeping my weight against the wall. I crept along like this, moving slowly, but moving. The lip held, and I was getting closer to safety. It wasn’t until I was almost to the far side that my luck ran out. The wall bowed out ever so slightly. It wasn’t much, but it was enough so that I had to move my center of balance back to get around. Bad move. I felt my weight shift toward oblivion. I grabbed for the wall, but my fingers brushed over the rock face uselessly. I was going down.

  I didn’t get far. Something hit me on the back. Hard. I carefully peeked to my right and saw that I was close enough to the far side that Loor was able to reach out with her stave and pin me to the wall.

  “Ouch,” I said. I didn’t mean it. She had saved my life. Again.

  “Keep moving,” she commanded.

  Having her hold me against the wall gave me confidence. I quickly got my feet shuffling again, and a few seconds later I was on the far side.

  “Thank you,” I said. That hardly covered it, but what else could I say? Saving each other’s lives was getting pretty common. Loor didn’t need to be thanked. She was already on to the next challenge. How strange is that? I could very easily have died just then. But I didn’t, so we had to move on like it was no biggie. That is what my twisted life has become. I shouldn’t complain. At least I’m still around to write about it.

  “It seems as though the Rokador abandoned these tunnels and set these traps to stop those who would follow,” Loor said.

  “Yeah, us,” I said.

  “Or the attacking Batu,” Loor said. “The Rokador are not warriors. In battle the Ghee will destroy them.”

  “What about the Tiggen guards?” I asked.

  “Bokka would not agree with me, but they are no match for the Ghee. Even if they were, they do not have the numbers we do. If they hope to win a war against the Batu, they will have to do it with cunning, not force.”

  I agreed with her. From what I saw, the Tiggen guards weren’t the fighters that the Ghee were. Heck, even I held my own against them. How pathetic is that?

  “These traps are a pain for us,” I said. “But they won’t stop an army.”

  “Not from what we have seen so far,” Loor said. “We should continue.”

  I was right about the map. It showed the location of every booby trap. Without it, we would have been history. Thank you, Bokka. But the markings only showed us where the booby traps were, not how to prevent them from springing. We were nearly skewered about a dozen times over. Rocks crashed down in miniavalanches. One time the ground started to churn below
our feet to reveal the sharp teeth of grinding gears that nearly turned us into hamburger. It was like making our way through a medieval video game full of pitfalls and surprises. Only this was no game.

  There was something else we saw along the way that I should mention. Whenever we reached one of the larger caverns, on either wall there would be these huge, round metal plates sunk into the rock. They each had to be about thirty feet in diameter. When we saw the first one, I stopped to examine it.

  “I do not know what it is,” Loor said before I had the chance to ask. “I have never come this far into Rokador territory.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder what they were, and if they might give us trouble. They weren’t on the booby trap map, so chances were they were safe. After passing hundreds of these giant disks, I didn’t know any more about them than after I’d seen the first one. Though my curiosity was still tweaked, the main thing was that they didn’t do us any harm, so I had to ignore them.

  We continued walking cautiously for a couple of hours. There’s no way to tell how far we had traveled, since we had to stop often to find ways around the booby traps. The map was really accurate. It showed every intersection, tunnel, and cavern exactly as we were seeing it. At one point we rounded a corner and came upon yet another bizarre sight. It was sitting to the side of a larger cavern, looking totally out of place. It was a giant, silver ball. I was so surprised by seeing this thing, I actually took a step back. It didn’t faze Loor, though.

  “That,” she said, “is a dygo.”

  Dygo? Oh, right. The tunneling machine. Very cool. I took a closer look at this odd device to see that the silver sphere was actually a passenger cab. It wasn’t much bigger than a golf cart. It looked like it could hold two people, with a clear window that wrapped halfway around. The giant silver ball rested on treads, like a tractor. This thing could move forward, back, or turn in place. But the most amazing thing was the gizmo attached to the outside. It was a six-foot-long drilling device. It was shaped like one of those old-fashioned megaphones-as wide as the sphere at its base and narrowing down to a hollow point that was about a foot across. Along the body of the drill were dozens of rings with various gnarly looking cutting devices. The circular tip had inch-wide teeth that looked like they could drill through pretty much anything.

  “That’s how they dig the tunnels?” I asked.

  “Yes, though it is one of the smaller vehicles.”

  I took a step closer to admire this silver tractor, drill, rock eater, whatever. “I figured they needed something more than shovels to create the underground, but this thing is…is…just killer.”

  “Bokka and I used to race dygos through the caverns,” Loor said.

  “They let you do that?”

  “No.”

  Oh. Those wacky kids.

  “So you can drive this thing?” I asked.

  Loor smiled mischievously, as if remembering some taboo joyrides. “They are quite fast.”

  “So let’s jump in and drive to Kidik,” I said. “If it can drill through rock, it’ll definitely protect us against the traps.”

  “Unless the trap is another bottomless pit,” Loor said.

  “Oh, yeah.” I’d forgotten about that.

  We had done all right getting by the booby traps up until that point, so it made sense not to mess with success. We left the cavern with the strange vehicle and continued our journey. Along the way I noticed more dygos. Some were parked in dark caves off to the side. Others were lined up in larger caverns, waiting for the next big project. I was getting very curious about the Rokador. In many ways they were incredibly advanced technologically. Yet they chose to live like moles. I hoped that someday I’d learn more about them-hopefully before they were annihilated by an army of Ghee warriors.

  “We are getting close,” Loor finally announced.

