Isle of Winds (The Changeling Series Book 1) (22 page)

“So, we’re nearly there?” he asked.

“I hope so,” Karya replied. “I think we’re being followed.”

Robin peered back, but could see almost nothing in the darkness. “What?” he asked worriedly. “Do you think it’s Strife?”

“No, not Strife,” Karya shook her head.

Robin looked from Karya to Woad for an explanation, fully awake now. His hand had unconsciously moved to his belt, close to Phorbas’ knife.

“Harpies,” Woad muttered, spitting the word as though it tasted bad. “Foul critters.”

“Harpies?” Robin said, his eyebrows climbing his forehead. “Are you serious? As in flying ladies with wings and birds legs?”

Woad made a face. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Pinky. Nothing ladylike about harpies. They’re all teeth and claws, wings and flappy tentacles. Eyeballs and suckers.”

“Harpies look nothing like people,” Karya said. “They’re the scavengers of the Netherworlde. Picture a very large leathery bat with a whole lot of teeth, a bit of squid thrown in for good measure, and more arms and legs than you’d like. Run the whole thing through a cheese-grater and you’d be getting close to how they look.”

“But … we’re underground!” Robin said, searching the darkness urgently for any sign of leathery, be-tentacled harpies and finding nothing but gloom and darkness. “There’s a distinct lack of sky down here. Flying things tend to be in the sky right?”

“Harpies roost in dark caves, brainwave,” Woad explained. “Like bats … only they eat bats.” He made a face. “They like the dark. I’d like the dark too if I was that ugly.” He shrugged his blue shoulders. “They eat anything. They only go up to the surface to feed, when they can’t find food down here…”

“I don’t know how many there are,” Karya said. “I’m sure I’ve seen a few clusters of eyes now. If they grow in numbers enough, they’ll get the courage up to attack.”

Robin could still see nothing behind them but blackness. He briefly worried about the fact that harpies apparently had clusters of eyes, but decided to add that to the ever-growing list of thing not to dwell on.

“Look!” Woad said, staring upwards. The other followed his gaze. Far above, countless red eyes stared down at them from the shadows. It was like looking up at the night sky, only all the stars were red. They were everywhere.

“There must be hundreds…” Robin said quietly. “Hawthorn never mentioned harpies, did he? Did I miss the part where he mentioned harpies?”

“He probably didn’t think it was worth mentioning,” Karya replied dryly. “You fae-folk are like that, as a rule. Always leaving out small and inconsequential details like the likelihood of gibbering death. I wouldn’t be surprised if this track eventually just ended and spat us into an abyss and he forgot to mention that too.”

“I don’t think this is the time, boss,” Woad said in a small voice.

“We should be okay…” Karya said, rather unconvincingly. “As long as we have light. They’re not fond of light.”

All three of them looked at the tiny flame. It flickered and wobbled in the wind. Suddenly it looked very small indeed.

“Um … Woad?” Robin asked quietly. “How long has your little magic fire been burning now?”

Woad seemed to calculate this carefully. “Hours and hours … and hours,” he concluded.

“And how long can you keep it burning for?”

Woad touched his moonstone pendant. The usually shiny trinket looked quite dull and lifeless.

“Um … minutes and minutes?” he offered. “Not much mana left. Even astonishing fauns have their limits.”

“I can’t conjure fire or light,” Karya said. “I’m only proficient in the Earth Tower.” They looked at Robin expectantly.

“Well, don’t look at me!” Robin held up his hands. “I can barely perform simple air cantrips. My Galestrikes probably couldn’t even blow that flame out.”

They finally reached the other side of the cavern and the tracks plunged them back into a narrow tunnel, the walls closing in. The stone lurched on an angle and began a very steep descent, making Robin’s stomach lurch. They gripped the stone and held each other to steady themselves as they plunged on into deeper darkness. From the cavern they had just left, there came a great whooshing noise, like a hundred umbrellas being opened at once.

“How deep do these tunnels go?” Robin wondered aloud as they plummeted along on the track.

