“Well, we’ve got to find a way somehow, miracle, magic or not,” he answered.
Before he or Mary could say anything else though, there was a sudden explosion and a spray of magma gushed into the air reaching just below them. A great geyser of molten lava had erupted.
Then several more molten gobs came up and fell back into the lake of seething fire.
“Whew, we don’t want to be caught by one of those eruptions!” Roger cried. “If that geyser of magma had come up ten feet more we’d all have been set alight like walking candles!”
“So sowwy to wowwy you, Wodger, but I fink there are fings down there spitting up at us! Look yourselfs. Thems not geysers, them fings look like big fish with pointy fins on their backs!”
“Whaat! Oh by Archimedes Screw-ups, you’re right!” Roger yelled, as he looked at the mental picture Regor now shared with him. With Regor’s Dragon Sight, he saw below him at least a dozen gold and bronze, shark-like creatures, their prominent fins slicing through the fiery red magma. Every now and again, one of them would leap out of the bubbling lake and shoot a spray of searing hot lava up towards them.
Luckily though, for the moment, they were just out of range.
“I see them, Regor, and I think we need to think fast and figure out how we’re going to get across to the other side of this abyss and not get hit by any of them spitting fish while we do it! Does anybody have any ideas?” Roger desperately asked to the group in general.
“I‘ll have a looksh in me handbag, dearie,” Gran answered, slurringly, “but I don’t thinksh I’m really up ter witchin’ much at the moment though, not fer thish perticular job anyhowsh!”
Mary squeezed his hand and told him, “Don’t worry, Roger, you’ll think of something, I just know you’ll come up with something, you always do you know!”
“Great,” he thought, “why’s it up to me to come up with the bright ideas all the time?”
“Because you’re our Knight Irritant!” came the reply in unison, from Mary and Regor.
CHAPTER 10:
A WITCH IN TIME …
Yllib and Taog had remained silent throughout the discussion. They were now all gathered together on the lip of the vent and looking down and across the cauldron of flames to where the exit vent opposite was that they so desperately needed. All except for Grannie Maddam that is. She still sat hunched up on her rock, looking rather green and poorly, Roger thought.
Before he could investigate further though he realized that he wasn’t feeling all that clever himself, and not just in the brains department, he was in fact feeling rather sick.
He turned toward Mary to tell her he was feeling ill too and was going to vomit any moment. But as he did so, Mary fell to her knees, dangerously close to the edge of the abyss.
“Wh-wh-what’s going on, Mary?” he called out to her as he too fell to his knees, now feeling even more nauseous, right beside her. “What’s happening to us?”
“It’s the fumes c-c-coming up from the magma chamber, they’re p-p-poisonous Roger,” she choked and spluttered to him.
Yllib then picked Mary up and pulled her away from the cliff edge and Toag did the same with Roger. “Something is making these fumes thicker and stronger than they were,” Yllib told him.
“Yes, Wodger, Marewee, Yllibsh right, I can feelsh them. There’sh defnitly sumfin down there doin’sh this, sumfin vewwy nashty an evilish!” Regor thought to them both.
Just then Grannie Maddam broke out in a loud series of hacking and wheezing coughs. She too was succumbing to the fumes. Mary came to her rescue, just as she started to fall off her rock.
“If we stay here much longer we will all be done for, that is certain,” Yllib told them, now looking very grave and serious.
“If we go back, brother, then our quest is over and we have failed,” Taog answered him.
“We can’t fail!” Roger spluttered. “We must do something and get across this fiery hell-hole no matter what.” But even as he was saying this, Roger felt like a fraud. He knew something like simple hankies wasn’t going to save them and he began desperately groping in his pocket to see if one of his magic tokens was going to actually activate and do something at last. “Nope, still nothing there,” he thought, “maybe the magic’s worn off; or maybe I’m not doing it right.”
“It’sh not yous, Wodger. It’sh jush the magic’s not weddy to be used yets, that’sh all.” Regor telepathed, gently trying to console him.
“Gran, can you use anything from your bag?” Mary asked, holding and squeezing her hand. But Grannie Maddam was in a very bad way now. She just sat on the stony floor, with her bag in her lap and wheezing. Mary knelt in front of her, tears filling her eyes.
