‘We kill orcs,’ Fletcher gasped, the cruel teeth digging into his throat. It was hard to speak, his tongue slow with the paralytic poison.
‘Human keel gremlin,’ Half-ear whispered, to the chittering agreement of the others around him. ‘Human keel gremlin moar than orc.’
In that moment, Fletcher realised it was true. When the military raided the jungles, the gremlins were often all they found. The poor creatures were slaughtered with impunity by the frustrated soldiers, eager to get a kill under their belts.
‘I saved a gremlin,’ Fletcher gulped, as the pressure of the knife increased. ‘I saved the blue gremlin.’
At these words there was a hush. That was when Ignatius chose to act, vaulting out of the paralysed bodies of the others and tumbling Half-ear into the grass. His tail-spike hovered over the gremlin’s eye and then he barked, daring the gremlins to make a move.
Fletcher eased himself into a sitting position, using the hump of Lysander’s back as a prop. The clever Griffin had its eyes closed, or perhaps Captain Lovett was in control. If they were about to die, she wouldn’t want the world to watch.
There was a commotion from the gremlins that crowded around them, somewhere at the back. One of them was shoving his way through, until he stood above Ignatius, his skinny chest heaving with exertion.
This gremlin was limping ever so slightly and he held a barbed harpoon in his hand, but that was not what marked him out from the others. No, it was the colour that still dyed the gremlin’s back and shoulders – fading, but still very much there.
It was Blue.
33
Blue did not say a word to them. Instead, he knelt beside Half-ear and whispered in the larger gremlin’s remaining lug. They bickered back and forth for a while, yet Ignatius never wavered once, his eyes flicking between the gremlins surrounding them.
After what felt like an age, Half-ear appeared to admit defeat. He sighed deeply and snapped some orders at the surrounding warriors. They paused as if confused, until slowly but surely they lowered their blowpipes.
In response, Fletcher directed Ignatius to get off Half-ear’s chest, but to keep the tail poised above. They were still very much at the gremlins’ mercy and he did not want to give up the last card he had left to play just yet.
‘Thank you,’ Fletcher said, bowing his head to Blue.
Again Blue ignored them, pushing his way out of the crowd and into the jungle. Strangely, the other gremlins did the same, disappearing into the burrows. Only Half-ear remained, staring at them with hatred in his eyes.
Sweat trickled down Fletcher’s back as he waited, trying to ignore the gremlin’s gaze. He noticed the sun was near setting and wondered how long they had been unconscious. If it had been a few hours, it mattered less. But if they had been unconscious for more than a day, they might miss their rendezvous with the other teams.
‘So … what do we do now?’ Sylva mumbled from behind him, recovering first from the darts.
She shuffled closer and laid her head on his shoulder, though whether it was the paralysis, exhaustion or something more, he couldn’t tell. It mattered little to him why. He had not been so close to another person in a long time, and it felt right.
‘Nothing,’ Fletcher whispered.
He laid his own head on hers and they sat there, watching the setting sun filter through the leaves above. Despite their situation, his pounding heart stilled. Only Half-ear’s unwavering gaze tarnished a perfect moment.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Sylva said suddenly.
She lifted her head, and Fletcher saw a red stain on her temple.
‘Your cheek,’ she murmured, gently touching it with her fingers.
It was where the goblin spear had nicked him. The wound was deep, but somehow it did not hurt. A side-effect of the paralysis, perhaps.
‘Let me,’ she said, tracing a heart symbol on his face. It tingled strangely, as her mana merged with his skin. Then the cool, soothing pulse of healing energy began to seal his wound.
‘Thanks,’ Fletcher said.
She watched his face, her lips half-parted with concentration. Her wide blue eyes met his, and he felt a sudden urge to lean in closer.
Then Cress groaned from behind them, half lifting herself off the ground. Her elbows gave way and she collapsed in a spatter of mud, her face planting in Othello’s backside.
‘Uhhh, little help here,’ she moaned, her voice muffled by his trousers. His moment with Sylva was gone, but still, Fletcher couldn’t help but laugh aloud. He grabbed the back of Cress’s jacket and pulled her off.
‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped, taking a breath of fresh air. ‘I thought I was gonna suffocate in the worst possible way.’
Despite the headbutt to the behind, Othello snored even louder, completely oblivious to the world.
‘And what about the blue gremlin?’ Sylva asked, her face suddenly hard once again. ‘What are you not telling us?’
‘So … I might have rescued a gremlin from the fighting pits on the front lines …’ Fletcher admitted, avoiding her eyes. He had preferred the girl he had been with a minute ago, but the wall she kept between them had returned once more.
‘You what?’ Cress exclaimed, so loudly that a gremlin poked its head out of the nearest burrow. She tossed a pebble at it and it ducked back once again.
‘What do you mean, “rescued”? Sylva asked, narrowing her eyes.
‘I released him. Back into the jungle,’ Fletcher murmured, and felt himself redden with a strange mix of embarrassment and shame.
‘You’re joking, right?’ Cress said, hauling herself upright with a grunt. ‘Are you a complete idiot?’
Sylva was even less impressed:
‘We spend the past two days trying to avoid detection and you send them a damned messenger?’
‘Well, he just saved our lives, so I guess it’s a good thing I did!’ Fletcher said, crossing his arms stubbornly.
‘They came looking for us precisely because you let him escape,’ Sylva replied, curling her lip with anger. ‘They’ve probably been tracking us for days.’
Fletcher bit back a retort. What he had done was wrong, in almost every way. But watching that little creature refuse to give in against insurmountable odds … he couldn’t have let it die. He would never have been able to forgive himself if he had. At the same time, he wondered if he would have made the same decision if he had known gremlins could speak.
‘What’s done is done,’ Fletcher said, shaking his head. ‘We can discuss this later. Right now we need to work out what’s going on and how we’re going to …’
He caught Half-ear’s gaze and lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘… get out of here.’
A voice came from the hole nearest to them before the others could reply.
‘You is not needing to do that,’ it said. It had the same fluty tone of the voices of other gremlins, yet the intonation was clearer, if a little stilted and formal. A strange animal trotted out of the entrance, with Blue riding it bareback.
The creature looked a lot like a mountain hare, were it not for its slightly extended snout, shorter ears and long, coltish legs. It reminded Fletcher of what a hare might look like if it had the skeleton of an antelope and the hind-legs of a desert kangaroo.
‘A mara,’ Jeffrey breathed. ‘I’ve never seen one in the flesh.’
‘Is that a demon?’ Cress asked, her eyes widening at the sight.
‘No, it is a real animal,’ Jeffrey replied, keeping his voice low. ‘But an uncommon one.’
Blue halted the mara with a short tug of the fur on the back of its neck.
‘How do you speak our language?’ Sylva demanded, her voice laced with suspicion.
Blue dismounted and crouched beside Half-ear. He shook his head sadly.
‘Many gremlins is learning it from humans, when we is captured. Many gremlins is escaping the pits. Me friend here, he is played dead after fighting a dog. He is being left to rot in a grave with the corpses. You is understanding
why he wants gremlins to kill you, even if it is meaning death from your demon.’
‘You learned to speak from that crass ringmaster?’ Fletcher said sceptically.
‘No. I is learning from another. A noblewoman, who is living in a cage. The human slaves are not being allowed to speak with she, so she taught I in secret. It was I who is being in charge of bringing woman food and water, changing woman’s straw.’
‘You know Captain Cavendish?’ Sylva exclaimed.
‘I do not know her name. She never trusted I enough to tell I. But she told I of you lands. How you hate the orcs like we. I did not believe the other gremlins, that you kill we like vermin.’
He trailed off for a moment, a wistful look in his enormous eyes.
‘She is losing her mind, in the later years. So I is escaping and coming here. Then I is being captured when I is scouting. Bad men put I in pit. Then you save I.’
It was a lot to process. But one glaring question remained unanswered.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Fletcher demanded.
34
Blue did not reply. Instead, he unleashed a tirade of orders, all clicks and whistles.
