“Or somethin’, luv, but don’t ‘old it against ‘im.”
They crept out of the cell and started up the stairs. No one challenged them when they entered the deserted guard room, where they helped themselves to handfuls of weapons. Thus equipped, they took the place apart searching for Mudge’s bow and Jon-Tom’s duar.
“No luck,” grumbled Mudge as he finished excavating the last cabinet. “Maybe further up. I thought I saw a barred storeroom on our right when they were bringin’ us down ‘ere.”
Jon-Tom nodded. They climbed to the next level.
Where they found the storeroom Mudge remembered. They also saw a pudgy but alert hare standing in front of the half-open door.
At the same time, the rabbit saw them and turned to slam the door shut. Mudge threw his spear and the swinging grate slammed against it. The guard did manage a piercing scream before Quorly could cut his throat. Nothing can scream like a dying hare.
“Shit!” Quorly snapped, her eyes going immediately to the stairwell leading upward. “That’ll bring ‘em down on us in a minute. I’ll watch while you and Mudgey get your stuff.”
Jon-Tom rushed into the storeroom. Tossed indifferently on a pile of spears was his ramwood staff. He grasped it like an old friend’s proffered hand. But where was the duar?
“Right, mate, let’s go.”
He turned. Mudge stood waiting nearby. His quiver of arrows and longbow were slung against his back, and he was staggering beneath a load of metal and rock. Long links of gold coins were draped across his chest like bandoliers while necklaces of pearls and gems hung from his neck and wrists. His arms were full of gem-encrusted plates and goblets. Two tiaras rested askew on his crushed cap.
“Mudge, what the hell are you doing?”
The otter blinked, then looked embarrassed. He dropped his heavy load. Coins and gems went rolling across the floor.
“Sorry, mate. For a minim there I kind o’ forgot where we are.” Reluctantly, he unburdened himself of the rest of the treasure. “Couldn’t we maybe take just a wee bit with us?”
“No, we could not.” Jon-Tom snapped angrily.
“Will you two kindly get your arses in gear?” Quorly’s shout reached them along with pounding footsteps from the stairs. There was a startled squeal and a four-foot-tall armored hedgehog went sprawling into the room, bleeding from a stab wound in the belly. “I can’t hold this lot off forever.”
Jon-Tom turned to search the room, but Mudge spun him around. The otter’s eyes were wide as he pointed, not into the storeroom, but across the floor.
“There she is, mate!”
Jon-Tom fairly flew across the stones toward the crackling fireplace. He ignored the heat and the cinders as he yanked the priceless duar from the top of the fire. It was blackened in a couple of spots, but the strings were intact and so was the body. He tested it, was rewarded with a familiar mellow ring.
“That,” he gulped, “was too close.” He tried the tremble and mass controls. Everything worked. A slight shudder went through the paving stones as the music filled the room. “Let’s get out of here!”
Only the fact that the stairwell was so narrow had enabled Quorly to hold off the guards. Mudge gleefully went to work with his longbow, and in a couple of minutes the passage was blocked by the bodies of the fallen. Those guards who hadn’t been shafted retreated.
“That ought to ‘old the bastards,” Mudge said with satisfaction.
They plunged down the stairs, for the moment pursued only by confused shouts and angry cries. Jon-Tom had thoughtfully requisitioned the unfortunate javelina’s keys. Now he used them to lock the cell from the inside. Arrows flashed past him. The guards had finally managed to bring up archers of their own.
Jon-Tom tossed the keys into the hole in the floor and followed them down.
“Wot about puttin’ the stones back in place?” Quorly asked as she fell on top of him and slid off to one side.
“Take too much time,” he told her. “They saw us come in here. As soon as they get the door open, the first thing they’ll do is start checking the walls and the floor.” He started running down the tunnel, cursing as he bumped against the unyielding ceiling while trying to juggle his burden of staff, duar, and extra weapons.
They weren’t halfway back to the well chamber when excited yells sounded behind them. Some of Jon-Tom’s initial confidence evaporated and he tried to run faster, but it was hard to speed up in the confines of the tunnel.
