by Simon Morden
Finally, they came to a jumble of rocks that barred their way, an ancient fall coated with the same white crust that covered the rest of the underground system. At its base, water flowed through the cracks to form the river.
“Well,” said Thaler. “That appears to be that.”
Prauss looked sour in defeat. “All that way, and to fail. Arse.”
They stared at the bubbling water and readied themselves for the trip back, but Ullmann held his lantern up high, almost to the apex of the arched ceiling.
“Now, I don’t know much about mining and digging, and I beg Master Prauss’s patience, but if the tunnel was flooded on the other side, wouldn’t the rocks at the top be running with water, too. But look.” He slapped his thin, long-fingered hand on the white-rimed boulder nearest the roof and showed his palm to the others.
It was damp, but not dripping.
“He’s right,” said Thaler, and Schussig moved in for a closer look. He spotted something in among the jumble of stone, and fished it out with the tip of his knife.
“What is it?” asked Emser. The guildsman made to pass it across but, his fingers numb, he dropped it.
Thaler stamped on the object as it floated past, with a speed that surprised everyone, not just himself. He smiled sheepishly. “Got it.”
He bent down and scooped it up, then held it to a lantern to inspect it: pale, thin, bendy, with a slight furriness about it.
“It’s a root, Mr Thaler,” said Ullmann.
“Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it? Which means,” said Thaler, looking up, “that we can’t be far from the surface.”
“What do we reckon?” Prauss reached for his hammer. “Do we risk it?”
“As you said, Master Prauss: we’ve come all this way.” Thaler looked at Emser, then at Schussig, gauging their mood. Ullmann was invariably so enthusiastic about everything that what he wanted wasn’t in doubt.
“Well, you’re the leader of this expedition,” said Prauss.
“Leader? Gods, no. Gentlemen, we must agree together. Master Schussig?”
“As much as I’d welcome death at this moment, I’d rather see the sun again. If you believe going through the fall is the quickest way of doing that, I’ll dig with the rest of you.” He tried to massage life back into his cheeks by slapping them, but they stayed as white as the root.
Emser grunted. “We have little to lose and everything to gain. And Ullmann’s right. If the tunnel was flooded, there’d be jets of water squirting out, not that damn trickle.”
“Master Prauss, we are guided by you.” Thaler stepped back.
“Start at the top. See if we can shift some of those little stones first, then the big stuff might free itself.” He stepped up to the rocks. “Careful, now. If I say stop, stop at once. Got that, Mr Ullmann?”
“Loud and clear, Master Prauss.” The usher reached up and started to wriggle a river-worn pebble free. It came out after a struggle, and he dropped it behind him. “It’s a start.”
They did what they could, which for Thaler meant the reduced role of removing debris and offering general encouragement, shifting the rocks that came free away from the base of the fall further on down the tunnel. At least the work helped to warm him a little, but they seemed to be getting nowhere. They removed some of the larger stones, only to find more behind.
Thaler considered the volume they’d already moved. They were, at least, that much closer to freeing the tunnel, but what if the fall just went on and on? At some point, they’d have to admit defeat and turn back. Preferably, before they ran out of candles.
Ullmann, balanced at the very top of the heap, wrestled with a large block, but the one he was perched on suddenly gave way. He toppled over backwards, still clutching his load, and Schussig, to his right, tried to catch him. Simultaneously, the clatter and grind of shifting rock grew from a whisper to a wild growl.
Dust billowed and covered everyone and everything. Thaler, at a remove from the rock face, turned his back and covered his eyes from the stinging, choking cloud. The tunnel was full of noise and chaos: coughing, shouting, booming, skittering.
And when the worst was over, and Thaler’s dropped lantern had been extinguished along with everyone else’s, he realised he could see light from between his fingers.
He cautiously took one hand away, then the other. No, not the Valkyries come to take him to whatever Valhalla had to offer portly librarians; he was still underground in the cold and the wet. Except for a shaft of daylight, unbearably bright, spearing through the settling dust and down the tunnel.
“Everybody all right?” he asked. Two figures emerged from the dark, filthy and bruised: Prauss and Emser, only their eyes and teeth showing white.
“Master Schussig? Mr Ullmann?”
“At your feet, Mister Thaler.” Ullmann spat out a mouthful of grit and heaved a rock of his chest. “I think Master Schussig has been struck a blow to the head. I can hear him breathing, though.”
The brilliance of the shaft was contrasted by the deep shadow it cast, but overall there was enough light to work by. Schussig was bleeding from a cut near his crown, but seemed otherwise intact. Ullmann declared himself entirely unharmed.
“We seem to be somewhere,” he proclaimed, and started to climb up the loose debris to put his eye to the gap that had opened up.
“Careful, man,” said Prauss, but the usher wouldn’t be put off.
“It’s daylight all right, powerful bright. There’s green, too. Let me see if I can push my way through.”
“No,” said Prauss and Thaler together, and Thaler gave way to the mason.
“I’ll check we’re not likely to bring the whole damn thing down on our heads first, if you don’t mind,” said Prauss, summoning Ullmann down with a tug on his tunic.
