by Frank Tuttle
“The tunnels. Where do they go?”
“One ends in the middle of the cornfield. The other extends much farther, to a point deep in the forest. Unfortunately, that tunnel has suffered a series of collapses, and the last fifty feet can only be crawled through, single file.”
I grunted, eyeing the stove. The builders had been clever. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary at all.
“Marlo knows about them? Anyone else?”
She shook her head. “Marlo knows. No one else knows. Except Singh, of course.”
Of course. Singh, who knew all and said very little.
I did some math in my head. Thirty artists, twenty odd staff – it would take a couple of minutes to evacuate everyone to the tunnels, even using both entrances.
A couple of minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, unless you’ve got a mob breaking down the doors at your back.
“We’ll need to split everyone up into two groups. One group is yours and the other belongs to Gertriss. If you yell for a retreat, your group goes down below with you from here. Same for Gertriss. You’ll need to show her the closet entrance, tell your people who to follow.”
“And which group will you follow, Mr. Markhat?”
“I’m my own group, Lady.” I gave the stove a pat and headed out of the kitchen. “Don’t worry about me.”
If she replied, I didn’t hear it. I was far too busy worrying about me.
She didn’t seem to be lying when she denied casting any deadly lightning charms. Of course, with sorcerers, even amateur ones, you could never tell. But she certainly had nothing to gain by denying her actions, if indeed they’d been hers.
Too, reaching down from the sky and catching up five adult humans and snatching them into the heavens was way beyond the ability of all but the most accomplished sorcerers. I hadn’t seen a stunt like that since the War.
I pushed that thought aside. If creatures on a level with Hisvin and the other sorcerous War heroes that haunted the High House were mixed up in this, the likelihood that any of us mortals would survive was dropping by the minute.
Toadsticker was still warm where it touched my hip and leg. I put conjecture concerning the Corpsemaster aside and grasped at straws instead. Had Evis snuck a major spell into the sword, somehow? I doubted it. A minor charm against the undead wouldn’t raise any hackles anywhere, unless you count any undead I happened to impale. But putting military-grade spellwork into a civilian trinket would be a risk even Avalante seemed unlikely to take. Especially just to protect a small-time finder with offices on Cambrit Street.
And if I put Lady Werewilk out of the running too, things were bleak for finders and clients alike.
I frowned and stomped. Chasing down errant husbands or wandering wives was beginning to look better with each passing moment.
Gertriss came running up, her eyes flashing. “All right, no more stalling. Tell me how you did that, out there.”
“Later, oh junior member of the firm,” I said. Lady Werewilk was coming up fast behind us. “Right now we have to get this lot ready for a siege. Lady Werewilk is going to show you something, and tell you part of our plan. Go with her. And listen.”
Gertriss glared. I failed to help matters by returning a jaunty wink.
Behind her, Marlo grimaced and rose, clutching at his side. The bandage wasn’t showing any blood yet.
Lady Werewilk loosed a string of shouted obscenities so virulent Marlo settled back down on the couch.
People stared. She took advantage of the sudden silence and started splitting people into the two escape groups. Gertriss soon found herself surrounded by a wide-eyed gaggle of artists and a handful of equally terrified household staff.
She immediately started prowling among them, adjusting their grip on whatever tool or club they’d managed to arm themselves with.
I grinned. My admiration for Hog women was rising. Like Mama, Gertriss was obviously not going to let anyone ever know she wasn’t the master of all situations.
Lady Werewilk led Gertriss out, to show her the secret door to the tunnels. I was left with Marlo and a nervous crowd of painters.
I plopped down on the couch beside the wounded man.
“I didn’t have time to compliment you on your woodcraft before,” I said. “Getting past that crew alive was no small feat.”
He grunted. His wound and fatigue were catching up with him.
“Wouldn’t be too quick on that,” he said. “Don’t think they tried to kill me too hard. Not once I started heading back this way.”
“You sure about that?”
