“No, because we’re traveling away from the sound faster than we can hear it,” I replied. “But you can bet that every animal or being down below can hear us!” I became thoughtful. “And so that’s why there’s this shield, then—if we’re traveling at the speed of sound, our skin wouldn’t be able to handle it. It would burn if unprotected and maybe even peel off our bodies. So this magical shield must disperse heat as well as wind. Cool.”
A rumbling chuckle came from Frelanfur in response. Jason put an arm around me wonderingly as we stood together to watch the scenery flash past beneath us like we were watching a sped up video.
Chapter 9
Out of the blue Frelanfur’s voice said quietly to Jason and me, “Having traveled in the Sub-realms and actually gone into a city-state, did you also happen to see a Conductivus?”
That threw me for a few reasons—first, how was it I could even hear him, even though we were standing near the base of his neck? Second, his voice wasn’t as loud or as booming as it usually was, but sounded more like a normal person standing next to me. From the look on Jason’s face, Jason must have heard him, too. So the dragon must be using some sort of magic to communicate with us. Dragons either used magic or were magic, according to Ragar—which all of a sudden made Frelanfur’s reaction to the iron more understandable. But how did Frelanfur know about Conductivi? Or was that Conductivuses?
“No, but I heard the term and how respectfully it was spoken,” Jason said meanwhile.
“Errr, yes, I did,” I said.
“Good. Then you know what one looks like,” Frelanfur said, sounding pleased.
I was about to ask a question when the dragon said, “You must be aware that a Conductivus holds a special place outside of Under-elven law. They can order things done, reverse decisions made by anyone—even by the High Councils of the city-state in which they live—and do other things as well.”
“They can? How? Why?” I asked.
“Because if a Conductivus got sufficiently annoyed, he or she could allow the dead some measure of corporealness, or ability to affect the physical world, and then make the offender’s life miserable.”
I shuddered. That meant every ghost movie or creepy story that I had ever read could actually have a basis in fact. It made the hairs on my neck stand on end.
“Huh? Cómo?” Jason wanted to know.
I replied, “I’m not looking forward to finding out if hauntings are also real. ’Cause if they are, I’m in trouble.”
My mind flashed to the trail of Under-elven bodies that we’d had to leave behind our party when we were last down in the Sub-realms.
“No, Lise, we’re in trouble,” Jason said loyally, taking my hand.
“I would not worry too much about that, Champion Lise,” Frelanfur interjected. “The dead, in order to affect the living, need to borrow energy from the Conductivus. So unless the Conductivus gives permission, you should be fine in the Sub-realms.”
“So, you’re saying the Sub-realms run on blackmail and blackmail give-and-take?” Jason asked, sounding a little intrigued.
“Perhaps,” Frelanfur replied, a smile in his voice. “Though it is beyond rare for a Conductivus to take such actions. Dealing with the hordes of the dead is a never-ending task that takes up most of their attention, or so I have learned. However, for anything that is found to be against the, errr, spirit of Under-elven society, Conductivi have been known to move mountains. So to speak.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“Conductivi have long been the holders of the origin of the ways of the Under-elves—especially since they have recourse to the spirits from the beginning of Under-elf society. If there is ever a question about precedence, the Conductivus for that city-state is consulted. By the way, Champion Lise, did you know that anyone has a right to ask for a Conductivus consultation? Or the right to have a Conductivus judge his or her case? However, the being in question had better have a worthy reason for such a request, or he or she will not live long enough to regret it. Or,” he said thoughtfully, “perhaps he or she just might. The cages in the Art section are not always for non-Under-elves.”
“How did you learn all this?” I asked, shuddering at the memories of the tortured beings that Under-elves called ‘Art’ that I’d seen in Chirasniv’s Central Court.
When Frelanfur chose to ignore my question, Jason jumped in with a different one. “Can a Conductivus give permission to any spirit to allow him-or-herself to be tapped for energy? Like, say, to a monster?”
“I do not know, little Human,” the dragon said to him.
