by Glen Cook
I did feel overdressed for the indoor weather. It was not hot but it was warmer than the plain outside and there was no wind biting.
“Where are the Captured?”
“There was a stairway over there. We must have gone a mile down into the earth.”
“You carried thirty-five unconscious people down there and got back in time to get away from the evening shadows? Without killing yourself?”
“Catcher did most of it. She has a spell that makes things float through the air. We roped the people together and pulled them along like a string of sausages. She did the pulling, actually. I stayed on the uphill end. More or less. At first. Because the stair has some twists and turns. We had trouble getting them around the corners. But a lot less trouble than if we’d carried them one at a time.”
I nodded. I knew of other instances when Catcher had used the same sorcery. Seemed like a handy one to have. We could use it right here, right now, to hoist my future buddy Shivetya.
Curious. Once upon a time Murgen said that name meant “Deathless,” although more recently I had been given the meaning “Steadfast Guardian.” But I had been provided with whole new sets of creation myths and whatnot, too.
I fought off an urge to charge off and plunge down the stairway right then. I hustled back to talk it over with the others. Most of the crowd were preoccupied with an effort to get Shivetya’s throne turned right side up by the power of talking about it. Suvrin told me, “It’s a way to keep warm.” And a way to work off some tension, no doubt. I heard plenty of traditional-style grumbling questioning the intelligence of any leader who wanted to play around with something like that great ugly thing over there on that throne.
I gathered everyone interested. “Swan knows the way down to the caverns. His memory is getting better all the time.” Goblin and One-Eye preened. I gave them no chance to congratulate themselves publicly. “I’m going down there to scout. I want the rest of you to get camp set up. I want you to work out specifically how we’ll divide up tomorrow so the majority can scoot on across the plain to safety.” We had discussed this time and again how we could break up the party, leaving the minimum number of people with the maximum stores to bring out the Captured while the rest moved on to, it was hoped, a more congenial clime.
Doj’s position, so perfectly rational, was that we should ignore the Captured until we had crossed the plain, had gotten ourselves established in the Land of Unknown Shadows, and were capable of mounting a more thoroughly prepared and supplied expedition. But none of us knew what we would face at that end of this passage, and way too many of us were emotionally incapable of walking away from our brothers again now that we were this close.
I should have gotten more information out of Murgen while we still had some flexibility. Time was winnowing our options rapidly.
Sahra’s response to Uncle’s repeating his suggestion was blistering enough to melt lead. She might be reluctant to have her husband back but she was not going to delay any crisis.
Swan leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “If you hang around here waiting for all these people to agree on something, we’re going to get very old and very hungry before anything happens.”
The man had a point. A definite point.
83
I got my daily constitutional in before we reached the stairway. I began to appreciate just how vast the hall at the heart of that fortress was. My party dwindled into the distance. I observed, “This thing has got to be a mile across.”
“Almost exactly. It’s a few yards under, according to Soulcatcher. I don’t know why. I wish we had a torch. I saw patterns in the flooring last time I was here, when there wasn’t quite so much dust, but she wouldn’t let me waste time looking at them.”
There was a lot of dust. There had been none outside. The plain tolerated nothing alien except the corpses of invaders, evidently. Even here, we had yet to discover any sign of the animals or equipment that had accompanied the Captured south.
“How much farther?”
“Almost there. Watch for a drop-off.”
“A drop-off?”
“A step down. It’s only about eighteen inches but you could break a leg if it surprises you. I turned an ankle last time.”
We found the drop-off. I stopped to look back once I stepped down. All sorts of genius was being invested in the assignments I had given. Closer, Sahra and the Radisha and several others to whom I had not given specific assignments had decided to follow me. I said, “You’re right. It does look like there’re some kind of inlays. If we have time, maybe we can take a closer look.” I considered the edge of the stone. “This curves. And it’s polished.”
“That part of the floor is a circle. And it’s almost exactly one-eightieth of the diameter of the plain. According to Soulcatcher. The raised part where the demon’s throne used to sit is one-eightieth the size of this.”
“That’s probably got to mean something. It have anything to do with the Captured?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then we’ll worry about it later.”
“The stairs start over here.”
They did indeed, right next to the wall. The crack in the floor had extended clear through that. The wall’s partial collapse had filled the gap there, then the material from the wall had been pushed back up as the fissure healed itself.
The stairs simply started. There was a rectangular hole in the floor. Steps went down, roughly paralleling the outer wall, away from the crack in the floor, which had healed almost completely. There was no handrail.
Twenty steps down we reached a landing eight feet by eight. The descending steps led off from our right. This flight appeared to go downward forever. Faint light crept up it, just strong enough so you could see where to put your feet.
Sahra and the Radisha had caught up close enough that I could hear them talking without being able to pick up specific words. Both women sounded frightened by the immediate future.
I could sympathize. I was nervous about achieving my life’s ambition myself. Just a little.
“You want to go first?” Swan asked. He lacked considerable enthusiasm, I thought.
