Lore of the Underlings: Episode 4 ~ The Letting Pen Read online

warm, sweet, summer, butter yellow - soft and pure as a pixie's whisper promising gold to come. Though those riches came at the cost of magic, which fled the advancing sun.

  The cowardly moon turned tail and ran too.

  Now all was bathed in a whole new light revealing much before concealed. A naked truth not so poetic, but plainly worth a look.

  "What the heck?!"

  John Cap's sharp eyes opened wide as he pointed due north of Morio's head. "Where did all those come from?"

  The cause of the young man's sudden surprise was the sight of a hundred vines, which had just appeared from out of nowhere where before there had been but one. They hung down in lengths all over the map as if snipped by a mischievous child - bobbed for no obvious reason or rhyme - though most were still furry like the first. And many of them were also damp with an ugly sheen in the new-found light or dangled dark drops from fraying ends that fell into old, moldy rings of black-green. The tipsy floorwood, already unsteady, was littered with these soggy spots, moist patches of rot that smelled of must. They let off a perfume of decay that mingled with some other secret stink and turned the air pungent and thick. It was hard not to choke from a whiff of it.

  Both men turned their gaze from here to look highward and trace the odd cords on their climb to the ceiling. Up, up, up they spun, one after another, by hair-raising turns each rose to the roof. Their spiral locks in twisted braids made mock of a circular stairway to heaven.

  At last by accord were all ascended, man vicariously through vine. And there they discovered a webwork of cracks that resembled a mapmaker's handicraft? a plotting of paths on the chamber roof by a million imagined milky ways now aglow from the honey sun pouring in? like long-sought trade routes blazed in the sky to dreamlands of spice and gilded things.

  The travelers crossed them by mind's eye to reach the far wall where their third yet slept. But descending that side they first found something fearsome hanging above her head. Another deathly array of spikeful machines - more morbid than those they saw before. Devices that few but a devil could love.

  Morio mumbled soft worries aloud. "Be careful Miss Vaam? something looms?"

  John Cap, however, did not seem concerned. Clearly he had other matter in mind.

  He stepped toward the space she displaced and spoke, his voice turned a tender hush. "It's morning Vaam. Time to find your way back."

  A thin stream of blue, one last lingering moonbeam, seemed locked upon the young woman's face. As if from another world it spilled to show her in some form of sleep. She sat on edge of a tiny platform - a place just big enough for one - back straight, palms up, legs crossed and tucked, pilgrim-style like those who quest for blessing, her eyes wide open yet all but missing. They were a blur as though submerged and fading off into a distance. In fact her whole shape looked drowned under water, submersed in a small oval pool around her. She floated below the surface of it. It rippled, distorting her form.

  Still, she stirred not. She made no wake.

  The vines, though, went to wag like a hundred tongues talking - a chorus commemorating the scene. Or ten tens tellers of a tale, whispering words such as these as they swung:

  Astride like a knight rides in the day

  This prince of light our treasured sun

  So charming in his starry armor

  Chasing the gray girl's blues away

  A golden kiss upon those lips

  The purple of sleepy beauty

  Then just as the moody blue was gone, she blinked and her handsome friend could see a pair of emeralds, lucent green, rising from the liquid deep. She broke the surface with a shudder and uttered the slightest sigh.

  The young man looked caringly in her eyes. "I'm sorry," he mouthed, moving near to her.

  She drank in the air then exhaled long and slow, as if she'd been holding her breath forever.

  "It's alright," she said to reassure him.

  The shape-shifting pool had receded behind her, although a trace of it remained. The hint of a faint gray glow.

  John Cap's eyes said he had more to say. He started, "I missed?" but stopped himself there.

  He saw that Vaam's thoughts were still elsewhere. A distant lost home. A time slipped away.

  In mindless motion she reached for her throat and clutched at something her high collar hid. She smiled when her fingers found it. And a calm washed over her flawless face in a way that drained her cares away and revealed how very innocent and young she really was.

  Then Vaam gently drew from her hiding place a most unusual necklace, and her calm overcame the room.

  It was a pendant about the size of an eye, a glossy object of reddest rosewood, mounted on a cord of hide from the side of an animal skinned and dyed. The icon was smooth looking worn from time in the palms of many possessed. The cord was crude against her skin.

