The Well of Darkness

by Randall Garrett

  “Therefore, you shall report to Obilin directly, as he requests, but from a distance. As of this moment, you will be in charge of the Lingis copper mine.”

  I don’t know who was more startled, Obilin or me.

  “Me? Supervising slaves? I won’t do it!” I exclaimed.

  Indomel laughed. “It sounds as though you’ve been talking to those stupid Raithskarians,” he said, then whirled on Obilin, his mood change swift as lightning. “Go prepare the transfer orders. He will leave immediately.”

  I had to hand it to Obilin. The rug had just been pulled out from under him, but he recovered quickly, betraying his reaction only in a slight shakiness in his voice. “Naddam, the present supervisor, is a good man, High Lord. What reason shall I give for replacing him?”

  “Think of something,” Indomel shouted. “The death rate among his slaves is higher than anywhere else. Tell him it’s punishment for working them too hard. Tell him it’s reward for such devotion to his work. Just write the order.“

  It was unquestionable a dismissal. The High Guardsman backed out of the room and closed the double doors, glaring at me all the way.

  “Raithskar,” Indomel said, and took a deep breath to calm the rage he had let us glimpse. “The name reminded me of a matter which does not concern Obilin.” The High Lord went to a shelf area on the wall behind me and lifted a wooden box. He set it on a lower shelf, opened it with his back to us, and turned around with both fists closed.

  “Where,” he asked, “did you get this?” He opened his left hand to display a blue jewel, darker blue lines hinting at a crystalline structure deep within it. Tarani and I both gasped.

  There seemed no point in hiding that part of the story. I had twisted in the chair to watch his movements. I turned back around and spoke with my back to the High Lord.

  “Gharlas stole it from Raithskar,” I said. “We got it from him.”

  “Not this one, you didn’t,” Indomel said. He came into the center of the grouped chairs, kicked aside the edge of the carpet and threw the jewel hard at the marble-slabbed floor. It shattered with a surprisingly soft sound.

  “Glass, as I discovered shortly after you left Eddarta—at least, as I suspected, when my dear mother proved to be overconfident of her powers. I took it from her, reserving judgment on the gem in favor of further experimentation. She …”

  He looked at Zefra, who merely stared back at him, unflinching. She hadn’t yet said a word.

  “The lady Zefra was punished for her temerity, I assure you. My next thought,” Indomel continued, “was to wonder how the three of you had arrived in the Council Chamber. It was unthinkable that no one would have seen you enter, equally unthinkable that anyone, seeing a stranger go into the Council Chamber, would not alert the guard.

  “There are two doors into that room. It is well known among the Harthim that Troman’s Way exists, though its secret has long been lost to us. Once I suspected you had somehow discovered it, and entered the Council Chamber through the treasure vault, I was understandably anxious to verify that the treasure was intact. By that time, I could hear the other Lords shouting about Pylomel’s death and searching for me, but I thought it wise to inspect the vault first.”

  He took a deep breath. “As it turned out, it was very wise. Only I know that Gharlas was killed inside the vault, instead of at the foot of the Bronze, where the others found his body. (A poetic statement, of sorts, isn’t it? Yet I was less concerned with symbolism at the time than with the weight of my dead uncle’s bones.)

  “Only I know,” he said, his voice rising slightly, “that the High Lord’s treasure has been systematically pilfered, all the jewelry and gemstones replaced by glass imitations. It was at that moment that I began to suspect the truth—that an imitation Ra’ira had been left here, to inspire my mother to over-tax her abilities in trying to control me. A wonderful thing, the mind. Because she and I both believed she had the true Ra’ira, she did actually succeed—temporarily.

  “One doesn’t imitate what is not real, and the real Ra’ira must have been present in that room, to allow … my sister to read the Bronze. That meant that you still had it.”

  He smiled—a little bitterly, I thought—and opened his other hand. “Now I have it.”

  7

  “And,” the High Lord added, “I am most anxious to hear how and why it escaped from Raithskar, how it was duplicated, and how it arrived here.”

