William, however, insisted that he could deal with Aonarán who, he said, had made of himself merely a harmless gibbering idiot, with all his damaging attempts to die. The damsel would not be persuaded. She was so set against the idea of the prince’s adventure that eventually William decided to set off on his quest for the gold without informing her. In fact the quest was kept secret for many reasons; not least that King Warwick thought it best for the denizens of the other kingdoms to remain forgetful of the masses of unclaimed treasure beneath the Northern Ramparts. Even though the mountains were within the borders of Narngalis and therefore belonged by right to the Narngalish Crown, some pirates might take it into their heads to become salvagers themselves.
Fionnbar Aonarán was fetched from the Asylum for Lunatics, and brought into the presence of Prince William and his father. Upon seeing the immortal madman they could not help but reel with shock. His numerous attempts to slay himself had wrought appalling disfigurements upon his person; he was reduced to a wreck that had once been a man. Black-charred with white scars, his flesh was peeling, suppurating and ulcerated. His head was bald, his fingertips burned to rounded stumps. A single wobbling tooth remained in his gums. Only his eyes, his pale-blue, swimming eyes like marbles set in cinders, were not ugly and ruined. The wretch moaned and wrung his horrible hands and sighed and whistled. Scant sense could be had out of him, and no one could be certain how much he understood of what was said to him, but he made no clear sign that he refused the scheme.
As soon as his expeditionary party was ready William took his leave of his family and set off northwards. They went on foot; William’s most esteemed advisor, Sir Torold Tetbury; a column of knights and men-at-arms, including the Knight-Commander of the Companions of the Cup, Sir Huelin Lathallan; a band of miners and engineers; explorers learned in cave lore, and a chirurgeon-apothecary. Aonarán was under close guard, for he could not be relied upon. Several carts accompanied them, drawn by hired teams of monstrous Marauders, strong as oxen, large as bears, chosen for their dimwittedness and lack of cunning. One vehicle carried the expedition’s equipment. It was intended that the other carts, which were empty, would be filled with gold on the return journey. William also brought a couple of cages of pigeons, well hidden from Kobold Watchmen, so that he could send a message to King’s Winterbourne as soon as the party re-emerged. It was a risky venture, for if the Watch found the avian contraband it would go harshly with the Narngalishmen.
Without horses they plodded slowly; it took more than three weeks to reach their destination. Ninember was waning and the skies were thick with cloud as Aonarán at last guided the party to the high, thin mouth of a cave that opened into a flank of Storth Cynros. Above them towered a sheer rock face with tumbled boulders piled at its foot.
When Aonarán’s custodians moved towards the cave’s entrance, drawing their charge with them, the pale-eyed man immediately became agitated. He tried to pull away, but they held him firmly in their grasp. When they asked him what was wrong he shrieked that he was afraid of the dark and the creatures that lurked there, afraid of goblins, afraid of the Marauders that accompanied the expedition. ‘Here I brought you,’ he gabbled, ‘but I will not be going in!’
‘Look you,’ said William’s knights, patiently repeating all their earlier assurances, ‘we will light your way with the brightest torches. With sword and charm we will protect you from unseelie wights. The goblins have departed, though we have brought gold-plated blades as a precaution, and as for the Marauders, these ones here, who we have employed as bearers, are as docile as lambs and as stupid as cockroaches.’ After much ado Aonarán reluctantly capitulated, though he did not let up his whining.
Leaving the carts and carrier pigeons at the cave’s threshold, under the care of six men-at-arms, the explorers passed in amongst the shadows of the underworld, entering the labyrinth by way of lower avenues rather than by the bridge into lofty Sølvetårn, because they had no wish to stray anywhere near the halls of the Mountain King. William deemed it wise to avoid the chance of encountering any eldritch wights lingering around the goblin fastness. More pertinently, Aonarán had assured him that the golden caves and the legendary werefire were situated far from goblin haunts. ‘They would not go near it,’ he said in a rare moment of lucidity, ‘they built their honeycombs far, far away.’
