Chapter the Thirteenth,
The Day Before the Last,
In which there is a hole in the plan.
I. Invocation
The pink boat raced down the mountainside like a falcon diving in pursuit of its prey. Astray stood in the prow, leaning into the ice-cold spray, a figurehead on a galleon. Why held onto the end of the cub’s tail to keep from being blown away. With his cape flapping like a small sail, the Dangler sat in the stern leaning back dangerously far, so much so that it seemed he must surely somersault backwards and out of the boat at any second. Jai and Ceder sat on the middle bench, screaming with exhilaration. The wind drew tears from their eyes and tore the ribbon out of Ceder’s hair. Jai could not say why, but he felt a stab of loss to see it fly away.
A log from the dam they had destroyed jammed against the side of the river and stuck into the mud with its splintered end spearing back into the path of the boat. The Dangler whipped out his fishing pole and cast it in one motion—the hook lodged in the log—and then he whipped it back, pulling the water-laden timber up and out of the river in an arc to land behind the boat with a booming splash. Jai and Ceder swapped a look of amazement—the log had passed only fins above their heads.
As suddenly as it had started, their plunge down the face of the summit was over. The river meandered between barren mountainsides marred with cracks and fissures, like skin dried and split in the sun. The mountain peaks were blanketed in white snow so dazzling the children had to avert their eyes.
The boat cruised around a wide turn, revealing a massive waterfall a tail away. The cascading falls hammered directly into the river—there was no outlet to avoid it. “Hurry, get us to the shore!” Jai begged the Dangler.
The fisherman looked forward steadily. He pulled the brim of his hat down. “Keep your heads covered,” he advised the children.
Astray slinked underneath the middle bench with Why clinging to the scruff of his neck. Jai and Ceder had just enough time to duck in the bottom of the boat and shield their heads with their hands. Waiting for the last possible moment before the pink prow reached the roaring falls, the Dangler whipped his pole back, hooked the same log he had rescued them from earlier, and cast it forward so that the log slammed into the waterfall twenty fins above the river. The impact of the timber crashing into the falls knocked a hole in the otherwise solid wall of liquid; for less than a second there was a gap like an arched doorway in the plummeting sheets of water. The noise was deafening and they were all soaked from head to toe with freezing mist, but the boat passed through the gap safely.
Jai lifted his head and peeked around. Everything was as black as the tunnels he had once called home. The din of the waterfall quickly faded behind them. Jai put a hand on Ceder’s back, letting her know the worst was over at the same moment that he felt her hand on his own shoulder, giving a comforting squeeze.
“Are you two all right?” came the quiet voice of the Dangler.
“I’m fine,” said Ceder with chattering teeth.
“Yes,” said Jai, shivering, “but a little warning might be nice next time you’re going to do something like that.”
“If I knew I was going to do something like that ahead of time, I would certainly warn you,” said the fisherman.
“Astray?” whispered Ceder, timid of speaking too loudly in the dark. “Why? Are you both still there?”
At once the cub leapt into her arms. She was so used to catching him by now that she could do it in the dark. He nuzzled his velvet nose into her neck for a warm welcome.
“Never better,” was the butterfly’s proud reply, although the children could not see where he was, and his voice sounded shaken.
“We need light,” said Jai.
“I think I can help with that,” said the Dangler. From his tackle-bag he produced a wax candle stationed inside a glass lantern box. “Give me your knife,” he said to Jai.
Jai took the blade out of his satchel but was reluctant to give it away. “Why?”
“Yes?” said the butterfly.
“Not you.”
“To draw a spark,” said the Dangler.
Jai hesitated. “It’s very sharp. You have to be careful—it doesn’t have a handle. Every edge will cut.” He held the knife out in the dark.
The Dangler grabbed the jagged blade unconcernedly and immediately let out a sharp hiss of pain.
“I told you to be careful!” cried Jai.
“I am not cut,” said the fisherman, “but… this weapon is bewitched. I can feel it. I can almost see it.”
