“Pearls… They’re precious and all, but it never made sense to me that of all the things you find down here, it’s the pearls that surface folk like most.”
“I blame it on the shore-lovers,” Sitz said. “It’s the same as when you sold those blue snail shells to that couple in Deep Swell and then when we swung around for the next trip everyone wanted one. Nothing special about blue snail shells, except that you can’t get them around Deep Swell. But the right person comes along and offers the right thing for sale, and suddenly everyone wants it. Good riddance. It’s hard enough getting the good stuff for ourselves. Those crystals from the bottom of the Trensgate? Can you imagine if the surface folk started trying to buy them, too? And then they’d just hang them from the prow of their boats or whatever it is they do with precious things…”
Bult knocked on the shell of one of the larger clams. “How often do you think he checks these? …”
“Bult, we’re here to find Mira’s brother, not to steal things,” Cul snapped.
“If her brother’s dead, by the time someone comes to see to this, it’ll have grown back, right?”
Sitz slapped Bult on the back of the head. “You idiot. They’d still know, because it would have been bigger if it wasn’t taken. … Now these fronds. No one will miss a few of these.”
He tugged a few of the seaweed fronds from the ground and coiled them up.
“Sitz!” Cul growled.
“What’s done is done. Not like I can put them back,” he said, grinning greasily as he slipped the purloined goods into one of his many pockets.
“What difference does it make? We already don’t do business with Barnacle,” Bult said. “So what if they think we steal? Shore-lovers barely move around anyway.”
“If someone robbed me when they’d been hired to help me, even if I was a shore-lover, I’d make certain I spread the word. Now let’s split up. And no one steal anything else,” Cul said. “We’ll meet back here once we’ve checked enough of the rift to be certain nothing might have happened near enough to the farm for someone working here to be hurt.”
Cul swam forward, taking the center of the rift. Sitz and Bult looked to each other knowingly before taking the north and south walls respectively.
#
Mab hammered at an axle and stepped back. It had only been a few minutes since she’d started working on it, less than half the time Eddy had spent, but that was evidently plenty. She’d completely transformed a rickety assembly of cobbled-together gears and struts into something that Eddy would have believed had been forged specifically for this purpose. A two-wheeled cart of sorts, with its seat slung between the wheels and low to the ground.
“Let’s see how that works for you,” she said, stowing her tools and slipping her gauntlets back on.
Eddy slid himself up to it and dragged himself into the sling. It was a tricky bit of maneuvering. The cart was eager to roll away from him as he tried to mount it. After a painful flop forward, he managed to slap his tail in place on the sling. He dug his claws into the ground and pulled forward. Sure enough, hand over hand, he was able to “walk” along in much the same position he normally swam, and all without scraping his already somewhat-raw tail along the stone.
“It works! A land roller! I can go on land as easy as you, and without magic!” He paused. “I need magic for the breathing, and for now the talking. Also, it would hurt me very much to go on land high up without magic. But now it would take less magic!”
“Enough tinkering,” Mab said. “I want to see one of these diggers finally working after wasting so much time trying to fix them.”
“Yes! We go! Take with you that pile of gears, please. Those are the parts that I think are missing.”
Mab gathered the indicated parts and they went on their way. While it was certainly faster and easier to wheel along with the cart, it was also a great deal louder, but Eddy didn’t seem to mind. He pulled himself forward with a broad, toothy grin.
“How did you get here, Mab?” he said.
“Long story.”
“I like long stories. We are living in a long story right now! Your story can be part of the story when I tell it to the people back home.”
“So, you think you’re getting back home, do you?”
“Why would fate send us on a fun adventure to learn all new things, and then not let us get back to tell about the adventure. Every adventure ends with someone going home again.”
“That’s not how my ‘adventure’ ended…”
“That’s because your adventure isn’t over yet. But tell me the first part, please!”
She sighed. “I thought I missed having someone to talk to… Fine. But listen close. This isn’t the sort of story I’m liable to tell twice.”
She cleared her throat.
“What do you know about mining?”
“Very much! I have a mine. I got here from my mine.”
“Good. I had a mine, too. My family did. It ran dry long before I was born.” She tipped her head. “Poor choice of words. It was never dry. We were close to the sea, and water was always finding its way in.”
“I can see that would be a problem for a bad swimmer.”
“What I meant when I said it ran dry was that we’d mined out everything we could make use of, in the tunnels and caverns that wouldn’t flood. The copper was gone in my grandfather’s time. We found some good flint, not worth much but always worth something. That was gone by my father’s time. Now even the strongest and most beautiful stone was mostly gone. When you’re a dwarf, if you can’t find what you need, as often as not, the solution is to go deeper. So we dug and dug, and dug and dug and dug. Finally, I found this vast cavern. No telling where it connected to the surface, but the air was fresh, so I climbed down. It went on forever, or so it seemed. Down and out. I didn’t know the surface as well as my brother, who had been working another branch of the mine, so I didn’t realize that all that digging and exploring had taken me out below the sea.”
She shut her eyes.
