Amphibians' End Page 2

  “Stay safe” drowned them out, though. In a few moments, almost all the frogs were chanting together: “Stay safe, stay hidden. Stay safe, stay hidden.”

  The chorus grew louder as a breeze swirled through the trees and rippled the surface of the pond. The flower-strewn raft spun slowly, and the wind lifted flower petals in the air. They floated and twirled, then scattered across the pond.

  As Darel croaked, “Trust the Serpent,” he watched the petals tumble from the raft—and his breath caught in awe. The petals drifted into a pattern on the water: red and orange together, then yellow and green and blue and purple . . .

  Like a rainbow.

  The wind blew again, and the petals floated apart. The pattern disappeared, but Darel lifted his chin and sang louder. “Trust the Serpent, trust the Serpent . . .”

  Slowly but steadily, the tide turned. The calls of “Stay hidden” faded, and his mother’s song of “Trust and faith” attracted more and more singers. A few minutes later, a single song rang out from Emerald Pond.

  “Trust and faith . . .”

  Now Darel just had to earn that trust. If he was wrong, he’d endangered everything he loved.

  OLLOWING THE FUNERAL FEAST, YABBER headed off alone. He needed to think after watching the frogs’ vote to lower the Veil. He agreed with the decision—trust came first—but he’d seen the Rainbow Serpent with his own eyes, while the village frogs relied on nothing but faith.

  That impressed him, but it also scared him a little. King Sergu’s death had left Yabber responsible for protecting the frogs with dreamcasting. But with the Veil down, he wasn’t sure if he could. He lowered himself onto the riverbank, trying to force his stubby legs into lotus position.

  “Ooooooom,” he breathed, closing his eyes. “I am the lotus, and the lotus is me. My shell unfurls like the petals of the flower—”

  He meditated for a long time before he heard the patter of frog feet approaching. He cracked one eye and watched Darel flop down into lotus position beside him. Of course it was easy for a wood frog—they were mostly leg anyway.

  “I can see you peeking at me,” Darel said.

  Yabber closed his eye. “I’m not peeking. I’m attaining inner peace.”

  “How long is it going to take?” Darel asked.

  “To attain inner peace?”

  “To tear down the Veil!”

  Yabber opened his eyes. “‘Tear down the Veil.’ It sounds easy when it’s just a bunch of words, like ‘Tickle a shark’ or ‘Lick the moon,’ but how am I supposed to undo King Sergu’s greatest casting? I’ll admit I was his star pupil, but—”

  “How long, Yabber?”

  Yabber sighed. “Unraveling the Veil will take time and preparation.”

  “How much time and preparation?”

  “And I don’t think I can do it alone.”

  “Who else do you need?”

  “Plus, the whole thing is . . . uncertain.”

  Darel frowned. “What does that mean? ‘Uncertain’?”

  “The Veil is big and complex . . .” Yabber scratched his neck thoughtfully. “Imagine you’re chopping down a tree. It takes a long time to chop, but the tree will fall—whooom!—in the blink of an eye.”

  “How long before that happens with the Veil?”

  “There’s no way to know. At least a week, I would think, perhaps more.”

  “And then whooom,” Darel said.

  “Very whooom,” Yabber agreed.

  Darel sighed. “Then you’d better start chopping.”

  “Are we ready?”

  “The Rainbow Serpent didn’t say, ‘Tear down the Veil whenever you’re ready.’” Darel rubbed his face. “It said, ‘Tear down the Veil.’”

  Yabber exhaled softly. “Start now?”

  “Start now,” Darel said.

  WIMMING WITH THE RIVER CURRENT, Darel spread his arms and pushed the triplets forward on a gentle wave. They hooted and giggled, and paddled clumsily with stubby legs. They were relearning how to swim, now that they’d begun their transformations from legless tadpoles into froglings.

  Darel slitted his nostrils in amusement. Sure, the entire Amphibilands was going to collapse at any moment, but at least the triplets still made him smile.

  Then Tipi completely forgot how to use her legs, and started wagging her butt, trying to scoot forward. Tharta bobbed along like a floating twig, swirling and dipping. Only Thuma was making any progress—except in the wrong direction.

