The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy Page 12

  “A few for you? Or a few for people who know how to swim properly?”

  “It’s at the far end of Droomla’s Rift.”

  “Droomla’s Rift…” She turned her head. “Frish. Droomla’s Rift.”

  One of the comparatively brawny mermen swam up and tugged a folded roll of cloth from one of his many pockets. After a moment, he handed it to her. She shook her head.

  “A few hours? I thought I was joking about you not knowing how to swim properly. This time of day, that’s against the current. No sense heading there now.”

  “Please. I can make it worth your while,” Mira said, holding up the satchel of gems.

  “We’re due for a meet-up with Casta’s Drift. We don’t get to meet with her but twice a year. Big trades happen. That bag isn’t big enough to make it worth our while if we miss out on that.”

  “I don’t need all of you! Just three strong men.”

  “We do our own trading. No one bargains as hard for her friend as she does for herself. And we’ve all got our deals and bargains set up from last time. The wrong person shows up, they don’t get what they bargained for.”

  “Please! It’s my brother! I’ve got a terrible feeling. It’s probably nothing. Just help me to be sure it was nothing.”

  The matriarch looked Mira in the eyes. If she was moved by Mira’s plea, it certainly didn’t show in her expression. When she spoke, it was with a raised voice, addressing those lingering around her.

  “Bult! Sitz! Cul! Up front!”

  Three mermen emerged from the crowd of nomads. They were substantial specimens, to be sure, and they looked to have seen their share of rough times. The first, Cul, was missing an eye, or at the very least had chosen to cover one with a scallop shell. He was also as dark of skin as the matriarch, and had a bulkier build than most merfolk could boast. Sitz's hair was trimmed short along one side. The roughness of his scalp and the sorry state of his ear suggested it was a consequence rather than a choice. Bult smiled, revealing broken, serrated teeth. Again, they weren't menacing, but something about their demeanor didn't give Mira the warmest of sensations.

  “What's your name?” the matriarch asked.

  “Mira.”

  “Mira, I'm Trendana. These boys are the fastest we've got. If anyone's going to check on your boy and catch up in time to earn their living, it's them. I feel for you. Had a brother of my own. Made some bad choices, that one. Ended up on the wrong end of a spear. But I don't feel for you so much that I'm going to order these boys to risk missing Casta’s Drift. So, it’s up to them.”

  The three mermen looked to each other, then to Mira, then to her sack of valuables.

  “What's in the sack, eh?” Cul asked.

  “Yeah. You got something I want, I'll take a look for your boy,” Bult said.

  “Gotta be some good stuff, though. I missed Casta two years back. Still haven't made back what I'd have made if I'd been there.”

  Mira tugged open the sack and poked about for some careful selections. Cul snatched the whole bag from her and rummaged through himself. Trendana swam up and thumped him on the back of the head with her scepter.

  “Who raised you? Snatching the young thing's goods. Each of you are doing this job for one gem or pearl or what have you. Just one. Until we find out if she’s going to need more than a look around.”

  “Worth more than one pearl,” Cul said. “Pearls are barely worth the trouble. Gotta make a deal with one of the ladies, get her to go up top and sell it to one of the sailors. And then you lose whatever she decides her cut should be.”

  “Then pick something that isn’t a pearl. But be quick. Now it’s you that’s wasting our time, not her,” said Trendana.

  They passed the bag between them and, with the eye of a jeweler, plucked out the three most precious gems Mira had. Cul handed the bag back.

  “That’ll do for a quick look, I think,” Cul said.

  “Fine. Get what you need. We’ll be listening for you once the tides are right for you to be swinging back,” Trendana said. “If we don’t hear from you by the time we’re swinging back after doing our trade with Casta, we’ll ride the current along Droomla’s Rift and see what’s become of you.”

  “Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me,” Mira said.

  “Best not to talk it up too much, girl,” Trendana said. “Otherwise these boys are liable to expect a little more gratitude when the time comes.”

