The stench of old death became powerful.
I stared at the body, now lying upon the icy floor. It was the dark purple-black of the death-dancer of my dreams but it dwarfed Shivetya. It was naked. Its perfect female proportions distracted from the ten thousand scars that marred its skin. It did not move, not even to breathe.
Another feather of vapor rose from one huge nostril.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Goblin shrieked. He jerked to the right suddenly, the Lance of Passion darting toward some target I could not see. The Lance’s head burned like it was covered by flickering alcohol flames.
A huge, unheard scream tore at my mind. Suvrin and Master Santaraksita moaned. Tobo squealed. The white crow unleashed a random stream of obscenities. I am sure I contributed to the chorus. As I kicked and punched the others to get them going, I realized that my throat was raw.
Goblin whirled back to his left, thrusting at the wisp of mist that had left Kina’s nostril a moment before.
Once again pale blue fire surrounded the head of the Lance. This time it ran a foot up the shaft before it faded. This time the Lance’s head betrayed penstrokes of dark ruby glow along its edges.
Another wisp of the essence of Kina rose from her nose.
There was no darkness or mist hiding the entrance now. Kina’s focus was elsewhere. Suvrin and Santaraksita were on the stair already, wasting breath babbling about what they had seen. I slugged Tobo up side the head with all the force I could muster. “Get out of here!”
When he opened his mouth to argue, I popped him again. I did not want to hear it. I did not want to hear anything. Not even a divine revelation. It could wait. “Goblin! Get your sorry butt in motion. We’re out of the way.”
The third wisp impaled itself upon the Lance’s head. This time the fire crept two yards up the shaft, though it did not seem to affect the wood directly. However, this time the Lance’s head became so hot that shaft wood in contact with it began to smolder.
Goblin started to back down but another wisp rose and drifted faster than he moved, getting between him and the stair. He thrust at it a few times but each time he did, it drifted out of reach. It continued to control his path of retreat.
I am no sorceress. Despite a life spent in the proximity of wizards and witch women and whatnot, I have no idea how their minds work when they are involved with their craft. So I will never be clear on what thought process led Goblin to make his decision. But from having known the man most of my life, I have to conclude that he did what he did because he believed it was the most effective thing that he could do.
Having failed to skewer the wisp, having noted that a second had appeared and had begun to circle him from the opposite direction, the frog-faced little man just whirled, lowered the head of the Lance and charged Kina. He let out a great mad bellow and drove the weapon through the flesh of an arm and into her ribs below her right breast. And just before the weapon struck home, one wisp flung itself in front, trying to block the thrust. The Lance’s head was ablaze when it pierced demonic flesh.
The second wisp set Goblin aflame.
Even screaming, telling me to get out, Goblin continued to heave against the Lance, driving it deeper into Kina, possibly in some mad, wild hope of penetrating her black heart.
The blue flame feasted on Goblin’s flesh. He let go of the Lance, threw himself to the icy floor, rolled around violently, slapping at himself. Nothing helped. He began to melt like an overheated candle.
He screamed and screamed.
On that psychic level where I had sensed her moments earlier, Kina also screamed and screamed and screamed. Suvrin and Santaraksita screamed. Tobo screamed. I screamed and staggered into the stairwell, retreating despite the urging of that mad part of me that wanted to go back and help Goblin. And there could have been no greater madness than that. The Destroyer ruled the cavern of her imprisonment.
Goblin had struck a fierce blow but in truth, its impact was no greater than the nip of a wolf cub at the ear of a dozing tiger. I knew that. And I knew that the cub, caught, was trying to buy time for the rest of its pack.
I gasped, “Tobo, go ahead as fast as you can. Tell the others.” He was younger, he was faster, he could get there long before I could.
He was the future.
I would try to keep anything from coming up the stair behind him.
The screaming continued down below, from both sources. Goblin was being more stubborn than ever he had been with One-Eye.
