Drake

More jungle wandering had Drake lamenting his lack of shoes, but when Zaphia broke out into a neighborhood and zig-zagged down streets of burning sand, he wished to be back in the jungle underbrush. If the girl knew Drake was following her, she gave no sign. The windows he passed were darkened and covered as a defense against the sun, but he traveled close to the houses anyway, forced to close the gap between him and Zaphia to keep track of her. She ended her purposeful journey at an innocuous house where she grabbed a few discarded nuts from the ground and tossed them into an upper window. A yawing face appeared. Zaphia flapped her arms to get its attention.

Drake tried his hardest to continue to suspect she was notifying the authorities, but when a boy scrambled down vines clinging to the side of his house, his certainty was tested.

The sharp-eyed boy pointed straight at Drake, and Zaphia glanced behind her, jumping when she saw Drake. “Wow,” she exclaimed, seeming impressed. “You’re really sneaky.”

Drake gave up trying to suspect her of colluding with the enemy after that. If she was helping them, she was doing so by accident. He came closer so she would stop speaking so loudly in the middle of a sleeping village.

“Drake,” she whispered, “this is Ario. He’s a good climber, and if the guards catch him, they won’t think anything of it.” Then she said something to Ario including the word “Drake” that earned enthusiastic head bobs from the fuzzy-headed boy.

Back to the palace they went, child in tow. Ario was one of those kids who bounced everywhere he went. He could hardly take a step without adding in an extra spring. Soon, all three were back under the volcano.

“How can he get me in the palace?” Drake asked, watching Ario. Even when the kid was standing still, he was bobbing up and down.

“Oh, no, he can’t do that. I mean, he can cause a distraction like last time, I guess, but I don’t think they’ll fall for that again.”

Zaphia chattered to Ario. He chattered back.

Zaphia shook her head at Drake. “No. They told him if they caught him again, he’d be scrubbing statues with a toothbrush for a cat-sleep.”

The length of time entailed in a cat-sleep was unknown, but it sounded long enough for Drake to respect Ario’s reticence.

Two young sets of eyes blinked at him hopefully. Well, prisons were prisons. “Since it’s your night, I’m guessing the head guard delegates this shift,” Drake pondered. “Where does he sleep?”

Zaphia shrugged. She chatted quietly with Ario while Drake peeked out from behind their boulder hiding spot next to the palace. A set of spear-armed guards sauntered by an open second-floor balcony. On the plus side, there was no reason for this prison to be on high alert. On the negative side, this prison had no reason to be on high alert. It was enormous, on an island that was impossible to find, and it had its own magical protection system. Maybe he should wait for Rosaliy to join them with some magical options.

“Ario thinks the head guard stays in the cone.” Zaphia pointed. In the middle of the sprawling palace, a large tower rested. Now that she named it, the tower did have the shape of a cone with its point wedged into the stone ceiling.

The beginnings of an idea swirled in Drake’s head. “You said Ario was a good climber?”

She bobbed her head in agreement.

“Could he wear your concha?”

It took a while to hash out the plan. Zaphia kept trying to overcomplicate the plan, and who knew what she was explaining to the boy, but finally, they all seemed to understand what was going on. A nimble child and an enthusiastic teenager were an ideal crew for a prison break-in. Certainly good people did not think that way, Drake chided himself. However, that was exactly why a nimble child and an enthusiastic teenager were so effective at prison infiltration. Besides, he was on the right side of this prison escape. If anything, he was helping these children take social justice into their own hands. “Taking social justice into their own hands” was a phrase Cliff had used more than once. Drake was not sold on its relevance to his current situation, but Cliff was usually on the right side of things, so Drake decided to accept the man’s hypothetical moral approval of the situation.

He jerked on the knots connecting the rope of vines he had created during the planning. He coiled up the vines, and Ario slung them over his shoulder. Even with the bulky extra weight, Ario was up the closest palm tree to the palace before Drake could get into a decent position to watch the patrol inside. Their timing could not have been worse. A pair of guards turned a corner to meander down an open outdoor hallway. Drake put out a hand as a signal for Ario to stay put. Ario pulled himself higher onto the green fronds of the palm and the wide palm leaves jostled in front of the passing guards.

Hearing the rustle, one of the guards veered off course to lean his head out the open wall. The guard’s eyes swept Ario’s way, scanning up and down the massive tree in front of him. Somehow, the boy remained still and hidden by the palm fronds, something only the threat of meticulous column cleaning could have coaxed out of him.

