Eolair stepped forward. “You are the ones our ancestors called Domhaini? But we thought they were legend only, or at least were long dead. You are…the dwarrows?”
Yis-fidri showed a mild frown. “Legend? You do be of Hern’s folk, be you not? Who was it, think you, that taught your ancestors to mine these mountains in days agone? We did. As to names, what matter? Dwarrow to some mortals, Dverning or Domhaini to others.” He waved his long fingers, slowly, sadly. “Only words. We are Tinukeda’ya. We came from the Garden and we can never return.”
Eolair sheathed his sword with a clang that echoed through the cavern. “You sought for the Peaceful Ones, Princess! This is as strange or stranger! A city in the mountain’s heart! The dwarrows out of our oldest legends! Has the world below gone as mad as the world above?”
Maegwin was scarcely less astonished than Eolair, but found herself with little to say. As she stared at the dwarrows, she mourned; the black cloud that had lifted for a while seemed to roll back over her mind.
“But you are not the Sithi,” she said at last, voice flat. “They are not here. They will not help us.”
Yis-fidri’s companions moved up, so that they formed a semicircle around the huddled pair. Watching Maegwin and Eolair worriedly, the wide-eyed dwarrows seemed poised to bolt.
“If you came searching for the Zida’ya—those who you name Sithi,” Yis-fidri said carefully, “then that is of deep interest to us indeed, since we brought us here to hide from them.” He nodded slowly. “Long ago did we refuse to bend any longer to their will, to their overweening injustice, and so we escaped. We thought they had forgotten us, but they have not. Now that we are weary and few, they seek to capture us once more.” A dim fire was kindled in Yis-fidri’s eyes. “They even call to us through the Shard, the Witness which has been silent for many long years. They mock us with their tricks, trying to lure us back.”
“You are hiding from the Sithi?” Eolair asked, confused. “But why?”
“We did serve them once, Hern’s Child. We fled. Now they would cozen us into coming back. They speak of swords to lure us—for they know that such Krafting was always our delight, and the Great Swords some of our highest works. They ask us of mortals we have never met nor heard of—and what would we have to do with mortals now? You are the first we have seen in a long age.”
The Count of Nad Mullach waited for Yis-fidri to continue. When it appeared he would not, Eolair asked: “Mortals? Like us? What mortals do they name to you?”
“The Zida’ya woman—First Grandmother, as she is called—spoke several times of…” the dwarrow conferred briefly with his fellows, “…of Handless Josua.’.”
“Handless…! Gods of earth and stream, do you mean Josua Lackhand?” Eolair stared, astounded. “Oh, heaven, this is madness!” He sat down heavily on one of the decaying benches.
Maegwin slumped beside him. Her mind was already reeling beneath such weariness and disappointment that she had no strength left to be surprised, but when she at last turned away from the mild, wide eyes of the puzzled dwarrows to look to Eolair, the count’s face was that of a man struck by lightning in his own house.
Simon awakened from a flight through black spaces and screaming winds. The howling continued, but a red light bloomed before his eyes as the darkness receded.
“Vren, you little fool!” someone was shrieking close by. “There is blood in the circle!”
When he tried to take a breath, Simon felt something pushing down on him, so that his lungs had to strain for air. He wondered briefly if a roof had fallen on him. Fire? The red light danced and billowed. Was the Hayholt on fire?
He could see a vast shape now, dressed in flapping white. The figure seemed to have grown tall as the trees, looming far into the sky. It took long moments before he realized he was lying on the icy ground, that Skodi was standing over him, screaming at someone. How long…?
The little boy Vren flailed on the ground a few cubits away, his hands holding his throat, eyes bulging in his dark face. Untouched and unapproached, he was kicking his feet wildly, heels drumming on the frozen mud. Somewhere nearby, Qantaqa was mournfully howling.
“You are bad!” Skodi screamed, her face gone pinkish-purple with rage. “Bad Vren! Spilled blood! They will swarm! Bad!” She gasped in a great breath and bellowed. “Punishment!” The little boy writhed like a smashed snake.
