Chapter 2

Darcy looked around him and counted eight sets of yellow eyes gleaming back at him.

The dais was 40cm off the floor of the cavern and most of the sets of eyes were looking almost straight at him. Now that his eyes had adjusted somewhat, he could pick out the outline of the animal nearest him. It was the biggest bloody dog he had ever seen in his life but he knew it wasn’t the biggest one in the room.

“Brighter,” he said softly. As the gem brightened, the outline of the dog in front of him became more distinct. He estimated that while sitting, the dog’s eyes were about 120cm from the floor. Some of the others had been closer to 140cm. The closest animal he could attribute the breed to was a Dalmatian. However, it had variations.

The muzzle was more squarish and shorter. The ears were wide at the base, and a lot longer and pointer than any breed he knew of. One of this dog’s ears was half folded over. Her coat was short, smooth and black. A white star was on her chest above her front legs.

She had a very long whip-like tail that was far longer than any earth dog he knew of. Her legs were a little longer and the front ones appeared marginally longer than the rear. The body was solidly built in the chest and sloped down to her narrow hips.

She was a powerful animal, and he wondered just how fast and far she could run. The wider jaw gave the impression that once the animal had hold of you, you wouldn’t be getting away anytime soon. The dog she still reminded him of most was a short-snouted Dalmatian, but she didn’t have spots or a white coat and she sure was a lot bloody bigger.

He looked the animal in the eyes and felt a strange sensation in his head. It reminded him a little of the entity that was attached to his magical items. He sometimes got strange feelings from it and often got the impression it was female. These feelings were similar except that he felt that they were being projected at him.

He cocked his head a little at the dog. He smiled when the dog did a similar movement and he felt surprised curiosity and excitement. She was curious about him, and he suspected she was interested in how he got into the cavern too. He knew that if he was in danger, his medallion should warn him but it didn’t feel hot or even unduly warm.

Thinking of the medallion, made it appear and he fished it out of his shirt. He turned it and looked at the symbols and then at the dog. He turned it towards the dog. “I’d swear that this symbol was of your kind. What do you think?” he said to the dog in his normal voice.

The dog seemed to study the medallion and then shifted its gaze to his face as Darcy slowly stood to his full height. As he gained his feet, the dog whined softly, dropped to its belly and rolled over. The dogs behind him suddenly growled. One barked sharply, but they didn’t attack him.

His medallion remained neutral in temperature even though his heart went into overdrive. He stood stock still, shocked by the dogs’ reactions. Slowly, he looked around the dais but the other dogs had disappeared into the darkness.

If these animals were wild, why was this one showing a submissive behaviour? Why had the others left her here with him? It was very perplexing, but he still felt no immediate threat from the dogs. He wasn’t sure if he was welcome here and he decided it was time to leave.

Slowly he stepped down the two steps and off the dais. He approached the dog and dropped down so he was balanced on his toes, and gently scratched her behind one massive ear. She whined in pleasure and thumped the long whip-like tail onto the ground, stirring up the dust.

“Sit, my mighty friend,” he said softly and projected at the dog the image of it sitting. It rolled back into a sitting position as Darcy stood. He sent the image of a tree with a sunny sky. The dog whined and stood. It turned and padded soundlessly away from him.

Darcy quickly grabbed his stave and his pack. He shrugged the pack on over the coat as he followed the huge dog. He was tickled that he could communicate with the animal on some level.

As he neared the wall, he noticed that not all of the crystals had been destroyed, high up in protective nooks and fissures were huge growths. He veered over to one such cleft in the wall. Using his stave, he knocked down several branches.

They broke as they fell and he gathered up the dark green square sided rods of different lengths and thicknesses and filled every available pocket on his coat and the spare space he now had in his backpack. He would dig out the magical box that his items would return to if he died and he would store the crystals in it later.

He had learnt that one of the boxes strange properties was its unlimited internal space. It was a great place to store many of his treasures and he was sure that if other magical people lived here, then the crystals would have value. He did hope that they weren’t commonplace here.

The dog had stopped and waited for him and once he was happy with what he had gathered, he sent the image of the tree again. The dog led him through a manmade two-metre high tunnel that was rounded at the top and had straight sides, one and a half metres apart.

As they walked, Darcy realized that the floor glowed from all of the dust the dogs had tracked out of the transporter room over the years. Over time, it had been kicked, shaken or puffed to the edges so that it looked like green fluorescent strips along either side of the path.

As they walked, he was surprised by how far from the cavern the dust had been transported. It also suggested to him that the crystals over the dais had been damaged a very long time before his arrival. He wondered how it was he had even gotten here if this was true.

He estimated that he had gone fifty metres and uphill in a tight circle that turned in a clockwise direction when the tunnel opened into a new room. This room was close to twenty-five metres square. His gem gave enough light for him to see that the room was roughly four metres high.

It once had a flat ceiling but several sections had since fractured and dropped to the floor. One large section in a corner to the left of him had a dribble of water trickling down the rubble. It pooled in a shallow hollow and then dribbled over the side and away under the rubble.

If the room had once had furniture in it, it was now bare except for the odd rock on the floor and several collections of broad leaves and other vegetation the dogs had collected to make their beds. Darcy noticed that the other dogs were not in here and he wondered where they had gone and why they had left him with just this dog.