He exercised much more caution than the younger man had done, inspecting both the roof and the walls, making his pronouncement only when he was sure.
“This is the end of the tunnel – it’s been deliberately blocked off – and the tunnel entrance itself appears perfectly intact. We just need to take stones from the top. Here,” he said, and he passed the first one down. “Let’s do this quickly, and get Master Schussig outside.”
They formed a chain, passing rocks down to be piled up by Thaler, who could barely lift some of them. The gap gradually grew bigger as they removed the infill, until there was just one large boulder in the way.
Prauss squinted around it. “If we all push, we can move it. Mr Ullmann, Master Emser?”
They arranged themselves around the base of the rock and heaved. It shifted, but then settled deeper.
“Again.”
They strained. It rocked forward, but then became stuck against something, and they had to let it roll back. The smell and sight of outside was tantalisingly close, and Thaler couldn’t wait any longer.
“You’re doing it wrong,” he said. He picked up two fist-sized stones from the pile at his feet and positioned himself carefully beside Emser. “Now push again.”
They did, and when the boulder rocked forward again, Thaler jammed one of the stones in the gap at its base, hammering it home with the other. He bent down a second time and came up with a bigger rock.
“Again.”
It was harder work pushing this time, and Thaler had to smash the wedge into position with all his frustrated strength. He looked up, and saw a slit of sky.
“It’s working, Mr Thaler,” said Ullmann.
“Of course it’s working. Archimedes. Basic stuff.” Thaler hunted on the floor for a tapered stone, and knocked it in under the boulder. “Push again.”
With grunts and groans, they took the strain. The boulder moved, and Thaler mashed the face of the stone like a berserker.
“Get in there, you fucker. Get in.”
The boulder was at an angle now, and the gap between the roof and the rock almost wide enough for the smallest of them to squeeze through. Thaler tossed his makeshift hammer to one side and pressed his own palms against the
gritty surface.
“One last push,” he said. “Don’t let it fall back.”
He took a deep breath and dropped his shoulder against it. It was going, it was definitely going. He gasped and grunted, and started to straighten his legs. Then he was falling forward with the weight, still pressing hard against it. Spread-eagled on it, almost.
Thaler looked up, and saw sky and clouds and trees. It was cool and sunny, and insects buzzed about him, tasting his salt sweat.
Ullmann pulled himself up the incline and out, standing on the very rock that had blocked their way.
“It’s a lovely day up here. Though I’m not sure where here is, exactly.”
Prauss and Emser dragged Schussig to the entrance and Ullmann helped pull him out.
“You feeling up to coming out, too, Mr Thaler?” Ullmann extended his hand. “That was a mighty effort from you at the end.”
Thaler mentally checked himself to see if anything had gone pop. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called on to exert himself so strenuously. If this was what life would be like without magic … He clenched his jaw at the thought. The cost of his ease had been shown to be great, too great.
He lifted his hand and let Ullmann haul him upright, giving his dark-adapted eyes time to adjust to the bright colours of above-ground. They were in a valley, with a particularly tall mountain towering almost directly over them – they’d emerged from an opening at the base its flank, right down by the valley floor where a river flowed between the trees.
Thaler frowned, and looked back. The tunnel opening was, as Prauss had said, intact: the top of the tooled stone arch was visible now they’d climbed up and out. He looked along the line of the tunnel from the entrance to the river.
At first sight, and even on closer inspection, it looked as if the tunnel was just cut into the mountainside. Yet water was somehow flowing from the river, through the ground and into it, all the way to the mikveh and beyond to the quayside in Juvavum.
“How is Master Schussig?” he asked.
“Beginning to come round. Lump on his head the size of a hen’s egg.” Prauss scraped grime from his chin and inspected his ragged fingernails. “Any sign of people?”
“No, no,” said Thaler, distracted. He slowly climbed down the rock pile and onto the soft shade-dappled ground. The tree roots were knotty under his feet, and he knelt down, tearing at the soil with his hands. He found a jumble of rock fragments a little way down. He stopped and moved on towards the river, stopping again to scrape away the leaf litter and loam.
“What is it, Mr Thaler?” called Ullmann.
“Come here,” he said. “Put your ear to the ground and tell me what you hear.”
Ullmann thought it a strange request, but he complied anyway. After a few moments, he looked up at Thaler. “Water. There’s running water under there.”
“There is indeed, my lad. Now,” he said, looking at the river, “that can only mean one thing.”
“It can?”
“One thing,” repeated Thaler, and he trotted to the river bank. He crashed around in the undergrowth, kicking and stamping until he’d found something that didn’t sound like waterlogged soil. He pointed downwards. “Here.”
He dropped to his knees and started to dig, joined shortly by a bemused Ullmann. The top of a piece of dressed stone, chisel-marks clear for both of them to see, appeared: the pointed capstone of a pillar.
“If that’s here, there should be another …” – Thaler scrambled up, shook the dirt from his fingers, and judged the distance – “over there.”
He walked a little way away from the river, but at right-angles to the line of the tunnel. The second stone pillar was even easier to find than the first, the top of it lying just below the surface.
