Rumi's Riddle Read online

  Dedication

  For Wesley and Harper and Henry

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Eliot Schrefer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Excerpt from

  THE SONG OF THE FIVE

  Verse Three

  (Translated from the original Ant by Rumi Mosquitoswallow)

  No rest for the five shadowwalkers

  chosen by fate

  to bear the magic of the eclipse.

  Our queen had perished

  [. . . but her magic had not.]

  [. . . but her plans had not.]

  We labored, a body without a brain . . .

  . . . and no less intelligent for it.

  Tirelessly, we burrowed and dug

  burrowed and dug

  burrowed and dug

  to release

  what has always been buried beneath

  what has always frothed and bubbled

  Magma, the destroyer.

  When it erupts, only one animal in a million will survive.

  The arithmetic is easy.

  One animal in a million

  . . . is probably an ant.

  SMOKE.

  Whorls and plumes of smoke.

  Rumi stares into the vortex, tapping a suction-cupped finger against his lips. To get so much particulate matter airborne, the temperature of the heat source must be higher than the surrounding—

  “Rumi, move!” Mez cries as she streaks through the moonlit clearing.

  Mez sounds fully panicked, which makes it all the stranger that they are, oddly enough, racing toward the smoke rather than away from it. Rumi knows that’s the plan, Rumi’s the one who came up with the plan, but Mez’s panic reminds Rumi how foolish it is to head right into danger, when every instinct—

  “Rumi, faster!” It’s Gogi this time. A tail whips out to pick up Rumi, and he’s suddenly in one of his favorite positions, right on top of a capuchin monkey head, fingers threading through tufts of eyebrow fur. He and Gogi slalom through the treetops, hand over hand and foot over foot, rising and falling through the canopy. Capuchin monkey is the best way to travel. “Thanks for the ride, Gogi.”

  “No problem,” Gogi says, breathing in bursts from the exertion. “Literally. You’re about as heavy as a palm nut.”

  “I’m even liiiiiighter,” Lima trills from the sky above.

  “Not everything has to be a competition,” Rumi grumbles under his breath. Gogi’s weaving through the trees starts to make him nauseated, so Rumi closes his eyes and uses hearing more than vision to track their progress. While Lima chirps away above, the panther sisters, Mez and Chumba, slink through the jungle off to one side, only audible because they’re moving at such breakneck speed; Sky soars above, making excited caws against the night sky; and finally Banu the sloth is somewhere behind, still within earshot but falling farther into the distance. Banu was the one who volunteered to “take rear guard,” and they all agreed that he would join them at the ruins of the Ziggurat of the Sun and Moon once he was able to get there. It wasn’t an option for the whole group to slow down to sloth speed, not with the volcano preparing to erupt.

  Their strangest companion is Auriel.

  While Gogi makes his way through the treetops, Rumi peers down at the monkey’s right foot, where he’s clenching what might appear to an unschooled observer to be a slender yellow vine. The shadowwalkers know, though, that it’s the reincarnated form of what was once the second-greatest enemy Caldera has ever known. After taking his revenge on the Ant Queen and destroying her for good, Auriel’s been reborn a fraction of his old size.

  This was all foretold at the Cave of Riddles, of course. But it doesn’t make it any less strange to see this curious mute baby snake, looking out at the jungles of Caldera passing by as if he’s never seen them before.

  What is going through Auriel’s mind?

  Will he grow bigger?

  It seems unwise to bring Auriel anywhere. But, Rumi reasons for the thousandth time, it would be folly not to bring him along. He just saved Caldera—maybe he could do it again.

  If he doesn’t destroy it.

  Rumi digs his fingers into the moist skin of his leg, to distract himself from the compulsive loop of his thoughts. The volcano under their rainforest hasn’t erupted yet, but its rumblings are accelerating. By this pace it will be eight nights before there’s no space at all between them, which he can only assume means the volcano will be going off. An exploding volcano—can any creature alive in Caldera help against that?

