A Company of Heroes Book One: The Stonecutter (18 page)

CHAPTER V

A FAMILY REUNION

The boy scuttles down from the rim of the crater. For a few moments, Bronwyn can hear only the rattling of dislodged pebbles. She has regained her feet, if not her equilibrium, by the time Henda appears around a curve in the path a few yards away.

“Henda! What in the world are you doing here?”

His only answer, considering he is mute, is in signs frenzied and incomprehensible to the girl.

“I don’t know what you mean. How did you get here?”

Exasperated by her lack of comprehension, Henda takes hold of one of Bronwyn’s sleeves and tugs her not up the trail toward the rim, but back down into the crater.

“What do you think you’re doing? I’m not going back down there, if that’s what you want. What do you want me to do?”

But the boy only holds a finger to his crescent lips and pulls her even more urgently. Annoyed, she follows him through the maze of shattered boulders at the center of the cirque until a black pit suddenly gapes in front of her. A moist, cool breath pours from its mouth. Trickles of water from the stream drool in clinquant threads over its polished lips. From somewhere far below she can hear the hollow clucking of the water as it struck an invisible pond or pool. In the spring, when the stream is at full flood, the hole must act like the drain in a dish basin. That last word triggers a memory from her geology studies. It’s a sinkhole! The whole crater is a sinkhole! There must be caverns under these hills and the roof of one that collapsed created the cirque. But why should I go down there? I don’t need a place to hide anymore. The little idiot’s going to get himself killed.

Henda is already a many yards down a steep semiconical slope of clay that has washed into the opening. He pauses, gesturing to Bronwyn insistently, then continues into the darkness. The princess follows, still hoping to stop him. The clay slope is as smooth as glass. Bronwyn slides down it, sitting half-reclined, braking with her heels, leaving behind a pair of deep furrows like a wagon track. The bottom is reached quickly, where she finds Henda waiting for her. Now that she is within the pit, she can see that it is not nearly so black as it had looked from the sunny exterior. The light that funnels from above lights her surroundings well enough for her to see clearly. Where the opening of the pit had looked like a velvet disk from outside, now, seen from the other side as it were, it is a circle almost as dazzling as the sun itself. It is also immensely wet.

Pools and rivulets of water are everywhere; it rains from pores in the ceiling in a chilly drizzle, and the rocks around her are covered with thick cushions of moss. Once again she feels an urgent tugging at her sleeve. She looks at Henda, puzzlement and grey clay covering her face in equal amounts. The boy nods his head violently, in what is apparently meant to be positive reassurance.

“All right, Henda, I’ll see what you’re after, but I’m not going to go into this very far. Understand?”

Henda nods even more vehemently and pulls her into the darkness. One side of the dome-shaped room they are in has been split, like an inverted bowl broken in a fall. They exit the chamber through this wedge-shaped opening, through which Henda slips like a mouse but which is barely wide enough to admit Bronwyn’s broad shoulders. She feel a momentary panic at a cold embrace of heavy stone that would have chilled even the most agoraphobic. To her relief the passage quickly widens, at the same time, however, it takes a steep turn downwards. She suddenly realizes how rapidly she is becoming committed to this venture: it would mean abandoning Henda if she turns back now. Well, that’d have to be
his
lookout; she has better things to do and certainly better places to be.

She knows for a certainty, however, that no matter what she does, the boy would refuse to follow her out. But yet, she is strangely reassured in that Henda seems to know what he is doing, that he is headed for a known destination. His certain urgency pricks her curiosity. She becomes aware of an odd thrumming; not quite yet a full-fledged sound, rather a nearly subliminal throbbing in the air. A waterfall?

The passage has widened considerably; it is still wedge-shaped, but the base of the triangle has broadened while the apex has lowered. Soon the floor, eroded by a million years of running water, begins to develop a rut in its middle. This eventually becomes a V-shaped gully that mirrors the ceiling above it; the passage in cross-section is now a narrow lozenge-shape. Walking consequently becomes extremely difficult, if not actually hazardous. Bronwyn has to brace her feet on either side of the sloping floor while at the same time the stone is as sleek and white as wet chalk. Every step risks a twists or broken ankle if a foot slips into the narrow cleft.