Jason frowned at the derogatory-sounding term, but Frelanfur went on. “I would suppose that a Conductivus could, but it would require intelligence on the part of the monster’s ghost. Hmmmmm. You have given me something to research. I thank you for that.”
“Little Human?” Jason complained. “My name is Jason, and I am really getting tired of getting the short end of introductions around here!”
“Did you do battle with me?” Frelanfur asked.
“Well, no, but,” Jason began.
The dragon cut him off. “Do you wish to?”
“Well, not if I don’t have to.”
“Then ‘little Human’ you are,” Frelanfur’s voice said with finality.
“Usted hijo de una madre prostituta,” Jason swore softly.
“What?” the dragon asked.
“Nothing important,” Jason replied.
I looked at Jason with my eyebrows raised, pretty sure I’d understood what he’d just said. Jason acknowledged my look with a small smirk. I mouthed at him “Are you crazy?”
Jason just put his arm around me and walked me back to rejoin the others.
In what felt like no time but was probably somewhere around ten minutes later, Frelanfur descended towards a rocky, flattened mountain top. He landed and said in his booming voice, “You have arrived at your beginning destination.” He dropped all our gear to the ground as we scrambled to get off his back.
I ran around to get in front of Frelanfur’s nose. “Where do we go from here, and what are we looking for?” I asked, making sure that he knew I didn’t consider our bargain complete until we were actually on our way.
“You need to climb down the side of this mountain a couple of hundred feet. There you will find a small cave. At the back of the cave is a rockslide that looks solid, but you will find a crack in the wall that will lead you down to the Sub-realms.”
“And where do we go from there?” I asked.
Frelanfur replied, “I have done exactly as you asked. I have brought you to a place that will take you underground and down into the Sub-realms, where you will find guides of a sort who will eventually get you to Chirasniv.”
“But we are nowhere near Chirasniv!” I said angrily.
“You asked for ….”
“I know what I asked for! And this isn’t it!”
“It is, and you will find it so in time,” the dragon replied infuriatingly as he rose to all fours and walked towards the edge of the cliff.
“Hey! You just can’t leave!” I said, running along beside him, but stopped when I came to the cliff edge.
Frelanfur didn’t even pause. He walked off the edge and spread his wings as he fell, a mountain updraft catching him and making him rise. I couldn’t stop myself from inhaling appreciatively at the sight of Frelanfur leisurely gliding away, the rainbow sheen on his scales glistening in the morning sun.
“Wow,” said Heather with a sigh, coming up behind me. “He’s kind of a jerk, but he is sooo pretty.”
Ragar cleared his throat behind her. She whirled about with a guilty expression on her face. The mountain-cat-elf gave her what I recognized as a mock angry face, then he laughed as she started to protest she didn’t mean it the way it sounded.
“I wonder what he meant by ‘of a sort?’” mused Auraus.
“I guess we’ll find that out,” Jason relied.
Dusk came up to me, the flying
carpet already spread and carrying all of our packs. “Let us find the way down to this cave, Lise. Because if Frelanfur says it is here and it will eventually take us to where you bargained for, then rest assured, it will do so.”
Chapter 10
“Hey, everybody, before we start looking for the path, I’d like to know if Frelanfur talked with any of you, too, during the flight?” I asked in general.
Dusk and the others, except for Jason, shook their heads.
“What did the dragon talk about?” Dusk asked.
I noted with a half-smile to myself that the Miscere Surface-elf still wasn’t using Frelanfur’s name.
“He was talking, of all things, about Conductivi,” I told him.
That seemed to throw Dusk for a loop. Auraus and Ragar exchanged glances.
“That … is a rather odd topic of conversation. Did you ask him a question about the one you had met in Chirasniv?” Dusk replied.
“No, and that’s the weird part,” I replied. “He brought it up out of the blue.”
“Out of the blue?” Auraus asked, perplexed.
“For no reason at all,” I explained.