There was an exit tunnel in the centre of each wall. He turned to look at the tunnel he had exited. He couldn’t see any determinable way to distinguish this opening to the others other than the placement of the rubble.

He placed one of the small pieces of crystal on the lintel and placed a glamour spell on the entrance and a shield spell that should deter any human visitor other than him. If he found that the cavern was owned by someone, he would remove the spells but his instincts told him that while the dogs lived here and generally wouldn’t like visitors, it was safer to keep the crystals away from prying eyes.

He knew that the Wizards of the Delta Pavonis Star System were very protective of any crystal caverns they found, so he felt it would be prudent to follow their lead, wherever here was. Once he had established where he was, he might need to see if he could fix the cavern, should he ever wish to leave here. On the other hand, that was a problem for another day.

His problem today was, ‘Where the bloody hell was he?’ He checked his Mad. It was strapped to his left wrist. If they had satellites here, the Mad couldn’t detect them from in the cavern. He followed the dog as it exited to his right.

This tunnel was broader in curvature and had a lower slope angle. It was lower than the previous one he had been in, making him stoop. After about ten metres, it also changed in shape and became more natural looking with irregular sides, widths and heights. He had to be careful not to hit his head.

He came to an opening where he had to get down on hands and knees and he crawled through a short section that then opened out into a natural cavern. He had noted two things to himself as he crawled, the gravity was lighter than Earth’s and he was crawling towards the light.

The gravity made him think of Lee’s home on Harmony where he had trained. Utopia’s twin planet Harmony, had gravity more like here but it didn’t feel quite the same and the bounce in his walk suggested that it was marginally lighter than Harmony’s was. This could also explain why the dogs were so damn big.

He wondered what other delightful surprises this new planet had in store for him.

The cavern that Darcy crawled into was not that inviting.

He lowered himself down from the metre-high ledge he had come out onto and was able to stand in the three-metre-wide space. Soft light flooding into the cavern indicated that the cave had been created more from seismic shifting rather than by water or other processes.

He could see where a fault in the rock had caused a section of the sloping wall to fall, a long time ago. It had since become the rocky base of the cavern. A landslide on that side of the fissure had provided the front wall but it had also left a gap that was high enough and wide enough that the dogs could enter the long but narrow space.

Darcy stepped out into the soft light. He didn’t know if it was dawn or dusk. The sun was behind the mountain he had just exited. With the bulk of the mountain behind him, the long shadows and the huge trees that clung to the side of the valley he was in didn’t provide him with a lot of visibility.

He drew in a long breath through his nose. The air was fresh and crisp, with a hint of dampness. The musky smell of leaf rot and the sharper smells of a variety of living vegetation tickled his nose. He was heartened to see that a lot of the trees were very familiar looking.

Many looked like those he had seen in sub-alpine forests found in more tropical regions of both Earth and Harmony due to the leaves of the lower plants being of a broader variety but not as broad as the wet-tropical plants.

Darcy looked around as he heard birds singing in the trees and the sounds of other animals moving in the forest below him. The huge height and spacing of the trees allowed for some undergrowth but it wasn’t dense. Vines and other parasitic plants grew on the massive trunks and short grasses and weeds covered any area that received enough light for them to grow.

He had to smile. He never had been good at remembering the names of trees other than the most common native Australian ones and a couple of easy to recognise ones in Britain and America. The varieties he saw around him and had him thinking that this planet had the stamp of the Keltrian people on it.

The Earthling’s that had settled on Harmony and Utopia had learnt that the Keltrian’s were an ancient people that had sent ships into their known universe to find planets that they could live on. If they liked a place, they placed transportation rings in caverns.

The Keltrians had also seeded many other planets that were not yet up to their requirements with plants and animals so that they developed faster. They didn’t need all the planets they had seeded but they had decided that the more planets they had to select from, the better.

The Keltrians had also liked to play with DNA and genetics. His people had found many animals on Earth and in Delta that had developed along similar family lines. While they had their differences, they were still carbon-based plants and animals.

Darcy chuckled when he looked at the huge dog and believed his assessment was accurate.

Darcy was able to determine that he was on the side of a wide valley that dropped down in gradual slopes.

Nothing indicated the presence of humans, in any way shape or form, in the area. As he looked around, he noted moisture on the ground-hugging plants. He stood still and watched the shadows for several minutes. A light breeze funnelled from his right.

He wondered where he should go from here. He sent the image of a stream to the dog who had been sitting patiently beside him. He also realized that the other dogs hadn’t followed them. The bitch hadn’t been the biggest of the dogs and he noticed that she hadn’t had puppies. He suspected that she possibly hadn’t even had her first season.

“You need a name,” he said to the dog. She looked at him with a tilted head. “My mother said that her first dog was called Tingko. It means female dog. I got in big trouble when one of my old girlfriends thought my using it as a pet name for her was sweet until she found out what it meant. However, in your case, it is what you are. So I shall call you Tingko.”

Tingko gave a couple of low chuffs and Darcy was sure she was laughing at him. He grinned at the dog, “So, Tingko what do you do around here for fun? I have a nasty suspicion I shall be here for quite some time. A transportation ring with no crystals over it and no Coordinates’ Book means that I won’t be going home in a hurry.”