Broken Hero (26 page)

Silence reigns. And God, I love her so much in this moment.

Felicity stares at everyone in turn. “Now someone fix a damn meal,” she snaps. “We’ll need our strength for what’s to come.”

My makeshift torch gutters in a sudden gust of air. Shadows leap on rock walls.

It could be quite dramatic. Unfortunately, however, I made my torch by soaking one of my sweat-drenched shirts in Hermann’s oil-phlegm and the stench bellowing off it rather undercuts the moment.

“You should change your feckin’ diet,” Kayla says. “There’s something feckin’ wrong with you if your shirts smell like that.”

It was my suggestion to explore the cave system while waiting for night to fall. Three tunnels lead out the back of the cavern we’d found. Felicity took the first one with Hannah, looking for an opportunity to smooth things over. Hermann and Volk took the second. So I, in my infinite wisdom, picked Kayla to help me explore the third. That left Clyde and Tabitha with a little time to talk things over while they guard the camp. Or Tabitha with ample time to murder Clyde. One of the two…

God, I don’t even know what to think there. I mean… Clyde… Didn’t they just start…? I guess it’s been almost two weeks. But… Clyde a father? Tabitha a mother? I mean… I’ve seen Tabitha dote on her laptop. But another living thing?

Jesus.

“Which one you want?” Kayla brings me back to the present. We’ve come to another fork in the tunnel. This place seems riddled with them.

“Right,” I say. I always say right. It’s a system. Plus the tunnels twist enough that we have yet to circle back on ourselves.

Kayla uses her sword to score an arrow into the wall, pointing the way back to camp. She examines the sword’s edge before slipping it back into its scabbard.

“Feckin’ labyrinth, this place,” she comments as we start off again.

“No Minotaur, though.”

Kayla turns to me, cocks an eyebrow.

A second later a roar echoes down the tunnel toward us.

“I feckin’ knew it.” She shakes her head, resigned. “You had to feckin’ say it.”

I shake my head. “No. No way.”

We both strain, listening for something else, any other clue. “It was something else,” I say. “Organic. Water or, I don’t know, rock heating, cooling, something like that.”

“This isn’t a feckin’ house built in the seventies.” Kayla’s expression indicates her opinion of me, never very high, just dropped a couple more notches.

“It was not a Minotaur.”

Kayla winces. “There you go a-feckin’-gain.”

But there is no roar this time. I shake my head, more confident now. “Sound probably bounces oddly down here. All this rock.”

Kayla snorts. “You have no feckin’ idea what you’re talking about, do you?”

I shrug. “Not that much different from usual.”

Another snort. “Feckin’ hark at you. Weren’t you all piss and vinegar earlier putting wee Hannah in her place?”

It’s my turn to be incredulous. “Wee Hannah?” I echo.

Kayla flicks her hair slightly. “She’s a good inch shorter than me. She’s wee.”

I’m honestly not sure that’s true. Still I get a sense I know where this conversation is going to go, so I decide to just cut it short. Kayla probably won’t have to insult me so much that way.

“This is where you tell me I’m being too harsh on Hannah and need to chill out, or some Scottish variant, right?”

Kayla doesn’t even bother looking at me. “I don’t give a flying feck at a rolling feckin’ donut what you think of Hannah. Don’t give much of a shite about what you think about most things, you uppity little feck. And Hannah’s a big girl, she can take care of herself.”

“You just said she was wee,” I counter.

“And you’re a pedantic feckin’ arsehole, but I wasn’t going to harp on it,” Kayla says without any apparent rancor. Or at least with no more than her usual amount.

This sort of flat acceptance of my belligerence brings me up a little short. I have no place to put my indignation. We trudge on a few more paces in the torches’ flickering light.

“Why do you like her?” I ask eventually. Kayla has only ever tolerated me. But she likes Hannah, and I can’t bring myself to. But I’m not above considering that issue might be on my end. At least not entirely.

Kayla shrugs. “I don’t know. She makes me laugh. She knows the right moment for a wee bit of the old ultraviolence. She’s another girl on the team who isn’t Tabitha. That lass can be a bit feckin’ abrasive on a Monday, if you catch my drift.”

I do. But, “There’s Felicity,” I say, feeling somewhat honor-bound to defend her in her absence.

