After a while the shadows up ahead seemed strangely different. Jack held the lantern higher and squinted against the gloom. His heart leapt as the patterns of light and darkness ahead of him resolved themselves into a set of rough wooden steps leading upward. He was almost there; all he had to do was climb the steps and clamber out through the trapdoor, and he would be free of the darkness and among friends again. He frowned suddenly and came to a halt at the bottom of the steps. He remembered how the steps had seemed to go on forever on the way down, and a faint twinge of fear went through him. He pushed it quickly aside. It didn’t matter how many steps there were. He was almost there, and he wasn’t going to be stopped by anything or anyone now. He was going home, to the trees.
He almost ran up the simple wooden slats, pushing himself on as fast as his aching legs would carry him. He held the lantern out as far ahead of him as his arm could reach, hoping for a glimpse of the trapdoor that would let him back into the fort’s cellar, but for a long time there were only the stairs and the darkness. It wasn’t until some of the frost in his hair began to melt and run down his face like tears that he realized the air wasn’t as cold as it had been. In fact, it was almost bordering on warm. His hands and feet and face tingled with returning feeling as the numbness slowly left them. He gritted his teeth against the pins and needles that followed, and kept on climbing. He began to smile, until he was grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. The trapdoor suddenly appeared above him, and he lurched to a halt before he slammed his head into it. His smile faded away. What if the people in the cellar had bolted the trapdoor shut and had then been … overcome by something? He’d be trapped down here in the darkness forever… . Jack quickly decided he wasn’t going to think about that. He reached up and pushed the trapdoor with his free hand. It rose an inch or so and then fell back. Jack cursed softly. He’d forgotten how heavy the trapdoor was. He put the lantern down on the top step and placed both his hands against the trapdoor. It shifted uneasily and then rose an inch or two. Jack took a deep breath and held it, and forced the trapdoor up another inch. MacNeil had always made it look so easy. And then suddenly the weight was gone as the trapdoor was yanked away from him. Light spilled down through the opening, and Jack blinked up into it. Strong hands reached down to help him, and finally Scarecrow Jack left the tunnels in the earth and emerged into the light of the cellar.
Flint and the Dancer let the trapdoor slam shut behind him, and Constance helped him sit down before his weary legs gave way. He grinned happily about him, and then he saw the look in their eyes, and his smile disappeared as he realized he had bad news to tell them as well as good.
“I’m the only one,” he said quietly. “Hammer and Sergeant MacNeil won’t be coming back.”
“They’re both dead?” said Constance.
“Hammer is. And I’m pretty sure the Sergeant is too. He gave up his life to destroy the Beast.”
“What happened?” said the Dancer.
“Sergeant MacNeil used Wolfsbane against the Beast.” Jack dropped his eyes for a moment, and then raised them to look squarely at the Dancer. “I would have used the sword, but he wouldn’t let me. He said it was his duty. He was a brave man. Bravest I ever met.”
“Yes,” said Flint. “He was.”
They stood in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Constance felt suddenly exhausted. She’d been saving what little strength she had left to welcome MacNeil back, and now it seemed she had no use for it. He was dead. She never had found the right moment to tell him how she felt about him, and now she never would.
“What happened to Hammer?” said the Dancer.
“He ran into something worse than him.” Jack looked about him, taking in the dead trolls and the Rangers’ wounds for the first time. “You seem to have kept busy while we were gone.”
“We managed to keep from being bored,” said Flint.
“We found the gold,” said Jack. “Its all there. I’ll draw you a map later on.”
“What about the missing people?” said Constance.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Jack. “It’s a long story, and not a pretty one.” His eyes fell upon Wilde’s unmoving body. Jack looked at it for a while, not sure how he felt. “Did he die well?”
“Yes,” said Flint. “He gave his life to save mine.”
Jack nodded slowly. “I never liked him, but he was good with a bow. At least he died in a good cause. He used to be a hero once, you know.”
“Yes,” said Flint, “I know.” She looked hard at Jack. “Are you sure Duncan is dead?”
“He has to be,” said Jack. “He knew he was going to die when he took on the Beast, and so did I.”