“To the bottom I would imagine,” Karya answered distractedly. “They’re following us … all of them.”

There were jostling flashes of red in the tunnel behind them. In some ways, it was worse not being able to see them, no matter how horrible they might look. It couldn’t possibly be worse than what Robin was imagining.

The travelling rock levelled out, banked around a corner sharply, so that they momentarily lost sight of their pursuers’ shining eyes. The tracks began to climb again steeply. Moments later, the flickering red eyes appeared in the blackness behind them again as the harpies gained ground.

They must have eyes like spiders, Robin thought. He tried to picture what the creatures’ faces might look like, and forcibly stopped himself. A vivid imagination could be a curse…

“How much further can it be until we get to the end of this thing?” he asked. Karya gave a noncommittal shrug with one shoulder.

“We may need to burn your books if Woad’s light goes out,” Karya said thoughtfully. “That would give us a few extra minutes, at least.”

Robin, horrified at the idea of burning a book which contained the only know picture of his parents, balked at the idea.

“What good will a few minutes do us?” he said. “There could be hours more travelling for all we know. What do we do when the books are gone? Burn our clothes?”

Woad sniggered inappropriately at this. Karya and Robin both shot him a hard look.

“Sorry,” he said, withering under their glares. “Nerves. If it helps, there’s something up ahead, something new – I can smell it. Doesn’t smell of stone or earth or water.”

This was promising, although the skittering mass of unseen harpies seemed to be gaining ground on them.

“Not soon enough. We need to try and hold them off until we get there,” Karya said determinedly.

“Hawthorn mentioned something about the doors of oak and holly?” Robin said. “He said the stone would take us that far. I didn’t think to ask him what that meant.”

“Holly and oak won’t stop harpies,” Woad said. “They’ll tear right through.”

The tiny flame affixed to the front of the travelling stone flickered and spluttered. They stared at it in desperate silence. It wavered and re-asserted itself.

“I hope you’re good at fighting in the dark,” Karya said to Robin.

“I’ve never fought in the dark,” he replied urgently. “I’ve never even been in a fistfight … in daylight…!”

“We need to think of some way to keep this flame alight,” Karya said, a hint of panic bleeding into her usually stoic manner. “It mustn’t go out!”

The tiny flamed wavered, and then, with a small pop, as though in sheer defiance of her words, it went out.

They were plunged into darkness.

Not the darkness of a night sky, but utter, crushing blackness. The smothering dark which only exists deep down under the world.

Woad yelped in alarm, and Robin, utterly disoriented, almost lost his balance. He groped wildly in the inky void with unseen hands until Karya caught him by the shoulders.

A chorus of screeches erupted in the blackness, amplified by the narrow tunnel. Hungry animal voices raised in joy, as the unseen harpies, emboldened by the darkness, lurched forward to claim their prize.

The wind rushed past Robin’s face in the darkness. He hunkered down, his heart beating wildly as he ducked, trying unconsciously to make himself a smaller target. With rising panic he tensed and awaited the inevitable brush of jagged razor claws across his back.

“Light!” Woad cried in the darkness. Robin thought at first that the faun was casting a cantrip, trying to make another flame, but then he realised that he could somehow just make out the dark outline of the faun, leaning out at the front of the stone like a masthead.

“Tunnel ends ahead!” Woad cried.

Something brushed Robin’s shoulder, leathery and heavy. He batted it away in panic, revulsion making him shudder. Another scraped across his flailing arm, and an unseen claw closed tightly around his wrist in a cold and clammy vice. Robin struggled against it desperately. There was foul breath in his face and with peaking terror he felt himself being jerked upwards, lifted from the stone.

There was a sudden flash of amber, blinding in the darkness, as Karya’s arm beat fiercely at the unseen grappler, wrenching Robin free of its grip. There was a screech of fury and pain, though it was too dark to see exactly what she had done to the harpy.

“Stay away from us!” Karya shouted to the flurrying maelstrom surrounding them.