“I didn’t think they’d follow us down here,” he yelled to his companions.
“I imagine they figure they can follow anyplace we can go, mate.”
“You go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”
“Now wot kind o’ cowards do you think we are?” Mudge replied, outraged. “Do you think that after all we’ve been through together, you and I, ‘avin’ come all this ways, that I’d for a minute think o’ leavin’ you behind to get your behind shot off? Wot do you take me for?”
Jon-Tom was gasping for breath now but still couldn’t keep from replying. “There’s also the fact that unless I can manage to do something with this duar, we’ll all likely never get out of here.”
“Well, yeah, that ‘ad occurred to me, too,” Mudge confessed.
Jon-Tom grinned, though he knew the otter couldn’t see him. “Glad to hear it. For a second I thought the dampness might’ve addled your brain.”
“Now, mate, you do old Mudge an injustice.” But the otter didn’t complain very strongly.
Meanwhile their pursuit continued to gain ground on them. Occasionally a flicker of light from closing torches would reach the refugees, spurring them to run still faster. The tunnel seemed to have stretched in their absence, lengthening like a rubber tube. The only advantage they possessed was the assurance of knowing their destination.
Even so, by the time the faint circle of light that marked the entrance to the well chamber appeared ahead, the guards were near enough for Jon-Tom to pick out individual voices. The three of them stumbled into the room, tripping and spilling weapons in all directions. The otters grabbed them up and waited for whatever might come.
Jon-Tom rolled over, discovered a pair of crossbow bolts protruding from the back of his cape. Once again he’d been saved by the thick leather. He plucked them out as several guards emerged from the tunnel mouth, only to find themselves confronted by not three but more than a dozen armed opponents.
Thornrack struggled to catch his breath, held his sword over his head. “All right, you’ve had your fun. You’ve led us a hard chase, but that’s over now.” He glared around until he located Jon-Tom. “We’ll see how well you run with your calf muscles cut.”
At that point Falameezar lifted his head, closed one eye, and spat. A small globe of very intense flame struck the jaguar’s sword, which melted like taffy. Eyes bulging at the immense outline which was slowly rising behind the otters, Thornrack dropped the glowing metal and bolted for the tunnel. He ran into the guards who were clustered thickly behind him.
Falameezar sighted and went poof with his lips. Thornrack’s tail burst into flame, and he redoubled his efforts to push past his own troops. They could hear him cursing and screaming halfway back through the tunnel.
“I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble from that direction,” observed Jon-Tom dryly.
“No,” agreed Oplode, dampening their euphoria, “but he will report what has happened back to Markus, and you can be certain the magician mil do something. There are only two openings to this room: the tunnel and the mouth of the old well above us. Both could easily be plugged. We could be sealed in here to starve or suffocate, and no magic would be required to accomplish those ends. Somehow we must get out before Markus has time to react to our escape.” Those salamander-slick eyes turned to Jon-Tom.
“Clothahump must have had confidence in you to send you by yourself in response to my request. If you are any kind of spellsinger, you must free us from this prison now. Even a wizard needs room to maneuver, a
nd we have none of that here.”
“ ‘E’s right, mate. We got your bloomin’ music box back. Now show ‘em wot you can do!”
Every eye turned to him. He was glad it was dark so they couldn’t see how nervous he was. A song— what would be the right song?
Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” created no openings in the stone walls, nor did any song of prisons or chain gangs. He started to sweat despite the coolness. Mudge sat down, looking resigned. He’d been through this before. Oplode looked disappointed and the rest of the party confused. It hurt Jon-Tom’s recall, though his playing was as smooth as ever.
“Wot’s wrong?” Quorly leaned over Mudge and snuggled close. “Nothin’s ‘appenin’.”
Mudge ran fingers lightly over her fur. “ ‘Tis just the way it works sometimes. ‘E’s a spellsinger for sure, but ‘e’s still new to ‘is profession and don’t quite ‘ave the ‘ang o’ it quite. Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it don’t. And sometimes you just ‘ave to be patient.”