Beyond Skodi, a shadowy face watched from the center of the rippling fire, its unstable mouth moving in laughter. A moment later the bottom-less black eyes settled on Simon, their sudden touch like an icy tongue pressed against his face. He tried to scream, but some great weight was pushing on his back.
Little fly, a voice whispered in his head, heavy and dark as mud. It was a voice that had haunted many dreams, a voice of red eyes and burning darkness. We meet you in the strangest places…and you have that sword, as well. We must tell the master about you. He will he very interested. There was a pause; the thing in the fire seemed to grow larger, the eyes cold black pits in the heart of an inferno. Why, look at you, manchild, it purred, you are bleeding…
Simon drew his shaking hand out from beneath his body, wondering why it seemed strange that it should respond to his will. When he disentangled it from Thorn’s hilt, he saw that the trembling fingers were indeed covered with slick red blood.
“Punished!” Skodi was shrieking, her childlike voice cracking. “Everyone will be punished! We were to give presents to the Lord and Lady!”
The wolf howled again, closer.
Vren had gone limp, facedown in the mud at Skodi’s feet. As Simon stared distractedly, the ground seemed to bulge, obscuring his view of the boy’s pale, crumpled form. A moment later another bulge appeared close by, quivering; the half-thawed earth parted with a crunching, sucking sound. A thin dark arm and long-nailed hand lifted from the agitated soil, reaching toward the dim stars with fingers spread like the petals of a black flower. Another hand snaked up beside it, followed by a pale-eyed head scarcely bigger than an apple. A needle-toothed grin split the wizened face, twitching the scraggly black whiskers.
Simon squirmed, unable to cry out. A dozen bulges blistered the earth of the courtyard, then a dozen more. In a moment the diggers were seething up from below like maggots from a burst carcass.
“Bukken!” Skodi shrilled in alarm. “Bukken! Vren, you little fool, I told you not to spill blood in the charm-circle!” She waved her fat arms at the diggers, who swarmed over the shrieking children like a plague of cluttering rats. “I punished him!” she screamed, pointing at the unmoving child. “Go away!” She turned to the bonfire. “Make them go away, Sir! Make them go away!”
The fire fluttered in the chill wind, but the face only watched. “Help! Simon!” Binabik’s voice was hoarse with fear. “Help us! We are still tied!”
Simon rolled over painfully, trying to pull his knees beneath him. His back was clenched in an immovable knot, as though he had been kicked by a horse. The air before his eyes seemed full of shining snowflakes.
“Binabik!” he groaned. A wave of squealing black shapes split off from the main cluster, flowing away from the children and toward the abbey wall where Sludig and the troll lay.
“Stop! I will make you!” Skodi had clamped her hands over her ears, as though to shield herself from the children’s pitiful screams. A small foot, pallid as a mushroom, emerged briefly from the knot of diggers, then was swallowed up again. “Stop!”
The ground suddenly erupted all about her, gouts of gelatinous mud spattering her nightdress. A flurry of spidery arms wrapped around her broad calves, then a swarm of diggers were climbing her legs as though they were tree trunks. Her nightdress bulged as they swarmed up beneath it in ever-increasing numbers, until at last the thin fabric split like an overstuffed bag, revealing a squirming mass of eyes and scrawny legs and taloned hands that almost completely obscured her doughy flesh. Skodi’s mouth pulled wide to scream and a serpentine arm pushed into it, disappearing to the shoulder. The girl’s pale e
yes bulged.
Simon had finally dragged himself into a half-crouch when a gray shape flashed past him, bowling into the slithering, squeaking mass that had been Skodi and tumbling it to the ground. The diggers’ mewing cries rose in pitch, quickly becoming trills of fear as Qantaqa snapped necks and crushed skulls, throwing small bodies in the air with gleeful abandon. A moment later she was through and racing toward the throng of creatures that had descended on Binabik and Sludig.
The fire had flared up to a great height. The unformed thing within it laughed. Simon’s could feel its terrible amusement sapping him, sucking the life from him.
