“Tyran,” I called, “do you see any rocks out here?”
Except for the glare he directed at me, I had no answer.
I tiptoed, surveying. There was nothing, nothing at all, that I could see. And anyway, a rock on the scale that we needed to plug the dam? In this miniaturized world, I very much doubted there were any. Those that would’ve done the job would be like mountains to the inhabitants here—and I hadn’t seen one in my search.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We can’t block the dam with Bub forever.”
“We could just let nature run its course?” suggested Heidi. At the dagger-sharp look I shot her, she said, “What? Come on, would it be a big loss? Really? They worship Burnton, for crying out loud. I’m just saying, there are clearly screws loose in these little people.”
“We’re not letting them die,” I said. “Borrick? Any ideas?”
He bit his lip. “Well … one, actually.”
My heart thrummed. Any idea was more than I had.
“Go on,” I breathed.
“The ring Carson stole from me,” said Borrick, with a moue of displeasure, “it appears to be … malfunctioning, or something to that effect. If he were to open a gate under the river, it would drain the water.”
“Yes,” I said, gripping his shoulders. “That’s brilliant—Borrick, I could kiss you.”
“Please don’t,” said Heidi.
I didn’t linger—though there was certainly a touch of color in Borrick’s pale cheeks as I jogged past him and toward Carson.
Carson had dredged himself out of the river. The bridge had come down now, the waters breaking it apart and carrying it off downstream. But he’d saved plenty of cars, which were arrayed upon the hillside—and quite a few houses too, which he’d snatched up as they sailed past.
Sopping wet, he bowed over the waters, now at their previous height, and scoured for anything he’d missed.
“I’m not certain I got it all,” he said as I approached. “I think I saw others—but they’re so small …”
“Thank you for saving us, O Great and Mighty One!” piped up a squeaky little voice. A tiny car window was open, a very small person sticking their head out to holler.
“Carson,” I said, “where’s your manbag?”
“Uhm … I dropped it back there.” He pointed distractedly.
I tugged his sweater. “I need you.”
“But the river—”
“Bub is blocking it.”
Carson looked past me—and then his eyes bulged, and he averted his gaze. “Oh, geez.”
“Yeah. Anyhow, I need you to open one of your gates so we can let the river drain.” To the little people in the cars: “I’m sorry—it’s the best we can do for your dam.”
“Oh, it was the dam!”
“I thought the Great and Mighty Ones were unhappy with us!”
“But then why would the Great and Mighty Sweatered One have saved us?”
“Come on,” I said, pulling Carson along.
He hurried up the hillside. Water sluiced off him, pooling where he trod and then leaking back down the slope toward the river. I hoped none of the little ant people were caught by the flow, or it would be like a flood had unloaded upon them.
Carson’s manbag lay where he flung it, some fifteen feet from where he’d sloshed into the river. He picked it up carefully by the strap, then passed it to me.
“I don’t want to ruin my college materials,” he said by way of explanation. I rooted around to find the ring as we returned to the dam.
Preston Borrick and Tyran Burnton were shouting at one another as they rose into the sky on their climb. I pegged them at probably eighty percent of the way up the Apex now. Preston was still ahead, although Tyran had closed that gap to under six feet. Preston, who Alain had inherited his height from and then accelerated a few inches past, was now hanging from a rung while Tyran yanked at his ankles.
“Unhand me,” Preston roared.
“I will never release you, scoundrel! Not until you give up!”
Preston kicked wildly.
Tyran hung on.
My fingers found the ring as we reached the blocked dam. Tugging it out, I thrust it out at Carson—he was doing his very best, like the rest of us, to avoid setting his eyes on Bub—and said, “Okay, when Bub moves, open a gate.”
He nodded, cleared his throat. “But what if it goes wrong? What if it goes wild and out of control, and swallows a city or something?”
