From down the black emptiness of the burrowed tunnel came the rumble of the Maw Grint. The company crossed quickly through the rubble-strewn opening and continued on.
For two hours they wandered the sewers beneath the city, searching in vain for the lair of the Stone King. They twisted and wound about, and soon any sense of direction was irretrievably lost. There were fewer stairs leading up from this level, and many of them were nothing more than ladders hammered into the walls of drains. They came across the burrowings of the Maw Grint several times in the course of their hunt, the massive, jagged openings ripping upward through the earth and then disappearing down into it again, chasms of blackness large enough to swallow whole buildings. Morgan Leah stared into those chasms, realized they must honeycomb the peninsula rock, and wondered why the entire city didn't simply collapse into them.
Shortly after midday they stopped to rest and eat. They found a set of steps leading up to the first level and climbed to where an abandoned platform offered a set of battered stone benches. Seated there, Walker's odd torch planted in the rubble so that its light spilled over them like a halo, they stared wordlessly into the shadows.
Morgan finished before the others and moved over to where a thin shaft of daylight knifed down a stairwell leading to the streets of the city. He seated himself and stared upward, thinking of better times and places, wondering despondently if he would ever find them again.
Carisman came over to sit beside him. “It would be nice to see the sun again,” the tunesmith mused and smiled faintly as Morgan glanced over. “Even for just a moment.”
He sang:
“Darkness is for bats and cats and frightened little mice,
It's not for those of us who find the sunshine rather nice,
So stay away from Eldwist's murk and take this good advice,
Go someplace where your skin is warm instead of cold as ice.”
He grinned rather sadly. “Isn't that a terrible piece of doggerel? It must be the worst song I've ever composed.”
“Where did you come from, Carisman?” Morgan asked him. “I mean, before the Urdas and Rampling Steep. Where is your home?”
Carisman shook his head. “Anywhere. Everywhere. I call wherever I am my home, and I have been most places. I have been traveling since I was old enough to walk.”
“Do you have a family?”
“No. Not that I know about.” Carisman drew his knees up to his chest and hugged them. “If I am to die here, there is no one who will wonder what has become of me.”
Morgan snorted. “You're not going to die. None of us are. Not if we're careful.” The intensity of Carisman's gaze made him uncomfortable. “I have a family. A father and mother back in the Highlands. Two younger brothers as well. I haven't seen them now in weeks.”
Carisman's handsome face brightened. “I traveled the Highlands some years back. It was beautiful country, the hills all purple and silver in the early light, almost red when the sun set. It was quiet up there, so still you could hear the sound of the birds when they called out from far away.” He rocked slightly. “I could have been happy there if I had stayed.”
Morgan studied him a moment, watched him stare off into space, caught up in some inner vision. “I plan to go back when we're done with this business,” he said. “Why don't you come home with me?”
Carisman stared at him. “Would that be all right? I would like that.”
Morgan nodded. “Consider it done. But let's not have any more talk about dying.”
They were silent for a moment before Carisman said, “Do you know that the closest thing I ever had to a family was the Urdas? Despite the fact that they kept me prisoner, they took care of me. Cared about me, too. And I cared about them. Like a family. Strange.”
Morgan thought about his own family for a moment, his father and mother and brothers. He remembered their faces, the sound of their voices, the way they moved and acted. That led him to think of the Valemen, Par and Coll. Where were they? Then he thought of Steff, dead several weeks now, already becoming a memory, fading into the history of his past. He thought of the promise he had made to his friend—that if he found a magic that could aid the Dwarves in their struggle to be free again, he would use it—against the Federation—against the Shadowen. A rush of determination surged through him and dissipated again. Maybe the Black Elf-stone would prove to be the weapon he needed. If it could negate other magics, if it were indeed powerful enough to bring back disappeared Para-nor by counteracting the spell of magic that bound it …
“They liked the music, you know, but it was more than just that,” Carisman was saying. “I think they liked me as well. They were a lot like children in need of a father. They wanted to hear all about the world beyond their valley, about the Four Lands and the peoples that lived there. Most of them had never been anywhere beyond the Spikes. I had been everywhere.”
