A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  A dim obscurity prevailed. There was no sign of illumination, no lamps, no torches, only dusty beams of light that streamed from some inexplicable source. Rykkla thought, for a moment, that she might still be semiconscious, perhaps still dreaming, that her brain had been affected by her fall and that all that was occuring and had occured in the last several hours were only the frenzied visions of a concussion. Yet, after a moment’s consideration she concluded that she was not mistaken and that all of her senses could not have conspired to mislead her at one and the same time.

  It’s sunlight, she rejoiced, blessed sunlight penetrating some mighty fissure in the rocks above. At first she could see nothing beyond the hazy effulgence: her dark-accustomed eyes were dazzled by the sudden brightness. She squeezed them tightly shut, then reopened them, stood still, far more stupified than astonished. It was, as she had thought, a city.

  It might have at first been confused with the titanic mass of rock that must have collapsed in the formation of such an extensive hollow, in fact, she suspected, rightly enough if she only knew it, that the city was indeed constructed from just that very mountain of débris. It was little more than a tumbled assortment of blocks, like that which might be found after the demolition of a large stone building, though each of these vaguely cubical boulders were themselves as large as houses. It looked like a hive with numberless ranges of cells, capriciously arranged, but a hive on a gargantuan scale and which instead of bees might have lodged all of the homeless megatheria of the antediluvian epoch. Between these was a labyrinth of galleries, some higher than the loftiest cathedrals, others like cloisters, narrow and winding.

  Above all was a mighty superstructure of rock rising to an immeasurable height, supported by enormous cliffs, buttresses and columns that vanished into the mists to her left and right, fading away into the fleecy film of cloud that swirled around them.

  How could she see all of this? How could she look upon the strange city instead of being plunged into utter darkness? That puzzled her greatly. The vast landscape was lit as though by daylight, but there was no brilliancy, none of the dazzling irradiation of the sun, none of the cold lambency of the moon, not even the wan illumination of the stars. The illuminating power in this subterranean world, she judged from its trembling, flickering character, its clear, dry whiteness, was evidently electric; perhaps something in the nature of the aurora borealis, except that this phenomenon was more constant and able to light up the whole of the vast cavern.

  A mist obscured the horizon and its width vanished in obscurity. Look hard as she might, Rykkla found it impossible to determine where the stupendous roof began.

  Above her head was a tremendous vault, a sky, as it were, composed seemingly of a conglomeration of nebulous vapors in constant motion. The lowest clouds must have been drifting at an elevation of as much as two thousand yards. Higher, heavier, denser clouds rolled along, and electric currents produced an astonishing display of light and shade. Suddenly shattering a deep shadow would be a ray of startling beauty and intensity. Yet for all of the brilliance, there was no heat and the atmosphere was as chill and clammy as ever. The cumulative effect was, oddly, sad and excruciatingly melancholy. Instead of an infinite firmament of blue, studded with stars, moon and sun, Rykkla was all too aware that above her head was a roof of granite as heavy as a planet. She was, in truth, imprisoned as she had never been in the Baudad’s palace, buried in a vast excavation whose size was impossible to estimate, imbedded in darkness like a fly in sooty amber. She gazed in a profound and gloomy silence.

  “Where are we?” she finally asked her giant friend.

  “Here,” he replied, and began walking again, descending into the city, forcing Rykkla to trot behind.

  She wondered, not for the first time since seeing the great cavity, how such a hollow could exist beneath the earth; that is, she knew that she could not be very far underground, yet the distant cloud-shrouded roof seemed thousands of feet overhead.

  On all sides were more giants, those who were already in the streets and those who were coming out of their dwellings, to curiously stare at the diminuitive visitor. They were all of a kind, similar to Thud in general outline: mountainous, bulky, powerful; un-like Thud, their skins were as grey and poreless as slate, their bodies bloated and spherical, their heads tiny and almost featureless. They were uniformly nude, male and female, and what little clothing any one of them wore was limited to stiff-looking grey aprons (which she later learned were woven of asbestos). Rykkla thought that they looked uncomfortably like slugs or maggots crawling from a forgotten mountain of garbage. Thud, she knew, had once been of these people, and it was only his long exposure to the outside world that had transformed him into as much semblance of humanity as he now bore. She glanced at her big friend with much the same look one gives an acquaintance who is just recovering from a debilitating illness.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To see the king.”

