by Tad Williams
36
Hunting the Porcupine
"The fairies who survived the second war with men and fled back into the north called down behind them-in an act of sorcery unseen since the days of the gods-a great pall of cloud and mist that men named the Shadowline. All mortal men who cross into those lands are now in danger of losing at least their wits if not their lives.The few who have gone and returned claim the whole of the north is now beneath the cover of that shadow."
-from "A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand"
I SEEM DOOMED to be part of strange trios in strange places, thought Ferras Vansen as they clambered up the curving track that Antimony called the Copper Ring. First across the Shadowline with the heir to the throne and a Qar soldier with no face, now through the depths of the earth with two little people. I survived the first one… if only just… But even now he was still dumbfounded by what had happened: why should he have fallen through a doorway behind the Shadowline and come out in the Funderlings' own halls beneath Southmarch?
There was no answer, of course. Perhaps the gods had a hand in it, although he wasn't certain about even that. The one thing that had become clear during this year of madness was that even the gods did not seem to be masters of their own fate.
Antimony and the grubby little creature known as Browncoal were arguing. The monk was a head higher-he was the largest Funderlings Vansen had met, the top of his head reaching the bottom of Vansen's ribs-but he could not match the drow's ferocity: the little man was snarling like a cornered cat. It was strange to see the two of them so close together, see both their similarities and differences, as though one were a wild pony, bristly and undersized, the other a handsome, stolid farm horse.
"What is all this about?" Vansen demanded.
Antimony scowled. "It is a trap or a trick. He wants to lead us up Old Quarry Way to Tufa's Bag, but I was there only yesterday. There is no way out of it! We call it a bag because that's how it is-you can only come out the way you came in."
Vansen looked at Browncoal, who was glowering like a badger who'd just been dug up. "Does he say why he wants to go there if there's no way out?"
"He says there is. And he says I'm a blind fool for thinking I know otherwise." Antimony balled his fists. If Vansen had been Browncoal's size it would have made him very nervous.
"Let's see where he leads us. If it's a trap, it's a rather strange way to go about it, leading us down a dead end. Besides, I'm sure he knows if he proves false he'll be the first to die." Vansen showed the sullen drow his ax. "But it wouldn't hurt to remind him of it."
Browncoal led them farther up Old Quarry Way until they had left all but the most occasional cross-passages behind them. The corridor took a distinctly downward slant; then, after a bit more silent trudging, they reached a fork.
Antimony pointed to the rightmost of the branching tunnels. "That's Tufa's Bag."
"And where does Old Quarry Way go from here? " Vansen asked, pointing along the other branch.
"Back up again until it finally connects with the Copper Ring on the far side of Funderling Town. That's one of Stormstone's roads."
"And why would somebody make a dead end here?"
"That was the original path of Old Quarry Way, but the digging proved too hard-there was no blasting powder in those days. They went this way instead," he said, gesturing to the left hand fork, "where the stone was softer."
Despite Antimony's distrust, Vansen allowed Browncoal to lead them both down the spur tunnel, which twisted and turned and grew low enough in places that Vansen had to get down on his haunches and move forward in an awkward crouch. At last they came to a slightly wider spot. By the pale golden light of Antimony's coral lamp Vansen could see that the monk's summation seemed accurate: the corridor ended in an abandoned scrape and a pile of rubble. There was no way out.
Even as Antimony shook his head in dour satisfaction, Browncoal stepped forward, bent, and reached under one of the broken stones piled in front of the scrape. He grunted as he lifted; to Vansen's surprise a few individual rocks rolled away but the rest of the stones came up together in a single block. Vansen hurried forward and saw that one of the drows' round battle-shields had been covered with some kind of cement and garnished with stones so that anything except a very careful inspection would reveal nothing more than an innocuous pile of rubble.
"Perin's Hammer!" he said. "A secret door!"
