The Chimera Summoner – Ch 40 – The Crawling Castle (Part 2/2)
Part 2--
My knees hit the ground.
What the fuck were they….
Hera had stopped and was looking at me with concern.
I realized I was clenching her hand very tightly, and relaxed.
She rubbed her thumb over the back of my hand.
Soothing.
We crouched against a wall, and she waited patiently.
Finally the pain subsided enough for me to talk.
“Lorna is here.” I gasped.
“She wasn’t destroyed when we got captured?” Hera asked. “I just assumed, since you hadn’t summoned anyone?”
I shook my head, trying to block out the soul deep ache from Lorna. “She got… I don’t know. Carmine did something to her. With a weird needle. Trapped her somehow.”
Hera frowned. “Setting aside how that’s possible, can you summon her to us?”
I shook my head.
“Can you tell where she is? You’ve mentioned being able to find each other before.”
I considered it. The bond felt like a broken bone, unmovable and painful but if I leaned into the pain instead of away from it…
“Yeah. Not clearly. But I could give us a direction.” I ground out between gritted teeth.
Hera studied my face. “But it hurts to do it.”
I shrugged. “It’s kind of an emergency. I won’t be incapacitated. And I can kind of block it out. So if I just have to check periodically, I’ll be ok.”
She hesitated, but nodded.
“Lead the way.”
We hustled along as silently as we could, now trying to find corridors that lead closer to my lost ghost.
The maze turned out to be far bigger than I had realized initially. Metal pipes ran along every ceiling, occasionally rattling or hissing, causing me to jump every time.
“Stop.” Hera whispered.
She pressed her ear urgently against a door. Then she had her gold wire out again, twisting it through the air and guiding it like a living thing to the lock. In a few seconds, it had the door open.
“Netherim.” I groaned. That made the prospect of escape a LOT more complicated.
We snuck into another cell, similar to ours but more than five times the size. The interior was divided into several individual barred cells. Inside, dozens of Netherim peered at us fearfully.
I held up my hands, as we carefully closed the door behind us.
“We’re friends.” I whispered.
There was a flurry of murmuring between the Netherim in their language before a small one was nudged forward. She pressed up against the bars and waved a timid hand.
“Friends.” she repeated. She had a HEAVY accent, but the word was clear enough.
I trotted over. “Hey. How many of you are here?”
The girl stood just over six feet tall, making her one of the shortest in the room. Even some Netherim children I had seen around school had been taller.
She frowned in concentration. “Here. Six and fourty. Again… four more…?”
She gestured around the room.
“Four more rooms of people, like this one?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeppers.”
Hera tisked. I glared at her.
“I take it you two know one another.” I accused.
“Other people say yeppers.” Hera said defensively.
“Mmhmm.” I said, skeptically. “Can you get them out?”
“I’m running out of wire. Maybe the ones here if I use all of it. Definitely not the four more rooms of cells.” She said.
“Do you have Wayfinders among you?” I asked.
The girl frowned. “I am not this word.”
I grimaced. “Fighters? Do you have warriors? Mages?” I remembered something Lorna had said on our date. “Adventurers?”
The girl's eyes lit up. She nodded. “Marok.”
“Marok’s here?!” I asked, incredulously. “HOW?”
If our captors had the means to imprison a Wayfinder like Marok, we were in very, very deep shit.
“She is somewhere.” The girl said.
“Nearby?” I asked. “Or back at Bayloft?”
She shook her head in frustration. “Not Bayloft. Not here. But not many here from here. Only a few here away.”
I screwed up my eyes trying to make out what she meant.
“She’s nearby.” Hera translated. “She’s in the crawler.”
The girl nodded. “What crawler?”
“It's where we are.” I explained. “It’s a big old moving castle from a war hundreds of years ago.”
The girl hesitated then nodded with an encouraging little smile.
I was absolutely positive I had not been clear enough for her to understand, but I appreciated her for letting it slide.
“Marok could be our ticket out of here, if we can free her.” Hera said.
“But however they’re keeping her, it probably won’t be something we can just pick a lock on.” I said.
“She is in big circle.” The girl said.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Big circle. Big…here. Big circle here.”
She gestured, and made some sound effects. An elaborate, exasperated pantomime later:
“That sounds like the throne room.” Hera said, eying the performance.
“Which probably means Carmine, and a million of those goons she let into our fucking school.” I said.
“And probably Lorna.” Hera added.
I nodded grimly. “What do they want us here for?” I demanded, angrily. “You and me, I kind of get. What with the whole…”
I eyed the Netherim. Not that I didn’t trust them, persay. But they were also already more dragged into this than I wanted.
“Yeah.” Hera said.
“But why the Netherim?” I went on. “Why Lorna??”
“Don’t you get the sense that Lorna is kind of a big deal?” Hera asked, carefully.
“Since the moment I met her.” I agreed. “And she certainly knows more about what’s going on than I do. But what do THEY want from her?”
Hera scowled. “I don’t know. But we can find out after we ruin their lives, somehow.”
I pondered.
Then I looked at the Netherim girl.
“What’s your name, by the way?” I asked. “I feel like a real dick for not asking. And for making this question so unnecessarily complicated. Oh, god it’s getting worse. Uhhhhhhh!”
“Name?” asked Hera over my shoulder to the bewildered girl.
“Seela.” The girl indicated herself.
“Hi Seela.” I peeped. “Eir.” I indicated myself.
“Hera.” Seela pointed at Hera, who introduced herself anyway, dogmatically pretending it was their first time.
“Hera.” Hera grunted. “We’re all best friends now. For the first time. So how do we ruin their lives.”
“Yeppers.” Seela said.
She turned with a brightening expression and pointed at one of the many pipes.
“Fuck.” She said, pointing hopefully.
“HMMMM??” I asked, eyes popping.
Hera let out a loud snort that she managed to turn into a cough.
“Fuck?” She said pointing at the pipe again. She furrowed her brow in concentration. “Fuck….Up?”
Ohhhhh.
Crawler hundreds of years old. Running on forgotten war magics. A million pipes.
Got it.
“Fuuuuuuck!” We agreed.