In our own world, this was a ridiculous concern. But here, the nearest city wasn’t much more than five meters away—upstream, fortunately, or the dam bursting would’ve seen its collapse and the deaths of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of tiny people. I’d seen Carson’s gates become huge rifts in the blink of an eye—so the possibility of it eating a city, and all the people in it? It could well occur.
“Just trust in yourself,” I said, all too aware that I sounded like a character from a Disney movie. “It’ll be fine.”
Heidi came up behind him, gripped his hand, intertwined her fingers. Carson stared at them a second, then to her.
“You’ve got this,” she said.
He hesitated a moment … and then he nodded. “Okay. Just … give me a signal, please.”
“On three,” I said, “Bub, I want you to move out of the way.”
The orc rumbled his assent, water spraying around the edges of his body and spattering us all with vaguely Heidi-scented drops.
“On four,” I said to Carson, “you open a gate under where Bub is standing right now—a long gate, please, following the riverbed. I don’t know just how hard the water is going to jet out of there, so we need to capture as much of it as possible.”
“Don’t you want to know where it’s going?” Borrick asked.
I shook my head. “Anywhere, as long as it’s not here. Right: one, two, three—”
Bub hefted himself out of the way—
The water exploded out as he moved, pushing him backward a few inches—but he was like a rock, and with his grip on the dam he pulled himself along and clear—
“FOUR!”
Carson swiped a hand downward, cutting a gateway beneath the yawning broken dam, following the riverbed where it flowed between the hillsides. It opened in an instant, its edges jagged, as though the gateway followed a network of fractures. I caught a glimpse of stormy skies as it flowed up the hillsides, opening—
What exactly lay beyond, though, I couldn’t know. The dam’s eruption poured down above it, and flowed through the gap between this world and our own. A spray overshot the gateway, and in my initial panic I experienced a rare moment of hoping Carson’s hellgate would spread wider and devour more of the land—but it really was little more than a spray. Certainly it would be a fairly powerful spray for the people that lived here … but the nearest village had been torn from the face of the earth already, albeit rescued by Carson, so by the time it reached the next pocket of civilization it wouldn’t be much more than a shallow ripple on the water’s surface.
A shout from behind rousted me.
Preston and Burnton had reached the top of the Apex. Preston was ahead, but now only by a few feet—Tyran’s pitch black pompadour reached up to Preston’s waist—a waist that Burnton was desperately gripped to, as he fought to haul himself up Preston’s body.
“Get off of me, you buffoon!” Preston roared.
“Never! Not until you relinquish—oof!—your hold on this structure, and concede—ouch!—that the Golden King of the Skies is the rightful—”
Preston thrashed. Tyran clung on—he reached a hand higher, to grab for Preston’s shoulder, and drag himself another foot and a half closer to the statue overlooking the both of them, little more than two arm-lengths away from Preston—
Preston had endured enough. As Tyran reached up, he gave a fierce, full-body buck—
Burnton jolted—
Then Preston drew something from his belt. I saw a flash—
&nb
sp; He sank it into Tyran’s hand.
Tyran howled. Releasing his hold from Preston, he dropped—
I gasped—
His leg caught, though, entangling in a rung. He flopped around like a ragdoll, upside-down, but tangled, his fall arrested.
And Preston clambered for the statue at the top, unencumbered. Up those last rungs, he rose—he scrabbled up the statue—he reached for the green-white eye surveying this land—
“WRETCH!” Burnton boomed. “CONNIVING, DASTARDLY—”
“Oh, shut up,” Preston growled.
He tugged the eye free.
“PRESTON!” I bellowed.
His head twisted in my direction, appraisal of his prize, the first key, interrupted—
And then he leapt off of the Apex, fell through the air—
“Dad!” Borrick cried, stepping forward—
At the last possible moment, Preston swiped a hand. A gate opened on the earth below him—and he vanished through it, the gate zipping closed a moment later.
15
“You failed me, Mira Brand,” said Tyran Burnton. “I sought you out, invited you along to a quest that, may I remind you, I had no need to invite you on—and you failed me, at the very first hurdle.”
