“No traps that I can sense. I’d think they’d leave that sort of stuff outside, don’t you?” He sounded like he wanted to convince himself.
“You’re asking me to define the psychology of those who worship devils and rakshasas? Vehdna priests would guarantee you that there’s nothing so foul or evil as to be beyond the capacity of those most accursed of unbelievers.” I thought they would guarantee it. If they had heard of the Stranglers. I had not heard of them before I became attached to the Company.
Suvrin said, “Sir, I don’t think you should-”
Master Santaraksita had recognized the ancient books as something remarkable and just could not resist going up for an up-close look. I agreed with Suvrin. “Master! Don’t go charging-”
The noise sounded something like someone ripping tent canvas for half a second, then popped like the crack of a whip. Master Santaraksita left the floor of the unholy chapel, folded around his middle, and flew at the rest of us in an arc that admitted only slight acquaintance with gravity. Suvrin tried to catch him. Goblin tried to duck. Santaraksita bounced Suvrin sideways and ricocheted into me. The lot of us ended up in a breathless tangle of arms and legs.
The white crow had something uncomplimentary to say about that.
“You and me and a stew pot, critter,” I gasped when I got my breath back. I snagged Goblin’s leg. “No more traps, eh? They’d leave that sort of thing out in the caverns, eh? What the devil was that, then?”
“That was a magical booby trap, woman. And a damned fine example of its kind, too. It remained undetectable until Santaraksita tripped it.”
“Sir? Are you injured?” I asked.
“Only my pride, Dorabee,” he puffed. “Only my pride. It’ll take me a week to get my wind back, though.” He rolled off Suvrin, got onto his hands and knees. He had a definite green look to him.
“You’ve enjoyed a cheap lesson, then,” I told him. “Don’t rush into something when you don’t know what you’re rushing into.”
“You’d think I’d know that after this last year, wouldn’t you?”
“You might think, yes.”
“Don’t anybody ask how Junior is doing,” Suvrin grumbled. “He couldn’t possibly get hurt.”
“We knew you’d be fine,” Goblin told him. “As long as he landed on your head.” The little wizard limped forward. As he neared the point where Santaraksita had gone airborne, he became very cautious. He extended a single finger forward one slow inch at a time.
A smaller piece of cloth ripped. Goblin spun around, his arm flung backward. He staggered a couple of steps before he fell to his knees not far from me.
“After all this time he finally recognizes the natural order of things.”
Goblin shook his hand the way you do when you burn your fingers. “Damn, that smarts. That’s a good spell. It’s got real pop. Don’t do that!”
Suvrin had decided to throw a chunk of ice.
On its way back, the missile parted Suvrin’s hair. It then hit the cavern wall and showered the white crow with fragments of ice. The bird had a word to say about that. It followed up with a few more. I began to wonder if Lady had lost track of the fact that she was not, herself, the white crow, and in fact, was just a passenger making use of the albino’s eyes.
Goblin stuck his injured finger in his mouth, squatted down and considered the chamber for a while. I squatted, too, after taking time out to keep Suvrin and Master Santaraksita from making even greater nuisances of themselves.
Swan slithered into the chamber, disturbing the,crow. The bird said nothing, though. It just sidled away and looked put out about all existence. Swan settled beside me. “Wow. Kind of impressive even though it’s simple.”
“Those are the original Books of the Dead. Supposedly almost as old as Kina herself.”
“So why is everybody just sitting here?”
“Goblin’s trying to figure how to get to them.” I told him what had happened.
“Damn. I always miss the best stuff. Hey, Junior! Run up there and show us your flying trick again.”
“Master Santaraksita did the flying, Mr. Swan.” Suvrin needed to work on his sense of humor. He did not own a proper Black Company attitude.
I asked, “Why not try it yourself, Willow? Take a run at the books.”
“You promise to let me land on you?”
“No. But I’ll blow you a kiss as you fly by.”
