Chapter 14

"Edmund! Edmund wake up!"

A voice cut through the thick fog in Edmund's mind. There was urgency in it. Urgency and fear. The combination of the two chased away the last wisps of drowsiness in Edmund's mind and he instantly became alert.

He opened one eye but other than that didn't move a muscle. There had been plenty of times in Narnia when he'd been in dangerous situations. He'd trained himself to wake up and take stock of his surroundings without making any unnecessary movements that could alert adversaries.

"Edmund!"

He was in a dark place . . . underground. He knew that because the air was cool and smelled musky, like soil and stagnant water. There were other scents too . . . something smoky and salty, sort of like a butcher's shop. The only light he saw came from an open flame that burned somewhere else in the room. It cast flickering shadows on the raw stone walls. The shadows that fell across his face were straight like stripes. It didn't take Edmund long to realize those shadows were being made by bars.

"Edmund! Please!"

"I say, Cousin! Wake up already!"

Jill and Eustace were there too then – wherever there was. Suddenly memory flooded Edmund's mind and he bolted straight up, so fast that Jill actually uttered a slight scream. He started to turn toward her but cracked his head on the low ceiling of his cage.

He growled against the pain. "Son of a -!"

All three of them were in different cages, Edmund saw immediately, each cage separated by a good two meters. And the light, the open flame he'd registered in his initial observations, came from a pit on the other side of the room. There was a contraption of charred logs built over the pit, some sort of spit for roasting meat. And there was a pile of bones beside of it. The pile contained plenty of humanoid shaped skulls.

"Wonderful," Edmund muttered. "We're in the Morlocks' kitchen."

"You're awake," Eustace said, sounding even thicker than normal.

"Am I really?" Edmund asked.

"Well, you're either awake or talking in your sleep –"

"Shut up, Eustace. Learn to distinguish sarcasm," Edmund snapped. He turned his gaze toward Jill. "Are you all right?" he asked her.

Jill nodded but looked miserable. "My head's a little spinny from whatever they hit us with, but I'm okay."

Drugs, Edmund remembered. Something stung me – a dart. We were all hit with them. That probably contributed to Eustace's vacant remarks. Possibly even to the irritable buzzing in the back of his mind, though it was just as likely that that came from letting the Morlocks get the drop on him and kidnap him. Edmund hated being caught with his guard down. At that moment he was more annoyed with himself than he was at Eustace. Of course that was probably nothing compared to what Peter felt – and surely he knew by now that they were missing. Edmund was not looking forward to explaining this to him, but trying to delay it was senseless. Edmund preferred not to stay for dinner with the Morlocks.

"Time to use our rings," he told Eustace and Jill. This classified as an emergency in Edmund's book – or at the very least as a situation that it would be better to extricate themselves from. If it was just him Edmund would have considered breaking out and taking a look around – seeing if perhaps Caspian was somewhere else in the cave or seeing if he could find the exit and make it back to the Eloi village. But it wasn't just him and there was little chance that Jill and Eustace would be okay with him staying there while they fled. Dragging them along with him wasn't an option. They were unarmed and untrained. Edmund's most dangerous weapon was the pocketknife he'd hidden in his boot. The dagger on his belt had been taken by those damn thieving Morlocks.

Edmund reached into his pocket and pulled out the handkerchief he'd folded around his rings.

"Edmund . . ." Jill sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

"It's okay," Edmund told her. "It's easy enough to get out of here. We'll just meet the others back –"

"It's not okay!" Jill cut him off. "I . . . I lost my rings."

"Bloody hell, Pole!" Eustace shouted. "How could you be so careless?"

"Eustace, shut up!" Edmund said angrily. "You are not helping."

"I'm sorry," Jill said. She bowed her head, wrapped her arms around her knees, and pulled them to her chest. "I'm s-s-s-sorry!"

"Jill," Edmund said firmly. "Jill, look at me." He waited until she obeyed before continuing. "It's going to be okay," he told her. "Do you understand me?"