“I ain’t dead. Proof enough for me. Fifty men, more?” Marlo fell into a coughing fit. “They was watching the roads, Finder. They don’t want anybody from here telling tales in town. That’s what they was out to stop. Leastways I hope so.”
I nodded. He might be right, I decided. Because if they did break down the doors with murder on their minds, they’d have to kill thirty of Rannit’s rising young artists. And even the Regent wouldn’t decide to turn a blind eye toward an atrocity on that scale.
If what Marlo suspected was true, we’d be safe, at least for a while, as long as we stayed indoors. Long enough, say, for a few hundred men to dig something valuable out of the ground not far from here.
There was only one way to test this theory, though.
I rose.
“Oh Hell no.” Marlo put his calloused hand on my elbow. “I know what you’re thinkin’, Finder. I’m telling you it’s a sui-i-cide.”
I pulled away. “Maybe. Tell Gertriss she ought not to cuss like that, when you tell her what I’ve done. And when she calms down, tell her she needs to drop that blasted sword and find herself a smallish crossbow.”
Marlo shook his head. His bandage was beginning to show tiny spots of blood. “I ain’t got the strength to wrestle with you, son. I wish your fool self luck.”
I nodded, made for the door, then veered off toward the kitchen.
“Almost forgot my corn bread,” I said.
Marlo’s only response was a long, loud snore.
I knew the massive cast-iron stove was rigged to move, but even so I nearly had to risk the ire of Gertriss by fetching Lady Werewilk to show me the secret lever.
But I found it, and with a surprisingly small bout of grunting and gasping I managed to pull the hot oven out from the wall, revealing a dark recess beneath it.
I heard female voices, so I felt for a ladder or a stair and found a flight of nice solid stair treads leading down into the dark.
The dark. I hadn’t planned my expedition very well. I spent a frantic moment rummaging through the kitchen drawers, found a box of matches, and fashioned a makeshift torch for myself out of a long-handled soup spoon, a dry dishrag, and a dip in the grease-pot on the counter. A second dishrag went in my pocket for the return trip.
I hoofed it down the secret stairs. Fifteen steps down—I counted in case I was in the dark coming up—I encountered a complicated set of gears and pulleys. A cable led up beside the stairs, towards the stove and the secret door. Another cable was attached to a trio of hanging barrels, each filled with sand.
I found a lever and pulled. Above me, the stove groaned as it was pulled back into place by the lowering of the heavy barrels.
I grinned. The machinery was well oiled and nearly silent. But of course it would be, since Lady Werewilk presumably used it often to reach her secret sorcerer’s lair.
The rectangle of light above me winked out as the secret door closed. The barrels hit the earth with a soft thud-thud-thud.
I cranked them back up, hurrying to spare my torch.
That done, I descended the rest of the stairs. It was wide enough for two to walk side by side. It ended on hard-packed earth, in a tunnel made of very old bricks.
I waved my torch around. My choice of paths was limited. The tunnel behind the stairs ended abruptly in a blank brick wall. The tunnel ahead stretched out straight and dark and doorless.
Doorless bu
t not empty. Junk of every description was stacked against both walls. Half a dozen torches were among the leaning items. They’d been left ready to light, with pitch already soaked into the rags wrapped around the top.
There was also a pair of bent brass candelabras perched atop a rickety old curio table. The candles showed some use, but had plenty of light left. I chose a torch instead, on the off chance I needed to shove it suddenly into a stranger’s face somewhere down there in the dark.
The ghost of the huldra, of course, came out to play. I heard it begin to whisper its nonsense words, felt it try to show me secret things, hidden things, useful things, all lurking in easy reach, just at the edge of the torchlight, just in the spaces between the tumbling shadows.
I countered the huldra’s unintelligible ramblings by muttering an old Army marching song.
But the truth is, I hadn’t been in a tunnel since the War. I’d been a dog handler, back in the day. Rooting out dug-in Trolls, in places deeper and darker than this.
