The World Beneath (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 1) Read online

  The World Beneath

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 1

  Robert J. Crane

  The World Beneath

  The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 1

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2017 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  1

  When I ran away, aged seventeen, I didn’t do it for the usual reasons. There was no drug problem. No trouble with the law. I wasn’t screwing up at school. And I didn’t hate my family either, although I’d be lying if I said we got on well. No, when I ran away from home, I did it because I was looking for adventure.

  I did it because I was looking for glory.

  London; the Underground. Piccadilly Circus.

  Back to the wall, I poked my head around to look out. I’d ducked into the short gap between opposite platforms. Easier not to be seen that way. Plus the wall was flat. None of the slightly awkward curves of the platform itself, like everyone within it was packed into an oversized Pringles tube.

  Man. Pringles. My stomach whined.

  “Shut it,” I whispered.

  It didn’t last long. A train pulled in, regular like clockwork. As a blast of air was dragged alongside it from the tunnel, the smell became almost suffocating—stale and warm and filled with about a million lingering coughs.

  The train slowed. On the platform, men and women clustered, guessing at where the doors were going to be. All the attention was on it, those within hurrying to get out, all without scrambling to get in.

  Time to move.

  I reached for my talisman. Strung up on a chain around my neck, it was teardrop-shaped, just a bit bigger than a pound coin.

  I squeezed it. Gentle heat emanated into my palm. My fingertips pressed against an indented pattern, all swirls and crazy lines.

  After shooting one last glance in both directions—the train came to a stop on my right, doors opening as it unloaded and filled up again, and the left-hand platform was near-empty—I raised my free hand, pointed at the wall, and swiped down.

  A shimmering white hole opened in the wall. Edges weren’t perfect; hunger had set me off at a bit of a shake—but the maw widened, pulsing with lights.

  “You ain’t got nothing on me, Harry Potter,” I muttered, and stepped through.

  The lightshow went into overload. For a moment, between places, I was almost blinded. Colors spun and flashed in a kaleidoscope, turning, turning, explosions going off with bright flashes, firework trails drawn across my eyes as white turned into yellow into red and then purple, going blue—

  Then, as if some unfelt gelatinous membrane had finally given, I fell out.

  I stumbled, caught myself one-handed before going down completely, skin dark against sand-colored rock beneath. My brown hair swum into view, jerked down by gravity.

  I pushed up and—

  The gateway had deposited me into a temple. Only this was nothing like any temple I’d ever seen, either on old documentaries or recreated in adventure games or breathed through words in adventure books. I mean, all right, there were a handful of passing resemblances—it was stone, for one, and yellow spiraled throughout as vines had crept in to reclaim this rock.

  But the angles were wrong. No squares, no curving statues. The walls were a hodge-podge of jagged bits, jutting forward and then jerking back, up and down, up and down into sharp points. Like the inside of a geode, I thought, blown up and stretched.

  Or the mouth of a shark.

  I reached to touch for the nearest jag. Its edges were captured in soft white light.

  I ran fingers across. The edges were still sharp. And the points … I prodded, and consulted my fingertip. It hadn’t broken flesh, but I didn’t doubt that it could given the chance. Tripping into the wall, for example … that made me cringe. Raked by a thousand little knives on the way down.

  I’d fallen into a hall, ceiling high above. Flat metal bowls hung from cords of rope; I assumed they were meant for wood to be burned for light.

  Behind me, the hallway descended into gloom. But ahead: light. Soft, like the glow of a sun.

  I safely stowed my talisman under my shirt after a quick check to make sure I hadn’t shattered it on the floor when I’d almost brained myself, and trekked toward the hallway’s end. My fingertips lightly trailed the jagged zigzagging to my left.

  A tiny slice of this room had been visible from where I’d first landed. Now, though, its full majesty revealed, I gasped. Cool air filled my lungs, a subtle mossy taste on the back of my tongue. Fresh; none of the dead man’s breath that was the Underground.

  The room was huge, hundreds of meters across. Sure enough, a divot had been torn in the ceiling, a long gash, like a giant bear’s claw had ripped through. Sunlight spilled through it. Roots crept around the edges, wide as my waist or even wider, but practically spindly lines from my vantage point. This was where the yellow ivy had come in, creeping down instead of up.

  Walkways like shelves crisscrossed the walls, and holes whose openings gave way to deeper darkness beckoned. From afar, these doorways were wrong too: all spiky angles, some almost square but not quite, most looking as if they’d been drawn by a child who could only produce short, sharp lines.

  I’d been deposited on one of these—midway up, it looked like, based on the walkways on the adjoining walls.

  Not, of course, that mine attached to either. That would be far too simple.