Satisfied, the lackadaisical guard shrugged to his partner and ambled on. Every step seemed slower than the last, until, finally, the spear-wielding sentries rounded the corner. Drake waved Ario toward the palace, and a dark blur of a boy took a flying leap onto the palace roof, landing with a soft thud. He must have been half monkey.

Zaphia and Drake slipped their way to the other side of the palace. Ario had beaten them there. He was already tying vines to the stone rails of a balcony and hurling them over the side. He scrambled down the vines and bounced around proudly.

“Nice work,” Drake praised him. The kid had a future in socially conscious cat burglary.

Ario ripped Zaphia’s concha off his neck and handed it over to Drake. Drake draped the ribbon around his neck and tucked the shell under his tattered shirt.

“Your turn,” Drake told Zaphia.

“How long should I give you?” she whispered.

“Long enough, but not too long,” he answered.

It was the best answer he had, and they had gone over the plan already. Drake had never been one to worry overly about the actions of his team getting him captured or killed because the possibility was so likely. Why fret over the inevitable? People he worked with usually misinterpreted this attitude as confidence in their abilities, which seemed to help team morale.

Drake scaled the vine as quickly as he could. The volcano side of the palace was an easy access point, but it was also free of tree cover. The guard patrols may have been tired, but they were not blind. Halfway up, Drake reconsidered the wisdom of climbing a vine rope in the mid-day heat. His slick hands were turning his makeshift rope into something impossible to grip. Only halfway up, he dropped half a length, barely managing to catch himself on a knobby leaf. Ario made climbing in the heat look easier than it was.

Drake yanked off a ripped piece of his shirt and wrapped it around his hand using his teeth. With at least one hand able to grip the vine, he hobbled his way up until his fingers grasped the lip of the stone balcony. Finally, he pulled himself onto the scalding stones and scrambled under cover, wishing he had a bucket of water to douse himself with. Failing that, Drake wiped a forehead of sweat onto the sleeve of his shirt before he hauled the vine up after him and rolled it up.

Zaphia waved good luck at him with two enthusiastic hands and took off to inform the guards her concha was missing. Such an announcement should rouse the head guard, bearer of the concha Drake needed. Putting the palace prison on alert was a gamble, but it was the fastest way to gain access to the prisoners. If a possible intruder emergency pulled Iketa or Dalor away from the temple and Rosaliy, all the better.

He took a second to orient himself, aiming for the cone.

This section of the palace was standard stone, but large gaps in the ceiling and floor were positioned to provide light and ventilation. Drake had to temper the need to move quickly with the necessity of traveling carefully past missing sections of floor big enough to tumble through. The benefit and drawback of this odd construction choice was that the labyrinthine hallways were well lit, but he could be seen by guards from too many angles to control. The increased visibility led to more stress, but it also saved him from a few dead end turns. He was under the cone in no time.

If Drake had to guess, the cone appeared to be the original prison for the palace. The only access point up to the lofty, oddly-shaped tower was a set of folding spiral stairs. The stairs were wooden planks suspended by vines, and the system to raise and lower the spiral of stairs was a crank at the bottom. Any attempt to jump down from the cone area without using the stairs was sure to end in a broken leg, and even if a prisoner could fly, the distance to the outside of the palace was lengthy and circuitous.

Drake stole to the stairway and looked up at the porthole in the rock—all darkness and quiet above. It made sense that at some point in its history the cone tower was considered more useful as a guard station. Its raised, central location gave it a sweeping view of the roof and the palace surroundings. Plus, the ability to lower the stairs and physically cut off the ability to enter or exit made this a good place to store weapons. Drake had not considered having access to an armory, but he could use one.

The stairs were raised and secured with chains, so the head guard was most likely in. Drake tested the stairs by carefully transferring half his weight to the bottom step. The stair creaked at him and the vine contraption tightened and swayed, causing a little jingle of chains. Drake froze. No one came running to investigate. Hopefully the head guard was a heavy sleeper.

Not one to overthink a plan, Drake hauled himself up, using his arms as much as possible to avoid the creaking wood stairs, succeeding only marginally.

He took a moment at the top to scan for people looking to do him harm. No one argued his right to be here, so he turned his focus to the cone itself. A solid stone wall ringed a hallway. The outer wall had once been solid, but now the wall had small cut-outs for contraptions that looked like periscopes. This place was definitely used as a sentry tower. Luckily for him, it was unstaffed at the moment.

Drake could see one door directly ahead and two more on the right and left. He assumed there was another room on the back of the circle. The effect was something like standing in an enormous cone-shaped lighthouse, if the light of the lighthouse had been partitioned off into separate wedges. Many stones were missing from the inner walls, allowing the people outside to see inside. The wide open door in front of him also allowed Drake to see inside.

