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29

I stepped inside the cavern from the tunnel, and immediately ducked behind a twelve-foot stalagmite to my left.

Nothing pounced.

No great crowd of nychtera had been waiting for me to cross the threshold.

I remained un-ripped-apart.

Best news I’d had all day.

Says something about the kind of day I’d been having.

Still. As I got my bearings, I could see that there was more than enough bad news in that cave to go around.

First of all, this place was huge.

I’d thought that the prismatic cavern was big. The nychtera cavern, deep inside that little tugboat, made the prismatic crystal cavern look like a snow globe.

This cavern was easily a mile across, lengthwise, and at least half-that in width.

Heck, the roof had to be at least a half-mile up. Far enough away that I would have had to try, if I’d wanted to gauge the exact distance. I couldn’t just sense it offhandedly, the way I could sense so many things now.

That roof was far enough away that if those stalactites I could pick out up there fell, they’d reach terminal velocity on the way down. They’d hit this dirty, rocky cavern floor and explode like fragmentation grenades.

And that was only one little worry in that huge cavern.

All over that ceiling were nychtera. Couldn’t judge how many. Not at this distance. And especially not the way they bundled in and hung there, or crawled across each other.

Hundreds though. Maybe even thousands. And at least half of them filled the air with chirps and screeches and cries.

Their droppings fell indiscriminately. Even if I lived through this, my nice silk shirt was definitely a goner.

That wasn’t the worst news though.

Something had heard me come through. Felt, maybe. Couldn’t be sure yet. All I knew for certain was that I heard a scuttling somewhere off to my left.

And whatever was doing that scuttling was big.

I heard the others come through the cavern entrance behind me. I glanced back to see Vasco, Magellan, even Brikatika slip through and duck behind a different stalagmite. This one on the right-hand side of the entrance.

I hadn’t been sure Brikatika should have been allowed to come through. Not until we knew it was safe. But either the big dorach wouldn’t hear of standing by while his mate and offspring were under threat, or Vasco’d thought we’d need him to find said mate and offspring.

If so, Vasco had a point. Might be able to search for—

“Down!” Vasco yelled.

I dropped to the hard, rocky surface without thinking.

A strand of web the size of my forearm shot past me.

I’d been watching the ground. Should’ve been watching the walls.

I clambered behind my shielding stalagmite and looked.

Calling it a spider didn’t do this thing justice.

This was the King Kong of spiders.

Milky white. Body easily twenty feet from pincers to spinneret. And its legs looked like cranes, they were so long. Even arched up so its thorax could throw webs our direction…

It was still throwing webs…

“Scatter!” I yelled, but Vasco one-upped me. While I dove away from the spreading filaments, he pulled a Molotov cocktail out of his duffel bag.

He lit the rag with a gesture, and broke the bottle in the center of that web.

Whatever he’d put inside that…

The moment I wondered, the information came flooding to me. A recipe for liquid fire. Not Greek fire, or napalm, or any kind of imitation. Not even plasma or lava.

No.

This was a recipe for fire made liquid. Pure, elemental stuff. Burned a brilliant blue-white, and left even the air in its wake smelling purified and clean.

And that fire spread faster than I could have dreamed. Whuffed up all the filaments around me.

That fire spread up the web, racing toward the thorax of the panicking and retreating spider.

The spider scuttled for the ceiling. Desperate to escape. Followed by a dozen much smaller spiders I’d overlooked, I’d been so focused on the giant. These smaller spiders were no larger than, say, motorcycles. But all were just as panicked.

None of them had a chance.

The fire jumped the distance from the end of the web to the Kong spider’s thorax.

And just like that, the great white spider vanished in a blazing white puff. Not even ash or smoke left behind.

I didn’t know if any of the smaller spiders were caught by the flame. But what survivors I could see wanted nothing more to do with us. They were heading for far off corners of the cavern at their top speed.

And those spiders could move.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Felt like my heart started beating again. I gave Vasco a twitchy smile.

“I will never, never say another bad thing about your duffel bag.”

“When did you diss my duffel?” Vasco said, then chuckled. “Sadly, I only have the one of those at the moment. Used the other two yesterday on a…”

Vasco’s words trailed off the moment we both realized something.

The nychtera had grown silent.

He and I looked up at the same moment.

Hundreds, no thousands of brown and yellow eyes looked down at us.

And it might have been nerves, but I thought I saw hatred in every pair of eyes.

“We’re doomed,” Brikatika said.

“Where is your mate?” Vasco snapped at him.

“Far left quadrant of the cavern,” Brikatika said without thinking.

The nychtera started taking to the air. All of them screeching challenges at us.

“Go!” Vasco barked at me, shoving my shoulder. “Both of you. Stick to the cavern wall.”

“What about the—”

“Leave them to us!” Vasco said, followed by a word I couldn’t parse. A moment later, I wasn’t even sure I’d heard it.

But Magellan heard it. He started growing at speeds that would have made Clifford the Big Red Dog jealous.

I didn’t stay to watch though. I started hustling along the side of the cavern, fists up and ready. Couldn’t go full speed though. I had to stay slow enough for Brikatika to…

The dorach bolted past me.

“Come on!” he said in his native tongue.

No time even to frown at that. I just doubled my pace. Still not exactly a sprint, but the two of us were moving along at a pretty good clip.

I couldn’t resist glancing back.

Magellan, sixty feet tall, at the least. Swiping paws through the air and knocking whole squadrons of nychtera to the ground.

The most impressive thing? Didn’t look like he was killing any of them. Knocking them out, sure, but I’d been worried about getting splattered in bat blood and juices.

Not to worry. They thumped here and there, and fell, but made no gruesome snapping sounds. And they didn’t bleed at all.

