by Dave Duncan
As he stumbled along, he wondered what made the shadowmen so aggressive—were they jealous of the living? Did they seek revenge for a violent death? He decided it must just be the way the spiritualism was concocted. One of the Yeomen at Quamast had cut his own throat. They didn’t want revenge; didn’t want to make you suffer; just wanted you dead like them.
Suddenly his feet were splashing in water and there was no more passage.
The pool was shallow, ten or twelve paces long, filling the space from wall to wall. It ended in a sandy slope. This was the end of the road, and stones were still pinging off Ranter’s shield. Once in a while he would curse as if one had hit him instead.
Glass shattered. “Oops!” Ranter said. “Need another lantern! Quick!”
Four lanterns left. Here we stand and fight. Here we die.
The shoring stopped short of the tunnel end and some balks of timber lay at Ringwood’s feet unused, so this had been the active face of the mining operation, not just a later collapse. In forty-four years the unsupported stretch of roof had crumbled, dumping sand and clay into the pool. The pool was seepage collecting at the low point of the tunnel. How far underground were they? Ringwood waded forward and raised his lantern to see if there might be a way out overhead, but there wasn’t, just a dome going nowhere.
Why had the workmen stopped here?
Why didn’t the whole tunnel fill with water?
“Hold this!” He thrust his lantern to True and started in on that sandy slope like a dog digging for rabbits, hurling muck through between his legs. In moments he found clay and pebbles that tore his hands. “Give me that!” He took the broadsword from her and began using it like a pick, digging away the detritus. It was strenuous work, but he drove himself hard, still hearing those vicious rocks bouncing off Ranter’s shield. I don’t want to die down here in a rathole.
The sides of his dig became unstable and collapsed. He kept on digging. True came to help him with a scrap of plank to use as a shovel. They dug side by side, ferociously. Above them loomed the unsafe roof of the cave, trickling sand.
“They’re coming closer, Leader!” Ranter said calmly.
In a few minutes Ringwood would have to change places with him. He couldn’t keep this up much…There it was!
“We’ve found rock!” he shouted. “It’s a wall.” Ashlar blocks, rough and unfinished on this side, set in mortar. Now he had to dig lower and his narrow trench kept trying to close up. “This is the wall of the crypt! Chisel marks! The opening must be here somewhere.” Down near the water, of course.
“Back, vermin!” Ranter shouted. He was striking at shadows and a little more than shadows, for Ringwood could hear faint metallic sounds.
But the opening was in view now. The workers had smashed a block completely, but only one, and the gap was plugged with sand and clay. Ringwood tore at it with his bare hands, scooping it out. Could a living person squeeze through that? Shadowmen had come through, but they might have had light to make them intangible.
He drew Bad News and dropped on his belly. His shoulders were too tight a fit, but he wriggled his head and one arm into the gap, so his chest rested painfully on a surface of rough mortar studded with sharp fragments of rock. There might be legions of shadowmen on the other side. Suppose something grabbed hold of his arm and pulled?…He waved his sword down, up, every way, and encountered nothing. There was a big space out there, but how far to the floor? There might be a lake, or a thirty-foot drop onto spikes.
But the air smelled fresh and clean.
He squirmed back into the passage. Trudy and Johanna were standing in the mud and even Ranter had retreated into the pool now, fighting off swords and pikes. The shadowmen were much closer than before, and horribly visible, a mass of writhing giant cockroaches, mummified wraiths, filling the tunnel to the roof. Most of them were ragged or naked, and the first dozen or so were transparent. Only the narrowness of the tunnel kept them from swarming all over Ranter. They were trying to smash his lantern, but its light turned their weapons to nothing; if they tried to strike with planks their hands faded out and the planks fell to the ground. They should just move back into darkness and throw rocks again, but Ringwood wasn’t about to tell them so.
He tossed a pebble through to the crypt. It hit something and bounced. The drop did not sound very far. There was still hope.
“Lantern!” he said. “I can’t find a floor. True, you go and look. We’ll pull you back.”
