City of Fire (City Trilogy (Mass Market)) (28 page)

“Mainlanders,” Pele snorted. She fussed over the board some more, grumbling to herself about sissy tourists. Then she stepped back. “There. I’ve made handholds and toeholds.” She gestured to the indentations she had made in the stone board. “Satisfied?”

“Can’t you do better than that?” Koko wheedled. “After all, you’re a goddess.”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave.” Pele pointed at the way they had come.

Koko glanced anxiously back at the dark tunnel. “I guess it’s worth a try.” Leaning in close to Leech, he added in a whisper, “But sue the old bat for everything she’s got if I fall off.”

Unfortunately for Koko, Pele’s hearing was sharper than he had thought, for she motioned him to very front of the board. “You take the seat of honor.”

Koko held up his forepaws. “Naw, I couldn’t.”

As Pele squinted at Koko, her voice took on a dangerous edge. “But
I
insist.”

“Well, sure, ha, ha.” Koko laughed nervously. “Can’t disappoint a goddess, can I?”

He waddled forward, keeping one eye on the explosive lava pool and the other on Pele. Gingerly he set a hind paw onto the board, which rocked dangerously. “Whoa, can’t you steady this thing?”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Pele said, and shoved Koko onto the board with such force, he slid across it until his head and shoulders plunged into the lava itself.

“Koko!” Leech raced to help his friend.

However, Pele was already hauling Koko out of the lava by his hind paws. “Oof. This is no time to play,
kupua.”

When Koko turned over on his back upon the board, a small fountain of lava rose from his lips. Afterward, he lay panting on the board for a moment and then sat up in amazement, staring at his forepaws and then feeling his shoulders and head. “Hey, I’m not burnt.”

“As long as you have my flower, you’ll be okay,” Pele assured him. At her urging, he put his paws to the holes that she designated. “And hold on tight,
kupua
. Or whoosh”—Pele’s hand pantomimed something flying off—”the lava will sweep you away and you could wind up in the middle of the earth.”

Leech climbed onto the board behind Koko, nearly falling into the lava himself as the slab of stone rocked under his weight. He and Koko held on for dear life when Scirye got on. She managed it without mishap, and as she sat down, she was relieved to see that
Pele had made smaller holes for Kles. Her griffin scrambled down from her shoulder and took his place beside her.

The largest ones were for Bayang, whose balance was so expert that they hardly noticed when she joined them.

“Where are your handholds?” Bayang asked Pele.

“Only you tourists need sissy things like that,” Pele scoffed, leaping nimbly onto the rear of the board.

Even Bayang cried out as the front of the board rose out of the lava and then slapped back down.

Pele was laughing. “Now you get the ride of your life.” Thrusting her hands in front of her, she began to sing. Sometimes the syllables bubbled like the lava around them and sometimes were as harsh as stone grinding on stone, but Scirye thought she could pick out a strange melody the longer she listened to it—as if the song measured itself not in speedy human time but by the slow, patient time of the earth itself.

The lava began to foam about them until the board was bucking up and down. When Scirye glanced behind her, she saw that Pele’s gray hair was flowing about her shoulders and her hands were now making intricate signs in time to her song, sometimes as graceful as a dancer and sometimes as violent as a battling warrior.

The lava roiled all around them, exploding now in big gouts of flame and gas that splattered even the ceiling. The molten rock splashed over them as harmless as ocean surf but the boiling surface seemed to rise all around them.

Frightened, Scirye looked back at Pele again, but she was smiling, holding her hands extended from her sides now for balance. The girl fought against her own sense of panic, telling herself that the goddess would not let them suffocate. She almost screamed as a wave of lava washed over them so that they were surrounded in the bright mudlike stuff. Now she knew how an insect must feel when it was trapped in sap and became amber.

She waited for the lava to drop away but it clung to them, hiding the black cavern walls and entombing them in an incandescent cocoon, as if they had been swallowed by a giant fiery coal. Pele let out a gurgling sound that might have been a whoop as they began to sink.

Scirye held onto the board as they shot downward. The lava roared around her ears as if she were trying to swim in boiling honey. The molten rock was thick enough to cling and resist but not enough to slow down their passage very much.

The board veered sharply to the right, then the left. Though Scirye could not see the goddess, she was sure Pele must be steering them through the currents by shifting her weight like a surfer on her board.

Every now and then through the curtain of lava, Scirye thought she glimpsed the rock wall of a tunnel. But mostly it was just the fluid rock that filled her eyes with an intense light.

They seemed to descend for a long time before they leveled off and suddenly burst into a chamber vast enough to swallow all of San Francisco and Honolulu combined. The lava became like a sea over which they glided. The rumbling noise was even louder now, as if they were near some great engine at the center of the earth.

The board sped up, the nose rising out of the lava. Poor Koko looked miserable. He twisted his head so he could look at his friend. “Okay, I’ve been triple-dipped in lava. You want to swap places with me?”

Scirye realized that even if the lava wasn’t burning him, he was getting the brunt of its force at the front of the board.

“Sure,” the loyal Leech said.

“You stay put, you two,” Pele commanded, and she laughed. “And,
kupua
, maybe next time, you’ll think twice before you call me ‘old bat.’“

“Me and my big mouth,” Koko groaned.

