“The weapons in the barrel will let us cut through such a column?” the barbarian asked. “Won’t one of us need to be here to use the weapons, though? And that one will be killed, too.”
“Heave! That’s the best part. We can set the barrels so they activate only after we leave. By the time they take light, we’ll be in the escape shaft and headed home. We’ll have to run like a pregnantheave! — a pregnant lass for the privy, but we’ll escape with our hides intact, and the whole damned mountain will come down, crushing every living thing in this hole. Heave!”
“The whole mountain, you say,” Morget repeated. Then he let out a booming laugh.
“Heave!” he called, in chorus with Balint.
Croy pulled hard on the rope. Would he go with them, he wondered, when the time came? What remained for him outside this dark pit? Perhaps he would stay, and watch, and listen to the elves scream as their bodies were crushed to pulp.
Yes. He thought he might enjoy that.
“Heave!”
Chapter Eighty-six
On their way back to Aethil’s chambers they were stopped by an elfin soldier who gasped for breath. He took the queen aside and gave her some desperate message that clouded her face with worry. When she came back to them, she looked confused and hurt. “Something terrible has happened,” she told them. “A group of our soldiers has returned from patrol, with only half their numbers-and that half terribly wounded.” She shook her head. “The messenger did not know what befell them. It must have been a cave-in in one of the tunnels. I’m sorry, my friends, but I must go help tend to the injured. I’ll see you again, Sir Croy, before you-before-well, I’ll see you tonight. Perhaps… perhaps you’ll give me some token of your esteem, to strengthen me for the ordeal I am about to face.”
“To be sure, lass, if you want my kerchief to wear, or-”
Aethil bowed low and grabbed the dwarf by the beard. Without further warning she pressed her mouth to his, kissing him long and deeply. Her arms wrapped around his neck and she sank against him, pushing Slag back until his back collided with the cave wall. “There,” she said when she broke the embrace. “That will sustain me. Until later… my love.”
She departed then, with many a backward glance over her shoulder. When she was gone, Slag rubbed at his face and combed out his beard with his fingers.
“Like being sucked dry by a moray eel,” he said.
The messenger remained behind to take them back to the royal apartments. At least, Malden thought, they wouldn’t have to wait for their doom in the elfin gaol. When the messenger brought them to Aethil’s door, he saluted the guards stationed there and said, “The queen’s pets are your responsibility now. Make sure they don’t leave this room.”
The soldiers leered and shoved the humans and the dwarf through the door. It was bolted behind them, and though Malden knocked again and again on the door, demanding food and drink, there was no answer.
Out of options, the three of them made themselves as comfortable as they might. Slag sat down to pick at the rotten pages of his book, laying out pieces of time-browned paper carefully on a table, as if assembling some puzzle. Cythera dropped heavily into a cushioned chair and put her hands over her eyes, as though the lamplight in the room was too strong for her.
“Tomorrow, she said.” Malden paced back and forth across the floorboards, feeling like a fox caught in a trap. “Tomorrow we’ll be fed to that demon.”
“No,” Cythera said. She looked distracted.
“I misheard her? We’re not going to be dropped into that mass, to dissolve into goo ourselves?”
Cythera sighed. “No, I meant it’s not a demon. More like a god.”
“I will make sure to be suitably reverent, then, when it chews on my flesh tomorrow, and sucks my soul to wash down my giblets.”
Cythera got up and went to a side table to pour herself some mushroom wine. “I should have realized, when I heard Morget’s description of the creature he saw in the mountains. It’s not a pit-spawned abomination. Sorcery didn’t draw it up from the Bloodgod’s domain. In substance it much resembled ectoplasm, the immanentized stuff of psychic energy. I imagine a powerful enough witch could generate a gallon of the fluid during a trance session, but-”
Malden had been staring at her in incomprehension for a while before she noticed.