She didn’t argue, wonderful woman! She said, “If I get stuck halfway I’ll never forgive you,” but she flopped down in the mud, put both arms and a lantern ahead of her, and wriggled headfirst into the nasty, rough space. Ringwood gave her a few seconds, then grabbed her dress and hauled her back. He heard her dress rip.
She howled. “Ow! That hurt! But it’s not very far. I can do it.”
“You first, then,” he said.
“This will not be dignified,” True said, but she was already covered in mud from her chin to her toes. She kissed him. “I want no fancy heroics from you, my lad!” she whispered. Again she heaved herself into the opening facedown, but now feetfirst. Her gown bunched up; her hips gave her trouble. She swore, squirmed, and then swore again as her legs flailed helplessly and her shoulders were crushed against the top of the gap. When only her arms were visible, Ringwood gave her a lantern and she pulled it in with her.
Then even that vanished.
“True!” he screamed, and hurled himself down to follow. He stopped when he saw the glow of the lantern coming from below the opening.
“All right, love!” she said, and her voice reverberated in a larger space. “Nothing here but me. Wait a minute, though.” The glow faded away and his heart began tying itself in knots. Then a horrible shriek.
He screamed in panic and banged his head against the top of the gap. Almost before he stopped seeing stars, he heard her voice.
“That sounded bad, didn’t it? It’s a door. Just making sure it would open. Send Her Grace through. I want to see it done gracefully.”
A door? But how many other doors were beyond it? Would there even be a way out of the crypt and the keep when they got there?
Ringwood wriggled out of the hole and then back in again, still one-armed, so he could pass True another lantern. She could not quite reach it standing on tiptoe, but he dropped it to her and she caught it without mishap. He had a brief glimpse of an apparently empty chamber and the door she had mentioned on the far side. The keyhole opening was grating him like a carrot.
Then Johanna. She said nothing and he noticed she had her eyes shut as she lay down to get in position, feetfirst, facedown.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Trudy can help you.”
Still without a word, Grand Duchess Johanna went squirming into the sewer and disappeared. That must take tremendous courage from someone with her dread of being underground. There were only two lanterns left, so the corridor was dangerously dim. It was time for fancy heroics.
“Right!” Ringwood said, drawing Bad News. “You next, brother. My turn to hold off our admirers.” Oddly, saying it was easier than he’d expected.
“No,” Ranter said. “I won’t fit through that. You go.”
The attackers had found some poles long enough to threaten his lantern. He was chopping at them and stamping on them. Some were so rotten he could break them. Others weren’t. It was hard work, and he was dancing around so much that Ringwood couldn’t squeeze past him to take his place.
“No!” he said shrilly. “I’m Leader and I’m ordering you to go!”
“I won’t fit. Stop wasting time.”
“At least try! If you really can’t fit, then I’ll go, but you must try.”
“No! Take the other lantern and go, Beanpole. You rapier types have all the luck. Us saber men make better lovers. Now get in there and look after our ward!”
The thought of Johanna down in the crypt with no protection and possibly shadowmen prowling threw Ringwood into near-pani
c. No heroics, True had said, but he was Leader, it was his duty to be last out. It made things no easier to know that Ranter was right. The big oaf would never squeeze through that tiny gap. Ringwood was not at all sure he could make it himself.
“Please!” he screamed. “At least try!”
“Fine pair of onions we’ll look if I get stuck in it with you on this side.”
“You won’t know until you try.”
“I’ll try, I promise. Now go,” Ranter said. “Quick! I can’t hold them much longer.”
A faint, distorted scream echoed out of the hole in the wall. Then two screams. The women were being attacked. No! No! No!
