The Search for Magic Part 4

Plainly disbelieving, Jai said he doubted Gilthas would look up from his poetry long enough to make such a plan.

"Really? Well, likely you know him better than I do."

Jai, who knew the king not at all, said no more.

"This place is a work-tunnel. We stashed gear and tools here when we were digging out this part of the main tunnel. The work began at Thorbardin, and once the job is done, there'll be a dark-road that starts about five miles from Qualinost and ends right at Thorbardin's cellar door. Till then there are ways into the finished part. Magic's one of them, and hunting you lostlings who fall out of the spell the G.o.ds know where gives me a way to pa.s.s my days. But the easier way is through one of the secret entrances." Stanach looked up, no sign of humor in his blue-flecked dark eyes. "Why did the lady warrior not lead your party to the Mianost entrance?"

Bitterly, Jai told him what had happened, and how it ruined his plans.

"Your plans? Promising as you say you are, there's got to be more scribes than you in Qualinost. I suppose they can find someone else to patch up the parchments now that you're gone."

"It's not about patching, it's about keeping." Jai put his palms flat to the stony floor and pushed himself up to sit. "I have to get back to Qualinost."

Stanach's left hand dropped to the haft of his axe. He looked right into Jai's eyes. "No. You're here now-"

"You don't have to take me. You don't have to do anything but point me in the right direction. I'll get there myself."

"No, you won't. Even if you could manage it, I can't let you. No one roams the tunnels alone. You're coming with me, and you're going to Thorbardin."

The hair p.r.i.c.kled on the back of Jai's neck. A cold bleakness lay behind the dwarfs eyes, like the far stretch of a winter plain.

"And besides, what's to keep, back there in your Qualinost? A few books and papers, some old songs . . . ? For how long? Might be your homeland is still in one piece tonight. Maybe it will be tomorrow, but the end is coming, and no one's thinking it'll be a long time happening."

In his low deep voice, Stanach Hammerfell said much the same thing Annalisse had. The echo chilled Jai to the heart. Was there nothing, then, but ending? Was there nothing but the road away from the golden kingdom and all the long years of elven glory?

There had to be more!

A sound, like far-off thunder, rumbled in the stone beneath him, vibrating through his spine and painfully in his knee. Jai looked around, seeing the strange pulsing lantern-light s.h.i.+ning on a high ceiling of stone, roughly hewn, and piles of rocks shoved up against the glistening walls.

"What's that noise?"

"Worms." Stanach said.

"Worms? How could worms-?"

Stanach waved the question away. "Better showing than telling." He peered closely at Jai, then stood and offered his hand. "You reckon you can get up and walk?"

Jai grasped Stanach's hand. The dwarf had a surprising strength. He stepped back and pulled Jai right up to his feet. He bore Jai's weight while he found his balance and didn't seem to feel it at all. When Jai was steady again, Stanach handed him the lantern. Jai almost dropped it. The light moved like it was alive-and then he saw something living did reside in the little lantern cage.

"Grubs," Stanach said. "Well, larvae. Hold steady. You drop it, you'll likely kill it."

Jai held the lantern at arm's length, watching the fat, eyeless larva pulse, its glowing body casting as much light as an oil lamp would.

Stanach picked up his axe and slid the haft into his belt. He settled the broad belt round his waist, checking to see that all was there: knife, fat leather water-bottle, and a coil of rope. When he took the lantern back, Jai had a good look at him. He was a dwarf in his middle age, not more than two hundred years, likely a decade or so less. He stood as high as Jai's chest. His beard was black, his hair silvering at the temples and long enough to fall over the collar of his s.h.i.+rt. Thick in the neck, thick in the shoulders, he looked like one who knew his way around a hammer and anvil.

"You're a forgeman," Jai said.

"Used to be."

Even as he said so, Jai realized that Stanach had done everything with his left hand, holding the axe, lifting the lantern, hauling Jai himself to his feet. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers twisted and withered. The dwarf stood braced, as though waiting for the inevitable, for Jai to mumble an apology for noticing. When Jai said nothing, he relaxed.

"All right, elf," he said, "we have some traveling to do, and it's going to be a hard old walk. You up to it?"

"Walking to where?"

"We'll catch up with the work detail. That's a good two miles out. They can send a runner back along the tunnel to Thorbardin and let your mam-" He c.o.c.ked his head, and offered a lean smile-"your mother and father, know all's well with you."

"Thorbardin. How far are we from there?"

"Farther than I like to be. We're standing about halfway between there and Qualinost. There's a crossway up ahead. Once we get there it's north to Qualinost, or as near to Qualinost as we get till we hit stone. From there, it's clear south to Thorbardin. You came in-or tried to come in-about a mile north of where we are now, near Mianost. We'll pa.s.s it on the way, but you won't see much. We hide those ways in and out pretty well.