To her infinite relief the passage opens into a large chamber. Bronwyn stops, sits on the stump of a broken stalagmite and massages her cramping calves while her injured knee throbs with each heartbeat. Henda plucks at her sleeve, making horrible burbling sounds while trying to hurry her along, and she pushes his hand away.

“Whatever it is, Henda, it can wait five more minutes.”

The boy, morosely, sits at her feet to wait, burbling under his breath. As the pins and needles of her knotted muscles gradually withdraw, Bronwyn once again becomes aware of the odd thrumming. It is truly a sound now: a regular, modulated sibilance, rather like the chanting of priests in a church. It seems to come from the walls themselves, as though she were within a seashell listening to the susurration of her own surging blood.

The chamber in which she finds herself is not broad, but of indeterminate height. Down one convex wall pours a frozen waterfall of pearly calcium carbonate, the glistening mineral leached out of the soil above by percolating waters and redeposited hundreds of feet underground in an ossified imitation of its watery origin. Peering up its fluted cascades, Bronwyn can not see its top.
But then, why can I see at all?
She stands up and looks around. She realizes that she can clearly see the rock walls and Henda and the crystalline waterfall in a sort of grey phosphorescence, like that of a moonless night in the country. Before it can puzzle her any further, Henda seizes the opportunity presented by her ambulatority, clutches her by the hand and pulls her in a rush around the curve of the fall.

Here she sees the opening of yet another, larger passage. Bronwyn is well into it before she realizes that it is more than broad and regular, level and smooth-walled: it is artificial. The realization does not come as an immediate shock, as it should have if suddenly noticed. Instead it has been blurred by speed, like a motion picture film that has jumped its sprockets, a painting spread out as it were by the trowel of Henda’s rush. Nevertheless, Bronwyn suddenly begins to no longer wonder at where the boy is taking her, but to
whom
.

Before this revelation can manifest itself as reservation she reaches the end of the corridor. A circular stone blocks it as neatly as a cork in a bottle. The stone face is flat and intricately worked with sinuous patterns and angular symbols.

“I don’t like this,” she tells Henda and begin to hang back, away from what she knows is a door.
Who or what needs a door nearly twelve feet high and Musrum knew how thick? Or worse yet, what needs to be kept behind such a door?
Henda ignores her, picks up a rock from the floor and begins to beat on the decorated stone. It rang like a drum.

“Don’t do that!” cries Bronwyn, grabbing at the boy’s arm, wresting the stone from his hand, but it is too late: they have knocked and someone is answering. Grittily grinding like a giant gristmill, the stone begins to withdraw into the wall, revealing a round tunnel almost twice Bronwyn’s height. It is a short passage; a circular portal rather, or perhaps a kind of anteroom. When the stone has been pulled beyond its farther limit, it rolls aside. A fluttering, silvery light pours through the opening and Henda unhesitatingly plunges into it. Bronwyn, stiffening her courage, follows. On the far side of the doorway stands a massively familiar figure.

“Thud!”

There is no response from the giant. She turns in confusion and then becomes even more confused. There are Thuds all around her. Thuds everywhere.
Dozens
of them.

“Welcome, Princess Bronwyn!” come words in the kind of voice a ton or two of courteous granite might have. One of the giants steps forward and once again she thinks it is her missing friend. But this creature would have made the Thud she knew seem like a toy balloon compared to a dirigible. It has the same pumpkin-like head, and eyes like capers, but while it shares Thud’s general baldness a semicircular fringe of grey hair grew from ear to ear, passing beneath the nearly nonexistent chin. This hair, which looks like stringy lichens hanging from a smooth rock, is woven into scores of long, thick plaits that hung down the creature’s chest for at least a yard. The effect is rather like an inverts Medusa. A robe of grey asbestos, threaded intricately with gold and silver and trimmed with knobs of uncut semiprecious stones, hung from its shoulders. Beneath the robe it wore only a kind of wide apron of some sort of thick grey felt. In one paw-like hand it grasps a pole as large as the bowsprit of a ship.

“She seems confused,” says the creature. “She is worries about her friend. We should have thought of that. We will take her to him directly; and of course she must accept our apologies!”

