by Brian Murphy
“Warrior, I greet you,” Emeth replied.
Warrior!
“Father…”Jai said, suddenly uneasy.
Emeth hushed him with a gesture. To the newcomer, he said, “I hadn’t expected to see you so soon.”
“Nor I you. There’s no going on to Mianost, Emeth. A Dark Knight has been seen farther up the trail.”
Jai’s heart lurched. Like his parents, he darted frightened glances into the forest shadows.
“It’s all right,” said the woman. She put a calming hand on the neck of Emeth’s horse, which had begun dancing uneasily, scenting his rider’s fear. “I don’t know if he’s looking for you, Emeth, but we can’t take the chance he is, or even that he’s alone.”
Emeth nodded, as though he understood something his wife and son did not. Marise voiced the very question in Jai’s mind. “How will we get past the Knight?”
The lady warrior hooked her finger through a golden chain hung round her neck. From her blouse she lifted something bright green. Jai had the swift impression of a talisman of flashing emerald, the stone shaped like a leaf half furled. She dropped the talisman so that it hung outside her blouse, the stone sitting at the V of her rough gray shirt, the place where her breasts rose.
“Magic,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”
“Father?” Jai said again, but he didn’t give voice to his doubts. The newcomer looked up at him, right into his eyes. She raised a brow and smiled, and Jai found himself not looking into her eyes but at the emerald nestled on the woman’s breasts.
The wind changed, shifting so that it was at the woman’s back. Jai caught her scent and could think of nothing else. His mind filled with images of the forest, of oaks and elms and trees less tame than those in the orchards of Qualinost. Clinging to her hair and skin and clothing was the perfume that comes from beyond the bridges of Qualinost, from outside the city and deep in the forest where the glens are shrouded in shadow and the streams run nameless into rivers long secret.
“Let me assist you,” she said to Jai, holding the gray horse still and reaching a hand to him.
Words of protest rose in Jai’s heart at the thought of this tall, lovely woman handing him down from the horse as if he were a child. He said nothing, however, for he found himself foot to ground before he remembered moving. Indeed, his parents stood each on one side of him, his mother’s face a little paler than it had been, his father’s settling into lines of peace. Jai’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. He gasped for breath. Once, twice, and then the woman put a hand on his shoulder.
“Easy,” she whispered. “It’s like a dream.” She came very close, and his eye fell on the emerald again. She laughed, a low, soft chuckle. “Just like a dream.”
And it was, the kind of dream where people did not move but suddenly found themselves in other places with no understanding of how they got there.
Jai drew breath to speak, but she warned him to silence. With that warning he realized she hadn’t really spoken to him at all, not with lips and tongue. She spoke into his mind.
The magic is unstable, she said, keep still and trust. Concentrate on being still.
Trust! That trembled in him just as his heart did, and he wondered if that quaking heart would be enough to cause the magic to collapse or worse, to change into something the woman couldn’t control. Again, she laughed. Her voice sounded like jays in the trees, raucous and challenging. Suddenly, it had nothing to do with jays at all, but became the voice of a storm. Wind and rain and driven leaves whirled along the ground.
Jai cried out-or tried to. He had no breath, no words, and no sight. The last sense to fail was his hearing, and the last thing he heard was his mother’s voice, frail and thin in the storm-wind of magic, crying, “Jai! Emeth! Hold on to-!”
“Hey,” said a voice, low and very deep.
Jai groaned, and then he shut his mouth. He simply lay still, in pain. He must have fallen hard. His chest hurt as if all the air had been blasted out of his lungs and only recently returned. His head hurt. Worse, pain screamed through his knee. The joint felt as if it were on fire. The ruined muscles that once supported him twitched feebly.
“Hey.” A finger poked him, once and then again. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
Jai opened his eyes to see a dwarf crouching near, a glowing lantern on the ground beside his knee.
A dwarf. How?
The lantern light flickered and moved, but not like a candle’s flame. It pulsed. The dwarf leaned closer, his bearded face so near Jai could see the blue flecks in the irises of his dark eyes. “I said can you hear me?”
Jai closed his eyes again. “I’m not deaf.”
