by Glen Cook
“Wow!” I said. “Look at him.”
“He has the strength and enthusiasm of youth,” One-Eye conceded. I glanced back. He was still astride the black stallion, wearing a smug look but obviously exhausted. The white crow was perched in front of him. It studied Tobo with one eye while considering our surroundings with the other. It seemed amused. Then One-Eye began to chuckle.
Tobo squealed in surprise. “Wait! Stop! Goblin! What’s happening?”
The worms of light were snaking up his arms. They would not respond to his insistence that they desist. He started slapping himself. One-Eye and Goblin began to laugh.
Meantime, the two of them had done something to Swan to clarify his mind. The man looked like he had just sucked down a tall, frosty mug of self-confident recollection.
Sahra saw nothing funny in Tobo’s situation. She screamed at the wizards to do something. She was almost incoherent. Which betrayed how much stress she inflicted upon herself.
Doj told her, “He isn’t in any danger, Sahra. He just let himself get distracted. It happens. It’s part of learning,” or words to that effect, several times, before Sahra calmed down and began to look defiant and sheepish at the same time.
Goblin told Tobo, “I’ll take it till you get your concentration back.” And in a moment there was light enough to see the walls of the huge chamber. Someone who is skilled at something always makes it look easy. The little bald wizard was no exception. He told One-Eye, “Help Swan keep his head clear.”
I thought the place looked like a nice change from sleeping out in the weather. I wished there was fuel we could burn to heat it.
“Whither now?” I asked Swan. For some time I had been silently regretting not having caught Murgen while I was dreaming so I could have gotten reliable directions.
The white crow squawked and launched itself, leaving One-Eye cursing because it had swatted him in the face with its wings.
I was starting to understand the beast. “Somebody see where it goes. One of you sorcerer geniuses want to send a light with it?” Tobo had received control of his light again and had it working in good form but it took all his attention to manage it. I hoped he outgrew this more-confidence-than-sense stage before he took a really big bite of disaster.
Uncle Doj trailed the crow at a dignified pace. I supposed I ought to contribute something more than executive decisions, so I followed him. A ball of leprous green light from behind overtook me and made a nest in my tangled hair. My scalp began to itch. I had a suspicion One-Eye might be sneering at my personal hygiene, which, I confess, sometimes became the victim of a negligent attitude. Sort of. “This’ll teach me to take my darn helmet off,” I grumbled. I refused to allow him to flash me his smug, toothless grin by not looking back.
I had not been wearing an actual helmet. God save me, that would have been cold. I had been wearing a leather helmet liner, which had kept my ears from getting frostbitten. Barely. Winter. It was one of those things the planning team had not foreseen.
I hurried past Doj, who was startled when he saw my hair. Then he grinned as big as ever I had seen him do. I tossed him a bloodthirsty scowl. Unfortunately, to do so I had to turn around far enough to see One-Eye and Goblin suddenly stop exchanging handslaps and snickers. Even Sahra turned slightly sideways to conceal her amusement. All right. So suddenly I am the clown princess of the Company, eh? We would see. Those two would...
I realized that they had lured me into accepting their system of thought. Before long I would be setting traps so I could get even first.
The crow cawed. It was down on the cold stone floor. It danced back and forth, suddenly impatient. Its talons clicked softly. I dropped to my knees. It let me get almost within touching distance before it flopped farther into the darkness.
More light took life behind us as people and animals came inside, making the predictable racket. Every new arrival had to know what was going on.
The crow became a silhouette if I lowered my head and looked at it with my cheek against the floor.
I told Doj, “There’s light coming from somewhere. This must be where the Captured got into the inner fortress.” I got down on my belly. There was a definite gap in a wall of stone so dark it seemed unseeable even in the available light. I could not make out anything on the other side.
Doj got down and placed his own cheek on the floor. “Indeed.”