Browncoal looked up them with a near-toothless grin of triumph, then slipped his legs into the hole revealed beneath. He pulled at the rope around his ankle until the length between him and Brother Antimony had gone taut, then dumped the rest of the coil down the hole before letting himself drop in after the rope. For a moment after the drow had disappeared Antimony and Vansen could only stand, staring, as the rope first went slack and then tight again.
"By the Elders," said Antimony in sudden shock, "he is down there by himself!" He tossed his pack over the edge of the hole and quickly followed. When he was gone, Vansen hesitated for a moment. He did not like the idea of letting himself down into something he could not see and did not know.
"Brother Antimony?" he called at the edge of the hole. "Are you there? Are you well?"
"Come down, Captain Vansen," the monk called up from what sounded like only a short distance below. "You can jump. The landing is easy, and down here there is… stay, you must see it for yourself. Wonderful!"
Vansen had his doubts, but was reassured to hear the Funderling. He dumped his pack in and then turned around and let himself drop, shielding his face with his arms.
His armor shirt didn't weigh much, but it still made his landing clumsier than the others': Vansen slid, stumbled, slid again, and just managed to turn around before his feet went out from him altogether and he landed on his tailbone in a pile of hard stones.
"By the Thunderer!" he swore, groaning as he got to his feet. "You call that an easy landing?"
"But look," Antimony said. "Is it not worth the tumble?"
Vansen had to admit it was-if you were a Funderling. The down-tilting passage at the bottom of the disguised hole opened out after a few sliding steps down a pile of tailings. The flickering golden glow of the coral revealed a huge cavern, its ceiling covered with strange, rounded pillow-shapes, each one almost as big as Vansen himself, so that he and the two smaller folk seemed to stand in the center of a motionless cloud. At the center of the room was a lake, lit by an odd, pearly light of its own. In the dim light the water was so still it seemed like crystal. As Vansen gazed down into depths no coral lamp could have reached he suddenly understood why the Funderlings believed that their creator god had arisen on the shores of such a pool.
"Is it not magnificent?" Antimony asked. "Who could have guessed this lay on the other side of Tufa's Bag? I could almost forgive this beast and his kind for trying to kill us, just for bringing me here. This is what it must have been like when my ancestors first explored the Mysteries!"
Vansen wasn't exactly certain what that meant. "It's certainly beautiful, but we must get moving."
"Of course, of course." The monk said something to Browncoal, received a reply, then turned back to Vansen with a pained smirk. "He says he is sorry he had to reveal this to me to save his own skin. He had hoped neither my people nor the Qar ever found out about these caverns so his people could claim them for their own. In that way, at least, he proves himself kin to us Funderlings."
The two little men led Vansen around the edge of the subterranean lake, which seemed almost as large as one of the lagoons in Southmarch Castle overhead. No matter where he looked down he could find no end to its depths, but from one or two angles he fancied he saw movement in the deepest shadows, although he told himself (and in fact hoped quite strongly) that it was only a trick of the lights he and his two companions wore.
Browncoal led them through the lake cavern and out the far end, where some ancient drainage had carved a sort of narrow valley down at an even steeper angle. They followed this low-ceiling
ed canyon, doing their best not to touch the delicate crystals like cone-shaped snowflakes that clung to the walls and disintegrated at the slightest touch. Antimony even wept after accidentally shattering one large and exuberant example that had sprouted sideways from the rock like a miniature tree, the trunk ramifying into ever more exquisitely narrow sprays of translucent stone. The drow Browncoal watched the unhappy monk in silence, his dirty face twisted in an unreadable grimace.
As the little company traveled deeper and deeper into the strange caverns Vansen saw things he could never have imagined-chambers hung with branching structures that might have been monstrous stag's horns, and caverns filled with chalky pillars that grew both upward from the floor and down from the ceiling, as if two pieces of bread had been spread with honey, pressed together, then slowly pulled apart. Often beauty and danger came together as the travelers made their way along narrow tracks or over slender bridgelike structures with pits of empty blackness yawning below them.