  I shuffled to the edge, looked down.

  The drop was long. Even surviving to the next ledge down was unlikely.

  I scanned for a chip of rock that might have come loose, mostly out of curiosity. But there were none; this material was apparently immune to weathering. At least by time, anyway, I amended as I glanced at the gash in the ceiling. A real number had been done there.

  The temple’s midsection was filled with platforms. All were held in place by lonely struts—and like the walls, the doorways, even the platforms themselves, the struts, too, were oddly misshapen,. What should have been a straight line from floor to pl
atform was a flattened zigzag, shifting jerkily back and forth without rhyme or reason. One that was particularly ridiculous caught my eye: so stupid were the jags that the platform it held was not even an inch above the point where the strut reared from the floor.

  But there in the center—that was the most exciting, most breathtaking, of all. Not at all jagged, a rocky spine lifted skyward. Almost literally a spine: the rocks that comprised it looked like vertebrae. Floating and detached, they softly undulated up and down.

  A ribcage surrounded it at the very top, the last twenty meters or so. Contained within was a cache, though impossible to see from my vantage point. And if I were right about where I’d been deposited …

  “Decidian’s Spear,” I whispered. Could it really be here?

  I glanced beneath me again. The nearest platform, kite-shaped (ish), was maybe midway between levels, just a tad closer to mine. I could make the jump, but I’d need to roll, unless I wanted to break my ankles. And though I could open a gateway beneath me if the worst happened, there was no telling where I’d end up—such as falling into the path of an oncoming train. Not ideal.

  I took a breath, four steps back into the corridor from which I’d come … then ran, and leapt—

  Arms pinwheeling, I flew—

  Feet touched the platform’s edge.

  I threw myself into an instinctive roll—

  The platform lurched underneath—and I hit the edge as it shifted. Collapsing?

  I jerked my hands out as half of me felt empty air. Scrabbled—

  Caught.

  I grunted. Dangling, and held only by my hands. By my fingernails, it felt like; they had caught an edge, and damn did they hurt.

  Do not snap, I told them. Don’t you dare snap.

  I pulled. No hunger pangs now, but I felt my emptiness even over the surge of adrenaline, and so although fairly light, I struggled to drag myself back over the edge. That the thing kept up its incessant shifting wasn’t helping …!

  “Work with me here!” I bleated stupidly.

  Stomach cresting the edge, it was easier. I dragged my feet up and over, and receded from the platform’s terminus.

  Long breath loosed. “Spear. Think of the spear.”

  I shot another look in its direction—and gawped. The entire room was moving, platforms shifting, coming close enough to neighbors to practically kiss and then descending or creeping away again.

  Forming a path?

  I watched as the kite-shaped rock I’d landed on drew up, up … and finally ceased, four or five feet from its nearest friend. They hung for just a moment—

  Time to get off.

  I pushed onto my feet, rushed for the edge again, leapt—

  Landed, no roll this time. Almost as soon as I had, my new platform began its shift, turning uncomfortably underfoot. Like a tour guide, almost: And here are the walls with the doors to ancient wonders … and here we come around now to another little square for you to drop onto; and it is a bit of a drop this time, mind that gap, just like the Underground—only you won’t land on tracks and be pulverized by the departing train, you’ll drop some eighty meters to your death against rock and dank pooled water. Oh, and here we see …

  I hit the next, bending legs to take the impact. Rising immediately, I scoured for the next place.

  “Useless security system,” I complained to any builder spirits who might be listening. “You’re just taking me right to it!”

  On I went, coming closer, closer, in an awkward dance that took me in every direction it could think of.

  Nearer the central spine, I was close enough to see its vertebrae moving up and down. They were rocks, surely, not bones. They had to be.

  The ridiculously off-center platform took me on a curving path around, close to the temple’s floor. (‘Close’ being the operative word; still some thirty meters above, I could make out the detail now, see a crack in the floor, and water come in from thousands of years of rain—and skeletons and decayed clothing and rusty armor—but a drop would still pretty much gimp me.)

  I swung around the spine, so close I could reach for it.

  Yellow vines hung down, the shade of a ripe banana.

  I stared up.

  “Don’t tell me I’m climbing. Do not—”

  But I wasn’t; not here, anyway. A last platform rose from beneath, not pausing, so I caught sight of it almost too late to jump—and then I was on it, rising beside the hundreds of stacked vertebrae, each almost as tall as me.

  I stared as they passed. Reached out …

  My fingers met an invisible wall. Not totally inelastic; I suspected I could make it yield if I pushed just hard enough … but what would happen then? I pictured one of the vertebrae going with it, the entire length of the spine collapsing—on me.