“Oh Gran, don’t give in, please; there’ll be something there, I know there will.”
Grannie Maddam lifted her head weakly and gave Mary a wan smile, and then whispered, “You hash to be the witch now, ducks, I carn’t do it. Jush pictures in yer mind’s eye what yer wants an’ yer’ll finds it. Me head’sh too full o’ fog an’ I carn’t rightly breathes neither. Me tonic’sh gone too, so it’sh up to you now, Mary. Remember, a Witch in Time makes hers mine!”
With that she unsteadily pushed her oversize handbag toward her tearful granddaughter.
“Oh Gran, what do you mean? I’m not a witch, well not yet anyway. I’m just not ready!”
Grannie Maddam didn’t answer. She lay slumped against the rock wall and silently slipped into unconsciousness, the empty ‘tonic’ flask falling from her listless fingers.
Mary scrabbled forward and pulled the handbag toward her and picked it up. It felt surprisingly light for an object so large and as she believed, so full of magical objects, potions and tricks. She sat by her Gran and prized the bag open and looked deep into its mysterious depths. She then thrust her hand and then her whole arm into it. She flailed her arm around inside, trying to find something, anything, that could save them from the lethal fumes slowly poisoning them all.
At last she pulled her arm out and gasped up at Roger, “There’s nothing there, Roger, it’s empty! Oh… this is terrible. I told you I wasn’t a witch. Now what are we going to do?”
“Come on, Mary,” Roger replied, sounding quite stern and serious, but secretly stopping himself from bursting into tears and crumbling into a useless mess himself. “That’s not the Mary Madden I know. Your Gran trusted you and so do I. Now what exactly did she tell you to do?”
“Sh-sh-she said I just had to picture in my mind what I wanted an’ then I’d find it,” Mary answered, nearly sobbing. “I juss ‘ave to see it clearly is all. She said a Witch in Time makes hers mine! But I don’t know what that means. I’m just not a witch, Roj!”
“Poo!” Roger snorted. “Enough excuses. Do what your Gran told you and do it now!”
Mary felt a bit stung and insulted now, but Roger’s words had done the trick. She wasn’t just going to sit there and give up and let them all get gassed to death. No way! She took hold of the bag once more. This time though she calmed herself and took a couple of slow, easy breaths and then closed her eyes. This time, she was going to follow her Grannie’s instructions exactly and picture in her mind what she needed.
“Right, what I need is something we can use so we don’t get poisoned by these fumes so we can all breathe,” she thought. “Something that existed sometime that I can make as mine!”
She put her hand into the bag and started searching inside it, all the time trying to come up with something clear in her mind that would do the job.
Then she had an idea and her fingers suddenly felt something. There was something cold and leathery lying at the bottom of the bag. She quickly grabbed it and whipped it out of the handbag. It was an old, Great War Gas Mask! It was a very unsightly thing, with leather straps and thick, glass goggles. But she thrust it on her face and immediately started feeling better. It worked! It was exactly what they needed! She then quickly thrust her hand back in, thinking of several Gas Masks now, all differen
t sizes, so they would fit all the members of the party. And there they all were. One by one, she pulled out a Gas Mask and handed it on, ensuring that Grannie had one safely fitted onto her first of all.
“You’re brilliant, Mary. See, I knew you could do it. Well done!” Roger said, beaming.
“Yesh, well done, Marewee, I finks you makesh a weally gwate Witsh!” echoed Regor.
Yllib and Taog though, had some difficulty fitting their masks on. They were not at all used to such new-fangled, humdrum contraptions that were so totally alien to their more natural world.
Roger quickly came to their rescue though, while Mary adjusted Nimp’s much smaller mask.
“Right, there we are then, all ready for the next problem!” she said, arms akimbo, as they stood before her like alien creatures from another planet, with oversized heads and big, bug-eyes.
“Zat iz correct indeedz,” piped up Nimp in a muffled tone. “Ver problem iz, vee must now crozz to ver other zide or vee vill ztill have failed. Zo, I askz, juz how are vee goingz to do viss?”