  Auriel seems to think so. Soon after the defeat of the Ant Queen, he had waited until all the shadowwalkers’ attention was on him, then slithered around in the dirt until he’d drawn a surprising likeness of a volcano cropping up out of the water. Then he’d reared back and smashed it all. Then he’d gone back to staring at them expectantly.

  Rumi was the one to point out that perhaps Auriel meant to stop the volcano. It was all they had to go on.

  Granted, it wasn’t much. Think, Rumi, think! A better answer is always out there!

  There’s a nagging feeling in his mind, and he realizes it’s guilt. Emotions are always that way for Rumi; he’ll feel a thing and only figure out what it really is after pondering it for a long time. He’s let his friends down, that’s it. Rumi’s usually the one to come up with the big plans—though Sky’s done his part, too—but here he is, racking his brain and turning up nothing. A mind seems such a puny thing against the power of a volcano. Surely journeying to the site of the eruption is a reasonable start. But what happens once they get there? What use is something as insubstantial as strategy against a million tons of magma? They’ll just put Auriel near it and hope he has some miracle to work?

  Wait. Is it actually a billion tons of magma? Rumi starts doing calculations to refine his estimate, then stops when he realizes he’s distracting himself from his worst concern.

  He’s got only eight nights to figure out how to stop the volcano.

  The reactions of the other rainforest inhabitants confirm the scale of the menace. First it was the pack of capybaras they encountered, braying nervously in the night air as they weaved along a riverbank, keeping their little ones protected in the center of the herd. Soon after were the peccaries, snorting and snuffling as they raced along narrow forest paths, fear revealing the whites of their eyes. Then birds soared overhead, a mix of blue macaws and white egrets and piping plovers, flocks of animals that never flocked together before.

  All of them, capybaras and peccaries and birds, were heading in one direction: away from the smoke.

  The shadowwalkers are the only ones going toward it.

  It’s not thick enough to cause trouble for his friends, but Rumi can already sense the acrid smoke on his skin, sharp against his pores. Amphibian problems. He’ll have to rig up some kind of mud mask before they get closer to the volcano. He’s confident he’ll deduce some way to protect his tender skin; that’s not the real worry. The real worry is that all the combined brainpower and
intuition of the other residents of Caldera is telling them to flee for their lives, and yet Rumi has convinced his fellow shadowwalkers to head straight for the volcano.

  He appears to have suggested an unwise course, indeed.

  Rumi hears a tree rat scrambling through the canopy. He calls out to it as they cross paths. “What do you know, rat friend?”

  “You’re heading into danger!” the rat gasps as it races past, bounding up a trunk and leaping to the next branch over. “Go the other way, idiots!”

  Then the rat’s gone.

  “Did you hear that?” Rumi chirps to Gogi.

  “Yes. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence,” Gogi says, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. He wipes the sweat from his neck and rubs his tired eyes.

  Rumi snuggles into the warmth of Gogi’s forehead fur, trying to scour the painful smoke residue from his skin. “I’m not feeling especially confident either right now.”

  “Buddy, I’m thinking, maybe it’s best if we join the other animals and get as far away from that smoke as possible. We can’t help anyone if we jump right into danger—”

  “—and incinerate ourselves,” Rumi finishes. “I know. Maybe discretion is the better part of valor.”

  “We are not giving up!” Mez calls from the darkness below.

  “Yeah!” Chumba adds.

  “Just when you think you’re out of earshot, panthers impress you all over again. They have simply amazing hearing,” Rumi admires, his spirits lifting.

  “A little too amazing, if you ask me,” Gogi grumbles.

  “Enough resting, Gogi. Let’s get moving!” Mez yells.

  “Come on, guys,” Lima calls from above, “let’s go—hey! Mrph! How rude!” Her voice trails off.

  “Lima, are you okay?” Rumi calls up.

  “Yeah,” she eventually responds. “I flew into a cloud of bats, and I tried to say hello, but they didn’t even take the time to answer! Unbelievable. I don’t know what’s happened to chiropteran manners. I guess imminent doom is making them impolite. Ow, hey! There’s another one! Shame on you!”