“If you like, you may think of it as a more-solid kind of ghost,” she said. “It is made, truly, of the memories and thoughts of Aethil’s ancestors. All those elves who have gone before. It’s strange, though. There was never any mention of such a mass in the legends of the elves I’ve read. There were old stories of their ancestors living in the trees, of how we angered them by chopping down their sacred groves, but that… that made it sound more like ghosts, more like immaterial beings. This is different-something has changed. Something has changed in the very nature of their life force. It must have been emanated only after they came here. Perhaps, in their desperation-when they realized they were sealed in and could not escape-their fear and their anger reified the etheric currents of the-”
Malden stared at her again.
“Oh, fie! Malden, why must you look at me like that?”
“Because I care very little what that thing is. I care very much about how to avoid being eaten by it. We need a plan. We need to think of how we’re going to escape, and we need to think of it now.”
Cythera inhaled deeply. “Yes. Of course. Slag?”
“Hmm?” The dwarf didn’t look up from his scraps of paper. “Ah!” he said, and moved one to lie next to another. “Yes… there…”
“Slag,” Malden said. “Sir Croy. Urin!”
“Busy,” the dwarf told him. With trembling hands, Slag picked another scrap of paper from a pile by his elbow and turned it sideways, then laid it down atop the others. “Hah!” he shouted, and jumped off his chair.
“Are you all right, Slag?” Malden asked.
“I have it! So simple! Lad, lass, this is a wonder! Three ingredients only, all readily available. Why this was lost so long-why no one stumbled on it since-I will never know. Huzzah! Fucking huzzah!”
Malden looked at Cythera. She shrugged.
“I have it! I have it precisely-when I saw this book, I knew there would be secrets inside. It’s the Manual of Applied Combinations. One of the greatest works of all dwarven literature, a compendium of formulae for creating various substances of use to dwarvenkind. It’s been lost for centuries. No copy is known to exist in any dwarven library, but here, here in this musty old deathtrap, this fucking hole-I have it!”
“What have you?” Malden asked.
“The nature of the powder. The recipe for its admixture. I don’t need those barrels. Balint can bloody have them! I can make as much of it as I like, for farthings on the hogshead. Fucking brilliant-I’m going to be rich, lad. Exile be damned, I’ll be richer than the dwarven king. I’ll buy the fucking crown off the top of his head, and we’ll see who’s a real dwarf then!” Slag pounded on the table merrily. Malden had never seen him so happy. “Rich!”
Malden sighed in exasperation and pushed a hand through his hair. “Both of you! You’re lost in mysteries and might-bes! Cythera, everything we learned today, everything we saw, will mean nothing tomorrow. Slag-this discovery of yours-”
“Means we have to escape,” Slag said, nearly jumping up and down with excitement. “Money’s no use to a dwarf who’s been et by a demon. Lad, lass, stop your moping. We must come up with an escape plan-and we must have it now. I have to get out of here and start formulating the compound, if I’m ever going to make any money from this.” His lips curled into an irrepressible smile and he burbled with laughter. “Rich!”
Chapter Eighty-seven
When Aethil returned, Slag lay slumped on the divan again, one forearm pressed against his eyes. “Oh, woe is me,” he moaned, and rocked his head back and forth.
Malden hoped he wasn’t overdoing it.
The elf queen, however, for once didn’t seem
to notice her paramour’s emotional state. She went to her sideboard and poured a goblet full of dark wine, then lifted it with a shaking hand. She looked even paler than she’d been before.
“Sir Croy,” she said, softly, “you didn’t…” She couldn’t seem to finish the thought. After a moment she swallowed her wine and shook her head. “No. Of course not. I refuse to believe it. You’re an honorable human. Not at all like the ones in the stories.”
Cythera stood up from her chair in the corner. “Your highness,” she said. “You don’t look well.”
Aethil gave her a bitter smile-then sighed and favored them all with a more sincere countenance. “Just a trifle tired. The soldiers were wounded most horribly, and many of them didn’t survive. I… I don’t normally see so much… blood.”
“A cave-in must be a terrible thing down here,” Cythera sympathized.
