The Tower of Nero

The bull blew the dagger out of its nose. It glared at me, its blue eyes as bright and hot as butane flames in the gloom of the cavern. Then it charged.

Like the heroes of old, I stepped back, stumbled on a cooking pot, and fell hard on my butt. Just before the bull could trample me into Apollo-flavored marmalade, glowing mushrooms erupted all over its head. The bull, blinded, screamed and veered off into the bedlam.

“Come on!” Meg stood a few feet away, having somehow convinced Grr-Fred to double back. “Lester, we’ve got to go!” She said this as if the idea might not have occurred to me.

I snatched up Beanie Boy’s crystal ball, struggled to my feet, and followed Grr-Fred and Meg to the edge of the river.

“Jump in!” ordered Grr-Fred.

“But there’s a perfectly good road!” I fumbled to secure the crystal ball in my pack. “And you dump your chamber pots in that water!”

“Tauri can follow us on the road,” shouted Grr-Fred. “You don’t run fast enough.”

“Can they swim?” I asked.

“Yes, but not as quickly as they run! Now, jump or die!”

I liked a good simple choice. I grabbed Meg’s hand. Together we jumped.

Ah, subterranean rivers. So cold. So fast. So very full of rocks.

You’d think all those jagged, spearlike stones in the water would have been eroded over time by the swift current, but no. They clubbed and clawed and stabbed me relentlessly as I sped by. We hurtled through darkness, spinning and somersaulting at the mercy of the river, my head going under and coming back out at random intervals. Somehow, I always picked the wrong moment to try breathing. Despite it all, I kept my grip on Meg’s hand.

I have no idea how long this water torture lasted. It seemed longer than most centuries I’d lived through—except perhaps the fourteenth CE, a horrible time to be alive. I was starting to wonder whether I would die of hypothermia, drowning, or blunt-force trauma when Meg’s grip tightened on mine. My arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket when we lurched to a stop. Some superhuman force hauled me out of the river like a dugong in a fishing net.

I landed on a slick stone ledge. I curled up, spluttering, shivering, miserable. I was dimly aware of Meg coughing and retching next to me. Someone’s pointy-toed shoe kicked me between the shoulder blades.

“Get up, get up!” Grr-Fred said. “No time to nap!”

I groaned. “Is this what naps look like on your planet?”

He loomed over me, his police hat miraculously intact, his fists planted on his hips. It occurred to me that he must have pulled us out of the river when he spotted this ledge, but that seemed impossible. Grr-Fred must have had to have enough body strength to bench-press a washing machine.

“The forest bulls can swim!” he reminded me. “We must be gone before they can sniff out this ledge. Here.”

He handed me a piece of jerky. At least it smelled like it had been jerky before our dip in the River Ouch. Now it looked more like deli-sliced sea sponge.

“Eat it,” he ordered.

He handed a piece to Meg as well. Her beekeeper’s hat had been swept away in the flood, leaving her with a hairdo that looked like a dead wet badger. Her glasses were cockeyed. She had a few scrapes on her arms. Some of her seed packages had exploded in her gardening belt, giving her a bumper crop of acorn squash around her waist. But otherwise she looked well enough. She shoved the jerky in her mouth and chewed.

“Good,” she pronounced, which didn’t surprise me from a girl who drank skink soup.

Grr-Fred glared at me until I relented and tried a bite of jerky, too. It was not good. It was, however, bland and edible. As the first bite went down my throat, warmth coursed through my limbs. My blood hummed. My ears popped. I swore I could feel the acne clearing up on my cheeks.

“Wow,” I said. “Do you sell this stuff?”

“Let me work,” growled our guide. “Wasted too much time already.”

He turned and examined the wall of the tunnel.

As my vision cleared and my teeth stopped chattering quite so violently, I took stock of our sanctuary. At our feet, the river continued to roar, fierce and loud. Downstream, the channel shrank until there was no headroom at all—meaning Grr-Fred had pulled us to safety just in time if we wanted to keep breathing. Our ledge was wide enough for us all to sit on, barely, but the ceiling was so low even Grr-Fred had to stoop a little.

Other than the river, I saw no way out—just the blank rock wall Grr-Fred was staring at.

“Is there a secret passage?” I asked him.

He scowled like I was not worth the strip of sponge jerky he’d given me. “No passage yet, crust-dweller.”

He cracked his knuckles, wriggled his fingers, and began to dig. Under his bare hands, the rock crumbled into lightweight chunks like meringue, which Grr-Fred scooped away and tossed in the river. Within minutes, he had cleared twenty cubic feet of stone as easily as a mortal might pull clothes from a closet. And he kept digging.

I picked up a piece of debris, wondering if it was still brittle. I squeezed it and promptly cut my finger.

Meg pointed to my half-eaten jerky. “You going to finish that?”

I’d been planning to save the jerky for later—in case I got hungry, required extra strength, or got a bad attack of pimples—but Meg looked so ravenous I handed it over.

I spent the next few minutes emptying the water from my ukulele, my quivers, and my shoes as Grr-Fred continued to dig.

At last, a cloud of dust billowed from his excavation hole. The trog grunted with satisfaction. He stepped out, revealing a passage now five feet deep, opening into a different cavern.

“Hurry,” he said. “I will seal the tunnel behind us. If we are lucky, that will be enough to throw the tauri off our scent for a while.”

Our luck held. Enjoy that sentence, dear reader, because I don’t get to use it often. As we picked our way through the next cavern, I kept glancing back at the wall Grr-Fred had sealed, waiting for a herd of wet evil red cows to bust through, but none did.

Grr-Fred led us upward through a winding maze of tunnels until at last we emerged in a brickwork corridor where the air smelled much worse, like city sewage.

Grr-Fred sniffed in disapproval. “Human territory.”

I was so relieved I could have hugged a sewer rat. “Which way to daylight?”

Grr-Fred bared his teeth. “Do not use that language with me.”

“What language? Day—?”

He hissed. “If you were a tunnel-ling, I would wash your mouth out with basalt!”

Meg smirked. “I’d kinda like to see that.”

“Hmph,” said Grr-Fred. “This way.”

He led us onward into the dark.

I had lost track of time, but I could imagine Rachel Elizabeth Dare tapping her watch, reminding me I was late, late, late. I could only hope we would reach Nero’s tower before sundown.

Just as fervently, I hoped Nico, Will, and Rachel had survived the bulls’ attack. Our friends were resourceful and brave, yes. Hopefully, they still had the assistance of the troglodytes. But too often, survival depended on sheer luck. This was something we gods didn’t like to advertise, as it cut down on donations at our temples.

“Grr-Fred—?” I started to ask.

“It’s Grr-Fred,” he corrected.