There were dozens of exits from the chamber but Pele guided them confidently to an exit on the right. Once again, the wild ride began as lava engulfed them and the currents swept them along.

Scirye’s arms ached and the trip became even more violent, requiring all of Pele’s skill to maneuver them. She even sent them in a spiral as if they were traveling through a tunnel shaped like a corkscrew.

Finally, though, they seemed to be rising, moving even faster now until they suddenly shot out of the lava and into the air with a gray ugly sky overhead.

Scirye

Scirye exhaled slowly, hardly believing she had survived the wild ride.

Kles’s head turned from examining himself to his mistress. “I think your hair’s singed. Yikes!” he yelped as Pele stamped her foot angrily, making the slab rock up and down like a teeter-totter.

“My charms work good,” the goddess declared.

“Of course, of course,” Kles agreed hastily.

They were floating in a huge lake of lava in the center of the crater that they had seen from the air in the eastern half of Roland’s island. Smoke and steam rose up in streamers, soaring up into the ball overhead so that it was possible to see across the crater. Surrounding them were the crater’s black walls, about a quarter mile away on all sides.

The lava on the shore of the lake had partly cooled and solidified, forming a crust of twisted, jagged stone. But there were plenty
of holes through which smoke and lava oozed in ribbons, mixing with other streams so that the lake’s rim was framed in a flaming net.

About ten yards beyond the lake’s rim rose a ring of cones, some twenty or thirty feet high, from which lava fountained in a brilliant spray of light. It was, thought Scirye, like being surrounded by fireworks or dazzling flowers that were forever changing their shapes.

The lake itself was rougher than anything they’d been on so far. The molten rock churned about them like the waves of a storm-tossed sea. Patches of dark, half-solidified lava rode the surface like crumbling rafts. A constant low, bubbling rumble filled the air, punctuated every now and then by the ugly gurgle of gas exploding, scattering flaming rocks the size of footballs and gobs of lava about.

The group might have been in serious trouble if Pele had not slapped her foot against the surface. “Behave!” Instantly the lava calmed down. “Roland’s wizards are controlling the lava with such a powerful system of spells that even I’m having trouble making the lava do what I want. I’m trying to keep it quiet”—the goddess’s face wrinkled with strain, as if she were wrestling with an invisible opponent—”but the lava keeps wanting to move.”

“We’ve got company,” Bayang said, pointing to the east at a giant woman some twenty feet tall with yellow skin and red hair that had been twisted into braids. On her head was a horned helmet, and she was dressed in coveralls with a leather apron and boots. Fortunately, she had her back to them.

“Muspeli,”
Bayang whispered to her companions. “They’re fire giants from the north. I once had a mission at Muspelheim, their home. Roland must have hired them and brought them here.”

The female fire giant certainly seemed at ease in the midst of the volcano. She swung her huge sledgehammer with quiet efficiency, shattering some lava that had begun to cool and solidify along the sides of a channel. Lava flowed along the huge trench from the lake
and out through a gap where the crater wall had been shattered and the debris heaped on either side. A rolling sheet of steam rose in the distance where the lava met the sea, hardening and widening the island.

In between blows, the giant yelled instructions to a half dozen fire elementals. Larger and more intelligent than the elementals that resided in lanterns, these generally resembled globes with tentacles, though their shape changed for what the task required and they could even take on human shapes if their employer demanded it. Fortunately the entire crew was too absorbed with their tasks to notice the intruders.

Near the fire giant was a fifty-foot fire salamander with black and yellow stripes nosing among the rocks as it looked for some tidbit.
It’s grazing
, Scirye thought,
just like some ox
. Around its great head was a halter of some iridescent metal and slung over its back were panniers of the same material to guard against the smoking debris from the channel.

Bayang reached out cautiously. Scooping up a pawful of the hot mud, she shaped it into a globe. Then, drawing back her arm, she whipped it at the salamander’s rump.

The lava ball didn’t burn the tough hide, but it startled the creature so that with a loud bellow it bolted across the rocks away from them, scattering boulders in her wake like pebbles.

Throwing down her sledgehammer, the fire giant gave chase, calling for the salamander in some foreign tongue while the fire elementals trailed after her.

“Good. That will keep them busy,” Pele said, still laboring to keep the lake flat. With another motion of her hand, a lava current picked up the board obediently and carried it toward the shore.

At the last moment, Pele swung the board broadside so that its side bumped against the lake’s edge. “Be careful. Sometimes the rock crust is thin. If you break through in the wrong place, you can fall
into lava.” Crouching, she held the slab steady against the stony shore. “Get off now.”

Koko tested the surface gingerly before he finally clambered off the board and the others quickly followed. As she climbed onto solid ground, Scirye felt the stone crunch under her feet and saw the hundreds of tiny needles along its surface.

Pele was the last on board the slab and as she got off, she gave it a kick that sent it spinning out onto the lake, which had already begun to boil again. Without Pele’s protective power, their board began to crumble along the edges, its rocky sides melting to join the lava already in the lake.

Pele jabbed a finger at Koko and commanded,
“Kupua
, change into a fire giant.”

Koko turned so that they could not read his lips as he said the spell. His outline blurred and then became a creature like the giant, widening quickly but no taller than he had been as a human boy.