by Demi Harper
We hadn’t been able to find the gnomes’ ancestral city because we’d been looking in the wrong place. It wasn’t a cave, or a tunnel system. It wasn’t hidden by a magic door or a rockslide. It wasn’t buried somewhere beneath our feet.
It was here.
Fifty
The Crossing
Corey
The riverbank buzzed with anticipation. As industrious as an ant colony, ninety-nine gnomes, eight badgers and one very special spider went about their business packing up the camp and preparing the wagons for the crossing.
We’d found what we came for. We’d located the gnomes’ ancestral home, and all that lay between it and us were the river and a few more hours of hiking.
Time remaining for Exodus: 1 day, 23 hours, 48 seconds
Though Bekkit and the humans had rejoiced at the news, Ket had seemed less excited than expected. She still carried an air of wistful sadness, which was now tinged with trepidation. Every time I caught her like this, I gave her a mental nudge, and gently pushed as much hope and optimism through our bond as I could muster. Still she seemed distant.
The sky had clouded over during Ris’kin and my trek back down the mountain, casting the camp in shadow and making the river look darker and more ominous than it had previously. Despite the threat of rain, the peak of the mountain—where the hidden city sprawled inside its secret crater—was caught in a stray beam of afternoon sunlight, lit golden like a tantalizing promise.
Soon enough we’ll be up there, and the journey will finally be over. I’ll have my powers back, and everything can go back to normal. Just a little further.
“D’you think the wagons will make it to the top?” asked Benin. The mage had washed his robes for the first time since we set off; the damp cloth was steaming in his aura of heat, already almost dry. “The trail we found wasn’t exactly smooth.”
I’d been thinking along the same lines. Though we were still operating under a deadline, that only applied to setting my gem in place and sanctifying my new altar. According to Bekkit that would be enough to mark the exodus as successful, end the timer, and restore my god tiers and abilities. The wagons could wait.
Even the chariot wouldn’t need to pass. If it came to it, I could just ask Coll to carry the ark to the top, so long as Gneil accompanied him to fulfill the sanctification ritual’s requirements. Still, it was better to be prepared.
“Coll, do you think you could go on ahead and find a clearer path up to the summit? Or maybe hammer one for us.”
That last part was a joke—mostly—but Coll just nodded amicably and splashed across. The water came up to his knees at its deepest part, which meant it shouldn’t be more than chin-deep for my gnomes.
The badgers and wagons should be able to cross without issue. So long as we made sure the children and less able-bodied denizens rode the wagons, and maybe roped the rest of them together so they wouldn’t get washed away by the current.
The emberfox paced along the water’s edge, clearly in some distress at the prospect of crossing. Both Benin and Ris’kin attempted to calm her. Though she no longer snapped at the mage when he came near her, she still clearly favored her fellow foxkin; in the end, my avatar picked her up gently and set her atop the chariot. Gneil gave the emberfox a reassuring smile and then resumed tending to Bruce, whom he was preparing to yoke to the chariot for this final leg of our journey.
I was more than a little uneasy at having the fiery little fox situated so close to my wooden ark, not to mention my acolytes. However, it seemed Pyra’s flames only damaged her surroundings when she wanted them to. I hoped. Ris’kin’s calming presence nearby also helped.
Benin had remained in place and had now taken Pyra’s place pacing along the bank. Rather than scouting with Coll, an endeavor in which we all knew he’d be a hindrance more than a help, he’d elected to remain in my Sphere and protect my denizens, perhaps still feeling some guilt about his absence when the dire badgers had attacked, but also because he wanted to spend time training with Bekkit. All of that meant that, like the majority of the gnomes, he’d yet to make the crossing himself.
It was time. Steelpaw was already stepping into the river. At my prompting, Gneil had rearranged the wagons’ passengers so they were no longer in color groups. Instead, the first two wagons contained only children and nurses. They would cross first, accompanied by two scouts and six warriors. Days of scouting had revealed no immediate dangers on the opposite bank, but if there was anything I’d learned by now, it was that there was no such thing as being too careful.
