Quicksilver (66 page)

Even so, the hunt lasted for perhaps an hour, making its way generally downhill. Jack’s only hope was to get out in front of them and flee through the darkness. But they had torches and they knew their way around, and had spread the alarm down the mountain and so no matter what Jack achieved in the way of running, he found himself always surrounded. There were any number of near-escapes that ended in failure. The million poky branches of the alder trees clawed his face and threatened to blind him and caused him to make more noise than he wanted to as he moved about.

Toward the end, he got into situations where he could have escaped, or at least added a few minutes to his life, by killing one or two people. But he didn’t—an act of forbearance he wished could have been observed and noted down by some other sort of Watcher, a lurking mystery with a mirror on a stick, so that news of his noble decisions could be provided to Eliza and everyone else who’d ever looked at him the wrong way. Far from earning him universal admiration, this only led to his being surrounded by some half a dozen men with torches, standing just out of sword-range and darting in to sweep flames past his face when they thought they saw an opening. Jack risked a look back over his shoulder and saw no one behind him, which seemed a poor way to surround someone. He wheeled, ran a couple of steps, and hit a wall. A
wall.
Turning back around, he saw a torch-flame headed right for his face and reflexively parried the blow. Another came in from another direction and he parried that, and when the third came in from yet another direction he parried it with the
edge
instead of the
flat
of his blade, and cut the handle of the torch in two. The burning half spun in the air and he snatched it while slashing blindly in the other direction and hurting someone. Now that he’d drawn blood, the other hunters stepped back,
knowing that reinforcements were on their way.
^*
Jack, keeping his back to the building, crept sideways, sword in one hand and torch in the other, occasionally taking advantage of the latter’s light to glance over his shoulder and gain some knowledge of what he’d run into.

It was an old wooden building. The door was closed by a padlock the size of a ham. Wooden shutters had been pulled shut over the windows and bolted from the inside. A gentleman would’ve been stymied, but Jack knew that the weakest part of any building was usually the roof—so as soon as he found a wood-pile stacked against the wall, he climbed up it and got up on top, and found clay tiles under his boots. These were thick and heavy, made to withstand hail-storms and tree-branches, but Jack with the strength of panic stomped until a few of them cracked. Fist-sized rocks were pelting down around him now. He stopped one that was trying to roll off, and used it as a hammer. Finally he created a hole through the tiles, threw in the torch, squeezed through feet-first between the wooden laths on which the tiles were mounted, and dropped through, landing on a table. He snatched up the torch lest it set fire to the place, and found himself looking at a portrait of Martin Luther.

His hunters—several dozen by now, he guessed—had surrounded the building and begun pounding, in an exploratory way, on its doors and shutters. The booms in the dark gave Jack a general idea of the building’s size and shape. It had several rooms, and
was therefore probably not a church, but not a mere cottage either. No one had tried to pursue him through the hole in the roof and he was certain no one would—they’d burn it. It was inevitable. He could even hear axes thudding into trees out in the forest—more fuel.

This particular room was a rude chapel; the thing he’d landed on, the altar. Next to the Luther portrait was an old and not very good rendition of a woman proffering a chalice with a communion wafer levitating above it, suspended by some ongoing miraculous intervention. It made Jack (who’d had enough, for one night, of accepting mystery drinks from eerie females) shudder. But from having spent too much time lately around miners, he recognized the woman as St. Barbara, patron of men who dug holes in the ground, albeit with all of her Catholic insignia filed off. The rest of the room was striped by plank benches. Jack hopped from one to the next to the back, then went sideways and found a kind of sitting-room with a couple of chairs and one of the towering black iron stoves favored by Germans. Turning on his heel and going the
other
way, he found a very heavy scale dangling from the ceiling; weights for it, the size of cheese-wheels; a cabinet; and, what he most wanted to see, a stairway going
down.