I felt for Petey’s doggy head, remembered where I was, and how long it had been since I buried him in a ditch a thousand miles from home.
The huldra tried to show me how I could raise his shade with a few strange words and an eye-blurring turn of my shaking right hand.
I cussed aloud and lurched ahead, shouting the song in my head.
My new torch sputtered and hissed. Shadows darted and spun at my sides, cast by the irregular mounds of junk that lined both walls. There were old farming implements mixed with hat-racks and odds and ends of lumber and tight-wrapped canvas tents and bits of armor and equine tackle. Rat’s feet scampered amid it all, fleeing my wobbling circle of light.
The huldra whispered to me a word that would send them all away.
I shivered, because for an instant I almost understood it.
I hurried on. A break in the refuse heap on my right revealed a plain wooden door. It was banded with old iron, and showed faint marks from an axe. I decided that Lady Werewilk’s sorcery room lay behind it, which meant only a fool would so much as peep through the key-hole. Bad things happen to those who would trespass a sorcerer’s tool room. Even if the sorcerer wasn’t among the favored in Rannit.
I kept walking. The huldra kept talking. I tried to keep the marching song in my head, but I kept forgetting the words.
Finally, a new tunnel joined mine. I could see it veer off, straight and even more packed with refuse than this one, until it too rose up in a wide iron stairs.
“The laundry room,” I said aloud. Echoes spoke in reply.
I kept going toward the deeper dark.
Lumber, on both sides. A stench hit me then, that of rot and decay. My hand was on Toadsticker’s hilt before I realized I smelled a stack of burlap potato sacks that had been down here a year or two too long.
A bit beyond that, though, were stacks and stacks of squarish flat parcels covered by big canvas sheets.
I paused, lifted the sheet, tore open the brown paper that covered the parcel.
Even the huldra shut up.
It was a painting.
I didn’t need a good strong light and a lecture in fine art to decide it would never grace the walls of a high-priced gallery in Mount Cloud, either.
I’ve never understood the attraction some artists have to a bowl of fruit. It’s a bowl. There is fruit. I fail to comprehend the need to immortalize the scene in oils.
But that’s what I saw. Even my untrained eye aided only by fickle torchlight could see it was a poor effort. The colors were all wrong, the bowl looked more like a sagging gourd than baked clay, and the stacked fruits might as well have been drawn by a child.
I ripped away the paper on the next, and the next, and the next.
Each was exactly the sort of amateurish failure I’d expect out of most young artists. Bowl of fruit. Sad-eyed puppy. Girl in sunset. More fruit with bowl.
The next one, though—woman reaching out and up to release a yellow butterfly. It was breathtaking, even in the torchlight. I spent a few precious minutes checking the names and dates helpfully printed on the back of each canvas frame, and discovered that none other than Serris Eaves had painted both the loathsome bowl of fruit and the stunning butterfly woman, a scant four months apart.
I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it meant something. In the back of my mind, the huldra’s shade chattered and railed. It knew, of course. But we no longer shared a language, and even at that moment I was glad of the lack.
I let the paintings fall back beneath the canvas. So. Lady Werewilk’s artists started out as rank amateurs. Now they were raising ire and eyebrows in the finer galleries of Mount Cloud.
And Lady Werewilk turns out to be a sorceress, with something worth raising a small army for hidden on her estate. She claimed she’d never suspected any old magics lay slumbering nearby.
Which might be true. She had after all hired me.
I hurried on. The tunnel got colder and wetter. The floor was slippery now, and big black blind crickets crept quietly along the walls. They did not chirp. I wondered if they even remembered how. Water began to drip, somewhere ahead.
I’d hated the sound of dripping water, when I was down deep with Petey. The Trolls tended to stay close to running water, even if it was only a drip. Petey could smell them, feel their great wide eyes upon him, but I had no such senses. After a while, I always felt their eyes on me, could always feel their hot breath warm on the back of my neck. I’d spent days down in the tunnels, absolutely sure my next and last sensation would be a Troll claw raking down my spine.
