Adept Paws 7: Familiar Faces
#9 of Adept Paws
Adept Paws 7: Familiar Faces
by Tempe O'Kun
The rescue party confronts the kidnappers, but it's not who they thought!
Rea scoffed. "Well, you certainly won't be getting anywhere near my tail."
"A Tale Seeker, not a tail seeker." The otter lashed his tail at that last, illustrating the point. "I'm out in the world to find stories."
The young vixen still regarded him with a quizzical look. This Flots character seemed odd, even for an otter.
"A noble profession, yes-yes-yes!" Chib-bib wove through Rea's crossed arms like an fuzzy eel, lemon-yellow in the evening light. "Perhaps I will like you after all, otter-giant."
"Thank you, stoat-or." The otter bowed, small ears flicking back in deference.
Chib-bib slithered and bounced from her lap to stand on the pommel of Rea's saddle, bowing back with wriggling formality.
Rea leaned back, cupping her ears at the leopardess riding behind them. "Why does he call them by all those different names and we don't?"
Rin flashed a toothy smile from her own shaggy pony and cooed: "We are not beholden to them, foxling. They didn't teach us the secrets of sleeping in a pile or acting like we have no bones."
Flots chittered at her flippant tone, but his comment was preempted by Chib-bib blazing past his nose in a streak of glitter. He sneezed.
"He didn't even say goodbye." Rea watched him go, tail swaying with interest.
The setting sun glowed in the swaying grass as the faerret pitched and fluttered above it. He flew and dove as if possessed.
Jax's father flattened his ears. "Now what is he doing?"
He spiraled under Tara's pony, causing even the druidess to look up from chanting over a pawful of dry spore pods. After completing a frantic half-lap around the group, the faerret chattered in victory, zipping back to dance upon Rea's lap.
The young vixen almost laughed, then met a stern look from Jax's father and remembered where she was. For the hundredth time since leaving the village, Rea tried to think of something to say to Jax's father. Finding nothing, she cleared her throat and turned back to the faerret. "What was all that about?"
"That that was about this this!" He clutched something in his front paws, hind paws pattering about on the fabric of her pants.
Rea blinked. "Ummm... What does that--?"
"Ooh-hoo-hoo-oo!" The faerret held it cupped in his paws, showing it to the others with great care. The green glow of it lit his eager eyes. "Message from the others!"
Rea lifted an ear. It looked like every other lightning bug she'd ever seen, pulsing a cold glow. After looking for a moment, though, she noticed with a gasp that the light it cast on his paws formed deliberate shapes. "What does it say?"
Chib-bib shrugged, a gesture that flowed down his lithe little body. "Don't know." And with that, he gobbled up the glow bug.
"Have you gone mad?" Jax's father hissed. "How are you going to read it now?"
"Not how, how else!" The fey creature pointed to his tummy, which had already begun to glow. Lines of light shimmered through his fur, forming into strange writing. "That's how: this how!" The small creature spread his paws proudly.
Toskun wheeled his pony around to face them. "And?"
The faerret curled down with boneless ease to read his own glimmering tummy. "The bats have not gone where we expected and may have expected where we wanted them to go!"
Rea studied the writing. "Is it in your language? I don't recognize it."
"It is, it is. Yours too, so it's rude not to recognize it."
"What?" She tilted her head, noticing the letters made sense that way. "Oh. It's upside-down."
"Upside-down is right-side-up on your own tummy." Dooking and clucking, Chib-bib did a handstand to allow them to see it upright.
Toskun nodded, stoic, and gripped his sword. "Where then?"
Jax's father grumbled and gripped his reins. "As if he even knows..."
Balanced on one front paw, Chib-bib looked up from grooming his wings. "Tsk-tsk-tsk! Have a little faith in a little fey." He backflipped up the neck of Rea's pony, standing in triumph between its ears. "I shall lead you!"
The whole group watched him, expectant.
"What?" He turned pink in spots under their gaze.
Toskun dipped his muzzle at the faerret. "Lead."