  Mira felt a twinge of concern at the advice. Something about the phrasing suggested that gems might not be the only form of gratitude favored among the nomads.

  “Hold on,” called a reedy voice from among the nomads.

  An equally reedy figure darted out from among the others. She was a younger mermaid, barely out of her adolescence. Everything about her suggested she was just beginning her life as a nomad in earnest. She had relatively little jewelry. Her outfit was light on patches and seemed to boast more empty pouches than full ones. But she had a fiery, feisty look to her, and made up for her lack of gold with three large knives with sharpened onyx blades hanging at her sides. Her skin was just one of many ways in which she bore a resemblance to Cul.

  “I’ll tag along,” she said.

  “You and your sister,” muttered Bult to Cul.

  “Cora, she needs boys. The problem’s at the sea floor, and Droomla’s Rift is well down below where the ladies can go without getting hurt.

  “Sure, but what’ll Mira do while you’re down there? Just float in the sea waiting? Big fish out there. Nasty things. And her with just the one blade.”

  “It isn’t the number of blades, it’s how you use them,” Cul said. “You having three of them isn’t going to do much if you don’t know where to stick a shark if it comes along and doesn’t decide to mind its business.”

  Cora put her hands on her hips. “Well you’re my brother, Cul. Maybe you should have been teaching me. And two is better than one, besides.”

  She turned to Mira. “Let me see the bag.”

  “I’m not sure I need you Cora,” Mira said.

  “There’s a lot of dangerous things out there in the open sea,” Cora said. “Looks like you get a lot of sun. Probably you spend most of your time going in toward the shore rather than out. I hear that surface folk can be a handful.”

  “They can be. If you find the wrong ones.”

  “But if they start making trouble, you can just head down and they can’t follow.”

  “That’s true.”

  “The same can’t be said of some of the wrong sort out here. Sometimes you have to head up. Sometimes they’ll be faster than you.”

  Mira considered her words, then held out the satchel. Cora picked a small, rough garnet.

  “Come on. Quickly,” Mira said.

  She darted off toward where she knew the rift to be. Behind her, the nomads went on their way. Those she’d hired to help her followed. For all she’d heard of their fabled prowess at traveling from here to there, they quickly fell behind.

  “Come on! Quickly!”

  “You go just as fast as you want, lady,” Cul called after her. “We’ll see you soon enough. Well before you get to anything you’d need our help with.”

  Mira gritted her teeth and worked her tail. She didn’t know precisely what she would do when she reached the spot above the rift without them. But it burned at her that they didn’t seem to have the urgency she had. She redoubled her efforts and rushed into the murkiness ahead.

  #

  Rustle had been flying with his eyes shut for almost an hour. He was just above the surface of the water, navigating by the flow of the wind and the distant point of focus that he hoped was the spirit he was seeking. Shutting his eyes was partially to help filter out the distractions, but it was the lesser of two reasons. Now that he was beyond the portion of the cavern that was riddled with tunnels, there was little but black stone and rippling water, neither of which were terribly distracting. What was distracting, and what his shut eyes helped k
eep at bay, was the terrible realization that the water level was getting awfully high. Once it reached the roof, there was likely to be plenty of pockets of trapped air, but his movement would be much slower, and the risk of being caught somewhere without a way to breathe would be much greater.

  Such precious ignorance cannot last forever, alas. He reached a point where, no matter which direction he went, the distant point of focus only seemed more distant. This was the place, or as near to it as he could get without dipping below the surface of the water again.

  He opened his eyes. The tunnel itself didn’t seem much different. It was a bit deeper here than elsewhere, perhaps. Otherwise, if he hadn’t been keeping careful track of his movement against the gradually more familiar curls and sweeps of the wind, he would have imagined he’d barely moved at all. He flared his personal glow as bright as he could manage. It penetrated just deep enough to reveal the mouth of a narrow tunnel. It was the only tunnel in sight. It could only be the one leading where he needed to go.