“Yesh eggzactly,” added Regor to them all mentally, “antsh there’sh shtill some vewwy nashty creetures down theres, letsh not forgetsh that. I can shtill senshe them swimming theres. They are vewwy angwy and they wants us all vewwy deads!”
Roger knew that this question was coming. And he knew that he was being relied upon once more to come up with some ingenious idea. But the truth was he had no idea. He’d fervently hoped that his magic tokens would have kicked in by now and come to his rescue in some way, but he now realized that, as Regor had said, that wasn’t how they worked at all.
“Well, let’s all get thinking then!” Mary told them in a muffled voice. (They were still
able to talk but sounded like they had their mouths full all the time because of the Gas Masks.) “We should look at this problem from as many angles as possible, shouldn’t we?” she finished.
“Well, I could shoot a rope across with my crossbow and make a rope bridge we could cross over, hand by hand, but it would slope down nearer to the magma lake,” Yllib suggested.
“But I don’t think this rope’s long enough anyway,” he added with a forlorn sigh.
“And I don’t think your poor Gran would be able to cross that way, even if it was,” his brother Taog remarked, looking over at Grannie Maddam apologetically.
“Ant, I don’t vant to make fings vorse but I finkz I knowz why vose creeturez are trying to kill uzz,” Nimp blurted out. “I fink theyz been zent here by ver Fire-Worm Lord, Morgrim!”
“Oh no! What do you know about these Fire-spitters then?” Roger asked, alarmed.
“Vay are called Fire-Sharks, ant vay are ver most vicious predatorz ant hunting creetures in ver magma realmz of ver UnderErf! Vay alvays swim in packs ant vay are all ver mindless zervants of ver Fire-Worm Lordz of ver Core!” Nimp finished, with much venom in his voice.
“What! Oh Sizzling Socrates!” Roger cried out in horror. “We’re not in any condition to fight things that bad controlled by a brute like Morgrim, now are we?”
Morgrave and Morgrim, two of the Lords of the Core, had after all just recently very nearly killed Roger and Mary, as well as leaving Nimp seemingly crushed on the side of Hooter’s Hill.
Roger well knew the deadly powers of these vast, worm-like engines of evil and destruction.
“Ant ver Fire Sharks shoot outz ver streamz of burning lava from their mouthz, zo if vee did try to cross by ver rope, vee vould be too zlow ant vay vould juzt pick us off vun by vun!”
“Just great!” snorted Roger. “So what do you suggest then, Master Nimp?” he asked, somewhat annoyed, and privately quite scared. Roger was in no hurry to ever meet up with any Fire-Worm Lords or their mindless slaves ever again.
“I am zorry, Roger, I do not know vot vee can do, I veally don’t,” Nimp apologized softly.
But just then, in a sudden flash, Roger got a fleeting gleam of an idea. Just a tiny twinkle of a distant star of an idea. It was something Mary had said earlier. He now turned to her excitedly.
“By Tesla’s Titanic Toes, Mary, I think I have an idea, but I’ll need your help as a witch.”
“OK, Roj, but I’m not an actual real witch yet you know, but what do you need?”
“I need you to make the rope longer,” he told her matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean, make the rope longer?” she asked, somewhat incredulously.
“Look, I’ll show you,” he said. “Now everyone gather round, I’ll draw diagrams of the plan I have in mind here, in the ash on the floor. Please pay attention. This plan is going to need some really good team-work.”
He then rapidly explained, drawing out the simple but dangerous plan that would, if successful, get them all safely across to the other side of the fiery chasm, and also keep them mostly out of the range of the deadly Fire-Sharks.
“That’s brilliant, Roger!” Mary called out beaming with pride. “But you’re right, it does depend on me being able to pull off a bit of a witchery rope-trick or two.”
“You can do it, Mary, I know you can. You just conjured up six Gas Masks for us after all, so making two ropes long enough should be a piece of Pi!”
“Don’t you mean cake?” she said, still beaming at him and feeling that for the first time they now had some small chance of actually making it through the volcano after all.