“Old adage. A dwarf has no place above the trees or below the waves. Put your pick through a wall and flood out a perfectly good shaft and you’ll soon understand just how much we hate water. But I didn’t know how far I’d gone. And I was too busy dreaming about just what we could do with a cavern so large. If I could prove I was the first to find it, it would belong to the Masonmill family. This place was large enough to found a city. So I did what any good dwarf would do. I started sampling the stone. Stupid. Should have waited.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a terrible sense of smell.”
Eddy looked up, puzzled. “Why is smell a thing for mining?”
Mab scratched her neck. “Sometimes we strike firedamp without knowing. I suppose it wouldn’t be a problem for you. You’d just see the bubbles rising.”
“Firedamp?”
“It’s like bad air that explodes if it touches flame.”
“Flame!” Eddy said brightly. “I have just seen flame for the first time. It is hot. Very much of it, and very fast, would be very bad.”
“I know…” she said. “It’s got a very distinctive smell, but I can’t smell it. At some point while I was digging I must have found some of it. If the cavern wasn’t so big, I probably would have died. You can’t breathe the stuff, you see. Instead, it found one of my lanterns back near the entrance before it found me. Big explosion. Big cave-in. Water started rushing in from everywhere. By the time it had settled enough that I could think, the way back was blocked. I could only follow every fresh path I found to try to stay ahead of the water. My food ran out, my water ran out. Eventually I found this strange, spongy substance growing through the stone. I tried to take a sample and the whole wall gave out. I tumbled down into this place.”
She shook her head.
“I really ought to learn not to take samples anymore. Anyway, I’d ended up here. That stuff grew over the hole, and any new holes I dig either get grown over as well or spew
water. So I’ve been living off these fronds and those skitter-clamps for longer than I care to think about. How did you get here?”
“My friend felt air in my mine, and when we went there, I cast a spell I shouldn’t have cast and ended up in a place with lots of tunnels. One had Borgle. Then the earth shook and I got buried, but I woke Borgle up and he dug me to here.”
Mab shut her eyes.
“The quakes… They’ve been getting worse, haven’t they? Lately they’ve been bad enough to shake more diggers loose. That’s what I thought sent this one down here,” Mab said, pointing to Borgle, now just a short distance away. “If that stuff wasn’t growing on the ceiling, holding it all together, I think this cavern would have collapsed ages ago.”
Eddy excitedly rattled up to the top of the hill.
“Borgle! Look, I found a friend who can help make you not broken!” he said.
Borgle released an enthusiastic chime. The points of light in its functional eyes shifted to follow Mab as she walked a slow circle around Borgle. She looked like she was appraising the digger for sale.
“Borgle is a very good digger. Maybe we cannot dig out of here, but if we can dig out of here, I’m sure Borgle can dig us out of here. As long as we can figure out how to ask nicely enough,” Eddy said.
“You are talking to it,” Mab said flatly.
“Yes! How else would he know what it is I am trying to say?”
“This is a mechanism. You wouldn’t talk to your pick.”
“Sometimes I talk to my pick,” Eddy defended. “Mining is long and lonely and talking makes the time pass. When my pick does not cut the rock very much and I need it to cut the rock very much, I yell at the pick.”
Mab paused. “Granted. It can do a bit of good to shout at a recalcitrant bit of apparatus. But you don’t very well expect it to listen.”
“Borgle, make some noises!”
The digger produced three deliberate grinding whirs. Mab’s jaw dropped.
“So it thinks then.”
“Yes! It is very good. Very much a wonderful, new thing.”
“New isn’t always good, Eddy.” Mab said. “If a thing can think, it can disagree. Fine for a friend. Lousy for a hammer.”
“Good that Borgle is a friend, then,” Eddy said.
Mab looked doubtfully between them.
“It doesn’t much matter. There’s no two ways about this. If we want a way out, this is the thing to do it. Let me see what sort of damage you’ve done to it.”
Mab peered into the open hatch and pawed at the loosened parts and unpopulated slots and holes. Eddy rattled forward to give Borgle a reassuring pat on the “nose.”
“Mab is very good with hammering and things, Borgle. You see? She made me this thing for rolling! We’ll have you fixed soon, and then, you can dig us to a better place!”
Chapter 14
Reading a book that is many times larger than one’s body is a slow and challenging endeavor. Rustle learned this in no uncertain terms as he flitted to the corner of a page and peeled it back to begin another spell. All of the incantations he’d encountered in Eddy’s spell book thus far had been far too dangerous for him to risk miscasting. Aside from refreshing his memory of the ice spell, his perusal had done little to reveal any tools that might help him find Eddy. It was profoundly discouraging.
“There must be something,” he murmured, unwilling to give up.
The shapes on the latest page formed words in his mind. This spell was a short one. Its title was simple, if a bit ambiguous.
“Stir the currents… Utter the following words with light focus while gesturing one’s hands in the desired direction.” He paused. “This might be safe to cast. Even if it isn’t, I am wasting time here if I don’t try something.”