I’d learned early on to ignore my own senses. Petey’s doggy senses never lied.
Mine never stopped lying.
The flames from my torch began to gutter and smoke. The tunnel’s builders hadn’t thought about hiding vent pipes anywhere. I fought back a cough – wouldn’t do to alert some sharp-eared sorcerer that people were sneaking around beneath their heels – and I hurried on.
The brick walls grew coats of slime. Rivulets of water slithered down them. Drips from above sputtered in the flame of my torch.
I came upon the first section of collapsed bricks. Part of the ceiling had caved in, narrowing the tunnel by half. I was able to squeeze through, fouling my clothes as I did.
A few steps, another collapse. The earth was wet, and it stank. I knew the stink well. Though this time, it lacked any hint of Troll.
A few hops over mounds of mud, a few slides through narrow openings, and I was on my hands and knees, pushing the torch forward as I went. My hands were covered with mud. My knees were soaked and torn.
I’m not sure how long I crawled. Time took on that odd quality it had during the War. I stopped being aware of minutes or hours or even days. There was only the present, only the movement at hand. Put this knee here, put this hand there—stop, listen, breathe, move. Hand, knee. Hand, knee. And again. And again, and again.
I was well out into the sudden opening before I realized I no longer needed to crawl.
I lifted the torch. The walls and the ceiling were intact. The floor was muddy, yes, and even puddled with water in places, but it no longer stank of old decay.
I rose. A few dozen steps brought me to a rusty iron stairs, and it cast shadows on a blank wall, right behind it.
I’d made it. I was either under the cornfield or well inside the forest. I wasn’t sure, though I was betting I was in the forest. Judging from the amount of torch left, I’d been crawling for quite some time. I hadn’t seen the place where the tunnels branched. I hoped it wasn’t buried by a hundred tons of fallen earth.
Beside the stairs was another barrel, and in it were fresh torches. I didn’t dare light one to take out into the woods. I’d need to rely on starlight out there.
I mounted the stairs, testing each gingerly before trusting it with my weight. The rust was superficial. I climbed up. Six treads took the top of my head to the bottom of the ceiling.
There was another mechanism here, different from the one at t
he kitchen end. This one appeared to lift a flat iron panel on a set of epically rusted hinges. The handle and the crank bore flakes of rust too, and though they appeared to be functional I cringed at the thought of the noise they’d probably make.
I crept back down the stairs, hoping some thoughtful Werewilk had left behind a pitcher of grease for just such an occasion. They had not.
So I climbed back up the stairs, seated myself by the crank, and snuffed out my torch on the stairs.
Then I took the crank in both hands, gritted my teeth, and slowly put my weight against it.
It turned. It creaked. It groaned. It made each and every noise one could ever hope to attribute to centuries-old ironwork whose constant companions were moisture and neglect.
I made a few very soft noises of protest myself, but I kept the damned thing turning and hoped the din wasn’t drawing every well-armed murderer from here to Rannit to a spot right by my hapless head.
It took me half an hour to lift that bloody trap door high enough for me to squeeze my muscular, youthful frame through it.
But at last, that’s just what I did.
Chapter Fourteen
I was a long way from the cornfield. Towering blood-oaks rose up about me close on every side. The door had been cleverly set in the midst of a ring of oaks. I hoped that had dulled any of the sounds the gears had made.
I lay there for a long time, listening.
I needn’t have been so worried about making a bit of a racket. The bugs were singing and buzzing and chirping. A wind was tossing the heavy limbs around, filling the leaves with endless whispering and the scratching and rubbing of limb against limb. Thunder rumbled in the distance, though a few stars peeked down through brief clearing in the boughs.
I hadn’t lain there very long before I heard voices too.
Voices and clattering and even a snatch of laughter.
I moved very carefully, after that.
I couldn’t see enough sky to get my bearings. I looked at the trees to see which side the moss grew on, but it grew thick and lush everywhere.