This is amusing, little fly, is it not? Why don’t you come closer and we will watch together.
Simon tried to ignore the pull of the voice, the insistent power of its words. He clambered agonizingly to his feet and staggered away from the fire and the thing that lurked within it. He used Thorn as a crutch, propping himself, though the hilt slid treacherously beneath his blood-damped hand. The slash Vren had made across his back was a cold ache, a numbness that was still somehow painful.
The thing Skodi had summoned continued to taunt him, its voice echoing inside his head, playing with him like a cruel child with a captured insect.
Little fly, where are you going? Come here. The master will want to meet you…
It was a terrible struggle to keep walking in the other direction; life seemed to be running out of him like sand. The diggers’ squeals and Qantaqa’s wet, joyful growl had become no more than a faint roaring in his ears.
For a long moment he did not even notice the talons grasping at his legs; when at last he looked down into the spider-egg eyes of the Bukken, it was as though he stared through a window into some other world, a horrible place that was fortuitously separated from his own. It was not until the scrabbling claws began to shred the legs of his breeches and score the flesh beneath that the dreamlike state fell away. With a shout of horror, he smashed the wrinkled face with a balled fist. More were climbing his legs. He kicked them away with moans of disgust, but they seemed as numberless as termites.
Thorn shivered again in his hands. Without thinking, Simon lifted it and sent the black blade whistling into a clump of prancing creatures. He felt it hum, as though it sang silently. Grown marvelously light, Thorn sheared heads and arms like grass stems until dark ichor ran down the bladed in streams. Every swing sent fiery pain lancing through Simon’s back, but at the same time he felt mad exhilaration course though him. Long moments after all the diggers around him had died or fled, he was still hacking at the tangled corpses.
My, you are a fierce fly, aren’t you? Come to us. The voice seemed to reach into his head as into an open wound, and he squirmed in disgust. Tonight is a great night, a wild night.
“Simon!” Binabik’s muffled cry at last cut through his frenzy of hatred. “Simon! Unbind us!”
You know we will win, little fly. Even at this instant, far away in the south, one of your greatest allies falls…despairs…dies…
Simon turned and staggered toward the troll. Qantaqa, her muzzle blood-washed to the ears, was keeping a hopping, shrilling throng of diggers at bay. Simon lifted Thorn once more and began to cut his way through the Bukken, smashing them down in bunches until at last they scattered from his path. The voice in his head seemed to be crooning almost wordlessly. The fire-washed courtyard shimmered before his eyes.
He bent to cut the troll’s bonds and a great wave of dizziness almost toppled him to the ground. Binabik rubbed the rope against Thorn’s cutting edge for a moment until the pieces fell aside. The little man tried briefly to rub life back into his wrists, then turned to Sludig. After picking at the knot for a moment, he turned to Simon.
“Here, lend your sword to this cutting,” he began, then stared. “Chukku’s Stones! Simon, you are all of blood on your back!”
Blood will open the doorway, manchild. Come to us!
Simon tried to speak to Binabik but could not. Instead, he thrust Thorn forward, clumsily pinking Sludig’s back with the point. The Rimmersman, coming slowly back to wakefulness, groaned.
“While he slept they struck his head with a stone,” Binabik said mournfully. “Because of his bigness, I am thinking. Me they only tied.” He sawed Sludig’s bonds against Thorn until they, too, fell slithering to the snowy ground. “We must be reaching the horses,” the troll said to Simon. “Have you sufficient strength?”
He nodded. His head felt far too heavy for his neck and the roaring in his thoughts was giving way to a frightening emptiness. For the second time that night he felt his inner self beginning to float free from its confining shell, but this time he feared there would be no returning. He forced himself to remain standing as Binabik coaxed the bleary Rimmersman to his feet.
The master is waiting in the Chamber of the Well…
“All we may do is run for the stables,” Binabik shouted over the wolfs menacing snarl. She had forced the diggers back, so that several yards of open ground stood between the ring of Bukken and Simon’s friends. “With Qantaqa leading, we can perhaps be getting there, but we must not slow or hesitate.”
