She was about to rise when—“Little Fur is very foolish to come here,” a familiar purring voice said. Little Fur turned to find Sly beside her. The narrow black cat had not a shred of cat shadow about her, and yet so dark was her pelt that she blended perfectly into the troll city.
“What happened to you?” Little Fur asked her.
“I led the trolls away,” she said smugly. “But why have you not escaped? Are the others still here?”
Was it Little Fur’s imagination, or did Sly smell of anxiety? “The others have escaped along the under-road; I stayed to free Sorrow.” Little Fur hesitated. “Can you help me get inside the palace?”
“Ginger told me that the fox wished to die.”
“Sorrow’s spirit is sick. If it were healed, I do not believe he would want to die,” Little Fur said. “Besides, it might be that Sorrow has learned something of the Troll King’s plans, and that is what we came to discover.”
Sly considered this, her green eye inscrutable. “I will help you to get to the fox. Wait here.”
Little Fur watched her go, wishing Sly had told her what she meant to do.
Bells began clanging again, and trolls poured from the gates of the palace. As they rushed out into the square, the gate guards joined them. Little Fur readied herself to hurry to the unguarded entrance. Then she realized that the troll warriors were rushing toward her! She shrank back against the wall and made herself as inconspicuous as she could. But they surrounded her, and a troll said, “This is it. Ugh, smell! Elf blood.”
One troll grabbed her wrist, but an older troll batted his hand away. “Master says she must walk to death on her own two feet.”
Little Fur stumbled between the trolls to the palace gates, her head ringing with the stench of her captors. The trolls led her deep into the palace, which was filled with endless dank passages that had cavernous empty rooms on both sides. Little Fur had the impression that the palace was empty but for a few inhabitants. Maybe all who normally dwelt here were with their king. Her thoughts were clear but strangely cold, as if her emotions had frozen inside her.
Eventually, the trolls led her down a flight of steps that gradually wound into a tight spiral. The walls streamed with mineral-scented water and were slippery with algae that grew in great clusters on the luminous toadstools. For a moment, the flow of earth magic quickened under her feet, and Little Fur thought she heard the voice of the earth spirit whispering to her to have faith.
Sly must have been caught and questioned by the trolls. How else could they have found her so swiftly? Little Fur could not bear to think of the lean, clever cat brought low in trying to help her.
Down and down they went, until they came to an enormous door carved with more of the ancient troll symbols. One of the trolls pushed at the door with a grunt, and it swung inward. A dreadful smell of pain and fear and anguish flowed out, and Little Fur’s steps faltered.
Another troll gave her a shove that sent her reeling through the door, and she heard him hiss that she was not to be harmed . . . for the moment.
CHAPTER 14
The Secrets of Sorrow
The nearly circular chamber Little Fur found herself in was a natural cave, empty but for a rough semicircle of cages of varying sizes set one atop the other. Little Fur stopped, her heart quailing, but the troll behind her forced her into one of the larger cages. She had to crawl over fouled rock to enter it, but at least it was a lower cage that rested on the rock, so she was not sundered from the earth spirit.
Again, very faintly, she seemed to hear the voice of the earth spirit bidding her to have faith. But have faith in what? she wondered.
Her captors muttered to one another, and Little Fur tried to listen, but she was too frightened to concentrate. For a time, she knew nothing. Perhaps she fainted or fell into some dark dream, but when she came to her senses, she could hear the sounds of animals and birds. She crept to the bars of her cage and peered out.
The troll guards had all gone, though the reek of troll was all about her. She groped for the cage binding and found a great greasy knot that her fingers could not undo. Well, she could hardly have expected that it would be a simple knot she could untie. She began sniffing delicately, sifting through the awful odors. She could not find Sly’s scent, but she found another she knew very well.
The smell of Sorrow.
He was alive but fevered, and his old wounds, and new ones, were so full of corruption that even were they safe within the grove of the Old Ones, she would have had little hope of saving him.
“Ye should not have come.” The voice of the fox whispered through the awful air.
“The others have all gotten safely away,” she told him, trying to make her voice cheerful. “That was your doing. Shikra and Brave Kell told me how you saved them.”
“I saved no one. I sought death coming here, and soon I will find it.”
“I don’t believe that was why you fought the trolls,” Little Fur said. “I think you were trying to help the others to escape.”
There was silence. Little Fur sniffed and could not tell if the fox slept or lay awake or in a delirium. At last he said, “I did not tell the troll Brod anything.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Little Fur said. “My getting caught was a stupid mistake and all my own fault. I fear for Sly, because she was trying to help.”
“The others left and ye stayed?” the fox asked.
“I made them go. I had to try to free you. And I need to learn more about the Troll King’s plans.”
There was a shudder of sound so close to a moan that it took Little Fur several seconds to recognize it as bleak laughter. “The Troll King thinks ye are the earth spirit’s chosen warrior. Perhaps he is right.”
“I am a healer, not a warrior,” Little Fur said gently. “I wish I could have healed you properly. Your spirit—”
“My spirit is what it is,” the fox said. “And soon it will be free. As will yours, for I think ye will not long bear the greedy cruelty of Brod.”