I called, “We need some more light over here. And maybe some tools. River. Runmust. Have those people start setting up some kind of camp. And see what you can do about shutting out the cold.” That would be difficult. There were several large gaps in the outside wall.
Goblin and One-Eye stopped grinning like fools and came forward dressed in their business faces. They kept Tobo right there with them, determined to teach him their trade quickly, hands-on.
With more light it was easier to see what the bird meant me to see, which had to be the crack Soulcatcher had sealed after working her wicked spells on the Captured. “There any spells or booby traps here?” I asked.
“The Little Girl’s a genius,” One-Eye grumbled. His speech had grown a little slurred. He needed rest badly. “The bird strutted through and didn’t go up in smoke. Right? That suggest anything?”
“No spells,” Goblin said. “Don’t mind him. He’s just cranky because him and Gota haven’t had no privacy for a week.”
“I’m gonna fit you out for all the privacy you’ll need for a couple of eons, Runt Man. I’m gonna plant your wrinkled old ass —”
“Enough! Let’s see if we can make the hole any bigger.”
The crow made impatient noises on the other side. It had to have some connection with the Captured even if it was not Murgen operating from some lost corner of time. Certainly I hoped it was not Murgen from the future. That would imply a less than successful effort on our part now.
I grumbled and snarled. I stamped back and forth while half a dozen men expanded the hole, every one of them grousing about the shortage of light. I did not contribute much as a human candle, either. Maybe the thing in my hair was Goblin and One-Eye offering commentary on how bright I was. Though I doubted that after only two hundred years they could yet have developed that much cleverness and subtlety.
A larger and larger crowd piled up behind me. “River,” I growled, “I said you should have these people do something useful. Tobo, get back from there. You want a boulder to fall on your head?”
A voice behind me suggested, “You ought to get more light on it so you can see if you need to do any shoring.”
I turned. “Slink?”
“There were miners in my family.”
“Then you’re as near an expert as we’ve got.”
One-Eye jabbed a thumb at Goblin. “The dwarf here has sapper experience. He helped undermine the walls at Tember.” His face split in an ugly grin.
Goblin squeaked, a definite clue that “Tember” was an episode he did not recall fondly. I did not remember any mention of a Tember in the Annals. Reason suggested that the referenced event must have taken place long before Croaker became Annalist, which he had done at an early age.
Two of Croaker’s more immediate predecessors, Miller Ladora and Kanwas Scar, had been so lax in their duties that little is known about their time — other than what their successors have reconstructed from oral tradition and the memories of survivors. It was during that era that Croaker, Otto and Hagop joined the band. Croaker says little about those days himself.
“Am I to take it, then, that I shouldn’t invest unlimited faith in Goblin’s engineering skills?”
One-Eye cawed like a crow. “As an engineer our bitty buddy makes a wonderful lumberjack. Things fall down wherever he goes.”
Goblin growled like a mastiff issuing a warning.
“See, this here skinny little bald-egg genius sold the Old Man the notion of sneaking into this burg Tember by tunneling under its walls. Deep down. Because the earth was soft. It’d be easy.” One-Eye snorted as he talked, his laughter
barely under control. “And he was right. It was easy. When his tunnel caved in, the wall fell down. And the rest of us charged through the gap and sorted them Temberinos out.”
Goblin grumbled, “And about five days later somebody remembered the miners.”
“Somebody was just plain damned lucky he had a friend as good as me to dig him out. The Old Man just wanted to put up a gravestone.”
Goblin growled some more. “Not so. And the real truth is, the tunnel never would’ve collapsed if this two-legged, overripe dog turd hadn’t been playing one of his stupid games. You know, I almost forgot. I never did pay you back for that. You should’ve never brought it up, you human prune. Damn! You almost went and died on me before I got you paid off. I knew you were up to no good. You had that stroke on purpose, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did, you nitwit. Every chance I get, I try to die just so’s you can’t backstab me no more. You want to be that way? I saved your ass and you want to be that way? Ain’t no fool like an old fool. Bring it on, you hairless little toady frog. I maybe slowed down a step the last couple years but I’m still three steps faster and ten torches brighter than any lily-white —”
“Boys!” I snapped. “Children! We have work to do here.” They must have driven the whole Company crazy when they were young and had the energy to keep it up all the time. “As of this moment, all the slates are clean of anything that happened before I was born. Just open me a hole so I can go see what we have to do next.”