“It’d probably help if you people would shut up,” Goblin said. He rose. “But by being blindingly, blisteringly brilliant I’ve worked it out anyway, already, in spite of you all. We get to the lecterns by using the golden pickax as a passkey. That was why Narayan Singh was so upset when he saw what we had.”
“Tobo still has the pick,” I said. A minute later I said, “Don’t everybody stumble all over each other offering to go get him.”
“Let’s just go together and all be equally miserable,” Goblin suggested. “That’s what the Black Company is all about. Sharing the good times along with the bad.”
“You trying to con me into thinking that this is one of the good times?” I asked, crawling into the cave right behind him.
“Nobody wants to kill us today. Nobody’s trying. That sounds like a good time to me.”
He had a point. A definite point.
Maybe my Company attitude needed attention, too.
Behind me, Suvrin grumbled about starting to feel like a gopher. I glanced back. Swan had had an attack of good sense and decided to bring up the rear, thereby making sure that Master Santaraksita did not stay behind and tinker with things that might cause a change in Goblin’s opinion about this being one of the good times.
“Where did he go?” I mused aloud. People were still working in the cave of the ancients, getting Lady and the Prahbrindrah Drah ready to go upstairs. But Tobo was not among them. “He wouldn’t just run upstairs, would he?” He had the energy of youth but nobody was so energetic they would just charge into that climb on impulse.
While I tromped around muttering and looking for the kid, Goblin did the obvious and questioned witnesses. He got an answer before I finished building up a good mad. “Sleepy. He left.”
“Surprise, surprise... what?” That was not all of it. The little wizard was upset.
“He turned right when he left, Sleepy.”
“He... oh.” Now I did have a good mad worked up. A booming, head-throbbing, want-to-make-somebody-pay, real bad mad. “That idiot! That moron! That darned fool! I’ll cut his legs off! Let’s see if we can catch him.”
Right was downward. Right was deeper into the earth and time, deeper into despair and darkness. Right could only be the road to the resting place of the Mother of Night.
As I started out, with intent to turn right, I collected the standard. The white crow shrieked approval. Goblin sneered, “You’re going to be sorry before you go down a hundred steps, Sleepy.”
I was tempted to abandon the darned thing before we had gone that far. It was too long to be dragging around in a stairwell.
89
“This stair has no bottom,” I told Goblin. We were puffing badly despite the direction we were headed. We had passed openings into other caves the stairwell had pierced. Each appeared to have been visited by human beings sometime in the past. We discovered both treasures and bone-yards. I suspected Sir Santaraksita, Baladitya and I could not live long enough just to catalog all the mysteries buried beneath the plain. And every darned unknown ancient thing I glimpsed in passing called to me like the sirens of legend.
But Tobo was still ahead of us and seemed deaf to our calling. Perhaps just as we did not waste time and breath responding to Suvrin and Santaraksita, who kept calling down to us from ever farther behind. It was my devout hope they would be smitten by good sense and abandon the pursuit.
Goblin did not respond to my remarks. He had no breath left over.
I asked, “Can’t you use some kind of spell to slow him down or knock him out? I’m worried. He really can’t
be so far ahead that he can’t hear us. Darn!” I had gotten tangled with the standard. Again.
Goblin just shook his head and kept moving. “He can’t hear.” Puff-puff. “But he don’t know that he can’t hear.”
Enough said. There was a bottom to the stair. And the Queen of Deceit was napping down there, with just a whisper of awareness left for manipulating a cocky, know-it-all boy who had a touch of talent and had taken possession of an instrument that could become a nasty weapon in the hands of those who would disarm her and have her slumber continue neverending.
After a while we had to slow down. The unnatural light faded until it became too weak to provide a reliable forecast of our footing. The occasional breezes rising past us were no longer cold. And they had begun to bear traces of a familiar, repugnant odor.
When Goblin caught that smell he slowed way down, worked hard on regaining his breath before he had to suck that stench down in its full potency. “Been a while since I’ve come face-to-face with a god,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to wrangle one anymore.”
“And what would that be? I never realized that I was in the company of an experienced god-wrangler.”
