Lucky Rabbit

When Pandy rejoined Isidor, it was to find him prodding the spider’s abdomen with a complete lack of the horror she herself felt. In fact, he looked as if he’d been given a particularly interesting but fragile gift, and didn’t want to damage it. Glancing up at her, he raised his brows.

“Is this one of the spiders that bit Chancellor Blackwood?” he asked, and Pandy realized someone must have filled him in. Professor Beeswick, probably, but possibly his ‘friend’ who could convince some number of knights to leave their posts, even for a few minutes.

Switching back to Ms. Wellington, Pandy nodded. “The exact one, I think.”

He grinned, momentarily looking like a normal teenager before he got the expression under control. “They caught some in the, uh, docks? But the healer said they just looked like normal spiders, though he wasn’t sure of the exact kind. They’re examining them, and testing the venom to see what’s most effective against it.”

Unless the librarian had already been in touch with the knights here – which wasn’t at all unlikely, actually – then Isidor had definitely gotten his information from his friend. “When do they think they’ll have results? Have they located more of the antidote for the Shadow Exchange poison? How are the rest of the victims? Did you-?”

He held up a hand, not seeming to realize he was still holding a spider leg. The corpse only had four and a half left, and looked distinctly less threatening with each limb it lost. “I only got to speak to my… friend for a moment. I probably don’t know much more than you do.” And he was definitely disgruntled by this fact, judging by his sour expression.

Pandy sighed. “Well, we should finish looking around here then, so we can get moving toward the river before we have company.”

Isidor nodded, but they both stilled at the very, very quiet sound of a door opening and closing above them. No footsteps followed the tiny creak and click, but that made sense if the knights were using their sneaky tricks. The boy almost looked panicked as he glanced around, gaze lingering only briefly on the dark space barely visible between the wooden steps.

Pandy shook her head, then pointed toward the tunnel beyond the broken shelves. Isidor’s lips flattened, but he nodded again, before picking up the spider corpse in one hand and Tempest with the other. The tortoise had been sitting on the step beside the spider, her eyes half-shut as if she was resting, but when Isidor’s fingers closed around her shell, both turtle and boy shimmered into something akin to a slightly laggy invisibility.

They ran toward the tunnel, the image covering them always taking just a fraction of a second too long to adjust. Pandy dismissed Shifting Faces, launching herself after them with a Hop that sent her flying just above Isidor’s head. She flipped off the ceiling and landed, already running, and absolutely did not give herself a silent mental high-five at how cool she must have looked.

The tunnel flashed by, seeming much shorter than it had when she’d been hidden inside Augustus’s shirt, and he’d been shuffling along with several other very sick people. There were a few curves she hadn’t noticed then, either, but she took them with ease, only to very nearly leap directly into the shallow, oily water that constituted the ‘river’. Only a rapid backpedal and the fact that the shore eased into the water rather than ending abruptly saved her.

Isidor came up behind her, panting softly, his semi-invisibility absent. Apparently, that wasn’t something he could do for long. He stared out over the dark water, which rippled gently in spite of the complete lack of air movement. “What is this?”

So his buddy hadn’t told him everything. Maybe hadn’t had time to tell him everything? While Pandy felt like she’d taken a long time to get here, it had obviously taken Isidor just as long, and he was certainly acting like he’d been in a hurry.

Pandy had less than an hour of time remaining on Shifting Faces, but she’d learned her lesson about not communicating when she got a chance. Popping back into human shape, she said, “A river. Aug- Mr. Blackwood said the Shadow Exchange probably hired a Water elementalist to make it, using what was left of an old river bed.” She pointed upwards. “I guess they wanted to be able to build up there, so they just moved the river out of the city and covered it up, but didn’t bother actually filling in any more than they had to.”

And she wondered just how long it had taken to do all of that. Months or years, like it would have in her old world? There would have been environmental impact reports, and planning meetings, then digging out the new river bed, and building a dam to block the old one. Someone somewhere would have screwed something up, and a big part of it would have to be redone. A whole new local industry would probably have appeared, at least for however long it took.

Here? Here it probably took a Water elementalist, an Earth elementalist, and maybe a Nature elementalist all of a few hours or days, depending on how strong their elementals were. If the King or Queen ordered it, there probably weren’t even committees involved to slow the process down. Though given the way Albert Christopher talked about it, a few more committees might have been a good thing in this case.

Isidor looked as impressed as Pandy felt, and for the first time in a while she remembered that he wasn’t actually from the city. She barely even noticed his subtle accent any more. But in spite of his world-weary air and apparent knowledge of, well, everything, he was as new to this city as the rest of them. In fact, only Suzanne and Matilda might know about this, since even Eleanor had essentially grown up isolated from everyone and everything outside wherever she grew up.

“I wonder how deep it is,” he muttered, crouching and trying to peer into the murky depths. He reached out as if to touch the water, and Pandy found herself darting forward, grabbing his wrist.

“Don’t,” she told him, though she wasn’t certain why. “I overheard someone say it’s only about three feet deep, but the people who captured the chancellor seemed to go out of their way to avoid getting wet.” She remembered the two men talking, with one threatening to throw the other in, while the second brushed off the suggestion as if knowing the first would never follow through. Was that because it wasn’t much of a threat, or because the consequences were too dire to make it anything other than empty?

Isidor looked at her, then the water, and straightened, clearly frustrated. “Then how do we get there?” He waved a hand at the darkness beyond reach of his light, where the water merged with shadow.

