They could aim, after all.
Either that, or they got lucky, because one of the fey suddenly took a bath, courtesy of a hundred-pound boulder crushing his skull.
A red plume stained the water before the current swirled it away, and I thought for a moment that one of his companions was going to jump in after him. But instead he grabbed a low-hanging vine, using it to swing to an upper one. And a second after that, three small fey were jerked through a hole in the ceiling and thrown down onto the rocks below.
I didn’t hear them land, for which I was grateful.
I also didn’t see them, for which I was less grateful, because it had to do with the cave floor suddenly giving way onto a waterfall that had me screaming down into darkness.
The second time I came up for air, I saw that, waterfall or not, we hadn’t lost our pursuers. Specifically, Pritkin hadn’t, because the silver fey seemed to be a lot more interested in him than in me. And a dozen fey warriors on one not-yet-a-war-mage weren’t good odds.
I jerked Rosier’s bag off my back and started trying to dig through it.
But if it had been hard to see before, it was all but impossible now. The waterfall had dumped us into what I guessed was an underground river, but I couldn’t be sure because there were no convenient skylights anymore. Just a vast, dark, echoing space, with the only light a rapidly dimming haze from behind and a few patches of phosphorescent lichen in the water. And the fey, glowing like beacons in the darkness up ahead. Or like deadly silver flashes as they leapt from rock to rock to rock, trying to catch up with Pritkin’s darker form.
They were doing a good job. They were doing a damn good job, since there were also patches of sandy bank that flashed by, here and there, making their weird parkour act that much easier. They were gaining, while I was facing the fact that Rosier had brought a lot of pills and potions, probably to help knock out his son, but damned little that looked like a weapon.
Other than the gun, which I couldn’t use here. And even if I could, there were more fey than bullets! And that was assuming that the damned thing still worked after being drowned and if I could get close enough to fire and if they didn’t catch Pritkin in the meantime—
And they didn’t.
But only because he suddenly sped up, I didn’t know how.
And disappeared; I didn’t know why.
Until I was grabbed and yanked ahead by something that was probably a current but felt more like a maelstrom. And I realized: that thing I’d thought was a waterfall? Was the bunny slope.
And we’d just hit the Olympic run.
The third time I came up, I could see fine, thanks to the glowing silver light spilling out from a single fey. He was only a few yards away, but he didn’t see me, being too busy battling a small, hairy creature that I vaguely recognized as the guard I’d seen by the portal. He’d found a boat somewhere, maybe pulled up onto one of the banks, I didn’t know. But he had, and had been using it to rescue his buddies who had been thrown down by the fey.
Only rescue was a debatable point, since one passenger was slumped in the bow, as lifeless as a corpse, and another was about to be.
And this one wasn’t fey.
The silver warrior landed a savage blow on a second little troll that caused him to fall back, almost into the water. And that caused his appearance to change and blur and—
Pritkin, I thought, realizing what had happened at the same time that his opponent did.
The fey lunged after his formerly disguised enemy, in order to finish the job, and probably would have succeeded because Pritkin looked dazed from the blow. But the first troll took that moment to counterattack, tripping up the fey. And a second later, he found himself fighting a desperate battle against a much larger, faster, stronger foe on a barely-bigger-than-a-rowboat craft that started rocking madly back and forth as I tried to grab the side.
I managed, somehow, but didn’t even try to pull myself up since I didn’t have the strength. Instead I pulled the only option I had and tried to aim it, while the little guard went into berserker mode, stabbing around with his spear so fast that it was almost invisible. And the silver fey started bobbing and ducking and weaving worthy of Muhammad Ali, and my hands were shaking from the cold of the water, and I was aiming the gun with my left arm because of course it was my right that had been injured, and the damned fey was shining so brightly in the darkness that he was almost blinding.
But not enough that I couldn’t see it when the troll guard was knocked aside, brutally hard. And when the fey lunged at Pritkin, who had ended up over by me, shaking his head to try to clear it. But it was too little, too late, with no more time and no more help and a silver blur shooting right at us.
And then shooting right back the other way, because it looked like a.44 Magnum worked just as well on the fey as on everything else.
And that included my shoulder.
The fey warrior staggered back, his face blooming red, and fell off the front of the boat. And my arm seized up from the recoil, dropping me off the back. Only I wasn’t sure it had seized up as much as broken.
Because now I couldn’t use it at all.
My head went under, the current being hard enough to fight even with two arms, and this time, it stayed that way. I got turned around, which is easy when everything is dark. And when your shoulder is a pulse of agony and doesn’t work. And when your waterlogged dress wraps around you, hampering what little movement you had left.
And when you realize that you can’t hear anything but a deafening echo.
Suddenly, all I saw around me was darkness.