We climbed as fast as Master Santaraksita could manage. I stayed behind the other two, already ready to turn and put the unholy pickax between us and any pursuit. I was convinced that the power of that talisman would shield us.
Darkness no longer inhabited the stair. Visibility was much better than it had been when we came down. So good, in fact, that had there been no landings to break up the line of sight, we would have been able to look up the stairs for a mile.
I was gasping for breath and fighting leg cramps before the screaming stopped. Suvrin had collapsed once already, losing what little his stomach contained. Master Santaraksita seemed the hardiest of us now, without a complaint to his name, though he was so pale I feared his heart would betray him before long.
As we fought for breath I stared downward, listening to the ominous silence. “God is Great.” Gasp. “There is no God but God.” Gasp. “In Mercy He is Like the Earth.” Gasp. “He Walks with Us in All Our Hours.” Gasp. “O Lord of Creation, I Acknowledge that I am Your Child.”
Master Santaraksita had enough spare breath to chide, “He’s going to get bored and find something else to do if you don’t get to the point, Dorabee.”
“How’s this?” Gasp. “Help!”
“Better. Much better. Suvrin! Get up.”
The white crow arrowed up the stairwell, nearly bowled me over landing on my shoulder. I did make the process more difficult by trying to duck the arriving bird. It lashed my face with flapping wings. “Climb,” it said. “Slowly, without panic. Steadily. I will watch behind you.”
We climbed for five or ten days. Hunger nagged me. Terror and lack of sleep made me see things that were not there. I did not look back for fear of seeing something terrible closing in. We moved slower and slower as the effort devoured our energies and will, and our capacity for recovery. It became a major trek and an act of ultimate will to climb from one landing to the next. Then we began resting between landings, though neither Suvrin nor Santaraksita ever suggested it.
The crow told me, “Stop and sleep.”
No one argued. There are limits to how far and hard terror can drive anyone. We found ours. I collapsed so fast I later claimed I heard my first snore before I hit the stone of the landing. I was only vaguely aware of the crow launching itself into the darkness, headed downward again.
91
Sleepy?”
My soul wanted to leap up and flail around in terror. My flesh was incapable and quite possibly indifferent. I was so stiff and I hurt so much that I just could not move.
My mind still worked fine. It ran as sparkling swift as a mountain stream. “Huh?” I continued trying to get the muscles unlocked.
“Easy. It’s Willow. Just open your eyes. You’re safe.”
“What’re you doing way down here?”
“Way down where?”
“Uh —”
“You’re one landing downstairs from the cave of the ancients.”
I kept trying to get up. Muscle by muscle my body gradually yielded to my will. I looked around, vision foggy. Suvrin and Master Santaraksita were still asleep.
Swan said, “They were tired, guaranteed. I heard you snoring all the way up in the cave.”
Twinge of fear. “Where’s Tobo?”
“He went on up top. Everyone went. I made them go. I stayed in case... The crow told me not to come down. But what’s one landing? You think you can get moving again? I can’t carry anybody. I can barely keep going myself.”
“I can manage one flight. Up t
o the cave. That’s far enough for now.”
“The cave?”
“I still have something to do there.”
“Are you sure you want to go out of your way?”
“I’m sure, Willow.” I could tell him it was a matter of life or death. For a whole world. Or maybe for multiple worlds. But why be melodramatic? “Can you get these two moving again? And headed toward the top?” I did not think Master Santaraksita could bear seeing what I intended to do next.
“I’ll get them moving. But I’m sticking with you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes, it will. You can hardly stand up.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“You go right ahead and talk. It’ll get the kinks out of your jaw. But I’m staying.”
I stared at him hard for some time. He did not back down. Neither did he betray any motive but concern for a brother he suspected of failing to be in her right mind. I closed my eyes for half a minute, then opened them to peer down the stairs. “God was listening.”