  “King? What king?”

  “The king of the Kobolds. He’ll help.”

  Resigning herself to wonder, Rykkla allowed herself to be led ever deeper into mystery. This, as it turned out, took the form of a seemingly random and mountainous pile of titanic cubical boulders deep within the city. As they approached, she was awed to see that these blocks were individually as large as the Great Temple of Musrum in Blavek; and there must have been hundreds of them heaped above her. There was a gate of sorts, though it looked to Rykkla like little more than a rough hole scrabbled out of the soaring wall of granite, whose guards deferentially allowed Thud and his companion to pass. (Rykkla was amused to the point of giggling, an extraordinary thing for her to do, by the sudden realization that the Kobolds looked for all the world like the Baudad Alcatote’s eunuchs.)

  The interior of what Rykkla assumed was the palace of the Kobold king was very much what an ant might perceive upon wandering into a geode: an arched convexity encrusted, chandelier-like, with pendant crystals of every imaginable shape and transparent tint. Rykkla was reminded of a planetarium she had once visited in Toth: a dark chamber whose dome seemed at one and the same time within arm’s reach and infinite, sparkling with artificial stars and galaxies. Now that I think of it, she realized, it looks a lot like a nightclub. At the center was a squat stalagmite, shaped like a low, truncated cone. Above this hung, stalagtite-like, a luminous crystal the size and general shape of a coal barge. Between its nether end and the level top of the stalagmite was located (precariously, thought Rykkla) the throne of the Kobold king.

  “King Slagelse!” greeted Thud familiarly. “Look who I found!”

  “Not another one?” grumbled the king, not unfriendlily but not altogether friendlily, either. King Slagelse looked not especially un-like every other Kobold Rykkla had so far seen, with perhaps the sole exception being the perfunctory, elaborately macraméd beard that decorated his chest. He wore an artless crown of uncut gems, each the size of Rykkla’s fist.

  “This one’s different,” explained Thud, “I like her.”

  “You didn’t like the other one?”

  “She was the princess! That was different!”

  “Hm. And what do you propose to do with this?”

  “I want to keep her . . . ”

  “Hm?”

  “And we’d like to get back to our jobs, if we could.”

  “You mean the circus? We thought that was obliterated.”

  “We can always find some way to make up a show,” interjected Rykkla. “We’ve done it many times; we’re experts.”

  “Experts, hm?”

  “I’ve been worried to death about Thud, your, uh, Highness,” said Rykkla. “I thought that he was dead, and I didn’t know what to do. I searched everywhere I could.”

  “And what exactly is Thud to you?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “He was the princess’s servant, her man, if you will. What is he to you? Is he part of your sideshow? A prop in your act? Something to attact a f
ew extra pfennigs?”

  “No! No, of course not! At least not any more so than I am. I care about Thud very much. I . . . I . . . well, I love him, your Highness.”

  “Love, eh?”

  “Well . . . ”

  “Look here,” the king said, almost conspiratorily, as he bent over toward the girl, beard dangling noisily, Rykkla noticed that it was full of lumpy, uncut gemstones. “We have no use for Thud any longer. It’s not his fault. It was a mistake we made in thinking that we were doing a Greater Good in replacing the human infant with the infant Thud. It has only resulted in ruining what could have been a fine Kobold. Look at him! Barely a shadow of his potential self. We’d be safe in wagering that he cannot be over seven feet tall, if that, and certainly he has wasted away to a mere three hundred pounds.”

  “All muscle, your Highness,” added Thud.

