He reached into what remained intact inside the mechanism and gave one of the larger free gears a spin.
“Gears are like wheels. And there’s plenty of rods for them to spin on… I wonder…”
#
“So, they have music too?” Cul said. “How does anyone hear it? Trendana says you have to shout for anyone to hear up there.”
“You don’t have to shout. You just have to get close. I’ve heard Disaahna play something she called a lute once. It was quite lovely.”
Mira found herself almost at ease for the first time since her thoughts had turned to Eddy’s potential fate. It wasn’t that she was no longer concerned for him. But Cul had proved to have an unquenchable curiosity for the details of the surface dwellers and their ways. Mira half suspected he was just trying to distract her, but she couldn’t fault him for it. She needed a good distraction, or the worry would have eaten her alive by now.
“We’re right near the end of the rift now,” Cora said. “We should be near your farm, right?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe it is below us. Eddy has been growing seaweed, and we’ve got a very nice bed for farming pearls. It should be easy enough to find the place.”
“And what exactly do you want done once we find it?” Bult asked.
“First, just go and see if anything has happened. Any collapses, fresh breaks in stone, anything like that. If something has happened, come back up and let me know,” Mira said. “If nothing has happened, then you’ve done all you need to do, and I thank you. If it looks like something may have happened, and there isn’t any sign of Eddy, come back and tell me and I’ll tell you how to find the mine.”
“Why waste our precious time?” Sitz asked. “Just tell us where the mine is now so we can check it all at once.”
“It is a very deep, very complex mine, I wouldn’t—”
“She doesn’t trust us,” Bult said.
Cora darted up and poked Bult in the chest. “The way you two have been acting, I don’t trust you.”
“Come on. We’ve been paid. We do the job as ordered. Just like when we do labor back in Deep Swell during our swings up that way,” Cul said.
“If I wanted to keep doing labor, I’d stay in Deep Swell,” Sitz muttered. “But fine. Let’s go.”
The three mermen thrust their tails and swam downward, quickly moving beyond the depth Mira could comfortably travel without magic. Cora remained behind with her.
Mira turned to the nomad mermaid. Even if she’d not been dressed differently, Mira would have known Cora was a nomad. There was something about how they moved, even when idle. Her head had a slow, casual pivot, perpetually scanning the area. It stood to reason. In a life of constant motion with no comfortable, familiar surroundings, knowing precisely what was around you was probably essential for survival.
“I really do want to thank all you for your help. It is probably nothing. But I worry.”
“You paid. No thanks necessary. And of course you worry. You’d be a lousy sister if you didn’t. Your brother’s family. Family’s just the word we use for ‘people who we worry about and who worry about us.’ It’s why we’re all here.”
Mira smiled weakly. “I am not certain if that is a wonderful or terrible sentiment.”
Cora shrugged. “Just the truth.”
“Your brother is very curious and interested.”
“Nope.”
Mira was taken aback by the blunt denial. “He plainly is.”
“Nope. Not until you came around. That’s the most I heard him talk all at once in a year. But then, you’re the first person with the stink of the surface on her he’s got a good whiff of in a while.” Cora grinned. “Just a turn of phrase by the way. You don’t stink.”
“I’d assumed. Or at least I’d hoped.” She reached up and touched the skull in her hair. “Tell me. You say you don’t do much trade with the surface.”
“We don’t do any trade with the surface. Nothing directly. But we have plenty of third and fourth-hand contact. Not much value in it for us, though. Once a thing has passed through that many hands, the price gets so high we’re not likely to find someone willing or able to pay for it.”
“How often do you and the others pass by Barnacle?”
“Three or four times a year, depending on who we’re set to meet with. Why?”
“As I’ve said, even if I am paying you, you didn’t have to do this. And if it turns out you’ll miss that meeting with… with…”
“Casta’s Drift.”
“Yes. I wonder if trimming down the chain to simply secondhand goods from the surface could help you at all.”
Cora grinned. “Now you’re talking a language a nomad can understand.”
#
Rustle gazed into the blackness, shivering a bit. His icy raft was doing its job, but it wasn’t the most comfortable way to travel. As the ice melted—which it was doing quite rapidly—less wind was necessary to keep him moving. But it also made for an unstable vessel. Worse, eventually the cold migrated up through the shield-size digging claw that had been the closest he could come to an insulated perch. He was just about recovered enough from the long flight, and energized enough from the big meal, to take to the air again, but it was difficult to pull himself from his reverie.
Images had been flitting through his mind. The most frequent was the stunning face of the marvelous and magnificent Merantia. She was a creature with a severe beauty, a perfect balance of power, authority, grace, and elegance. These reminiscences of her wondrous visage were periodically tempered by the reminder from another part of his mind that he’d never once actually seen her face. This image in his mind was either imagined or inserted. Both possibilities were equally unreliable.
A second focus for his daydreaming was of the escalation of power he’d noticed. He found himself hungering for further strength and growth. That much was a staple of his longing and dreams for as long as he could remember. But now there was more. He saw that power being used for glory. For domination. And for attaining further power. No other fairies had a place in these dreams of aspiration. It was all about individual achievement and gratification. It was all very unfairylike.