"Come on, now. We'll make the camp, and then you can rest."

Bleak dwarf, rough as stone. His strange eyes seemed to see only winterscapes, only lifelessness and ending. But there are endings, and there are beginnings, Jai thought. Out from winter, spring. He didn't know where he'd find his beginning, that spring again. With all the world seeming to want to end around him, he couldn't imagine. He did know, though, that he would not find it in Thorbardin. His heart told him that.

No, he decided. He wasn't going to Thorbardin. He was going back to Qualinost, and the first thing he could do about that was get rid of the dwarf.

It was, as Stanach had said, a hard old walk through the tunnel. Once they turned south the going became rougher, rising and falling in ways a man able to stride out and not worry about his footing wouldn't notice. Jai felt every rise and dip, every rock on the underground road. He had a sense of walls rising high, curving to a rough ceiling, but he didn't look around much. He couldn't take his eyes from the ground. Stanach kept the light near, for the farther they went the rougher the road became.

"They haven't made the second pa.s.s yet. It's going to be hard going. Hold on to me if you want, elf."

Jai didn't, and didn't even thank him for the offer. He concentrated on the way ahead, lurching along una.s.sisted. He was looking for something, an opportunity.

They went that way for a time. Jai looked at the walls when they stopped to rest. Stanach called them the ribs of the runnel, and he said the ceiling was the spine, the floor the belly. Like we've been swallowed by some horrible beast, Jai thought. At these ribs, spine, and belly he looked, trying to find some sign of the Mianost entrance. He saw nothing but stone. All the while the earth vibrated beneath them, the rumbling growing stronger the farther they went. The vibrations rattled Jai's knee, sending fiery lightning lances shooting through the joint.

"That can't be worms," he said, his words coming through gritted teeth as he leaned up against a damp wall, again forced to rest.

"If you say so."

Lanterns hung at intervals on the walls, settled snugly in iron brackets. By their glowing light Jai saw the tunnel here was strewn with debris, boulders half as high as Jai stood, many looking like they'd been flung to the ground by some giant hand and shattered.

To balance, he put his hand on one of the piles. His fingers closed round a stone the size of his fist. His belly clenched suddenly. That might be one way to get rid of the dwarf.

"Larvae?" Jai said, speaking of the lanterns, getting a good grip on the stone.

"Lots. We're almost there." Stanach untied the leather water bottle from his belt and held it out. Jai let go the stone and took what he offered. "It's not water. Go easy."

Jai would have known what the bottle held the moment he unstopped the mouth. The pungent odor of dwarf spirits stung his nose. He took a sip, the liquor burning past his lips and down his throat, finally sitting like fire in his belly. Standing there, the spirits afire inside him, he imagined he felt pain ease. He took a step, his knee wobbled beneath him, but for the moment it didn't hurt.

"Just the lying spirits," Stanach said. In the light and the shadow, he looked like he knew those lies and maybe had believed them for a while. He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned the leather bottle to his belt. "Rest. It isn't far to the work camp now-just beyond the bend. There'll probably be a healer there to slap some poultice or something on your knee. It won't help the pain, but if anything's inflamed, it might help that."

Again, Jai felt the stone beneath his hand. Again, he closed his fingers around the roughness of it. "You don't sound like you have a lot of faith in healers."

Stanach grunted. "Magic was better, but G.o.ds come and G.o.ds go, and this latest going of theirs isn't the first. I had the bad luck to get my fingers broken the time before, during the War of the Lance, while the crowd of them was shuffling around on the doorstep, trying to decide whether to stop by again. Friends tried to help. . ." Again, he shrugged. "Healer-craft is good for cuts and boils and colds, but you probably notice it doesn't do much for the big things."

The ground beneath their feet shook again. Stanach braced with his feet planted wide. Jai caught his balance against the wall. From behind came voices, several shouting in Dwarvish. A great rumbling filled the tunnel, sounding like thunder. With gestures and words Jai couldn't hear, Stanach made him understand that he should get right up against the wall.

"Second pa.s.s!" he shouted, his words sounding small and distant. He pointed back the way they had come, and Jai's blood ran cold. He gripped the stone now.

Something huge lumbered through the tunnel from the direction he and Stanach had just come, something nearly six feet thick through the middle, and so long Jai couldn't see the end of it. It came hungry, eating all the stone and rubble in its path, chewing boulders with the same placidity as a cow chewing gra.s.s in her green pasture.

"Worm!" Stanach shouted.

