Alex Bell - Fighting with fire

‘You’ve seen them before?’ Lex asked.

‘You get ’em out in the desert sometimes. Nasty little buggers they are. Dying out now, thank the Gods. Ain’t seen one in years.’

‘Let’s hope there aren’t too many more of them,’ Lex said as they went on. He knew from past experience just how much damage one fire-breathing rabbit could do and he did not fancy being stuck down here with one, let alone more.

‘Are they carnivorous?’ Lex asked, remembering that first time he’d come across one on the enchanter’s boat and it had tried to chew through his boot.

‘Oh yeah,’ Jesse replied. ‘They’d gladly make a feast of you if you let ’em.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Lex said, a horrible, terrible, awful suspicion suddenly occurring to him. ‘What if… What if there isn’t any dragon?’

‘What makes you say that?’ Jesse asked, frowning. ‘It killed all those men, didn’t it?’

‘Did it? No one ever saw the attacks, did they? They only found the charred bodies later.’

‘Yeah, but… those bodies were blackened to a crisp. Half eaten most of the time, too. No way one little bunny could do that, even if it could breathe fire.’

‘Not one perhaps,’ Lex replied. ‘But if there was a pack of them..’

‘But the fire-bunnies are dyin’ out,’ Jesse said, starting to sound a little desperate. ‘Everyone says so. Besides, other miners reported havin’ seen the dragon.’

‘Well, of course they did,’ Lex replied dismissively. ‘Down here in the mines, getting increasingly scared, with more and more people dying, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t convinced he’d seen the dragon at some point. Who knows? perhaps a few of them really did catch a glimpse of one of the fire-bunnies. They would probably have been genuinely sure that it was a dragon they’d seen. Besides, if miners were being attacked in the tunnels whilst they worked then how would a dragon even fit into those narrow corridors? How would it be able to move around the mine at all?’

‘Some of the descriptions are quite detailed though,’ Jesse pointed out? although he sounded anything but certain.

‘But none of them match,’ Lex muttered. ‘Although I suppose it would’ve been dark down here and they would have legged it as soon as they saw anything. Hopefully, there are fire-breathing rabbits and a dragon down here.’ That sounded odd, given the circumstances, so Lex added, ‘Well… you know what I mean.’

‘I sure do,’ Jesse replied. ‘I don’t much fancy wanderin’ round this old mine looking for a dragon that don’t even exist, and maybe never did.’

‘You and me both,’ Lex grunted.

The problem, though, was that sending players down to an abandoned mine to slay a dragon that wasn’t real sounded exactly like the sort of stupid thing Lady Luck would do. Lex couldn’t help wondering what would happen to the Game if that was the case. How would they decide the winner if the third round was one that couldn’t possibly be won?

After about twenty minutes of navigating their way through the corridor, Lex was starting to worry that it didn’t lead anywhere useful at all. The mine was unfinished? for all they knew, this corridor would suddenly come to a dead end.

But then they came out into the cavern.

As previously stated, there is more than one way to wake up a glow-canary. Shouting and poking will do the trick. But another thing that works like a charm is to bring a glow-canary that’s already awake into close proximity with sleeping ones. Something about the light the awake one sheds will rouse the sleeping ones within seconds.

Jesse and Lex, therefore, had to shield their eyes because, after a good half hour spent wandering the dark mine, they were not prepared for the bright light of three hundred or more glow-canaries. The cages hung from the cavernous ceiling far above them and the light illuminated one of the largest rooms Lex had ever seen in his life. It was massive? and it was only because there were so very many glow-canaries that they were up to the task of illuminating it at all.

The room contained a railway track. Or, at least, the hub of one. The track ran out of the room in several different directions. Presumably, the little carriages had been intended to transport equipment in and gold out. But they had never got very far with the actual mining and Lex assumed that the railway, too, was unfinished.

He and Jesse moved cautiously into the cavern. They walked past laid and unlaid track, and a couple of steam trains with names like I. M. Daring. A multitude of rusty tools lay around on the gravelly floor, too. There was something a little sad about the abandoned scene? with all that stuff just left down there to rot. When the great gold rush had started, bright-eyed, hopeful people had flocked to Dry Gulch thinking that they were going to make a fortune when, in actual fact, they had met only with disaster, death and destruction before they were finally forced to close up the mine, cut their losses and flee.

Jesse and Lex passed through the cavern at a brisk walk. The canaries had started to talk to each other and that worried Lex. Whilst they may have only been chirping softly, the fact was that there was at least one fire-bunny down here and, possibly, a dragon as well that might be alerted to their presence by the noise.

‘Damned birds,’ Lex muttered under his breath.

At least the fact that the mine was unfinished meant that it shouldn’t take too many hours to explore it. If they covered every scrap of ground and failed to find a dragon then they would know that it was useless.

They were about halfway across the cavern when there was a dull rumbling. They could feel it as well as hear it. The very walls and floor seemed to tremble and bits of rubble fell from the ceiling. Now that sounded more like a dragon and this cavern would certainly be big enough for one. From the sounds of it, the thing was gigantic and, suddenly, the thought of attempting to kill it seemed… well… completely and utterly absurd. Lex was a clever thief, not a warrior. How the heck was he supposed to manage it?

But then the rabbits came. They poured out of the tunnel from which Lex and Jesse had entered, as well as the other three tunnels alongside that one. Perhaps, back in the days that the mine was being built, there had just been a small pack of fire-bunnies. Now there were hundreds. And hundreds. And hundreds of them. And they were all swarming directly towards Jesse and Lex, some of them even shooting little plumes of fire from their mouths in their excitement.

‘Oh my Gods,’ Lex whispered.

He and Jesse spun on the spot and ran along a line of track towards one of the exits, out of the cavern. A single cart was perched in the dark arch, poised to run along the track sloping downwards into the next room.

‘Get in the wagon!’ Lex shouted, leaping in.

‘Get in?’ Jesse gasped, aghast. ‘Have you gone barmy? We don’t know where that track goes! It ain’t safe! It might not even hold our weight-’

‘Get in here right this second or I’m leaving without you!’ Lex snapped. ‘I don’t care where it goes! We can’t escape those things on foot and they’ll be on us any moment now!’

Jesse glanced over his shoulder. And Lex took the opportunity to grab his arm and drag him bodily into the cart. The cowboy lost his balance and flipped into it head first. There was barely room for the two of them and the force of Jesse’s bulk landing inside was all that was needed to push the cart forwards on to the track.

As it turned out, the next room wasn’t a room so much as another huge cavern, even bigger than the first one. As before, the caged glow-canary? still clutched in Lex’s arms? set off all the rest. There were hundreds of them hanging from the ceiling again. No doubt they had been brought in to illuminate the area so that the workmen could see the monstrosity they were building. It looked like some sort of wooden roller coaster. Tracks on stilts weaved everywhere within the great space, from all directions, branching off this way and that to other parts of the mine.