The dwarf grunted. “That’s good.” He kept silent for a heart’s beat, then, “Your ears work. How about the rest of you?
Jai’s belly clenched, but he refused to groan as he moved his leg. Pain lanced through the knee, shooting up his leg to his hip, yet in that pain he found a measure of comfort. Even all these years later, he remembered what broken bones felt like, he remembered how ripped muscle screamed and burned. His breath eased through clenched teeth. He had broken or torn nothing.
He opened his eyes again. “I’m all right.”
“If you say so.” The dwarf shrugged, sitting back on his heels, deeper into the shadows beyond the lantern light. In his muscular left hand he gripped the haft of a throwing axe. “I’m Stanach Hammerfell. You’re Jai Windwild, I take it.”
Jai frowned. “How did you know…?”
Relaxing his grip on the axe, Stanach nodded toward Jai’s knee. “I’ve been told to keep an eye out for you- a lame elf named Jai.”
For a long silent moment, the dwarf looked at the ruin of Jai’s knee, the poorly knitted bones, the swelling of new bruises. He gave Jai a sidelong glance as to say, Well, that’d be you, wouldn’t it?
But aloud, he only said, “You might like to know your mam and your da are all right.”
“My what?”
Stanach looked at him as if he’d had a few wits jogged loose by the fall. “Your mother and father,” he said with exaggerated care. A sly smile tugged at his lips. “You were concentrating on something when the lady did her magic, eh? That pretty emerald in its pretty nest. Not concentrating on keeping still and trusting, which is what you were supposed to do. Damn magic. I hate it when they have to use it. It’s always me got to go searching miles of tunnel for the ones who fall out of it too soon or too late.”
“Where am I?”
“Underground.” Stanach sat back again, and this time Jai noticed that his strange eyes changed, as a dwarfs will when the light recedes. The irises opened wide, all black now, no blue flecks to be seen. “Underground, and nearer to Qualinost than Thorbardin.”
Thorbardin?
At Jai’s puzzled expression, the dwarf nodded. “Thorbardin, which is where you’re headed. Didn’t they tell you that?”
Flatly, Jai said, “No one tells anyone all of anything about escape plans.”
“All right, then, I’ll tell you. I suppose you or your parents did something to catch the eye of the dragon’s underlings, yes?” Jai let his silence be the answer. “Thought so. Well, you’re near the route you elves take when you’re leaving Qualinost in the dark of night.
Dwarves have been delving a tunnel between Thorbardin and Qualinost — ”
“Delving? Why?”
Stanach shrugged. “Kings don’t tell me why they do things. The elf-king and our thane put their heads together one day and said, ‘Delve!’ and off we went, digging a road between Qualinesti and Thorbardin.”
Plainly disbelieving, Jai said he doubted Gilthas would look up from his poetry long enough to make such a plan.
“Really? Well, likely you know him better than I do.”
Jai, who knew the king not at all, said no more.
“This place is a work-tunnel. We stashed gear and tools here when we were digging out this part of the main tunnel. The work began at Thorbardin, and once the job is done, there’
ll be a dark-road that starts about five miles from Qualinost and ends right at Thorbardin’s cellar door. Till then there are ways into the finished part. Magic’s one of them, and hunting you lostlings who fall out of the spell the gods know where gives me a way to pass my days. But the easier way is through one of the secret entrances.” Stanach looked up, no sign of humor in his blue-flecked dark eyes. “Why did the lady warrior not lead your party to the Mianost entrance?”
Bitterly, Jai told him what had happened, and how it ruined his plans.
“Your plans? Promising as you say you are, there’s got to be more scribes than you in Qualinost. I suppose they can find someone else to patch up the parchments now that you’re gone.”
“It’s not about patching, it’s about keeping.” Jai put his palms flat to the stony floor and pushed himself up to sit. “I have to get back to Qualinost.”
Stanach’s left hand dropped to the haft of his axe. He looked right into Jai’s eyes. “No. You’re here now-”
“You don’t have to take me. You don’t have to do anything but point me in the right direction. I’ll get there myself.”
“No, you won’t. Even if you could manage it, I can’t let you. No one roams the tunnels alone. You’re coming with me, and you’re going to Thorbardin.”