  Rustle thought back to their time dealing with the other prison chamber and weighed the risk. If it was a similar distance to the chamber itself, he would probably be able to reach it by taking a deep breath and relying upon his fairy nature to make the very best use of the air in his tiny lungs. But if he was wrong, it would be the last mistake he made. If he was going to hedge his bets, he was going to need enough air with him to sustain him through whatever unforeseen trials lay ahead.

  “If I was a better water fairy, this wouldn’t be a problem,” he moped. “Great-Grandmother can stay under the water for as long as she pleases. And if I was a better air fairy I could probably conjure my own air wherever I please.” He crossed his arms and indulged himself in a bit of feeling sorry for himself. “It isn’t fair that I need to be better at everything in order to get better at anything.”

  He huffed a breath.

  “Enough. I am what I am. Eddy’s somewhere down there, and he needs my help. I… I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but it’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Rustle clenched his mind around the air around him. The natural affinities all fairies had to air came without any training. His watery nature was more of a choice made by the tribe. All of the mysticism of that element was learned. It was something like learning a second language, though. Until he became fluent, he always fell back the familiarity of his mother tongue.

  He buzzed his wings and felt the wind gradually acclimate to his will, like a cool suit of clothes warming once slipped onto the body. He was anything but a skilled practitioner, so the amount of wind he could force to yield to his will was very limited. He held it tight and fluttered his wings, dipping downward. The surface of the water dented beneath him for a moment before he sprang back. Another quick dive caused a hemisphere of water to displace around him before ejecting him again. He buzzed his wings even more powerfully and thrust himself downward. The water spread, arched, and finally collapsed over him, held at bay on all sides by the air he’d dragged with him. In essence, he was at the center of a bubble. Keeping it with him was difficult, but if the contents of his lungs could be made to last an hour, the contents of the bubble would last him ages.

  Rustle plunged downward and began to navigate the tunnel. The air wanted very much to force him to the surface. He let it, floating up to the roof of the tunnel. The bubble flattened into a dome and rolled along with him until, to his combined relief and anxiety, he came to a grating precisely the same as the one outside Stuartia’s prison. He didn’t bother wrestling with the lock. The gap in the grating was quite large enough for him to slip through. The hard part was coaxing the wobbly orb of air to squeeze through with him.

  He finally got it to slurp through the grating with him and ended up bouncing up to the roof of the prison chamber. It was different than the other chamber. For one, the ominous glow of the crystals in the roof of the chamber was entirely absent. There were still gems, and there was still a carving, but aside from his own glow there wasn’t a flicker of light. That should have worried Rustle. There was reason to believe that a place so devoid of any sign of magic would also lack the sort of help he required. For better or worse, he was far too terrified of the evidence to the contrary.

  In Stuartia’s chamber, he’d felt the presence of focus without will. Here, it was almost the opposite. There was a will, a mind. It was dagger-sharp and tightly coiled. He could almost hear its voice in the back of his mind, muttering to itself. It was rumbling with anger. But for all of its intensity, it seemed unaware of him, and unable to reach out.

  He forced the bubble down with him as he quested toward the floor of the chamber. There he found the shallow dish of an altar, just the same as in Stuartia’s prison. He tried to steady himself with a deep breath. It did no good. No amount of slow, calm breathing was going to wipe away the fact that he was about to perform a blood ritual to a foreign god, to awaken the trapped spirit of a powerful wizard. There was nothing to it but to do it.

  Rustle ran his finger along the edge of the digging claw until he drew a drop of blood, then crouched and smeared it against the surface of the bowl. Power welled and surged, though not to the degree it had for Eddy. Perhaps, like the magic, this place was only really meant for merfolk. But a blue glow pulsed and breathed in the gems around him. They illuminated, gradually offering a better glimpse of the carving on the domed ceiling.