He buzzed upward, dragging his bubble with him, and glanced down at the shifting shapes below. His lips formed the awkward, unfamiliar wording, and he thrust his arms forward. The effect was subtle, and not immediate. At first, he thought the spell had failed entirely. But then he saw that the bubble was rippling forward.
Rustle allowed himself to drop down until all but his head was dipped into the warm water, then repeated the spell. There was no doubt. The water around him moved in the direction he’d waved his arms. It was a tiny motion, barely enough to disturb the bubble or jostle his wings. The size didn’t matter, though. What it helped him realize was the real prize.
The water moved just like the wind did. He wasn’t the best manipulator of wind by any stretch—though he’d improved markedly over the course of the day through sheer necessity. But until this moment he’d never truly been able to link the motion of water to the same flexing of will that allowed him to stir the breeze. Now he had. It was as though someone had lit a candle in a darkened room, and now he could see what had always been there.
He cast it again and felt its motion. This was so like the magics that were a part of him from birth. It was just a matter of this twist of the mind instead of that. And he knew he could navigate by the breeze. He knew he could follow it to the outside, no matter where it led, and feel its presence, even when it was far from him. He cast the spell yet again. In a half-heard whisper, he heard the water begin to tell the same tales.
Again and again he cast the spell. Each time he learned a bit more of how the water differed from air, how to adapt what he knew to what he needed to know. Finally, he set the spell aside and instead attempted to sculpt the water around him not with words, but with the same innate magic that was as natural to him as flying.
It took more will than he imagined should ever be necessary for a spell, but finally he felt a sluggish imitation of the spell’s effects without the spell. The amount of strength he poured into moving the water would have been enough to cause a veritable gale if he’d been directing it to the air, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. What mattered was that, just as Merantia had done with her written language, the sea had just made its own voice known to him.
He took a deep breath and let the bubble drift away. His mind became still as he listened to what the currents could tell him. From the wind, he’d already cobbled together an image of much of the cavern, and he knew that there was no connection to the surface. Now a similar, complementary image of the flooded cavern came to mind. It wasn’t yet enough for him to navigate by. He could feel that there was, for now at least, no direct connection between this place and the rest of the sea. And he could feel which of the tunnels around him dug deepest into the earth. He could feel chambers, vast and unexplored, that had been just beyond the reach of his glow as he’d flown about.
There was no clear path to the dull flicker of Eddy’s spirit in the depths beneath, but there were chambers that seemed closer to it. That was enough for him. He launched to the surface and darted toward the largest and deepest of them. It was his best chance to find Eddy.
#
Cul swam along, sweeping his sensitive eyes left and right. The rift that held Eddy’s farm wasn’t very wide, but it was deep enough to be almost devoid of light, even in the middle of the day. He was limited to what light his own personal glow could provide, and thus could only search a small patch of the rift at a time.
He tried to keep himself from being distracted, but the words of his teammates refused to leave his thoughts. They thought he was falling in love with Mira. Absurd! She simply knew more about the surface than anyone she’d met in ages. Why wouldn’t he talk to her? She spoke quite intelligently as well, and seemed to be quite the trader. Weren’t those worthwhile reasons to have a chat? She was quite lovely, too. A strapping young merman like him would have been a fool to pass up a chance to spend some time with her just because she was a shore-lover.
His argument was absolutely solid. He knew he was right. He also knew the only things doing a better job at keeping his mind spinning than the implications of his burgeoning feelings for her were his thoughts of her specifically. Her face, her voice.
He shut his eyes for a moment. Infatuatio
n. That’s all this was. Again, entirely natural. She was lovely and interesting. It was infatuation. Entirely different from love. Those two didn’t know what they were talking about.
The circles of distraction shattered as he heard two high-pitched chirps of a horn. He shifted his direction toward one of the rift walls. Bult had found something.
Though it took scarcely a minute to reach the source of the trumpet toot, Sitz was already there when Cul arrived. The merman had been busy. The pouches of his outfit were notably more tightly packed than they had been when they’d parted ways. Bult’s own harvest was even less subtle, with the feathery tips of some stolen fronds sticking out of a pouch on his side. He’d also taken the liberty of snatching a few snails to munch on.
“You two are going to get a thump from Trendana when we get back. We weren’t supposed to be robbing this place,” Cul said.
“How is she going to find out unless you snitch?” Bult said.
“Yes. Or if she has eyes.” Cul batted the bit of improperly stowed frond.
Bult tucked the evidence out of sight. “It’s just a few fronds… Hardly anything…”
“Did you just call us over here to let us know what a lousy thief you are? Or was there more to it?” Sitz asked.
“Just follow me,” Bult muttered.
He swam down to the floor and along the base of the rift. The others stayed close behind. It took a trained eye to see what had convinced him to summon the others. The entire base of the rift was made up of stones that had broken free and tumbled down over the untold centuries. A quick glance would have suggested this stretch of the rift was just more of the same. But the fractures here were fresher, free of the thick growth that clung to everything else. And there were caves as well. Plenty of little shallow caves, some still visible above the mounds of stone. Others were half-obscured by fresh debris. One could only imagine how many others were entirely hidden.
“You called us over here for this?” Sitz said.
The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy Page 17