It was getting smoky in there, and not just from his torch. Jack mauled the cabinet open and grabbed a handful of kienspans. He’d lost his hat while running through the woods and so he stole one of the miners’: a conical thing of extremely thick felt that would soften impacts of head against stone. Then he was down the stairs, and none too soon as the old wooden building was burning like gunpowder. They’d make a big fire of it, throwing on whole trees: a fire that could be seen by the burghers of Bockboden, sending those Hexen-hunters a powerful message by which they’d be completely baffled.

The stairway went down for perhaps two dozen steps and then levelled off into a tunnel that went at least as far as Jack’s torch (which had consumed most of its fuel) could throw light. He lit a kienspan, which burnt a little brighter, but he still could not see the end of the tunnel, which was good, and to be expected. He began running along in a kind of crouch, not wanting to smash his head on the ceiling timbers, and after a minute, passed by a hand-haspel crammed into a niche in the tunnel wall, its ropes descending into a shaft. A minute later he passed by another, then another, and finally he stopped and decided he should just go down one of those shafts. He’d been down here long enough to stop being so proud of his own cleverness, and he’d begun to worry. The Hexen knew the territory better than he. They couldn’t
not
know that the
building was a mine entrance, and they must have anticipated that he’d find the tunnel. Perhaps the mine had other entrances, and they’d soon be coming down with torches and dogs and God knows what, as when they hunted burrowing vermin with their sausage-shaped dogs.

One of the hand-haspel’s buckets was at the top, the other down below. Jack climbed into the one that was up, and hugged the opposite rope, and by letting it slide through his arms was able to descend smoothly for a short distance: until he relaxed, and the rope slid too fast, and he hugged it tight out of panic, so it burnt him and made him let go, causing the same cycle to repeat, except worse. The only thing that interrupted this round was when, at the halfway mark, the lower bucket came up and caught him under the chin and caused him to let go entirely—which was fine, as he would have been stuck at that point anyway. He dropped, then, with only the empty, ascending bucket as counterweight, and what saved him was that the impact of his chin against same had set it swinging briskly back and forth, its rim biting into the rough wall of the shaft faster and faster as it rose higher and higher, throwing sparks and dislodging fusillades of jagged rock in Jack’s direction with every impact, but also slowing his fall with a corresponding series of violent jerks. Jack kept his head down and his kienspan up in case this shaft terminated in water, a possibility he should have considered earlier.

Actually it terminated in rock—the bucket landed unevenly and ejected Jack. Loose bits of stone continued to clatter down from above for a little while and hurt his legs, which was welcome as proof he hadn’t been paralyzed. The kienspan still burnt; Jack held it in a death-grip and watched the blue flame pour out of it and turn yellow as it moved sideways along the shaft, contrary to the normal habit of flames, which was to tend
upwards.
Jack kicked the bucket out of the way and did some moving about, and found that there was a rapidly building draft, approaching a breeze, moving toward him along the tunnel. But when he backed up to the other side of the shaft opening in the ceiling, the air was moving the opposite direction. Two flows of air converged at this point and moved up the shaft, starting now to make a certain wailing noise that Jack could not fail to liken to damned souls or whatever.
Now
he understood why the Hexen had gone to work felling trees up above: they knew that with a sufficiently enormous fire they could suck all of the air out of the mine.

He had to find a way out, which did not seem all that likely now, as he’d made the (in retrospect) mistake of going
down
to a lower level. But he chose the direction from which there came the
strongest flow of air, and began to move as quickly as he could. The faster he ran into the wind, the more brightly his kienspan burnt. But it burnt less brightly as time went on. He tried lighting a fresh one, but it, too, burnt feebly unless he waved it in the air, and then the light flared up and shone between the heavy bars of the wooden cage that kept the rocks from crushing him on all sides, and cast rapidly moving shadows, sometimes looking like angry faces of mangled giants, or huge ostrich-skeleton-monsters with scimitar teeth: all of which went together neatly with the deafening chorus of moans and wails made by all of the passageways as the breath was sucked out of them.