Simon swayed. “Get the saddlebags,” he said. “In the abbey.” The little man stared at him incredulously. “Foolishness!”
“No.” Simon shook his head drunkenly. “I won’t go…without…White Arrow. She…they…won’t take that.” He stared out across the dooryard at the heaving mass of diggers gathered where Skodi had stood.
You will stand before the Singing Harp, you will hear His sweet voice…
“Simon,” Binabik began, then briefly swung his hand in the Qanuc ward against madmen. “You are barely able for standing,” he grunted. “I will go.”
Before Simon could respond, the troll had vanished through the door into the abbey’s lightless interior. Long moments later he returned, dragging the saddlebags behind him.
“We will hang most on Sludig.” Binabik said, eyeing the waiting diggers apprehensively. “He is too full of sleepiness to fight, so he will be our pack-ram.”
Come to us!
As the troll draped the bags over the bemused Rimmersman, Simon looked out at the circle of pale, naked eyes. The waiting diggers clicked and chittered quietly as though talking among themselves. Many wore tatters of crude clothing; some had rough, jagged-bladed knives clutched in their spindly fists. They stared back at him, swaying like rows of black poppies.
“Are you now ready, Simon?” Binabik whispered. Simon nodded, lifting Thorn before him. The blade had been light as a switch, but now it suddenly seemed heavy as stone. It was all he could do to hold it before him.
“Nihut, Qantaqa!” the troll shouted. The wolf sprang forward, jaws wide. Diggers piped in fear as Qantaqa plowed a furrow through flailing arms and gnashing teeth. Simon followed, swinging Thorn heavily from side to side to side to side.
Come. There are endless cold halls below Nakkiga. The Lightless Ones are singing, waiting to welcome you. Come to us!
Time seemed to fold in on itself. The world closed down into a tunnel of red light and white eyes. The throb of pain in his back seemed to grow as rhythmic as his heartbeat, and the aperture of his vision alternately spread and shut as he stumbled forward. A roar of voices as continuous as the sea washed over him, voices both within and without- He swung the sword, felt it bite, then shook it free and swung again. Things reached for him as he passed. Some caught and tore at his skin.
The tunnel narrowed to black for a while, then opened up for a few moments sometime later. Sludig, who was saying words too quiet for Simon to hear, was helping him up onto Homefinder’s back, pushing Thorn through the saddle-loops. They were surrounded by stone walls, but as Simon drove his heels into his horse’s ribs, the walls were suddenly gone and he was beneath the tree-slashed night sky, the stars glimmering overhead.
Now is the time, manchild. The door is opened by blood! Come, join us in our celebrations!
“No!” Simon heard his own voice shouting. “Leave me alone!”
He spurred ahead, leaping out into the forest. Binabik and Sludig, not yet mounted, shouted after him. but their words were lost in the din inside his head.
The door is open! Come to us!
The stars were speaking to him, telling him to sleep, that when he awoke he would be far away from…eyes in the fire…from…Skodi…from…clawing fingers…from…he would be far away from…
The door is open! Come to us!
He rode heedlessly through the snowy woods trying to outrun the terrible voice. Branches tore at his face. Stars peered coldly down through the trees. Time passed, perhaps hours, but still he rode wildly onward. Homefinder seemed to feel his frenzy. Her hooves flung clouds of snow as they pounded through the darkness. Simon was alone, his friends far behind, but still the fire-thing spoke gleefully inside his thoughts.
Come, manchild! Come, dragon-burned! It is a wild night! We await you beneath the ice-mountain…
The words in Simon’s head were a swarm of fiery bees. He writhed in the saddle, striking at himself, slapping at his ears and face as he tried to drive the voice away. Even as he flailed, something loomed abruptly before him—a patch of blackness deeper than the night. In a split instant he felt his heart falter, but it was only a tree. A tree!
His headlong flight was too madly swift to avoid the obstacle. He was struck as though by a giant hand and thrown from Homefinder’s saddle, tumbling through nothingness. He was falling. The stars were fading.
Black night came down and covered all.
17
A Wager of Little Value