The hair prickled on the back of Jai’s neck. A cold bleakness lay behind the dwarfs eyes, like the far stretch of a winter plain.
“And besides, what’s to keep, back there in your Qualinost? A few books and papers, some old songs…? For how long? Might be your homeland is still in one piece tonight. Maybe it will be tomorrow, but the end is coming, and no one’s thinking it’ll be a long time happening.”
In his low deep voice, Stanach Hammerfell said much the same thing Annalisse had. The echo chilled Jai to the heart. Was there nothing, then, but ending? Was there nothing but the road away from the golden kingdom and all the long years of elven glory?
There had to be more!
A sound, like far-off thunder, rumbled in the stone beneath him, vibrating through his spine and painfully in his knee. Jai looked around, seeing the strange pulsing lantern-light shining on a high ceiling of stone, roughly hewn, and piles of rocks shoved up against the glistening walls.
“What’s that noise?”
“Worms.” Stanach said.
“Worms? How could worms-?”
Stanach waved the question away. “Better showing than telling.” He peered closely at Jai, then stood and offered his hand. “You reckon you can get up and walk?”
Jai grasped Stanach’s hand. The dwarf had a surprising strength. He stepped back and pulled Jai right up to his feet. He bore Jai’s weight while he found his balance and didn’t seem to feel it at all. When Jai was steady again, Stanach handed him the lantern. Jai almost dropped it. The light moved like it was alive-and then he saw something living did reside in the little lantern cage.
“Grubs,” Stanach said. “Well, larvae. Hold steady. You drop it, you’ll likely kill it.”
Jai held the lantern at arm’s length, watching the fat, eyeless larva pulse, its glowing body casting as much light as an oil lamp would.
Stanach picked up his axe and slid the haft into his belt. He settled the broad belt round his waist, checking to see that all was there: knife, fat leather water-bottle, and a coil of rope. When he took the lantern back, Jai had a good look at him. He was a dwarf in his middle age, not more than two hundred years, likely a decade or so less. He stood as high as Jai’s chest. His beard was black, his hair silvering at the temples and long enough to fall over the collar of his shirt. Thick in the neck, thick in the shoulders, he looked like one who knew his way around a hammer and anvil.
“You’re a forgeman,” Jai said.
“Used to be.”
Even as he said so, Jai realized that Stanach had done everything with his left hand, holding the axe, lifting the lantern, hauling Jai himself to his feet. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers twisted and withered. The dwarf stood braced, as though waiting for the inevitable, for Jai to mumble an apology for noticing. When Jai said nothing, he relaxed.
“All right, elf,” he said, “we have some traveling to do, and it’s going to be a hard old walk. You up to it?”
“Walking to where?”
“We’ll catch up with the work detail. That’s a good two miles out. They can send a runner back along the tunnel to Thorbardin and let your mam-” He cocked his head, and offered a lean smile-”your mother and father, know all’s well with you.”
“Thorbardin. How far are we from there?”
“Farther than I like to be. We’re standing about halfway between there and Qualinost. There’s a crossway up ahead. Once we get there it’s north to Qualinost, or as near to Qualinost as we get till we hit stone. From there, it’s clear south to Thorbardin. You came in-or tried to come in-about a mile north of where we are now, near Mianost. We’ll pass it on the way, but you won’t see much. We hide those ways in and out pretty well.
“Come on, now. We’ll make the camp, and then you can rest.”
Bleak dwarf, rough as stone. His strange eyes seemed to see only winterscapes, only lifelessness and ending. But there are endings, and there are beginnings, Jai thought. Out from winter, spring. He didn’t know where he’d find his beginning, that spring again. With all the world seeming to want to end around him, he couldn’t imagine. He did know, though, that he would not find it in Thorbardin. His heart told him that.
No, he decided. He wasn’t going to Thorbardin. He was going back to Qualinost, and the first thing he could do about that was get rid of the dwarf.