We were in the medical bay. Wembley was gone now. Manny wasn’t yet awake—there hadn’t been much change in him, said Fiennes, although he’d hooked my brother up to a drip and a monitor that displayed his slow but steady heartbeat, as well as … some other vital sign. Fiennes explained it, but it sounded all a bit mumbo-jumbo, like a weird ‘life-force’ kind of thing. Whatever it was, it at the very least looked steady, cycling up and down in a sedate sine wave on the screen. So that was good.
Burnton had been stabbed through the palm. Luckily, the blade had sailed through a gap between bones, which was fortunate—he possessed a fair range of motion still, although he winced as he flexed. He’d been rather stoic about the whole thing, despite the pain as Fiennes bandaged him up—he grunted breaths, gritting his teeth.
Now he’d shooed Fiennes away—and spoken to us for the first time, properly that was; we’d had a short interaction when he clambered awkwardly back down the Apex and instructed us to return to the Velocity. Those were the only words he’d had for us though. Likewise, the ant people received nothing from him—he pursed his lips at their cries of praise, and passed through the gateway to the Velocity’s deck in silence.
He looked at me expectantly.
“Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, go on then.”
“First of all—” I counted this off with a finger “—you didn’t seek me. You thought about seeking me, and the Antecessors gave you a quick window to come find me—very likely because Preston Borrick is apparently on this quest, and for the purposes of their entertainment, it was important to get you to me and this whole thing moving just as quickly as was possible. So: you didn’t lift a finger to find me.”
“I destroyed the metal beast preparing to assault you,” said Tyran hotly.
“Yes, you did. And I thank you for that. But that’s outside of the realm of what you said.
“Second—” another finger “—I am not your lackey. I don’t jump when you clap. It’s you who wants to go on this quest, you who’s after the latest carrot-on-a-stick the Antecessors are dangling. I’ve made my view perfectly clear—as have they. The trinkets are pointless, and I ascribe no value to them. I’m here simply because I will need to be when it comes to the final prize, the Phoenix Flames.
“And third—lives are important—real lives. Preston blew the dam. He endangered the lives of countless people in that world. If we—” I pointed between the rest of us “—hadn’t acted, countless of those people might have died.”
“They would have been fine,” said Tyran coldly.
“Carson pulled out over two dozen cars, and I don’t know how many houses the floodwaters had torn out of the hillside. If Bub hadn’t blocked the dam in time—and if Carson hadn’t used his gates to empty the river—then the damage would have been catastrophic.”
Tyran flexed his stabbed hand. The fingers didn’t move far, a product from combined pain, the beginnings of stiffness, and the sheer thickness of the bandage—it didn’t give him much in the way of freedom of movement.
“We lost the first key,” he said quietly. “If you had climbed the Apex with me, we would not have.”
“Well, I didn’t climb it with you. And I’m not sorry, so don’t think you can change my mind. I did the right thing back there.”
Burnton grimaced. It seemed as though he wanted to say more—to try to argue me into admitting that I’d been wrong for trying to save people—but I wasn’t budging. And I guess he saw that, because he instead turned to Borrick. “Why is your father on this quest?”
Borrick considered. He bit his lip. “I … I wouldn’t want to speculate.”
“But if you did?”
Borrick glanced to me. “I’m not certain,” he said slowly. “It may be that … but then I don’t think …”
“What is it?” I asked.
He appeared uneasy. Now I was watching him—now we were all watching him—he didn’t seem to want to meet my gaze. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I just wonder …”
Whatever it was, though, he didn’t appear to be able or willing to say it.
Carson said, “Does it really matter why Mr. Borrick is fighting against us? He just is.”
“It could matter,” said Burnton. “It could be very important indeed.”
Borrick frowned, but said nothing.
“Look,” Tyran huffed, “whatever it is this Preston character is hoping to achieve, I need you on point next time, Mira.”