"Oh! Right-right!" With that, Chib-bib engaged in a weasel war dance, shimmying the light down from his tummy to his tail. He seized it in his front paws, spine twisted in an impossible coil, and angled it around like a divining rod. The tail dimmed, flickered, then shone with a brilliant green light as he turned it just the right direction. "This way." He pointed the way with his hind paw across the vast, trackless foothills.
In the fading light, Rea could see the distant outline of a gray stone tower.
* * * * *
A night and a day later, Rea stared up and up and up the side of the tower. Its gray stone walls loomed like a storm cloud fixed to the ground. A massive turret cast a shadow on the empty marketplace around her, suspended on a buttress large enough to hold up her whole village. Up close, she could see the fine layer of grayish moss that covered the stone, blending in almost perfectly.
Never in her life could she have imagined something on this scale, except perhaps the Dragon Tower-- and she'd certainly never looked up from the base of that.
The young vixen only realized how far back she'd craned her neck when she almost toppled over backward. She staggered and stumbled, regaining her footing.
"Steady, foxling." Rin settled a spotted yellow paw on her shoulder. "You remember the plan, yes?"
"The plan?" Her mind reeled, still coming down from the height of the walled tower. She wrapped her cloak tighter against the cold mountain wind. "Yes."
"Good. Keep close." The leopardess's grin gleamed. "This should prove interesting."
Together they watched the doors to the keep, which had to be ten times the height of the people walking past them, made of the same gray stone. Even from a dozen paces away, the scale seemed impossible.
A crack like lightning.
A beam of light and shadow split the doors down the middle as they opened on what had to be vast counterweight hinges. At the base, a striped form, dwarfed by the great doors, ripped them open, slivers of magic sparking off him like a crackling fire. Toskun.
"That's our signal!" Rin called to the others, almost laughing as she jogged forward.
Rea felt her stomach do summersaults, but she followed. She kept pace with Jax's father and the otter.
Through the mighty doors ahead, she could see the inner courtyard surrounding the tower. The empty square allowed her to see a dozen uniformed canine guards come running from one side of the door, spears gleaming sharp in the sunlight.
An instant later, a trio of soft pops. An instant after that, half the marketplace was awash in a mist of spores.
The young vixen held her breath as she entered them, out of instinct. There was no need. She'd played with spore pods as a child. These were just big ones.
Seeing more than a few feet was difficult, even with the vision charm, but she managed to make out the floppy-eared form of Tara. The robed dog casually dropped a few more spore pods, which instantly popped, further thickening the mist.
The sun appeared as a faint, fuzzy ball, vanishing almost entirely in the spores.
Tara eased into stride beside Rea and Jax's father, shaking her head. "Next time, I am making the plan."
Both the fox and the older cat grumbled agreement.
A clamor arose from the guards as they stumbled through the fog, at least one colliding with the wall in a crash of armor on stone.
They came loping up to the badger constable, who had wedged the door open wide enough for two people to walk abreast. The shattered ends of a thick wooden beam hung from either side at chest height, snapped like a dry branch.
"Their wards are down." Toskun cracked a smile, breathing hard.
"So you told me, Boss." The leopardess patted him on the back, careful not to scatter his strength charm as she pushed him along.
Ears down in fear, Rea dashed after them into the inner courtyard. They had scarcely cleared the spore clouds when they came upon a figure standing in the wide, cobblestone plaza. The otter tapped a webbed foot, as if he'd been waiting all day. "I told you we could get in though the servants entrance."
The courtyard sprawled, a landscape of violets, blues, and reds, flowers from every corner of the land plotted and tended alongside a cobblestone plaza. It circled around the entire inside of the walls, surrounding the base of the massive tower.
Rin and Toskun skidded to a stop before the heavy iron portcullis which led to the tower proper. In a heartbeat, they hoisted it up with a scream of metal, shards of their strength charms scattering in smoky trails.
"Come-come-come!" Chib-bib fluttered about with such speed that his wings left slight trails of cinnamon glitter through the swirls of spores. His little spear glinted on his back.
Tara ducked under the iron grate, her face serene except for her swaying silken ears. "Did you spy out the route, Chib-bib?"
