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And Pritkin grabbed the thing’s spear and threw it straight at me.
I would have screamed, if I weren’t suffocating. Or moved out of the way if I weren’t being crushed by all that water. Which was suddenly falling all around me, as the membrane dissolved in a burst of light.
And I exploded into the room, along with a few thousand gallons that tsunamied through all around me. And around Pritkin. And around the hairy little nugget, who was now an angry little nugget, appearing here and there through all the churning water to stab at us with a couple of knives.
That would have been more of a problem if we hadn’t been simultaneously rushing headlong down a rock-strewn corridor on the torrent of water gushing through the wall. And doing it with only intermittent light, because the roof of this cave was not in great repair. Big gaps flashed by overhead, showing not the hellscape we’d just left, but instead pieces of a discordantly beautiful day, with bright blue skies, fluffy clouds, and riotous vines waving cheerful tendrils at us.
And a bunch more angry nuggets peering down through the greenery.
I was more worried about drowning than about the locals, so when a wave tossed me at a huge stalagmite, hard enough to knock what little air I’d managed to suck in right back out, I held on for dear life.
And struggled to breathe with what seemed like an ocean’s worth of water crashing by on both sides. It looked like waves breaking against a cliff, to the point that I couldn’t even see the floor anymore, just a swirling mass of roaring water that wasn’t just rushing by and foaming off the walls, but was also flaring up in miniature water spouts that I didn’t understand until I looked up again.
And saw the hairy nuggets raining bowling-ball-sized boulders down through a gap in the roof.
“What the—what are they doing?” I yelled, before remembering that Pritkin didn’t understand me.
“Saying hello!” he yelled back from a perch by the wall. “We’re not armed!” he added, shouting upward.
The only answer was a bunch more rocks, peppering down like gray hail. But I barely noticed. Maybe because I was too busy staring at Pritkin. “What the—how did—did you just—”
“Translation spell!” he told me over the roar of the water.
“Transla—Then why didn’t you do that before?”
“I didn’t do it this time! I don’t know that one yet!”
“Then who—”
I cut off to flatten against the stalagmite, allowing a rock the size of my head to splash down in the maelstrom between us.
“You go home,” one shaggy thing yelled down at us. “You go home now!”
And, okay, I thought I could guess.
“Would you like to explain how?” Pritkin yelled, gesturing at the torrent spilling through the door.
The only answer was more rocks, everything from fist to boulder-sized. One hit my stalagmite’s shiny dome, shearing it off into the flood and scattering shrapnel-like hunks everywhere. Including down onto me.
“It seems he would mind!” Pritkin told me. And then he gauged the distance and made a flying leap across the narrow straight that separated us, landing on a jutting piece of my rock. It was tiny and mostly underwater, and I would have been impressed if I hadn’t been so damned freaked-out.
“How do we get out of here?” I yelled, because the roar around us was still deafening, even this close.
“I was hoping you’d have an idea!”
I stared at him. “You don’t have a plan?”
“Plans are overrated!” said the man who never made a move without one. He looked up. “And I wouldn’t worry about the *unintelligible*. They can’t hit the side of a barn—”
“The what?”
“A small type of forest-dwelling troll! The spell doesn’t translate proper names, Ohshit!”
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the rock’s remaining bit of dome as half a river tore past on either side. I was not here; I was not hearing this; I was not, I was not. “Forest-dwelling trolls?”
I opened my eyes to see Pritkin looking slightly apologetic. “Earlier, we came through a . . . a type of doorway. And now we’re in, well, perhaps you’ve heard stories—”
“We’re in faerie!” I yelled, flailing my arms and almost falling off my rock. “I know that! What I don’t know is how we get out!”