“I’ll try,” she murmured worriedly, “but Oplode said we didn’t have a lot of time.”
Jon-Tom sang until he began to grow hoarse, and still the singing produced no results. Only a few idle gneechees, who didn’t hang around long enough for him to finish a single tune.
More to cheer himself than out of any hope of doing anything, he launched into a spirited rendition of Def Lepard’s “Rock of Ages.” Still no magical escape hatches appeared, no stairways or corridors.
He got something else, though.
The otters stirred. Awed whispers rose from the Quorum members. Oplode’s eyes narrowed, and he stroked his chin as he tried to analyze the meaning of this bizarre conjuration. Powerful sorcery it was, but of what kind, and what could it portend?
Only Mudge knew the origin of the shifting, glowing shapes that had appeared and now danced gleefully around the spellsinger’s feet. He knew because he’d encountered them once before.
“Wot did you call ‘em, mate?” he asked softly, staring along with the others.
The duar continued to produce thunderous, ringing chords. “Geolks,” Jon-Tom shouted at him, “but what are we going to do with them?”
XVII
The exquisite phosphorescent worm-forms continued to multiply, until they occupied much of the floor and most of the walls. They twisted and flowed through the stone in a peculiar cadence all their own, sometimes in time to the rhythm of the duar, sometimes in time to one utterly alien. The chamber was alive with living rainbows.
Jon-Tom concluded a brazen chorus, kept playing as he spoke. “Hello! Do you remember me?”
“It is good to see you again, music-maker.” The speaker might have been the same one who’d conversed with Jon-Tom back among the karst pinnacles in the Wrounipai, or it might have been another. There was no way of knowing for certain. Color was no clue. “Singing still, we see.”
“Yes, but not freely. We’re trapped in this place.” He tried to alter the melody subtly, to substitute his words for Lepard’s lyrics. “Trapped in this awful dark place.”
“Awful? What is the difference between one vacuum and another?” the worm asked him.
“Freedom of movement. Something you take for granted. Can you help us out of here? I’ll play whatever you like for as long as you want if you’ll just help us get out of here. There’s an opening higher up. Can you make something we can climb?”
“What is ‘climb’?” inquired a coolly curious geolk. The other prisoners looked on in mesmerized silence. “What is ‘out’? We like your emptiness but your movements concern us not.”
There had to be something they could do, he thought desperately. What could the geolks do? They could move freely through solid rock, come and go as they pleased and. . .
They could make earthquakes.
“Find a crack in this wall. . . in the rock that surrounds us. Link together as I saw you do before. Feel the music.”
“Nothing to do with us,” the geolks insisted distantly. “To tremor we have to work together, and right now we do not feel like working together.”
“Don’t feel like working together?” a new voice said. Jon-Tom continued to sing while trying simultaneously to quiet Falameezar, but the dragon’s political consciousness was up and he refused to be shushed. If anything, he looked inspired.
“Leave this to me, comrade. This is a matter of organization.”
“But you don’t understand, Falameezar,” Jon-Tom said desperately. “These aren’t your usual folks. They won’t—”
“Workers of the world, arise!” Falameezar bellowed. “Join together in solidarity and nothing can stop you!”
“Nothing can stop us now,” a bright blue geolk replied. “And we are not workers.”
Falameezar would have none of it, continued to lambast the glowing shapes with the profoundest barrage of Marxist rhetoric Jon-Tom had ever heard. It made absolutely no sense to him, but it seemed to hypnotize the geolks.
“Make Vladimir Ilyich proud of you,” Falameezar rumbled. “Show the world what true collective action can do!”
Whether it was Jon-Tom’s music or the dragon’s rhetoric or a combination of both, the geolks started to line up on the far wall, twisting and curling against one another.
“Get back, everybody,” Mudge warned the onlookers. “And don’t be surprised no matter wot ‘appens. Be ready!’ He grinned at his friend the spellsinger. “Bugger me for a blue-eyed bandicoot if I don’t think we’re gettin’ out o’ “ere!”
