“He say or do something?”
“No. It was his expression. And that was probably because we dropped him on his nose once. In think I’d have trouble being grateful for a pop in the snoot myself.”
Santaraksita was puffing when he joined us. He was excited. “We’re walking the actual roads of myth, Dorabee! I have begun begging the Lords of Light to let me live long enough to report my adventures to the bhadrhalok!”
“Who will call you a liar over and over again. Sri, you know the Right People don’t become involved in actual adventures. All of you, follow me now. We’re going to have another actual adventure traveling into mythology.” I headed on up the steepening slope.
I soon discovered that someone had gone this way before me. At first I suspected Tobo had gotten farther than I had thought. Then I decided that the disturbances in the frost were too old for that, so concluded that Soulcatcher must have gone back this way, just to see what she could see.
Back there, small side caves entered the main cavern, few of them large enough to permit passage of an adult body. The main cave dwindled in diameter. We had to hunch down, then we had to crawl. Whoever had gone before us had done the same.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Swan asked. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Of course I do.” Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out.
I had been through here in my dreams. But only sort of, evidently, because every few feet I ran into some detail I did not recall from those nightmares. And then we stumbled onto something that was far more than a mere detail.
The sole of a boot nearly smacked me in the face because I was concentrating on trying to decipher the story encrypted in the frost on the cave floor. That was the story of someone who had been moving wildly, maybe in a panic. Not only had the frost been rubbed away, in places the stone itself was bruised or chipped.
“I think I’ve found Mather, Willow.” It was one of those odd moments when you discover the trivial. I noticed that Cordy Mather really needed to have his boots resoled. I did not immediately wonder how a man’s leg could stick out like that, with the toe pointing halfway upward above horizontal while the man himself was lying on his stomach. “We’d better stop right here and take a good look. I don’t see the man doing this to himself.”
Swan said, “I’ll get Goblin. Don’t do anything till he gets here.”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m fond of my hide. If I lose it, I’ll miss out on our honeymoon.” I drew my sword, for what good that might do, then raised up slowly till the top of my head bumped the cavern roof.
Cordy Mather had crawled over a hump in the floor. And something fatal had happened to him before he could get all of himself onto the downward side.
Suvrin eased up beside me. Inexplicably, I found myself painfully aware of him as a masculine presence. Luckily, he was even less interpersonally adept than I was. He failed to notice my flustered and uncomfortable reaction.
Odd. The urge was not something I would pursue, certainly. I just wondered why I sometimes suffered these sudden, random impulses, some of which were extremely difficult to resist. Ninety-nine percent of the time I did not so much as think about the possibility of combining myself, a man and a bed in a search for adventure.
Maybe I should not have been teasing Swan.
Suvrin said, “That sure doesn’t look very appetizing. What do you think happened?”
“I’m not even going to guess. I’m just going to sit here and wait for the expert to show up.”
“May I look?” Santaraksita asked.
Suvrin scooted back. He discovered that the older man was too broad to pass by him there. So we all had to retreat twenty yards so Santaraksita could get past us in turn. I admonished him repeatedly not to go farther forward than I had. “I definitely don’t want to have to drag you out of here.” Though I will grant that the man was a great deal leaner now than when I had worked for him. “And because you want to get home to tell the bhadrhalok all about this.”
“You were right about them, Dorabee. They won’t believe a word I say. And not only because they’re the Right People but because Surendranath Santaraksita never had an adventure in his life. He never had the urge until this adventure had him.”
“Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true.”
“You persist in amazing me, Dorabee. Who are you quoting?”
“V.T.C. Ghosh. He was an acolyte of B.B. Mukerjee, one of the six Bhomparan disciples of Sondhel Ghose the Janaka.”
Santaraksita’s face lit right up. “Dorabee! You are a marvel indeed. A wonder of wonders. The pupil begins to exceed the master. What was your source? I don’t recall ever having read of a Ghosh or a Mukerjee featured in the Janaka school.”
I snickered like a prankster kid. “That’s because I was pulling your leg. I made it up, Sri.” And that seemed to leave him even more amazed.
Goblin broke it up. “Swan says you found a dead man.”
“Yes. It looks like Cordy Mather from this end. I didn’t see his face, though. I wasn’t going to move anything anywhere until we had a good idea what happened to him. I’d rather it didn’t happen to me.”
Goblin grunted. “Pudgeman, you want to back down here so I can get past you? This tunnel gets pretty tight, don’t it? Watch out you don’t let your chubby butt plug it up. For how come do you want to go slithering around back here, anyway, Sleepy?”
“Because if I keep going this way far enough I’ll get to the place where the Deceivers concealed the original Books of the Dead.”
Goblin gave me a funny look but took my word for it. I talked to ghosts in mist machines. Birds talked to me. A talking bird was following me right now, at a distance. At the moment it did not have much to say because its throat was sore but it did manage to rip out a curse or two whenever it had to dodge somebody’s flailing feet. “That’s interesting.”
“I thought so.”
“Ah. Yeah. It’s not sorcery, though. It’s your basic mechanical booby trap. Spring-loaded. Stabs you with a poisoned pin. There’re probably twenty more between here and where you want to go. What do you think Mather was trying to do?”