No one spoke for a moment. The next thing the children saw was a crackling series of white sparks which they realized, to their horror, was the result of the Dangler drawing the blade of the knife horizontally across his glass mouth. It made a sickly screeching sound as he repeated the action again, left to right, running the blade surgically across his pursed lips. As he cut, he blew—softer than the lowest whistle—and the white sparks jumped away from his face to the wick of the wax candle. The candle gave off an eerie orange flare that cast the fisherman’s face in hideous shadows, intensified by the low brim of his hat and his high scarf and the absence of eyes from the holes in his face. Jai and Ceder fell back into the cold water in the bottom of the boat, startled by the monstrous vision.
The fisherman was taken aback by their reaction. He lowered the knife sheepishly and tried to force a disarming smile. Jai and Ceder were astounded to see that the jagged blade had not made a single scratch on his face. The Dangler closed the lantern box and looped it onto the tip of his fishing pole, causing the wooden rod to bow ever so slightly as he held it aloft in front of the prow, lighting the underworld like an anglerfish in the deep of the sea.
Jai and Ceder climbed back onto their bench, offering the Dangler apologetic, shame-faced smiles. The fisherman handed the knife back to Jai. “This weapon is bewitched,” he repeated. “What do you know?”
“Sorid used magic on my wheelbarrow so the lava wouldn’t burn holes in it,” said Jai. “I broke that piece—my knife—off of the wheel rig.”
“What magic does your master meddle with?”
“It was a short spell.”
“Say it,” said the fisherman.
Jai stared at the Dangler, not wanting to be bossed around in front of Ceder, then lost his nerve and looked down. In a low voice he begrudgingly recited:
Whither shines the sun
In waves of light,
Let this body be as one,
But sleep in endless night.
“Those are powerful words,” said the fisherman. “Can you feel it? The chill? It flows out like a wave. Powerful words, which make this a powerful blade.”
Jai stared ahead silently, unsure whether the fisherman was upset with him.
“Curses swim though blood like fish through water,” said the Dangler. “If you cut a living thing with this weapon, you will stain them with its dark current.”
“What would happen to them?” asked Jai, keeping his voice as level as possible. “What would happen to a ‘living thing?’” He had allowed the rusty metal to cut into his own hand every time he held it. Ceder had fallen victim to its edge, as well, during their escape on the first night, a fact which he had yet to confess.
The Dangler considered the invocation carefully. “I do not know the meaning of ‘endless night,’ but I would not want to be caught with such a dark curse in my cup when the sun came up. As for the rest of the spell, it sounds as though it renders its target impervious to the touch of the sun.”
“So the sun couldn’t hurt my wheelbarrow,” said Jai, “but my wheelbarrow was never in the sun. What about the lava? That’s what the spell was for.”
“The domain of all fire is one and the same. A single spark and the wildfire it begets, one is the seed, the other the tree. They are one.”
“That’s like blaming the river when it’s the rain that sinks your boat,” said Ceder.
The fisherman gave her a startled look before continui
ng his thought. “As for the effects on a living thing, that is a difficult interpretation to make.”
Is that why my curse seems to be getting better? Jai wondered in a tizzy. Have I balanced out one spell with another? The sun can’t dry me out because I’m ‘impervious’ to it! He frowned. But that can’t be right—Sorid’s red beam still burned me, and besides, I’ve never fallen into any ‘endless nights,’ have I? Well, besides a life in the tunnels. His eyes lit up. The King and Queen! Could they have cured Ceder and I of the knife’s ‘dark current’ when they touched our heads? It seems like the white unicorn definitely cured Ceder of the curse from the apples, so why not both? Jai looked at Ceder as though the answer might be written across her brow. But why didn’t they remove the mark on my forehead and the magic behind it? And why is it getting better on its own? “What would happen if you mixed two curses together in one person?” Jai asked the Dangler.
“I presume it is a bit like making breakfast,” said the fisherman. “You won’t know how eggs and apples are going to taste together until you try it.”
In his head, Jai tried mixing together the spell he had just recited with the curse Sorid placed on Ceder’s apples.
