“That is right!” came a giggling voice from the tunnel ahead.
“Figgis!” shouted Loor and continued on to the end of the side tunnel.
I followed her out and into the wider tunnel on the far side. When I hit the intersection I saw that this next tunnel stretched out in two directions. Ore-car track was at our feet and an empty ore car sat on the tracks to our right. It was an ancient Milago mine tunnel. I looked at the floor and saw there was a lot more rusty tak dust coating everything. This must have been residue from when Figgis mined the stuff out of the rock. Like gold dust. A thin layer of the deadly stuff was everywhere. But there was something else strange about this place. It looked somehow familiar. The ore car, the opening to the side tunnel, the pile of rocks in front of the opening. I felt as if I’d been here before.
That’s when my ring began to glow. I looked to Loor and she had already seen her own ring glowing. We had indeed been here before. This was the tunnel that held the gate to the flume. When we used the flume the other day, we had no idea that we were close to Figgis’s source for tak. I looked to my left and sure enough, a few yards down the tunnel was the wooden door that led to the flume.
“Why does this whole setup give me the creeps?” I asked Loor.
She felt it too. Why would Figgis lead us down to the one place that he would want to keep secret? The answer came in the form of a rumble.
“What is that?” asked Loor nervously.
I listened. The rumble grew louder. It was either thunder, an earthquake, or…
“Cave-in!” I shouted.
I grabbed Loor’s hand and ran along the track in the direction that would take us back to the main cavern of the mine. We passed the door to the flume and got only a few steps further when the ceiling in front of us collapsed! Tons of rock and gravel fell down, blocking our way out. My first thought was to go for the gate and jump into the flume, but we couldn’t leave Denduron. Not now. So we ran back into the tunnel and dove into the side tunnel that led to Figgis’s tak mine.
No sooner had we entered the tak mine than another cave-in sealed off the smaller tunnel ahead of us. Rocks tumbled down from the ceiling and poured into the small cavern. I took a few steps back and fell down on my butt. When I turned to get up, I came face to face with something that had tumbled down in front of me when the ceiling collapsed. It was a skeleton. I’m not ashamed to admit it; I screamed. Yes, I screamed like an idiot in aScooby Doo cartoon. I quickly scrambled away and Loor helped me to my feet. The two of us stood there holding each other, not sure of what to do. It seemed as if the cave-in had stopped, at least for the time being.
Loor looked at the skeleton and said, “It must be a miner who was trapped here.”
That made sense. But then I saw something that threw her theory out the window. I took a closer look at the skeleton. He wore rotted-out leather clothing that marked him as Milago. But there was something else, something unique that made me want to scream all over again. The corpse wore an eye patch. The cloth was shredded and dangled down from the empty socket, but it had definitely once been a patch. And that’s not all. On each of his bony fingers was a braided green ring. I had seen this only once before and remembered it all too well. This wasn’t any miner.
“It’s Figgis,” I said, trying not to sound too freaked out.
“That cannot be!” exclaimed Loor. “Unless we have been chasing a ghost.”
Then a voice came from behind us. “I am afraid it is indeed Figgis.”
Both Loor and I spun to see someone standing in the opening to the tak mine. It wasFiggis! Huh? The guy looked pretty healthy for a, okay I’ll say it, for a ghost.
“The poor little man died a few years ago,” he said. “Such a tragedy. He set traps to protect his little find here. That’s why the ceiling collapsed. He didn’t want anybody else to steal it from him. He died setting one of those traps. So sad. Such a visionary, and so…dead.”
My mind was not getting around any of this. We stood there staring at Figgis, uncomprehending.
“I see you have not figured this out yet,” he said with a smug smile. “Let me make things easier for you.” And then, the little man began to transform. I had seen this happen once before, in a lonely subway station in the Bronx. His hair grew long and his body grew back to its normal height of seven feet. His leather Milago clothes changed into an all-black suit, and his eyes flashed with icy blue intensity. Yes, we were looking at Saint Dane, and he had us trapped under a ton of rock with no escape.
“I told you, Pendragon,” he said with a smile. “You can’t beat me.”
Journal #4 (continued)
Denduron
The Milago miners charged out of the forest. The attack was on.
The Bedoowan knights didn’t budge. They wanted to see what these bold peasants had planned. The first line of miners stopped and loaded their slingshots with tak. On command they flung their explosives at the waiting Bedoowan. The small tak bombs flew across the battlefield and exploded on impact. But they had fallen far short of the front line of the Bedoowan defense. If they were going to do any damage, they were going to have to get closer, which meant they had to put themselves within range of the Bedoowan archers.
The Bedoowan on the other hand, were surprised by the explosions that blasted down in front of them. Except for the quig that had been blown to bits in the stadium, they had never witnessed anything like this. There was a movement along the lines to retreat, but the Bedoowan commander wouldn’t let them budge. They were going to hold their ground. The Bedoowan commander sent a line of shield carriers to the front. These brave men stood in line like a barrier of steel and flesh to protect their comrades from the incoming missiles. Behind them, the archers stood ready to release their arrows as soon as the Milago miners were in range. This was going to get real ugly, real quick.
But I didn’t know any of this until afterward. Right now I had my own problem to deal with, which was Saint Dane. There was no way out. We were trapped by two cave-ins that were caused by Figgis’s booby traps. The only way out of this seemed to be through the flume. But it might as well have been a mile away because standing between us and the gate was Saint Dane.
“You brought the tak here, didn’t you?” I spat at the guy.
“I did no such thing!” he said, acting all innocent. “Tak is natural to Denduron. Figgis discovered this vein several years ago.”
He walked over to one of the walls and scraped off a layer of dirt with his hand. As the dirt fell away, I saw beneath it the familiar rusty red color of tak. I looked to Loor and for the first time since we met, she looked scared. That’s because she realized, as I did, that this entire cavern was made of tak. The bomb we had dissolved in the stadium was like a firecracker compared to this cavern…and we were standing in the middle of it.
“Figgis thought the miners could use the tak to help them tunnel through the rock,” Saint Dane explained. “It was noble of him, but he was a merchant and he thought like one. He wanted to help the miners, but he also wanted to make a profit.”
The evil Traveler walked over to the skeleton that used to be Figgis and nudged the bones with his foot. “I can’t say that I blame him, but his greed proved to be his undoing. He set traps all over this cavern to protect his precious find. Unfortunately one of them backfired.”
He kicked Figgis’s skull and it rolled away from the body and landed at our feet. I wanted to kick it back just to keep it away from me, but that would have been gross.
“So you came to Denduron and took his place,” I said. “And you showed the Milago miners how to use tak as a weapon.”
“Of that, I am guilty,” he said with a proud smile.
“But we stopped you,” Loor shot back at him. “Rellin did not use the bomb.”