Kingdom Keepers VII
SHE HAS BEEN CALLED MANY THINGS: the Black Mamba, Calypso, Tia Dalma. And worse. Much worse.
The scratching of rat claws on stone at her bare feet is accompanied by the disturbing squeals of the rodents as they stream past. Consumed by the darkness of the tunnel, she shuffles forward, her toes stabbing into the void like a cockroach’s antennae.
Her stubby fingers feed twine from the ball she carries. Slowly she plays out the lifeline, measuring the ball’s diminishing diameter with a slight pressure of her left thumb. It is the third such ball she has knotted, one to the other, in as many days. She has no idea how long it may take for her captors to realize she has escaped; some spells outlast time itself, others prove themselves fleeting.
The string now stretches more than fifteen hundred feet behind her—nearly a third of a mile—as it winds through the unmarked turns and dead ends of the Devil’s Labyrinth, the name she has given this seemingly endless underground maze. Carved from caves by an ancient civilization, the interconnecting subterranean passageways might have once connected temples or burial monuments, might have provided safe harbor from hurricanes or served as death traps for exiled citizens, prisoners, or the sick and elderly. Her torch burned out twenty minutes and two tunnels ago. She has considered going back, chasing the twine to the daylight, but what would be the point? Though she cannot see in the dark, Tia Dalma is not without her ways. She has her voodoo, her visions, is able to direct wormholes through reality to sense Danger, Desire, and Death—the three Ds.
She does so now, but detects only the worry and scurry of the rats and a looming menace that hangs like a stink. Bad things have happened here. Evil stains these walls. Where some would feel fear so intense as to set teeth to gnashing, this woman warms at the very thought.
Getting close now.
A slight breeze, fainter than the breath of a bumblebee bat, flutters the two mole whiskers on the underside of her chin, tickles her tattooed eyelids with delicious warmth, fills her dilated nostrils with the fetid odor of moldering organic matter. Proof of life. Somewhere, perhaps far from her current position, perhaps as near as the other side of a two-ton slab of rock, something lives. Or it once did. Candidates include blind wolves, dead snakes, dragons, or bubbling gases from the corpses of sacrificed animals stacked like cordwood two thousand years earlier. Tia Dalma picks up on it with the instincts of a bloodhound. Won’t let it go. Sniffs the air loudly as she pursues the frail thread of decomposition.
The twine uncoils as the ball spins on her fingers. Even a maze as complicated and devious as this must contain compromises, secret passageways connecting one to the other, hidden exits, covert companionways. This whiff of decay is her first encouragement. But it proves fleeting, no more than a temptation to hurry her forward to the fraying end of her rope, where she stops, eager to press forward even without the connection back.
Not daring to release the twine, she stretches her body, pushing her fingertips as far as she can reach, tickling the dark with pointed purple nails like a relay runner reaching for the baton. It is a risky business, this, for she could inadvertently release the stretched string and send it recoiling from her, elusively difficult to locate. Divorced from the certainty of survival, a person could go mad in such darkness.
But Tia Dalma is no person. If she were, she would prove herself less susceptible than most: she’s mad already.
Once again the fetid, rank odor of rot overcomes her. It comes from stone rubble to her left caused by a cave-in. She approaches and begins to dig, driven by a gnawing suspicion that whatever corpse is causing this foul report, it is meaningful to her, pertains to her. This thought causes a spike of energy, determination and—dare she admit it?—apprehension.
The digging is surprisingly easy. She pulls a stone loose only to cause a small rockslide. The grave comes open for her. A few more rocks is all and—
She gasps as her fingers touch not rock but scales—large scales, the size of dinner plates, but with the rough texture of giant fingernails. Dragon scales, she realizes. She howls into the dark like a lone wolf. Maleficent transfigures herself into a dragon—or did, Tia Dalma realizes. No longer. In her mind’s eye she can see the willful boy who trapped and killed one of the greatest practitioners of black magic ever to live.
The boy who did this!
A second haunting cry reels though the catacombs. It’s a high-pitched complaint tinged with pain and anger, grief, and agonizing uncertainty. There should be others even if the one is lost. The Evil Queen. The Beast. Tia Dalma has made it her charge to collect these principals and rebuild. No battle is without losses; no army survives with all its generals. Hope is ephemeral, defying her wish to hold on to it. Who needs hope when there is hate to take its place? Who needs even hate when there is an attack planned for later this same night many, many miles to the north? An attack set to bring the Kingdom to its knees?