To flesh run… whither shines the sun.
By virtue of a bite… in waves of light.
When the day is done… let this body be as one.
Live in fright… but sleep in endless night.
The words chilled him to the bone; Jai was certain the combined effects of the two hexes would be far greater than their sum. He shuddered to imagine what twice-cursed doom might have befallen Ceder if the unicorns had not intervened. Would she have ‘slept in endless night’ when the sun came up? And been stuck in her nightmares again at the end of every day? Would she ever wake up? For that matter, what about Seaweed? I cut him, too, and if he ate that apple he stole from us, he’s going to get a lot more than he can chew.
II. The Hand of Darkness
The Dangler’s candle illuminated a sphere of space scarcely bigger than the boat. Outside the sphere, shapes and forms were detectable only as wavering shadows.
The river narrowed to a few fins on either side of the boat. The current slowed and came to a stop. A peculiar sight greeted them: there was a hole in the water, no wider than a bucket. The water from the river flowed into the hole and disappeared. It was not a well, for there were no walls inside the hole. It was a pure black perforation in the realm of the visible.
The boat jerked to a stop. The Dangler had jammed the handle of his fishing pole down into the riverbed, acting as an anchor. He took the compass from his breast pocket—he had not yet returned it to the children—and held the dial in all directions, studying the haywire needle as if its perpetual rotation told him everything he needed to know. Finally, he put the compass away and returned his attention to the aberration in the river. “I should like to look into this before moving on,” he said in a quiet voice, his eyeless gaze fixed on the hole in the water.
Jai and Ceder both nodded vapidly as if the fisherman’s professional curiosity were inevitable.
“I will need my pole. You two must hold the boat in place. The water is shallow enough for you to stand and there is no undercurrent,” said the Dangler, oblivious to the children’s reservations, “and your clothes are already wet.”
“You want us to get out of the boat?” asked Ceder, incredulous.
“In there?” asked Jai, looking at the river. “In here?” he added, gesturing to the dark cave all around them.
“Is there a problem?” asked the Dangler.
“What if we get sucked into that hole?” asked Ceder.
“Nonsense. You’ve seen what a whirlpool looks like—this appears to be entirely different. I would be more than a little surprised if it sucked you down into nothingness.”
“That makes me feel much better,” said Jai.
His sarcasm was lost on the fisherman. “Excellent. Out you go.”
As Jai climbed out of the boat, he realized the only reason he had not put up more of a fight was that he did not want Ceder to think he was afraid. She climbed overboard on the opposite side, giving Jai a look that told him she was every bit as apprehensive as he was.
The water came to their shoulders. The current was nonexistent, so close to the hole, which made the children wonder why they had to hold the boat in place at all. Jai and Ceder watched the fisherman expectantly, silently willing him to conduct his investigation as fast as possible.
The Dangler swung the lantern box directly above the hole in the river and instantly the cavern was filled with light, as if the abyss contained a convex mirror to reflect the candle’s orange glow back out, magnified a hundredfold.
The children looked around anxiously. The top of the cavern was dripping with massive stalactites that were longer than the boat and sharper than broken glass. “Shhhh,” the fisherman whispered to the children, nodding to the stone teeth above as if one loud noise might bring them all crashing down.
The Dangler took the end of his watery line in one hand, holding the translucent hook between two fingers. He reached into his bag of bait and withdrew a plump glowworm. As he prepared to impale the worm on the hook, Astray jumped up next to him. The cub held a blue flower petal in his mouth.
The fisherman gave Astray a puzzled look, as if to ask Why use that, when I already have bait of my own? but he took the blue petal a moment later, saying, “Don’t mind if I do,” and speared it onto his hook. He restored the glowworm to his bag.
With one hand working the reel, the Dangler positioned the baited hook above the hole in the water. He let the line out slowly, lowering the cobalt petal one scale at a time.