The two wizards did not stop growling and muttering and threatening and trying to sabotage one another in small ways but they did lend their claimed expertise to the effort to open the gap.
82
Once the opening had been expanded enough to use, there was a brief debate about who would use it first. The accord was universal: “Not me.” But when I squatted down to duckwalk forward into the shadows, in hopes I could get a look at what might eat me a few seconds before its jaws snapped shut, several gentlemen turned all noble and chivalrous. I suspect it was significant that two of them, Swan and Suvrin, were not Company brothers.
Goblin grumbled, “All right. All right. Now you’re making us look bad. All of you, get out of the way.” He bustled forward.
He did not have to duck.
I did, just slightly, as I followed him through.
I did not need anyone to be noble or chivalrous or to go in before me.
“There is no God but God,” I muttered. “His Works are Vast and Mysterious.” I was five steps inside and had just bumped into Goblin, who had stopped to stare as well. “I presume that’s the golem demon Shivetya.”
“Or his ugly little brother.”
Murgen had not kept me posted on the golem’s state. At last report it had been just a single earth tremor short of plunging into a bottomless abyss, still nailed to a huge wooden throne by means of a number of silver daggers. I observed, “It appears the plain has been healing itself in here, too.” I eased forward.
There was still a vertiginous abyss. I had to close my eyes momentarily while I regained my equilibrium. Shivetya remained poised over it but the gap clearly was narrower than Murgen had described. In closing, the surface had pushed the wooden throne upward somewhat. Shivetya was no longer in momentary peril of falling. It looked like a few decades would see him lying there with his nose pressed into healed stone, the overturned throne on top of him still.
Willow Swan invited himself to join me. He said, “That thing hasn’t moved since last time.”
I countered, “Thought you couldn’t remember anything.”
“Whatever the short farts did, it seems to be working. I recognize things when I see them.”
Goblin told Swan, “Considering what could still happen if Shivetya starts jumping around, holding still seems like a pretty good idea. Don’t you think?”
“Could you hold still for fifteen years?”
I said, “He’s held still a lot longer than that, Swan. He’s been nailed to that throne for hundreds of years. Or even thousands. He has to have been nailed down since before Deceivers fleeing Rhaydreynak came here on their way to other worlds and hid the Books of the Dead.” That observation got me some looks, particularly from Master Santaraksita. I had not yet shared the tales I had gleaned from Murgen. “Else he would’ve stomped them good at the time. They would’ve looked like the kind of thing he was put here to guard against. I think.”
“Who nailed him down?” Goblin asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Might be a handy piece of information. You’d want to keep an eye on a guy who could do that kind of thing.”
“I would,” Swan agreed. He grinned nervously.
“It’s listening,” I said. I moved along the edge of the abyss several steps, squatted. From there I could see the demon’s eyes. They were open a crack. I could also see that there were three of them instead of two, the third being in the center of the forehead above and between the other two. This point had not come up before, though it was the sort of thing you would expect of a Gunni-style demon.
The oversight became self-explanatory as soon as the demon sensed my scrutiny. The third eye closed and vanished.
I asked Swan, “That throne look like it’s solidly wedged?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just wondering if we could move it without losing it down that crack.”
“I’m no engineer but it looks to me like you’d really have to work at it to dump it down there now. Obviously, it could go. One really stupid move... it’s a hell of a deep hole. But...”