“But did you actually see the body?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“Then there’s a chance he’s still alive,” said the Dancer. He turned to Constance. “Can’t you See where he is; what’s happened to him?”
“I’m sorry,” said the witch. “I’ve nothing left. It’ll be weeks before I can See anything again.”
“He’s dead,” said Jack. “I’m sorry, but he has to be.”
Flint started to say something and then stopped, and for a long time nobody said anything.
“All right,” said Flint finally. “Let’s get out of here. We can clean up and sleep in the dining hall for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go down into the tunnels and see if we can recover Duncan’s body.”
“Right,” said the Dancer. “We can’t leave him here, alone.”
Duncan MacNeil woke up slowly. His whole body ached, and all the length of his back was a single great stabbing pain. He groaned aloud, and tried to raise his head, but for the moment even that was beyond him. He opened his eyes, but everything stayed dark. He lay quietly where he was, gathering what was left of his strength, and tried to figure out where the hell he was. There was a hard unyielding surface beneath his aching back, but one arm and both his feet seemed to be hanging over the edges of it. An appalling smell filled the air all around him; a dank oppressive stench of rotting foulness that made him want to retch. He tried to lift his head again, and this time succeeded. He still couldn’t see anything. Of course not, he thought sluggishly, It’s dark down here. Down here …
Memories returned in a rush, and his heart missed a beat as he remembered falling toward the giant glowing eye. He thrashed about in the dark, trying to find something to grab onto, and then froze as he realized he was lying on something precariously narrow, with an unknown drop to either side. He felt about a little more cautiously, and his hands encountered something soft and unpleasantly yielding. He snatched his hands away and lay very still while his heart and breathing returned to normal. The first thing to do was to shed some light on the subject. He reached carefully into his pocket and brought out the inch of candle stub he always carried with him for emergencies. Lighting the wax stub with flint and steel from his boot whilst being very careful not to overbalance himself turned out to be a nightmare in itself, but finally he got the wick to light and held the candle up before him.
He was lying on a narrow shelf of discolored bone, surrounded by dark walls of rotting flesh. If he looked up, he could see above him the beginnings of a broad tunnel reaching up through the decaying meat. Another equally broad tunnel fell away beneath him. MacNeil sat up cautiously on the ledge of bone, cradling the candle stub carefully in his shaking hands. He finally knew where he was. He was in the body of the Beast. He’d plunged into the eye and through it, and fallen into the head of the Beast, destroying its mind. The liquid in the massive eyeball must have cushioned his fall enough so that when he finally hit the more solid flesh beyond it, the shock of the impact hadn’t been enough to kill him. At some point he must have dropped the Infernal Device. It had carried on without him, rotting its way deeper into the Beast’s mind, and leaving behind it the tunnel beneath his ledge. There was no knowing how deep Wolfsbane had gone, but it must have gone deep enough. The Beast was dead. MacNeil only had to look around to know that;
everywhere he looked was rotten with decay. And the Infernal Device was gone, lost deep in the decomposing body of the Beast.
And there it can stay, for all of me, thought MacNeil firmly.
He clambered unsteadily to his feet and looked up at the tunnel above him. The opening was just above his head, easily within reach. It was the only way out, much as he disliked the thought. There was no telling how far he’d penetrated into the Beast’s body before the bone shelf broke his fall, and in his current battered state he wasn’t up to much climbing. The ledge of bone suddenly creaked loudly and shifted under his feet. He looked down, and saw a fine tracery of cracks spreading across the bone. The decay was continuing. He no longer had a choice; he had to climb out while he still could. If he fell any farther into the body of the Beast he might never get out, even if he survived a second fall.
MacNeil allowed a trickle of melted wax to fall onto the absorbant cloth of the shirt over his shoulder, and used it to stick the wax stub firmly in place. He was drenched from head to foot with foul-smelling slime from his passage through the eye, but the candle stub seemed more or less secure, and he had to have both hands free for climbing. He drew his knife from its sheath and cut himself a series of foot and handholds in the decaying flesh of the tunnel opening above him. He then gripped the knife firmly between his teeth, gagging at the awful taste, and pulled himself up into the wide shaft. His arms groaned with the effort, but eventually he pulled himself high enough for his feet to find the first footholds, and then the long climb began. In later years, he was only to remember most of it in his worst nightmares.
