by David Drake
I was rising from the trance when somebody shook my leg violently. I came out instantly, completely disoriented—and furious. Nobody was supposed to be anywhere close to me!
When I became alert—the anger helped clear the fog but it sure didn’t improve my thinking and perceptions—I found Fox sprawled over my legs. Andreas was dragging him away one-handed. Andreas’s other hand held the weapon with which he must just have killed Fox. A knife lay on the floor, not far from Fox’s right hand.
The Female remained huddled where I’d laid her. The copper net lay at her feet.
I stood up, but I had to touch the wall because I felt dizzy. Osbourn—I hadn’t seen him come up—touched my arm but I shouted, “I’m all right!” and shook myself free.
When I was sure that the Female was remaining where she was, I said, “All right, what happened?”
The Aspirants looked at each other. Andreas said, “Fox came back from the kitchen with a bowl of gruel and started downstairs. I didn’t stop him—”
“I thought it was all right when I saw him,” Osbourn said.
“—but then I tried to bring him back. I saw him try to stab you, so I stopped him.”
There was a smashed bowl and a smear of barley gruel farther down the tunnel where it might have flown in a struggle.
“I guess he was afraid you’d take the diamond,” Andreas said.
I rubbed my temples, trying to make sense of what had happened beside me—while my mind was elsewhere, enmeshed with freeing the Female. How would he have expected to get the treasure if he’d knifed me?
“All right,” I said. “You guys get upstairs and I’ll bring up the Female. She seems quiet enough.”
I sure hoped she was.
Osbourn snatched the torch and walked backwards ahead of me to light the way. I didn’t need that and would just as soon that he’d gone well ahead, but I didn’t say anything. My nerves were really ragged and I didn’t trust my judgment. I kept plodding on in a straight line, bending over the Female and humming a nursery rhyme that Mom had used to sing to me: “Round and round the cobbler’s bench…”
The Female was making colors, not sounds, in my mind. I felt washes of muddy blue, shading to green and growing clearer though also becoming more faint. I realized that after years of being tightly bound, her muscles may have wasted to the point that she couldn’t move.
I chuckled at the back of my throat. That might be why she hadn’t torn me to bits already.
The colors in my mind were verging on yellow now and were still fainter. The Female’s body trembled against mine. When occasionally my eyes dropped onto her little form, I saw the shape of her body shivering in and out of visibility.
I wished there was somebody here to tell me what to do. I wished there was somebody here to do it instead of me.
“Here’s the steps!” Osbourn said. “What would you like me to do?”
“Get up on top and take her from me if I tell you to,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll have to, but just in case. She doesn’t bite.”
I suddenly laughed again. I was a Champion of Mankind, one of the heroes who do the jobs that nobody else can do. Which now involves nursing an injured Beast. I couldn’t claim that anybody’d forced me to do this.
The steps were no problem. I just had to take a few of them sideways so that I didn’t bump the Female’s head or feet as I reached the upper floor. As I did, Osbourn came in from the next room dragging with him the coarse cloths that had been covering the furnishings there. I laid the creature down in a nest of fabric.
“Master Andreas said you needed more gruel,” Hemans said, coming in with a bowl.
I knelt beside the Female and lifted her torso so that she could reach the bowl that I took with my free hand. “Can you hear me?” I said to her. “Is there anything more that you need?”
I want to go back to my village, something said in my mind. But everyone there died. And I am dead.
“You’re not dead,” I said. “I’ll get you back to your own people as soon as I can. I think I know how to do it.”
I am dead, the voice said. It sounded dead. The fragile, shivering body looked like a shadow lying on the floor.
“What about the diamond?” Andreas said. “Is it still where you were?”
There were two diamonds, the voice said. The Female didn’t move. My brother-uncle brought them; he was a great thief. Then there was only one diamond and everyone died, but the diamond remains. Then the voice repeated, I am dead.
The Female had stopped eating. I laid her back down carefully and set the bowl beside her where she could get to it if she wanted.