“On point?” I echoed, hotly.
“You’ve shown quite blatantly to Preston that he only needs to pull a stunt like that with the dam again, and you’ll forget the objective and go peel off to engage in other activities.”
“I was saving people—”
“And if we lose another key, the Spoon of Abundance is out of our hands. Our only hope is to pursue him to the last phase of the quest, and rip it from his hands then. And let me tell you—with three of us in possession of items necessary for access to Brynn Overson’s crypt, and Phoenix Flames, things are going to get a whole lot more complicated.”
“Excellent,” I muttered.
“What I want to know,” said Heidi, turning to Borrick, “is just why your dad is traveling with a jacket full of weapons. A knife, a grenade-launcher or whatever it was he blew the dam up with—what else is he carrying in there?”
“Irrelevant,” Burnton said.
“Err, very relevant,” Heidi retorted, “if you want me to go toe-to-toe with a man whose jacket might conceal the means to blow my brains out of my head, or a way of ripping my intestines from my body, or whatever.”
“I don’t know what he’s carrying,” Borrick admitted. “He likes to be prepared, though, so I can only imagine.”
“Right. Well, great, just great.”
“My men would not balk at such possibilities,” Tyran grumbled.
“Well, your men came off a production line, by the look of them, and probably weren’t built to have qualms about personal safety unless their glorious golden leader specifically instructed it.”
“My men are among the best in all the worlds,” Tyran countered, puffing his chest out. His eyebrows were low, an increasingly hot fire burning in his eyes. “They are expertly trained from children to be calm, to be rational and collected, and above all, to keep their primary objective at the front of their actions.”
“Well then,” I said, coolly, “maybe you should drop us off and take your men into the next challenge instead.”
Tyran’s lip curled. “Perhaps I will.”
We watched each other, at an impasse yet again.
Then Tyran rose heavily from the bed. He pushed off of it with both hands—he bit back a grunt, as
pain evidently radiated up his arm from his stab wound—and then he marched through our throng and out of the medical bay, only pausing at the door to announce, “We will arrive at our next destination shortly. Be ready—for I am not dallying.” Then he was gone.
“Hmph,” said Heidi. “So much for dropping us off.”
“He’s not very happy,” said Carson quietly.
“He doesn’t like to lose,” I said. “Remember when I won the first key en route to the Plate of Immortality? He knocked me out and held me hostage until you gave it up.” Shaking my head, I said, “Tyran Burnton is just as underhanded as Daddy Borrick was back there—”
“'Daddy Borrick'?” Alain echoed.
“Nickname,” I said.
“Wait...what nickname did you give me?” Alaian asked, brow furrowed in thought.
“Doesn't matter. Anyhow—Tyran Burnton cheats, but he doesn’t like being cheated himself.” I frowned sourly—he’d berated me a lot during our fight for the Plate of Immortality when I stole key #2 from him. Worse, my own crew, Carson in particular, had somehow fallen a little closer to Tyran’s side than mine.
I pushed that thought down. No sense letting bad blood come to the fore again.
“The point is,” I said, “Tyran isn’t happy unless he’s winning. If he’s not, he’ll do everything he can to correct that. Back there, he expected us to wade in and wrestle Preston down from the Apex. We didn’t—and now Tyran not only has competition on his hands, which I suspect he partly invited me along to try to avoid, but he’s on the back foot at the end of the game’s first stage.”
“So why’s he still dragging us along if we’re of no interest to him?” Carson asked.
“You know how it is,” I said. “When Seekers get moving, we move fast. It’s the whole rat race thing the Antecessors have built into this stupid affair—everyone scrambling over everyone else for their latest shot at glory, however long- or short-lived. I’d imagine Tyran started on this because he got the stages figured out—”
“Strange,” Heidi muttered sarcastically, “when so much of the fun comes in figuring out the next steps while you’re making them.”
The Gang of Legend Page 11