  To the naked eye the strange figurine mocked the shape of a priestly being - behooded, kneeling, arms concealed - like a sacred relic from holier times or hallowed jewel baptized in blood, so ruby-enrobed it was. But who could tell with so much wear?

  Vaam herself left no room for doubt. She cradled the thing in her slender hand and felt it with her fingertips. It looked like she hoped to coax magic from it or perhaps just reminders of the past. What came out was a mingling of them both, here and now spellbound in her grasp.

  Maid of mirage she was. Shy by trials yet untold. Still statuesque even as she sat.

  Absently she closed her eyes and quietly began to sing. She sang a beautiful, haunting song? the spirit of a shadow's dream? a shapeless, enrapturing melody that wrapped the mind in mystery? the echo of some ancient lullaby calling from deep inside?

  O you my little love, my child

  Were born a flower of the field

  Your perfumed hair so soft, so sweet

  The gold of summer long adored

  Adorned in ribbons, O yet wild

  Bright-eyed, no darkness have you seen

  But kissed of sun, caressed in rain

  Brushed by the wind upon the field

  My ever love, my only love

  My child, my flower of the field

  They say your petals ride the wind

  One and a thousand leagues away

  My ever love, my only love

  My heart, my flower of the field

  They say your petals sail the sea

  Two and two thousand leagues away

  My ever love, my only love

  My soul, my flower of the field

  They say your petals grace a land

  Three and three thousand leagues away

  Tonight my love, the stars above

  Show me my flower of the field

  Your petals cast across the sky

  Long gone my love yet ever here

  As her ballad's last notes drifted off in the air, Vaam pressed her lips to the toy statuette and tucked it inside the neck of her frock, hidden away and safe again. Then she raised her downcast eyes.

  "Tell me, John, of all I've missed."

  But he'd been charmed speechless, so all enthralled.

  And Morio's face was wet with warm tears.

  "O hearthland! Dear Merth! You've taken me back. Beckoned again to the days of my youth and the fair, green farmlands where we played - I see them even now in sounds, reborne homeward bound by your incantation."

  Morio wiped his chubby cheeks and pressed both eyes with the heels of his hands. His face was red when he pulled them away.

  Vaam peered at him. "Are you unwell, Uncle M?"

  Morio let go a few more tears but he was less wistful now than proud. "I cry for my beloved country? Oh child, Miss Vaam, so pure of heart, your hymn has made mine beat again refilled with the blood of a native son. It pours from your voice and through my veins, unmeasured by rhythm or rhyme."

  "It's a song my father sang to me? at bedtime as I fell asleep? wherever we hid that night?" Vaam's voice faded off into soft nothingness, as if drained of all it had to give.

  "Your father,
your father," he nodded his head. "My all-but-brother and dearest friend. The bravest heart of the Underland and comrade-in-ogs so true? Oh how I miss him so."

  "Yes, Uncle M. I miss him too."

  John Cap briefly touched her hand and found his voice again. "We learned some more about this place and these folks or whatever they're called. They're tough. They know what hard times are for sure - the elderly ones especially. Their story and how they got here is good. A long, hard road but they survived?"

  "Even thrived," chimed a cheery Morio, heartily joining in. "Yes, a long and winding road of death that left just the fittest alive at the end to build this stronghold on a hill. We're all but experts now Miss Vaam. The locked door, it turns out, is the key to knowledge. Come and I shall show you?"

  "In time, Uncle M, in time. But mostly we must know if your findings alter the map of our mission at all. From what you both have said I say not."

  Vaam unwound her long crossed legs and shifted position with ease in place, half springing up to crouch a-heel. Something in the way she moved seemed to prove her a creature of force and grace, a little cat-like in a way.

  The narrow platform she made her lair was but the one flat spot in the room. Nothing else was on the level.

  "Remember that I was here once before - a fortnight ago, though not for long - and imagined our plan of attack based on that?"

  "No, no indeed! Yes of course I recall. But, just for the record, how did that go?"

  Vaam gave him half a grin. "Just for the record?" she began. "Under cover of dark on the stormiest night I came to scout this settlement out and unlock its secrets for our quest. The rain and the hour had driven all in, whether gentle folk or beastly men, so