In an instant, gremlins surrounded them once again, appearing as if from nowhere. Many had daubed their skin with green and brown ochres to blend in with the foliage. Others rode their own maras, their blowpipes firmly centred on Fletcher and the others. These were even more warlike, with bone-carved harpoons strapped to their backs and more of the deadly knives that had almost slit Fletcher’s throat.
‘We is taking you into the Warren, to meet leader,’ Blue trilled, as the closest gremlins marched into the burrows. ‘I warn you, we darts can make you sleeping, or freezing or dying. When we shoot this time, we use the dying ones. Do not make gremlins nervous. They eager to kill you, they is hating you as much as this one.’
Half-ear grunted and stood up as Blue prodded him with his blowpipe. The maimed gremlin’s hateful glare never left Fletcher’s face, but he backed away with his hands spread wide and empty. Fletcher did not blame him. After the cruelty he had seen in that tent just three nights ago, he would feel the same way.
Othello was still asleep, so they reluctantly left him with Solomon, as well as Athena – who kept watch in the trees above. Lysander continued to keep his eyes closed, so he remained too, while Sariel was too large to fit into one of the burrows.
Blue descended into the burrow he had come from, the largest of them all. Its mouth yawned dark and ominous but, far within, Fletcher could see the same glowing mushrooms that grew in the Great Forest.
Despite the burrow’s greater size, Fletcher and the others had to crawl on their hands and knees to fit, with Ignatius and Tosk scampering ahead, ever wary of an ambush within. It was with great relief that the tunnel opened up into a large chamber, big enough to fit them all, if they stooped and pressed together. The luminous lichen was even thicker here, and they were all lit by an eerie green glow.
‘Are we sure this is a good idea?’ Sylva whispered.
‘If they wanted us dead, we would already be in the ground,’ Cress replied. She glanced at the earth above her and laughed. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘The dwarf is speaking truth. We will not be harming you if you do not give reason,’ Blue said, nudging his mara into a tunnel that sloped even deeper. ‘This way. Mother is being waiting below.’
They pressed on, their already filthy clothing stained further by the dark, moist soil. The temperature seemed to increase as they crawled deeper. They passed chambers on either side of the path they followed. Within them, furry mounds of mara pups suckled on their mothers’ bellies, so young that they were yet to open their eyes. Piles of fruit, tubers and freshly cut grasses sat beside them, and the adult mara grazed on them as they passed.
The next room contained spherical green eggs, tended by gremlin matrons who splayed themselves over the grapefruit-sized objects protectively when they saw the intruders. They hissed as Fletcher peered in, and he hurriedly crawled on, whispering to Sylva, ‘Gremlin eggs’.
Deeper still, Fletcher looked into another chamber, the rustle of insects distracting him from their path. A maelstrom of crickets, locusts and mealworms swarmed the walls, bouncing around the cavity with a mad energy. Fruit skins and husks were stacked in the centre of the room, while gremlins carefully plucked the largest insect specimens with their nimble fingers, putting them into tightly woven baskets at their hips. It was only when a gremlin popped one into its mouth and crunched down that Fletcher realised the room’s purpose. He shuddered and moved on, though Ignatius licked his chops and had to be pulled away.
‘They live as rabbits do, in a warren of sorts,’ Jeffrey whispered from behind. ‘Their eggs are kept safe from predators underground, and they farm insects to feed themselves. They have even developed a symbiotic relationship with the mara. See how their loincloths are made from mara fur and they ride them as we do horses, but the animals are protected and well fed by the fruit and grasses that are brought to them.’
Fletcher was fascinated, but he could not help but feel constricted in the tight confines of the tunnel. It put him in mind of his prison cell, and he shuddered at the memory. Ignatius mewled in sympathy and slowed, so that he could rub his back against Fletcher’s arm.
‘Thanks, little guy,’ Fletcher whispered.
On and on they went, until the side chambers ran out and the tunnel pitched forward so sharply it became more of a slide than a crawl. The earth seemed to become hotter still, and the sweat ran down his face and into his eyes. Even the frilled lichen became scarcer, until Fletcher felt like he was being swallowed down a black throat and into the belly of an enormous beast.