“It takes youth. It takes confidence. It takes brashness. Most of all, it takes a huge ration of stupidity and a lot of luck.”
“Then why don’t we just sit down here and let those sterling qualities carry Tobo through? Though I confess I’m a little nervous about his supply of luck.”
“I’m tempted, Sleepy. Sorely and sincerely. He needs the lesson.” Troubled, perhaps even a little frightened, he continued, “But he’s got the pickax and the Company needs him. He’s the future. Me and One-Eye are today and yesterday.” He started picking up the pace again, which meant a rapid heightening of the intensity of my skirmish with the standard.
“What do you mean, he’s the future?”
“Nobody lives forever, Sleepy.”
The burst of speed did not last. We encountered a mist that complicated the hazards of darkness. The visibility turned nil and the footing became particularly treacherous for a short person trying to drag a long pole down a tight and unpredictable stairway. The moist air was heavier than anything I had experienced since the fogs above the corpse-choked flood that had surrounded Jaicur during the siege.
A chilling shriek came from far back up the stair. My mind flooded with images of horrors pouncing gleefully upon Suvrin and Master Santaraksita.
The shriek continued, approaching faster than any human being could possibly descend that stairway. “What the hell is that?” Goblin snapped.
“I don’t —” The shrieking stopped. At the same time, I stepped down and there was no more down to step. I staggered, betrayed by the darkness. The Lance banged into overhead and wall. We had reached another landing, I assumed, until I felt around with my toes and the standard and could find no more edge. “What do you have over there?” I asked.
“Steps behind me. A wall to the right that goes forward about six feet, then ends. All level floor.”
“I’ve got a wall on the left that just keeps going on and a level floor. Gah!” Something slammed into my back. I had only an instant of warning, the sound of wings violently flapping as a large bird tried to stop before it hit.
The white crow cursed as it landed on the floor. It flopped around for a moment, then started climbing me. That would have been a sight, I am sure, had there been any light to reveal it.
I fought down an impulse to bat the creature into the darkness. I hoped it was here to help. “Tobo!”
My voice rolled away into the distance, then came back in a series of echoes. The heavy air seemed to load those up with despair.
The boy did not answer but he did move. Or something moved. I heard a rustle from less than twenty feet away.
“Goblin. Talk to me about this.”
“We’ve been blinded. By sorcery. There’s light out there. I’m working on getting our sight back. Give me your hand. Let’s stick together.”
The crow murmured, “Sister, sister. Walk straight ahead. Look bold. You will pass through the darkness.” Its diction had improved dramatically over the past year. Maybe that was because we were so much closer to the force manipulating the bird.
I felt around for Goblin, grabbed hold, pulled, dropped the standard, picked it up and pulled again. “All right. I’m ready.”
That crow knew what it was talking about. After a half dozen steps we transited into a lighted ice cavern. Make that comparatively lighted. Dim, grey-blue light leaked in through translucent walls as though it was high noon just on the other side of a few feet of ice. Much more light radiated from the vicinity of the woman asleep on a bier at the center of the vast chamber, some seventy feet away. Tobo stood halfway between us and it, looking backward, completely surprised to see us there and equally baffled as to where there might be.
“Don’t you move, boy,” Goblin snapped. “Don’t you even take a deep breath until I tell you it’s safe to do so.”
The form on the bier was a little fuzzy, as though surrounded by heat shimmer. And in spite of that, I knew the woman lying there was the most beautiful creature in the world. I knew that I loved her more than life itself, that I wanted to rush over there and drink deeply of those perfect lips.
The white crow sneezed in my ear.
That certainly took the edge off the mood.
“Where have we seen all this before?” Goblin asked, voice dripping sarcasm. “She must be awfully weak or she’d pluck something better from our minds than a replay of an old Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. There isn’t a castle built like this anywhere south of the Sea of Torments.”
“A castle? What? What castle?” The word for castle did not exist in Taglian or Jaicuri. I knew it meant a kind of fortress only because I had spent so much time exploring the Annals.