  He was only asking for my life story for the past two months or so. I hesitated answering merely because I didn’t know where to start. Tarani said nothing.

  “In the space of three breaths, you three will be the next meal for the dralda,” he said fiercely. “Answer!”

  “Gharlas wanted to—” I broke off before I finished the thought.

  No point in giving him the idea of “world conquest” if he doesn‘t already have it, I reminded myself.

  “—control Eddarta through controlling you,” I finished, hoping the pause hadn’t been too noticeable. “He spent a long time planning to get the Ra’ira. He had—” Another pause, to avoid saying Volitar’s name. “—the same person who duplicated the gemstones make a duplicate. Two duplicates were actually made. Gharlas took one to Raithskar, but managed to lose it before he could switch it for the real one—so he just stole the real one.

  “Later, he realized it probably wouldn’t do for anyone else to claim having the Ra’ira. The first one was lost and harmless, but he went back to get the other duplicate. He killed the man who had made it, but didn’t actually get it. We had the duplicate; we followed Gharlas here, and—well, you already know we gave you the imitation Ra’ira in order to get ourselves out of here.”

  Indomel considered what I had said, working his fingers gently around the Ra’ira.

  So close, I moaned to myself. I wonder, if I jumped him … Tarani caught my eye and shook her head, very slightly. She may not be able to read minds, I thought, but she‘s getting damned good at reading me. What does she think we can do from more than a hundred miles apart? The copper mines, for heaven‘s sake!

  I felt the edges of despair closing in on me. It was becoming a familiar feeling. Indomel snapped my attention back to him.

  “As far as it goes,” he said, “your tale is believable, and I accept it. But none of it tells me what I most want to know.” He walked over to where I was sitting and looked straight down into my eyes.

  I forced myself to look back, into the dark iris and the peculiar, familiar glow behind the pupil, and suddenly I had to fight hard to keep still and control the panic that bubbled at the edges of my mind.

  He‘s going to try his mindpower on me—a compulsion—I can feel it—God! He‘s as strong as Gharlas, if not stronger— but I‘ve had practice now; he can‘t control me—but I don‘t want him to know that!—Keeshah, I wish you were still with me, just for the comfort—Oh, Lord and Grandmama Marie, let me do this right …

  “How did Gharlas know that the Ra’ira has special powers?” Indomel asked, a slight tremor disrupting the solemn note of command in his voice.

  I let my eyes go slightly out of focus, opened my mouth a couple of times as though I were struggling against the compulsion (as, indeed, I was—only more successfully than I pretended), then said, slowly: “He said he found a book in the vault—a journal of the ancient kings—that described what the Ra’ira could do and how it was used.”

  “I have examined every article in the vault,” Indomel said. “There is no such book.”

  That wasn’t a question, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Where is that book now?” Indomel asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, telling the absolute truth.

  “Did it—no, you wouldn’t know that, either,” Indomel said, more to himself than to me. He broke the eye contact for a moment and stared thoughtfully at the jewel and his fingers as they moved, turning the Ra’ira in his hand. “Gharlas would have planned carefully, studied its keeping in Raithskar—there is nothing
special in the theft itself, I suppose. It is only remarkable that it took a fool like Gharlas to think of bringing it back to Eddarta.”

  There was something special in the theft, I thought to myself. But you don‘t need to know that Gharlas seemed to have the rarest of mindgifts—the ability to actually read the thoughts of another Gandalaran. I ought to tell you, just for spite, but it wouldn‘t be in character.

  Indomel turned to me again, and I stiffened under his spooky stare. “Gharlas would have no reason to lie to you,” he said, “so the book he spoke of must exist, and he must have removed it from the vault.

  “That could have been done only through Troman’s Way. The guards who searched Gharlas’s home had no more fortune in finding the entrance than has anyone else in the generations since Troman used that passageway to meet his women. If you came through it, you know how to get into it—tell me.”

