Otherworld
“I can’t believe we’re stuck here,” Cassandra vented for the umpteenth time. She paced back and forth across the archives chamber. “What does MacDonagh think? That the Serpent Brotherhood is going to slither right in the minute we try to slip out?”
Hours had passed since Mill Ends had gone into lockdown. She and Jenkins had been left alone in the archives so that Jenkins could at least continue his research in the interim, while MacDonagh had departed to personally see to the colony’s security in the wake of the Pittsburgh attack. Brigid had slipped away as well, no doubt embarrassed by the whole situation.
“That we know the way in and out of Mill Ends is surely also a consideration,” Jenkins said. A hefty tome rested open in his lap as he bided his time in the comfy chair MacDonagh had vacated. “Under the present circumstances, MacDonagh no doubt prefers to keep that information confined, lest the Serpent Brotherhood somehow attempt to use us to gain access to Otherworld.”
Jenkins shifted his weight in the chair. Cassandra was surprised that he could remain so calm in captivity, but she imagined that immortality taught one patience over time. It took a lot to make Jenkins lose his cool.
“That being said,” he added, “this forced confinement comes at a very inconvenient time.” He closed the book on his lap. “I believe I’ve learned all we need to know here. The sooner we can return to the Library, so I can embark on some judicious cross-referencing, the better.”
Cassandra wondered if Baird and the others had missed them yet. “Any chance that our friends will be coming to liberate us?”
“Eventually, perhaps,” Jenkins said. “Certainly, Mister Carsen might have some ideas and options should it come to that, if and when he returns from undersea, but there’s no way of knowing what might be occupying our compatriots at the moment. They may well be preoccupied with a hostile banshee as we speak. Or even, conceivably, the latest incarnation of the Serpent Brotherhood.”
“Right,” Cassandra said glumly. “For all we know, they’re counting on us to come to their rescue.”
Her stomach grumbled, reminding her that she had not eaten since departing the Annex a good while ago. A tempting repast, provided by their apologetic “hosts,” sat uneaten on a desk nearby. A bowl of Irish stew, accompanied by generous plates of bread and cheese, called out to her, despite Jenkins’s warnings earlier.
“So, anyway,” she said, “about the whole food-and-drink thing…”
Jenkins contemplated the enticing Irish cuisine. “Traditionally, accepting refreshments in any sort of underworld is not a good idea if you don’t want to end up losing any desire or ability to leave, but given that we’re all already under house arrest as it were, we may have to compromise on that front eventually.” His own stomach rumbled audibly. “Mind you, I once fasted for more than a year during a prolonged stay in Lyonesse.…”
Cassandra was about to point out that she probably couldn’t hold out that long when Brigid quietly slipped back into the grotto.
“Brigid?” she said. “I was wondering what happened to—”
“Hush!” Brigid held a finger to her lips. She glanced around the library to confirm that they were alone before continuing in a low voice. “If I show ye a way out of Mill Ends, will ye take me with youse? I’m ever so longing to see the world I came from … and this other Bridget who ye say could be my double.”
Once again, Cassandra was struck by how much Brigid resembled her twin back in the real world. It dawned on her that, distracted by the new murder and its aftermath, she and Jenkins had yet to figure out what the story was there. What was it Jenkins had said about “changelings” before?
“We would be delighted to show you our world,” Jenkins said, quick to seize the opportunity Brigid held out to them, “if there is indeed a path open to us.”
“Sure and there is,” she said. “I keep my eyes and ears open, which is how I heard tell of a secret escape route back to the world. In truth, I’ve oft been tempted to dare the path on me own, but I’ve never had the courage, since there’s also said to be cunning traps and lures along the way.” Her emerald eyes gleamed with excitement. “Yet with yer help, perhaps we can all take leave of this place?”
“That’s the best offer I’ve heard all day,” Cassandra said. “Jenkins?”
“Do not expect that this will be easy,” Jenkins warned, “despite our new friend’s timely assistance. Nevertheless, we would be fools to let this chance pass by.” He rose from the chair and gestured toward the exit. “Please lead on, Miss Brigid.”
“Come,” she said, sounding both tense and relieved. “But tread softly while the Fair Folk sleep.”
They slipped out into the hall, where they found the sentry slumped against the wall, snoring loudly. A jug rested in his lap, while his shillelagh had slipped from his fingers onto the floor.
“Drinking on the job?” Cassandra said. “For shame.”
“Do not judge him too harshly,” Brigid said. “It may be that a powerful sleeping draught came with the wee bit of refreshment I offered him ever so thoughtfully.” She shrugged. “’Twill do him no harm, although his head may feel like the very divil come morning, by which time we shall be well away from here, if the fates be with us.”