Finally, a glow of orange light told Fletcher that they had reached the end of their journey. Blue waited inside the entrance to the glowing chamber and tugged them out, one after the other, like newborns freshly birthed. ‘Mother is here,’ he said, reverently, when they were all through. ‘You all meet Mother.’
Fletcher blinked in the glare, the heat so fierce his skin almost hurt with the force of it. A glowing stream of molten liquid flowed ahead, coloured the orange of heated metal. The lava trickled from a rent in the cave wall, wending along a deep channel and into a tunnel that stretched endlessly into the distance. Bubbles broke along the surface, spattering red-hot droplets with gloopy plops. He sensed a longing from Ignatius to approach the lava, but quelled it with a thought – now was not the time for curiosity.
Stalactites and stalagmites studded the floors and ceilings like snaggled teeth, while columns of those that had joined together held up the ceiling. They reminded Fletcher of the pillars of a great cathedral.
‘The wild gremlins built their Warren here because of the lava.’ A voice echoed from deep within the cavern, where the light of the magma did not reach. ‘It kept the soil warm for them.’
It was a garbled voice, as if spoken through a mouth full of marbles. It sounded feminine somehow, despite the guttural intonation. The speaker had to be old too, for their speech quavered and cracked in their throat. Fletcher knew one thing for certain. It was not a gremlin.
‘They need heat for their eggs, you see,’ the voice continued, growing louder, ‘the same way the goblins do. That is what you call them, is it not? Goblins? My spies have heard you call them such.’
There was the gentle tap of a cane on the ground and a presence appeared on the edge of the gloom. Fletcher squinted, but could see no more than a shrouded figure.
‘Show yourself,’ Sylva demanded, stepping beside Fletcher.
‘Give me your word that you will keep the peace,’ the shadow said. ‘I do not wish to see any more death tonight.’
‘I swear it,’ Sylva said, looking around at the others for their nods of agreement. ‘As do my friends.’
‘Very well.’
The figure stepped out of the shadows, a long, blackthorn staff clutched in her gnarled hands. She was hunched like a vulture, the burden of her obvious age
weighing heavy on her shoulders. Tangled black hair tumbled over her shoulders down to her waist, covering her nakedness, for all she wore was a feathered skirt and a broad necklace made from the small bones of a dozen unfortunate animals.
Her face and body were painted as if overlaid by a skeleton, the outline of a skull leaving her eyes as black holes, stark against the chalky whiteness. But one thing stood out more than anything else, jutting from her lower lips like the jagged stalagmites she stood among. Tusks.
Mother was an orc.
35
She stood there in silence, her eyes staring out blankly. Sylva’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish, while Fletcher could do no more than stutter. Despite her size, he did not feel threatened by her presence, for she was as frail as the withered staff in her hands.
‘Who are you?’ Cress asked, almost politely. She seemed respectful of the orc’s old age rather than scared, even as Jeffrey shuffled behind Cress and tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind her shoulders.
The venerable orc smiled, revealing a row of jagged teeth.
‘You may call me Mother,’ she croaked, stepping even closer. ‘I have known no other name for the past half-century. Nor have I seen the light of day with my own eyes.’
Sylva’s hand wandered to her back, as if her falx was still strapped to her shoulder. Mother noticed the movement, but did nothing more than cluck her tongue disapprovingly.
‘With your own eyes?’ Fletcher asked. His suspicions were confirmed when a green-brown Mite buzzed out of her hair, settling on the blackthorn staff and watching them through beady eyes. The demon was smaller than most Mites, almost the size of a normal beetle. It was then that Fletcher saw the milky whiteness of Mother’s eyes, clouded by cataracts. The orc was blind.
‘My Mites, Apophis and Ra, act as my eyes and ears. There is no limit to what I can see. I have more eyes now than I was born with.’
‘A shaman then,’ Sylva said, finding her voice again.
‘I am a summoner, as you are,’ the orc said simply.