  Darel sloshed them around a turn in the river. “Use your legs! Slow and steady! Pull them toward your belly and—”

  “Platypuses!” Thuma squealed.

  Darel glanced downstream, where a row of creek oaks rose over the river and dozens of inviting holes—platypus burrows—lined the muddy riverbank. Furry brown platypuses flashed through the water, while more floated on the surface. A few older platypuses built furniture on the top of the riverbank, and a handful of young ones dug rocks from a steep strip of dirt beside the burrows.

  Darel grinned. The young ones were making a mudslide.

  The other two triplets turned. “They’re everywhere!” Tipi said, her eyes bulging.

  “Look at their tails!” Tharta flopped his own tail, which still hadn’t completely disappeared, trying to whack the water like a platypus.

  “I heard the boys have poison like us,” Thuma said, gaping at all the activity.

  “You don’t have to be a boy to have poison,” Tipi said indignantly.

  “That’s true,” Darel told her. “Look at you, the mightiest Kulipinki.”

  Tipi was the smallest of the triplets, but Darel suspected that one day she’d become the most powerful. She glowed a bright pink when she got upset or excited, and she was already strong enough to lift Darel over her head—which made bedtime a challenge.

  “You need to be a boy to have poison if you’re a platypus,” Thuma insisted.

  “Who needs poison anyway?” Darel asked.

  Tipi splashed him. “Easy for you to say.”

  “You’ve got other talents,” Thuma said.

  “Like talking to the Rainbow Serpent,” Tharta added.

  “And being the Blue Sky King,” Gee said, splashing into the river.

  “Gee!” the triplets cried, tumbling through the water toward him. “Did you bring candy?”

  “Darel’s not a blue anything,” Thuma said as Gee handed out snacks.

  “I’m also not a sky anything,” Darel said. “Or a king anything. It’s just a dumb nickname.”

  “I don’t get it, either,” Gee admitted, munching on a honey worm. “I also don’t get”—he licked his frog fingers—“why platypus honey is so much better than frog honey.”

  “’Cause we’re that sweet,” Pippi said, her face poking up from the water beside him.

  The triplets stared at her with eyes full of wonder. They’d left the nursery pool only a few days ago and had never seen a platypus up close.

  “I’m Okipippi,” she told them, her bill curling into a smile. “But everyone calls me Pippi.”

  “We’ve heard—” Tipi gushed.

  “—so much—” Thuma gasped.

  “—about you!” Tharta gurgled.

  “Did Gee tell you I have a beak?” Pippi asked, eyeing Gee with pretend suspicion. “Because I don’t! It’s a bill.”

  “He says you’re a hero,” Thuma told her.

  Pippi ducked her head in embarrassment. “Anyway, er, welcome to our new platypus village.”

  “We’re very sorry—”

  “—about what happened—”

  “—to your old village,” the triplets said.

  “Me too,” Pippi said with a brave smile. “But this is pretty amphibitastic.”

  Darel heard a doubtful note in her voice, and looked again at the half-built village. Burrows, river, trees—everything a platypus needed. Except it wasn’t her real home, the place where she’d grown up. And how would he feel if he had to leave the Amphibilands?

  Gee
must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, “We can plant bamboo along the bank, build a few bridges, and it’ll be platyperfect.”

  Darel groaned. “That’s even worse than ‘amphibitastic.’”

  “Poison froglings!” Pirra—Pippi’s older sister—squealed from the bank. “Look! They’re the coolest things ever!”

  Pirra splashed into the river with a bunch of her friends and swam closer. They oohed and aahed over the brightly colored triplets, and then Pirra offered to give them a chance on the mudslide. She didn’t have to ask twice. The triplets happily trailed after her.

  A moment later, Pippi, Gee, and Darel were alone. “Everyone loves a poison frog,” Gee said with a grin.

  “Yeah,” Darel said. “I wish I took after my dad.”

  “You’d look weird in yellow and purple,” Gee told him.

  “Not that.” Darel looked toward the triplets. “I mean, if I were a Kulipari, I wouldn’t be wondering what else the Rainbow Serpent wanted. I’d know exactly what to do: tap my poison and kick some carapace.”