Into the close-walled darkness the party ventured, lanterns held high. A glacial draught was blowing out of the cave’s throat, as if to warn that the mountain had a heart of ice. On either side the walls sloped inwards, glistening with a thin film of seepage. The swarmsmen porters were forced to stoop, to avoid cracking their massive skulls on the low ceiling. Underfoot the ground was rutted and fissured, littered with rubble and ankle-wrenching stones. Carefully the men went forward, until the long slit of daylight that marked the entrance was lost from sight behind them.
A moment later Aonarán stopped in his tracks and refused to go on. He threw himself to the ground, shuddering and squealing, shouting that the goblins would seize him if he dared to venture any further; that they would torment him without pity and hang him up on the highest pinnacle with two bags of bones for neighbours. It took a great deal of argument to convince him of his security, but in the end he weakened a second time and went on. He seemed, at least, to know where he was going; if he was frightened of the dangers, he was at least confident of the route.
It appeared to the Narngalishmen that their ardour to retrieve the lost gold was matched by an equal and opposing force: the hostility of the deep places. As they followed their marginally sane guide through the echoing tunnels, ever descending, they too were seized by inordinate terror. They sensed, or seemed to sense, spectral presences. Half-glimpsed movement unnerved them; they felt as if hostile stares from alien eyes were boring into their backs. And they could not help but call to mind the traditional denizens of underground: wights both seelie and unseelie, the dead, worms that ate the rotting flesh of the dead, roots that strangled boulders and sucked nourishment from the casts of worms. Pairs of glowing lights blinked at them from crevices. Footfalls padded alongside them in the gloom, always slightly outside the range of the lanterns’ light. It was hard to breathe; the air was alternately muggy and stifling, choking with mould spores or as cold as the void between the stars; so cold it was like an attack of steel razors shredding the lungs. The men’s lamps illuminated milky rock lining the walls, pallid crystal veined with gold. Beyond the reach of the lamplight a watery luminosity strained itself out of some fluorescent rocks. Radioactive ores glowed faintly, and the miniature lights of eldritch miners winked as they scurried away from the intruders. From time to time sounds of agonised squealing, or groaning, or giggling issued from far away in the dimness. Only the Marauders remained unaffected, plodding along, clearly oblivious of the atmosphere of tension.
The miners marked their route with daubs of paint, though none could be certain whether tricksy wights might erase or shift these signposts. They tried, also, to commit their path to memory, for no one trusted their half-mad guide to lead them safely back to the outside world.
Fionnbar Aonarán kept up his complaints of being frightened of the darkness. He baulked and protested, but with bribes and threats his supervisors forced him to proceed, and when he did so he went forth with disturbing sure-footedness, avoiding chasms, easily locating stairs and ramps. The Narngalishmen suspected he could see very well in the dark, like a fell-cat.
In truth, it was more due to the fact that the madman had spent so long in those places, he had become familiar with them. He could read their smells and interpret their air currents. He could recall their layout. So excellently were maps of the underways imprinted on his brain that it only took two days for him to lead the expedition to their first goal.
With their crowbars William’s miners levered aside a pile of boulders and there it was—the jagged-edged gap through which the Silver Goblins had escaped from their jail. The engineers examined the structure of the aperture, making ce
rtain it would not collapse. Then the prince and several men stepped into the prison caves, brandishing swords and lanterns.
They found themselves inside the first of a series of interconnected chambers, large and low-roofed, all lavishly coated with burnished gold. Diffused images of the intruders reflected from the walls and ceilings. Mellow light gleamed off every surface except the floor, which was covered with flagstones. On closer inspection, having judiciously wielded their picks, the miners discovered that a continuous layer of gold half an inch thick had been inserted between the flags and the ground beneath, thus preventing the goblins from tunnelling their way out.
‘Seamless!’ one of the engineers cried in approval, squinting at the sombre glory that surrounded him. ‘A masterful undertaking, this.’
Austere were the furnishings; they consisted of hundreds of marble couches, with no cushions or coverings. That was all.
‘Hard beds,’ commented one of the miners.