The faerret giggled like this was some grand game, slithering between her magicking paws. "Heeheehee! Spying and slying, sneaking and snaking! Yes-yes!"
Slipping under the portcullis with the others, the massive gate crashed down just after Rea's tail; she curled it around herself in fear. No turning back.
The villagers charged away down a corridor so wide, a dozen folk could all run abreast. Rea gripped her bag of spore pods, the canvas digging into her pawpads. It weighed almost nothing, but she knew that one sharp impact would set them all off. She'd had one of the smaller pods go off in her paw as a kit-- not an experience she wanted to repeat.
Thanks to Chib-bib's spying, they knew the corridor had rows of hanging plants. Thanks to Tara's magic, those plants now crackled with growth, choking the hallway in a tangle of flowers and vines as they passed.
Rea's blood shot cold through her body as she looked around. Fine tapestries tumbled from the walls, knocked loose by the spreading vines. The carpet sang its smoothness under her bare hind paws; never in her life had she seen such finery. Too bad this wasn't a social call.
Confused shouting echoed from the rooms they passed, shouts that turned to profanity as the occupants opened their doors to a new and spreading jungle.
Her breath burned in her lungs, burning for a pause.
Her ears cupped forward, listening for trouble.
After endless, breathless scampering, the wide corridor opened to a massive cylindrical chamber, a hall so large the village of Lagan could have fit inside, so tall she had to crane her neck to see the top. Flots scampered forward, chattering in delight at the frescoed walls and towering stained-glass windows.
"You there!" An armored Dalmatian barked, barring their path. "Halt!"
Toskun tossed the dog-guard over his bulky shoulder like a toy, back into the tangle of plants.
A pawful of guards saw this and rallied to confront the villagers. A massive equine soldier clopped forward, his shoed hooves ringing against the stone floor. His thick-muscled arms swung a massive maul around his head. Flots squawked in terror, but all eyes were on Tara. The horse's colossal hammer fell like a comet to crush the druid--
And shattered on the bracer of a snarling leopardess.
The horse stood stunned for a moment, and then Rin knocked his legs out from under him. Smoky lines trailed off her arm where the maul had struck. She loped forward and kicked a fair dent into the horse's helmet. The big equine whinnied in pain and shock, clutching his head as he sprawled on the stone floor.
A pair of mutt guards charged Toskun from either side, while a third leapt onto Rin's back.
Chib-bib whapped the last guard in the nose with his tail, causing the armored lupine a mighty sneeze.
Flots watched with a collection of stunned servants, flanked by chattering, silk-clad fox twins.
Rea exchanged a worried look with Jax's father as they hurled spore pods over their friend's heads. If they got bottled up here, the raid would get violent fast.
A blaze of fiery fur broke through the lines. Rea gasped, frozen. A vulpine guard charged at her, his spear gleaming and his fangs bared. Then he yelped in surprised and twisted around, panicked. The fox hit the floor in a hail of splattering berries.
Rea looked up.
A troupe of faerret warriors, complete with acorn helmets, streaked into the hall from above. Their hind paws held small bags of berries, which their front paws hurled with blurring velocity. There looked to be a half-dozen, but they moved too fast for Rea to be sure. The faerrets set upon the guards-- pelting their pelts with berries, tripping them with long bodies, and bedeviling them with tiny spears.
A teal and gold faerret commanded the others about with her dandelion-bannered spear. "Cover the giants' escape from their jam! Cover the other giants in jam!"
The villagers skirted the faerret-routed guards. Pandemonium spread, echoing across the hall as courtiers and servants scattered with yips and squeaks, hurried along by the occasional hurled berry or exploding spore pod.
Chib-bib, an ornate dinner fork replacing the spear he'd lost in the battle, fluttered before them. "This way, giants! Quick-quick-quick, not slow!" He led them to what looked like a wooden porch recessed against one of the walls, a porch with ropes running out the top. He danced and dooked on the railing, twirling between the polished brass levers. "Inside! Inside!"
"What now?" Toskun growled, the last one inside.