Bronwyn realizes that the “him” the monster is talking about must be Thud, and he is doing so in the present tense.

“Thud is alive?” she asks.

“Oh yes! He is quite all right. Does she want to see him?”

“Yes! Of course! Yes, but...where is this? What is this place? Who are you?”

“This is impossible and so embarrassing!” the giant says to no one in particular. “Our first visitor in...how long? Never mind! It must be centuries, just centuries. Fellow royalty at that, and how is she treated? The princess must let us beg for her forgiveness!”

“Well, certainly, of course, yes...but...”

“No offense?”

“None! I...”

“What a relief that is! Oh, yes! Please, then, will the princess do us the unprecedents honor of coming with us? We must first make her comfortable and then all will be explained. This way if she will...”

The giant, with a swooping gesture, allows the princess to precede him through a doorway excavated to his gargantuan scale. With the exception of three who follow, all of the others remain behind.

She finds herself now in a large room, definitely a room this time and not a cave, lit by the same sourceless phosphorescence. It is a pleasant, soothing light, but its shadowlessness is disconcerting and flattening, it plays havoc with her sense of depth. The chamber is furnished, more or less, in a kind of High Rustic style, though instead of wood, logs or branches, everything has been fashioned from stalactites, stalagmites and some of the weirder formations that only caverns have the time to create. The furniture looks fluid and is polished to a lustrous translucency. It is very artistic, Bronwyn is sure, but she feel that the artfulness came from the nature of the material itself and not from any skill of the giants. She looks from the furnishings to the giant, then to the attendants who has accompany him. Like the others she has seen, they wear only thick grey aprons, like those of blacksmiths. She is glad she has never seen Thud that nude.

“May we make so bold as to introduce ourselves?” asks the giant.

“Please!” says the dazed princess. “You have have the advantage.”

“We are the princess’ humble and obedient servant, King Ooflool Slagelse, the one hundred and thirty-third.”

“King? Of what? Oh, I’m sorry, I...”

“No, not at all! Not at all! We realize perfectly well how few people from the princess’ world know of our kingdom. We rather prefer it that way, so she must not blame herself. Her ignorance is, in fact, very gratifying!”

“Well, ah, thank you, ah, your Highness.”

“This is our kingdom.” He wavs a hand in wide gesture. “The princess is in it now.” All she sees is the room they stood in; she is sure he must mean more than that. “I don’t understand you. This is Tamlaght. I haven’t left it.”

“The princess left Tamlaght the moment she stepps beneath the ground.”

“Well, I won’t argue the point now...But the name of this kingdom?”

“Name? We are not certain what the princess means. Our kingdom 149 Palaces & Prisons has no name.”

“Do please go on.”

“Our kingdom is far, far older than the princess’ own. It is old when the house of Slagelse was founded one hundred and thirty-three generations ago and the princess must understand that we are very long-lived.”

“Who are you, then? And, I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to put this:
What
are you?”

“We are a Kobold, these gentlemen here are Kobolds, our kingdom is of the Kobolds.”

“Kobolds? I have heard of such things...you, I mean...but only in fairy tales, in stories.”

“Really? We know that our people are known to the surface dwellers who live on the mountains above our kingdom but, between the princess and ourselves, we do not believe they are very intelligent representatives of her race. They would believe anything. It is very gratifying to learn that someone of relative education and breeding knew of us.”

“Well, I’d heard of Kobolds, of course, but I can’t honestly say I believed all that I was told.”

“No matter, no matter! We know that the princess is anxious to be reunited with her friend?”

“Thud? Yes, very much! I thought he was dead.”

“We are sorry about that, we really are. We had no idea that the two of you were in any way connected, not until we spoke to Thud. It is quite a surprise, the princess can believe us, to learn that one of our own has become so intricately involved in a convoluted upper-world intrigue.”

“Now that you mention it, that’s something I would like the answer to before I see Thud...Why do all of you look like him? And what do you mean, ‘one of our own’?”

“Why, because Thud’s a Kobold, of course.”

Before Bronwyn can close the mouth that has involuntarily dropped open, there is a knock at the door and the king calls out, “Enter!”