“Except here,” Morgan said with a smile.
But Carisman only looked away. “I wish I had never come here,” he said.
The company resumed its search of the sewers of Eldwist and continued to find them empty of life. They discovered nothing—not the smallest burrowing rodent, not a bat, not even the insects that normally thrived underground. There was no sign of Uhl Belk. There was only the stone that marked his passing. They wandered for several hours and then began to retrace their steps. Daylight would be gone shortly, and they had no intention of being caught outside when the Rake began its nocturnal scavenging.
“It may be, however, that it doesn't come down into the tunnels,” Walker Boh mused.
But no one wanted to find out, so they kept moving. They followed the twisting catacombs, recrossed the burrowings of the Maw Grint, and pushed steadily ahead through the darkness. Grunting and huffing were the only sounds to be heard. Tension lined their faces. Their eyes reflected their discouragement and discontent. No one spoke. What they were thinking needed no words.
Then Walker brought them to a sudden halt and pointed off into the gloom. There was an opening in the tunnel, one that they had somehow missed earlier, smaller than the sewers and virtually invisible in the dimness. Walker crouched down to peer inside, then disappeared into the dark.
A moment later he returned. “There is a cavern and a stairwell leading down,” he reported. “It appears there is yet another set of tunnels below.”
They followed him through the opening to the chamber beyond, a cave whose walls and floors were studded with jagged projections and rent with deep clefts. They found the stairwell and looked down into its gloom. It was impossible to see anything. They exchanged uneasy glances. Wordlessly, Walker moved to the head of the stairs. Holding the makeshift torch out in front of him, he started down. After a moment's hesitation, the others followed.
The stairs descended a long way, ragged and slick with moisture. The smell of the Tiderace was present here, and they could hear the trickle of seawater in the blackness. When they reached the end of the stairs, they found themselves standing in the middle of a broad, high tunnel in which the rock was crystallized and massive stone icicles hung from the ceiling in clusters, dripping water into black pools. Walker turned right, and the company moved ahead. The dampness chilled the air to ice, and the six pulled their cloaks tightly about them for warmth. Echoes of their footsteps reverberated through the stone corridor, chasing the silence.
Then suddenly there was something else, a sort of squealing that reminded Morgan Leah of a rusted iron lever being shifted after a long period of disuse. The members of the company stopped as one at its sound and stood in the faint silver glow of the torchlight, listening. The squealing continued; it was coming from somewhere behind them.
“Come,” Walker Boh said sharply and began hurrying ahead. The others hastened after, spurred on by the unexpected urgency in his voice. Walker had recognized something in the sound that they had not. Morgan glanced over his shoulder as he went. What was back there?
They crossed a shallow stream of water that t
umbled from a fissure in the rock wall, and Walker turned, motioning the rest of them past. The squealing sound was deafening now and coming closer. The Dark Uncle passed the torch to Morgan wordlessly, then lifted his arm and threw something into the black. A white fire flared to life, and the tunnel behind them was suddenly filled with light.
Morgan gasped. There were rats everywhere, a churning, scrambling mass of furred bodies. But these rats were giants, grown to three and four times their normal size, all claws and teeth. Their eyes were white and sightless, like everything else the company had encountered in Eldwist, and their bodies were sleek with the dampness of the sea. They looked ravenous. And maddened. They poured out of the rocks and came for the men and the girl.
“Run!” Walker cried, snatching the torch back from Morgan.
And run they did, charging frantically through the darkness with the sound of the squealing chasing after them in gathering waves, struggling to keep at the edges of the torchlight as they fought to escape the horror that pursued. The tunnel rose and fell in ragged slopes, and the rocks cut and scraped at them. They fell repeatedly, scrambled up again, and ran on.