Whimpering, Ringwood sat down, put the third lantern close to hand, and slid his legs into the burrow. He sent Bad News through ahead of him, hilt first so he wouldn’t kill anyone. Then the broadsword. He rolled over on his face and started. Assuming he didn’t castrate himself, his hips would be the problem. He had to twist and struggle to force them through, and the rocky claws seemed to be cutting him to the bone. Ranter swore loudly, as if he’d been hurt, but at that moment Ringwood thought he was permanently stuck and could go neither forward or back. His shoulders were wider than his hips, but more flexible. Then he was through, his legs were dangling, and he had to hang on while he got a grip on the lantern.
Hands gripped his legs, and he suppressed a wail of fright, frantically trying to convince himself that they were trying to help, not drag him through to his death.
“I’m gone,” he said. “You come now!”
“Be right there,” Ranter said.
Ringwood slid agonizingly over the edge, tearing belly and shoulder blades both. He wanted to bring the lantern with one hand and hold onto the edge of the opening with the other and didn’t succeed. Trudy was trying to take his weight on her shoulders and she failed, too. They collapsed together. He hit the flagstones hard enough to knock all the breath out of him. The lantern shattered.
He struggled to sit up. “You all right?” Nothing seemed to be broken.
“Yes, yes!”
They had been lucky. “What’s wrong? Why were you screaming?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.
“We could hear you arguing, Commander,” the Duchess said, “doing the manly thing, and we had to get you moving. We need you, both of you.”
He stood up shakily, smelling his own blood. “You all right, Your Grace?”
“I’ve been better, but I’m not injured.”
He was surprised to see how far he had dropped. The hole was a rectangle of faint light. He could just hear Ranter swearing at the shadowmen.
“Ranter!” he roared, and the chamber reverberated. “Come now!” He turned to give True a hug. “Any shadowmen here?”
“I don’t think so. Very faint. But I’ve been sort of numbed by their stink, so I may be wrong.”
“Ranter!”
The light winked out.
“Ah!” the Duchess said. “He’s coming!”
Ringwood looked at Trudy. Trudy looked at Ringwood.
“I don’t think so, Your Highness,” he said hoarsely. “I think they broke the last lamp.”
Silence. There was no noise from the tunnel.
“Ranter?”
More, terrible silence.
“If I climbed on your shoulders,” True whispered. “And held a lantern to the hole?”
Ringwood put an arm around her again. And then the other one round Johanna. All three of them hugged for a moment. If Ranter were alive, he would be telling them so.
“He wouldn’t have been able to get through the hole,” True said. “Would he?”
“I don’t think he would.” I wish I was certain. I wish he’d tried.
So Ranter’s name would be added to the Litany of Heroes in Ironhall, and it would be Ringwood’s duty to write the citation: “Abandoned by his leader, he fought on undaunted against impossible…”
Some other time. His own name was still heading in that direction. Just as well, perhaps, that there would be nobody to write about him. Neither Bad News nor Invincible would ever hang in the sky of swords.
Now they must go. To stay and mourn would be folly and a betrayal of Ranter’s sacrifice. Running would not be cowardice, only brutal common sense. He was bruised, abraded, and exhausted, and the women were in no better shape. Three people and two lanterns. He looked down at the one he had dropped and was dismayed to see how little oil there was in the splash of broken glass.
“Let’s move our lanterns away from that opening,” he said. “I don’t think the monsters can get through there in the dark.” But he didn’t know that, and he had underestimated the shadowmen before. “Let’s go and see the sunrise.” The first ray of daylight would make them safe.
The chamber was muddy, but not littered. It had no windows, only a small and rusty iron door in it.
“This looks like a jail,” he said, heading for the exit. The others followed, bringing the lights.
“I was thinking that,” Johanna said. “Chain someone up in a place like this with a few candles and let him watch the shadowmen for a while. Then you come back when the candles start to run out and ask if he’s ready to talk yet.” That was the longest speech she’d made in hours. Her voice held a hysterical brittleness, but at least she was talking.
“That’s not a nice thought, Your Highness.”
“Unless the someone was Lord Volpe,” True suggested. No one disagreed.