"Level the lever to rise up-up-up through levels!" The little faerret ratcheted his body taller with every "up."
The badger constable hesitated only a moment before pressing down the lever. Rea felt a sickening surge of vertigo as the entire porch plummeted upward from the floor of the hall. She screamed, clutching to Tara's robes, the druidess viewing this all with cool interest.
Flots clucked and hopped from foot to foot, clapping his webbed paws. "Oh, how exciting! A lift!"
The young vixen summoned the courage to look up from the robes to the floors whizzing past. A thin trail of glitter past the railing made her look up. A faerret vanguard fluttered up alongside the lift. Their bodies undulated in time with the bells of alarm ringing throughout the tower.
Chib-bib eeled his way to Toskun's shoulder and shouted into his ear. "Stop starting and start stopping!"
The old badger dutifully obeyed and reset the brass lever with a grunt. A viper hiss signaled the stop of the lift. Jax's father threw a pawful of spore pods to scatter the onlookers on their level. They rushed onto the landing. As the fog cleared, Rea looked over the rail. A hundred feet below, a dog in golden armor, a captain perhaps, rallied the guards and ordered them to the other two lifts.
"Dump the spore pods over the rail, foxling." Rin crooned, her toothy smiling widening. "We won't be coming back this way."
Both Rea and the older cat upended their canvas sacks into the architectural chasm from which they had just emerged. The brown-green pods tumbled, shrinking away as they fell past countless floors, before exploding with distant pops. The bottom three levels of the tower filled instantly with a gray haze of fungus spores, though by now the floor lay abandoned, save for the brindled shepherd barking orders. All the others had either taken cover, or were charging upstairs to find the invading villagers. Rea's tail bristled at the thought.
To the other side of the landing, the other two lifts whirred to life on oiled wheels. No doubt filled with guards. Rea gasped, her paw falling to her whittling knife. That's it! She raced past the leopardess and jumped up on the ledge, jamming her knife into the nearer lift's pulley. Grinding on the knife, the lift shuddered to a stop.
The young fox leapt down from the railing, shaking. "Stop the other lift!"
Jax's father snatched a candlestick off a nearby table and jammed it in just like she'd done. The pewter sparked and moaned against the whirling rope, but it eventually stopped it.
"That ought to stop them!" Rin laughed. "Quick thinking, foxling."
"Yes! Quite dramatic." Flots applauded, his thick tail swaying as he surveyed the scene. "I'll have to remember this part when I tell it back home."
A loud click drew Rea's attention. At one side of the landing, Jax's father knelt before a door, working intently at something. She cupped her ears forward in interest and padded over to see.
Just then, one of the great stain-glass windows of the tower exploded inward. An ear-splitting caw echoed through the tower. A great gray falcon flew in, a rider on its back. Unfazed by the shower of glass, the bird dove into the spore-mists, emerging a second later with a figure in its talons. The guard captain!
The villagers wasted no time. Rin grabbed Rea by the shirt and hauled her along the semi-circle of landing between themselves and the door Jak's father had just opened.
The massive falcon circled up the central shaft, its broad wings shining a dizzying spectrum of color in the light of the stained glass. Higher and higher it flew, wings beating hard, swirls of spores blown asunder, until it came level with the villagers. At that moment, the bird flapped its colossal wings, blowing Rea off her feet.
As the fox scrambled back into a run, she watched in shock as the brindled shepherd captain was thrown from the falcon's grasp. The canine sailed over the banister, landing with a roll on the stone floor behind her. In an instant, he rose, snapping and snarling, to his feet, golden armor shining. A sword flashed to his paws. She needed no further encouragement.
Slipping on the carpet once, the young vixen ran on all fours through the open door.
Toskun slammed it after her. Jak's father bolted it. The shepherd slammed against it, swearing.
"Are you well, Rea?" Tara helped the girl to her feet.
"Yes, I'm fine." She looked to her left and right. "Where's Flots?"