“It was no accident. The wounds I saw were made with swords. Iron swords… they tell me there are other humans in our home now. Two fierce warriors, brutes who offer no quarter or mercy. Supposedly they’re even being helped by a dwarf, of all things. They lay ambushes for our soldiers and cut them down without warning.”
Cythera gasped, though Malden was certain it wasn’t out of horror. These two warriors the queen described could be none other than Croy and Morget. The dwarf with them must be Balint or one of her crew.
“I know,” Aethil said, draining more of her wine, “that you three had nothing to do with this. You couldn’t have-it’s-it’s impossible. You were with me, or in the gaol, this whole time. So I will not say more, for fear of offending you. Yet when these two men are caught-and their traitorous dwarf-well, justice must be done.”
“Of course,” Malden said. He sidled over to the queen and went to one knee before her. “Perhaps you’ll let us see them when they are brought in, so we can revile them with you.”
Aethil shook her head. “I would grant that wish if I could, but I’m afraid right now I have little ability to arrange things.” She looked at Malden, and for a moment he thought she was looking at a thinking, rational being. Always before she’d regarded him like an especially talented pet. “The lords have been in close council with the Hieromagus. They have a plan, they claim. Some method to capture the fugitive humans without losing any more of our people. They wouldn’t tell me the details-already they’ve stopped trusting me. They’ve also been saying things about me. Hurtful things.”
Malden was so shocked by her confiding in him that for a moment he could only respond in kind. “They threatened you?”
The queen shook her head. “I’ve told you. I have very little real power. For simple things, for things that don’t matter, sometimes my words are heeded. But this is different. Those soldiers… they died to protect me. From humans. And the lords are saying I’ve already shown you three humans far too much compassion. They fear you, squire. They are afraid, and they are men, and when men are afraid, they think only of violence. I’m not sure but I think they may try to harm you, and Cythera, and Sir Croy.”
Malden wasn’t sure what the elfin lords could do to him worse than throwing him into their ancestral mass. But then he remembered they had a reputation as torturers. “If there’s anything we can do, anything to help-”
Apparently Slag hadn’t forgotten that they were trying to use Aethil to aid their escape. He went on with the scheme, as planned-exactly according to the script they’d worked out. “Oh!” the dwarf moaned, more loudly this time. “Woe is me!”
Aethil dropped her goblet on the floor, spilling wine across the hem of her gown. She rushed to the divan and knelt beside it, grabbing up Slag’s hands in her own. “Sir Croy! Are you sick? What has befallen you while I was gone? Oh, I hurried back here as quickly as I could. You must believe me!”
“Oh, to die, to perish here, in this dark place,” Slag moaned.
“You won’t die at all!” Aethil’s voice was near hysterics. “My love, you’re going to live forever. And I can come visit you as often as you like, once you’re part of the ancestral mass.”
“To live… forever,” Slag said. He shook his head wildly. “In the dark!”
Aethil looked up at Malden and Cythera, her eyes pleading.
Malden almost regretted what they would say next. He was not pleased with the harm they’d already done to Aethil. But he knew this was their only chance.
“Sadness has gripped him like a fever,” Cythera explained.
“He longs for one thing only,” Malden added, perhaps not with the same theatrical plaintiveness he’d originally planned on putting into the words.
“What is it? My darling, tell me, and I’ll give it to you with all my heart. Is it another kiss? Is it a caress? I’ll gladly give to you my virtue, if it will-”
“I must feel the sun’s light on my face, one last time,” Slag whispered. “Or my soul will shrivel and fucking perish.”
Malden’s hands were balled into tight fists at his sides. This was the moment that could be their undoing-or mean their escape. If Aethil agreed to let them go up to one of the exits from the Vincularium, they could slip past any escort and be free. If she refused, there would be no more chances, no more possibilities “Of course you can see it,” Aethil said.
The dwarf’s body stiffened on the divan. “Really? I don’t mean the red bauble you’ve got chained up down here either. I mean the sun that warms the surface world. The-The-”
“The golden orb of day, the fiery chariot of heaven,” Malden supplied.
“Aye, that one,” Slag concurred.