Who would have guessed that an entire world lurked here beneath the ground? Vansen thought as they passed pools with eyeless white crabs and fish that darted away from their intruding footfalls. In some of the larger caverns bats roosted in astounding numbers-once they disturbed such a dormitory and the shrieking, flapping cloud seemed to take a good part of an hour to clear the chamber, the little creatures were so numerous. But more often Vansen followed his guides through confined spaces where he often had to crawl on his elbows and knees, or even on his belly, wriggling like a snake through narrow holes so that soon every part of him had been covered in mud and grit.
Finally they halted in front of one such gap, a crevice so small Vansen did not believe even his companions could get through it. He put down his pack and crouched beside it, measuring. It was no wider than the cubit between his elbow and fingertip!
"I cannot fit through a space so small," he said.
The drow seemed to understand him; he said something in his guttural speech. "He says you must go," Antimony translated. "This is the last narrow passage." He frowned, listening. "Although he says that this is why they did not try to attack this way. It was too narrow for the…" He fell silent. "He calls them the Deepings-I think he means the giants we call ettins. They could not fit through this tunnel and it was too long to widen-someone would have heard so much work."
Vansen suppressed a shiver. "None of this matters. I will not fit."
"Then he says you must go back," Antimony reported. "There is no other way to reach the dark lady."
But Vansen knew that only he could speak to her-only he had a chance to end this before every living person in Southmarch, big and small, aboveground and belowground, had been slaughtered. "Very well," he said at last. "I'll try. Can you take my armor and my weapon?"
Antimony considered for a moment. "Not and carry the rest of the food and water through a narrow place. I am not that much more slender than you-Nickel says I eat enough for two or three Metamorphic Brothers."
Vansen did his best to smile at the monk's weak joke. "Then I must leave the armor-but I will push the ax in front of me. So how will we do this?" Vansen asked. "Should I go last?"
"No. If you are as necessary to this envoy as you say you are, I do not want to be stuck on the far side from Funderling Town, unable to go back but unable to pull you out. If aught goes wrong, someone must be able to return for help. And I am certainly not trusting that inbred creature to go first. If you did get stuck, that would be the last we saw of him. No, I'm afraid you have to lead the way, Captain Vansen. Our little friend will follow, and I will be last."
Ferras Vansen took off his byrnie and his padded undershirt-the change sent a chill through him so that his teeth chattered a little. He looked over to the drow, who was watching the proceedings with squint-eyed interest. "Don't let him hamstring me," he told Antimony.
"Don't worry about that, Captain," the monk said with a grim set to his jaw as he gathered the coils of the prisoner's rope. "If he tries to do anything he shouldn't, I'll pull the leg right off him."
"Yes, well, don't kill him," Vansen said. "We may still need him on the other side. Do I go in head or feet first?"
"Depends on if you want to travel in light or in the dark." Antimony pointed at the Salt Pool lantern tied around Vansen's brow. "No, you must go head first, Captain. Your shoulders are the widest part. Remember to lift your arms when you need to make yourself narrower. And do not fear-I will be behind you."
Vansen took a deep breath, then a few more, but he knew he could delay no longer. He crawled to the hole. How could he ever get himself into such a tight space?
"One arm up, one arm down if you can manage it," said the monk. "It will give you more choices of how to move, and it can make you even narrower."
Vansen pushed his ax into the tunnel and then crawled in after it. To his surprise he managed to shift his shoulders and torso through the first tight space. The tunnel opened up a little after that, although he still could not bring his arms down below his head, so he nudged the ax ahead and then wiggled after it like a snake.
A very slow, clumsy, and frightened snake, he could not help thinking.
Everything in Vansen revolted at the idea of forcing himself ever deeper into the earth this way. Even the warm, moist air he was breathing began to feel thin and inadequate. The tunnel was not, as he had half-imagined, a single smooth passage like the burrow of an animal-it had been created by the accidental spaces left between huge slabs of fractured stone. He began to think about tremors, those times that the earth shrugged like a sleeping giant. If it did that now, even the smallest shift, he would be obliterated like a grain of wheat caught between millstones.