As soon as the second wagon, pulled by Flea, entered the water, Binky followed of his own accord. The young badger had calmed considerably throughout the exodus, and was usually too tired after the day’s exertions to pursue his favorite pastime of harassing the spider. In return I’d noticed Binky was always close by, keeping his octet of watchful eyes over his former nemesis and protecting him as fiercely as he did the gnomes. The two owlets riding on the back of Flea’s wagon hooted cheerfully at the spider, who acknowledged them with a cordial wave of his furry palps.
The relatively relaxed atmosphere was broken when one of the children screamed. The accompanying warriors waded over as quickly as they could, peering into the water at where she was pointing, but it seemed the alarm had been raised for nothing.
The child who’d cried out—Pan, I realized—continued to call to the surrounding warriors, pointing at the water around them, but they shook their heads and ignored her. A nurse beside Pan gently reprimanded the child, then put his arm around her in an attempt to calm her down. In the second wagon, though, Emrys was frowning—his old warrior instincts kicking in, perhaps. He peered down at the river suspiciously.
Despite the alarm, both wagons reached the opposite side without further incident, as did the two that followed.
The chariot made it halfway across before stopping abruptly. Gneil frowned, then shrugged and urged Bruce to pull harder. The badger strained, and for a moment the chariot looked as though it was about to break free of whatever held it.
Then there was an ominous crack.
Stop! I told Gneil.
“What’s happened?” asked Ket. She, Bekkit and Benin were each watching one of the other carts, with instructions to immediately report any sign of danger or other issues.
I dipped beneath the water, my god’s-eye vision permitting me to travel through any surface within my Sphere. Peering through the silt that had been disturbed by our passage and now clouded the darkening water, I quickly spotted the problem.
“It’s stuck,” I told the others.
“You think?” Ket and Benin said together.
I resurfaced and flitted over to them. “It’s caught on a driftwood log that’s wedged into the riverbed. One of the wheel bits has cracked.”
“’Wheel bits’?” Ket’s voice was tinged with as much amusement as concern. “You sure that’s the technical term?”
I located Dovetail and Groove, my carpenter repair team, and immediately sent them both in. Dovetail hopped down from the wagon behind the ark, while Groove waded back into the water from the opposite side.
“How are they going to fix it if it’s underwater?” asked Benin. I could sense his agitation, probably because of Pyra’s presence on the stranded chariot. To his credit, though, his eyes remained fixed on the wagon I’d asked him to watch. Pulled by Helga and led by Hammer, it was the least likely to run into trouble, and was almost at the other side.
“I was hoping you could help with that. Is there any way you could, I dunno, make it not be underwater?”
“Eh?”
“Well, you’re good at fire, and now you can do air and a bit of earth as well. Can you maybe take the water away?”
The mage had finally looked away from his charges. Unlike Coll, who usually addressed either the sky or my gem when conversing with me, Benin’s arcane abilities let him sense my presence and approximate location even when in my god’s-eye form, and he now stared at me in
disbelief.
“’Take the water away’? Are you mad?”
“All right then, reroute the river or something. Just for a few minutes.” I pushed down panic as I watched the carpenters struggle, reassuring myself we still had plenty of time.
Bekkit alighted on the mage’s shoulder and the pair began murmuring about displacement barriers and the pairing of something-or-other.
All the time they talked, Benin eyed the water nervously. Then I realized.
“Are you afraid of the water?” I asked incredulously.
He scowled, hands fidgeting inside his sleeves. “Little bit.”
“But you were fine in the marsh!”
“I was crapping my breeches with every step. And it was barely an inch deep in there.”
“You have to overcome your fears,” I told him. “I did.”
“Says the Core who’s afraid of frogs.”
“I am not!” I spluttered. “Ket, you traitor—”
“Something’s wrong.”