Cassandra was impressed. “Crafty!”
“One doesn’t grow up among the Folk without learning a thing or two about shenanigans,” Brigid said with a smirk. “But let’s not tarry. Time is a-wasting!”
“Sound advice.” Jenkins helped himself to the drugged leprechaun’s shillelagh and hefted it in his grip. “Shall we be on our way?”
Brigid led them through a bewildering maze of underground passages and side-tunnels, which were quieter and more dimly lit than before. The stillness reminded Cassandra of the graveyard shift at some of the hospitals she’d spent too much time in back in her pre-Librarian days. She pushed aside the memory; that was not her life anymore.
“Where is everybody?” she asked.
“Sleeping off this evening’s hooley,” Brigid explained, “or else locked away in their chambers, fearing for their lives and gold.”
Cassandra couldn’t blame them on that latter score, especially if the Serpent Brotherhood was involved. They were scary enough to drive anybody to hide behind closed doors.
“With any luck,” Brigid said, “our way will be clear.”
Cassandra didn’t like relying on luck. Too bad they took our four-leaf clovers.
Brigid stuck with unfrequented back corridors until they had to take a necessary shortcut through the ballroom Cassandra had visited earlier. The festivities were long over, however, with many an exhausted celebrant passed out atop oversize mushrooms, mossy boulders, and each other. The fiddler was catching forty winks as well, so the only music came from one off-key leprechaun butchering “Danny Boy” in his sleep. Jenkins winced, with reason.
“Looks like quite a blowout,” Cassandra whispered as they tiptoed carefully around the slumbering partyers. “Is it Celtic New Year’s Eve or something?”
“’Tisn’t,” Brigid answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Never mind,” Cassandra said, concluding that leprechauns simply knew how to have a good time. It occurred to her that Saint Patrick’s Day was getting close, at least by Real World Time. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that they’d be missing that bash here in Mill Ends. Assuming we can even find our way out of here.
Somehow they made it across the ballroom without waking anyone. Cassandra started to relax, only to spot a pair of green-clad guards heading toward them. Short woolen capes held on by a broach, along with surly expressions, differentiated the soldiers from the other leprechauns. She froze, briefly tempted to double back the way they’d come, but it was too late for that. The guards had already spotted them.
“Oh-oh,” she murmured.
Jenkins began to raise his borrowed shillelagh, but Brigid discreetly shook her head. “Follow me lead,” she whispered before falling back between Jenkins and Cassandra and throwing her arms around their waists. She giggled loudly and added a drunken list to her gait as she tottered toward the approaching men.
“How’s she cutting, me fine boys!”
“Brigid?” one of the men said, seemingly puzzled to bump into this unlikely trio. “What are ye about at this unseemly hour of the morning? ’Tis fierce late to be roaming so, and in such company.”
“So ye say, Fergus O’Toole!” she exclaimed merrily, slurring her words somewhat. “Sure the night is young, and don’t ye be telling me any different!”
The other guard regarded Jenkins and Cassandra suspiciously. “And what are ye doing with these two?”
“And what business be that of yours, me man?” she shot back, giggling some more. She pulled both Jenkins and Cassandra in closer to her. “MacDonagh himself did request that we make our guests feel quite at home, so ye’ll pardon me for doing just that!”
Cassandra blushed in embarrassment, while Jenkins stared resolutely at the ceiling, striving to maintain his dignity as best he could.
“I see,” O’Toole said. “Is that what you’re calling it then?” The guards exchanged knowing looks before stepping aside to let them pass. “Very well then. Away with you. Some of us have more serious duties to attend to, like protecting the Folk from those who would do us ill.”
“And don’t we all appreciate it?” Brigid slurred, leading the other two mortals past the smirking guards. “Eyes sharp, me lads!”
She staggered unsteadily between Jenkins and Cassandra until the guards were out of view, then released her hold on her partners-in-crime. A chuckle betrayed her pride in her own cleverness.
“So much for me reputation,” she said, “but ’tis a small price to pay to finally see the world above.”
Jenkins sighed. “Was that performance truly necessary?”
“Ye would have preferred to trade blows with those buck eejits?”
“Possibly,” Jenkins said. “Probably.”
Cassandra changed the subject. “How much farther to the escape route?”
“Just a short ways,” Brigid promised.