The lowest, weakest layer of his stack of daydreams was the longing for the thrills of what would come next. He’d always wanted to discover things, but not until he’d met Eddy did he realize that he had wanted no part of the excitement that so often accompanied discovery. Now, as he thought of how he would find Eddy, how Eddy would help with Merantia and Stuartia, and how they would eventually escape, a tiny part of him was quite enthusiastic for the dangers they would surely overcome.
For the dreams of devotion and empowerment, he worried that these thoughts were not his own. For the dreams of excitement, he worried they were his own.
What finally shook him from the near fugue of layered daydreams was the gleam of something other than water and volcanic rock in the distance. He only saw it for a moment, lit by a reflection from the water’s surface, but it was certainly not the same field of black.
He blinked. “How… How could I have missed something? I flew this way to find my beloved and adored Merantia. … Oh, that’s right. I had my eyes shut, as I’d yet to awaken her, and thus her incomparably powerful spirit was too weak for me to feel otherwise. If only I had known the wisdom of her desires, I might have come to her with the full knowledge of the things she’d sought. How proud she would have been for me to have foreseen and fulfilled her demands before I’d even met her!”
Rustle tugged the digging claw. The ride thus far had caused it to sink somewhat into the ice, so yanking it free took some effort. When it finally broke away he buzzed toward the source of the unexplained glimmer. It was a large rectangular tablet, similar to the one he’d fetched for Eddy before they’d become trapped here, but much more substantial, and more firmly affixed to a smoothed section of the wall now half-submerged in the water. He swept his eyes over the tablet and felt oddly terrified. It wasn’t what the tablet
said, but that he knew what the tablet said.
His people had no written language. Not only did he not know how to read, he’d never even understood how reading could function. It just seemed like another form of magic. The larger creatures, like humans and elves, etched special shapes onto pages and bits of wood, and those shapes could conjure the message they were thinking of at the time in the other person’s head. What could that be except magic. But now, as he looked upon innocuous loops and points, it was as if a voice in his head was speaking the words to him. Astounding, and unsettling. Just to make it more like the speech that had until that moment been the source of everything he’d ever learned, he decided to read the message aloud.
“Woe be to the merfolk unfortunate enough to read this message,” he said. “If the divine are true to their covenant and the fates are kind, this tablet will not exist long enough to be read. By the joint workings of Tria and Tren, and under the observation of Tria’s Left and Right Hands, the diggers have been sent forth, to reach through the earth and bring forth the cleansing burn of the glowing heart. If the children or children’s children of those who witnessed the formation of the Broken Fields look upon this tablet now, fear the stirring of the Great Ancient and the Thieves. Should they rise again, when they fall, they will take the very sea with them.”
He stared for a moment, blinking in silence.
“It was supposed to have instructions!” he snapped. “Merantia said! I don’t need a warning. I know this is all horribly dangerous. The moment I felt the water close over my head when Eddy grabbed me I knew it was dangerous. It being dangerous and uncertain is why Eddy likes it so much. Being dangerous is what makes it an adventure!”
He buzzed up to the tablet and kicked it. Though he immediately regretted the decision, while flitting about in pain, his flaring glow cast on another fleck of white further below the half-submerged table. He took a breath and darted below the water. With breath held, he couldn’t read aloud, so he was forced to deal with the unsettling experience of having words form in his head simply by looking at the strange shapes.
This point lies between the cages crafted to hold the lingering spirits of the mages foolhardy enough to threaten the sea in their efforts to prove once and for all which was the mightiest. Like the Great Ancient, and like the Thieves, they could not be extinguished. In death, they remain dedicated to their endless aspirations. The strength of the spirit of Stuartia empowers the chains that bind the Great Ancient. The Spirit of Merantia seals the crypts of the Thieves. The struggling of the Great Ancient seals the cell of Merantia. The flails of the Thieves seal the cell of Stuartia. So long as the creation of one exists, the other shall remain focused upon its defeat. So long as the spirit exists, the beasts of the other cannot escape. So long as the beasts exist, the spirits cannot escape. Pay heed to this. Any who would free the world of their torment must take all in a single stroke, lest the others escape.
Rustle darted for the surface and spun the droplets of water from his body. He tried to fit the pieces together aloud.
“The Great Ancient and the Thieves. They are dangerous monsters. Merantia and Stuartia created them, I suppose? One each. And they hate each other’s monsters, and keep them at bay. My magnificent and wise Merantia wants me to destroy Stuartia, free her, and release her beast. … It doesn’t say how to destroy Stuartia, but Merantia’s beasts somehow fuel the spell that binds her… I would have to destroy her beast to free her… I don’t think she wants that. If I destroy Stuartia’s beast, that would free Stuartia… This is a terrible knot to untie. And I don’t know where either beast is anyway, and I don’t know how to destroy them. Except, maybe… that bit about ‘the cleansing burn of the glowing heart,’ and I don’t know where that is either.” His shoulders slumped. “I am going to have to find a lot more tablets…”
A quiet but insistent part of his mind spoke up.
“And that is why I need to find Eddy first!”