‘Grim indeed is this prison,’ said William, holding aloft his lantern as shadows fluttered. ‘There is scant comfort here.’
‘They gave our forefathers no comfort,’ said Lathallan, who stood beside him. ‘Therefore it was right that they should receive none. What say you, Captain?’
His second replied, ‘Methinks, sir, it was too generous of the weathermasters to provide those vermin with any restingdais at all. A floor paved with golden knives to warm them through the centuries would have been more fitting.’
‘I shall leave here a team of miners and engineers,’ declared William, ‘along with some men-at-arms, and six swarmsmen to do the heavy labour. While they are busy hacking the bullion off the walls and pulling it out from beneath the floor, the rest of us will go looking for the Inglefire.’
His officers acknowledged the command, and the miners began to unpack their equipment, but as the prince and Lathallan were about to make their exit from the caves of gold the knight-commander paused and said, ‘Sir, an uncomfortable notion has just now struck me.’
‘Speak.’
‘What if the goblins ever return?’
William stood awhile in dark thought. At length, he nodded. ‘I see your point,’ he said. ‘If they come back to Tir, even if it be many years hence, future generations of mankind will need a ready prison in which, with any luck and cunning, they might incarcerate the wights once more.’
‘Yet,’ said Sir Torold Tetbury, at the prince’s elbow, ‘there is much treasure here, and much good would it do the realm.’
‘Indeed we face a dilemma,’ said William, ‘and I would that I had foreseen it ere we set forth on this quest. I was so caught up in my gold-gathering scheme that I did not think through the ramifications. No doubt Asrăthiel pointed it out to me, but I was paying no heed to anyone who gainsaid my proposal.’
On the spur of the moment the prince consulted with Sir Torold, Lathallan and his other close advisors. Ultimately they decided to repair the small amount of damage they had done, then seal the caves, and leave them alone. Instead of salvaging this treasure they would pin all their hopes on the Inglefire and its incalculable hoard. When they returned to King’s Winter-bourne they would not make public the location of the golden prison. The Northern Ramparts would be declared a forbidden region, and legislation would be enacted to punish any would-be looters who dared to go fossicking there.
After they had reached their verdict they turned to Aonarán and bade him lead them to the pit of flames. The madman flung himself to his bony knees and commenced to wring his hands.
‘No!’ he cried, writhing in terror. ‘Have mercy! I brought you here, is that not enough? Let me be going back to the upper world now! I was trapped here for too long, too long.’
William, however, would not be moved. ‘You must lead us, Aonarán,’ he insisted. ‘After you have done your duty we will take you back to King’s Winterbourne, where you may dwell in comfort for the rest of your days.’
‘For the rest of my days!’ shrieked Aonarán. ‘That will be forever! When your proud city has crumbled to ruins, there will I be still! When all of you have turned to dust, there will I be still! How say you now, royal prince? Can you be giving me comfort for the rest of my days?’
For that, William could devise no answer.
It took more expressions of intention to reward or punish to persuade the cringing man to keep going. Eventually he acquiesced once more, having no other choice, and again he began to show them the way. Into the ventricles of the ground they plunged, descending steep ramps and stairs, striding along lengthy tunnels that sloped ever downwards.
For two more days they travelled, pausing briefly for rest stops. Sometimes they suspected that Aonarán might be leading them astray, but his keepers threatened and cajoled, and he vehemently asserted that he was loyal and true. Ill at ease with all this bullying, William privately vowed never again to traffic with the sorry excuse for a man, and decided to make sure he was well treated for his pains upon their return to the city.