A ladder! That was all that Morgan Leah could think. We've got to find a ladder!
But there was none. There were only the rock walls, the streams and pools of seawater, and the rats. And themselves, trapped.
Then from somewhere ahead came a new sound, the booming of waves against a shoreline, the pounding of the ocean against land.
They broke from the blackness of the tunnel into a faint, silvery brightness and staggered to a ragged halt. Before them a cliff dropped sharply into the Tiderace. The ocean churned and swirled below, crashing into the rocks, foaming white as it spilled over them. They were in an underground cavern so massive that its farthest reaches were lost in mist and shadow. Daylight spilled through clefts in the rock where the ocean had breached the wall. Other tunnels opened into the cavern as well, black holes far to the right and left. All were unreachable. The cliffs to either side were impassable. The drop below led to the rocks and the roiling sea. The only way left was back the way they had come.
Through the rats.
The rats were almost on top of the company now, their squeals rising up to overwhelm the thunder of the ocean's waters, their masses filling the lower half of the tunnel as they bit and clawed ahead. Morgan yanked out his broadsword, knowing even as he did so how futile the weapon would be. Pe Ell had moved to one side, clear of the others, and his strange silver knife was in his hand. Dees and Carisman were backed to the edge of the drop, crouched as if to jump.
Quickening stepped forward beside Morgan, her beautiful face strangely calm, her hands steady on his arm.
Then Walker Boh cast aside his torch and hurled a fistful of black powder into the horde of rats. Fire exploded everywhere, and the first rank was incinerated. But there were hundreds more behind that one, thousands of churning dark bodies. Claws scraped madly on the rocks, seeking to find a grip. Teeth and sightless eyes gleamed. The rats came on.
“Walker!” Morgan cried out desperately and shoved Quickening behind him.
But it wasn't the Dark Uncle who responded to Morgan's plea, or Pe Ell, or Horner Dees, or even Quickening. It was Carisman, the tunesmith.
He rushed forward, pushing past Morgan and Quickening, coming up beside Walker just as the rats burst through the tunnel opening onto the narrow ledge. Lifting his wondrous voice, he began to sing. It was a song that was different than any they had ever heard; it scraped like the rub of metal on stone, shrieked like the tearing of wood, and broke through the thunder of the ocean and the squeal of the rats to fill the cavern with its sound.
“Come to me!” Quickening cried out to the rest of them.
They bunched close at once, even Pe Ell, flattening themselves against one another as the tunesmith continued to sing. The rats poured out of the tunnel and swept toward them in a wave of struggling bodies. But then the wave split apart, flowing to either side of the tunesmith, passing by without touching any of them. Something in Carisman's song was turning them away. They twisted to either side, a churning mass. Onward they scrambled, heedless of everything, whether fleeing or being called it was impossible to tell, and tumbled into the sea.
Moments later, the last of them had been swallowed up or swept away. Carisman went still, then collapsed into Morgan's arms. The Highlander propped him up, and Quickening wiped cold seawater onto his face with the sleeve of her tunic. The others glanced about breathlessly, cautiously, scanning the dark tunnel opening, the empty rock, the waters of the sea.
“It worked,” Carisman whispered in surprise as his eyes fluttered open again. “Did you see? It worked!” He struggled up and seized Quickening jubilantly by the arms. “I'd read something about it once, or heard about it maybe, but I had never thought I would … I mean, I had never tried such a thing before! Never! It was a cat song, Lady! A cat song! I didn't know what else to do, so I made those horrid rodents think we were giant cats!”
Everyone stared in disbelief. Only then did Morgan Leah appreciate how truly miraculous their escape had been.