“Can you see it now?” Thaler spread his hands to take in the whole of the valley. “The Romans diverted the river to run under the mountain. Right here. The tunnel was blocked off later, when our ancestors used magic instead; the aqueduct was filled in; and the gate that must have been here was lost or buried. But it’s all right under our feet.”
“And has been all the time.” Ullmann nodded, satisfied. “Well done, Mr Thaler.”
The librarian blushed and slapped Ullmann on the back. “Well done to you too, Mr Ullmann. With a team of men to dig this out, we could have it working in a crude fashion in, say, a week?”
“There’s a lot to do inside the tunnels, too, Mr Thaler.”
“Then we’d better make a start. First things first: find out where in Midgard we are.” He looked down at his belly. “And perhaps get something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I appear to have regained my appetite.”
38
The prince sat by the window, watching the sun hovering low and orange over the mountains. Trommler slipped in like a shadow and stood behind him, waiting to be noticed. Felix, chin on the window shelf, was as far away as the sharp snow-covered peaks he could see through the glass.
The chamberlain coughed politely, and then a little less politely.
“My lord, it’s time.”
“I know,” said Felix. “I know that someone else can’t do it, that I have to, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to be … Oh, I don’t know … what’s the furthest place you know of?”
“They say there’s a great emperor in the utmost East, who commands flights of dragons and wears cloth woven from spider silk. They call him the Son of Heaven, the Lord of Ten Thousand Years.” Trommler held out the Sword of Carinthia on the flats of his hands. “I imagine that would be far enough, even for you.”
Felix took the sword just above the guard, but there was no way he could strap it on one-handed. Then he realised that the ceremony had started, and there was no escaping its inevitable conclusion.
“Prince of Carinthia is the best I can hope for.” He handed the sword back. “However long I last.”
“Be assured of your subjects’ support, my lord.” Trommler fed the belt around Felix’s waist and fastened it in front.
“That’s not what you said this morning,” said Felix. “You said they’d turn on me if they realised there was magic still around.”
“They will support you tonight, at least. Everything is ready, and you needn’t even speak. It’s certainly not required, nor even expected.”
Felix looked down at the sword. “Can you hang this on my right? There doesn’t seem any point to having it where I can’t even draw it.”
Trommler looked to see if he could change it, but the fittings were on one side only. He solved the problem by turning the whole belt around, so that the buckle was at the back. “My lord hasn’t eaten anything today.”
“I had something for breakfast.”
“Which is contrary to what the servant I sent to you told me.” Trommler gave a mirthless smile. “I shall have him beaten.”
“Maybe I didn’t. Don’t beat him.” Felix looked across at the table, with its untouched plate of cold meats and bread and beer. “I’m just not hungry.”
“It is, I’m afraid, your royal duty to eat, and drink. Especially drink, and I’d rather you had some ballast inside when you take the horn tonight. I’ve made sure that the Gothi waters the mead down for you: it wouldn’t do for you to either collapse or spew.” He guided the boy over to the chair and pulled it back for him. “Anything would be better than nothing, even though it might taste like wood.”
“Has the signore returned, Mr Trommler?”
“Not that I know of,” said Trommler. “But you cannot wait for his return.”
“He can’t have failed.” Felix poked at a small wheat-flour roll with his finger. “Perhaps he’s just waiting for the right moment.”
“I’m sure that’s the case.”
“He couldn’t have left me, could he?”
Trommler pursed his lips. “No. I very much doubt that he has. The signore will return when he is done.”
Felix sighed and dug his fingers into the roll, splitting it apart and revealing
its close-textured middle. “I’ve got another question, one that I don’t want to know the answer to.”
“Oh?”
The prince reached behind his bandaged arm and retrieved a small square of folded paper. “I … no, just read it. You don’t need to know where it came from.”
Trommler reached out and opened up the paper. The writing was tiny, almost illegible, and he had to hold it well away from his face in order to see anything of it.
“Trouble seeing, Mr Trommler?”
“The enchantment on my eyes has failed, my lord. I’m reduced to this now.” He looked over the top of the note. “And no, I don’t wish for it back, even though I’ll miss easily being able to read even the smallest handwriting.”
He finally deciphered the note. In silence, he folded it back up and slid it across the table to Felix.
“It’s a very good question,” he finally said. Felix waited, and waited some more. Trommler grew increasingly uncomfortable, and eventually went to stand by the fire.
“But is there an answer?”
Trommler’s hunched back tightened. “There is, my lord. But, as you wisely said, you don’t want to know what it is.”
“What if I did?” Felix pushed his chair back and adjusted the sword of state at his hip. He walked slowly across to Trommler. “What if I felt that, as the Prince of Carinthia, I needed to know.”
“And not just because she was your mother?” Picking up a poker, the chamberlain riddled the half-burnt logs with something approaching anger.
“Why did she die?”
“She died in childbirth. She died having you.”
“That’s how she died,” said Felix. “Not the why. The note that … the note asks why she died. I always assumed that the how explained everything. My father never said any more than you just have. There is more, though, isn’t there?”
“It’s getting perilously close to late, my lord.” Trommler replaced the poker and wiped his hands. “Your escort’s waiting for you in the courtyard.”