Swan was working on Suvrin. The Shadowlander officer had his eyes open but seemed unable to move. He murmured, “I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much.” Panic flooded his eyes. “Did we get away?”
I said, “We’re getting away. We’ve still got a long way to climb.”
“Goblin’s dead,” Swan said. “The crow told me when it came up to get something to eat.”
“Where is that thing?”
“Down there. Watching.”
I felt a chill. Paranoia touched me. There had been a connection between Lady and Kina ever since Narayan Singh and Kina had used Lady as a vessel to produce the Daughter of Night. That had created a connection, a connection Lady had hammered into place cleverly, unbreakably, so that she could steal power from the goddess indefinitely. “Forgive me, O Lord. Drive these infidel thoughts from my heart.”
Swan said, “Huh?”
“Nothing, part of the ongoing dialog between me and my God. Suvrin! Sweety. You ready to do some jumping jacks?”
Suvrin offered me an old-fashioned, storm-cloud glower. “Smack her, Swan. At a time like this, cheerful ought to be against the laws of heaven and earth.”
“You’ll be cheerful in a minute, too. As soon as you figure out that you’re still alive.”
“Humph!” He began to help Swan waken Master Santaraksita.
Upright now, I did a few small exercises to loosen up even more.
“Ah, Dorabee,” Santaraksita said softly. “I have survived another adventure with you.”
“I’ve got God on my side.”
“Excellent. Do keep him there. I don’t think I can survive another of your adventures without divine assistance.”
“You’ll outlive me, Sri.”
“Perhaps. Probably, if I do get out of this and I don’t tempt fate ever again. You, you’ll probably graduate to snake-dancing with cobras.”
“Sri?”
“I’ve decided. I don’t want to be an adventurer anymore, Dorabee. I’m too old for it. It’s time to wrap myself up in a cozy library again. This just hurts too much. Ow! Young man...”
Swan grinned. He was not that much younger than the librarian. “Let’s get going, old-timer. You keep lying around here and whatever adventure you found down there is going to catch up and have you all over again.”
A possibility that posed a fine motivation for us all.
When we finally got moving again, I brought up the rear. Swan wrangled my companions. I gripped the golden pickax so tightly my knuckles ached.
Goblin was dead.
That did not seem possible.
Goblin was a fixture. A permanent fixture. A cornerstone. Without its Goblin, there could be no Black Company... You are mad, Sleepy. The family will not cease to exist simply because one member, unexpectedly, has been plucked out by evil fortune. Life would not end because of Goblin’s absence. It would just get a lot harder. I seemed to hear Goblin whisper, “He is the future.”
“Sleepy. Snap out of it.”
“Huh?”
Swan said, “We’re at the cave. You two. Keep climbing. We’ll catch up with you.”
Suvrin started to ask. I shook my head, pointed upward. “Go. Now. And don’t look back.” I waited until I saw Suvrin actually guide Master Santaraksita over the tumbled stones and onto the stairs. “We’ll catch up.”
“What’s that?” Swan asked. He cupped an ear.
“I don’t hear anything.”
He shrugged. “It’s gone now. Something from upstairs.”
We entered the cavern of the ancients. The wonder had been polished off it by the trampling about of a horde of Company people. I was amazed that they had managed without damaging any more of the sleepers. As it was, almost all the wondrous ice webbing and cocooning had broken up and collapsed. A few stalactites had fallen from the ceiling. “How did that happen?”
Swan frowned. “During the earthquake.”
“Earthquake? What earthquake?”
“You didn’t... there was one hell of a shake. I can’t say exactly how long ago. Probably when you were all the way down. It’s hard to tell time in here.”
“No lie. Oh, yuck.” I had discovered why the white crow had all that energy. It had been dining on one of my dead brothers.
Some evil part of me tossed up the thought that I could follow the bird’s example. Another part wondered what would happen if Croaker found out. That man was obsessed with the holy state of Company brotherhood.
“You never know what you’ll do until you’re in the ring with the bull, do you?”