  The ribcage drew near …

  My eyes lit. A room was enclosed, and I could see its floor, a minute shaft of light breathed out of a single crack.

  And then the platform ceased moving.

  I swayed in surprise, carried by momentum for a moment longer.

  “Oh, no way.”

  It didn’t recede. Just waited … two feet below the bottommost rib.

  Teeth gritted, I belted, “You couldn’t just make it simple, could you?” Shaking my head, I steeled myself. “All right. I’m going.” A last aside to any lingering phantoms: “Spear better be damn well worth it.”

  If it was even here, of course.

  It had to be. Had to.

  Eyes on the rib—just the rung of a ladder; a bloody big ladder—I crouched low, and jumped.

  The first time my hands slid off, and I landed heavily on my backside. A jolt of panic filled me at the thought of meeting my platform’s edge—but I shoved up, checked it remained stationary, and leapt a second time.

  I caught it, and hung.

  “Monkey bars,” I told myself. “Just, like … up.”

  The ribs were small, almost like those of a human, but not nearly as close together as ours. I needed to push myself to inject the force needed to reach the second—but I had it, and then the third.

  When I was high enough to plant my feet, something gave a stony rumble beneath.

  I glanced down.

  The final platform was descending.

  “Thanks for waiting,” I told it. Then, to myself: “All right. Don’t screw up now.”

  That would be just my luck. All this searching, jumping through gateways into the wrong worlds, finally landing in the right one, even finishing this stupid game of parkour the builders had set up as one last hurdle … and then I’d slip and fall to my death with Decidian’s Spear just meters from my fingertips.

  What a positively pleasant thought.

  With my feet on, I was able to climb much easier. It was just like a ladder, albeit the sort built into a wall: perfectly vertical, no angles.

  Up I went, past vines snaking down. The gash did not run directly overhead, but angled rain could have easily come in this way and made my handholds slick. I was thankful it hadn’t.

  I rose, rose … sweat burst on my forehead, licked by a gentle, cool breeze breathed in from above … and then, at last—at last!—an opening rose to meet me. Carved between the ribs where the bottom of the sternum would have been, it led into a small cavity. And in the center …

  I pushed myself up, heart thudding madly in my chest.

  “Yes,” I breathed, stepping for it.

  Atop a wide podium, it sat: Decidian’s Spear, long and shined to a sheen, its pointed tip silver, as though it was new, not a thousand years old or more. Strange energy clung to it, infusing the air, making my skin break into gooseflesh—

  “Search the chamber!”

  I froze. Spun.

  Along the nearest, topmost walkway, was a man. My age, maybe a couple of years older, he was dark-haired—and maybe handsome; even from here, the set of his jaw was so clear, square and sharp and perfect. A tight-fitting jacket betrayed the V of his chest.

  He strode, every s
tep rigid. But not awkward; this was a practiced gait.

  “Who …?” I started whispering—and my breath caught.

  The stranger must have come from one of the angular doorways—because from behind him, flooding out onto the walkway in droves, were an army of bulky, armored, green-skinned, ugly trolls.

  No, not trolls.

  Orcs.

  2

  I ducked back into the cavity, spear—okay, not forgotten, but for a moment out of mind.

  Was this a guard outfit?

  No. They were Seekers, too—or at least I guessed the man leading them was.

  Damn it! Why couldn’t I have beaten them here by a slightly wider window? Twenty more minutes to get in and out, that was all. Tiny, on the scale of time Decidian’s Spear had been lost.

  I crouched low, listening. Walkway to the left of this opening, there was no way the orcs or their commander would see me. But if any should flow out of the doors opposite in their search …

  I grimaced. Television, movies, and books had decided for decades to write orcs off as unintelligent, practically useless creatures, threatening only due to their numbers.

  I, on the other hand, knew better. Though neither smart nor stupid, their eyesight was solid.

  Also the numbers thing. Did I mention the numbers thing? Because as far as I could count, this was one Mira Brand, against … at least a couple dozen orcs, easy.

  “Mr. Borrick!” came a low voice across the expanse. “Something has activated the security system!”

  A noise like a slap against metal echoed across to me.

  “I’m not blind, Murshan. Search for intruders!”

  The clunking sounds of armor echoed through the chamber as the orcs fanned out.

  I pressed lower, cursing. Would they clamber onto the platforms and mimic my path out to the spear, to claim it for their leader? I couldn’t see that. They were too bulky, even without the armor. The extra weight meant extra momentum—which meant a lot of overshooting.

  But what if they could bypass it altogether? Whoever built this place couldn’t have been stupid enough to have made the only way up here a game of stepping stones.