Song of the Serpent

by Hugh Matthews

  The skeletal mage thought about it. "Unwise, I should say. It seems to be bound to him now. Remove him from the mix and it might begin to act independently."

  "That worries you?" said Wartnose.

  "Inasmuch as I cannot get a close read on its capabilities, I would prefer to see it remain where it is. It would give me an opportunity to study it."

  "And how," said his employer, "would I profit from that?"

  The thin man bent to examine the snake again. "I have a sense," he said, "that there is more power here than meets the mage's eye. Indeed, I suspect that the entity in question is disguising its true nature."

  "Entity?" said Wartnose. He rounded on the man in the chair. "Is that thing around your neck alive?"

  The thief didn't need Chirk's prompting. "I am a simple wayfarer," he said. "Wizards' tricks are beyond my understanding."

  "Here's what I suggest," said the thin man. "Keep him well away from his boots and sword. Put him down with the chain gang. He can earn his keep moving baskets of ore. In the meantime, I'll pore through my books and consult a colleague or two."

  "And, at the end?" Wartnose said.

  "I make no promises, but that object around his neck may give you more rock-cracking power than a battalion of Skanderbrogs." He bent and peered again at Chirk. "Assuming, that is, that we can harness it."

  Krunzle wondered what a Skanderbrog was, but the rest of the conversation's import was clear to him: he was going to be kept alive while the mage studied Chirk; he was also going to be put to work—never a prospect that held great appeal—in some kind of mining project. He directed a thought to the snake—This sits well with you?—and received the mental equivalent of a shrug.

  Meanwhile, his bonds were cut and for the second time in as many days his extremities felt the agony of his blood reoccupying its old haunts. Redbeard opened the door and shouted a name. The scar-pated brawler the thief had last seen in the door to Room Thirteen came and seized him by one arm while the Ulfen took the other. He was hustled across a room and out into the alley he had last seen from above. He offered a protest about the state of his feet, which earned him a quick, short jab to the jaw—a professional's blow—from the brawler. After that, he knew nothing for a while.

  Chapter Four

  A Promising Young Troll

  When he awoke this time, he was at least unbound. He was lying on his back on a wooden floor in a dark place. But he knew he was not alone from the hubbub of voices and motion around him. Something startling had happened—no, frightening, he thought as his senses fully reassembled themselves and reported for duty—and a crowd of people were reacting to it by putting as much distance between themselves and the something as their circumstances allowed.

  But their circumstances were not liberal; the mob had not gone far away, though the panicky cries and curses suggested they would have liked to. Krunzle also suspected that, given the chance, the unseen melee of forms struggling against each other in the darkness would have welcomed the opportunity to bathe—surely, nobody wanted to reek of filth, sweat, rotten meat, and untreated sores. And over it, a strong stink of charred meat.

  His head ached, but at least it was clear. He sat up, and as he did so he heard from behind him the tramping of hard-soled boots on planks, accompanied by a faint light that grew stronger. He turned his head and, seeing vertical stripes of light, realized that they were gaps between the timbers of a heavy door. Someone was approaching the other side, carrying a light.

  A rattle of iron keys, then the turning of an unoiled lock, and now the door was pushed in. A big man armed with a club bent to peer under the low lintel of the doorway, extending the oil lamp into the room. "What's all the ruckus?" he said.

  He didn't seem to have directed the question at Krunzle, and the thief used the presence of the light to look about him. He was sitting on the floor of a large room, its walls made of squared-off logs. The room contained three or four score men—ragged, filthy, scrofulous-looking men—who were crowded in a group against the far wall, their eyes large in the lamplight.

  The eyes were frightened and focused on Krunzle—except he now saw that the mob's collective gaze kept going to something on the floor between him and them. Something man-sized and man-shaped that, when the fellow with the lamp came into the room, casting more illumination on the scene, was revealed to be a man. Or at least most of one. And what was left of him was dead.

  The man with the club stepped past the thief and bent to examine the body. Krunzle took the opportunity to rise. He thought about making a break through the open door, but decided he was far too wobbly on his feet. And for all he knew, in the blackness that seemed to be outside this jail—for ragged men, a strong door, and a man with a key and a club all said jail to Krunzle—he'd run straight over the lip of the gorge.