  “Hmf. And look at his face! Looks more human than Kobold, poor fellow. Shrunken. Shriveled. Wasted, “ Thud shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed “, No. There’s no longer any life for him here. Might have been, if he hadn’t elected to follow the princess, but it’s too late to go back now.”

  “Then you’ll help us get back to the surface?”

  “Nothing would give us greater pleasure,” replied the king, settling back into his throne with a sigh, “but there are complications.”

  “This war that I heard about?” Rykkla offered, stabbing in the dark.

  “Yes, the war,” replied the king, confirming her hit.

  “But I haven’t heard about any war. I mean, Crotoy has been invading the northern territories of Tamlaght, and there have been a number of skirmishes, but it’s all been pretty feeble. They’ve been doing it for years and years. Nothing that anyone could honestly call a real war.”

  “No, no, it’s not that at all, or at least not directly. We take it that you know the Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Do you know then the story of the favor she performed for us? how she brought the faeries from Soccotara to Guesclin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that turned out to be a terrible mistake. Just goes to show what happens when you try to do someone a kindness. Not all her fault. We take full responsibility.”

  “What happened?”

  “As soon as Hod Tawley, who was king of the faeries in Soccotara, arrived on this side of the strait, he tried to usurp the position occupied by Spikenard, the reigning king of the Guesclin faeries, who, with considerable justification, considered this an imposition.”

  “So there is a war between the faerie kingdoms?”

  “Yes, and it is making life here sheer hell.”

  “How so? You seem to live in entirely different worlds.”

  “We’d be uncertain that you’d understand, had it not been for your recent experiences, notably the sad one concerning your circus. Hod Tawley has taken it upon himself, realizing that he is hopelessly outnumbered, to play exceedingly unfair. His unsportsman-like behavior is being manifested in his determination to drop one of the moons on top of his enemies.”

  “Do what?”

  “Drop one of the moons on top of his enemies. Hawley, evidently, has little conception of the real nature of the universe, just because Kobolds choose to live underground we are not entirely ignorant of the universe around us; indeed, our very nature makes us something of natural scientists, and he, Hawley, that is, apparently believes that the moons, sun and stars are quite literally small objects at a not very great distance. No doubt he thinks the sky is a rigid dome roofing over a world shaped like a serving tray!”

  “But he can’t do that,” protested Rykkla. “The moons are huge things, I know that much. Even if he could do it, if one dropped onto the earth it’d be catastrophic.”

  “Of course it would; the holes that mere pieces of the damned thing have been punching in the planet have been aggravating enough. Having the entire thing fall is quite simply unacceptable.”

  “I can see where it would be, but what can you do about it? Granted that such a thing is even possible, of course. Just a moment,” she said, suddenly struck by an appalling thought. “You just mentioned that pieces of the moon have been hitting the earth?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “That was what destroyed my circus wasn’t it? a piece of the moon?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it’s possible for the faeries to bring the entire moon down?” The memory of the destruction of her circus was still a vivid nightmare, her imagination recoiled from the larger catastrophe like a mouse from a tiger.

  “Oh, it’s possible, all right, have no fear about that. The faeries have ways and means, they do indeed. And we certainly do intend to do something about it. That’s why it seemed more than circumstantial that Thud would so fortuitously, ah, drop in and so inarguably Musrum-ordained that you would join him.”

  “What are you getting at, your Highness?” Rykkla said with considerable foreboding. “What do Thud and I have to do with all of this?”

  “Nothing all that difficult, we assure you. Nothing that we’d hesitate doing ourselves, were we not prohibited from the surface of the earth. The merest bagatelle for a surface-dweller. We ask nothing more of you than the trifling favor of begging the faeries to abandon their plans to drop the moon.”

  “That’s all? Why should they listen to me?”

  “Why not? Besides, we’ll be glad to do a favor for you in return.”

  “Oh? like what?”

  “Return you and Thud to the upper world?” he said as he passed a slate salver toward her. “Have a lichen?”