Jill jerked her head in a nod. "Y-y-you t-two should g-g-go," she said, fighting back sobs with every word. "I b-be okay here."

"Like hell!" Eustace said flatly. "There's no way I'm leaving you. Not after all we've been through together."

"You're not staying here alone, Jill," Edmund told her and smiled. "I am."

"W-what? No," Jill said immediately. "No, Edmund, you c-c-can't."

"Jill lost her rings, Edmund's lost his mind, what next?" Eustace asked, annoyed.

"You could lose your attitude problem and think about this rationally," Edmund told him. "I can get out of this cage – but it will take some time. If the Morlocks come before that, I'm the only one who has chance of fighting my way past them. I can't do that if I have to be watching out for the two of you."

"There's no guarantee that you can do that though," Eustace protested.

"There's no sense in all of us staying," Edmund pointed out. "And while we're sitting here arguing we're wasting time that I could be using to get out of this cage. Right now the two of you are going to listen to me. I'm the oldest. I have the most battle experience and have been in the most sticky situations. This plan has a better chance of getting all three of us through this alive than anything else I can think of."

"And you've given it what, ten seconds worth of thought?" Eustace muttered.

"My ability to think fast was what made me such a good general," Edmund said with a smirk. He checked and made sure that his rings were still in the folds of his handkerchief then tied the fabric in a knot so that they wouldn't fall out. "We're doing this my way," he told them in the cold, resolute voice that always got him his way. He rarely used it, but not even Peter in one of his High King moments would go against Edmund's judgment when he spoke like that.

He tossed his handkerchief through the bars of his cage with just the right amount of force. It hit the ground several feet in front of Jill's cage and its momentum slid it the rest of the way to her.

"You two go now," he ordered.

Eustace clenched his teeth and looked disgusted. "I don't like this," he said. "I just wanted to make that clear."

"Noted."

"I'm so, so sorry about this, Edmund," Jill said. "It's all my fault . . ."

Actually, things worked out quite well this way, Edmund thought, but didn't voice those thoughts out loud. "It's okay," he told her. "I'll be okay. I've gotten out of much worse situations than this. When I meet you back at the village I'll tell you about some of them."

Jill looked like she was about to cry. "I'm holding you to that," she told him. "So you have to be okay."

"I will be. Aslan's watching over us, remember? Now go."

Eustace heaved an over-exaggerated sigh. "I'll see you soon, Cousin."

"I'm sorry," Jill whispered once more.

Then they were gone.

"That took long enough," Edmund muttered and fished his knife out of his boot. He unfolded it and quickly began cutting through the twine that held the bars of his cage in place. He only had to remove two of the bars to create a space big enough for him to squeeze out of his cage. The whole process took about two minutes – less time than he'd spent arguing with Jill and Eustace.

Once he was out of the cage Edmund took stock of his inventory. He had his pocketknife. It was razor sharp and made of good steel, but its blade was only five inches long. There was also the pouch of caltrops he'd made. Those would be quite useful in the narrow tunnels, as would his flashlight. In a pinch he could use the torch to bludgeon off an enemy, just as he'd done in the past. He added another weapon to his repertoire – a long, jagged knife that he picked up off a slab of stone by the fire. Its blade was about as long as his forearm and thinner near the handle than it was at the other end. From the looks of it, it seemed to be designed to cleave straight through bones. It was heavy and not balanced for combat but it was better than nothing.

Footsteps echoed through the tunnels just as he picked up the knife. Edmund hurried to stand right beside the entrance and pressed himself against the wall. He strained his ears, trying to determine how many people the footsteps belonged to.

Two, he decided, noting the patterns of resonances. Shouldn't be a problem as long as they don't see it coming.

And they didn't see it coming. Edmund made sure of that. He kept his back pressed against the wall as they entered the kitchen. Once the second one had passed him he made his move. The pocketknife was his choice weapon for this assassination. He stepped up behind the Morlock and stabbed the five inch blade right under the base of the Morlock's skull, through his brainstem, killing him instantly. The creature didn't even have a chance to gasp in pain or cry out in surprise.