That was unexpected.

Drake used his forearms to haul himself up onto the floor, avoiding the rest of the stairs entirely. The head guard was in his unlocked, unguarded room, asleep. This seemed like such a clearly terrible idea, Drake worried it was a trap. Granted, the guard had reason to put a good deal of faith in his impenetrable island and the impenetrable magic barriers of his prison, despite the fact that Drake had penetrated both of them in the same day.

Drake decided to change his plan. Of course, changing the plan meant Zaphia was certain to execute her end, so he had to move quickly. He crept to the doorway of the guard’s room. The guard was sleeping with his spear out of reach, but he had muscles that could crush coconuts, so Drake was not interested in waking the man. Luckily, his concha was on a table beside him. It looked like Zaphia’s, but it had faint gold threads ringing the shell. Drake scanned once for anything else that looked like a wearable shell. There were none of those, but there was a ring of keys hanging on a hook. Honestly? Drake was half tempted to wake the man up and have a chat about the management of his organization.

He made a silent grab for the concha and the keys. Then he escaped the room before he had to explain himself. With an agonizing slowness, Drake pulled the door closed behind him. With the turn of a key, the guard’s room became a cell once more. It only locked from the outside, so that was going to be inconvenient for the giant head guard when he woke up.

The next three open rooms were for storage. They were ill-stocked and mostly full of weaponry that had been broken and was waiting to be repaired. Drake looped a few pairs of hand restraints around his belt, and he decided he had time to grab one weapon. Really, his knives were a more comfortable close-range weapon than those bulky spears, so his first instinct said the grappling hook was the way to go. His instincts might have been swayed by the ten-year-old boy inside with a fascination for big, shiny objects, but the pronged hook attached to a rope and a launching system did seem like a better exit plan than he had currently. He could admit to himself these were flimsy justifications to carry around a grappling hook, however. He may have had had plenty of problems, but lying to himself was not one.

He gave the vine stairway a once over after he was down, debating the best way to render the contraption inoperable. He cranked it down as quietly as he could, removed the handle, and laced his vine rope through the contraption, haphazardly tying knots as tightly as he could. Panicking guards would do plenty of damage trying to figure out what vines to cut. No need to waste his own time sawing through vines when they could do the work for him in their quest to liberate the head guard.

Drake’s next objective was to find the wing with the vine ceiling and see what he could do for Daniella. He was sure they had captured her, and as little sense as it made, he felt responsible for her. He shifted the weight of the grappling hook slung across his back and headed for the section Zaphia had pointed out to him. According to her, there were prisoners being kept all over this palace. Clearly, no one here knew what they were doing, but he refused to let their odd choices fill him with confidence. Their unpredictability made them even more dangerous.

His uncanny sense of direction took him to the right section, but the right room was not immediately apparent. Perhaps there was some advantage to keeping prisoners all over a sprawling palace. He considered scaling a nearby tower and getting a view from above, but if Zaphia had sounded the alert, a guard might very well be watching the roof. Of course, the way things were going, the day shift guards might just brush off the loss and decide to look for the missing access shell tomorrow.

While Drake considered his options, he heard the snap of sandals to his left. He dove behind a pillar before some quick-moving guards stormed past. Their conversation did not sound cheerful. Drake let them pass and followed as close as he dared. They stopped down a hallway, and he waited around the corner. They must have stopped to talk to Daniella’s guard. He hoped the conversation was going something like, “Zaphia lost her concha.” “Ugh, that girl.” “I know. We’re on our way to wake the head guard.” “You know how cranky he is when he’s tired.” “Do we ever, but if Seer Loyalists manage to sneak in here on the day shift, we’ll never hear the end of it.” “That’s true. I’ll keep an eye out.” Implicating Seer Loyalists was Zaphia’s idea. Hopefully that would move any guards to the Seer’s end of the palace to prevent a break-out.

Drake waited until the guards clicked away before stealing around the corner. He had a window of time where most of the guards would be occupied, and he needed to hurry. They had sounded like they were talking to only one man.

In an alcove in the wall, there was a wooden statue of a bird, something like a pelican, as ancient as the rest of the palace. Drake scooped it up and chucked it down the hallway. It stopped abruptly on a stone wall, its large beak snapping off with a crack. A guard popped his head out a doorway to investigate the clatter. He took a step into the hallway. He was manageable.