She had managed to push the door open a handsbreadth. Leaning on it, Ringwood was surprised by the effort he needed to move it farther. She must be even stronger than he had realized. The hinges screamed again. When all three of them had squeezed through the gap, he and Trudy between them managed to shut it, and once again the crypt rang with the cry of tortured iron.
There was a lock, but no key. He didn’t mention that.
“I can smell rain!” True whispered.
“I can hear it!” the Duchess said. “And the wind!”
They were in a corridor, facing a similar door that probably led to a similar room. To their right the corridor ended, so they set off to the left to find the source of the fresh air. Trudy still carried the Count’s broadsword. The flagstones were carpeted with soft loam where dirt had washed in.
Very soon they came to a rockfall. Huge masses of masonry blocked the corridor from side to side and as high and far as their pathetic puddle of light could reach. The keep was a ruin, fallen in on itself, and stored in its own crypt. There was no sky, but rainwater was trickling and dripping in somewhere. Fungoid vegetation lurked in corners and tree roots twined between mossy relics of arches and pillars.
True said wistfully, “I could use that rain. Be nice to get rinsed off.”
“Morning must come soon,” Ringwood said. “We’ll find a way out of here as soon as there’s some light.” He did not believe that. Only mice would ever find a way through that heap.
Whether the others were deceived by his bravado was not established, because at that moment a groan of rusty hinges echoed in the corridor behind them. True raised her lantern and peered back along the passage. Whatever was coming was not visible…yet.
“I think the trumpets have sounded for the third passage of arms,” she said.
With the score at Shadowmen two, Humans zero.
Ringwood said, “Find a niche to hide in. I’ll hold them off.” He had no Ranter to help him now. His turn, and soon he would be fighting in the dark. How long would the oil last?
“We can do better than that, I think,” True muttered, moving closer to the rock pile. “The shadowmen have a way through this. I can smell it.”
Miracle woman! She meant White Sister smelling, of course, not real smelling, but he didn’t care. “Lead the way, then. Quickly!”
True scrambled up the heap and wriggled into a badgersized gap under a slab. After a moment her voice echoed back out: “All clear ahead.”
“Your Grace?”
This was going to be muc
h worse than the tunnel or the hole in the wall had been. Even if True was right and could find the road of the dead, there was no reason to believe that living bodies could follow. The Duchess knew that. She had her demons back, but she said nothing, just followed where True had gone, tracking the glow of her lantern. Ringwood went close behind her, ready to lend a hand if she had trouble, staying close to her light so he did not get lost. He kept expecting icy hands to close around his ankles.
Progress was terrifingly slow. The tunnels and cracks seemed to get smaller and smaller as they climbed higher. At one point, when True had been forced to backtrack and was hunting for a way through, he found himself jammed in a very awkward bend, not at all sure he would be able to get past and unable to try because his ward’s feet were right in front of his eyes. He could hear her breathing. It was too fast, too irregular. She must be close to panic.
He said, “I am deeply sorry, Your Grace, that I have been such a disaster as a Blade. I have failed both you and my Order.”
After a painful silence she said, “I think you have done marvelously, Sir Ringwood. You saw through Count János. I’m sure he would have turned me over to Lord Volpe if you hadn’t spirited us away. You and Bellman and Ranter were all wonderful, and I am not ready to give up yet.”
“You are very brave!”
“If women were cowards, there wouldn’t be babies, Sir Ringwood.”
Silence again. Ringwood was listening to tiny noises behind him and trying to convince himself they were only his imagination, or rain dripping.
Johanna laughed harshly. “It isn’t difficult to be brave when you have no choice. I don’t mean that I do not appreciate Sir Ranter’s sacrifice. He had no choice but to defend both himself and the rest of us this night, but he made that decision back in Ironhall. I saw him overcome his fear on the night he was bound, and that memory has given me courage to do what I have had to do this evening. He was not an easy man to like, but he had some admirable qualities.”
“Yes,” Ringwood said. “He supported me tonight when he could have settled an old score. He gave me a chance to live when he knew he must die. Above all, he did his duty. If I survive this I will report his heroism to his brothers in the Order.”