  “The door is on the right-hand side of the entry door,” I said. “A wall panel slides back, and you go through sideways to a small landing, and then stairs. But Gharlas opened it, and I couldn’t do it again.”

  “How did he open it?” Indomel demanded.

  “Pressure on the nearby floor tiles, a complicated pattern. I couldn’t tell you which tiles, what order—anything about it, only that I’m pretty sure that’s the way he opened the door.”

  Indomel thought about that. “The vault has similar tiles, that date from about the same period,” he mused. “The same method—where is the vault door located?” he asked.

  “Behind the big tapestry—on the other side of the vault from where you must have found Gharlas’s body. That’s as close as I can pinpoint it.”

  Indomel smiled. “Well, I expect that’s sufficient. It is only a matter of time before I can discover the correct combination.”

  It‘s only a matter of time, I thought, before a computerized random selection of alpha characters and spaces recreates Hamlet‘s soliloquy. A matter of a lot of time. Good luck.

  “One more question,” Indomel said. “Why are you involved in this?”

  Uh-oh. I blinked dazedly at Indomel for about three seconds, worrying furiously the entire time. Then I thought: Sorry, Tarani, but this seems the safer course.

  “The man who made the duplicate Ra’ira was Volitar.” At the edge of my vision, I saw Zefra twitch. Tarani never moved a muscle. “I met Tarani and Thymas on their way to visit him, when they still thought Volitar was her father. I tagged along because of Tarani, and happened to be there … Gharlas killed Volitar, but couldn’t force Tarani to give him the second duplicate. Between her looks and her power, Gharlas figured out that Tarani was Zefra’s daughter. Tarani was determined to come to Eddarta to meet Zefra and defeat Gharlas’s plans. Thymas and I came with her … to protect her,” I ended, unable to hide the bitterness I felt.

  Some of that was true, some false. But it seemed to satisfy Indomel, and I marked that down as one assessment of his character: He likes simple solutions.

  “All right,” he said, and I felt the compulsion drop away abruptly.

  I relaxed with a sigh of relief. Accepting that compulsion without really responding to it had been a terrific strain. I wasn’t sure what “mental muscles” I used at times like that, but I knew it cost a lot of energy. But I wasn’t griping. I felt, in fact, as though I was really ahead, for a change—I’d kept Indomel ignorant of my specialness.

  The feeling of victory vanished when Indomel put away the Ra’ira, stepped into the waiting area, and opened the outer door. “Get Obilin,” he ordered, then came back into the room. “You may now say your farewells to the lady Tarani,” he said. “It is the last time you will see her.”

  Protests of all kinds gathered in my throat, but I put them aside for the one thing which seemed immediately important. “Can we speak privately?” I asked.

  “I’m sure that Obilin is eager to accept charge of you, Guardsman,” he said. “Don’t waste what time you have making ridiculous requests.”

  Tarani had moved around the chairs; I stood up to meet her. She was guarded, restrained, conscious of the people watching. I was full of grief and guilt and bitterness. In silence, I pulled her into my arms.

  There was no passion between us in that moment, but an acknowledgment of linkage, of bonding, of being a single unit no matter what physical distance separated us. And somehow, in the midst of every evil thing that surrounded us and the seemingly impossible struggle that faced us, there was comfort. We didn’t kiss, but merely held each other, her body pliant and soft, her embrace as strong as mine.

  The door opened. Tarani stirred and pressed her cheek against mine. So softly that I barely caught the words, Tarani whispered: “There is hope” Then she moved away from me, leaving a giant coldness where she had been.

  The way to Lingis was straight, hard, and boring. I had a lot of time, in those five days, to remember the final few seconds of the interview with Indomel, the picture of the room indelible in my mind: Obilin stony-faced, Zefra still immobile, Indomel sort of blank-looking. All of them loomed in my remembered vision like statues; even I seemed frozen. Only Tarani was alive, breathing, warm. She glowed with vitality, and promise, and a curious sort of peace.

  There is hope, she had said.