“Well, yes, of course I knew which one you meant,” Aethil told him. “Nothing could be simpler. Are you too gripped by sadness to walk? I can summon servants to carry you there, if you like.”
Slag sat up and then slid off the divan to his feet. “I can manage.”
“Then come this way,” Aethil told him. She looked back at Malden and Cythera, and for a moment Malden was terrified she would tell them to wait there, that she and Slag would go look on the sun alone. “Your servants must come with us. Though they lack your sensitive nature, I’m sure they’ll want to see this as well.”
“I wholeheartedly agree,” Slag said, and started toward the door.
“Oh, no, not that way,” Aethil said. “I’ve been given instructions not to let you leave my chambers. Luckily we don’t need to, for this.” She walked toward the back of the room, to where the curtain of water fell constantly. She lifted a hand and the waters parted, revealing a dark room beyond. Lifting a candlestick from one of her tables, Aethil stepped through and into a sumptuous bedchamber. “I had planned on showing you this room anyway,” she told Slag. “Though not in such company.”
The queen led them through the bedchamber to a broad archway. Myriad glinting beams of light emerged from beyond the arch. One by one they filed through, into a cave of unsurpassed beauty.
At first Malden thought the walls were decked with snow, and that icicles of impossible size and profusion had grown from the ceiling. It was no colder in this hidden cave, however, than in the rest of the Vincularium, and he quickly determined that the “snow” was in fact a dense encrustation of rock crystals. They covered every surface, sending up faceted spearheads both minuscule and gigantic, sticking out in every possible direction. One spar fifteen feet long crossed the cave on a diagonal slant, and as Aethil’s light touched it, beams of pure color shot out to dazzle Malden’s eyes.
“This is my personal grotto,” Aethil explained. “For centuries, only royalty have been allowed back here. Please, don’t touch that!”
Malden looked up just moments after he’d touched a rock so covered with crystal spines that it resembled a sea anemone. Even the softest contact was too much, as it turned out-the crystals snapped off one by one and fell to the floor to shatter.
“Oh, they’re so delicate,” Aethil said.
“I am sorry,” Malden told her.
She shook her head prettily. “Never mind. Come this way.”
&nb
sp; Deeper in the cave, its natural shape curved around an entire pipe organ’s worth of standing crystal columns, each thicker and taller than the last. In the next section a perfectly still pool of water covered most of the floor, with islands of crystal rising from the yellowish water here and there. Still farther on, a narrow path led upward, fringed on either side by perfect growths, like a garden of diamonds.
Slag must have seen him slipping crystal shards into a pocket of his robe. The dwarf shook his head and leaned back to whisper, “They’re worthless, lad. Too fragile to use as gemstones, and common as crap.”
Malden frowned. He’d thought perhaps to make his own fortune here. He still hadn’t forgiven himself for failing to rob the Hall of Masterpieces when he had the chance. Yet all expression left his face when he followed Aethil up the path-and sunlight fell across his hands.
Real sunlight.
The light of day-the light of the surface world.
Its color, its warmth, its clarity, all proclaimed its provenance. He hurried after the queen, and nearly trampled on a patch of crystals grown into the shape of flowers.
“Here, stand just here,” Aethil said. She showed Malden the exact patch of cleared ground she meant. “Now. Look-there.”
Malden looked up, following her pointing finger.
And saw a patch of blue sky.
It was beyond being beautiful. It was the coolth of summer shade, the first taste of ale after a day of thirst. It was perhaps six inches on a side. The cave stretched onward and upward, he could not say how far-perhaps hundreds of feet. It opened on what must be the side of the mountain, a natural exit from the Vincularium. Too bad, then, that it was so encrusted with crystals that not even Balint’s knocker could have fit through that gap.
Of course, if one were to break the crystals out of the way, say with a hammer, uncaring of their beauty in the desperation of one’s need to get out “Let Sir Croy look now. He feels the need the most,” Aethil said.
Reluctantly, Malden stepped away from the viewing place and let Slag take his spot.
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