It was, as Stanach had said, a hard old walk through the tunnel. Once they turned south the going became rougher, rising and falling in ways a man able to stride out and not worry about his footing wouldn’t notice. Jai felt every rise and dip, every rock on the underground road. He had a sense of walls rising high, curving to a rough ceiling, but he didn’t look around much. He couldn’t take his eyes from the ground. Stanach kept the light near, for the farther they went the rougher the road became.
“They haven’t made the second pass yet. It’s going to be hard going. Hold on to me if you want, elf.”
Jai didn’t, and didn’t even thank him for the offer. He concentrated on the way ahead, lurching along unassisted. He was looking for something, an opportunity.
They went that way for a time. Jai looked at the walls when they stopped to rest. Stanach called them the ribs of the runnel, and he said the ceiling was the spine, the floor the belly. Like we’ve been swallowed by some horrible beast, Jai thought. At these ribs, spine, and belly he looked, trying to find some sign of the Mianost entrance. He saw nothing but stone. All the while the earth vibrated beneath them, the rumbling growing stronger the farther they went. The vibrations rattled Jai’s knee, sending fiery lightning lances shooting through the joint.
“That can’t be worms,” he said, his words coming through gritted teeth as he leaned up against a damp wall, again forced to rest.
“If you say so.”
Lanterns hung at intervals on the walls, settled snugly in iron brackets. By their glowing light Jai saw the tunnel here was strewn with debris, boulders half as high as Jai stood, many looking like they’d been flung to the ground by some giant hand and shattered.
To balance, he put his hand on one of the piles. His fingers closed round a stone the size of his fist. His belly clenched suddenly. That might be one way to get rid of the dwarf.
“Larvae?” Jai said, speaking of the lanterns, getting a good grip on the stone.
“Lots. We’re almost there.” Stanach untied the leather water bottle from his belt and held it out. Jai let go the stone and took what he offered. “It’s not water. Go easy.”
Jai would have known what the bottle held the moment he unstopped the mouth. The pungent odor of dwarf spirits stung his nose. He took a sip, the liquor burning past his lips and down his throat, finally sitting like fire in his belly. Standing ther
e, the spirits afire inside him, he imagined he felt pain ease. He took a step, his knee wobbled beneath him, but for the moment it didn’t hurt.
“Just the lying spirits,” Stanach said. In the light and the shadow, he looked like he knew those lies and maybe had believed them for a while. He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned the leather bottle to his belt. “Rest. It isn’t far to the work camp now-just beyond the bend. There’ll probably be a healer there to slap some poultice or something on your knee. It won’t help the pain, but if anything’s inflamed, it might help that.”
Again, Jai felt the stone beneath his hand. Again, he closed his fingers around the roughness of it. “You don’t sound like you have a lot of faith in healers.”
Stanach grunted. “Magic was better, but gods come and gods go, and this latest going of theirs isn’t the first. I had the bad luck to get my fingers broken the time before, during the War of the Lance, while the crowd of them was shuffling around on the doorstep, trying to decide whether to stop by again. Friends tried to help…” Again, he shrugged. “Healer-craft is good for cuts and boils and colds, but you probably notice it doesn’t do much for the big things.”
The ground beneath their feet shook again. Stanach braced with his feet planted wide. Jai caught his balance against the wall. From behind came voices, several shouting in Dwarvish. A great rumbling filled the tunnel, sounding like thunder. With gestures and words Jai couldn’t hear, Stanach made him understand that he should get right up against the wall.
“Second pass!” he shouted, his words sounding small and distant. He pointed back the way they had come, and Jai’s blood ran cold. He gripped the stone now.
Something huge lumbered through the tunnel from the direction he and Stanach had just come, something nearly six feet thick through the middle, and so long Jai couldn’t see the end of it. It came hungry, eating all the stone and rubble in its path, chewing boulders with the same placidity as a cow chewing grass in her green pasture.
“Worm!” Stanach shouted.
His heart pounding, Jai thought the last thing you could name that creature was worm. And yet it did look like an out-sized worm, its hide glistening with slime in the light of lanterns, advancing as worms do, slithering in a gigantic sort of way. It had horns, and atop its back a basket sat, maybe where the neck was if, indeed, it had a neck. In that basket a dwarf stood, thick leather reins in his hands.