D. MacHale - The Rivers of Zadaa

I tried not to think about how my butt was dangling out over oblivion. My entire being was focused on keeping my weight against the wall. I crept along like this, moving slowly, but moving. The lip held, and I was getting closer to safety. It wasn’t until I was almost to the far side that my luck ran out. The wall bowed out ever so slightly. It wasn’t much, but it was enough so that I had to move my center of balance back to get around. Bad move. I felt my weight shift toward oblivion. I grabbed for the wall, but my fingers brushed over the rock face uselessly. I was going down.

I didn’t get far. Something hit me on the back. Hard. I carefully peeked to my right and saw that I was close enough to the far side that Loor was able to reach out with her stave and pin me to the wall.

“Ouch,” I said. I didn’t mean it. She had saved my life. Again.

“Keep moving,” she commanded.

Having her hold me against the wall gave me confidence. I quickly got my feet shuffling again, and a few seconds later I was on the far side.

“Thank you,” I said. That hardly covered it, but what else could I say? Saving each other’s lives was getting pretty common. Loor didn’t need to be thanked. She was already on to the next challenge. How strange is that? I could very easily have died just then. But I didn’t, so we had to move on like it was no biggie. That is what my twisted life has become. I shouldn’t complain. At least I’m still around to write about it.

“It seems as though the Rokador abandoned these tunnels and set these traps to stop those who would follow,” Loor said.

“Yeah, us,” I said.

“Or the attacking Batu,” Loor said. “The Rokador are not warriors. In battle the Ghee will destroy them.”

“What about the Tiggen guards?” I asked.

“Bokka would not agree with me, but they are no match for the Ghee. Even if they were, they do not have the numbers we do. If they hope to win a war against the Batu, they will have to do it with cunning, not force.”

I agreed with her. From what I saw, the Tiggen guards weren’t the fighters that the Ghee were. Heck, even I held my own against them. How pathetic is that?

“These traps are a pain for us,” I said. “But they won’t stop an army.”

“Not from what we have seen so far,” Loor said. “We should continue.”

I was right about the map. It showed the location of every booby trap. Without it, we would have been history. Thank you, Bokka. But the markings only showed us where the booby traps were, not how to prevent them from springing. We were nearly skewered about a dozen times over. Rocks crashed down in miniavalanches. One time the ground started to churn below our feet to reveal the sharp teeth of grinding gears that nearly turned us into hamburger. It was like making our way through a medieval video game full of pitfalls and surprises. Only this was no game.

There was something else we saw along the way that I should mention. Whenever we reached one of the larger caverns, on either wall there would be these huge, round metal plates sunk into the rock. They each had to be about thirty feet in diameter. When we saw the first one, I stopped to examine it.

“I do not know what it is,” Loor said before I had the chance to ask. “I have never come this far into Rokador territory.”

I couldn’t help but wonder what they were, and if they might give us trouble. They weren’t on the booby trap map, so chances were they were safe. After passing hundreds of these giant disks, I didn’t know any more about them than after I’d seen the first one. Though my curiosity was still tweaked, the main thing was that they didn’t do us any harm, so I had to ignore them.

We continued walking cautiously for a couple of hours. There’s no way to tell how far we had traveled, since we had to stop often to find ways around the booby traps. The map was really accurate. It showed every intersection, tunnel, and cavern exactly as we were seeing it. At one point we rounded a corner and came upon yet another bizarre sight. It was sitting to the side of a larger cavern, looking totally out of place. It was a giant, silver ball. I was so surprised by seeing this thing, I actually took a step back. It didn’t faze Loor, though.

“That,” she said, “is a dygo.”

Dygo? Oh, right. The tunneling machine. Very cool. I took a closer look at this odd device to see that the silver sphere was actually a passenger cab. It wasn’t much bigger than a golf cart. It looked like it could hold two people, with a clear window that wrapped halfway around. The giant silver ball rested on treads, like a tractor. This thing could move forward, back, or turn in place. But the most amazing thing was the gizmo attached to the outside. It was a six-foot-long drilling device. It was shaped like one of those old-fashioned megaphones-as wide as the sphere at its base and narrowing down to a hollow point that was about a foot across. Along the body of the drill were dozens of rings with various gnarly looking cutting devices. The circular tip had inch-wide teeth that looked like they could drill through pretty much anything.

“That’s how they dig the tunnels?” I asked.

“Yes, though it is one of the smaller vehicles.”

I took a step closer to admire this silver tractor, drill, rock eater, whatever. “I figured they needed something more than shovels to create the underground, but this thing is…is…just killer.”

“Bokka and I used to race dygos through the caverns,” Loor said.

“They let you do that?”

“No.”

Oh. Those wacky kids.

“So you can drive this thing?” I asked.

Loor smiled mischievously, as if remembering some taboo joyrides. “They are quite fast.”

“So let’s jump in and drive to Kidik,” I said. “If it can drill through rock, it’ll definitely protect us against the traps.”

“Unless the trap is another bottomless pit,” Loor said.

“Oh, yeah.” I’d forgotten about that.

We had done all right getting by the booby traps up until that point, so it made sense not to mess with success. We left the cavern with the strange vehicle and continued our journey. Along the way I noticed more dygos. Some were parked in dark caves off to the side. Others were lined up in larger caverns, waiting for the next big project. I was getting very curious about the Rokador. In many ways they were incredibly advanced technologically. Yet they chose to live like moles. I hoped that someday I’d learn more about them-hopefully before they were annihilated by an army of Ghee warriors.

“We are getting close,” Loor finally announced.

I took the parchment and saw that we were only a few turns away from the top of the map. The markings showed that the final tunnel led to an area with no detail. That had to be Kidik. My excitement started to build. Not only were we nearing the end of a dangerous journey, I was dying to see what an underground city would look like here on Zadaa. I tried not to think about the fact that we would be going from the frying pan into the fire. We were Batu. At least Loor was. I was kind of an honorary Batu. Bottom line was, we were the enemy. There was every possibility that the Rokador would capture us and lock us away. Or worse.

“Let’s rest a minute,” I suggested.

We double-checked the map to make sure there weren’t any land mines around, and sat down.

“There’s something we need to talk about,” I said to Loor. “What is that?” she asked.

I had been bothered about something since we decided to leave for Kidik. It was a problem I didn’t know how to handle. Now that we were on the verge of arriving at our destination, it was time that I shared my concern with Loor. “We still have no proof that Saint Dane is controlling events down here,” I said.