“What?”’
“A proverb from back home. Means that actually facing the reality is never quite like preparing to face the reality. You never really know what you’ll do until you get there.”
I passed the rest of the Captured, not meeting any open eyes. I wondered if they could hear. I offered up some reassurances that sounded feeble even to me. The cavern shrank. When it came time to get down and crawl, I crawled. I told Swan, “Maybe it’s good, you being here after all. I’m starting to have little dizzy spells.”
“You hear anything?”
I listened. This time I did hear something. “Sounds like somebody singing. A marching song? Something full of ‘yo-ho-ho’s.’” What the devil?
“Down here? We have dwarfs, too?”
“Dwarfs?”
“Mythical creatures. Like short people with big beards and permanent bad tempers. They lived underground, like nagas, only supposedly big on mining and metalworking. If they ever did exist, they died out a long time ago.”
The singing was getting louder. “Let’s get this handled before somebody interrupts.”
92
The pessimist in me was sure I would not be able to pull it off. If nothing else, the earthquake Swan mentioned would in some way have sealed the chamber of unholy books off from the rest of the world. If the chamber was not sealed off, then I would trip the only booby trap that Goblin had overlooked. If Goblin had not overlooked any booby traps, then the pickax would not be a protective key, it would be a trigger igniting the thousand secret sorceries protecting the books.
“Sleepy, do you know you talk to yourself when you’re worried about stuff?”
“What?”
“You’re crawling along there muttering about all the bad things that’re going to happen. You keep on and you’re going to convince me.”
That was twice. I had to get that under control. I did not use to do that.
The place where the Books of the Dead were hidden had not changed visibly. The pessimist in me worked hard to find a dangerous difference, though.
Swan finally asked, “Are you going to study on it till we pass out from hunger? Or are you going to go ahead and do something?”
“I always was a better planner than a doer, Willow.” I sucked in a peck of frigid air, took the pickax out of my waistband, intoned, “O Lord of Heaven and Earth, let there be no password
that has to go with this.”
“Right behind you, boss,” Swan said, making a joke as he nudged me forward. “Don’t be shy now.”
Of course not. That would belittle Goblin’s sacrifice and memory.
I realized that my breathing had turned to rapid, shallow panting as I reached the point where Master Santaraksita had achieved flight. I held the pick in front of me with both hands, muscles protesting its weight, squeezing it so tight I feared I would leave my fingerprints etched upon it permanently.
A tingling began in my hands. It crept up my arms as I eased forward. My skin crawled and I developed severe goose bumps. I said, “You’d better hold onto me, Willow.” In case I needed yanking back. “In case you need the connection to the pick.” The shield was not rejecting me. Not yet.
Swan rested his hands on my shoulders an instant before the tingling reached my body. I began to shiver. Suddenly I had the chills and shakes of an autumn sickness.
“Woo!” Swan said. “This feels weird.”
“It gets weirder,” I promised. “I’ve got one of those agues where the chill goes all the way to the marrow.”
“Uh... yeah. I’m getting there, too. Toss in some joint aches, too. Come on. Let’s get that fire started and warm ourselves.”
Would fire be enough?
Once we moved forward another ten feet, the miseries stopped getting worse. The tingling on the outside faded. I told Swan, “I think it’s safe to let go now.”
“You should have seen your hair. It started dancing around when we were halfway through. It lasted only a couple of steps but it was a sight.”
“I’ll bet.” My hair was a sight anyway, usually. I did not offer it nearly enough attention and I had not had it trimmed in months. “Got anything to start a fire with?”
“You don’t? You didn’t prepare for this? You knew it had to be done and you didn’t bring —”
“All right, we’ll use mine. I just don’t have much tinder left. Didn’t want to use mine up when I could use yours.”
“Thanks a lot. You’re getting as bad as those two nasty old men.” Chagrined, he recalled that one of the nasty old men he meant had just completed his tenure with the Company.