19

Countermeasures

Jeshudassik rested his wrists on his knees and focused on his breathing. As he inhaled, he imagined blue air—bringing peace and tranquility into his body, and as he exhaled he imagined red air—pushing away stress and negativity. The sunlight felt warm on his shoulders and he soaked it in.

Oddly, he didn't miss it as much as he thought he would. No, he did miss it, but he didn't need it. It didn't fill some void in his being.

The mouseling crawled onto his lap and curled into a ball. Jeshu opened his eyes and observed the way the sun lit up the white patches of her fur.

He sat atop a spacious, comfortable mushroom cap—a deep eggplant color with green scales—beneath the Craters in the swamp. It was the closest he could get to the surface and it felt... cozy.

Without constant communion with the sun, he had grown distant from some of his druidic powers. On the other hand, he felt something new stirring inside of him. A kinship with the dark and the rock and the loam. A closeness he never felt to them on the surface. But there was life and energy in the dark—just different. The dryad wondered if recharging in the sun might push him away or suppress this affinity.

He felt a shift in the mouseling's breathing and knew that she had fallen asleep. The druid placed a rough hand on her neck and scratched between her ears. Even in her sleep, she repositioned to give him a better angle. Her back leg began to kick.

As he petted the mouseling softly, the druid looked up at the sky. Through each crater he saw only a spot of it, like peering through a looking glass, which made it not feel like the sky at all. It took away its breadth, its expansiveness—it bottled it up! One could not experience the sky by seeing a piece of it.

Patches' ear twitched suddenly and she opened an eye as a black speck drifted down on a sunbeam and landed before her. Slowly, its wings disappeared beneath a red, spotted shell, and the tiny beetle began to wander along the top of the mushroom.

Patches perked up and lighted from the druid's lap, circling to observe the beetle from behind.

Jesh watched in amusement as she followed the tiny speck.

"It's called a ladybug."

Patches looked up only long enough to register what he had said then turned back to the ladybug, fascinated by her incredible find. "It's got little black pips," she whispered. "Like on dice."

Jeshu smiled and nodded.

"What does it eat?" She asked curiously.

"Aphids. Er... a very small insect. Smaller than a ladybug. I imagine it eats other things too. Maybe it smells something nearby."

Patches looked around the top of the mushroom cap then ran to the edge and peeked down at the stem of the next stalk over. "I want to keep it."

"It is probably resting, but then it will fly away. We don't have a way to keep it."

Patches looked down, thinking, then retrieved the small bag from her pouch—the one with the green ribbon. She opened it and pulled out a tiny glass jar with a cloth lid secured with twine. She removed the cloth.

"Where'd you get that?" the druid asked in astonishment.

Patches pulled the jar to her side, covering it with her paws. "I didn't steal it..."

"No, I don't think you stole it. I meant... I don't understand where it came from. That bag was flat before you opened it, and then you took out a round container."

Patches looked down at the bag, once again flat, and pulled at her whiskers. "Um... that's not weird," she explained. "It does that all the time."

"But it is weird. That's unusual," the dryad said. "What other things have you found in that bag?"

The mouseling squinted, thinking hard and said, "A rock... two rocks—one was on a ring, but it fell. A pair of boots..." She thought another moment and opened her pouch, rifling through her trinkets. She produced a dried green leaf, wrinkled and ground down to nearly nothing but stem.

"And this!" She held the remains of the leaf up proudly. "But it was on the surface, so that's not weird."

"But did you ever put a leaf in there?" the dryad asked. "Or did you just open it one day and find a leaf?"

"I just found a leaf. But a lot of things show up in my bag that I didn't steal. Like Cricket's blue marble. And Raccoon's dice... and Oydd's scalpel was in my hole, but I didn't put it there."

Jeshu regarded the mouseling carefully, discerning whether she told the truth—or rather, whether she believed she was telling the truth.

At length he spoke to her softly. "This is different." He pointed at the bag with the green ribbon. "I believe this bag is magical. I can almost sense it, I think. But Oydd would be able—"

"Don't tell Oydd!" Her voice cracked, and the mouseling looked like she was about to cry.

"Why?" Jeshu asked gently.

"He'll take it..." she clutched the bag tightly, rumpling it in her paws.

Jeshu looked down on her patiently. Just as the ladybug lifted its wings to fly away, Patches cupped her glass jar over the insect. It flew into the wall of the container with a soft clink, then latched onto the glass and walked along the side in confusion. The mouseling placed the cloth on the bottom and secured it with the wire. She then placed the whole bottle back in her pouch.