Once, when the tightness of the passage around his chest kept him from filling his lungs all the way he had to fight a sudden and surprising terror. He could dimly hear Antimony talking behind him, encouraging him no doubt, but his own body and the drow behind him blocked most of the sound and the monk's voice was no more than a murmur.
Maybe he's not encouraging me, Vansen thought suddenly. Maybe he's thought of something he forgot to tell me-that there's a pit or an even narrower spot ahead… or to watch out for snakes or venomous spiders…
Stuck in a tight bend and trying to free himself, Vansen banged his head painfully on the wall of the tunnel. He felt a trickle of wetness on his head and assumed it was blood. A moment later his lantern flickered and went out, leaving him in complete and utter darkness.
His heart raced, tripped, and seemed for a moment as if it would not catch its rhythm again. He was choking-trapped in blackness and strangling! No air!
"Stop!" he growled at himself, although the sound was more of a gasp or gulp than actual words. Still, it was his own voice. There was air. The sudden terror that was making his heart pound and his head feel as though his skull was being squeezed in a monstrous fist was only that… fear.
What does darkness matter, anyway? he asked himself. You can only crawl, moving forward an inch at a time, Vansen. You are a worm. Do worms fear darkness?
It was a weirdly reassuring thought; after some moments his heart began to slow. He suddenly saw himself as a god might see him-a god with a sense of humor: Vansen was only a little creature where he didn't belong, crammed in a tunnel deep underground like a dried pea in a reed-the kind he used to blow at his brothers and sisters when they were children. The earth surrounded him, but it cradled him, too. There was nothing to do but go forward. When he stuck in the narrow places he would simply wriggle until he managed to free himself.
Forward. Only forward, he told himself. No point in anything else.
How the gods must be laughing!
Sweaty, shivering, with mud stinging his eyes and every joint trembling, Ferras Vansen at last crawled out of the far end of the crevice into a small cavern that felt as capacious and airy as the great temple in Southmarch after the tunnel. Browncoal crawled out behind him, followed by Antimony, who clutched the drow's rope like a child hanging onto a kite strin
g. They ate and rested, unspeaking, and then when Vansen could stand without his knees shaking they made their way forward.
They encountered only a few narrow spots the rest of the way, and nothing like that long, throttling tunnel; at last, after perhaps an hour or two of steady upward movement they clambered up into a gallery that had clearly been worked by the hands of thinking creatures, with crude pillars of stone left to hold up the roof so that the long, low series of chambers had the feeling of a beehive or a garden maze. Vansen was just wondering who and what had created it when a spatter of arrows cracked off stones above them. Vansen and Antimony dove for cover, the monk yanking the drow's rope so hard the little creature flew off his feet and tumbled like a child's toy.
The attackers quickly found the range and arrows smacked against the rocks all around them. A chip of broken stone gouged Vansen's cheek. The drow Browncoal, crouching beside Antimony, began to scream at the unseen enemy in his guttural tongue.
"Tell me what he says!" Vansen demanded.
"I don't understand all the words." Antimony listened as the others shouted something back. Browncoal called out to them again, an odd tone of desperation in his voice. "Our drow is saying we come in peace to talk to the dark lady," he told Vansen quietly. "But the others-they are drows, too-say something about the rope around his leg. I think they do not trust him-they think we force him to tell lies for us."
"Cut the rope."
"What?"
"You heard me. Cut the rope, untie it, what you will. But let him go to them so they can see we speak the truth."
"Forgive me, Captain, but are you mad? What will stop them from killing us then?"
"Don't you understand, Brother? We cannot fight them. They have bows and we do not, and even now they may be sending for reinforcements. Let the drow go."
Antimony shook his head but did as Vansen ordered. When he realized what the monk was doing, Browncoal's eyes widened. When the rope fell off he began to inch away from his captors.