The mountain-cat-elf frowned. “A dragon never does anything ‘out of the blue,’ as you call it. There has to be a reason.”
Jason said, “Maybe he was just seeing what we knew about them, since Lise had actually seen one. And I did end up giving him something new to research on Conductivi while we were talking, he said. Maybe that was why?”
“Perhaps,” Dusk said doubtfully.
“Hey, uh, Lise?” Heather called over from where she was sitting on the rocks. “Since we need to get going, why don’t we use the carpet here to go looking for the path to the cave?”
She jerked an overly casual thumb to indicate the carpet that was presently laden down with our gear. Auraus smiled at the ground and didn’t offer to go flying to find it herself.
I smacked my head. “That makes perfect sense, Heather. Thanks for thinking of it.”
“Oh, can I do it?” she asked excitedly.
Remembering that she could probably use magic now, I said, “Go for it.” Last time Heather had been on the carpet, a Gnome had controlled it for her, so I was pretty sure she wanted to do the flying herself now.
Heather squealed and jumped on the flying carpet. She took off a little fast, but fortunately the magic of the carpet kept all of our stuff in place as she zoomed up over the edge of the cliff. She took a couple of circular passes high above around the mountain top, yelling out happily. Seeing us all wave at her to get on with it made her get serious, and she started hunting for the cave opening. Soon she was back and hovering at the edge of the mountain top.
“It’s not that far down. Let me use the carpet and ferry everyone there. It’ll be easier than climbing down to it,” she said.
That made sense to me even as I smiled at her transparent-ness at keeping on flying. One-by-one Heather took everyone down to the little cave. And little it was—once we were all inside, it was more like a hole in the mountainside rather than a cave. But after we lit the magical smokeless torches we’d taken from the keep, we found the rockslide at the back with the crack in the wall. Ragar squinted his eyes while Auraus shuddered at its narrowness. Those two would be scraping both their backs and fronts against the walls no matter how much Ragar sucked in his breath or how closely Auraus wrapped her white-and-gold feathered wings about herself.
“Are we sure this leads somewhere?” she asked nervously. “I do not believe I would find it funny to be the butt of a dragon’s joke.”
“What do you mean?” Dusk asked her.
“You mother said that Frelanfur once played a joke on you.”
Dusk sighed. “That was different. This, here, is the result of a dragon’s bargain. This crack in the wall will lead where he has said. You can trust that.”
She visibly gulped, and I couldn’t blame her. I was sort of nervous about the crack’s narrowness. I’d never gone either caving or spelunking underground before coming to this world.
“Are you going to be okay?” Dusk asked Auraus.
Mutely, the Wind-rider nodded her golden head, squaring her shoulders to face the confining space. Then, we all re-shouldered our own packs and rolled up the rug so it would fit in the crack.
“Okay, Ragar, you go first, then Jason, then Heather, then me, then Auraus, and then Dusk,” I ordered.
Jason raised his black eyebrows at me, but I nodded my head at Auraus to indicate that I wanted to be near her while we were going through this part of our journey. He nodded acceptance.
“All right, Ragar, its show time,” I said to him.
“She means, ‘let’s get going,’” Heather translated for him with a fond smile.
The mountain-cat-elf turned and dropped his pack to the floor in front of him. He pushed it inside the crack with his foot, and then wriggled through after it. And I’d been right; his general stockiness made it as bad for him getting through as I suspected it would be for Auraus. Jason and Heather were next with their packs, and then me. I, however, paused at the entrance to look back at Auraus and Dusk.
“I am with you, Auraus,” Dusk softly said to her.
“I am, too,” I said as I held out my hand to the Wind-rider, hiding my own nervousness.
