But someone else remained unseen. Emmie had followed their movements, knowing they’d be so wrapped up in the thought of catching Legends that she could shadow them easily.
She crouched to the ground, found a patch of dust, exactly the sort created when something comes through a gateway. But there was only one smattering, as if a large foot had been placed in this world, and immediately withdrawn. Otherwise, there was no sign of scratch marks on walls, or bite marks on bins.
Nothing.
She was about to leave the scene when something else caught her eye. A small bottle of Shampoodle rolling across the ground, spilling a dull blue chemical from its open top.
Emmie walked to it, rolled it with her foot and glanced back at the door of Woofy Wash.
Something was wrong, although she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Finn would know what to do, she decided.
She set off to find him.
Finn woke.
He was trapped in a small space, so dark he could see nothing at all, not even the hand in front of his face.
Hold on, he thought, maybe my hand is missing.
No. He wiggled his fingers and it felt like they were all present and correct. But he still had no sight. No light. Only a sandpapery surface at his back and a gooey, ribbed roof he could feel inches from his face.
Panic grabbed him, even as his mind was slow to get moving, heavy, dopey, unable to quite fix on where he was or how he had got here. He tried to stay composed, to figure it out.
The sharp sting on his neck. Passing out. He must have been drugged, Finn thought, and dragged here. Wherever here was.
The smell was so deeply terrible it was invading every pore in his body. He would need a change of skin if he ever got out of here. He tasted it on his tongue, wanted to pull his tongue out in disgust.
It would be pointless trying to find a way to describe the stench in Earthly terms, because there was nothing on Earth like it. It was a smell that belonged only to one place.
The Infested Side.
Finn’s breath quickened. He groped for a wall either side of him, and found bars of some sort, surrounding him on at least three sides. And those bars were wedged into a hard but slippery surface. The fourth side was narrow and soft and his hand couldn’t quite find the wall.
It made his stomach crawl. Or maybe that was the movement he now realised he was feeling in jolts. He was moving. In fact the whole room was moving.
Up. Drop.
Up. Drop.
A damp breeze blasted through each time it rose, heating his ears. There was also a deep, unnerving gurgle from somewhere terribly close.
Finn wriggled on to his tummy, feeling the roughness against his face, giving him the shudders as he reached out and pushed his hands through the bars, whose dark outlines he could just make out against the redness of the walls.
He prised open a gap in his prison, working it wider with his fingers, just enough for grey light to pour into the space and show him the bars were, in fact, large fangs.
He was lying on a tongue.
A pink tongue, rough and pulsating with each of the breaths pushing up from the throat at which his feet dangled.
A giant tongue, in a giant mouth.
Finn allowed himself to panic some more. It had been a bad day already but now he was something’s lunch. Could this day get any worse?
Pushing his face towards the crack in the mouth of whatever creature was carrying him, Finn saw water rushing past outside, a blur of dark waves, getting closer. And closer. He retreated just before the creature hit the sea, brine leaking through the mouth as Finn breathed hard and shallow.
Yes.
His day could get worse.
Up. They were out of the water.
Drop. Whooosh. Back into it.
A few seconds later, the creature hit something hard, slid to a sudden halt. Finn gripped on to a long tooth to stop himself being thrown back into the deep cavern of the creature’s gullet.
Blurpp. A rumble was building from deep within the throat, getting louder, closer.
Oh no, thought Finn, at the precise moment a belch hit him.
The mouth opened and he was propelled into the grey light of the Infested Side.
He looked around, dazed. He was lying on a shoreline, a beach of smashed rock in the shadow of a looming mountain, chunks missing from its slopes and most of it swallowed by heavy cloud.
The sea creature retreated into the waters before Finn could even get a proper look at it. He was instead distracted by a huge figure approaching up the beach, feet stuffed into boots with three clawed toes stabbing through. It had granite hands, muscles popping from the wide shoulders. Glancing up, Finn realised this was the single-eyed giant, the Cyclops that had grabbed him from Darkmouth in the first place. This must be one of Gantrua’s goons, out for revenge.
It snarled something at him.
Finn jumped to his feet, his skin sticky with sea-creature saliva, his hair flattened and damp, his legs numb from being trapped in such a small space for … well, he didn’t know how long. But they had enough feeling left to help him scramble across cutting stones among which were scattered splintered and broken tools – axes, knives, picks, hammers.
He stumbled, saw the nearing shadow of the Legend. He needed a plan. Perhaps he had an expert move learned over many hours at training. Maybe he could threaten to explode, just as he had done before in this world – draw himself up and stare even the mightiest of them down with his power. Even if he didn’t really have it any more.
Instead, Finn did what he had so often done best.
He ran.
He heard the roars and shouts of other Legends joining the Cyclops. He didn’t look back. He needed to keep pushing along the shifting rock and broken tools of this beach, which sloped upwards now, away from the sea towards the scarred mountain and, he hoped, some sort of shelter. The Legends were closing. His legs burned with adrenalin. He needed to keep climbing this slope, to get somewhere safe.
Finn reached the top of the slope and went straight over a cliff.