“She’s the boss of the team. She’s not on the team.”

“Who’s the pedant now?” I ask.

I earn a genuine grin for that one. As we approach another fork in the path.

“Right,” I say, pointing.

Kayla scores the rock and we move on.

“Look,” she says. “The universe has preordained you for death. Pointed its big old feckin’ finger at you and said, time’s up. That’s some heavy shite. You need to be an arsehole from time to time, be a feckin’ arsehole. Just stop trying to find a way to feckin’ apologize for it all the time.”

As she says it we round a corner and step into an abrupt shaft of light. I blink, the sudden illumination bleaching everything out. As my vision returns, I see the ceiling of the tunnel splits here, a deep fissure in the rock, as if the finger of God slammed into the clay of the world and retreated, leaving this pit of light. The sun must be almost directly overhead. The walls are rough and ragged, yellow stone stained with seams of brown.

Behind us, the tunnel twists back into darkness. Before us—

“What’s behind that, do you think?” I ask, pointing at a large boulder that blocks off the far end of the fissure.

Kayla looks at it, weighing it up. “You asking me to show off, is that it?”

“You mean, demonstrate your inhuman weirdness?”

“I have an alternate feckin’ physiology because I was head-fecked by aliens, you feck. Be a little feckin’ sensitive.”

“You just belittled my imminent death.”

Kayla shrugs. “Past. Future. Totally different. Yours might never happen. Mine definitely did.”

I roll my eyes. “Just move the boulder already.”

And then there’s another roar.

We both pause. It’s louder here. Something unnatural to the timbre.

“It’s coming from above,” I say, not at all sure it is. “It’s a mountain lion or something.” Kayla just stares at me. “Weird echoes,” I finish up. It’s less convincing than it was the first time.

Kayla looks back to the boulder. “I shift that thing and a Minotaur feckin’ guts you, I get to say I told you so.”

I sigh. Knowing my luck it’s half likely to happen. Still, at least the subsequent paradox-ridden death of reality will wipe the smug grin off Kayla’s face. “Deal,” I say.

Kayla puts her shoulder to the massive boulder, heaves. It grinds, moves. Kayla dusts off her hands.

I wave my torch into the revealed depths and fail to illuminate anything much. I stand there, hesitating. On the plus side, I am not gored by a Minotaur.

“Get in there, you big jess,” Kayla says.

Fine then. The cavern is cold after the warmth of the fissure’s sunlight. It smells of wet stone.

“You hear that?” Kayla asks.

I freeze, listen intently. And then, yes, I do. A faint whispering sound. A barely audible rustling.

Just in case, I pull my pistol.

“Jumpy feck.”

“You know what,” I say, “of the two of us, I still don’t have superpowers.”

“Whatever.”

I sweep my torch around trying to probe deeper into the darkness. Two tentative steps in and the beam of light catches the edge of a wall. It glitters oddly, almost glistens.

And then it moves.

I jump about six feet back, but it’s already too late. Whatever the hell it is, it’s awake.

There is an explosion of movement, a flurry of shadows. The rustling surrounds us, consumes everything. I try to point my pistol everywhere, fail to do so.

It’s not just one thing. It’s many. They’re everywhere.

“Fuck!” I shout.

And then I realize. They’re butterflies.

“Oh, Jesus.”

My professional pride flutters past, flies out the cavern entrance. I holster my pistol. Kayla smirks.

“Imminent death,” is my excuse.

The butterflies are a cloud around us, filling the space. They land on me, wings whispering against my skin.

The rays from the cavern’s entrance catch their patterns. And there is something entrancing about them after all the darkness and rock. I stare. Then something about the wings catches my attention… Where are the whorls of color? The bright eyes and warning lines? Instead of the expected patterns there is something more intricate, more delicate.

I reach out my hand. A butterfly alights. I pull it close to get a better look.

A forest. No, a jungle. Its wings show a jungle. A tangle of trees and vines. I can see birds flitting between trees, sunlight dappling their bodies.

“The hell?” I pull the butterfly closer. At first I think it must be a painting, but… no. It’s actually the pattern on the butterfly’s wings.

Another one lands. It shows a building. The fort. The one that housed the death cult. The one we were trying to get into. The butterfly takes off. Another lands. This one shows a dark tunnel of rock.