Jai was transfixed by the fisherman’s methodological process until a stirring in the dark caught the corner of his eye. He turned and looked up. The shadows of the stalactites, cast by the reflected light of the candle, were squirming like spider legs. A handful of the shadows swelled, stretched, and extended, crawling down the side of the cavern with a life of their own. Jai pointed the leaching shadows out to Ceder. If she had looked frightened climbing out of the boat, now she was petrified.
The Dangler stared at the hole in the water, which seemed to have as little to offer for sport as the lagoon he had fished in for centuries without a catch. “Odd,” he muttered, unaware of the threat from above.
The wraithlike hand reached the cavern floor and crept its way toward the river.
The fisherman hunched over his unwavering line as if additional concentration was all that was required to catch a fish at will.
“We have to go,” Ceder whispered urgently.
“Wait,” said the Dangler, leaning toward the hole.
The shadow crawled closer, the fingers vibrating with the anticipation of snapping shut around fresh, warm-blooded prey.
“Stop fishing!” Jai hissed.
“Almost…” said the fisherman, motionless.
“Ceder, this is crazy,” said Jai, breaking their unspoken code of silence, “let’s get in the boa—”
“Stay where you are!” the Dangler ordered them with unprecedented ferocity.
The children froze.
The wriggling shadow closed around the river.
Utmost concentration was etched into the Dangler’s face. Jai dared not speak, but his mind was racing, wondering why the fisherman paid no heed to the advancing terror, and how he—Jai—and Ceder were to escape the cavern if the Dangler decided to keep fishing instead of defending himself.
Jai looked at Ceder. The hand of darkness would have them soon. If the boat didn’t stand between us, he thought, I would kiss her now, before death.
The Dangler shouted “Ah ha!” and began furiously winding in his line, the iron reel screeching as he did so.
The children ducked under the water just before the black claws closed around the boat.
III. No Evidence
Ceder did not see if Jai made it down safely in time; the shadow had not found her yet; it did not loo
k as if the fisherman had gotten away; the cub and the butterfly flashed into her mind—they had both been on the boat and were probably already abducted, or worse; she scrunched her face up with the effort of holding her breath, battling the impulse to surface and draw air; the dark claws could be waiting for her—she had to stay under, to keep hiding; she thought about Jai again—had he made it down in time?
She put a hand over her mouth to fight the urge to breathe, her other hand pushed up against the bottom of the boat, keeping her under. She was getting dizzy. She could hardly recall where she was, why she was here, in the dark, what she was hiding from?
Something clutched tight around her head and she panicked and coughed away her air and flung her hands up to tear herself loose but she was pulled easily out of the water like a weed from wet soil. As soon as her head broke the surface she gasped for air and started hitting and kicking, struggling to break free. Jai was laughing. She stopped kicking and warily opened one eye.
The Dangler had picked her up by the head with one hand and lifted her back aboard the boat. “What happened?” she asked Jai. He shook his head, shrugged, and pointed to the river. The hole was gone, and with it the infinite reflections of the lantern box. The cavern was pitch black save for the small sphere of light that the candle provided. The water was flowing again. The hand of shadows was nowhere to be seen.
The Dangler stared at his translucent hook as fondly as a father looking at his firstborn son. The children had not noticed before, but the delicate hook appeared to be made of glass.
“Is that waveglass?” Ceder whispered to Jai. He shrugged again.
The hook was glowing with a silver light. “Quick!” the fisherman barked. “Get something to put it in!”
“Put what in?” asked Jai.
“What else? A fish! Come on now, do not be dull! She could get away at any moment!”
“We don’t have anything to put a fish in,” said Ceder, but she knew she was wrong as soon as she said it. She looked at Jai’s satchel, aglow with the sapphire light of the enchanted eggs.
“For the Sight of Silver, hurry!” cried the Dangler.
“Jai, give him one of the eggs,” said Ceder.
Jai looked at her doubtfully, then sighed and handed one of the eggs to the fisherman. The Dangler dipped his delicate hook into the cracked hole on top of the shell. Quite at once the egg stopped vibrating. He handed it back to Jai and heaved a sigh of relief. “Imagine that,” he said at last, “an El fish.”