True to her word, they soon reached a dead end of sorts: a gaping chasm in the earth that was, oddly enough, guarded by a particularly tough-looking leprechaun, which was not a description that would have ever occurred to Cassandra before. Surly eyes glowered above a shaggy red beard. A curved hunting horn hung from his belt. He gripped a heavy wooden club and stood nearly as tall as Jenkins himself. A boxer’s nose and cauliflower ears suggested that he was no stranger to brawling.
“That’s far enough,” the looming leprechaun said gruffly. “Turn around and go back the way ye came.”
Cassandra got the distinct impression that this guy wasn’t going to fall for Brigid’s giggly party-girl routine. His very presence, however, begged a pertinent question: Why position a sentry in front of a bottomless ravine?
Unless appearances were again deceptive?
“Is this it?” she asked Brigid. “What we’re looking for?”
“’Tis.” The other woman nodded. “Or so they say.”
“And none too soon.” Jenkins strode forward. “Remind me to think twice the next time I feel inclined to go calling on the Wee Folk.”
“Go no farther!” The sentry raised his club in a menacing manner. “I’m warning ye.”
Jenkins was undaunted. Flipping his shillelagh in his hand, he grasped the heavy end of the cudgel as though it were the hilt of a sword. He swung it about, testing its balance.
“Not exactly Excalibur,” he observed, “but it will have to do.”
The sentry gulped. Still brandishing his own weapon, he reached for the horn on his belt to sound an alarm.
“Come no closer! Ye don’t know who ye’re trifling with.”
“I believe that’s my line,” Jenkins said.
He lunged forward with both speed and power. The tip of the shillelagh jabbed the guard’s wrist before he even saw the attack coming. The horn flew from the leprechaun’s fingers and went flying off into the chasm, and his jaw dropped as his gaze swung back and forth between his suddenly empty hand and Jenkins, who barely seemed to have broken a sweat.
“I’d advise you to let us pass,” the caretaker said, “although I suppose I can use the exercise after sitting at a desk all day.”
“Blackguard! Mortal swine!”
“Mortal?” Jenkins said. “Not exactly.”
The guard charged at Jenkins, swinging his club, but he was no match for a former knight of the Round Table. Jenkins nimbly sidestepped the attack, ducking beneath the guard’s truncheon, and pivoted to bring his shillelagh squarely across the back of the leprechaun’s skull with a satisfying thunk. The big little man fell forward, face-planting at Cassandra’s feet. She hurriedly stamped her foot on the hand holding the club, just in case he still had some fight in him, but it turned out he was down for the count. She kicked the club into the chasm anyway.
“Och!” Brigid exclaimed. “Yer man’s a right corker, he is!”
“Don’t I know it?” Cassandra beamed at Jenkins. “MacDonagh was right about you, you know.”
“Oh,” he said. “And how is that, Miss Cillian?”
“You are still a knight.”
“Nonsense. I’m merely a caretaker in a hurry to get back to his work.” He turned away from his fallen foe to contemplate the chasm gaping before them. “Although this does rather remind me of a bottomless pit I once encountered while in pursuit of a certain grail.”
Cassandra and Brigid joined him at the brink of the chasm. Peering into the gulf, Cassandra saw nothing but a long fall into inky, impenetrable darkness. It took plenty of nerve not to back away from the precipice.
“That’s it?” she asked uncertainly. “The way out?”
“Why else post a sentry before it?” Jenkins said, echoing her own earlier thoughts. “And falling down to go back up to the surface world? That’s just the sort of trickiness you’d expect from a leprechaun.” He stared into the abyss. “I must say, however, that if this is an illusion, it’s quite the convincing one.”
“Too convincing.” Cassandra fingered the buttonhole that had once held the protective four-leaf clover. “This would be easier if we could see past any magic tricks.”
“I cannot disagree,” Jenkins said. “Still, we’ve come this far, so I’m not inclined to turn back now.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Brigid said. “Or so they say.”
Cassandra looked back the way they came. The vanquished guard was still sprawled on the ground but he was bound to come to eventually.
“MacDonagh’s not going to be happy about this,” she said.
“All the more reason not to delay our departure.” Jenkins stepped up to the edge of the chasm. “Ordinarily, I would say ‘Ladies first,’ but in this instance perhaps you had best permit me to take the lead.”
“No,” Cassandra said decisively. “We’re doing this together or not at all.”
“But—” Jenkins started to protest.
“No buts,” she said, pulling rank. “You may be immortal, but I’m not, and you’re not leaving me alone here for who knows how long.” She glanced over at Brigid. “No offense.”
“None taken,” the other woman said.
“It’s decided then,” Cassandra said. “On my count … three, two, one … Erin go Bragh!”