“Are you seeing this?” I ask Kayla.

“Feckin’ weird-arse butterflies.”

I take that as a yes.

I stare at them as they settle on me, take off again. I see rivers and lakes, distant cityscapes. Then, as we stand there, the butterflies begin to get used to us and our light. They settle back on the wall of the cavern.

I approach slowly, peer at them. They have grouped themselves. All the jungle butterflies together. Butterflies with dirty paths painted across their wings strung out in a long winding line. And here, I see a cave entrance. Butterflies with black rock, and narrow twisting passageways, clustered here. I pick out the butterfly showing the fort with a cluster of similarly patterned creatures over to my right.

A thought lands in my mind, spreads its wings. I take a step back, let my light play over the scene.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“What?” Kayla is checking the grip of her sword, oblivious to the wonder before us.

I point at the butterflies. “They’re a map.”

“No bloody way.”

Hannah stares at the rock face as billowing butterflies settle back to rest. “That’s bloody mental.”

“
Papilionis mappa
,” Clyde breathes. “I mean I’d read about them, but this technique’s been lost since the early twelfth century. I think it was Aramadeus the third…”

“Shut up.” Apparently Tabitha and Clyde did not exactly bury the hatchet during the time I gave them. Unless it was in Clyde’s crotch.

“Of course, love,” Clyde says immediately.

“Don’t fucking call me that.”

“Of course, l—” Clyde catches himself. “Tabby,” he finishes.

Tabitha, apparently unwilling to look at Clyde even to scorch him with her ire, instead glares malevolently at the butterflies.

Felicity approaches the wall. The butterflies’ wings flutter at her approach, the map rippling. When they subside she peers closer.

“So where are we?”

I point to a yellow triangle in amongst the dark rock-patterned butterflies. “I’m pretty sure that’s the fissure we just came through to get in here. So we follow this path—” My finger starts to trace a line of paler rock along the backs of the butterflies, “—and we come out here.” Two side-steps and my finger lands on the cluster depicting the fort.

“Just right turns?” Hannah sounds incredulous. “You just took right turns and you happened upon this?”

“Is there a problem?” Felicity speaks before I do. I have yet to find out how her chat with Hannah went.

Hannah stares a minute longer. “No.” She shakes her head slowly. “I just. I mean… I don’t know.”

“Good.” Felicity’s smile is tight. “OK, so it looks like—”

She is cut off by another one of the roars Kayla and I heard earlier. It is louder now. Closer perhaps. Booming and rolling around the room, sending the butterflies into a flurrying cloud of motion. They whip and whirl around us.

“What the hell
is
that?” Felicity looks around.

“Mountain lion,” I say, but with less conviction than before. It didn’t sound like a mountain lion. It didn’t sound organic at all. “Or maybe the rock shifting. Or water.” I shrug. “I think all the rock is distorting the sound.”

“Minotaur,” Kayla says with a simple nod.

Felicity narrows her eyes. I shake my head in warning and she leaves wisely alone.

I turn to scan the cave for the tunnel the butterfly map says leaves this cave. As I do so, something in the way Volk and Hermann are standing catches my eye. Some discrepancy in their mechanical body language.

I try to figure out what it is. “Do you recognize it?” I ask, pointing to the map.

Volk glances at Hermann, then bends his head toward me.

“No,” Hermann says loudly, and Volk comes up short. “It is meaningless to us.” Hermann looks hard at Volk.

I look to Volk. “No secrets,” I say. “Right?”

Volk doesn’t say anything for a moment then straightens. “That is what I was going to say,” he says. “Nothing else. We do not recognize it.”

I stare at them for a moment, but I trust Volk. And maybe I was just misreading the body language thing. They aren’t human after all.

“Always wanted to get in a scrap with a Minotaur,” Kayla tells no one in particular.

“Yes,” Felicity greets the utterance. “Well, if everyone’s had their say then I think we have a path forward. So let’s get ready, march on this fort, and kick the living shit out of everyone inside it.”

“Two more lefts and we should be there,” I say, glancing at the directions I’ve scribbled down. I try to inject my voice with confidence. It turns out maps made out of magically evolved butterflies are a bit inconsistent when it comes to scale. Well, either that, or I’m crap at writing down directions. I’m really banking on it being the first of those options.