Jai looked inside the egg and saw that the raging squall had been quelled. There was no evidence of the unborn spirit of Syn—all he could see was a tiny speck of silver light moving back and forth through the clear water.
The Dangler leaned back with his hands behind his head and smiled like they were all on a picnic. The children could only stare at him, speechless that he should be so enamored of a fish that was too small to see, that he should not even acknowledge how an evil, spectral hand had almost stolen him away.
When he could bear it no longer, Jai asked, “What happened to the shadow?”
“Oh,” said the Dangler, whistling a simple tune, “the shadow. Yes. I don’t know.” Jai and Ceder were shocked. “As soon as I pulled in my catch I turned to show you two, but you had just ducked into the river.”
“What happened to the hole in the water?”
“Vanished as soon as I reeled in my line.”
“So you caught your fish, and the hole closed, and then the shadow hand disappeared,” Jai clarified, “but where did it go?”
“And why?” added Ceder.
“Yes, my lady—I’ll find it for you!” volunteered the butterfly.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” said Ceder, but Why was already gone.
IV. Light At the End
“Why!” Jai bellowed. “Get back here!”
“I see it!” shouted Why. “There it is! I see the hand of shadows!”
“Why!” shouted Ceder.
“Oh no!” Why cried in fear. “There are shadows everywhere up here!”
“We must press on,” said the Dangler. “If the darkness descends again, get back in the river. The water is far safer than this boat.” He jammed his pole in the river and began heaving them forward thrust by thrust to add speed to the power of the reawakened current.
Sounds of a struggle came from above—scuffling and scraping interspersed with Why’s occasional shout of “Take that!” or “En garde!” Ceder bit her lip and looked for any sign of the butterfly’s purple wings, but the darkness at the top of the cavern was impenetrable. “We can’t leave without him,” she said to the Dangler.
The fisherman hardened his brow but said nothing as he ferried the boat forward through the dark. There was a distant spot of light far ahead—an exit.
A bloodcurdling scream filled the cavern, a flash of red light burst overhead like ball lightning, and a shriveled black object fell from above, leaving a trail of greasy smoke in its wake. Before it landed in the river the Dangler cast his fishing pole and hooked the falling object in mid-air.
Now the children saw it was a severed hand of black bone with three long, reptilian claws. The Dangler’s hook was pinned in the middle finger. When he whipped his line back, the hooked claw pulled away from the rest of the hand like a head that has been sliced clean off its neck but does not roll free until the body collapses.
The remainder of the black hand fell into the river and sank. The Dangler stared after it regretfully, stunned that it had been in two pieces, causing him to miss the catch, then he lowered the piece he had managed to retrieve over the boat for a closer look, exceedingly cautious not to let the foreign object touch anything or anyone. Jai and Ceder leaned in to see, terrified but fascinated. It was a single bone charred black as pitch. The marrow inside—exposed where the claw had been hewn free of its hand—glowed as red as the sun. A drip of molten lava leaked out, but the fisherman swung it over the river before the liquid fire could fall into the boat.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Ceder.
“It’s one of Sorid’s claws,” whispered Jai, hardly believing what was before his eyes. “It has to be. How in the world did it get here?”
The Dangler stared at the claw hanging on his hook. The heat it gave off was palpable. His elemental fishing line began to steam and drift away. “What would it feel like to have undying fire for blood instead of cool waves?”
It was unlike anything the children had heard the fisherman say before, full of sympathy and doubt; Jai was not sure if Ceder and he were expected to give an answer.
The black claw made a snapping sound, trying to clap itself like one hand in any effort to cause trouble. The fisherman asked Ceder for one of the enchanted eggs—the one without the El fish—and used it to pour a steady stream of cold water on the undead bone. The severed digit lashed back and forth and steamed like smoke from a forge, forcing the children to turn from the heat, but the Dangler kept his hands in the core of the combustion like a blacksmith with skin of iron. The water ate away at the bone for more than a minute before breaking through to the marrow; the magma inside sizzled like eggs cooking in the sun as it was washed away.