Drake dove on him from behind, clapping a hand over the man’s resulting yell and squeezing his throat with his arm. Poor man was going to have a sore windpipe for days. He wished there was a way to be reasonable with guards about allowing themselves to be tied up and gagged. Drake felt less sorry for him when the guard slammed him backwards into a stone wall. A cloud of black spots danced in his eyes, and Drake was dizzy, but he was still able to keep his arm clamped down around the man’s neck. Letting go led to fist fights and stabbing, and there was no need for either of them to nurse injuries right now. The man went limp quickly after all the struggling, and Drake dragged him into a nearby room, using a pair of hand restraints to attach the guard to a heavy table.

Drake hurried into the room the man had been guarding. He found a space decorated with two chairs and a sad-looking broken coconut and brown banana in the corner. He hurried for the doorway. His body tingled slightly as he crossed a barrier at the door, but he was able to pass through into an enclosed stone room. Filtered light came down through the vine ceiling. Success. Daniella was leaning against one wall, and Issabeth was slumped on the other side of the room. Daniella noted his arrival. Her eyebrows rose, and she said nothing.

“I took care of the guard,” Drake said.

Issabeth moaned and turned her head. “Drake. How nice of you to not be dead. I thought you were a thousand lengths under the ocean by now.”

“I would have thought so, too. Let’s get you two out of here.”

“How would you like to accomplish that?” Daniella asked.

Drake eyed the vine ceiling. “The grappling hook can reach the ceiling,” he said. “If I could carve out a hole and escape that way, I could toss the concha down for you to follow.”

Daniella eyed the ceiling. “I’m not above trying.” She grimaced at the tall ceiling. “Well, I’m a little above trying, but something tells me those vines are impenetrable. And…” She cast a pointed glance at her cellmate.

The Sorceress looked a fin away from passing out. Her whole shoulder was red with blood. He dug the jar out of his pocket. “I have healing potion that might help.”

Issabeth shuddered. “Is that the Baysellian concoction? The monstrosity mixed up by Old Coasters?”

“That’s the one,” he agreed, holding out the jar.

“Keep that horrible stuff away from me,” she grumbled. “Ugh, you’re giving me flashbacks to my trip to the coast when I was nine. Broken leg, a crazy Senira. That stuff lingered for days, I swear.”

“It might be worth—” he tried to suggest.

“Plus,” she interrupted, “it has horrible, unpredictable interactions with other magic. I’d probably incinerate myself using the pearl to fry those Flifary and get us out of here.” Even half conscious and suffering the effects of blood loss, Issabeth was not someone to argue with.

“At least let me wrap up your shoulder?” he offered.

“If you have to,” Issabeth sighed.

“May I borrow?” Daniella asked, gesturing toward a knife on Drake’s belt. Drake handed it over, and she cut a long strip of cloth off an almost clean underskirt.

“Why are you here, anyway?” asked Issabeth, struggling to sit up. “Did Arlana send you?”

“The Seer? I haven’t talked to her.”

Drake peeled the blood-soaked shirt from Issabeth’s shoulder. She had been stabbed deeply by a knife, and it was impossible that she was still conscious. Drake was half tempted to hold her down and throw healing potion at her, but he did not see the attempt ending well for him. He wrapped the skirt cloth tightly around the wound and under Issabeth’s arm.

“Haven’t talked to her,” chided Daniella, handing over another length of cloth. “You came here first? What were you thinking?”

Was he really having to defend himself here? “I was thinking,” he replied, “that you know an awful lot of information the Flifary should not know.”

“I know nothing,” Daniella disagreed. “And I’m not stupid enough to go announcing what I do know.”

“That much is true,” Issabeth agreed weakly. “Whatever she did to herself, it’s like she wiped out everything. All that’s left is this cold shell of stubbornness. She has so many truth potions humming around her system, it’s ridiculous.”

“You should talk,” Daniella groused. “You wouldn’t even let me look at your shoulder before you bleed to death.”

“You wouldn’t let you touch you either if you were me,” Issabeth insisted. “Is the pearl out there, Drake?”

The what? “I could search,” offered Drake.

“No,” Issabeth sighed. “I’m sure Dalor took it with him. Just go free Arlana.”

“Yes,” Daniella agreed. “The Seer is our best hope.”

“Don’t agree with me,” muttered Issabeth. “It makes me question my decisions.”

“But one of you could escape with this.” Drake held up the shell on his neck. “You could free her yourself.”

“She’s in no shape,” said Daniella, glaring at Issabeth, “and you already know the layout of the prison. Shouldn’t you be moving already? In some sort of hurry?”

So now he had to make his way toward the corner of the palace where the guards were likely heading to prevent a break-out. Fantastic planning.