* * * * *
Flots giggled and clapped his webbed paws, watching the brindled shepherd slam against the door. "Wonderful! This will make for an excellent story. I just have to find a way in." He padded down a side passage in the general direction, adjusting his belt over around his slender waist. Doors lined the hallway in regular intervals. He picked one, found a nicely furnished, but empty room, then picked another.
The door flew open, pressing him against the wall. A dozen canine guards rushed out, snarling and baying. Since very few people bother to look behind doors they open, none of them noticed the Seeker of Tales. He, however, noticed them and decided to hurry up or he'd miss all the action. He spun around, scampering right into a freestanding lantern. The glass cask of unlit oil hit the floor, shattering with an incredible amount of noise.
He froze mid-strive, paws in the air, hearing the dogs howling back toward him. He backed up against the wall, seeing no choice but to surrender. Oh well. Perhaps prison will make for an interesting story...
The first of the dogs turned the far corner. He closed his eyes.
A paw seized on the scruff of his neck and yanked him backward. He fell with a squeak onto a carpeted floor.
Above him, a beautiful corgi girl closed the door and turned to face him, her toga swirling, her fur shining golden. Her big ears perked up, blushing, as she glanced down at him. Her fingers steepled, and a wave of calm seemed to run through her small body. Her blue eyes opened and she looked to him with quiet intrigue. "What's your name?"
"Flots." The otter answered without hesitation. He lay, tail at her feet, too stunned to stand. Outside the door, the guards' barking faded.
"Okay, Flots." A slight wag tugged the back of her garment back and forth, almost hypnotic. "You're going to give me a very good reason why I did that."
As he stared into the depths of her curious blue eyes, he knew he'd found the best story of all.
* * * * *
Rea wrung her hands. "Do you think he'll get out okay?"
Toskun growled, adjusting his sword. "He got in."
I hope he's okay. Then again, he talked us into taking him...
"Dad! Rea!"
She spun around to a ball of striped orange fur colliding with her. Pointy, triangular ears brushed under her chin. Green, slitted eyes flecked with soft tears at the corners regarded her with infinite warmth.
"Jax!" She hugged him close, savoring his scent for a moment, then released him so his father could do the same. "Are you okay? Did they hurt you?"
"Hurt us? No." His ears flicked in confusion. Stars and sky, how she had missed his ears flicking. "We're in the middle of tea."
His father and Tara asked as one: "Tea?"
Only then did Rea look around. Not just another hallway or side passage; this room held a great table with a dozen windows pouring light upon it. The five other adepts hurried from their plates of cookies and tea, past where Rin and Toskun held a pair of dogs at swordpoint. The first stood short and plump, a sheet-like garment wrapped around her golden body. The second loomed tall and thin, fine clothes draped over his lanky body, but not concealing a familiar brindle pattern. Neither moved, though the tall one spoke.
"Who are you people?"
"Stay back and stay quiet, friend." Rin gestured with her curved blade, a charming purr to her voice. "We're just here to take back our adepts."
"Your adepts!" The tall dog almost laughed in relief. His companion stayed quiet and composed, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He swept his paws at the barred door. "And you had planned to just fight your way back out?"
"No-no-no!" A side window opened, admitting seven snickering faerrets, Chib-bib among them. After wheeling about the room for a moment, they settled onto the table. Chib-bib waved his silver fork at the window. "We will be a slide and be slid upon by sliders!"
The other faerrets nodded and chittered in agreement, more than one claiming a fork of their own as spoils of war. The others performed belly dances of victory.
The pounding on the door grew louder, with one voice calling for an axe. The villagers edged toward the open window.
The brindled dog whined in frustration. "Wait!"
Toskun snarled. "No."
"You don't understand. There's been a mistake!"
"Indeed." Rin hissed as the faerrets prepared for their maneuver. "Your master's mistake was stealing our children. If he trifles with us again, he will find less mercy."
"I'm not a servant!" The dog stepped forward, ignoring the sword tips that nicked his silken vest. He lifted his paw, turning it so they could see a fine, jeweled ring, along with a second, plainer one. "I am King Alaster, Lord of this Citadel."
There you have it. Do let me know what you think.
-Tempo