Around this time Jack also noted that he was on his hands and knees skidding the dully glowing kienspan along the floor. From time to time he’d see the low portal of one of those side-tunnels go by him to the left or right. Going by one of these he felt a strong cool breeze, and the kienspan flared up; but when he went past it, the air became dead and the kienspan went out entirely. He was breathing very fast, but it did him no good. With what strength he still had, he backtracked through absolute darkness until he felt the wind from that side-tunnel on his face. Then he lay down flat on the rock for a while and simply breathed.

Some time later his head was working more clearly and he understood that the flow of air implied an exit somewhere. He groped around on the floor until he found one of those elbow-planks, and then crawled sideways, headed upwind. He followed the air for an amount of time impossible to guess at. The low side-tunnel opened out into a smooth-floored space that seemed to be a natural cave. Here the river of air had been broken up into many trickles curving around rocks and stalagmites (tricky to follow), but (nose to floor, tongue out) he followed them for what seemed like a mile, sometimes standing up and walking through spaces that echoed like cathedrals, sometimes squirming on his belly through spaces so close that his head got wedged between the floor and ceiling. He sloshed through a pond of dead water that froze his legs, climbed up the other shore, and entered a mine-tunnel, then passed through tunnels of low and high ceilings, and up-and-down vertical shafts, so many times that he lost track of how many times he had lost track. He wanted badly to sleep, but he knew that if the fire went out while he slumbered, the air-current would stop and he’d lose the thread that, as with that bloke in the myth, was showing him the way out. His eyes, not satisfied with total darkness, fabricated demon-images from all of the bad things he’d seen or thought he’d seen in the last days.

He heard a bubbling, hissing sound, such as a dragon or Worm might make, but followed it, and the air-current, along a slowly descending tunnel until he came to water’s edge. Knocking off a few sparks from his flint and steel he saw that the air he’d been following this whole time was boiling up out of a subterranean lake that filled the tunnel before him and completely blocked his way out. Having nothing else to do, he sat down to die, and fell asleep instead, and had nightmares that were an improvement on reality.

N
OISE AND LIGHT, BOTH FAINT,
woke him. He refused to take the light seriously: a green glow emanating from the pool (which had stopped bubbling). It was so unearthly that it could only be another of the mind tricks that the broth of the Hexen had been wreaking on him. But the noise, though distant, sounded interesting. Before, it had been drowned out by the seething of the water, but now he could hear a rhythmic hissing and booming sound.

The green light grew brighter. He could see the silhouettes of his hands in front of it.

He’d been dreaming, before he woke up, about the giant water-pipes, the hubbly-bubblies that the Turks smoked in Leipzig. They’d suck on the tube, and smoke from the tobacco bowl would pass
down
through the water and come back upwards into the tube, cooled and purified. The dream had, he guessed, been inspired by the last sound he’d heard before falling asleep, because the cave had made a similar seething and gurgling noise. As he considered it (having no other way to spend the time), he wondered whether the mine might not have acted like a giant water-pipe, and the fire like a giant Turk sucking on its tube, drawing air downwards, through a water-filled sump, from the outside, so that it bubbled up into this tunnel.

Might it be possible, then, that by swimming for some short distance through this water he would come up into the air? Could the green light be the light of sunrise, filtered through greenish pond-scum? Jack began to work up his courage, a procedure he expected would take several hours. He could think only of poor brother Dick who had drowned in the Thames: how he’d swum off all active and pink, and been pulled up limp and white.

He concluded he’d best do the deed
now,
while the witch-brew was still impairing his judgment. So he took off most of his clothes. He could come back for them later if this worked. He took only his sword (in case trouble awaited), flint, and steel, and his miner’s hat, which would be good to have if he smashed his head against any underwater ceilings. Then he backed up the tunnel several
paces, got a running start downhill, and dove in. The water was murderously cold and he almost screamed out his one lungful of air. He grazed the ceiling once—the light grew brighter—the ceiling wasn’t there any more, and so he kicked against the sump’s floor and burst up into fresh air! The distance had been only three or four yards.

But the light, though brighter, was not the light of the sun. Jack could tell, by the echoes of the trickling waters and of the murmur of voices, that he was still underground. The strange green light shone from around a nearby bend in the cavern, and glinted curiously off parts of the walls.