The curious kept piling up behind us. Their chatter was becoming annoying. Every single whisper turned into a gaggle of echoes that made the place seem more haunted than it was. “Everybody be quiet. I can’t hear myself think.” I must have sounded nastier than I intended. People shut up. And gawked. I asked, “Does anyone see a way to get that thing turned right side up and pushed back away from the gap?”
“How come you’d want to do that?” One-Eye asked. “Quit shoving, Junior.”
Suvrin asked, “Using equipment we have on hand?”
“Yes. And it would have to get done today. I want the majority of these people back on the road south at first light tomorrow.”
“That means using brute force. Right now. Some of us would have to get on the other side of the fissure and lift the top of the throne enough so people and animals on this side could get the leverage to pull it on up. Using ropes.”
Swan said, “You try to stand it up the way it is there, the bottom end will just slide off the edge. Then it’s a grand ride off to the entrails of the earth.”
“How come you’d want to do that?” One-Eye demanded again. I ignored him again.
I concentrated on the argument spreading outward from Suvrin and Swan. I let it run for several minutes. Then I announced, “Suvrin seems to be the only one here with a positive view. So he’s in charge. Suvrin, draft anybody you want. Help yourself to any resources you need. Sit Shivetya back up for me. You hear that, Steadfast Guardian? Gentlemen, if you have any ideas, feel free to share them with Mr. Suvrin.”
Suvrin said, “I can’t...! don’t...! shouldn’t...! guess the first thing we’d better do is get a solid idea of how much weight we’re dealing with. And we’ll have to rig up some way to get across the gap. Mr. Swan, you handle that. Young Mr. Tobo, I understand you’re skilled at mathematics. Suppose you help me calculate how much mass we’re dealing with here?”
Tobo grinned and headed for the throne, not at all intimidated by the demon.
“One adjustment,” I said. “I need Swan with me. He’s been here before. Runmust, you and Iqbal figure out how to get across. Willow. Come with me.”
Out of earshot of the others, Swan asked, “What’s going on?”
“I didn’t want to remind anybody that the Company got this far once before. Somebody might recall a grudge against the man who made it impossible for our predecessors to go any farther.”
“Oh.
Thanks. I guess.” He glanced at the clot of Nyueng Bao. Mother Gota continued to nurture her grudge. She had a son somewhere down under this stone.
“I may just have a strange perspective. I do believe all of us should accept responsibility for our actions but I’m not sure we ever understand why we do some things. Do you know why you cut Soulcatcher loose? I’d bet you’ve spent the odd minute here and there trying to figure that out.”
“You’d win. Except it’d be more like the odd year here and there. And I still can’t explain it. She did something to me, somehow. Just with her eyes. All the way across the plain. Probably manipulating my feelings about her sister. When the time came it seemed like the right thing to do. I never had a doubt until it was all over and we were on the run.”
“And she kept her word.”
He understood. “She gave me everything her eyes promised. Everything I could never have from the sister I really wanted. Whatever her failings, Soulcatcher keeps her word.”
“Sometimes we get what we want and find out that it wasn’t what we needed.”
“No shit. Story of my life, Sleepy.”
“Around fifty people came onto the plain. Two of you got away. Thirteen died on the road, trying. The rest are still out here somewhere. And you helped put them where they are. So I’m going to need you to show me. Are you still blind in the memory or have you started to remember?”
“Oh, those spells took. It’s coming back. But not necessarily organized the same way that it happened. So bear with me when I seem a little confused.”
“I understand.” I kept an eye on the others as we talked. Sahra seemed to be putting herself under a lot of unnecessary stress. Doj looked ferociously ready to seize the day should an opportunity pop up. Gota was nagging One-Eye about something while keeping one grim eye aimed Swan’s way. Goblin was trying to get the mist projector set up amidst a jostling crowd. I noted, “There seems to be more light than Murgen reported.”
“Tons more. And it’s warmer, too. If I was allowed a guess, mine would be that it has something to do with the healing that’s going on.”