He darted off toward where his friend had been buried. Now more than ever he needed the merman. There was too much to do for one little fairy.
#
Eddy took a break from hammering two pieces of metal with a rock to catch his breath. This was by a large margin the longest he’d ever breathed air, and by an even larger margin the longest he’d been entirely out of the water. He did not like it. His skin felt awful, like he had been rolling in sand. The worst of his injuries had swollen a bit, and supporting his weight on his folded over tail was easily the most uncomfortable thing he’d ever had to do. He turned aside and flopped onto his back.
“I don’t know why surface folk always seem to build things. It is terribly unpleasant to work without being able to move freely in all directions.”
Now that he’d settled back to rest, he slowly became aware of some fresh aches and pains. His hands felt strangely numb, a consequence of striking great big gears and feeling the shock rebound clear up to his elbow. He may as well have been bashing gongs as well. Each fresh blow brought a mighty clang that left him half deafened and with a throbbing headache. Now that there was relative silence and his hearing was gradually returning, something seemed… off.
Here and there while he’d been working, he’d heard the clacking footsteps of one of those long lobster creatures, but it was always far enough away that he wasn’t concerned. Now he was hearing something else. It was far too small to be another such beast. And it was far too close for comfort. He glanced aside. His pick was well out of reach. Quietly he worked himself toward it, wriggling on his back rather than taking his eyes off the stalks around him long enough to flip himself over.
He heard the rustle of stalks and saw a subtle swaying motion.
“Hello?” he called, eyes locked on the source of the motion.
No answer.
He stretched and scrabbled with his fingers until he caught the edge of his pick. When he tried to pull it closer, the long metallic grind shattered the silence.
“Ha!” cried a raspy voice from the thicket.
Eddy pulled the pick in front of him as a flurry of motion swept the golden fronds aside. Something stout and frenzied launched toward him and pounced on him. The attacker was a blur of maddened motion, barely discernable. Whatever it was, it was roughly human-shaped. The thing was short and stocky, and from the weight as it grappled with him, it was of a very sturdy build. The assailant was covered head to toe in strange, overlapping plates of chitinous material, bound with twisted golden fronds and accented with sparkling gears and levers. The thing’s head was hidden behind a mask of sorts, a rather ornate one with care taken to craft it into a fearsome, angular visage with matted white hair poking out the bottom. It carried two hatchets, one in each hand. They had clearly been fashioned from parts harvested from diggers like Borgle. The heads of the axes were wedges of gear with sharpened teeth. The one thing Eddy had in his favor was a significant size difference. It was very squat, and only a bit over half his height.
“Stop! Stop! Wait!” Eddy grunted.
He curved his tail and flopped to the side, spilling the attacker off him and rolling atop it. Slamming to the ground caused the attacker to lose its grip on its hatchets. They clattered to the ground and the gauntleted hands instead wrapped around the shaft of Eddy’s pick. They wrestled over the rusted bit of metal. It was a test of strength. If not for the beating he’d been taking, Eddy would have been able to overcome his opponent, but whatever this thing was, it was stronger than it looked, and his own arms were knotted with fatigue and pain.
“Listen!” Eddy grunted, putting his full weight on the pick and pinning the attacker to the ground. “I don’t know who you are, but we can talk about this! I don’t mean you any harm!”
The struggling attacker responded with a boot to his midsection. Eddy grunted, and grimaced.
“Fine!” he barked.
He heaved himself aside. The attacker held tight to the pick until the force of the roll launched it into a tuft of fronds. As it scrabbled to get back on
its feet, Eddy jabbed the pick down in to the stone beneath him, embedding its tip and giving him something to anchor himself with. He rolled to his back and held tight to the pick. The squat little attacker recovered and rushed him once more. It made an ill-advised dive. Eddy flexed his entire body, putting his well-developed swimming muscles to work to swing his mighty tail upward. The tail struck the attacker and turned its dive into an arching, out-of-control arc. The hostile creature flew like a batted ball into the half-gutted hulk of the digger Eddy had been scavenging. The hollowed-out shell rang like a bell and rolled over backward, sending sprockets and chains scattering in all directions.
Eddy clenched his teeth tight. His muscles tightened in pain. The attack had further aggravated whatever injury had already been ailing his tail. On the other side of the upended digger, he heard the attacker groan.
“The first thing I see in who knows how long, and it fights dirty…” the thing muttered.
Clattering and clanging signaled the attacker’s attempt to haul itself back to its feet. Eddy wrestled with his pick until it finally slid from the ground.
“I didn’t want to hurt you, but you attacked me,” Eddy said, clutching his pick warily and looking in the direction of the voice.
The attacker limped out from behind the digger hull. The mask was askew. Rather than fight it back into proper alignment, the stranger simply removed it. The face beneath was barely visible, hidden as it was behind dense white hair. Every place hair could find purchase was thick with the stuff. Beard and mustache hid the lower half of the face. Eyebrows so long they curled at the tips reduced the eyes to little more than a twinkle beneath. The hair atop the thing’s head was wiry and barely tamed by a sloppy braid that disappeared down the back of its armored suit. Only the forehead and nose were clearly visible, pocked and creased with age.
The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy Page 15