  The corpse was that of a heavily muscled man with a scarred face and no hands or forearms. Above where his elbows should have been were charred stumps, still smoking. His eyes were wide open, as was his mouth, creating an impression that his final emotion had been huge and painful surprise.

  The jailer made a noise of confirmation, straightened, and poked the club gingerly in Krunzle's direction. "You," he said, "back off. Over in that corner, and stay there." When the traveler raised both hands in a gesture of non-confrontation and did as he was bid, the man with the club pointed at a couple of the ragamuffins and said, "You two, haul this out and dump it in Skanderbrog's trough."

  The indicated pair crept forward, took the corpse's ankles, and began to drag it toward the door. "Wait," said the jailer, then stooped to rifle the body's rags, which Krunzle noted were in better condition than any of those worn by the other men in the cell. Having found and pocketed a few items, the man with the club said, "Carry on."

  He remained in the room, eyeing Krunzle warily, until the corpse detail returned. Then he pointed the club at the thief again, said, "No more trouble," and left, taking the lamp with him.

  Krunzle heard the key turn in the lock again. Before the light went, he had seen rags and sacking on the floor near him. He scooped these into a pile, then lay down. Over on the other side of the room, he heard stirrings and mutterings and a few curses as the crowd of ragged men composed themselves for what remained of the night.

  None of them came too near Krunzle, for which the traveler was grateful. Their stench was not to his liking. He raised a hand to carefully waggle his jaw, poked with his tongue at the loosened tooth, and contemplated the general ache in his skull. He had known worse.

  He needed sleep. Tomorrow would bring more information about his predicament, and perhaps some means of improving it. His last thought was to wonder again what Skanderbrog was.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Krunzle, along with the other slaves, was roused at dawn by the clanging of an iron bar on an iron triangle hung outside the strongroom. The door was flung open by another man with a club, and the slaves roused themselves from where they had slept on the floor and rushed outside. The thief rose and followed.

  He found himself on a broad platform made of planks, close to the edge of the gorge. The ragged men were clustered around a big cauldron near the door to the barracks. They'd taken rough wooden bowls and were dipping them into the big pot and slurping the contents. More tough-looking men with cudgels—some of them had coiled whips at their belts—stood around, some of them telling the ragged men to hurry up and finish.

  Krunzle went to the pile of bowls, found one that was not too encrusted with dried remnants of previous meals, and moved toward the cauldron. He could not help but notice that those in his path—or even well wide of it—moved out of his way. Even the bruisers seemed chary of coming too close to him.

  He dipped the bowl into the stuff in the pot—some kind of pasty gruel afloat with chunks of spoiled vegetables—and brought it to his lips. It tasted like pig swill, the kind given to swine who were not highly prized by their owner. But he reasoned that the day was not likely to offer better nourishment, and he r
emembered someone saying last night that he would be "moving baskets of ore." That was not work to be undertaken on an empty stomach.

  He saw the red-bearded Ulfen who had beaten him at Wartnose's behest come down from the town and speak a word with a big-shouldered guard who looked to be in charge. The thief recognized this one too: he had been one of the men who had come to take him from Room Thirteen. Now Redbeard went back the way he had come and the head guard cast his gaze over the workers, until he found the one he was looking for. "Raimeau!" he called. "You show the new man what to do!"

  A gangling young man with long locks of prematurely gray hair got up from where he'd been eating, drained the final few drops of gruel from his bowl, then wiped its wet inner side with a finger to lick off the absolutely last remnants. He tossed the bowl onto the heap of others and came very slowly toward the traveler, his hands extended in a gesture that said he hoped for no trouble.

  Krunzle noticed that Raimeau's eyes went from his to the thing around his neck and back again. The traveler put the facts together. To the young man he said, "You have no need to worry about this,"—he moved a hand to indicate Chirk—"as long as you leave it alone."

  "Have no fear," said the other. "Seeing what happened to Chenax was instruction enough for me."

  "Chenax was the man with no hands?"

  "He was, though he had a very hard pair of fists before he met you, and had no qualms about using them."