"Okay..." the dryad promised. "I won't tell Oydd." As an afterthought, he added, "Let's see if we can find it some food."

Jeshu ambled to the edge of the mushroom cap and lowered himself onto the top of the next highest mushroom, and then again down to the next. The mouseling leapt to a nearby stalk and quickly scurried to the swamp floor, circling as she climbed down.

By the time the druid reached the ground, Patches was already running about looking under rocks and through weeds for suitable bugs to feed her pet.

Nearby stood a contingent of lizardmen, waiting just out of the sunlight. The rudra had insisted Jeshu take a guard, stating they were basically at war.

Jeshu saw some new blooms—primrose from the surface, whose seeds had fallen through the craters and landed in the lush soil below. He wandered over and brushed aside the petals until he found a cluster of aphids. Then he extended his hand and let a few crawl onto his fingers.

Just as he was about to call the mouseling over, he saw a white bird—a heron or an egret—glide down from above, flitting its wings to slow as it landed in the shallows of the crisp, underground lake.

He paused to watch as the bird craned its neck and called—a short, raspy squawk. A heron, Jeshu decided, based on the coloration. Then, as it looked behind, toward the shore for predators, a young swamp dragon lurched from below and snapped it up, chomping twice as it hopped from the water with a wing and several loose feathers protruding from its wide mouth. The swamp dragon swallowed, then filled its throat sac and began to croak.

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*****

"No, not like that!" Cricket cried in frustration.

His lizardman partner paused the fight and looked over to Scorpion for clarity.

"Don't ask me!" the ratling griped.

Cricket took a deep breath. "He needs to ready the next attack while he's striking. It can't just be strike, pause, strike."

"Why are you both looking at me? Tell Jiukec!"

Cricket looked back at the lizardman. "I just need you to attack faster. Forget about defense. Just come at me as fast as you can, with combos. I need to practice blocking."

Jiukec nodded and started to attack again.

"Too slow! Faster..."

The lizardman increased his speed.

"Aim at my head more. Make me scared. This is too easy."

The lizardman hissed.

"I would be upset too," Scorpion commented. "It's unclear what you want, and he needs to train too."

"I need to train more," Cricket grumbled.

"Why? I've never seen you lose a fight."

Cricket groaned. "Just trust me..."

"Well, I don't think he can fight the way you want. I don't think I could. We can't help if we don't know what's going through your head."

Cricket sighed. "I need to learn to block more attacks at once. When I'm training... I'm always fighting someone who knows less than me. I want to be able to fight someone who's better than me. Faster than me."

"That doesn't describe anyone in the Warrens," Scorpion said bluntly.

"I want to be ready for attacks I don't expect, like a kick to the head."

"No one here can kick that high."

"But you can strike at my head. And she used weird strikes, like hitting with elbows and knees, and... she even spat at me. So many things were coming at my face that I couldn't think."

"Who?" Scorpion asked again.

"What I need is to... Scorpion, can you and Jiukec attack me at the same time?"

The lizardman nodded.

Scorpion drew three knives, wrapping one in his tail. "I won't go easy on you. You won't be able to block everything."

"Perfect," Cricket replied.

Scorpion grinned.

*****

The rudra hurried, excited, down to his laboratory. He nearly fumbled with the keys to the door and left it open, rushing past the library, and placed a bottle of bluish liquid on his desk. He scoured the shelves of the morgue until he found a suitable container and the flask of remaining troll's blood then set them next to the blue liquid.

Oydd poured several drops of troll blood into the empty container and then an equal amount of blue. The mixture turned instantly black. At first it fizzled so violently that he considered the solution unstable, but soon it calmed to a smooth, muddy fluid.

The mixture began to pool toward him, climbing up the glass wall. Oydd gave it a twirl. However, it reformed quickly and began to ooze toward him again.

He held his hand against the glass, and then the other hand—the one with the obsidian ring—but it responded to each hand equally. This was not dark magic, but the changeling blood bonding with the troll's blood—reacting to its regenerative nature.

And yet, he wondered if it were drawn to the life energy in his hands out of kinship or malice. Did it simply react to him, or hunger for him?

Oydd filled a syringe with the solution then walked to the corpse of a deep goblin and injected the mixture into its veins.