My sprite’s voice was hard and deadly serious.
“What d’you mean?” I asked, all levity instantly evaporated.
She’d been watching the rear-most wagon. Pulled by one of the dire badgers, it mostly held non-essential supplies: spare animal hides, shroomwood cast-offs, sticks and other materials gathered from the forest. Swift and Cheer were the only gnomish passengers; still decked out in their owlish attire, they’d been rifling through the wagon’s supplies like the unscrupulous opportunists they were. Now, though, Swift was clutching her netgun in front of her, and Cheer’s knuckles were white around the daggers she gripped in each hand. Both scavengers’ stares were fixed on the water.
“Where’s Garda?” I asked, suddenly realizing that the lone warrior set to accompany the final wagon was nowhere in sight.
“I don’t know,” said Ket. The sprite wrung her hands. “One moment she was there. When I looked again, she’d gone.”
Waves of mounting panic crashed through our bond, and I struggled not to be swept away. A little way upstream, Benin was staring at the place the warrior had disappeared, his eyes wide.
“I’ll take a look,” I tried to reassure them both. “She probably just slipped.”
Once again I ducked into the river. The sky above was even more heavily overcast now that evening was approaching, making the water darker and colder. Mud and silt from the bottom was even more churned up than before, and even with my god’s-eye vision I struggled to pierce the murk. I headed deeper, checking in all directions for any sign of the missing warrior.
A pale hand loomed suddenly to my right.
“Found her!” I told Ket. “Just let me check she’s all r—”
Cold dread filled my entire being as I stared at what I’d found.
“What is it?” Ket almost shouted, having sensed my sudden shock at the sight of the gnome’s hand. Her disembodied hand.
“She’s not all right,” I said faintly.
The ragged flesh and jagged wrist bones suggested her hand had been chewed off rather than cut. Which meant…
There’s something in the water.
Fifty-One
Red Water
Corey
I shot up out of the water and immediately Inspired Gneil to give the signal to retreat. I felt bad abandoning Garda, especially after what happened with Ajax, but it seemed unlikely she was still alive, and right now I had to focus on saving those who could definitely still be saved.
Helga heaved herself onto the far shore, leaving just two wagons and the chariot remaining in the water. The signal to retreat had been passed around, and the scavengers’ wagon was soon approaching the stranded chariot. Its contingent of warriors stood a wary guard around Bruce and the two carpenters, who were understandably struggling to complete repairs since they could assess the damage no better than they could breathe under the near-opaque water.
Where’s Coll when you need him?
Cursing myself for sending the warrior on ahead, I turned to Benin. “If you can’t magic the water away, we’ll have to abandon the chariot. Can you go in there and bring the ark across?”
The mage flinched as something broke the surface beside the chariot, but it was just Dovetail coming up for breath. She’d barely taken her first gasp of air when she was yanked beneath the surface.
Ris’kin, who was doing her best to try and keep Bruce calm, unsheathed her spear and stabbed down in one smooth motion. Graywall, standing beside her, reached down and hauled Dovetail back to her feet. The carpenter coughed water from her lungs, wincing at whatever injury she’d sustained, but she was alive. Graywall and Ris’kin nodded to each other and kept wary eyes on the water.
“We need to get them out of there.” I connected with Gneil again and instructed him and the acolytes to climb across onto Swift and Cheer’s cart. He saw the acolytes across, but when I reiterated for him to follow, instead of the high cleric’s usual enthusiastic obedience, all I got was a sense of steadfast refusal. I attempted to convey that Benin would soon be collecting the ark, and that I wasn’t being abandoned, but still he flatly refused to leave my gem.
Furthermore, when Gneil tried to signal that the warriors should also seek the safety of the shore, they in turn refused to acknowledge his orders, as unwilling to abandon the high cleric as he was to abandon the ark.
“Noble idiots,” I cursed. “Benin, Bekkit—how’s that magic solution coming along?”