  “You’d still look weird in yellow and purple.”

  “The Stargazer believed,” Pippi suddenly piped up.

  “Believed what?” Darel asked.

  “In the Blue Sky King. She told me you were coming, back when I first met Gee. If she wasn’t hibernating, she could help you figure out what the Rainbow Serpent meant.”

  “Can we wake her up?” Gee asked.

  Pippi shook her head. “We don’t even know where she is. She wanders off every few years and stays with a new tribe—like possums or lizards or emus—and sleeps for like a month.”

  “Emus?” Gee scoffed.

  Pippi nodded. “She says it takes all kinds.”

  “What takes all kinds?” Gee asked.

  “I don’t know.” Pippi shrugged. “‘It.’”

  “‘All kinds.’” Darel inflated his throat thoughtfully. “Maybe it does take all kinds.”

  “And maybe you can lead a horsefly to water, but you can’t make it drink,” Gee told him. “Or a pinworm saved is a pinworm earned.”

  Pippi splashed him with her tail. “You hush!”

  “What?” Gee splashed back. “I thought we were reciting dumb sayings!”

  Darel plunged underwater and swam to the swirling silt of the river bottom. He hadn’t seen a rainbow, and he hadn’t felt the Serpent’s ancient gaze upon him, but the tiny seed of an idea had taken root in his mind. The current washed over him as the seed sprouted into a vague plan. Maybe that’s how the Rainbow Serpent worked. Not with a sudden shout but with hints and whispers, like ripples spreading across a quiet pond. It takes all kinds, it takes all kinds . . .

  He kicked off the river bottom and surged upward. “The Kulipari!” he gasped when he broke the surface.

  “What about them?” Gee asked.

  “We’re going to see them.”

  “Right now?”

  Darel nodded, then looked to Pippi. “You’ve got to come, too.”

  “Me?” Pippi asked. “Why me?”

  “Because you lived your whole life outside the Veil,” Darel told her. “And you’re the closest thing we have to a Stargazer.”

  As his crocodile surged through the water on the coast of the Amphibilands, Yabber swayed in the saddle. Lulled by the motion and the spray of seawater, he closed his eyes and sent the golden glow of his dreamcasting toward the Veil.

  “This is the place,” he finally murmured. “The edge of the Amphibilands.”

  Although the Veil covered the frog lands completely, it unraveled at the ocean: Neither the scorpions nor the spiders ventured into the sea. So here, where the Veil drifted apart, Yabber could send his mind inside the great dreamcasting, and learn how to reverse it.

  The croc paddled water. The sun crossed the sky. Waves splashed Yabber’s shell, then flowed away as he puzzled through the old king’s spell.

  Finally, he told his croc, “I was right. I can’t do it alone. Time to go home, to the Coves.”

  With a happy glint in her eyes, his croc snapped at a wave, then surged forward. Yabber almost laughed at her eagerness as they passed through the Veil completely.

  Then the air shimmered around them, and a nightmare vision flashed in his mind, perhaps triggered by passing through the Veil. The frog villages lay in rubble, the streams are bone dry. The green Amphibilands are withered to a dead brown as scorpions and spiders crawl over the ruins.

  Yabber gasped in fear as the vision vanished. “Is that what happens if we do lower the Veil?” he muttered. “Or if we don’t lower the Veil?”

  IPPI WRINKLED HER BILL AT THE SIGHT of the salt marsh, where mist drifted around gnarled trees and black water lapped at a soggy path winding between clumps of reeds. Old Jir lived in the marsh, and the Kulipari were staying with him, so Pippi took a breath and followed Darel and Gee.

  She immediately regretted the breath. The marsh smelled like badly pickled fish to her. But at least she was able to keep up with the others by waddling fast on her knuckles. She’d been practicing her walking and was pretty proud of herself.

  “Would you please just tell me?” Gee asked Darel again.

  “Just wait!” Darel said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Of course, your periwinkle majesty,” Gee said with a deep bow. “Your wish is my command.”

  “Okay, okay!” Darel flared his nostrils in annoyance before continuing. “You know how I keep saying this whole thing with the Veil isn’t only about us? Not just about the Amphibilands, I mean?”