“If he woke up and found himself down here and didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, he might have panicked and taken off and just went in the wrong direction. I bet it’s his fault all those guys back there are dead. He probably tried to wake them up.”
Goblin grunted again. “There. That’s disarmed. I’d better go ahead and see what else is waiting. But first we need to get Mather pulled back so you all can get past him.”
“If you can weasel past him so can I.”
“Yeah, you can. But what about your boyfriend and your sugar daddy? They’ve got a little more pork on them.” He grunted and cursed softly as he fought Mather’s remains back over the hump in the floor. I noticed, for the first time, that the echoes were different in this more confined space, jammed with bodies. They were almost nonexistent.
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I do not believe it was miles to where the Deceivers of antiquity concealed their treasures and relics but my body believed that before we got there. Goblin disarmed another dozen traps and found several more that had fallen victim to time. The underground wind whimpered and whined as it rushed past us in the tight places. It sucked the warmth right out of me. But it did not dissuade me. I went where I wanted to go. And was hungry enough to eat a camel when I got there.
It had been a long, long time since breakfast. I had a dread feeling it could be longer still before supper.
“It feels like a temple, doesn’t it?” Suvrin asked. He was less troubled than the rest of us. Though raised nearer this place than anyone else, he was less intimate with the legends of the Dark Mother. He stopped staring at the three lecterns and the huge books they bore long enough to turn to me and whisper, “Here.” He offered me a bit of crumbling flax cake from the pouch he wor
e at the small of his back.
“You must have read my mind.”
“You talk to yourself a lot. I don’t think you realize you’re doing it.” I did not. It was a bad habit that needed breaking right now. “I heard you when we were crawling through the tunnel.”
That had been a private discourse with my God. An internal dialog, I had thought. The subject of food had come up. And here was food. So maybe the All-Merciful was on the job after all.
“Thanks. Goblin. You feel any tricks or traps in here?” There were echoes again, though with a different timbre. We were inside a large chamber. The floor and walls were all ice that had been cut and polished by the flow of frigid water. I presumed the invisible ceiling was the same. The place did have a feel of the holy to it—even though that was the holiness of darkness.
“No traps that I can sense. I’d think they’d leave that sort of stuff outside, don’t you?” He sounded like he wanted to convince himself.
“You’re asking me to define the psychology of those who worship devils and rakshasas? Vehdna priests would guarantee you that there’s nothing so foul or evil as to be beyond the capacity of those most accursed of unbelievers.” I thought they would guarantee it. If they had heard of the Stranglers. I had not heard of them before I became attached to the Company.
Suvrin said, “Sri, I don’t think you should—”
Master Santaraksita had recognized the ancient books as something remarkable and just could not resist going up for an up-close look. I agreed with Suvrin. “Master! Don’t go charging—”
The noise sounded something like someone ripping tent canvas for half a second, then popped like the crack of a whip. Master Santaraksita left the floor of the unholy chapel, folded around his middle, and flew at the rest of us in an arc that admitted only slight acquaintance with gravity. Suvrin tried to catch him. Goblin tried to duck. Santaraksita bounced Suvrin sideways and ricocheted into me. The lot of us ended up in a breathless tangle of arms and legs.
The white crow had something uncomplimentary to say about that.
“You and me and a stew pot, critter,” I gasped when I got my breath back. I snagged Goblin’s leg. “No more traps, eh? They’d leave that sort of thing out in the caverns, eh? What the devil was that, then?”
“That was a magical booby trap, woman. And a damned fine example of its kind, too. It remained undetectable until Santaraksita tripped it.”
“Sri? Are you injured?” I asked.
“Only my pride, Dorabee,” he puffed. “Only my pride. It’ll take me a week to get my wind back, though.” He rolled off Suvrin, got onto his hands and knees. He had a definite green look to him.
“You’ve enjoyed a cheap lesson, then,” I told him. “Don’t rush into something when you don’t know what you’re rushing into.”
“You’d think I’d know that after this last year, wouldn’t you?”
“You might think, yes.”
“Don’t anybody ask how Junior is doing,” Suvrin grumbled. “He couldn’t possibly get hurt.”
“We knew you’d be fine,” Goblin told him. “As long as he landed on your head.” The little wizard limped forward. As he neared the point where Santaraksita had gone airborne, he became very cautious. He extended a single finger forward one slow inch at a time.
A smaller piece of cloth ripped. Goblin spun around, his arm flung backward. He staggered a couple of steps before he fell to his knees not far from me.
“After all this time he finally recognizes the natural order of things.”
Goblin shook his hand the way you do when you burn your fingers. “Damn, that smarts. That’s a good spell. It’s got real pop. Don’t do that!”
Suvrin had decided to throw a chunk of ice.
On its way back, the missile parted Suvrin’s hair. It then hit the cavern wall and showered the white crow with fragments of ice. The bird had a word to say about that. It followed up with a few more. I began to wonder if Lady had lost track of the fact that she was not, herself, the white crow, and in fact, was just a passenger making use of the albino’s eyes.