20
With the destruction of the rats, they were able to retrace their steps through the tunnel that had brought them to the underground cavern, climb back into the sewers of Eldwist, climb from there to the level of tunnels above, and finally reach the streets of the city. It was already growing dark, and they hurried quickly through the descending gloom to gain the safety of their nighttime refuge. They only just succeeded. The Rake appeared almost at once, an invisible presence beyond the walls of the building, its armored legs scraping across the stone below, searching for them still. They sat huddled silently in the dark listening to it hunt until it had gone. Walker said he thought the creature could track by smell, only the rain and the number of trails they had left was confusing it. Sooner or later it would figure out where they were hiding.
Exhausted and aching and shaken by what had befallen them, they ate their dinner in silence and went quickly off to sleep.
The next morning Pe Ell, who following their escape from the tunnels had descended into a mood so black that no one dared approach him, announced that he was going out on his own.
“There are too many of us stumbling about to ever find anything,” he declared, his voice calm and expressionless, his narrow face unreadable. He spoke to Quickening, as if only she mattered. “If there truly is a Stone King, he knows by now that we are here. This is his city; he can hide in it forever if he chooses. The only way to find him is to catch him off guard, sneak up on him, and surprise him. There will be none of that if we continue to hunt like a pack of dogs.”
Morgan started to intervene, but Walker's fingers closed about his arm like iron bands.
Pe Ell glanced around. “The rest of you can keep bumbling about as long as you wish. But you'll do it without me. I've spent enough time shepherding you around. I should have gone off on my own from the first. If I had, this business would be finished by now.” He turned back to Quickening. “When I have found Uhl Belk and the Black Elfstone, I will come back for you.” He paused, meeting her gaze squarely. “If you are still alive.”
He strode past them contemptuously and disappeared down the hall. His boots thudded softly on the stairs and faded into silence.
Horner Dees spit. “We're well rid of that one,” he muttered.
“He is correct, though,” Walker Boh said, and they all turned to look at him. “In one respect at least. We must divide ourselves up into groups if we are ever to complete this search. The city is too large, and we are too easy to avoid while we stay together.”
“Two groups then,” Dees agreed, nodding his shaggy head. “No one goes out alone.”
“Pe Ell doesn't seem worried about hunting alone,” Morgan noted.
“He's a predator, sure enough,” Dees replied. He looked at Quickening speculatively. “How about it, girl? Does he have any chance of finding Belk and the Elfstone on his own?”
> But Quickening only said, “He will return.”
They seated themselves to work out a strategy, a method by which the city could be searched from end to end. The buildings ran mostly north of where they were concealed, so it was decided to divide Eldwist in two with one group taking the east half and the other the west. The search would concentrate on the buildings and streets, not the tunnels. If nothing were found aboveground, they would change their approach.
“Pe Ell may be wrong when he says that the Stone King must know we are here,” Quickening said in closing. She brought her slender fingers up in a quick, birdlike movement. “We are insignificant in his eyes, and he may not yet have even noticed us. We are the reason he keeps the Rake in service. Besides, the Maw Grint occupies his time.”
“How do we divide ourselves up?” Carisman asked.
“You will go with me,” Quickening answered at once. “And Walker Boh.”
Morgan was surprised. He had expected her to choose him. The disappointment he felt cut deeply. He started to dispute her choice, but her black eyes fixed him with such intensity that he went instantly still. Whatever her reasons for making this decision, she did not want it questioned.
“That leaves you and me, Highlander,” Horner Dees grunted and clapped one heavy hand on Morgan's shoulder. “Think we can manage to disappoint Pe Ell and keep our skins whole?”
His sudden laugh was so infectious that Morgan found himself smiling in response. “I'd bet on it,” he replied.
They gathered up their gear and went down into the street. Sheets of gloom draped the buildings, hung from skies thick with clouds and mist. The air was damp and chill, and their breath exhaled in a haze of white. They wished each other well and began moving off in separate directions, Morgan and Horner Dees going west, Quickening, Walker, and Carisman east.
“Take care of yourself, Morgan,” Quickening whispered, her exquisite face a mix of shadow and light beneath the sweep of her silver hair. She touched him softly on the shoulder and hurried after Walker Boh.