Silently, Pandy pointed to their left, where a thin ridge of stone was visible. There was a similar ledge on the right side, but Pandy had been playing videogames for too long to blithely follow the right-hand wall. Game designers knew that trick, and she was convinced that they deliberately designed their dungeons to screw with players who followed it.

Isidor looked from Pandy to the ridge, then deliberately went right. Rather than immediately setting out, however, he touched the pendant that hung around his neck, shifting into his younger – and smaller – form. Then, without looking back, he set one foot on the four- or five-inch wide protrusion and began to walk along it, almost as easily as if he was simply taking a stroll along the broad halls of Falconet.

For her part, Pandy looked longingly at the left-hand ledge. Surely the two sides parallelled each other. Why wouldn’t they? But she still thought, and hopped along after the boy. She wasn’t taking any chances. He might think he was all grown up and independent, but if he fainted again, or something rose up out of that foul-looking water, Pandy wasn’t going to be at least fifteen or twenty feet away, on the other side of the river.

In the end, however, Pandy’s worry was for nothing. A few times, it seemed like Isidor’s fingers had slipped, and his body swayed away from the wall, but he always managed to catch himself and continue on, without even looking back. The river did widen out after a bit, however, forming something more like a lake, and the far side was lost in gloom, so Pandy was glad she’d opted to follow Isidor, if only because he had a light that didn’t involve turning herself into a glow-bunny.

The boy set a good pace, and Pandy found that her paws were sure on the rocky outcrop, so in spite of the fact that it would probably have been faster if they could go straight across the wide part, they actually reached the defunct port in what seemed like a reasonable amount of time. Reasonable to her, at least, but when Isidor finally stepped down onto solid ground again, it actually seemed like his legs might give out beneath him. His knees trembled, and he shook out his hands, flexing his fingers.

Unlike the Rabbit’s Den, this place definitely wasn’t empty, however, and they could see lights moving around in the distance. The steady, white lights were immediately recognizable as not-fire, which meant it was probably produced by the Knights, but neither Isidor nor Pandy was technically supposed to be there, so Isidor tapped his own light, putting it out.

“Can you see?” he asked quietly a moment later, his voice having shifted to the deeper register of his teenage form.

Pandy’s vision did seem to depend upon having some small amount of light to work with, but the knight’s armor really did a good job of reflecting their orbs’ illumination into the surrounding area. She couldn’t see any details, but she could at least differentiate between dark lumps that were probably buildings, and lumps that were probably just Stuff left behind when people abandoned this place.

Back to human shape she went, losing any depth to her vision as she did so, and whispered back, “A little. Can you see me? Bunny me?”

He snorted softly. “You’re filthy again, but yes, I can see your white fur.”

She nodded, realized he probably couldn’t see Human Pandy, and said, “Then follow. And, um, watch out for spiders.”

Pandy couldn’t bring him to the old warehouse, which was absolutely blazing with light, at least compared to the rest of the cavernous space. The building the gang had been using as a headquarters was little more than smoldering cinders, filling the area with the acrid reek of smoke. In spite of Pandy’s warning, no spiders struck from the darkness, so either they’d fled now that the Boss was no longer controlling them, or the knights had found them all. Either one seemed possible.

They did manage to search through a few other buildings, but each of them was little more than a shell, and if they had doors, then those doors stood wide open. In fact, it seemed like the knights had done an excellent job of searching here, as well. Pandy felt her frustration mounting as she realized that her ‘special knowledge’ had done her no good, other than locating the dead spider.

Finally, as they reached the wall opposite the warehouse, where very little light reached, and Pandy was almost as blind as Isidor, she stopped and shifted back to her Ms. Wellington shape. “We should go back,” she told the boy who clung close to her heels. He’d contributed even less than she had to their search, since he was effectively blind, and he couldn’t use his light when it would be clearly visible through broken boards and tumbled walls.

“How?” Isidor asked, and his dissatisfaction was much louder than his whispered words.

That… was an excellent question. Since this was an old neighborhood, they’d been able to use the cobbled streets to make their way around, and twice those streets had come to an abrupt end, with solid stone simply bisecting road from earthen reformation. Albert Christopher had said that there were a few ways out that hadn’t been completely blocked off.  Plural. He’d found one, at least large enough to allow them to escape, but presumably there were still others.

“I guess we just keep going until we find a way,” Pandy said lamely. “Unless you want to try to sneak out the way the knights are getting in, or go back to the Rabbit’s Den.”

She could see his grimace even in the dark, and Isidor rubbed his fingers reminiscently as he said, “No, I don’t want to do that. Are you sure there’s more than one way out?”

No, of course she wasn’t. But she thought about what Albert had said, and the fact that children never let little things like rules and danger keep them from adventure. Even if the exits had all been blocked, she would be willing to bet there were at least a few child-sized openings remaining. Conveniently, both Pandy and Isidor fell into this size range. “Yes. Probably.”

He sighed, she bunnified herself, and they hopped on through the darkness until they came to something that lay perilously close to the light cast by the searchers, and seemed like a simple rockfall. At least, it seemed like that until a desperate Pandy wriggled her way in between two rocks larger than Isidor, and found herself in what looked like an entirely separate street, which had lain long untouched, at least if she was to judge by the thick layers of webbing stretching away on both sides of her.

Seeing those webs, she honestly considered simply going back out and continuing onward without telling Isidor this area existed. Surely such an old, abandoned space couldn’t lead anywhere, which meant this was just the equivalent of a ghost town, of no interest to anyone except historians and spirit-hunters. Then Isidor’s young voice said, “Ouch!”, and he scraped his way through the gap, carefully holding Tempest in one hand, and the remains of the spider in the other.

The spider was glowing.