Finn held on to a blackened, blasted tree root, one foot dangling over a sheer drop that a quick and frightening glance told him went down far enough that there were dark angry waves where the floor should be.
The sea. On both sides. He was on some sort of narrow cliff jutting perilously out over the waves.
And he had come within a Manticore’s whisker of falling straight off, had thrown a hand out just quick enough to save himself. For now.
He wrapped his arms around this lone root and prayed it would not break. He never wanted to let go.
Above him was dark cloud. Below him was darker sea. And behind him on the cliff, he realised, was a pair of boots bigger than his head. Three claws were sticking through one of them. The Cyclops.
“Don’t be trying to fly out of here,” said the deep-voiced Legend, offering a hand.
Finn’s grip slipped a little on the slimy root. He grunted with the effort of holding on, but he wouldn’t be able to for much longer. He felt dead either way.
Then a more familiar voice intruded.
“Accept that helping hand,” it said.
Finn saw four paws on the ledge now. Beside them, the lime-green arrowhead of a snake dropped into his eyeline.
“We need your help,” said Hiss, “and you won’t be much use if you’re dead.”
“The number you have dialled is either unavailable or—”
Emmie didn’t wait to let the message finish but ended the call, put the phone back in her pocket and continued her search for Finn. She’d tried contacting him several times in the couple of hours since the gateway appeared. There had been no answer yet.
She had also walked a good part of the town, head up, watching out for him, ignoring the usual glares of the fearful townspeople and the curiosity of the assistants infesting Darkmouth.
She had not found Finn, nor any sign of him. Nothing about this felt right. She broke into a run, rounde
d a badly bent signpost, ducked around a postbox with a dent punched in it, jumped across a puddle of rainwater and almost knocked Lucien over as they collided at a turn in the street.
“Take it easy there, young lady,” he said, stepping back and searching for something on the ground. He found his pen, picked it up, began to weave it through his fingers in a practised fashion. “I got this pen the day I graduated as an assistant. Writes with squid ink. Don’t want to lose it.”
She went to pass him.
“Where’s your friend?” he asked, causing her to stop.
Emmie loathed Lucien but there was the fact of his superior rank and she had to recognise that or it might make things far worse for her and her dad. And things were bad enough as they were.
Lucien sensed something amiss about her. “Is everything all right?” he said, pen tumbling through those long fingers. Across. Back again. “You seem in a great hurry.”
“I just want to get home,” she said, not wanting to look at him but hardly able to avoid seeing the swish of the pen. “In case it rains again.”
“Yes, the rain,” said Lucien, looking up, sniffing the air almost theatrically. “It wasn’t in the forecast. Strange.”
Even with her back to an open street, Emmie felt backed into a corner.
“So, no Finn? What’s he up to?”
“Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” she said, finally looking him in the eyes. She immediately regretted it – feeling like she’d given him a small victory.
“I wouldn’t expect you to tell me,” said Lucien, smiling. Or, at least, using a smile to cover over whatever was really going on in his mind. “It’s all part of the job to keep secrets, Emmie. Important to remain silent under questioning. To trust no one.”
“What job?” she replied, trying to be as rude as possible without giving away the nervous anger she really felt. “You took all this from us when you came in here and accused everyone of being a traitor.”
“I accused no one of anything,” said Lucien.
Emmie paah-ed at that idea.
“You might dismiss that, and you’d be wrong, but I don’t blame you. Maybe you’re a little young to appreciate the nuances of an investigation. I simply looked at the evidence and came to objective conclusions. Anyone else would have done the same. Once I saw the highly unusual events happening here, precautions were needed. After all, here we were in Darkmouth, with a boy and his family who had a habit of going to the Infested Side, fraternising with Legends, and bringing back trouble.”
“Finn was a hero,” insisted Emmie. “I saw it. I went to the Infested Side too.”
“So did Estravon, and like him you surely have to admit you don’t know what was really going on with Finn at all times.” He let that idea sink in before continuing. “I worry you’re getting dragged into whatever he’s up to.”
“Nobody’s dragging me into anything,” she said.
Lucien was still doing that thing with the pen. Through the fingers, across and back again. It was really beginning to bother Emmie. He noticed it. Stopped. Slipped it into his suit’s breast pocket.
“You’ve proven yourself an exceptional apprentice Legend Hunter,” he said to her. “Honestly, really exceptional. Steve, your father, must be very proud.”
Emmie shuffled, uncomfortable, and feeling alone now she was reminded that her dad was stuck so far away in Liechtenstein.
“You should have been next in line for Completion after Finn,” said Lucien. “You should be first in line now.”
“I need to go home,” she said, and tried again to move past Lucien.
He stayed where he was, simply loitering on the spot, looking skyward once again, examining the town around them as if he just hadn’t noticed her desire to get going.
“You could be the next Legend Hunter, the first in many years,” Lucien said, his eyes still on the surroundings. “I’m pretty sure that once the investigation is complete, you and your father will be free to get on with your lives, to claim your place among the Legend Hunters.”
Emmie squeezed past him, forced him to step aside to let her past, then turned to him, feeling her nails digging into her clenched palms. “I know you’re trying to turn me against Finn,” she told him, voice trembling with anger. “It won’t work.”