  At that moment, a whistle blew and the slaves moved toward the edge of the platform. "Work?" said the thief.

  "Work," said Raimeau. "We'll be hauling baskets of ore from the face up to the crusher. Watch where you put your feet, because there are no railings on the ledge or the scaffolding. One misstep, and you'll be joining Skanderbrog for dinner. Like Chenax is about to do for breakfast."

  The thief focused on the immediate. "Are Chenax's shoes still available?" He indicated his stockinged feet. "Mining is no work for the unshod."

  "They will be if Skanderbrog hasn't had breakfast yet. He usually doesn't bother to peel his fruit."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Skanderbrog, it turned out, was a name—a name that had been given to a juvenile male troll by his mother, who after nursing him through childhood and teaching him the rudiments of trollery, had handed young Skanderbrog the forequarter of a deer and sent him down from the mountains to see if he could establish a territory for himself and get on with life. But Skanderbrog had been unable to find a niche that was not already occupied by larger and more experienced trolls. Starving, he had come down to forage on the outskirts of Ulm's Delve. After eating a couple of unsuccessful gold-panners—they made poor meals, being half-starved themselves, living off leaves and roots while striving for the elusive gleam in the pan—he had been trapped in a pit that Wartnose's mage had caused to be dug and lined with charms.

  The man with the wart on his nose was, as the thief might have expected, the same Boss Ulm by whose order Ulm's Delve barred "thieves, filchers, bun-passers, vagrants, and holy-fakers." The skeletally thin wizard he employed was Mordach the Prudent, and the red-bearded Ulfen was Brundelaf, the outfit's chief enforcer. He even knew the name of the brawler who had clipped him: Little Fost, he was called—apparently there was a larger version somewhere in the world. The thief thought he would as lief as not be spared the experience of making Big Fost's acquaintance.

  Raimeau was both the knowledgeable type and the sort who liked to tell what he knew. As they descended the scaffolding then stepped off the trestle-work to where a broad ledge had been cut in the rock face, he filled Krunzle in on the history of Ulm's Delve. By the time they had wrested a pair of sturdy shoes from the feet of dead, handless Chenax, laid in a broad wooden trough at one end of the ledge, near a cave sealed behind a grillwork of black metal, the thief was well briefed.

  Boss Ulm had established himself quite solidly here in the Rumples, as this stretch of hilly country was called. Hearing of the gold strike and the rush of goldbugs into the region, he had come with his henchmen to establish the first saloon, brothel, and hardware emporium—in tents at first, though a sawmill was one of his earliest accomplishments, so that he could put up more enduring structures.

  Once the instant town was booming, and Brundelaf and Little Fost and the others had eliminated any doubts as to who was in charge, Ulm had begun to think larger thoughts. He had hired Mordach the Prudent and set him the task of locating the source of the alluvial gold that had the prospectors lining the river's banks, panning and sluicing. The mage had cast his runesticks and questioned a number of subterranean beings he managed to summon and bind. Finally, he had marked a spot halfway up the south side of Starkriven Gorge, as the sheer canyon upriver from the town was called.

  Ulm had established a claim to the gorge by the simple expedient of sending his bullyboys to throw out the handful of gold-hunters who were trying to work the gravel beneath the swift-running water at its bottom. He then moved the infant town to the edge of the chasm and began to develop a mine.

  Mines require miners. These Ulm acquired by the simplest and least costly of measures: he promulgated several ordinances, signed by himself as de facto Reeve of Ulm's Delve. He knew that gold camps attract more than goldbugs; they attract several categories of persons who are skilled in separating prospectors from their pokes of dust and the occasional nugget. Boss Ulm made many of these activities illegal—the penalty for engaging in such banned enterprises was to be sentenced to an indefinite span of labor in the mine or the sawmill. He soon had a sizable, though resentful, work force.

  Ulm had them build a trestle-work of timbers from the gorge's bottom to its top, and cut a wide ledge at the level where the seam of gold within the rock came closest to the rock face. Some of his enslaved card sharps, cutpurses, badger-gamers, and sandbaggers were set to hacking their way through to the gold, while others carried baskets of split rock to the surface, piling up the ore where Ulm had put more of his prisoners—there seemed to be an unending supply—to building him a crushing mill.