While he waited, he began an autopsy on the fresh demon corpse. Without the red glow of Agoth, the dark shell appeared more blue than purple.

He waved a hand and the orb of invisibility flew from its place on the shelf to hover over the corpse. The magic from the orb barely affected the demon's skin, only turning it translucent, rather than invisible, and had no effect at all on the tough plates. The substance was far too tough to cut with a scalpel, so Oydd slid the blade beneath the sheets of armor to cut them free from the leathery skin then pried them up with a pair of forceps.

He removed a plate of armor from the face, where he normally would have expected eyes. But beneath the covering he found what more closely resembled ear canals, proceeding all the way down to the septum, and an enlarged cochlea more sophisticated than anything he'd seen in a bat. The nasal cavity and other olfactory structures appeared underdeveloped, which meant the creature relied almost entirely on sound to sense its surroundings. Presumably to hunt.

The deep goblin corpse at his side suddenly inhaled. Oydd set down his instruments and smiled. His theory was correct. The changeling blood prevented the host from rejecting the troll blood infusion. Now he only needed to balance the proportions.

*****

As soon as they returned, Patches hurried to her hole. She dug through her stash until she found Oydd's favorite scalpel. She placed the jar with the ladybug and the aphids on the ground then pressed it down into the mud to prevent it from falling over.

She pretended not to hear Oydd's voice calling after her.

The mouseling opened the jar then pricked the tip of her finger with the scalpel and squeezed a single drop of blood into the container. Carefully, she returned the cloth lid then lifted the glass to observe the beetle.

"Come on, Pip. Eat just a little..."

The ladybug sat as still as a frightened turtle, its legs tucked beneath it. It showed no interest in the aphids crawling along the bottom of the jar looking for an escape route. One of the aphids plodded through the blood then climbed over the ladybug's shell, but still it cowered unmoving.

Patches withdrew around the corner then poked her head back just enough to see the jar. She rested her chin in her paws and waited. After several long minutes, the ladybug began to crawl about, investigating.

Though he showed no interest in the smeared blood, he did begin to eat one of the blood-covered aphids. The mouseling waited until he was half-finished, then scurried up to the jar and recited the words Licephus had taught her. A purple mist swirled in the bug's teensy eyes.

Patches pressed her nose against the glass. "Now we are bound to each other, Pip!"

*****

"They've desecrated another shrine," Oydd said. "And yet the dhampiri seem unconcerned. Won't they defend their god? I certainly don't want to do it!"

"Perhaps they cannot," Jeshu suggested. "The clerics control the church, and their power is waning with each ruined shrine."

"And Bale's grows stronger. Which makes the cultists more of a nuisance with each passing day."

“Also, the dhampiri are not as organized as they appear," Jeshu added. "When they want something done, they bark orders to us slaves, and then seldom even follow up."

"I expect Ghajan and Licephus to follow up," Oydd grumbled. He considered the dryad a moment, then asked, "Why do you stay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Here. Why do you stay here? You could flee to the surface."

"I know the consequences."

"I don't believe it," the rudra pressed. "I'm in charge of runaways, and I tend to let them go. Mostly because Cricket used to be in charge of pursuit, and he refuses now. And my masters are distracted."

Jesh breathed deeply. "It is... a good time if I wanted to leave. But my village on the surface was destroyed by the dhampiri—my brothers captured and sold. I imagine my friends are down here somewhere."

"So you want to stick around for what? Revenge? To potentially rescue your friends?"

"No. It's more than that. The Warrens... feel like home now. I have been transplanted, and returning to the surface would be a shock. I simply have nothing there. As for revenge, that doesn't really interest me. But Elkennah's philosophy is not simply to enjoy nature, but to bloom where you're planted. To spread life and energy. I think, given time, I might convince her to see value in this world without sunlight."

Oydd changed the subject. "I'm sending Scorpion and Agena to investigate the incident at the shrine, and I believe we can spare five or six warriors."

"Is that all? Not that it requires many hands, but where is everyone?"

"We still have as many missions to fill as before this matter with the Right Hand began. Plus we have lost more men recently than we've gained, and Cricket insists on a certain amount of training before sending out new recruits."

"Which is sound advice," Jeshu stated.

"I agree. But it leaves us stretched thin."

"You also said you had a task for me?"

"Ah, yes. At present, it's more of an inquiry. If I procured the necessary herbs, would you know how to produce potions for healing?"