The climb seemed to last forever. The flickering candlelight showed him a wall of red and purple flesh, already dark with spreading pockets of decay. Dim pulses of light ran through the Beasts flesh occasionally, and once MacNeil thought he saw a strange distorted face peering up out of the meat at him. When he looked again it was gone, and he didn’t wait to look more closely. A slow dull ache burned in his legs as he climbed, spreading to his hips and chest and arms. His back grew steadily worse. He couldn’t even stop for a rest; his weight would have been too much for the precarious foot-and handholds he hacked out of the yielding wall before him. Occasionally slivers and promontories of splintered bones erupted out of the walls, and he quickly learned to work his way around them. They looked solid enough, but they were eaten away inside. Wolfsbane did its job thoroughly. MacNeil climbed on, slowly making his way up the decaying column of flesh.
He came at last to the enormous socket that had once held the Beasts eye. It was an open crater now, carpeted in places with a rotting, translucent jelly. MacNeil clambered out of the tunnel and into the crater, and just stood for a moment, while his various aches and pains subsided enough to be bearable. His candlelight didn’t travel more than a few feet, but the glowing crystals in the cavern walls still shone with a dim, stubborn light. The curving sides of the crater stretched away in all directions, and beyond them lay the cavern wall he would have to climb to reach the stone ledge that led to the exit tunnel. Assuming of course that the damned tunnel was still there … MacNeil shrugged, and started off across the crater, heading for the nearest wall. There was no point in thinking about things like that. Either the tunnel was there, or it wasn’t. He’d find out when he got there.
The rest of the journey passed in a kind of daze, and he remembered little of it, even in his dreams. Possibly because he was too tired to be scared anymore. He reached the edge of the crater eventually, and climbed up the sheer rock face until he got to the stone ledge. The climb wasn’t too hard; the walls were cracked and broken from where the Beast had stirred briefly in its sleep, and there were plenty of ready-made hand-and footholds. He made his way along the ledge and trudged wearily back up the tunnel that led to the wooden steps and the cellar. He wasn’t thinking much by this time. There was only the pain and the tiredness and his own dogged refusal to give in.
His candle stub had pretty much run out by the time he finally reached the wooden steps, and he clawed his way up the steps in pitch darkness after the light suddenly guttered and went out. The first he knew of reaching the closed trapdoor was when he banged his head against it. The shock snapped MacNeil awake again, and a horrid thought came to him. What if the others had supposed him dead, and gone away, leaving the trapdoor securely bolted? He grinned savagely. After all he’d been through to get here, a closed trapdoor sure as hell wasn’t going to stop him. He braced himself on the narrow wooden slat, and his hand brushed against something on the top step. He froze, studying the feel of it in his memory. It hadn’t seemed alive; it had felt cold, like metal or glass. He reached out again carefully, and his fingers found the familiar shape of his lantern. MacNeil smiled widely in the darkness. So Jack had made it back, at least. He took out his flint and steel and lit the lantern with trembling fingers. The sudden light was blinding, and tears ran down his face. He waited patiently till his eyes had adjusted to the new light, and then put his shoulder against the underside of the trapdoor. He took a quick breath, and then thrust upwards with all his strength. For one heartbreaking moment he thought the damn thing wasn’t going to budge, and then it suddenly rose a good three inches, almost throwing him off balance. He quickly regained his footing and pushed again, and in a few moments the trapdoor had swung high enough for him to push it over backward. It fell to the floor with a great echoing crash, but there was no response. The cellar was dark and abandoned.