“Are there booby traps or something?”
“No. She probably wanted to, just in case somebody passed this way someday, just for the sheer mean fun of it, but there wasn’t enough time. She piddled around so much, for so long, I didn’t really believe we’d ever get away. I’m sure we wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been who she was. She spun spells that chased the shadows away. She’d been in there before. And she’d practiced.”
“There it is!”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just remembering something.” Stupid me. All those years I wondered how Swan and Soulcatcher had found time to bury the Captured without getting gobbled up by shadows and I had overlooked the obvious, the fact that Soulcatcher was a major sorceress and already had some experience manipulating shadows. You can be screamingly blind to the obvious if you don’t realize that you have not opened up all the doors of your mind.
Forgive me, O Lord of the Hours. Be Merciful. Be Compassionate. I shall close the borders of my soul as soon as my brothers are free.
At this point Swan had no incentive to steer me into danger. I started downstairs.
The architects, engineers and stonemasons responsible had not been determined to achieve geometric perfection. Though this portion of the stairwell continued downward in a specific general direction, it tended to meander from side to side of a straight line. Nor were the steps of a uniform height. The builders had been thoughtful enough to provide landings every little way, though. I had a feeling those would seem to be miles apart once I started climbing up again.
“If we have to bring One-Eye down here, we’re going to have to carry him back up. He won’t survive the climb otherwise.”
“You might want to organize what you’re going to do before we go down there, then.”
“I can’t decide what has to be done until I
see what I’m dealing with.”
“You might call up your genie in a bottle. Get him to tell you.”
“He’s never said much about the place where he’s at. Not since he’s been in there himself. It’s like he’s constrained against that. I dreamed about it a few times but I don’t know how accurate my dreams were.”
Swan groaned. “I really didn’t want to make this trek.”
“Will it be that bad?”
“Not going down. But heading the other way is likely to change your attitude.”
“I don’t know. I’m beginning to get a little winded just going in this direction.”
“Then slow down. A few minutes isn’t going to make a difference. Not after all these years.”
He was right. And wrong. There was no rush for the Captured. But for us, with our limited resources, time was destined to become critical.
Swan continued, “You need to slow down, Sleepy. Really. It’s going to get a little bit hairy in a minute.”
He was absolutely right. But he understated the case dramatically.
The stairwell did a meander to the right. It caught up with the chasm caused by the earthquakes that had occurred during the reign of the Shadowmasters.
There was only half a stairway there. It hung in the face of a cliff. That left a whole lot of down on my right-hand side. And it was down that was entirely too well illuminated by a reddish orange light that may have come from the stone itself, since there seemed to be no other obvious source. Though I did have trouble opening my eyes wide enough to look. Wraithlike wisps of vapor wobbled upward from somewhere down below. The air seemed wanner. I asked, “We’re not heading into Hell itself, are we?” Some Vehdna believe al-Shiel is a place where wicked souls will burn for all eternity.
Swan understood. “Not your Hell. But I’d guess it’s Hell enough for them that’re trapped down there.”
I stopped on the remains of a landing. The steps narrowed to two feet just below me. By leaning out slightly I could see clearly that the stairwell had been constructed inside a larger bore at least twenty feet in diameter. The shaft had been filled with a stone darker than that through which it had been cut. Maybe the bore had needed to be that big so Kina could be dragged down below. I asked, “Can you imagine what an engineering project this must have been?”
“People with plenty of slaves aren’t daunted by big projects. What’s the matter?”
“I have a problem with heights. This next part is going to take a lot of prayer and some outside encouragement. I want you to go first. I want you to go slow. And I want you to stay where I can touch you. I believe in meeting my fears eyeball to eyeball but if it gets bad and I feel like I might freeze up, I want to be able to close my eyes and keep going.” I was astounded by how calm and reasonable my voice sounded.
“I understand. The real problem then is, who’s going to keep his eyes open for me? Whoa! Don’t panic, Sleepy. I was joking! I can handle it. Really.”
It was not the worst thing I ever dealt with. I never abandoned rational thought. But it was difficult. Even when Swan promised me that an unseen protective barrier existed on the abyssal side and demonstrated its presence, the animal inside me wanted to get the heck out of there and go someplace where the ground was flat and green, there was a sky overhead, and there might even be a few trees.
Swan assured me that I was missing one heck of a view, especially as we approached the lower end of the gap, where the light was brighter, revealing churning mists way below, mists that concealed the depths of the abyss. I kept my eyes closed until we were back into a closed cavern again.
I had started counting steps up top so I could get an idea of how deep we went but I lost count while I was pretending to be a fly crawling on a wall. I was too busy being terrified. But it did seem like we had traveled a long way horizontally as well as downward.
Almost immediately after I had that thought, the stair turned left, then left again. The orange red light faded away. The stair made a couple more quick turns into a total darkness, which aroused whole new species of terrors. But nothing bit me and nothing came to steal my soul.