Lucien remained eerily unflappable. Somehow, he had another pen in his hand, was turning it too through his fingers. “You only have to ask yourself one simple question, Emmie,” he said. “Do you really know what Finn is up to?”
He thrust the pen into his breast pocket, turned and walked away.
Cornelius was scratching. Hiss was complaining. It was exactly how Finn remembered the Orthrus, this strange hybrid of dog-body and snake-tail.
He had met them over thirty years ago. Or only a year ago. It depended on your perspective. Time travel had been involved. Headaches had resulted.
“After all our years together, I still pray you will satisfy that itch one of these days,” Hiss said to Cornelius as the canine adjusted himself and started a new round of intense scratching.
Finn had taken the hand of the one-eyed Legend and allowed himself to be hauled up to safety. He’d then been led back down the slope to the beach, huddling against the scraped rock wall at the base of the mountain. It looked like it had been hacked away, piece by piece, and its debris left to scatter the beach. Even the slope he had climbed he now saw to be a path made by hand, or claw.
And the tools littering the ground had a variety of handles and grips, to accommodate, he guessed, the variety of hands and paws and claws that had done the clearing.
The Cyclops chewed slowly on a cigar-shaped rock, rolling it across his mouth from one side to the other while he watched Finn, who couldn’t quite shake off his wariness bordering on fear. He’d studied Legends, read the guidebooks. The Cyclops was not supposed to exist. It was a myth even among Legends.
On the Cyclops’s shoulder perched a tiny Legend, no taller than Finn’s leg, with a squashed pink nose, wide eyes and rounded grey face, so that he looked not unlike a squirrel, but not entirely like a squirrel either. He was smiling with unfathomable excitement. Finn guessed he was a Sprite.
A fourth Legend lurked further along in the tall grooves of the rock face. Finn could not see much of this creature but for the eyes, black slits on yellow. Finn had seen eyes like that before, but couldn’t recall where. They flooded him with dread.
“What is this place?” Finn asked over the sound of the sea sucking at the stones like it was trying to steal them.
“You’ll have a lot of questions, kid,” said the Cyclops, “and we’ve very little time so pay attention. First, you’re on an island.”
“Tornclaw. In the middle of the Great Ocean of the Dead,” said the Sprite in a helium-high voice, smiling brightly as if delighted to see Finn. It scrambled down the Cyclops’s arm and around behind Finn to get a closer look at him.
“Those tools you see? They’re here because this whole island used to be a crystal quarry,” continued the Cyclops. “It once stretched all the way out into the sea there, but has been hacked away until only the mountain is left. There are no crystals any more, just the bones of those once forced to work here.”
“…” Finn started to say.
“How did you get here? We found you because the little guy …” he pointed at the Sprite lurking at Finn’s legs, “… traced you through an energy imprint you’re leaking since you exploded in this place all those years ago. He can see you through the invisible walls separating our worlds.”
“I can’t see you clearly, though.” The Sprite grinned. “You look more like an orange blob.”
Cornelius was still scratching an itch while Hiss got out of the way.
The other, quiet Legend stayed half out of sight, except for those burning eyes.
“But most of all,” the Cyclops said to Finn, “you’re wondering, how are you talking to a Cyclops when they don’t exist in the first place?”
“That’s no
t what I was wondering,” Finn said, even though it was what he was wondering. Or at least, one of the things he was wondering.
The Cyclops leaned back, grinning. “Well, you’d be right to wonder.”
“If that’s what you were wondering,” clarified the Sprite, looking up at Finn while picking at the fabric of his jeans.
Finn swatted him away, and he backed off without complaint.
“We don’t exist,” said the non-existent Cyclops. “True, I have one eye. But it wasn’t always that way.” He paused and gave Finn a closer look at the scar circling an eye that appeared to have been pulled over across his face; around it was a patch of crooked, raised skin that looked like it had been carved with a stone and stitched back with that same stone. “I’m Fomorian, like Gantrua. But we had a little disagreement. This was the result. And now I work for your old pals here.”
Cornelius had finally stopped scratching, and Hiss was able to lift himself, curled and steady, to meet Finn’s gaze. “His name is Sulawan. Our tiny friend there is Beag. And I am sorry we had to grab you like that. It was the easiest way.”
“The easiest way?” exclaimed Finn. “You put me in the mouth of a sea creature.”
“A Leviathan, to be precise,” Sulawan the sort-of-Cyclops said.
“Which means that you, pal, got the luxury trip.”
“It didn’t smell like luxury,” said Finn.
“The rest of us had to rely on being flown here by Quetzalcóatl,” growled Sulawan. “They don’t like carrying me, and I sure as hell don’t like being carried.”
As if on cue, a shadow crossed the beach, a wing slicing through the cloud cover. Finn looked up and saw one of the Quetzalcóatls – a kind of enormous flying serpent that looked too broken to fly yet did so majestically. Some of them had led the resistance against Gantrua when Finn first came here, had controlled the Orthrus through some psychic trickery. But they had also been at war with serpents loyal to Gantrua. He had seen them fight in a great sky battle when rescuing his father from the Infested Side.
Hero Rising Page 3