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ANYTHING THEIR ROUGH-speaking assailant said was menacing enough already, but Dun found the point of a spear jabbing him as punctuation. The bag they were suspended in swung and twisted, slowly. Dun was sure he could sense others besides the speaker. The resinous smell, and using his air-sense while slowly rotating, was giving Dun a headache.
“What’s wrong, fishy? Swallowed your tongue?”
The surrounding gang all laughed at this point, harsh and guttural. Dun estimated that there were six of them, including the leader. What use that information would be to him stuck in a net though, he wasn’t so sure.
“What do you want?” Padg said coolly from the net above Dun.
“Ah, I thought these might be talking fish if I tickled them enough.” More laughter.
“What do I want. What do I want? Perhaps, I want all of your belongings and for you to be telling me what it is exactly you’re doing in my river?”
Dun drew breath in response, but the coarse bark cut him off again.
“Or maybe, I want to peg your insides out to dry in the vents for trespassing.”
“Or maybe, you want to let them all down from the net and the Bridge-folk will forgive your little blunder!”
The new voice sang out cool and ringing across the walls of the tunnel. The authority it spoke with was impressive. A slight speech tic to it and he’d certainly never heard the voice used to that effect before. Myrch had followed them.
“Now, now, I don’t want to hurry you but...”
The voice was closer now, about the same distance away as the leader of their captors. The “but” had an extreme gravity that even the bluff leader of the group of ruffians didn’t wish to try. Dun could’ve sworn he heard a faintly suppressed squeak from the leader, then the new voice whispering too low for him to hear. Next, the group’s leader issued a couple of barked orders in the odd River-folk dialect and with a creak of the rope, they began to be lowered back into the water.
“Come on,” Myrch said, helping with the ropes. “I think we’ve outstayed our welcome.”
“Welcome?” Padg said. “I must have missed that.”
As they disentangled themselves, with the liquid floating the edges of the rope net, there was a quick swirl in the water as Myrch twirled around. There was a sharp twang and a bang as metal hit metal at the tunnel wall. The leader of the River-folk gang gave a muffled gasp.
“Do not toy with me, Darvan. The next bolt will be in your head,” Myrch’s voice rang out strong and clear.
The silence of the stand-off gave the three friends time to free themselves, collect their traveling sticks, and stand up again in the water.
“How...?” Dun said.
“Not now, not here,” Myrch said, brusquely.
Then he leaned in toward Tali and whispered in her ear, “Right, young alchemist, we need a diversion, in about fifty clicks. Can you manage it?”
“Yep,” Tali said and fumbled in her backpack.
Myrch turned back again in the direction of the River-folk and spoke deliberately, “And now we must leave. Do not think to follow us, or any of your clan, Darvan. It will be the worse for you if you do, trust me.”
Then he spoke to the friends again, “Shall we? Tali, if you would?”
Tali threw a small fabric bag she had been preparing into the water between them and the River-folk. There was a splosh as it hit the water, a brief pause, and then the noise of frothing and boiling with a very strong stale smell.
“Run,” Myrch said. And they did.
***
A THOUSAND OR MORE serious clicks of running in nearly knee-deep water and everyone’s lungs started to protest. Luckily for the friends at that point, Myrch was always slightly ahead of them. Keeping up an easy lope, he shouted, “In here quick!”
There was a trapdoor in the pipe, about a hand-width above the level of the water, that opened outward and upward. They all scrambled into the cramped slimy room on the other side.
Before anyone could voice their million questions, Myrch spoke, “Tali, sorry to trouble you again, but have you the supplies to make some hunter’s balm?” He referred to the smear that hunters applied to themselves, before venturing out, to mask their scent. Powerful stuff, as it effectively rendered them undetectable.
“Yes,” she replied, “or at least I did. I’ll check that my stuff that hasn’t gotten wet.”
“Good,” Myrch said. “Make it up but don’t apply any water. Give it to me still in powder form.”
She rustled in her bag again. “We’re good, I think. The pack’s dry on the inside.”
“Excellent,” Myrch said.
There was the noise of mixing and stirring and a clean, slightly sweet, powdery smell emerged. She handed a small bag of powder to Myrch, who stuck his head back out of the hatch, clapped his hands together loudly several times, then closed the hatch silently.
“That should keep them off the scent for a while. This isn’t a passage they know yet. Follow me.”
He guided them to a small rusted set of steps pegged vertically into one of the walls.
“Up here,” he said.
They climbed up a short way; what must have been the height of the top of the river’s pipe. There a room opened out. Dun thought from Air-sense it was about the size of the main room in River-hole. Once up the metal steps, they heard a quiet metal-on-metal closing noise as Myrch lowered another trapdoor back down over the hole they’d climbed through.
“We can rest here. There’s a vent over there. Dry yourselves out.”
It wasn’t long before Dun broke the silence, “Thank you. For helping us.”
Myrch made some kind of non-committal grunt.
“Yes. Thanks and all that,” Padg added. “But how did you know?”
“How did I know what?” Myrch replied evenly.
“Where should I start?” Padg said, warming to his theme, irritation rising in his tone. “How did you know the name of that bandit? Darvan was he called? How do you know so much about what’s going on here? How did you know this hole was here? And most importantly, how did you know to follow us?”
Awkward silence.
“Well?” Padg pressed his point. “You were following us.” It was a statement, not a question.
“My, my,” Myrch said, the faintest hint of amusement in his tone. “So much indignation from one who’s lucky to be alive.”
“We don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but he does have a point,” Dun said.
“Yes, he does,” Myrch said. “Yes, he does.”
“So?” Tali said, less edge to her tone than her friends.
“In no order, the answers to your questions would be: I’ve known about this hole for quite some time, and I’ve prepared it for just such an occasion for quite some time. You’ll find a metal box in the corner opposite where we came in. It contains food and some limited medical supplies. Darvan is slightly more than a bandit in these parts. He has been slowly removing his enemies among the factions of the River-folk for quite a while. He now holds quite a lot of power for a River-folk and shouldn’t be taken lightly. I know so much, about what’s going on, by taking a shrewd interest and a little care. And yes I was following you, with good reason as it turned out.”
“And that doesn’t answer a damned one of our questions,” Padg barked.
Tali chipped in at this point, in a slightly more conciliatory tone, “I don’t get it. For as long as I’ve known you’re this nobody in the village. Hardly there, hardly noticed. Then all of a sudden, you’re following us, you know all about the local goings on, have a more than passable knowledge of alchemy and you turn up armed to the teeth to rescue us in the nick of time. Who are you, and what are you up to?”
“Ah,” Myrch said, his tone becoming instantly serious. “That is a different question entirely.”