“We seem to be inside the keep of an abandoned castle. There’re dormant rose creepers all over the place. There’re tons of cobwebs. In the middle of everything is a beautiful blonde woman lying in an open casket. She just begs to be kissed and brought back to life. The part that always gets ignored, and that our ungracious hostess has overlooked here, is that the bitch in the story almost certainly was a vampire.”
“That isn’t what I see.” Carefully, detail by detail, I described the ice cave and the absolutely not blonde woman I saw lying upon a bier at its center. While I spoke. Goblin finally worked some subtle spell on Tobo that kept him too confused to move.
Goblin asked, “Do you remember your mother, Sleepy?”
“I vaguely recall a woman who might have been. She died when I was little. Nobody talked about her.” We did not need to go into this. We had work to do right here, right now. I hoped he got that message from my tone and expression.
“What do you want to bet that what you’re seeing is an idealized vision of your mother charged up with a whole lot of sexual come-hither.”
I did not argue. That might be. He knew the artifices of darkness. I did keep moving forward slowly, closing in on Tobo.
“Which would mean that up close and quickly, she doesn’t have a real good connection with what’s outside her.” Two decades ago it had become clear that Kina did not think or work well in real time, that she did best when she applied her influence over years rather than minutes. “I’m too old to be snared by temptations of the flesh and you’re too unsexed and undefined.” He grinned weakly. “The kid, on the other hand, is at that age. I’d give a toe or two to see what he sees. Ruff!” He gestured. Tobo collapsed like a wet sock. “Grab the hammer. Hang onto it hard. Don’t get any closer to her than you absolutely have to. Drag Tobo back to the doorway.” He sounded old and hollow and possessed by a despair that he did not want to share.
“What’s going on, Goblin? Talk to me.” This was a situation where we ought not to keep dangers to ourselves.
“We’re face-to-face with the great manipulator who’s been disfiguring our lives for twenty-five years. She’s very
slow but she’s far more dangerous than anything we’ve faced before.”
“I know that.” But my reaction was elation. My spirits soared. All my hidden doubts, kept so carefully submerged for so long, now seemed trivial, even silly. This lovely creature was no god. Not like my God is God. Forgive me my weakness and my doubts, O Lord of Hosts. The Darkness is everywhere, and dwells within us all. Forgive me now, when the hour of my death stares me in the face.
In Forgiveness He is Like the Earth.
I grabbed hold of Tobo’s arm and yanked him upright. I clutched him as tightly as I gripped the standard. He would not break away easily. Disoriented, he did not struggle when I pulled him back from the sleeping form.
I averted my eyes. She was beauty incarnate. To gaze upon her was to love her. To love her was to dedicate oneself to her will, to lose oneself within her. O Lord of the Hours, watch over and guard me in the presence of the spawn of al-Shiel.
“I need the pickax, Tobo.” I tried not to think about why I wanted that unholy tool. At this distance Kina might be able to pluck that right out of my mind.
Moving slowly, Tobo removed the pick from under his shirt and handed it over. “Got it!” I told Goblin.
“Then get going!”
As I started to do that, Suvrin and Santaraksita, gasping violently, stumbled into the light. Both froze, staring at Kina. In soft awe, Suvrin declared, “Holy shit! She’s gorgeous!”
Master Santaraksita seemed to be experiencing some confusion as he stared.
Suvrin started forward, drooling. I popped him in the funny bone with the dull end of the pick head. That not only got his attention, it relaxed his overwhelming interest in Kina. “Mother of Deceivers,” I told him. “Mistress of Illusion. Turn around. Get the boy out of here. Take him back to his mother. Sir, don’t make me hurt you, too.”
Something like a bit of mist rose from and hovered over the sleeping woman’s mouth. For an instant it seemed vaguely man-shaped, which reminded me of afrits, the unhappy ghosts of murdered men. Millions of such devils could be at Kina’s beck.
Water Sleeps tbc-9 Page 43