I stood up. “I’m going to enter the cyst, now,” I said. I was speaking to the Female, but the Aspirants and Hemans were listening also. “When I come back, we’ll go to a place where someone will be able to take you home.”
Osbourn and Andreas followed me out into the sunshine. I wanted to see sunshine again while I explained what we’d be doing.
CHAPTER 15
Living Hell
I would have cut off the device binding the Female but I couldn’t have done that without injuring her. Because I’d gone in as a Maker instead, I’d preserved the delicate mechanism to reuse. I hadn’t had any intention of doing that, but even as a kid I’d had the habit of keeping around bits and pieces “in case they might come in handy.”
On a farm, scraps often did, after all. And as a self-taught Maker, everything surviving from the Ancients was a scrap or fragment. Tables and shelves filling about half the barn were covered with them, frequently too worn for me even to guess what they came from originally. Master Guntram, sorting them with the eye of experience and genius, had found the two major parts of the weapon I now wore.
“Sir, are you going to tie the Beast up again?” Andreas said when I came back up from the tunnel holding the copper coils.
“No,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think she needs to be bound. Do you?”
Hemans had resumed responsibility for the feeding. Instead of shoving a shallow bowl into the cage with a pole, he was now cradling the Female against his torso and holding a cup to what seemed to be her mouth. The servant’s willingness to treat her as a charge rather than a ravening monster was perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole business.
“If you say so,” Andreas said. He didn’t need the doubtful tone to show that, like Fox and Master Croft, Andreas would have been just as happy to play safe. I doubt the notion of cruelty even crossed his mind.
Well, I’d seen hogs butchered, their snouts held with toothed clamps which were too painful for them to wriggle against. And I’d eaten the bacon and sausages afterwards too, glad to have had meat.
We went outside again. I said, “I wonder how much luck Osbourn has—”
“There he is!” Andreas said before I got the question out. He pointed.
I’d sent Osbourn to find a smith. The Aspirant rejoined us then, followed by a heavy-set man whose leather apron and gauntlets were scarred by hot sparks. Between them they carried a bronze sheet measuring four feet by three.
“How do you like this, Lord Pal?” Osbourn called triumphantly.
“Good job!” I said. “How did you find that, Osbourn?”
“It’s from the temple, sir,” the smith answered over the rumble of the sheet metal as he and Osbourn laid it down. “I’m Hilton, you see. Father Lassa had us use it to sound like thunder, you know? Only the new priest, that’s Master Probert, doesn’t like all the show, he says.”
The smith tapped a brief rustle from the bronze and added sadly, “Back when I was a lad, I used to rattle the sheet every time God spoke, you know? In the service. Father Lassa gave me a copper after the service.”
Hilton looked up and smiled softly at me. “I remembered it was up in the temple attic when your boy here—”
He nodded to Osbourn. I don’t know how well Lord Osbourn liked being called a boy, but he didn’t react that I noticed.
“—asked me if I had
a sheet of metal. Is this what you wanted, lord?”
“It’s perfect,” I said honestly. “Master Hilton? Can you rivet the sheet into a tube? Join the short ends, I mean, so the tube’s as wide as it can be.”
The smith shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “You want it done now?”
“I’d like it done by the time my squires and I have eaten some lunch,” I said. “You’ll be well paid.”
“Sure,” Hilton repeated. “Nothing to doing that, is there?”
I hoped he was right, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to help if I hung over Hilton’s shoulder while he worked. The Aspirants and I had pasties in the room with the Female. She’d managed to stand upright, though she wouldn’t be walking for some while yet.
The smith returned with a bronze tube three feet long and wide enough for a man to crawl through. I gave him a silver Dragon, which delighted him as much as the neatly riveted tube did me.
The Aspirants eyed it doubtfully. Osbourn said, “Can you stick that through the side of the cyst, then?”