  I took the parchment and saw that we were only a few turns away from the top of the map. The markings showed that the final tunnel led to an area with no detail. That had to be Kidik. My excitement started to build. Not only were we nearing the end of a dangerous journey, I was dying to see what an underground city would look like here on Zadaa. I tried not to think about the fact that we would be going from the frying pan into the fire. We were Batu. At least Loor was. I was kind of an honorary Batu. Bottom line was, we were the enemy. There was every possibility that the Rokador would capture us and lock us away. Or worse.

  “Let’s rest a minute,” I suggested.

  We double-checked the map to make sure there weren’t any land mines around, and sat down.

  “There’s something we need to talk about,” I said to Loor. “What is that?” she asked.

  I had been bothered about something since we decided to leave for Kidik. It was a problem I didn’t know how to handle. Now that we were on the verge of arriving at our destination, it was time that I shared my concern with Loor. “We still have no proof that Saint Dane is controlling events down here,” I said.

  “But he was there when Pelle a Zinj was assassinated,” Loor argued. “And Bokka said he is down here-“

  “Yeah, I know, but we still don’t know what he’s up to. We’re only guessing. Maybe he’s just hanging around, observing.”

  “What are you saying, Pendragon?” Loor asked.

  “We came down here thinking that we’ve got to stop the war,” I answered. “I have no idea how we’re going to do that, but it’s why we’re here. What are we going to do if we find out that Saint Dane hasn’t influenced events after all, and the war between the Batu and the Rokador is the way it was meant to be? What do we do then?”

  This truly was a dilemma. If Saint Dane wasn’t controlling events, then the Travelers had no business being here and monkeying around. We’re not supposed to mess with the natural course of a territory. That’s not our job. We already screwed things up by putting Pelle a Zinj in a position to be killed.

  Loor said, “I believe the real question is, am I here to do the work of a loyal Batu, or a Traveler? As a Traveler, I must do all I can to stop Saint Dane. But as a Batu, I must be loyal to my tribe.”

  “Right, which means you might suddenly have to go from somebody who wants to stop the war, to being the first warrior who has to fight it.”

  Loor looked at the ground, thinking. As we sat in that cavern, only a few yards away from Kidik City, we truly didn’t know if Loor was there as a peacekeeper or an invader.

  “That is our first challenge,” she finally said. “We must learn what Saint Dane has been doing. Once we know that, we will decide how to proceed.”

  She was right. Until we found Saint Dane, we wouldn’t know what to do. I took a tired breath and asked, “Is this Traveler stuff ever going to get easier?”

  “I do not believe so,” Loor answered.

  We continued on through the last portion of the tunnel. Up ahead I saw that the stone corridor turned sharply to the right, just as the map showed. My heart raced. Around that corner was our destination. Kidik. I was excited about what we would find…and scared to death.

  “You ready for this?” I asked.

  “Do you need to ask?” Loor shot back.

  I gave her a smile, and we continued on. We reached the corner, made the turn, and came face-to-face with… a dead end.

  There was no Kidik.

  (CONTINUED)

  ZADAA

  Loorand I stood staring at a huge, blank wall of rock where there was supposed to be a city. “No way,” I said.

  It was the end of the line. There wasn’t any way around it. Literally. The tunnel opened up into a large cavern, but instead of a city, there was nothing but a vast wall of rock. There were no tunnels. No doorways. No hidden passageways. We had cometothe end of the map, but there was no Kidik.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said, looking at the map. “Did Bokka send us on a totally useless trip?”

  “No,” Loor said defensively. “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe…” A though
t hit me. “Maybe we didn’t get this map from Bokka after all.”

  “You were there, Pendragon,” Loor said impatiently. “You took it out of his boot.”

  “Yeah, but was it really Bokka? Maybe Saint Dane turned himself into Bokka to get us this map!”

  Loor dismissedit, saying, “Then Saint Dane’s ashes are now scattered across the desert.”

  Oh. Right. Bokka died. Maybe I was getting a little too paranoid about Saint Dane turning up in various disguises. “Okay, so it was Bokka,” I said. “Then why did he send us into a dead end?”

  Loor stared at the blank wall, looking to find some clue that would make sense of this.

  She found it.

  “Look!” she said, pointing to where the rock wall met the ceiling.

  I looked. I didn’t see a thing. “Look at what?” I asked. “Look to where the wall in front of us meets the side of the cavern.”

  I looked. Nothing. “I’m still not getting it,” I said.

  “Look at the color of the rock,” she explained. “The wall is different from the ceiling, and the side. That is not natural.”

  A closer look told me she was right. The ceiling and side walls were a different brown color than the wall. The dead end wall was ever so slightly darker.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “That is not natural, Pendragon,” Loor said. “I believe this wall in front of us was constructed.”

  “Constructed?” I shot back. “You can’t just build a huge wall of rock.”

  “The Rokador can,” Loor said confidently. “How can you doubt that, after seeing the world they have built? I believe this is another attempt to stop the Batu attack.”

  I took a step back and tried to imagine the wall not being there. Now that I was thinking that way, it did seem like where the wall met the sides and the ceiling, and even the ground, was a little bit too perfect and precise.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe they sealed off the cavern. It’s still a wall of rock and we’re still stuck.”

  Loor smiled and said, “Maybe not.”

  “It’s a stone wall, Loor,” I said impatiently. “Whether it was made by the Rokador or not, we can’t get through-” The words were barely out of my mouth when the lightbulb went on. I realized what she was talking about. “Are you serious?” I asked. “Do you really know how to use those things?”