His heart pounding, Jai thought the last thing you could name that creature was worm. And yet it did look like an out-sized worm, its hide glistening with slime in the light of lanterns, advancing as worms do, slithering in a gigantic sort of way. It had horns, and atop its back a basket sat, maybe where the neck was if, indeed, it had a neck. In that basket a dwarf stood, thick leather reins in his hands.

"Attached to the horns!" Stanach roared as the worm came nearer and the sound of the earth rumbling beneath it grew even louder. "See!"

Jai saw, and he understood that this was how the handler in the basket directed the creature, even as other dwarves jogged along beside it, poking it with long sticks when it paused in its journey or lumbered off and threatened to eat its way through the wall. Stanach warned Jai to keep still, not for fear that the worm would harm him. The thing had no eyes and no interest in anything but eating its way to some dwarf-directed destination, but it would be easy to slip in the slime of the worm's pa.s.sing and fall beneath the beast.

"Then," he said, "we'd be sending to Thorbardin for sponges to sop up your remains."

The worm pa.s.sed to the shouting of a parade of dwarves, hooting and poking to keep the worm in a more or less straight line. None of them looked to the side or even seemed to be aware they pa.s.sed one of their fellows and an elf. It was worth the life of each of them to keep their eyes on the worm and keep the worm itself moving. It was a slow pa.s.sing, like a mountain strolling by. Stanach stood a moment looking after it.

Jai pushed away from the wall, getting a better grip on the stone in his hand. Somewhere along the way he'd find the Mianost entrance. It wouldn't be an easy thing alone in the tunnel, trying to find his own way. Adrenaline shot through him in the instant he made his decision. In a brilliant moment of clarity he saw just where he would bring the stone down on Stanach's skull-there, in the center.

He c.o.c.ked his arm and the dwarf turned, his own arm coming up with arrow swiftness. Stanach grasped his wrist so hard that Jai's fingers went numb.

"Now why," the dwarf said, his words edged with ice, "why would you want to do that, elf?"

Stanach's grip tightened. Pain shot through Jai's wrist to his elbow, to his shoulder.

"Drop the stone," the dwarf whispered, "or I'll break your wrist."

The stone fell, but not by an act of will. Jai's fingers had no feeling in them to hold. Stanach eased his grip, a little, but didn't release Jai's wrist. "Answer me. Why?"

In the pulsing light and the s.h.i.+fting shadows, Jai took a long breath against the pain in his arm. "I'm not going to Thorbardin. I'm going back to Qualinost."

Stanach laughed, a hard, harsh bark. "You are, are you?" He looked pointedly at Jai's knee. "And how do you reckon you're going to get there?"

Jai hated him in that moment. His blood burned with hate. "I'll get there walking."

"By Winter Night, maybe." The dwarfs eyes darkened. "You're a fool to go back up there now. Your people are running these tunnels as fast as we can build them, as fast as we can bring them in. Soon there'll be nothing for you to go back to. Nothing."

"You're wrong! Up there is all there ever was of us. Every tale of who we are, every song, every story, all the history of us. It's up there, and-"Jai stopped, s.h.i.+vering. "And if all that were lost, Stanach, here is one more tale that needs telling. The tale of the end. Someone needs to know how it ends, so they will know how to begin again."

Stanach let go his wrist. Jai looked at the flesh there, already bruising, then he looked away.

"Please, let me go. What's it to you, Stanach? Nothing, so just. . . let me go."

As swiftly as he'd turned before, that swiftly did Stanach turn again. His eyes took Jai's and held them. "I feflte being here. I hate being out of Thorbardin. I was too long away in older days." He glanced at his ruined right hand, then away. "I came home broken and saw the city and the kins.h.i.+p broken after that. I hate being out of Thorbardin."

"Why? If you leave the city, will it fall apart without you?"

"No. No, if I leave the city, I fall apart without it."

He looked away. Jai saw nothing of his face, his blue-flecked dark eyes. He saw no sign of what the dwarf was thinking or feeling, only one small twitch of his thick shoulders.

"All right," Stanach said, his eyes still on some point south, some point in the direction of Thorbardin. "All right. It's all falling apart, elf, but if you want to stand in the ruin, off you go."

You, he said. He bent and picked up something from the shadows: a broken stick one of the worm-handlers had discarded. With one swift stomp of his booted foot, he sheared off the splintered end. The stick he handed to Jai, with two words of advice. "Use it."

Then he walked away, back south toward Thorbardin. Jai smiled, following. Before Thorbardin, or even the crossway, they would come to the way out of the tunnel, the way through and up to Mianost. It was all right. He could manage the walk. He'd come this far.