“Nope, that was just a silly Maths joke,” Roger told her, with a knowing chuckle. “The Pi I’m on about is the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle you see,” he added, now pointing to the diagram he’d just drawn for them on the sooty floor.
Mary just wrinkled her nose under her gas mask and looked puzzled.
“It was you saying we should look at this problem from all the different angles, that’s what gave me the idea. Now we just have to put it into practice and get the exact right angle.”
“All right, Roj, whatever you say, it’s the best plan we’ve got and I’ll do my best.”
Mary then told Taog to bring his rope to her and feed it into Grannie Maddam’s handbag.
“Feed the end a few good feet into it,” she told him. Then once again, she took a deep breath, and then closed her eyes. She concentrated on visualizing the rope lying within the dark recesses of the magical bag. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes and ordered the Hircuman to heave away and to start pulling the rope back up out of the handbag.
Roger couldn’t stop a grin spreading across his face as he saw the burly Hircuman pulling away at the rope and getting more and more puzzled as he found he just couldn’t get to the end of it. No matter how hard or how long he pulled, more and more rope coiled out from the handbag, spilling onto the rocky floor all around them.
“That’s enough!” Roger finally called out. “You are a Witch, Mary, whatever you say. You’re just a natural-born Super-Witch!”
Mary almost blushed but beamed back in silent reply. “Maybe I really could be a witch,” she thought to herself quietly.
“Yesh you ish, Marewee. I agwee wiv Wodger, Yoush a Super – Witsh for sures!” Regor now emphatically telepathed to her.
“Now, we’re not making a Rope bridge, as Yllib said, that’s far too slow and dangerous, those Fire-Sharks would definitely get us, especially when we got nearer to the other side, we’d be a lot lower and an easier target. So the answer is all Angles, Accuracy and Speed. So now it’s over to you two Hircumen chaps. Who’s going to take the first shot?”
The two Goat men looked at each other briefly and then Yllib stepped forward.
“Well, someone has to go first and we’re both dead-eye shots, but as the elder brother, it best be me I suppose. I’ll shoot first and I’ll cross first too.”
“OK, Yllib, you’ve got to shoot the rope up into the opposite wall above us at the exact point I tell you, right? The angle has to be spot on or we’ll miss the mouth of the vent when we swing over Tarzan-like and then we’ll all be done for,” Roger explained.
“I underst
and,” Yllib replied tersely.
“Good. If you do that, then we can all quickly swing across, two at a time, just like a real bunch of Tarzans and not give those vicious shark brutes a chance to hit us!”
“Don’t know who this Tarzan fella is but we’ll be more like a couple of hot potatoes, and baked ones at that, if we don’t get a move on!” Taog bellowed.
“What about Gran though?” Mary suddenly called out, realizing that Grannie Maddam wasn’t capable of swinging like anyone or anything right at this particular time.
“Can you give her something to bring her around Mary, even for a bit,” he asked, “then Taog, can hold her and take her across with him?”
Mary nodded her agreement and started to look into the handbag once more, this time with more confidence and her eyes wide open.
“OK, Roger, I’ve got something,” she said, then paused and cried. “Oh no! It’s smelly socks instead of smelling salts! Oh dear, I think I rushed it a bit, sorry!”
“Well try them anyway. Maybe they’ve got the magic pong that you were thinking of. Right now, if Yllib goes across with Mary, then me with Regor and Nimp and then Taog comes over with Grannie. That will also give her time to recover a bit. We just need three very fast and accurate swings and with a bit of luck we’ll all be across safe and sound.”
While Roger had been giving out his orders Mary had loosened Gran’s Gas Mask and had dangled the smelly socks under her nose and it was definitely having the desired effect.
“Oh my galloping gawd! Who’s been burning rotten turnips and fox dung?” she cried, coughing and choking with disgust as these pongy but much less dangerous fumes effectively brought her around.
“OK, now explain to Gran what we’re doing, Mary, and let’s get to it,” Roger ordered.
Mary did so and then they all fell silent, as Yllib stepped back up to the edge of the vent with Roger. Roger made some precise calculations using his index finger and thumb as a square rule and then worked out the arc the rope would make that would take them to the exit vent opposite.
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