The Dangler wiped a hand across his forehead—a bead of glass had melted and was dripping down his temple like sweat. “That sort of filth has no place in the river.”
“What about the rest of the hand that fell into the water?” asked Ceder.
The fisherman stared at her. “I shudder to imagine what becomes of it.”
“Can’t you catch it?” asked Jai. “Isn’t that, like, your specialty?”
“Fishing in a river this fast is as difficult as flying a kite through a hoop in a windstorm,” said the Dangler, “but if we see it again I will try my luck.”
Why floated back into view like a dead leaf falling from a purple tree. Ceder caught him as gently as a snowflake. His wings were torn, tattered, burnt, and branded. “Oh, Why!” she cried, “What happened to you?”
The butterfly’s breathing was weak. “Alas,” he intoned, “and woe is me! The dark fiend crumpled my beautiful wings. I shall never fly again.”
Astray nuzzled the butterfly with his pink nose; Why patted the cub affectionately. A tear brimmed in Ceder’s eye. Jai put a hand on her shoulder. The Dangler watched them with a blank expression and continued to ferry the boat toward the exit.
“But I got a piece of him!” boasted Why. “I cut off one of his heads! He’ll not soon quarrel with a butterfly again.” He held his walking stick over his heart and clutched it with both hands. “Good thing I always practiced my swordplay.”
“Yes,” said Jai, wondering how a twig could cut through bone, “good thing.” Or had it been shadow?
Ceder broke out crying, “You were so brave! We never would have made it this far without you!”
Jai was not sure this was strictly true, but he thought it best not to belabor the point.
Astray bit a pale purple petal free from his necklace. He laid it gently on the butterfly’s body, blanketing him like a sick child. The glow of the petal seeped into the color of Why’s tattered wings, illuminating them with renewed vibrancy, although the ragged rips remained. The butterfly gasped, his eyes shut tight. He sat up in Ceder’s hand like he was sleepwalking.
“Why?” said Ceder. “What is it?”
He got shakily to his feet, using his walking stick for support. He held the purple petal close against his heart.
“You need to rest,” said Ceder.
Why spread his wings.
“What are you doing?”
He turned to her and held out his cane without a word. Ceder reluctantly accepted the twig from his outstretched hands.
Astray roared into Ceder’s hand, blowing the butterfly away. As soon as he was in the air Why fanned his broken wings, flying ahead of the boat in a crooked, lilting manner, carrying the purple petal away with him.
“Why, get back here!” called Jai.
The butterfly caught a stray draft of wind that took him swiftly to the light at the end of the tunnel. When the boat reached the exit and sailed out under clear skies, Why was nowhere to be seen.
The Year One Hundred & One,
The magma bubbled like stew in a pot. A severed black hand with two claws scuttled like a crab out of the liquid fire onto the underground shore. It flexed back, cracking its joints—it had fed the sprawling inferno for a century, refilling the lake of molten lava with its own seeping, red-hot marrow. Finally, bleeding smoke and flame, the severed hand dragged itself into the dark cracks of the bedrock. It took more than a year for the hand to find its way though the roots of the mountain up to the light.
The black claws emerged in a vast chamber filled with sunlight. There was a well in the center of the space that radiated sheer power throughout the mountain like the beating of a drum. The severed hand crawled to the base of the well, basking in the overflowing energy, and grew like a weed.
The claws extended day by day, then split, forking branches. Each end divided again, forming crude hands and feet. Where the third claw had long ago been severed, a tail sprouted. The stump where the black hand had met its original arm grew into a hideous knot of bone, an elongated tumor, and finally a skull without eyes, ears, or a mouth.
The black skeleton crawled to its knees and pulled itself up to the cusp of the well. It had no heart, but not all wishes come from a pure light within: the unquenchable thirst for power, the burning for revenge, the lust for chaos—these are dreams conjured in dark places. The skeleton reached its clawed hands into the water, which immediately began to boil and steam. It withdrew from the well, one by one, three eggs, each bright as a ruby. One dark wish, three answers; three eggs, one keeper, waiting to be born again in the heart of unholy fire.