He was bleeding by the time he got there-cuts from falls, sc.r.a.ped hands, torn knees, his cheek ripped raw by a rock. He was bruised, and the muscles and bones of his knee screamed. He fell again, he didn't think he could get up again, but Stanach said, not gently, "Come on, elf. You said you could do it. So do it."

"Shut up," Jai snarled, and he wasn't sure it was only sweat running down his cheeks. "Shut up and give me your hand."

Stanach did, gripping hard, laying bruises on top of bruises as he hauled Jai to his feet. Wordless, he put the stick back into Jai's hand, and he pointed to the stone wall, the rocky ribcage of the tunnel. "There," he said, but Jai saw nothing other than worm-chewed stone and moisture running down in rivulets made golden by the lantern light.

Stanach touched the wall, just a gentle nudge, and the stone swung inward-a slab as long as an elf is tall, and as wide. It moved silently, smoothly, and there was no magic attached to it, just good dwarven engineering. When Stanach held the lantern close to the entrance, he illuminated rough stone stairs winding upward. He did not, however, illuminate anything that might remotely resemble guards or any kind of watch. "Not at this end," Stanach said. "The guards are above, and they're your folk. We delve; they ward."

They stood quiet a moment and then Stanach said, "That's your last climb up. Just hang around looking suspicious and some elf or another will find you and fetch you home."

Jai drew breath to speak, then held it. Thin light slipped suddenly down the stairs, pale and silvery. A whiff of rain drifted in on a vagrant breeze. A woman's voice wafted softly down from above, speaking in Elvish. The voice sounded familiar, distant whisper though it was. When it came closer, Jai knew it. Annalisse!

Another party of refugees was coming through, but why was Annalisse with them? His heart sank. Had she fallen foul of the Dark Knights? Had the Marshal learned of her connection to the resistance?

Annalisse's footfalls came closer. Another followed her, this one's tread heavier. A dwarf, Jai thought, and then he heard the chime of ring mail, the clank of armor.

"I told you the Marshal would want to know about this," Annalisse said coolly. "This is no cave. This is a way down into the earth."

The next voice Jai heard was human, and he knew the clanking armor was black, the wearer a man whose soul was owned by the green dragon. "d.a.m.n. That's dwarf craft."

Whistling, something dark and swift flew past Jai's face. Stanach's throwing axe made a terrible sound as it bit deeply into the throat of the Knight. The man made no sound at all but for that of his body clanking down the stairs. Shoving Jai back, tumbling him to the stony floor, Stanach leaped for the corpse and kicked his axe free of the Knight's neck.

Shouts and cursing erupted in the stairwell as three more Knights ran down the steps.

Jai got the stone wall behind his back, the cold damp rock biting into his flesh as he pressed close, levering himself to his feet. Stanach's voice swore in the name of a G.o.d years gone away.

"By Reorx! Close the door, elf!"

Close it? Close him in with the Knights and the traitor? And what? Howl for help? Beneath him, the earth vibrated. No matter how loudly he shouted, no one would hear him above the thunder of worms eating through stone. Jai kicked the door open wider and got a good grip on his stick. The first Knight to come through got his feet tangled in the stick and, while he was struggling to rise, his skull shattered by a two-handed blow with a rock. Bone shards flew up from the broken skull, brains and blood seeped through. Jai's stomach turned, his gorge rose.

"Close the d.a.m.ned door!"

A second Knight came through, staggering. Blood poured from his mouth and nose. He tripped over his fellow and Stanach's axe stuck quivering in his neck above his mail s.h.i.+rt.

Jai dropped his stick and planted his hands on the pile of corpses, ignoring the stench of blood and death. Balanced on one leg, he yanked the axe put of the Knight's neck and hobbled for the doorway. From the shadow within the doorway, he trembled to see Stanach standing on lower ground, three steps below a burly Knight-undefendable ground-and the glinting tip of a keen edged sword was dipped to touch his neck. Above the Knight, Annalisse stood. Her face was cold as the white moon on an icy night.

"Kill him," she said.

Icy fear washed through Jai. In his scribe's hand was a weapon that would do Stanach no good. Neither could he charge up the stairs to the dwarfs rescue. He grinned suddenly, and he moved, flinging himself into three lurching steps, the stick in his hand. With a cry to distract the Knight, Jai hit Stanach hard behind the knees.

Roaring curses, Stanach fell backwards. The Knight, just thrusting his sword, lost his balance and pitched headlong down the stairs. Annalisse cried out as Stanach staggered to his feet and took the axe Jai thrust into his hand. He finished the Knight in the s.p.a.ce of a breath and turned toward Annalisse, arm c.o.c.ked to throw the axe.