Her bracelet flashed again and again, silent golden gunfire. Yowls and yelps reverberated through the blackness. In the flashes, Robin saw frozen images of the small girl surrounded by a whirlwind of wings, claws and long black glossy limbs.

The light was growing imperceptibly around them as they barrelled onwards. Robin, trying to keep low beyond reach of the grasping harpies, could now clearly make out Karya’s silhouette. She seemed to have somehow rooted her feet into the stone to keep her balance. He could see the harpies moving in a seething, maddening mass. It was impossible to separate one from the crowd; they were everywhere.

A claw reached down and tangled in Karya’s hair. She yelled, crying out in pain as it tried to tear her from the rock.

“Boss!” Woad shouted in alarm.

Robin stood, fury and fear rushing through him, and with all his concentration, focussing on every lesson he had ever had with Phorbas, he threw a Galestrike at the cloud of monsters above.

It was poor, by anyone’s standards, but he must have clipped a wing with the blast of air, as there was a screech of surprise and Karya was released, the harpy spinning off from the flock, glancing off the rock wall and taking several of its fellows with it.

“Good shot, Pinky!” Woad said, his voice filled with astonishment.

“Lucky, not good,” Robin gasped. He risked a glance forward. The light ahead was brighter, growing with every second, but it was still agonisingly far away.

“I can’t keep throwing rocks at them!” Karya shouted over the din. “There’re too many!”

An idea suddenly came to Robin. A flash of inspiration as he remembered his very first lesson at Erlking. The piece of parchment stuck flapping to the ceiling. The large windowless room and the cantrip Phorbas had cast to block the wind from the room.

“Breezeblock!” he shouted.

“What?” Karya replied bellowing to be heard.

“Flying creatures! They can’t fly through the air if there isn’t any!” Robin yelled back.

He pushed his way past Karya to face the mass of harpies head on. He held his hands out in front of him, palms outward. Closing his eyes, he forced himself to focus. His mana stone flashed with heat and light, and he felt the cantrip leave his palms like a vast shuddering breath, throwing up an invisible wall.

The flying mass of claws and wings hit the unseen barrier, suddenly finding their wings useless in the lack of air. They fell like a cascading wave, tumbling over each other, blocking the thin tunnel with their interlocked bodies.

Unencumbered, the travelling rock carried the three children onwards, swiftly putting distance between them and their disabled attackers, the light around them growing brighter and brighter with every passing second.

Woad whooped with triumph. Even Karya gave Robin a brief look of astonishment.

“Not bad for a hornless wonder, eh?” he said, panting with relief. His hands were shaking, his bones vibrating. He had put every ounce of his mana into the cantrip, and now expelled, he was light headed and dizzy, his legs like water.

“That won’t hold them for long,” Karya said in her usual flat manner. She looked ahead toward the light at the end of the tunnel. “We’re slowing down … have you noticed?”

Robin hadn’t, but now that she mentioned it, the travelling stone was indeed finally losing speed. “I suppose we’re about to arrive, wherever we are.”

The track levelled out as they finally reached the top of the long slope, the cries of the harpies distant now. With a clatter, the rolling stone emerged from the tunnel, delivering them into another large cave, the floor of which was dotted with dozens of shimmering pools of water. The source of the bright light was evident now. The walls and ceiling were covered, every glittering inch, with crystals. The violet and blue light was dazzling after so much darkness.

The travelling stone chugged to a jerky halt in the very centre of the cave, where the rusted mine cart tracks ended rather unceremoniously. It stopped with a clatter, the sudden lack of motion after so long making them all lose their balance.

“Look at this place,” Robin said in wonder, weaving slightly on his feet. It was like being inside a geode.

Unlike the astonished boy, Karya leapt off the stone, wasting no time and barely giving the glittering cave a second glance. After wobbling slightly, she rushed back to the tunnel and stared down into the gloom. Viewed from the top, the tunnel stretched away like a long dark coal shaft. Echoes of angry struggling harpies floated up distantly.