  Rykkla and Thud were provided quarters that were, at least by Kobold standards, luxurious, though she thought them not just monastic but penitent. The beds were vast slabs of marble, like those that might be found in a candy shop or mortuary, the floors and walls were undecorated marble, the furniture the kind of approximations that a child might attempt with his or her building blocks. The only artfulness was purely serendipitous: an accidentally attractive pattern in the coloring and texture in the parquet floor that was intrinsic to the materials used; the use of elaborately twisted, sinuously polished flowstone for some of the furnishings; enormous, spectacularly faceted crystals hollowed out as containers.

  Water flowed from a spout in one wall, falling into a basin scooped out of the floor, which also seemed to be the sole sanitary facility. Thud’s adjoining chamber was an indistinguishable duplicate.

  As tired as Rykkla was, she was not so tired as to be not pleased. “How can I sleep on this?” she grumbled, slapping the chilly surface of the bed with her hand. “Do they think that I’m a slab of meat in a butcher shop?”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Thud.

  “And why not?”

  “I don’t think they know what a butcher shop is. Kobolds only eat moss, lichens and fungus.”

  “Well, there’s no question that I’m taking the king up on his offer.”

  “You’re going to see the faeries?”

  “Hardly. That’s a fool’s errand if I ever heard of one. As soon as you and I are out of here, the king’s never going to hear of us again. What’s Slagelse going to do once we’re back on the surface? Sue me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m not staying here a moment longer than necessary. I’m very tired of being shut up in places that I don’t like by people I don’t like who want to do things to me that I like even less or who expect me to do things that I don’t want to do.” She looked at Thud’s sad face, that, for all of its simplicity and inexpressiveness, looked tired and worried. An unfortunate side effect of his increasing humanity. She sighed and allowed her clenched muscles to relax a degree. “I don’t like lying, but what am I to do? These faeries aren’t going to listen to me; why should they? And if they are at war, why shouldn’t they treat us like spies or something? Who knows what they could do? I certainly don’t. I haven’t even believed in faeries for most of my li
fe. And look at it this way: Slagelse isn’t exactly acting in the most honorable way by making our release subject to such conditions. Why doesn’t he just let us go, instead of holding us hostage to our own parole like this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  At that moment a female Kobold rapped at the doorframe, carrying a large tray covered with steaming bowls and plates. Bid to enter, she placed the food onto a low table and retreated, not once removing her beady eyes from the human girl. Rykkla, not at all unused to being stared at, returned the scrutiny photon for photon. It was her first close look at the female of the species and it had for her much the same morbid fascination that some people have for sanguinary vehicular accidents. The Kobold looked like nothing so much as Thud with a pair of half-filled grain sacks attached to his chest. If, in fact, Rykkla was at least partly responsible, as the king implied, for Thud’s humanization, then she was immeasurably proud of that. Then the bizarre mental image intruded of Thud and a Kobold woman atop one of the marble slabs, bumping together like a pair of barrage balloons and she was unable to repress her second uncharacteristic giggle of the day.

  “Feeling better?” Thud asked.

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so,” she said, mentally apologizing. “Is that food?”

  “Uh huh. Good, too.” he replied, already inserting things into his capacious mouth. Even after witnessing it so many times it was invariably startling to watch the giant eat; his mouth was so wide that the whole top half of his round head seemed to hinge backwards, like the lid of a coffeepot, as he dropped food into the resultant circular opening.

  “What do we have here?” she asked, poking around on the tray. Nothing looked very familiar and it all smelled a little like hot topsoil.

  “Moss,” Thud replied, “mold, lichens, mushrooms. That’s a really good mildew soup; you should eat it while it’s hot.”

  Un-like Princess Bronwyn, who when faced with Koboldan cuisine had prefered near-starvation, Rykkla was far more cosmopolitan. In her career, she had learned that it was prudent to eat what was available when it was available. Whatever her private opinions might have been, she silently helped herself to portions of each dish, though it might have been noticed by someone more observant than Thud that none were particularly lavish servings.