“No,” I said. “But when I’ve joined it to the device that held the Female, the two of you will be able to push it through the hole that started to open on the Road when Master Croft removed the cyst’s core—the Female, you see. The cyst began to die, then. I’ll be able to squeeze the hole farther open, in a trance. The two of you can shove this tube into the hole, and the switching device will prevent the walls of the cyst from flattening it like it’d do if we were just depending on the bronze. Or even steel.”
“Why didn’t this Croft do that himself?” Andreas said.
“It takes somebody besides the Maker,” I said. “And the cyst is dying but it sure isn’t dead yet. You saw the way the white fungus, the flower Croft called it, was moving through the window in the keep. Master Croft cut the Female out from the back, but then he just sealed the hole to let the cyst finish dying. Which it didn’t do before he died himself.”
“I don’t understand why Croft didn’t make some attempt though,” Andreas said. “Since he knew there was a huge diamond. He was such a clever man, after all.”
I was picking the words to answer that, but Osbourn beat me to it. “I suppose he didn’t care about being rich,” he said. “Money’s useful, of course, but it isn’t anything to be proud of by itself.”
Osbourn took a deep breath and turned to me. He straightened. “Lord Pal,” he said. “I need to apologize to you—and to you, Master Andreas. I think it might have been better if my grandfather hadn’t given me so much money to bring to Dun Add. I fell in with the wrong sort, and I fear I behaved badly to both of you.”
“It would have helped…” I said, because I’d been thinking about this too, “if I hadn’t behaved like a stiff-necked prick myself. Let’s hope we’ve both learned something.”
“Your lordship never behaved improperly to me,” Andreas said.
“Well, thank you both for your generosity,” Osbourn said. He really had been raised right. Now that he was sober, he was reverting to what I like to think was his real self. “So, Lord Pal—what do we do next?”
“The two of you amuse yourselves,” I said. “I’m going down into the tunnel to work on the tube.”
I pursed my lips. “Come to think,” I said, “you guys can help me. If you’d carry the tube down and then sit by the door up here so that I won’t be disturbed this time. Can you handle that?”
I followed the Aspirants carrying a pillow and the device that had bound the Female. Osbourn insisted on leaving the pastel torch. I didn’t need it, but it didn’t get in the way so I didn’t care.
I was glad that the sheet from the temple was bronze. It’d give me a better bond than I’d get from the iron chimney pipes which I’d expected—and I hadn’t been sure of even that in Severin. It wouldn’t have kept me from getting the job done: I’d have taken the boat back to Dun Add for the necessary materials if I’d had to.
This had to be done right. Even then it was going to be dangerous—maybe impossibly dangerous. It was the best way I saw for getting information on what had happened to Master Guntram, though.
When the Aspirants had returned to the ground floor, I set the switching device on the tube and arranged the attached copper wires across the surface. I didn’t need a strong mechanical bond between the two metal parts, but I preferred it just from a sense of neatness.
I’d been a craftsman all my life. Working with the amazingly precise creations of the Ancients drove home that attitude.
I lay down inside the tube with my head on the cushion and went into a trance. I didn’t need the cushion to work, but I knew from experience that when I came out of a long trance, my body would make clear any discomfort it had felt during that trance.
I had no idea how long this business was going to take. The actual task was quite simple, but I was working on a much larger scale than the usual matter of extending a quartz lattice and slipping atoms of the correct metal—usually a metal—into a pattern which the Ancients had set for it.
I was fusing the wires into the fabric of the tube. I could probably have gotten the same result by brazing, but I hadn’t seen enough of Hilton’s work to know whether I could trust that. I knew I could transfer enough sufficient from one portion to the other and vice versa; and I’d get a better contact my way besides.
When I’d attached the wires in four places, I decided I’d done enough to make the tube and the device parts of one structure. I could do more—I could continue this for years—but all I’d really be doing was delaying the next part of the business, the dangerous part.