“You survived his questions,” Little Fur said.
Again the shudder of laughter. “I can resist any pain,” Sorrow said. “It is life that I cannot bear, this life in which there are things that can love the pain of other living things.”
“What caused all of your wounds?” Little Fur asked. As she spoke, she understood something more. “Who hurt you and then healed your body so that you came to loathe the touch of a healer as if it were the touch of the one who injured you?”
The fox gave a light, eerie laugh. “I have
The fox gave a light, eerie laugh. “I have always hated curiosity, but perhaps curiosity can also be a kind of courage.”
“I am not courageous. I am very frightened,” Little Fur whispered, and her voice shook.
“Hush,” the fox said. “Listen: I remember my birth. I was born inside a machine. I opened my nose and senses into a world of metal and wires and the smell of humans. The humans were the only warm things that smelled of life, and so I yearned for them. When they touched me, I licked at their hands, but they wore strange coverings that would not let me taste their scents. I longed for pack, and humans were the closest thing to pack I had, and so I strove to bond with them. But their scents did not mingle or strive toward mine. I was puzzled and began to doubt what I was and what I longed for.
“Then there came a human that touched me with bare hands and stroked my pelt. His skin took my scent and we were pack. I was content, and my mind strove toward the human. In time, I came to love him, for there was nothing else to love.
“But then he began to hurt me. Small hurts to begin with, that I thought must be accidents. My instincts told me that such accidents could happen among those who were pack, for pain is not separate from love. So I accepted the pain. The hurts grew worse, but each time, the human that I had come to think of as brother healed me. I sniffed for his regret or even for guilt, but there was nothing. The hurts grew even worse. There were machines that made sky-fire run thro
ugh me. I sniffed for love and understood there was no smell of it in the human.
“Sometimes I was put into water and made to swim and swim until there was no strength in me, and then I drowned, but the human healed me. I was burnt, and the human healed me. I began to hate the human and to fear him, but the human did not hate any more than he loved. It was as if I were dead in his hands. He smelled of nothing I could understand. But I made it my quest to learn what he did feel. To understand.
“Then, one day, it came to me what I could smell on the human when he was hurting me. He was hurting me with sky-fire, and I smelled that he was interested in the hurting and what it caused me to do. He liked watching how I acted. He was curious about what I would do next.
“For the first time, I thought about escape. Beyond the machine, there was something that I smelled which called to my senses. I began to watch, and I saw that the humans in their white coats came and left the machine through a hole they closed behind them. A door. The smell that called me was beyond that door. So I plotted and thought, and I made a plan. Whenever the humans had hurt me badly, they put me onto a white bed and made me sleep and healed me. The bed was by the door.
“The next time they hurt me and put me there, I fought the sleep. I fought it just as I fought for hours not to drown and fought the sky-fire that swarmed through my bones and gnawed at them. I fought the sleep and I pretended sleep. The pain was terrible, but I was not afraid of pain. And when they were not watching because they thought I slept, I rolled and fell to the floor. I had never been on the floor before. It smelled of nothing. I was hurt but made myself walk. When a human entered, I crept out the door. I entered a long room where there was nothing but many more doors.
“Then one door opened as I sniffed, and the smell that flowed through it was very strong and urged me to come to it. The human who had opened the door saw me. I knew that I had just a second. So I hurled myself toward the gap. The human tried to shut the door, but I was in it, and although something tore open the wounds that had just been healed, I was outside of the machine. Seeing the sky for the first time and feeling the grass under my paws, I was overwhelmed. I might have stood there like that in a stupor of wonder until they caught me.
“But then I heard the voice of the human who had taught me pain. He held out his hand, and his voice was soft, as it had been when I loved him. Part of me wanted to go to him, as if all the pain had been a mistake. But then I saw him make the gesture that he made when he wanted other humans to hurt me. Behind him, a door had opened in the high metal web that ran all around the machine, and two men were coming through it toward me.
“I leaped at them. They had not expected it and tangled themselves trying to stop me. The wounds in me were torn further by that leap, but I passed through that gate and I was free.”
Little Fur waited, crouched in her cage, hardly breathing, to hear what the fox would say next. But when she sniffed, she realized that the fox had fallen into a feverish sleep. She did not call out and awaken him to tell her more, for what end could there be except the one she would now share with him? The rest was clear enough anyway. He had escaped and realized that this freedom, and all the wild world that ought to have been his, had been stolen from him. There was no point in seeking other foxes, because he was not a fox in anything but shape. He was what the humans and the machine had made of him.
Sorrow.
Little Fur found that she was crying, and for a time she gave herself up to a sadness so profound that even her fear of the trolls and what they would do to her was swallowed up. She thought of the poor tiny fox cub Sorrow had been, born amidst humans in a machine instead of in a litter of cubs with a mother to suckle him. How had they managed it? And yet perhaps there was nothing humans could not do because there was nothing they would not do.
The sound of a door clanging and the thud of troll feet brought her back to an awareness of her own fate. It was the troll Brod, and his huge face was lit with greed and eager cruelty. She told herself that what she must now face was a small thing compared to what Sorrow had endured.