Brikatika and I had to duck around a few fallen nychtera as we made our way around the edge of the cavern. Sure looked like they were breathing.

Tough bastards.

Couldn’t be sure about the ones Vasco himself was fighting. And anytime a nychter was stupid enough to close with him, he pounded the daylights out of it.

“Look out!” Brikatika cried.

Apparently a squadron of nychtera had realized that Vasco and Magellan weren’t alone.

A dozen of those huge, yellow-and-black bat-things. All winging down at us.

I jumped between Brikatika and the descending nychtera, over his protests.

I became a whirlwind of punches and kicks, each strike backed by energies, just like when I’d fought the gossaks. Didn’t have to think about it. Just trained reflexes.

Moments later, there were twelve unconscious nychtera and Brikatika and I were running again. Brikatika was looking at me differently now. Impressed, maybe.

Another squadron came down after us. This batch, alas, was more organized than the last. I took down about eight, but the last four grabbed me and took wing.

Brikatika jumped up. Dug his teeth into the leather of a wing and ripped for all he could. Jaw muscles supplemented by his own weight and his tearing forepaws.

That wing tore right in half. The nychter had to let me go as it fell, screaming and bloody, to the rocky surface of the cavern floor.

The other three carrying me made the mistake of looking down.

I caught them between wing-beats. Pulled in with all my muscles and energies, slamming their bodies into one another.

Not enough to knock them out, but enough to knock them out of the air. And we were about fifty feet up at that point.

I surfed one down with my feet, and held the other two in front of me with my hands while the floor got closer…

Closer…

I let go with my hands at the last moment, but it was way too late for them to pull out of the dive, even if they could have.

Three more unconscious nychtera, and I was rolling to my feet and running once more, Brikatika beside me.

Magellan barked a challenge that boomed through the cavern. He came trotting over near us to ram any more nychtera that were thinking of feasting on dorach or Eagleson.

But then came a bat cry louder and sharper than any I’d ever heard before. So loud and sharp that I could feel it in my teeth, in the bones of my skull. All throughout my body.

I’m pretty sure that’s when my ears started bleeding.

Looking back, I was lucky that I didn’t go deaf right then. My ears were ringing pretty badly though, and kept ringing for quite a while.

I had a fleeting thought of applying Serpent’s Kiss inside my ears, then decided no, I could still hear well enough.

Brikatika stumbled, overwhelmed by the sound.

The signal, I should say. Because all the conscious nychtera, of which there were still hundreds, all took to the air and retreated to the ceiling.

“Enough!” Chiron’s voice,speaking English, but only just loud enough for me to hear over the ringing in my ears.

I could see him now. Standing upright on the rocky floor. Maybe five hundred feet away from me. Two other nychtera his size stood with him.

The two beside him held doracha. One held a larger dorach, the other held two smaller doracha.

“Surrender Brikatika,” Chiron called out, “or we will kill his mate and offspring.”

“Attention,” Vasco called out in the screeching language of the nychtera. “We are Locksmiths, and here on official business. Your leader stands in violation of the Va-a-naska Treaty on at least three counts, possibly as many as a dozen.”

“Hear him not!” Chiron ordered his people.

Vasco kept going.

“As Lockmaster, I am duly informing you that his holding those doracha is itself a violation, as is the threat against their lives that you yourselves heard. Any who stand with him now will be treated as accomplices.”

Nychtera took wing in droves, over the orders to return shouted by their leader.

True, many nychtera remained in support of Chiron, but the greater number left.

“We are still numerous enough to devour you all,” Chiron said, English once again.

“Maybe,” I said, walking closer. “Maybe not. But it’s not going to come to that.”

“Release your prisoners,” Vasco said. “Turn yourselves in now and it will go easier for you. So far, none of you have died.”

“And no one has to die here today.”

“Keep walking and you’ll kill them,” Chiron said, but he sounded nervous to me.

Then again, I’d think most sane creatures would feel nervous, when confronted with two Locksmiths and a sixty-foot-tall Beagle.

I smiled. I saw my opening. Nychtera might not have been the most honorable creatures around, but their society revolved around pride.

“You are such a coward,” I said, shaking my head.

Chiron’s brown eyes seemed to light up with inner fire.

“What did you say?”

I chuckled at that. True, I was chuckling at the irony of his asking what I’d said, when I was the one having trouble hearing after that screech he’d let out earlier.

“I called you a coward,” I said. “Yesterday you tried to straight up murder me, when I had no more defenses to call on than Brikatika’s mate and offspring.”

I spread my arms out wide. “Now I stand before you. But you must hide behind poor, innocent doracha.”

“He’s right,” Vasco said, as though realizing something important. “You are a coward.”

He laughed a lot louder than my little chuckle.

“To think,” he said, still laughing, “the mighty nychtera being led by a coward.”

The two eight-foot-tall nychtera on either side of Chiron gave him considering looks. I heard what I thought were jeers coming from the ceiling, but with my ears as they were, I couldn’t be sure.

I did notice a few dozen more nychtera fly off from the ceiling and leave.

“And what of you?” Chiron said, trying for a mocking tone. “You hide behind a Lockmaster and a giant dog.”

“Release those doracha and I’ll fight you right now.”

Sure, I sounded confident. Truth was, I didn’t know if I could take him. But getting those prisoners released was worth the risk.

“No,” called the nychter behind Chiron on his right. “Defeat Chiron and we will surrender the doracha and submit.”

Chiron hissed and screeched in anger at the two behind him. No words I could pick out, until he turned back to me.

“Fine!” Chiron said. “The two of us then!”

And for the second time in two days, the great bat creature leapt into the air, murder in his eyes.

Maybe I should have thought this tactic through…

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