Along the way they caught glimpses of wights of many kinds; knockers, resembling pint-sized mineworkers; hag-like spinners at their wheels; a lone family of trows in their trailing rags the colour of smoke. When the adventurers paused and sat down to take a meal they were careful not to leave food unattended on the rocky floor, for if they took their eyes off it, it would vanish. The evasive fridean haunted these hollows; stealers of victuals, players of eldritch bagpipes. Whenever the men passed underground pools or lakes they had to prepare to resist eldritch temptation, for as often as not, from the dismal water there would arise naked female forms of waif-like loveliness; lovely, despite their unhumanness—the chins perhaps a little too small, the jawbones a fraction too delicate and piscean, yet graceful as grasses, with long, green hair that poured down over their long white backs. Silent in the murk, these wild water-wights would stretch out their arms and beckon. Perhaps for centuries they had hungered for mortal flesh. The men spoke rhymes to ward them off, and clutched at the amulets they wore about their necks, and threw salt at the drowners, but one of the Marauders was tricked, and jumped into a pool. The ravishing girls twined their arms and hair about him, dragging him down despite all efforts to save him. Inky waters closed over the bulky figure and he was never seen again.
Screaming in panic after witnessing this episode, Aonarán tied to escape, but his guards held him, binding him with ropes.
On went the expedition, through the confines of darkness, through the intense cold and unforgiving inimicality that reigned in the underworld, beneath incalculable tons of rock. Three times they chanced upon small groups of roaming kobolds, and drew their swords, ready to fight. Each time, the toxic imps scuttled away and the men put away their weapons.
‘Evidently the goblins did not order all their slaves into the four kingdoms,’ said Sir Huelin Lathallan. ‘Some remain to patrol the underworld.’
‘I daresay they did not love the notion of humankind trespassing in the halls of Minith Ariannath,’ Sir Torold surmised.
‘These are busy dominions, the entrails of the world,’ muttered Lathallan. ‘Far too busy.’
As they passed down the centre of a long gallery of natural rock, picking their way across a ridged floor on which boulders squatted like toads, there came, from the opening of a tunnel to the left, a glimmer of strange light. The radiance was silver—shafts of pure silver, translucent, like rays of moonlight or starlight purified and concentrated; or long diagonals of virgin ice glimmering ethereally as if lit from within by some numinous force. At the same time the men heard a low rumbling as of distant thunder underground. They halted, drawing their swords and crowding together for protection. The touch of the light upon their skin was tingling, as if a million silver pins sizzled, delightful and excruciating. And the silver pins pushed into their minds, harped on wires across their consciousness, and resonated, and pulled taut their veins.
There was a disturbance in the lightless narrows between spindles of silver.
Shadowy
figures were moving there.
All of a sudden Aonarán howled and flung himself away from his captors. He tried to run, but the ropes brought him up short and his guards grabbed him. He grappled with them, yowling. Believing the wretch could see in the dark, the men were frightened, for it was evident he had perceived something that scared him from the remnants of his wits; but they held fast and took a firmer grip on their weapons and raised their lanterns high. For an instant of uncertainty they stood poised, like carvings.
Out of the shadows stepped the tall, lithe shapes of men, yet not human.
At first the explorers could not believe what they were seeing; they thought it some illusion, some trick of the senses invoked by glamour. Gradually they comprehended. Those who stood before them were, in truth, knights of the Argenkindë. There were about twenty of them, dressed in sable and silver; handsome beyond dreams, insidious as poison, spirited and sparkling, dangerous as hatred. Their hair cascaded past their shoulders, blacker than midnight in a coal cellar, shot through, here and there, with a crow’s plumage sheen of blue iridescence. Silken strands of this marvellous hair rose and fell, buoyed by currents of gramarye, and tiny stars seemed snagged therein. The eyes of the goblin knights were dark, and outlined with slender smudges, as if they had pencilled the rims of the lids with kohl.
When the ogrish Marauders comprehended what it was that stood before them they roared in alarm. They were large and slow, and burdened with heavy packs; for them there would be no escape. Overcome by terror, they cast themselves flat upon the ground and covered their eyes. As one, the men unsheathed their gold-plated swords.
One of the unseelie incarnations was leaning against the side of the tunnel a little way behind the rest, his arms folded across his chest, one knee bent and his foot braced against the wall. His profile could not be described in the gloom. Lazily he turned his head sideways to look at the Narngalishmen, saying, ‘Greetings, Your Royal Highness. What brings you to my domains?’ and William instantly recognised the voice of Zaravaz.
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