Still the geolks continued to gather, until the opposite wall of the well chamber was alive with blinding light. Jon-Tom had to close his eyes to shut out the intense glow.
Falameezar’ roared something about the worker’s imperative at the same time that Jon-Tom and his duar thundered out the opening words of Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize.” The earth trembled as the huge rope of geolks convulsed. The concussion knocked Jon-Tom off his feet, and even Falameezar was tossed sideways.
His head rattling, he tried to keep playing, tried to do it as fluidly as Jimi or Robin Trower or Eddie van Halen would have. Finally he had to stop because the dust in his nostrils was choking him.
He opened his eyes to a different kind of light.
The geolks were gone, and so was much of the far wall. Light washed over the bottom of the well because the right side of the roof had collapsed. In place of wall and roof was a pile of rubble that reached all the way to the main floor above.
Falameezar shoved his way clear of the talus. “Free! Free from the imperialist neo-colonialist yoke!” He started pawing up the steep slope. “Where is he, lead me to him!”
“Easy, easy, comrade!” Jon-Tom struggled to catch up to the angry dragon. “If he sees you, he’ll only put you to sleep again.”
“No, he will not,” said Falameezar decisively. “The people are awake to reality now, and nothing can put them to sleep again.” Flame and smoke billowed from his jaws. “I’ll reduce the fascist dictator to a cinder.” He started climbing again.
“Don’t underestimate him!” Jon-Tom shouted up at the dragon, but to no avail. Falameezar wasn’t dumb, but he was more than a little impulsive, especially when the revolutionary fever was on him.
Shouts sounded from the floor above, and they found themselves looking up at Markus’s guards. Their expressions were more than a little fearful as they stared down into the gaping hole that had materialized practically under their feet. If that wasn’t enough to send them running, the sight of Falameezar climbing rapidly toward them finished the job. The floor cleared with gratifying swiftness.
“He’ll keep the soliders busy,” Jon-Tom muttered, “but I’ll have to handle Markus. Somehow.”
“You can do it, mate. You’re the only one who can,” Mudge said.
Jon-Tom looked grim. “Maybe I can convince the geolks to concentrate in his spine. Hell, we’ll get him! I just managed a Marxist earthquake, didn’t I?” He looked past the otter, waved to the others.
“All right, let’s go!”
Yelling and barking enthusiastically, the otters followed him up the slope. Oplode and the Quorum members trailed at a discreet distance. They were administrators, not fighters.
Falameezar was searching the intact part of the big room, hunting for fascists. Occasionally a guard or two would peer through a doorway, only to be sent fleeing by a ferocious blast of flame. Falameezer launched into a spirited rendition of the “Internationale.” He was out of tune and had the words all wrong, but Jon-Tom wasn’t about to correct him. The scaly Marxist was having too good a time incinerating capitalist dupes.
“We’ve got to find Markus as fast as possible, before he can get his wits together. Falameezar will keep his guards occupied.” He looked at Trendavi, the deposed premier. “Can you show us the way to his tower?”
The aged pangolin nodded. “Without fail, my friends.” He led them through a still-standing door.
Occasionally they encountered some of Markus’s guards, but while the otters were usually outarmed and outweighed, they were never intimidated. Guards broke and ran without fighting. No doubt word of the escape was already racing through the Quorumate, and no solider wanted tp risk the chance of encountering a bunch of hyperkinetic fanatics who might be backed up by a fire-breathing, if somewhat verbose, dragon.
“This way,” Trendavi told them, turning to his left. Then they were outside, on the parapet Jon-Tom had been marched across not so long ago, racing toward Markus’s sanctuary.
“He has outsmarted himself,” Oplode commented as they slowed. The members of the Quorum were near collapse from the run, but not the salamander. His eyes glittered. “None can approach from three sides, but by the same token there is only this way out.”
“I’m going in,” Jon-Tom told them. “The rest of you stay behind me.”
“I was about to suggest that meself,” said Mudge.
They rushed forward. There was no sign of the two armed lions who had flanked the entrance when Jon-Tom had been brought here before.
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