  Obilin had led me directly from the house to the gate of Lord City, where a group of guards waited with full backpacks and a lot of suppressed questions. We had stopped just out of their hearing range.

  “They will take you to Lingis,” Obilin had said. “Naddam will be expecting you in five days, and it is worth the girl’s life not to be even an hour late. He will show you the routine before he leaves. Be sure the mine continues to produce as well, but never forget that you are as much a prisoner there as the slaves are.“

  He had given me a sword, and a folded, wax-sealed sheet of paper. I had put the sword through my baldric, aware of Obilin’s alertness, fighting the tempting vision of the sword lashing out, of Obilin falling into his own blood. I had been sickened by the savagery of the image, even more so by the pleasure I felt in anticipation of its execution. That, and the background awareness of the consequences to Tarani, had guided the sword safely and unblooded to its place.

  “There is a clerk,” Obilin had continued, after a slight hesitation. I had wondered if he had been disappointed that I hadn’t tried something. “He sends daily reports directly to the High Lord; he has been instructed to see you every day; the first day he misses you will be the last day of Tarani’s life.”

  He had spoken savagely, and I had seen a new truth—part of Obilin’s hatred, now at least, was concern for Tarani’s welfare. I had control of her fate, and Obilin was losing control of mine. At least, so it had seemed to Obilin and to me.

  “One last word,” Obilin had said, gripping my arm painfully. “Remember that Naddam is not the only guard in Lingis who reports to me.”

  He had shoved me toward the group. The six guards—most of whom had been assigned to the rotating schedule around my confinement—had sandwiched me between two columns, and we had left Eddarta.

  Naddam greeted me, in Lingis, with understandable resentment. Obilin’s explanation—I got a glimpse of the message which had arrived by messenger bird the day I had left Eddarta with the “official” transfer orders—was patently transparent, and he wanted to know what was going on.

  I didn’t tell him anything, at first—but Naddam turned out to be a real surprise. He had the same tough-muscled, scarred look as most of the mine guards—generally not the pick of the crop—but Naddam was an intelligent man, as compassionate as his role would allow him to be.

  The mine operated from a city-like enclosure two man-days away from the Lingis River for which it was named. Water was hauled in by vlek and stored in rooftop tanks to provide drinking water and an occasional bath.

  The slaves were organized into semi-military groups, each of eight groups assigned to a small barracks. Each group had twelve to fifteen slaves and four guards, divided into two teams which alte
rnated resting and working six-hour shifts broken up among the duties of actual mining, hauling, and loading ore, and “camp” duties like cooking, washing, and cleaning. During any given seven-day, one of the slave groups would have it slightly easier on “vlek” duty. Team A wrestled half the work animals into delivering ore to the foundry in Tarling and bringing back water, while Team B tended the other half and took care of the shorter hauling job of bringing mined ore into camp.

  Naddam was explaining all this to me as he guided me through the barracks area.

  “Every group has more than just the twelve people necessary for both teams,” I pointed out.

  “To allow for illness,” he snapped.

  “Or death?” I asked, and Naddam pulled up short. “I heard,” I continued, “that the death rate among slaves is higher here than in the other mines.”

  The Guardsman looked at me squarely, his hands on his hips. He wasn’t a young man, as the darkening areas of his yellowish headfur betrayed. “My people get hot meals, regular rest, and more comfort than in the other mines,” he said. “As you’d know, if you had any mine experience at all.” He turned away in disgust.

  The explanation he didn’t offer then arrived the next day in the form of a group of slaves being transferred from a mine further north: three men and a woman, all skin and bones, standing unsteadily, coughing violently. Naddam greeted their guards at the gate of the compound with something less than politeness, gruffly directed them to the dining hall, and called his own guards to take the newcomers to their assigned barracks. He caught the woman and supported her during a coughing fit, then handed her to a guard with a gentle touch.

  8

  Naddam walked back to where he had left me, near the command barracks; the gentleness I had seen in his handling of the woman vanished in an explosion of anger.