I came out of my trance, smiling. Delaying the next part seemed like an awfully good idea to the sensible part of my mind, but it was my duty. I’d worked very hard to become a Champion so that I’d be asked to do this sort of thing.
Footsteps ran toward me from the other side of where the torch leaned. I could hear them clearly, but I couldn’t see the runner through the pastel bloom.
“Who’s there?” I said, fumbling the weapon out of my pocket.
“Lord Pal, it’s me, Osbourn!” the Aspirant called. He appeared in the light and then came past it. “I know you said to wait upstairs, but I thought it’d be all right if I sat at the bottom of the steps. I didn’t say anything until I heard you speak. Well, move, anyway.”
“Since you’re here,” I said, “you can carry the tube upstairs instead of me doing it. Don’t bump the thing I’ve put on it, though, or I’ll have to do it over again.”
“The shackles you took off the Beast?” Osbourn said. “Sure. Do we go straight out onto the Road?”
I picked up the torch and led Osbourn down the corridor. “Not until I’ve caught my breath,” I said. It was a good thing that I didn’t have to carry the tube myself. It wasn’t very heavy, but I was still wobbling from the trance. “What time is it, anyway?”
“About the middle of the afternoon,” he said. From his tone he hadn’t realized that I was completely unaware of the present when I was working as a Maker.
Andreas jumped to his feet at the table where he sat reading the notebook which I’d brought from Master Croft’s workroom. “Have you found anything useful?” I said.
“Nothing beyond what was in the report,” Andreas said. “But I have trouble reading the handwriting.”
I switched the torch off by touching the black square just above the grip, then took a deep breath. “I’m going to have a mug of ale,” I said. “Then we’re going down to the cyst. Are your weapons and shields working? Both of you?”
“Yes,” said Andreas.
Osbourn shrugged and said, “It’s working as well as it ever does.”
I was suddenly sorry that I hadn’t bought him a decent weapon when I was getting a shield for Andreas, but that was from hindsight. At the time I’d made the decision, Osbourn was a useless drunk who I was making a last-ditch effort to rescue—for May’s sake, or my sake with May. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he’d turn out to be a useful companion in th
is business.
Osbourn called for Hemans. When the servant arrived with beer and wine—Osbourn poured himself one goblet, and the local vintage wasn’t very strong—we drank quietly. I wondered what the Aspirants were thinking about. I also wondered how long it would take me to open the cyst wide enough to insert the tubing.
“Well, let’s get going,” I said. “This isn’t going to get any easier to do if we let it wait.”
The three of us set off through Severin with our dogs. The Aspirants were carrying the tube between them. Baga started to join us as we passed the boat, but I waved him back. “Just stick with the boat till I send for you!” I called.
I didn’t need another servant so long as Osbourn and Andreas were with me, and Baga was the only boatman within goodness knows how many days of here by Road. I didn’t expect that to matter either, but I was more likely to need a boatman than I was somebody more to do fetch and carry.
“There’s villagers coming with us,” Osbourn said, sounding concerned.
“They’re welcome to watch,” I said. “So long as they don’t bother me in my trance, I don’t care.”
“I guess we can see to that,” Andreas said. He brandished his weapon and turned to glower back at the locals, which struck me as more extreme than the situation required.
At landingplace we stepped through the insubstantial curtain onto the Road. Sam’s eyes smoothed all details from my companions’ torsos and limbs, though I saw their mouths and eyes in unusual detail. Their clothing looked muddy and featureless besides.
The scar in the Waste was black and seemed wider than it had been when I’d first seen it. Andreas might have been thinking the same thing, because he said, “Do you suppose it’s dying faster now that we’re here?”
“No,” I said. “I think our minds ’re tying to trick us. I’d like to believe that this isn’t going to be anything dangerous at all, but that’s not true. Anyway, we’re going to do it.”
Just as an experiment, I took two steps into the Waste beside the place where the scar showed in the gray blankness. It was just the Waste, as it had been the hundreds of other times when I stepped off the Road or past the edge of a node.