Not so for his companion. The other Morlock froze when he turned his head and saw the empty cages. "Dinner gone!" he snarled and spun around.

Edmund let the first Morlock he killed slump to the floor and jumped over its corpse. He raised the primitive kitchen knife and drew it back to get better leverage before he struck. The other Morlock registered the danger and threw his hands in front of him to try to ward off the attack. When Edmund struck it with the meat cleaver the blade went straight through one of the Morlock's arms, muscle, bone, and al. A dull thump sounded as it sunk into his chest but got stuck in its breastbone. The Morlock howled. Edmund swore and silenced it by swiping his pocketknife across its throat.

"That was easy enough," Edmund muttered as the Morlock fell to the ground, gargling on its own blood. He removed the iron knife from its chest and fled into the tunnels.

It didn't take him long to realize that navigating the tunnels wouldn't be as easy as he thought. There were dozens of forks and branches that seemed to be going off in every direction. Within a minute of exiting the kitchen chamber Edmund was thoroughly lost in the maze.

The tunnels formed a veritable labyrinth and with no idea which way he'd come from or which way he should be going Edmund might have stumbled around lost for a very long time had the orange glow of firelight coming from a side tunnel not caught his eye.

It was the first thing that was noticeably different from everything else that Edmund had seen so far, so naturally he headed toward it. He actually had a sinking feeling that he'd ended up right back where he started – at the kitchen with its open fire pit. When he saw the shadows of bars he thought that his fear had just been confirmed but it only took him a moment to realize that he was wrong. The tunnel didn't open out onto a room – it led to a dead end that had been sectioned off by rusted bars that looked like part of some ancient jail cell. And in that jail cell, looking thoroughly miserable was –

"Caspian!"

Caspian's head snapped up at the familiar voice. His eyes darted toward Edmund and he stared at him in disbelief. "Edmund?" he asked incredulously, immediately moving forward. "What – how did you get here?"

A smile lit Edmund's face as he moved closer to his friend. "Come on, Caspian. You didn't really think we'd let you just disappear, did you?"

"No – I mean I knew you would look, but I did not think you would manage to find me after I learned that I'd been dragged off to another world," Caspian told him. "And how did you get here so fast? I cannot have been gone longer than three days . . ."

Edmund blinked. "Caspian . . . you've been missing almost two weeks."

It was Caspian's turn to blink. "That is not possible."

"What's not possible is hunting you down in another world in only two days." Edmund studied the rusty bars that were keeping Caspian prisoner. "We've got to get you out of here," he said distractedly. A part of his mind dimly realized that that comment made him sound like he was trying to give Eustace a run for his money where stating the obvious was concerned, but the larger part of his mind had found something bigger to worry about.

Time was obviously passing faster in their home world than it was in this world. If they didn't get home quickly there would be a lot of difficult questions to answer.

End of Chapter Fourteen

Thank you everyone who reviewed including: diva divine, Anne Amazon, HeadBangGirl, Shahzadi, garnetred, amber'eyed'countess, and maristelle

merlyn2 – I haven't read "That Hideous Strength," but I probably should. The few ideas that I have so far don't sound similar to what you said, but I wouldn't want to unintentionally write something that mirrored that book. Thanks for mentioning that.

Miniver – Yay! Someone figured it out. I was starting to worry that I might be blindsiding everyone with that because no one mentioned that they got it yet – until you. *cheers*

mae-E – Shi'ftla has his own agenda. If he's helping someone it's only so that he can advance his own plans. Also, your idea about listening to the audio book version while I do other work was a good one, but I don't think it would work for me. I tend to tune out everything that's going on around me while I'm reading or writing – a habit I developed while living in college dorms, lol. It's too bad though, b/c last time I was at Barnes and Noble I saw they had the entire Chronicles of Narnia on CD in their bargain section, unabridged for only twelve dollars. I almost bought it but I knew I'd never manage to listen to all of it so it would have been a waste. I think I'll probably end up getting the omnibus to save space on my bookshelf and to save money.