  “Sure,” Gee said. “You keep saying there’s something else we need to do, but you never say what you mean.”

  “Because I didn’t know! Except ‘It takes all kinds’ got me thinking. How are we supposed to beat the scorps after we lower the Veil?”

  “We can’t,” Gee told him. “That’s the problem. That’s why you keep croaking on about ‘We need to have faith in the Serpent.’ Like we’re going to beat Marmoo over the head with rainbows.”

  Darel snorted. “We need faith and a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “We need allies, Gee.” Darel hopped past a clump of swamp reeds. “We need help from outside the Veil, to stand with us.”

  Gee looked at Pippi. “Like the platypuses.”

  “Exactly! Warriors from around the outback.”

  Pippi made a face when her knuckles sank into a swampy puddle on the path. “We’re not exactly warriors.”

  “Entire battalions!” Darel croaked to Gee. “Entire armies. The problem is, we don’t know anyone from outside.”

  Gee nodded slowly. “But the Kulipari do.”

  “And so does Pippi,” Darel said with a grin.

  “Oh!” Pippi swallowed. “I never really left the riverbend.”

  “You must know someone.” Gee thought for a second. “How about this? Who’s got the best food?”

  “This is serious, Gee,” Darel scolded.

  “I am serious. Haven’t you heard the saying ‘An army marches on its stomach’?”

  “I think that only applies to gastropods,” Darel said.

  Pippi was too embarrassed to ask what a gastropod was, so she just fwapped her tail against the ground. Then something splashed in the swamp nearby, and she wrinkled her bill uneasily.

  “Anyway,” Gee said with a snort that made Pippi think he didn’t understand, either. “Who else can we ask for help?”

  “There are possums,” she told him as they followed the winding path past a spidery hillock of grass.

  “What are they like?” Gee asked.

  “Shy,” she told him, “but nice.”

  “And they’ve got those cool tails, right?” Gee wiggled his butt. “Maybe they could use them as whips!”

  “I kind of doubt that,” Pippi told him. “Ooh, I know! How about fish? There’s carp, lungfish, perch, gudgeon—”

  “You’re a gudgeon,” Gee said. “Fish can’t fight scorpions.”

  “Oh, righ
t.” Her bill tingled, which reminded her of food. She looked into the misty swamp. “How about shrimp? I love shrimp.”

  “Then you’re in luck,” Quoba said, landing suddenly beside her.

  “Eeep!” Pippi chirped in surprise as Gee leaped in shock and blurted, “Don’t do that!”

  “Sorry,” Quoba said with a glint of humor in her eyes. “I thought you saw me there.”

  “You did not!” Darel laughed. “But why are we in luck?”

  The tingle returned to Pippi’s bill, and she smiled. “Can’t you smell that?”

  Darel sniffed. “Is that barbecue?”

  “Yup—Ponto’s special recipe,” Quoba said, pointing with her staff. “Grilled shrimp in a spicy grub marinade.”

  Gee licked his lips. “I love shrimp!”

  “I love grubs,” Pippi said.

  “I love grilled and spicy and marinade!” Gee said.

  Quoba laughed and led them toward Old Jir’s house, a stump with round windows and a small twig door. They followed a stony path around back to a mossy lawn that sloped toward a forest of reeds. A flowering wonga-wonga vine climbed the wooden tables on the lawn, and Old Jir and Burnu sat at the biggest table while Ponto stood at a fire pit, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat.

  Instead of using tongs or a fork, he glowed briefly whenever he reached into the fire with his bare hand to turn the shrimp, using his poison to protect himself from the heat.

  “Show-off,” Gee called.

  Ponto grinned at him and flicked a charred shrimp into the air. A tiny arrow flashed across the lawn, stabbed the shrimp, then pinned it to a plate on the biggest table.

  “He’s not a show-off!” Dingo announced, holding up a tiny bow with matching toothpick-arrows. “I’m a show-off!”

  Her fingers blurred as she released a barrage of tiny arrows. The cloud of toothpicks peppered a wonga-wonga vine, then shot directly at Pippi. Before Pippi could even blink, she felt a dozen tugs at her fur. She squeezed her eyes shut . . . but didn’t feel the slightest pinprick.