They muttered and didn’t respond, deeply focused in a debate about the best way of dealing with the situation. I wanted to scream at Benin to just wade in there and pick up my ark, but the memory of my own crippling fear of the surface world—laughable to Ket, but downright terrifying to me—made me bite my tongue. Besides, things were tense enough already. At least one of us had to remain calm.
“I’m going back in there,” I said to Ket. “We need to see what we’re dealing with.”
“Be careful.”
Whatever was in the water couldn’t hurt me in god’s-eye form, and probably couldn’t even damage my gem if it got hold of it. Still, Ket’s anxiety was starting to affect me as well, and I was tense as I slipped beneath the water for the third time.
It seemed even more threatening than it had before. The dark water and the knowledge that something was picking off my denizens had me jumping at every sign of movement. Though it was only shallow, it was like a different world beneath the water.
The memory of Grimrock’s deep-water monstrosity rising to devour my sinkhole boulderskin rose unbidden, and I shuddered.
I floated amongst the legs of my warriors over to where the carpenters were still attempting to fix the wagon, despite my orders to retreat. Despite the recent attack on Dovetail, there didn’t seem to be anything lurking beneath the chariot. I passed through one of the shroomtree-cap wheels—
—and came face to face with a monster.
Black scales glinted metallic in the faint gray light that filtered through from above. Red eyes gleamed, a glowing band of crimson around a deep black pupil like portals to the hells. Triangular teeth zigzagged around the entrance of a perpetually open mouth.
Dire Fangfin
Fish
The spawn of a dire fangfin queen. The fangfin’s teeth are strong but hollow, allowing them to siphon the blood from the flesh they pierce before tearing it apart for consumption. This is so as not to alert competing species, such as black piranha, to the presence of fresh food.
A distant relative of the tigerfish, the fangfin usually dwells in the silty river waters of jungles and tropical rainforests, though this particular specimen was encountered in the River Emon in Kelaria.
Tropical rainforests? This fish was far, far from home. I distantly recalled thinking the same thing about the mole-rats we’d fought, which the Augmentary had claimed were usually desert creatures.
Another fangfin flashed past on my other side, followed by a third, and then the water was alive with deadly shadows. A carpenter’s tool floated past a
s Groove was dragged under the chariot and immediately lost beneath a fury of flashing scales and thrashing tailfins.
“Benin!” I yelled, bursting from the water. “Help them!” If he’d just go in and carry the ark across, the warriors and Gneil would follow.
But the mage was staring at the churning red water. “I’m not going in there!”
We’d already doubled our entire exodus’s casualty count, and more were sure to follow once the fish were done devouring my poor carpenter.
I considered inspiring Gneil to order the unfurling of the skynet, but there’d be no way to use it now the creatures were in amongst the gnomes. If I’d thought of it earlier, we could have used the net to rope off a safe crossing area and avoided this whole situation. I’d praised myself for being cautious despite the present urgency, yet I hadn’t even considered that we might face danger from the water itself.
The gnomes have been fishing and bathing here for almost two days. Why are we only now under attack?
Unlike the venomous stings of the marsh creatures, the badgers were not immune to these teeth. The fangfins had foregone their whole blood-siphoning thing and instead seemed to have entered a feeding frenzy. Those that couldn’t find a place amongst the ravening school beneath the chariot spread out, attacking gnomes and badgers indiscriminately, and tendrils of red soon stained the murky water.
Even stolid Bruce was beginning to lose it. The whites of his eyes were showing and he shifted in his yoke, on the very knife-edge of going berserk.
A thrashing shape darted through the warriors and tore a chunk from the badger’s flank. Near-submerged in bloody water, being eaten alive by unseen enemies, and the stench of blood rising from the water finally broke Bruce’s domestication and triggered his animal instincts. The badger snarled and threw himself forward, desperate to escape the water. The yoke held him back, and he strained and heaved, even snapping at the gnomes around him who tried to help.