  “They’re scared, Lima,” Gogi calls up to her. He lowers his voice to a mutter. “Maybe we could take a note from them.”

  “This is why I spent that year with panthers instead of my home colony,” Lima prattles on indignantly. “You’d think that mighty carnivores would be inferior company to my own kind, but no, bats are basically the worst. I’m much better as an honorary panther. Maybe I can be an honorary capuchin monkey too. Or a tree frog. Or a macaw. Sorry, guys, didn’t meant to leave you out. I’m equal-honorary.”

  “We’ve been going at breakneck speed for hours,” Rumi whispers into Gogi’s ear. “How does she have enough breath left over for all this chatter?”

  “. . . why, hello there, Madame Owl, thank you for finally paying attention to me—wait, owl! Ack! Scary!”

  Suddenly, with a crashing of branches, Lima is huddling next to Rumi on top of Gogi’s head. “I could have been owl meat! I’m traveling down with you guys from here on out.”

  “Um, my head is starting to feel a little crowded,” Gogi says. He holds up his foot, where a skinny yellow snake is writhing. “I’ve got this stowaway to carry around too, of course.”

  Owl forgotten, Lima darts her wings forward and plucks up Auriel, draping him across her shoulders. He doesn’t seem to mind at all, looping himself loosely around her neck. “How do I look?” Lima asks, twirling around to show off all sides. “Glamorous? Do you like my boa?”

  “Very nice,” Rumi says. “But I’m not sure if you should . . . I mean, he is still a constrictor.”

  “Aw, he’s so little, though! And resurrected Auriel wouldn’t hurt me, would you, my handsome reptile friend?”

  He stares at her.

  “I mean, it’s not like you even could hurt me, not when you’re so small . . . right?” Lima seems suddenly less sure about what Auriel’s thinking. She returns him to Gogi’s foot. “I’ll let you hold on to him after all, I think,” she says.

  “Good idea,” Gogi says.

  “Enough resting!” Mez calls up. “We have to cover more ground before the Veil lifts!”

  “She’s such a taskmaster,” Gogi grumbles.

  “Yes I am!” Mez calls. “Now get going.”

  “Yeah!” Chumba echoes.

  “What’s worse than a panther taskmaster?” Rumi asks.

  “Two panther taskmasters,” Gogi replies, giving Rumi a high five. Then he sighs, grips a branch with his tail to steady himself, and leaps. Like that, they’ve lurched into motion, making their way against streams of fleeing animals.

  The distant volcano sets the ground rumbling, shaking the nearby branches and sending the smaller animals of the canopy—beetles and mantises and a few unlucky snakes—tumbling to the floor. Rumi scrunches his eyes shut when the vibrations get especially bad. Even though he’s clutching Gogi with four suction-cupped limbs, he still nearly loses his grip and tumbles to the jungle floor.

  “Is it over yet?” Rumi asks, digging his fingers and toes even deeper into Gogi’s wiry fur. In stressful moments like this, he has to focus on stopping the pores on his back from exuding poison. Over the years it’s gotten easier, sort of like holding in a sneeze, but he can’t afford to get one of the most powerful toxins in the animal world onto Gogi’s fur. That would definitely not be a good idea.

  Once the rumbling stops, they continue on, more cautiously this time. The sky is ripening, black turning blue at the horizon. “How are you doing, Chumba?” Rumi chirps down after the companions’ next pause.

  “My daycoma’s near,” she calls up. “We’ll need to find someplace to camp soon.”

  “I’m on it,” Sky calls from above. “I’ve scouted a spot for us, and have already alerted Banu, so he’ll meet us there. Go around the ironwood tree ahead, then follow the trickling stream after. I’ll guide you once you’re close.”

  They do as Sky directs, moving downstream to a swampy forested area, then turning a corner to find a den formed by an overhanging rock. Gogi slowly descends his tree until he’s right above it. Six eyes blink as monkey, frog, and bat peer into the darkness.