Goblin stuck his injured finger in his mouth, squatted down and considered the chamber for a while. I squatted, too, after taking time out to keep Suvrin and Master Santaraksita from making even greater nuisances of themselves.
Swan slithered into the chamber, disturbing the crow. The bird said nothing, though. It just sidled away and looked put out about all existence. Swan settled beside me. “Wow. Kind of impressive even though it’s simple.”
“Those are the original Books of the Dead. Supposedly almost as old as Kina herself.”
“So why is everybody just sitting here?”
“Goblin’s trying to figure how to get to them.” I told him what had happened.
“Damn. I always miss the best stuff. Hey, Junior! Run up there and show us your flying trick again.”
“Master Santaraksita did the flying, Mr. Swan.” Suvrin needed to work on his sense of humor. He did not own a proper Black Company attitude.
I asked, “Why not try it yourself, Willow? Take a run at the books.”
“You promise to let me land on you?”
“No. But I’ll blow you a kiss as you fly by.”
“It’d probably help if you people would shut up,” Goblin said. He rose. “But by being blindingly, blisteringly brilliant I’ve worked it out anyway, already, in spite of you all. We get to the lecterns by using the golden pickax as a passkey. That was why Narayan Singh was so upset when he saw what we had.”
“Tobo still has the pick,” I said. A minute later I said, “Don’t everybody stumble all over each other offering to go get him.”
“Let’s just go together and all be equally miserable,” Goblin suggested. “That’s what the Black Company is all about. Sharing the good times along with the bad.”
“You trying to con me into thinking that this is one of the good times?” I asked, crawling into the cave right behind him.
“Nobody wants to kill us today. Nobody’s trying. That sounds like a good time to me.”
He had a point. A definite point.
Maybe my Company attitude needed attention, too.
Behind me, Suvrin grumbled about starting to feel like a gopher. I glanced back. Swan had had an attack of good sense and decided to bring up the rear, thereby making sure that Master Santaraksita did not stay behind and tinker with things that might cause a change in Goblin’s opinion about this being one of the good times.
* * *
“Where did he go?” I mused aloud. People were still working in the cave of the ancients, getting Lady and the Prahbrindrah Drah ready to go upstairs. But Tobo was not among them. “He wouldn’t just run upstairs, would he?” He had the energy of youth but nobody was so energetic they would just charge into that climb on impulse.
While I tromped around muttering and looking for the kid, Goblin did the obvious and questioned witnesses. He got an answer before I finished building up a good mad. “Sleepy. He left.”
“Surprise, surprise … what?” That was not all of it. The little wizard was upset.
“He turned right when he left, Sleepy.”
“He … oh.” Now I did have a good mad worked up. A booming, head-throbbing, want-to-make-somebody-pay, real bad mad. “That idiot! That moron! That darned fool! I’ll cut his legs off! Let’s see if we can catch him.”
Right was downward. Right was deeper into the earth and time, deeper into despair and darkness. Right could only be the road to the resting place of the Mother of Night.
As I started out, with intent to turn right, I collected the standard. The white crow shrieked approval. Goblin sneered, “You’re going to be sorry before you go down a hundred steps, Sleepy.”
I was tempted to abandon the darned thing before we had gone that far. It was too long to be dragging around in a stairwell.
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“This stair has no bottom,” I told Goblin. We were puffing badly despite the direction we were headed. We had
passed openings into other caves the stairwell had pierced. Each appeared to have been visited by human beings sometime in the past. We discovered both treasures and boneyards. I suspected Sri Santaraksita, Baladitya and I could not live long enough just to catalog all the mysteries buried beneath the plain. And every darned unknown ancient thing I glimpsed in passing called to me like the sirens of legend.
But Tobo was still ahead of us and seemed deaf to our calling. Perhaps just as we did not waste time and breath responding to Suvrin and Santaraksita, who kept calling down to us from ever farther behind. It was my devout hope they would be smitten by good sense and abandon the pursuit.
Goblin did not respond to my remarks. He had no breath left over.
I asked, “Can’t you use some kind of spell to slow him down or knock him out? I’m worried. He really can’t be so far ahead that he can’t hear us. Darn!” I had gotten tangled with the standard. Again.
Goblin just shook his head and kept moving. “He can’t hear.” Puff-puff. “But he don’t know that he can’t hear.”
Enough said. There was a bottom to the stair. And the Queen of Deceit was napping down there, with just a whisper of awareness left for manipulating a cocky, know-it-all boy who had a touch of talent and had taken possession of an instrument that could become a nasty weapon in the hands of those who would disarm her and have her slumber continue never-ending.
After a while we had to slow down. The unnatural light faded until it became too weak to provide a reliable forecast of our footing. The occasional breezes rising past us were no longer cold. And they had begun to bear traces of a familiar, repugnant odor.
When Goblin caught that smell he slowed way down, worked hard on regaining his breath before he had to suck that stench down in its full potency. “Been a while since I’ve come face-to-face with a god,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to wrangle one anymore.”
“And what would that be? I never realized that I was in the company of an experienced god-wrangler.”