Dark Lord of Derkholm (43 page)

It was bigger than he had thought. He could see Sukey and Reville through the sheet of blueness, on the other side of it, staring as if they had been put under a stasis spell. There were three eyes in the blueness, all of them watching Blade sarcastically. He understood why he had been feeling as if he had been plunged into a bath of icy acid.

“Oh,” he said. “It's you.”

Me,
agreed the demon.
I said we would meet again. Why are you here? Have you come to steal demon food like the other humans?

“Demon food?” said Blade.

They dig it out of the mountain, and they take it out of the world,
the demon told him.
And they set the place around with wards and demon traps. Take just one ward off for me. I will make you rich.

“I—I'm afraid I don't know how to,” Blade said.

Or I could kill you if you don't,
the demon suggested.

“But that wouldn't help you,” Blade answered through clenched teeth.

Then what reward would persuade you?
wondered the demon.
Let me see
. Blade felt it pressing all over his mind, sickeningly. He could not think of any way to stop it. He just had to stand there, shaking all over, until the demon seemed to have finished. Then he felt its laughter pulsing through him.
He wants Deucalion to teach him magic! I could arrange that.

But the White Oracle said Deucalion would teach me anyway, Blade thought. That was a comforting thought, until Blade realized that the Oracle had not said how it would be arranged. Sweat came popping out all over Blade at the idea that Deucalion actually might be a demon. He opened his mouth to protest again that he had no idea how to take demon wards off. And he realized the demon had gone. Strange.

“Phew!” said Reville. “That was nasty! What
is
demon food?”

“I really don't know,” Blade said.

“I think the poor thing was hungry,” Sukey said. “It wasn't going to do anything to Blade. It was just letting him know they were stealing its food.”

“Poor thing—nothing!” said Reville. “Don't ever get sorry for a demon, love. It will eat
you.
”

“Then are
people
demon food?” Sukey asked. “It's not people in those trucks, is it?”

“No, they just eat souls usually,” Reville said. “We
must
get a look in those trucks.”

They hurried along the earthy gallery the ladder had brought them to. Shortly there was another hole and another ladder, this one in much better repair, with dim light shining from below. Reville dismissed his tuft of witchlight, and they all clambered quietly down. Halfway to the next earthy floor the demon wards began, strung across the shaft like cobwebs made of nearly nothing. At least most of them were warding against demons, but Blade saw others that seemed to be warding the mine against being found by other people. Sukey found all of them fascinating. She stretched a hand out to the nearest.

“Don't
touch
them!” Reville and Blade whispered, both at once.

Sukey snatched her hand back and climbed on down, looking chastened. Reville went very cautiously from then on, because the ladder brought them down into what was clearly a side passage in the main mines. At the end of the passage trucks were being pushed past in a much wider space that was properly lit by electric lights in wire cages. Chains clinked. Ragged people grunted and strained, and the lighted part was filled with the
rumble, rumble, squeak
of heavy wheels moving on metal tracks. After one cautious look Reville led them along the passage the other way.

“Too many overseers out that way,” he said. Blade lost touch with where they were after that. As Shona had pointed out, his sense of direction was not the same as other people's. He simply went where Reville went. He thought they might have gone parallel with the main part, until they came to a slanting place, where smaller trucks were squealing slowly downhill under a raw-looking ceiling propped up by girders and beams. To Reville's delight, these trucks were not covered. Each one seemed to be heaped up with earth and broken rocks.

“What is it?” Reville wondered. “Some kind of ore?”

He and Sukey both took a handful and went upslope to the nearest wire-caged light. The place where it hung was probably weaker than the rest. The walls and ceiling here were entirely lined with iron girders, making it rather narrower than the rest of the sloping track. When Blade squeezed up beside them, Reville and Sukey were sorting knowledgeably through their handfuls of dirt. Sukey seemed to know as much about minerals as Reville did. But they were both puzzled.

“Bit of iron ore, shale, limestone—a lot of nothing really,” Sukey was saying.

“Not even gold-bearing,” Reville agreed. “Not volcanic. So no diamonds.”

“It could be some kind of valuable chemical,” Sukey was suggesting when they all heard the squealing rumble of another truck coming. They pressed themselves against the iron wall to let it go past, and Sukey said, still inspecting her handful, “If I didn't know better, I'd say this was just what it looks like—any old earth and stones.”

“It must be
something
valuable,” Reville said as the truck came rumbling past.

Blade understood then. Sukey was right, right about the demon and right about the stuff in the trucks. The demon had been trying to tell them, in its demonic way, and no demon could ever do anything without threats or laughter. But he never would have realized what it had been trying to say if they had not been standing inside the narrow place surrounded by iron. As the truck came through, rumbling the walls and the tracks, with its pile of cold earth almost brushing Blade's face, he found himself receiving a blast of solid magic—magic that seemed like part of the very smell of the heaped-up earth and stones. And he remembered that iron insulated magic. “Got it!” he said. “It
is
just earth and stones, and it
is
valuable! Our whole world's magic. The magic's part of the earth. That's what they're stealing—magic!”

Reville gave a little whistle. “So demons eat magic!”

“They must do,” Blade was saying when Reville's whistle seemed to be taken up from further down the passage, loud and shrill. Someone along there shouted.

“I see them! Intruders in shaft twenty! Up there in the arch!”

Sukey and Reville threw down their handfuls of earth, and they all three ran. And ran, and ran, with whistles and shouts urging them on to dodge around corners, whisk up side passages, or double back the other way, stumbling on stones, splashing through at least one underground river, stubbing toes on iron tracks, tripping over spades, and racing bent over behind rows of big metal trucks. Reville was good at this. He was
trained
for it, Blade thought, struggling to keep up, with his robe flapping around his knees and getting in his way. Deeper and deeper into the mines they went. They pelted through wet yellow mud in front of rows of chained people, who all leaned on their spades to watch them.