Auraus gulped again, wrapped her wings closely around her, and took both of our hands. In a line together, the three of us squeezed into the grey-brown stone, maneuvering our packs as best we could. The crack in the wall extended downward pretty sharply but stayed tight about us. It seemed like a fault or something at some point in the past must have created this. We had to turn and duck and squash and bend ourselves to make our way ever downward, pushing our packs ahead of us when the way was too narrow to carry them on our backs. Only the fact that the dragon had promised me that this was the right way to go was what kept me pushing the others on. We traveled for what seemed like hours this way through tunnels of varying widths, which only occasionally opened into pockets of stone wide enough that where we could all be together briefly and touch base. We stopped in one such pocket for lunch but didn’t linger when the air started getting stale.
Finally, in what had to be an hour after squeezing through a particularly narrow passageway, I heard Ragar say, “Lise! The tunnel is starting to open up ahead!”
“Thank Caelestis!” Auraus breathed fervently behind me.
In a few minutes we were standing together in the largest pocket of stone that we’d encountered, although that still wasn’t saying much. I didn’t know what had caused it, but I was grateful. I was beginning to feel like the weight of the mountain was on top of me, and I knew we were nowhere near its bottom yet—never mind being near Sub-realm level.
“How long do you think this is going to go on, Dusk?” Heather asked, reaching out to hold onto Ragar’s furry arm as if looking for reassurance.
Dusk shrugged. “I do not know. However, given that the dragon instructed Lise to only bring five days of rations with us, I suspect that we will get to Chirasniv within that time.”
“But surely it’s farther than five days from here?” argued Jason. “We were going muy rapido on Frelanfur’s back. We have to be at least a hundred miles away!”
Dusk frowned. “I am not sure what you mean by ‘miles,’ but I assume it is some sort of large measurement of distance. But the dragon’s bargain ….”
Jason cut him off. “That’s what you said before: ‘dragon’s bargain, dragon’s bargain,” he said with annoyance. “Are you sure we can trust Frelanfur?”
“My mother does,” Dusk replied, not quite answering the question Jason had asked. “But my mother tends to see long term because of being a Goddess. So while I trust that eventually we will get to where we need to be, it might not be as soon as we, personally, had hoped for.”
“If Quiris trusts him, then that’s good enough for me,” said Heather firmly. She looked at each of us in turn. “If a Goddess believes in something or someone, then you sh
ould, too.”
I blinked. There was something inherently wrong with Heather’s statement, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But she was right—Quiris had chosen Frelanfur to aid in Her Champion’s rescue. Which meant that She trusted in him to do right by us. I hoped her trust wasn’t misplaced.
“All right, debate’s over,” I said. “It’s not like we really have a choice, do we?”
Nobody contradicted me.
“All right, let’s take a break, eat something, and then move on,” I commanded.
“Where?” asked Auraus. “I see no exit point.”
I looked around the chamber, and at first glance it seemed she was right. A quick look around found promising crack, except this one was in the floor.
Chapter 11
“That could be dangerous,” Dusk said, looking at the hole in the floor. “But it does look like it goes some way down. Someone should scout it first, Lise.”
“Let me send an air spell,” Auraus suggested, touching my arm for attention. “It is not perfect, but the spell will be better than going in blind.”
That sounded good to me. Auraus opened her Handbook, sent up a prayer to Caelestis, and drew down the power for the spell. She put her book away, closed her eyes and raised her hands, and then magic tingled across my skin. Heather and Jason both jumped like they’d been goosed.
“That’s fresh cast magic you both just felt,” I explained to them in a whisper, not wanting to upset Auraus’ casting. I couldn’t smother the smile that went with the whisper, though.
“Wow, so you weren’t kidding,” Jason said. “A here-and-then-gone-in-a-flash kind of sensation.”
“Good thing, too,” said Heather giving herself a shake. “I’d hate for that to be an ongoing feeling. Imagine living in a world where you were tingled all day long because of the magic happening around you.”
“Actually, that is a valid concern,” Ragar said. “It is one of the reasons why magic is regulated and controlled in places like settlements and so forth, and why magic items are more common than spells. The feelings of magic being cast by all and sundry around you would quickly get annoying were it an everyday occurrence, but as magical items do not have this problem, society uses them more.”
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