But she was wrong.
For walking with sleek black grace at the side of the huge troll was Sly.
CHAPTER 15
A Gift for the Troll King
Brod leaned over with a grunt and peered through the bars of the cage at Little Fur. His huge nostrils quivered, and a foul gust of air wafted at her through his thick, wet lips. The troll reached for the ropes that tied the cage door.
“Do you think that wise, Master?” It was Sly’s voice, delicate and amused and full of malice.
The troll turned to her with a growl of irritation. “Wise? What you are saying?” he grunted.
“It is only that the Troll King himself might wish to have the pleasure of giving pain to one so important. He might be angry at the troll who usurped that pleasure.”
“Important? This only one of spies. Maybe least of them because others left it behind,” the troll snarled.
“Ahh, but it was not left behind, Master. It commanded the others to go, for this is their leader.”
“Fox is leader.” The troll glanced at the cage where Sorrow lay.
“The fox is nothing next to this one,” Sly said eagerly. She shifted her green eye to Sorrow’s cage, and her tone was disparaging. “That is why it could tell nothing. I think it will die before the king returns, and it may not please him that he cannot ask questions of it himself.”
“Hah,” the troll grunted. “Fox should not have resisted Brod. Maybe Brod would stop sooner if fox beg. But fox dare say no to Brod.”
“He was a fool, Master. But he is only a fox,” Sly said. “You need not fear the wrath of the king, for you will offer him this prize instead.”
“What prize?” the troll demanded, aiming a slap of impatience at the cat.
Sly eluded the blow and rubbed her sleekness against his thick ankle. “You have captured Little Fur,” she said. “Little Fur the healer, whom the king loathes above all other things except the earth spirit.”
The troll looked as shocked as Little Fur felt at hearing Sly’s words. He swung to squint at her. “This Little Fur? The great warrior?”
“Not all things that are great are large,” Sly said.
The troll tugged at his huge lower lip. “If this Little Fur, king will be pleased.”
“Brod is too modest!” Sly cried. “The king will shower the troll who caught Little Fur with gifts. He will proclaim to all that Brod is his heir and his favorite.”
“All know Brod is heir!” the troll snarled.
“Of course,” Sly said smoothly. “But no one will dare to challenge it as they did yesterday in the troll council.”
Again the troll looked at Little Fur. “Brod has decided. Brod will present Little Fur to king as gift when king returns to Underth.”
“What brilliance,” Sly purred. “How clever and wise is Brod. How tricky and trollish.”
The troll bellowed with laughter, then glanced at the fox’s cage. “Pity fox not awake. Brod could make him scream to celebrate.”
“Once the fox knows we have his mistress, that will be torment enough,” Sly said viciously. “Let him wake to find her here.”
The troll laughed again and reached down to scoop up Sly. He draped her about his neck, and as he turned and went toward the door of the chamber, Sly looked back at Little Fur. Her green eye glimmered as the door closed behind them.
“She betrayed you,” said a new voice.
Little Fur smelled that the new voice was coming from a small cage under the one containing the fox, but she did not recognize its scent. “What are you?” Little Fur asked.
“I am a monkey,” the creature replied. “I listened to the tale the fox told. The place he called a machine was a human experiment house. Many animals are kept in such places, though not all are as cruelly used as the fox. I myself was in such a place for a time, though I was not taken from my mother’s body and put inside a machine as the fox was.”
The monkey gave a chittering laugh. “It was not difficult. Some humans smell of softness and sweetness and regret. I chose such a one to beguile, knowing that it would help me to be free. But before I could escape, the trolls carried me away.”
“The trolls?” Little Fur could hardly believe what she was hearing.
“The Troll King is not a thick-headed fool like Brod. He is clever and subtle and patient. He has been studying humans for a long time, and there was something in that place that he wanted, a terrible sickness that humans had brewed. It was in a tiny glass bottle. A greep who had worked there when he was still human showed the Troll King where it was hidden, and he took it. Then the greep told the Troll King to take me, too, after it read the writing on my cage.”
“Writing?” Little Fur wondered at the word.
“It is a thing that humans do. It means putting words down as marks that others can understand. The marks spoke to the greep, and he told the Troll King to take me, for my blood holds the antidote to the sickness in the glass bottle.”
“Antidote?” Little Fur echoed. The word smelled like a potion to heal those poisoned by snake bite. She wanted to ask what the Troll King wanted with the sickness in a bottle, but she heard the sound of the door opening. Her heart began to beat very fast, but it was not Brod. There were a number of trolls, and they were carrying something. They set it down after a long and rather stupid argument about where it should be put, and then they went out again, leaving one troll behind to guard.
Little Fur did not want to think of Sly’s betrayal. Sly had obviously told the trolls where to find her. But why had she gone to such lengths to convince the troll to leave hurting her to the Troll King? It must have also been Sly’s doing that the troll guards had been warned to let her walk on her own two feet. Was Sly really saving Little Fur for the Troll King’s pleasure? Little Fur found that she could not believe it. But what other reason could Sly have? Unless . . .
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