They jumped together into the abyss. Gravity seized her, and as she found herself with nothing but empty air beneath her, Cassandra had time enough to wonder if maybe she should have taken Jenkins up on his offer to go first, after all, but then bright golden sunlight replaced the darkness and she landed in the midst of a seemingly endless field of clover somewhere beneath a bright blue sky. A warm, gentle breeze felt like summer.
Come again?
Cassandra took a moment to appreciate that she wasn’t splattered at the bottom of a ravine, then looked around. Jenkins and Brigid, who had also landed safely in the meadow, did the same. The vast field of clover appeared to stretch in all directions, for as far as the eye could see. They clearly weren’t underground anymore, and yet …
“This doesn’t look like Portland,” she said.
“And what does Portland look like?” Brigid asked.
The unseasonal weather worried Cassandra. How long had they spent in Otherworld anyway, relative to the real world?
“This isn’t Ireland, is it?” she asked.
“I think not,” Jenkins replied, a dour look on his face. He bent to pluck a shamrock from the acres of clover surrounding them. “More likely it is another illusion hiding the actual exit from Otherworld. One of the traps and snares our guide alluded to earlier.”
Cassandra turned around and around, seeing nothing resembling a path to follow. “So which way do we go now?”
Jenkins gestured at the sprawling carpet of clover. “The only way to see through the glamour is to find another four-leaf clover … which could take a while, given that only one in ten thousand clovers have four leaves instead of three.”
“Och!” Brigid gasped at the enormity of the task. “Finding one lucky clover amidst a sea of shamrocks … sure and it will take forever!”
“Well, not forever,” Jenkins said, “but at least long enough for MacDonagh and his men to catch up with us.”
Brigid dropped to the ground and began sorting through the shamrocks, one by one.
“Wait!” Cassandra said. “We don’t have time for that. There may be a better way.”
Brigid looked confused. “How is that?”
“Wait and see.” Jenkins nodded at Cassandra. “Wait and see.”
Cassandra took a deep breath, not letting the seemingly infinite number of clovers intimidate her. Her senses mingled and merged as she put her magic brain to work. The gentle rustling of the shamrocks turned into a symphony of shimmering numbers and equations that tinkled like calculus and tasted like geometry.
“It’s all about the math,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “If one in ten thousand clovers has four leafs, and”—she took a moment to listen to the colors and watch the sounds rising from the field—“there’s roughly two hundred clovers per every nine square inches of the field, then we can expect, on an average, one four-leaf clover”—the calculations shimmered before her eyes—“in every thirteen square feet of shamrocks.”
That was a much more manageable area to search than the entire field, but she was just getting warmed up. Her brain superimposed a hallucinatory grid, about the size of a standard office desk, on one thirteen-square-foot patch of clover. She then proceeded to break down that grid into smaller and smaller grids, while applying basic geometry to the problem. If ordinary three-leafed shamrocks were basically triangles, but four-leaf shamrocks were squares, then all she had to do was eliminate the triangles, which were now outlined in pink in her mind’s eye, and …
“There we go!”
A single green square flashed within the grid. It chimed like a harp and smelled like marshmallows. Grinning in triumph, Cassandra plucked a perfect four-leaf clover from the surrounding shamrock. The imaginary grid popped out of existence as her brain ramped back down again. It occurred to her that there was something almost mathematically elegant about using a hallucination to beat an illusion. Like two opposing factors canceling each other out.
“So swiftly?” Brigid looked up in surprise from where she had been scouring for a lucky clover on her own. “Are ye a sorceress?”
“More like a mathemagician,” Cassandra explained, sort of. She was still determined to make that word a thing. “But don’t be too impressed until we see if this works.”
Closing her eyes, she affixed the four-leaf clover to her sweater.
Here goes nothing, she thought.
She opened her eyes to a whole new scene. The endless clover was gone, vanished like a mirage, and instead she found herself in a subterranean grotto, facing a stone stairway leading up to … freedom?
“Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed. “I can see it! The way out!”
“Where?” Brigid asked, looking about in bewilderment. She and Jenkins were still seeing the illusory field of clover, Cassandra realized. “I believe ye, truly, but me poor eyes see only what they see.”
“Trust me,” Cassandra said. Magic brain or not, she wasn’t about to waste time finding two more four-leaf clovers for her companions. “You got us this far. Let me guide us the rest of the way.”
Jenkins took her hand and offered his other to Brigid, forming a chain with Cassandra at the front. “With pleasure, Miss Cillian.”
“Good.” She started toward the stairs. A damp, earthy smell, like a forest, wafted down from above. “Now close your eyes and follow me.”
She couldn’t wait to get back to the Library—and find out what was happening with the rest of the team.