“Tried that. Been there,” Blade heard as he splatted past. “Bet you my next meal they'll be caught in gallery five.”

And Blade was. He was not sure if it was actually gallery five or somewhere else. He only knew that he somehow lost Reville and Sukey, turned down the way he thought they had run, and ran full tilt into a pair of overseers. He was grabbed in an instant, and his arms were twisted behind him. Blade struggled and fought and tried to translocate, but his ability to do that was still not there. All he could do was put his cold spell on them, but they were used to the chill of the mines and hardly seemed to notice. They ran him along the wide earthy tunnel to a metal door and shoved him into a small room like an office. The door clanged shut behind him. Blade, half dazzled by the much brighter light in there, found himself blinking at Barnabas.

Barnabas was blinking, too, and breathing heavily. “You can't be allowed to leave, you know,” he said, in his usual jolly way. “Sorry about this, but this is a highly secret operation, Blade. It beats me how you ever got inside the secrecy spells over this area. They were some of my best.”

The only thing Blade could think of was to play stupid. “I don't understand,” he panted. “What are you doing here?”

“Mr. Chesney had to have an agent this side,” Barnabas said, “and he chose me. Or did you mean the earth mining?”

“That,” gasped Blade. “Just
earth
. I mean—”

“It's full of magic,” Barnabas said. “Everything in this world is.” And while Blade was thinking,
I was right!
Barnabas went on, “But it doesn't endure very long in the world it goes to. It does marvels while it does last, of course. I believe they market it as the new superfuel and use it to run all their machines, but they have to keep getting more.”

“Don't they pay for it at all?” Blade asked.

“Why should they? It's just earth,” Barnabas said. “They pay me and the overseers rather well for our help, naturally, but who else would they pay?”

“Then why do you keep it secret?” Blade demanded.

“Patriotic people like Querida or your father would be bound to object,” said Barnabas. “I suppose there may even come a time when this world gets short of magic, but that won't be in our time. It won't be for hundreds of years. Meanwhile you wouldn't deny Mr. Chesney and his world all the obvious benefits of massive amounts of cheap power, would you?”

Why is he explaining to me like this? Blade wondered. As he wondered, he realized that Barnabas was keeping his jolly, crinkled, bloodshot eyes entirely on Blade's face. As if Barnabas was carefully not looking at something behind Blade. Blade whirled around. But it was too late. The overseer behind him reached around with a long arm and jammed a pad with something smelly on it against Blade's nose and mouth. Then he held Blade's head hard against his chest until Blade was forced to breathe the smelly stuff in. Blade did not even manage to put his cold spell on Barnabas, although he tried.

W
HEN PRINCE TALITHAN
's green haze swung outward and let Derk and his companions out into the garden of Derkholm, Derk almost understood how it was done. At any other time he would have been fascinated, but now, when Talithan asked gravely, “Do you require anything more, Lord?” Derk said, “Only to be left completely alone, thank you.” Prince Talithan understood and stepped away into the haze again.

Derk had only vague memories of what he did for some while after that. He supposed he must have put the dogs, the pigs, and the Friendly Cows in the right places and given them food. But maybe Old George did that. Derk recalled Old George jogging beside him like a skeleton out for a run, protesting, while Derk was sealing Derkholm off from the rest of the world, but Derk was putting out his full power to do that, and he had no attention to spare just then, even for Don, who galloped anxiously at his other side, saying, “Won't you even let Mum in then?”

“She won't be coming here,” Derk said, and almost lost his magics in the terrible, bitter grief at the way Mara had left him. “Go away, Don.”

“Shona then?” said Don.

Shona, Derk remembered, was probably on her way here. “All right. I'll leave the back gate,” he said, and made a small, almost invisible passage to it, that you could only find if you knew where the back gate was. Lydda, if Lydda was still alive, could come in that way, too. The rest of the grounds Derk sealed with a strength he did not know he had. Then, as far as he remembered, he went and camped on the terrace. He must have put out the balefire and filled in the trench when he made himself a hut out of the tables. But he did nothing else. He simply could not be bothered to take the rest of the Dark Lord scenery away. He sat in the hut. After a while, cautiously and kindly, the pigs came along and settled in with him. Derk scratched between wings and rubbed backs from time to time. It was the only comfort there seemed to be.

Blade was gone. Mara was gone. Lydda was gone. Kit would not be coming back.

It was wrong to have let Kit have charge of the battles. Kit had been too young, just like Blade and Lydda. And the soldiers had hated Kit. And I knew they hated him, Derk thought, and I still let him fly up there where they could take a shot at him, merely because I was finding it all so difficult being the Dark Lord. It should have been
me
they shot.

He did not know how many times he relived that awful moment when Kit dwindled and tumbled in the air with three arrows sticking in him. He relived himself staring at the surging ripples in the lake where his first, best, cleverest, most successful griffin had gone down. He knew exactly where Kit's body would be, under the water. He would go and fetch it up when he had got over hurting about it so much.

But the hurt went on. Derk sat in his hut on the terrace and hurt and wished people would leave him alone. There were constant interruptions. Everyone came on tiptoe and terribly
kindly,
which irritated Derk. Don came at least once an hour. Don was growing, Derk noticed after a vague number of days, bidding fair to be nearly as big as Kit. Seeing Don made the hurt worse, even though Don usually just looked at him and then went away. Old George always came with some gloomy news or other.