MacNeil clambered painfully out of the opening, but rested only a moment before checking through the piled up bodies for signs of his friends. But among all the trolls, there was only one human body: Wilde. MacNeil heaved a sigh of relief and started the long slow journey out of the cellar and back through the warren of passageways that would take him eventually to the outside world. Not for the first time, he wondered if the others had already gone, leaving him alone in the fort. He had no way of knowing how long he’d been unconscious in the body of the Beast. But if they hadn’t left yet, they were probably still in the dining hall. He stood undecided in a dark passageway for a moment. He wanted to get out of the fort, with all its blood and death and madness, and breathe fresh, clean air again, but even more than that he needed the company of friends. So he set off in the direction of the dining hall and hoped. It took longer than he’d thought to get there, mainly because he was so much weaker than he’d realized, but finally he stood in the empty corridor before the closed hall door. He hesitated again, but couldn’t hear anything. He shrugged and pushed the door open, slamming it back against the wall.
The Dancer had been sitting on guard. He was on his feet, sword in hand, before the echoes had even begun to ring, but when he saw who it was, his jaw dropped and he stood frozen in place. Jack, Flint, and Constance sat up bleary-eyed from sleep, and stared blankly at the grisly apparition in the doorway And then the shock of the moment passed, and all four of them hurried forward to greet him. Constance got there first and hugged MacNeil ferociously, despite the blood and slime that soaked his clothes.
“You’re alive! Oh, Duncan, I knew you had to be alive! I knew it!”
Her feelings ran wild within her, making her suddenly inarticulate, but that didn’t matter. There’d be time to tell him about those feelings later. There would be time for many things now.
Finally she let him go, and the others took turns hugging him and slapping him on the back and shoulders. All the exuberance was suddenly too much for MacNeil, and he had to sit down quickly before he fell down. The Dancer and Jack helped him to a chair, and MacNeil then had to spend some time assuring them all that he was fine really, and just needed a little time to get his breath back. Constance wrapped a blanket around his shoulders to keep out the cold. Flint handed him a wine flask, and he nodded his thanks.
“All right,” said Constance, “tell us what happened. You’ve been missing for hours. Did you really kill the Beast?”
“Oh, yes,” said MacNeil. “It’s dead.” He told them his story, and they sat aro
und him in silent awe, like children listening to the village storyteller. When he was finished, no one said anything for a long time.
“So, Wolfsbane is lost again,” said Flint finally “I can’t say I’m sorry to see the back of it. Damn thing gave me the creeps.”
“Right,” said MacNeil. “As far as my official report is concerned, it’s lost without trace. I think it’s better for everyone if it stays that way.” He yawned suddenly and allowed himself the luxury of a long, slow stretch. “And now, my friends, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to lose these clothes and crawl into my sleeping roll and sleep for a week. Good night … and pleasant dreams.”
In the end, he slept about ten hours. It was late in the afternoon when he finally woke up. Every muscle he had was complaining loudly, but the long sleep had taken the edge off his pains, and he thought he could live with them now. Flint and the Dancer were sitting not too far away, talking quietly. Constance was preparing a meal of cold field rations at one of the tables. There was no sign of Scarecrow Jack. MacNeil smiled contentedly. It felt good to be alive. He lay back in his bedroll and stared up at the ceiling. In a strange way, he felt very much at peace with himself. Down in the darkness, under the gaze of the Beast, he had tested his courage and found it sound. He’d never been more scared in his life, but still, when it mattered, he had done the right thing. It meant a lot to him, knowing that.
He emerged reluctantly from his blankets and climbed into his spare set of clothes. One look at the stained and slime-drenched clothes he’d worn previously was enough to convince him they were beyond saving. He raised his hands to his face and sniffed them suspiciously. Despite a thorough washing the night before, he could still smell the foul stench of the Beast. Maybe when the reinforcements arrived they’d have someone with them who could repair the hot water boilers, and he could have a long soak in a very hot bath. MacNeil smiled, savoring the thought, and moved over to join Constance at the table. She smiled back at him and passed him some of the cold field rations. It was a continuing matter for debate among all guards as to whether field rations tasted worse cooked or cold. Most guards usually ended up deciding they tasted equally vile either way. MacNeil wasn’t all that hungry anyway, but since Constance had gone to the trouble of preparing the meal, he supposed he’d better eat some of it or she’d be upset. After a few mouthfuls he discovered he was hungry after all, ate the lot, and even wished there was more. He pushed back the empty plate with a sigh, and looked up to find Constance sitting patiently beside him.
Down Among the Dead Men (Forest Kingdom Novels) Page 20