  If Eddy were here, he would have been fascinated. The mural was very much like the one in Stuartia’s chamber, though rather than the massive behemoth lurking behind the other shapes, there was the same insect-like shape repeated in an interlocking pattern. It repeated thousands of times, and even those spaces between individual insects appeared to simply be another insect in another position.

  He’d only started to make sense of it when a radiant form finally resolved in the center of the chamber, directly above him. As before, the shape was indistinct aside from the broad strokes of arms, head, fins, and eyes. It was a merperson. If he were pressed, Rustle would guess it was another mermaid. The will sharpened only slightly as it wavered into view, but it was enough, at least, for the voice to finally form words.

  It was different than with Stuartia. The words didn’t come as simple understanding. This was language. It was as though he could hear her smoldering, rage-filled voice in his ears. Certainly female. Certainly intelligent. And completely incomprehensible. It was the language of the merfolk.

  He floated up to eye level and drifted back until he was beyond the perimeter of her prison. She looked at him through narrow eyes.

  “M-Merantia?” he asked. “I’m sorry, but I need your help.”

  The voice lashed out in his mind again, but he couldn’t make sense of it. From the tone, he suspected she couldn’t understand him either.

  “Of course,” he said. “If the water-for-air spell has failed, why wouldn’t the language spell?”

  The glowing eyes narrowed further and the voice made a demand. Rustle’s mind raced. It was bad enough he didn’t know how he would ask her for help. The last thing he needed was to have awakened a wizard only to infuriate it with his inability to communicate.

  “Uh… Uh… My friend! He… He looks like this!”

  Rustle coaxed the bubble around him to pinch and tug, to elongate around him until it formed a passable approximation of Eddy’s form.

  The eyes looked with a degree more interest. He heard a single word in his mind now. He imagined he was being asked to continue.

  “He’s trapped! Trapped at the bottom of a tunnel…”

  Rustle continued telling his tale, shaping the bubble of air around him into forms that he hoped would make his point clear. A falling stone, a mound of rubble. He pantomimed his inability to breathe, this inability to understand. He even attempted to produce Stuartia’s form and explain that he’d been told the story.

  That last bit may have been a mistake, because the semblance of Stuartia caused the feeling of rage to surge around him, and a
flurry of words that had the edge of profanity, even if he didn’t understand them.

  “I just need help,” he urged. “The spells he cast are failing. The breathing spell stopped working. I need to help my friend. I…”

  His voice trailed off as a dull but very real sensation of pain began in his ears. It was the same pain he’d felt periodically when he and Eddy were traveling down toward the sea floor. The bubble around him seemed like it was squeezing tighter, succumbing to the pressure that a now failing spell had been holding at bay. His time was running out.

  “Please! Please! You’ve got to do something. I can’t help him. I can’t help you. I can’t help anyone if you don’t help me! Please!”

  With this final plea, he darted past the perimeter of the spell that imprisoned her. The pain was growing more intense. Soon it was difficult for him to think. The glowing form before him looked at him curiously. His vision began to dim. She placed her glowing hands on either side of the bubble and gradually the pain eased.

  The voice in the back of his mind took on a different tone now. It was lilting, almost like it was murmuring a lullaby. With each cycle of its lyrical chant, he felt it probing deeper into his mind. Word by word, the song began to make sense to him. And as each word became clear, his own thoughts became murkier.

  “Listen, listen. Hear and know. Think only of what I say…” she crooned.

  Soon, these words dominated his thoughts. They crowded out logic, dedication, and fear. If not for the upwelling of magic around him, he likely would have lost control of the bubble of air he held in place.

  “Good… Good… That is better isn’t it?” Merantia said as Rustle wavered before her.

  He was transfixed. The voice of the mermaid was the most soothing sound he could imagine. All he wanted was to hear her speak, to luxuriate in her words. He drifted close to her.

  “It was good of you to awaken me. I am so very grateful to you.”

  “You are welcome, Merantia…” he said, his lips curled in a vacant grin.

  “But you have no place down here, do you? The water is trying to squeeze and bruise my precious little helper. Let me see to that…”