  In the early days, the work had gone slowly, but the pace speeded up considerably when Mordach was able to bring Skanderbrog—in massive leg fetters of hammered iron—into the picture. Accommodating the troll required extra shoring up of the scaffolding, the cutting into the rock of a cell barred with a thick grill of charmed iron—the cell outside which Chenax waited to make his final contribution to Boss Ulm's wealth—and the manufacture of a huge hammer and chisel scaled to the young monster's size. But the investment was worth it. After a couple of the least-motivated workers were delegated to become troll-fodder, in full view of the rest of the work force, the mine's productivity increased severalfold.

  Krunzle was on the ledge with Raimeau, trying on the dead man's shoes—they almost fit—when the whistle blew again. "We should leave here," the other man said. "Skanderbrog's coming out." As he spoke, a creak of metal on metal announced that the iron grillwork covering the opening at the end of the ledge was being winched upward on unseen cables. The thief needed no more encouragement but went quickly back the way they had come.

  The young troll emerged into the morning light, blinking. Krunzle could see that he was not full grown: his undertusks thrust up no more than a few inches and he was barely twice the thief's height, even allowing for the stooped, bent-kneed stance that was common to his species. But his months of enslavement to Boss Ulm, each day spent swinging a hammer with a head as big as a man's torso to drive a long, thick chisel into resisting rock, had put even more muscle onto Skanderbrog's arms and shoulders than most mature trolls ever achieved. Trolls were generally averse to hard labor, preferring to make their livings by leaping from concealment onto passersby of whatever species. After overwhelming their prey with sudden, massive violence, they would sit down immediately to eat them raw. Trolls actually preferred cooked food, but most were too lazy to bother gathering fuel and going through the process of kindling a fire.

  Skanderbrog's attention was drawn to the trough. He picked up
Chenax in both his talon-tipped hands and brought his long snout down to sniff the body's charred arm-stumps. He clearly found the scent unpleasant, and delicately pulled Chenax's upper limbs from their sockets, much like a man twisting the wings off a cooked fowl, and threw them into the gorge.

  The iron entrance to his cave closed behind him. He ignored it, and hunkered down on his haunches. A single twist of his wrist and Chenax's head popped off in his hand. He tossed the morsel into his mouth and Krunzle heard it crunch between the wide molars. Skanderbrog chewed, it seemed to the traveler, quite thoughtfully for a troll, his gaze moving across the crowd of slaves ranged over the flat and inclined surfaces of the scaffolding. He focused most clearly, however, on Mordach the mage, who had come down from above, along with a crew of torch-bearing men from Boss Ulm's cadre of enforcers.

  While Skanderbrog made short work of the rest of Chenax, spitting out a metal belt buckle before swallowing the last of his meal, the men formed a double line of fire across the ledge between the troll and any possibility of his escape up or down the trestle-work. Mordach took up a position behind the twin rows of lit torches, raised his hands skyward, so that his sleeves fell back from his stick-thin arms, and shouted several harsh syllables.

  The troll reacted as if he had experienced a sudden toothache. He shook his head, spittle flying from his black lips and prominent bottom tusks, and got to his feet. The look he gave the mage and the torchmen would have rendered Krunzle in instant need of a toilet, preferably one behind a locked and troll-proof door, but the men did not flinch. One or two of them even jeered and made rude noises with their tongues and lips.

  Skanderbrog took only three steps, then paused where a sheet of canvas covered something against the gouged rock of the cliff face. He bent and threw back the heavy fabric as if it were the lightest cloth; beneath were his hammer and chisel. Mordach sent another string of syllables his way, and the young troll took up the tools and faced the rock. He set the chisel's edge into a crack, drew back the hammer, and slammed it forward. The collision gave off an almost musical chink, and a chunk of rock separated from the cliff and fell at Skanderbrog's feet. He swiveled, stooped, and bashed the hammer against the lump of stone, smashing it into fragments. Then he turned, straightened, put the chisel back against the wall, and repeated the process.