Then there was light again, growing so subtly I was never really aware of first noticing it. It had a golden cast to it but was extremely cold. And as soon as I was aware of it, I knew we were approaching our destination.
The stairwell passed right through a natural cavern. At one time that had been sealed off but the quakes had toppled the responsible masonry walls. I asked, “We here?”
“Almost. Careful climbing over the stones. They aren’t very stable.”
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That sound.”
We listened. After a while, Swan said, “I think it’s wind. Sometimes there was a breeze when we were down here before.”
“Wind? A mile underground?”
“Don’t ask me to explain it. It just is. You want to go first this time?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you would.”
84
Golden caverns where old men sat beside the way, frozen in time, immortal but unable to move an eyelid. Madmen they, some covered with fairy webs of ice as though a thousand winter spiders had spun threads of frozen water. Above, an enchanted forest of icicles grew downward from the cavern roof.
So Murgen described it once upon a time, decades ago. The description remained apt, though the light was not as golden as I expected and the delicate filigrees of ice were denser and more complex. The old men seated against the walls, caught up in the webs, were not the wide-eyed madmen of Murgen’s visions, though. They were dead. Or asleep. I did not see one open eye. Nor did I see one face I recognized.
“Willow. Who are these people?” The bitter wind continued to rush through the cavern, which was a dozen feet high and nearly as wide, with a relatively flat floor, side to side.
It sloped with the length of the cavern. It looked like ancient, frozen mud covered with a pelt of fine frost fur. Water had run through the cavern in some epoch before the coming of men.
“These ones? I don’t know. They were here when we came down.”
I leaned closer but was careful not to touch. “These caves are natural.”
“They have that look.”
“Then they’ve been down here all along. They were here before the plain was built.”
“Possibly. Probably.”
“And whoever buried Kina knew about them. So did the Deceivers chased here by Rhaydreynak. Hunh! This one is definitely deceased. Naturally mummified but definitely gone.” The corpse was all dried out. Bare bone showed at a folded knee and tattered elbow. “These others? Who knows? Maybe the right sorcery could get them up and running around like Iqbal’s kids.”
“Why would we get them up? We’re here to get the guys that me and Catcher buried. Right? They’re on up there.” He pointed upslope, where the light was even less golden, becoming almost an icy blue.
The light was not bright. Not nearly so much so as in the vision I had experienced. Maybe it was more a psychic witchlight than a physical one, more suited to the dreamwalker’s eye. I mused, “They might be able to tell us something interesting.”
“I’ll tell you something interesting,” Swan muttered to himself. In a normal voice, for my benefit, he said, “I don’t think so. At least I don’t think it would be anything any of us would want to hear. Catcher took extreme pains to avoid even touching them. Getting the captives past without disturbing them was the hardest work we did.”
I bent to examine another of the old men. He did not look like he belonged to any race I knew. “They must be from one of the other worlds.”
“Maybe. There’s a saying where I grew up: ‘Let sleeping’ dogs lie.’ Sounds like exquisitely appropriate advice. We don’t know why they were put down here.”
“I have no intention of releasing any deviltry but our own. These men here aren’t the same as those.”
“There were several different g
roups last time. I doubt that that’s changed. I got the feeling that they were dumped here at different times. See how much less ice there is around these guys? Makes me think it takes centuries to accumulate.”
“Ow!”
“What?”
“I banged my head on this damned rock icicle thing.”
“Hmm. I must’ve overlooked it somehow.”
“Get smart and I’ll punch you in the kneecap, Lofty. Does it feel like it’s colder in here than it ought to be?” It was not my imagination and not the icy wind, either.
“Always.” His grin had gone away. “It’s them. I think. Starting to realize somebody’s here. It keeps building up. It can get on your nerves if you pay any attention to it.”
I could feel the growth of whatever it was. Insanity becoming palpable, I suppose. That was the impression, anyway.
“How come we’re able to move around in here?” I asked. “Why aren’t we frozen?”
“We’d probably end up that way if we stayed long enough to fall asleep. These people all had to be unconscious when they were brought down here.”
“Really?” We were up where there was less ice. The frost on the floor still betrayed the tracks left by Soulcatcher and Willow Swan years ago. The old men here were different. They resembled Nyueng Bao, except for one, who had been tall, thin and extremely pale. “But they don’t stay asleep?” Several pairs of open eyes seemed to track me. I hoped it was my imagination, stimulated by the spookiness of the cave. I never actually saw any movement.
Footsteps.
I jumped hip-high to a short elephant before I realized that it had to be Sahra and the Radisha and whoever else had decided not to participate in all those exciting projects that were underway upstairs. “Go keep those people from stomping in here and messing everything up. I’ll get an idea of the layout and try to figure out what we’ll have to do.”
Swan scowled and growled and grunted, then minced carefully back down the slight slope toward the stairwell. He talked to himself all the way. And I did not blame him. Even I thought nothing ever went right for him.