  Mez stops short in front of the entrance. “There are panthers here.”

  “There were panthers here,” Sky corrects as he crashes through the canopy to the cave opening. The macaw never was one for elegant entrances. Head tilted, he struts into the den, steps one way and then the other. “It’s empty now,” he caws back. “I saw the panthers fleeing the other way and tracked their path to their home cave here.”

  “Abandoned,” Mez says grimly. “Panthers don’t leave a den without a good reason.”

  Chumba sniffs around the entrance, teeth bared. “It doesn’t feel right to enter another panther family’s cave.”

  “I know,” Mez says. “But Sky’s right, this is the most defensible spot around.”

  “We’re going to defend ourselves from molten lava now?” Gogi says dryly. “Want to tell me how that works?”

  “Hello?” Chumba calls out as she heads in.

  “Smells like cat pee,” Lima says as she flutters into the den.

  “It’s called territorial marking,” Mez says.

  “Definitely cat pee,” Gogi says as he huddles in. “But at least this den is dry.”

  Lima goes about straightening the den, tossing brittle bones and tufts of rodent fur over her shoulder. “Are you talking about the pee or the rain? Because I think we all assumed the pee would be dry, just smelly. But it will definitely be good to get out of the rain. It doesn’t smell too bad in here, I don’t think, I’m already used to it, I guess, have you ever smelled bat pee? It’s ten times worse, and I’m a bat, which means I’m probably partway immune to it. Or attuned to it? What’s the right word here?”

  No one answers, but Lima doesn’t seem to notice, prattling on as she flits about the dark cave, checking out each corner. Mez and Chumba hole up in one end, tails low, bobbing their noses as they sniff the
stale panther scents. Gogi rubs a section of stone clear of cat hair and then daintily places his butt on it, Sky perching on a branch above him.

  Rumi gives himself a bath in a mossy, algae-clogged puddle just outside the den, rubbing chilly goopy sludge up and down his arms to neutralize the sting of the ashy air. It feels amazing.

  “Looks like you’re enjoying that,” Gogi says to him. “I don’t think I’d feel the same way.”

  “Here, try,” Lima says, picking up a glob of green sludge and hurling it at Gogi. It misses, striking the cave wall and dribbling to the ground.

  “Not funny,” Gogi huffs, an uncharacteristic scowl on his face.

  Lima’s round ears droop. “I was just kidding.”

  “We’ve been awake for too long, and in very stressful circumstances,” Rumi says, blinking his wide, inky eyes. “I think we could use a sleep. You all can go first. I’ll take watch. We amphibians don’t need as much uninterrupted sleep as birds and mammals do.”

  “Is that true?” Lima asks. “I had no idea!”

  “Yes,” Rumi says, blinking, “it’s quite true.”

  Mez yawns, exposing her set of powerful teeth. “I’d love to rest, but I won’t be relaxed enough for a while yet. First we need answers about what exactly went down at the Cave of Riddles.”

  “Yeah, no sleep until we hear the truth!” Gogi adds, jabbing a finger toward Rumi and Sky.

  Soft snoring. Lima’s already upside down, eyes closed, narrow rib cage rising and falling evenly.

  Gogi nudges her, and she snorts awake. “Yes, yes, I’m up, what’s going on? Let’s go!” she says as she bursts into the air.

  “No, we’re not moving,” Rumi says gently. “Sky and I are about to tell everyone what happened at the Cave of Riddles, in case it helps us solve the problem of how to stop Caldera from, um, exploding in eight nights’ time.”

  Lima takes back her perch, and nods vigorously. “Yes, stopping Caldera from exploding. Very important.” Her nodding becomes less vigorous, and then the snoring starts back up.

  “Maybe we just fill Lima in after,” Mez says. Chumba’s snores join Lima’s. “And my sister, too.”

  “Rumi and I have been over this so many times together,” Sky says. “It’s hard to imagine that there’s any part of our time in the cave that might be useful information, that we wouldn’t already have considered.”