The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Chronicle of the Black Company) (55 page)

“If he woke up and found himself down here and didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, he might have panicked and taken off and just went in the wrong direction. I bet it’s his fault all those guys back there are dead. He probably tried to wake them up.”

Goblin grunted again. “There. That’s disarmed. I’d better go ahead and see what else is waiting. But first we need to get Mather pulled back so you all can get past him.”

“If you can weasel past him so can I.”

“Yeah, you can. But what about your boyfriend and your sugar daddy? They’ve got a little more pork on them.” He grunted and cursed softly as he fought Mather’s remains back over the hump in the floor. I noticed, for the first time, that the echoes were different in this more confined space, jammed with bodies. They were almost nonexistent.

88

I do not believe it was miles to where the Deceivers of antiquity concealed their treasures and relics but my body believed that before we got there. Goblin disarmed another dozen traps and found several more that had fallen victim to time. The underground wind whimpered and whined as it rushed past us in the tight places. It sucked the warmth right out of me. But it did not dissuade me. I went where I wanted to go. And was hungry enough to eat a camel when I got there.

It had been a long, long time since breakfast. I had a dread feeling it could be longer still before supper.

“It feels like a temple, doesn’t it?” Suvrin asked. He was less troubled than the rest of us. Though raised nearer this place than anyone else, he was less intimate with the legends of the Dark Mother. He stopped staring at the three lecterns and the huge books they bore long enough to turn to me and whisper, “Here.” He offered me a bit of crumbling flax cake from the pouch he wore at the small of his back.

“You must have read my mind.”

“You talk to yourself a lot. I don’t think you realize you’re doing it.” I did not. It was a bad habit that needed breaking right now. “I heard you when we were crawling through the tunnel.”

That had been a private discourse with my God. An internal dialog, I had thought. The subject of food had come up. And here was food. So maybe the All-Merciful was on the job after all.

“Thanks. Goblin. You feel any tricks or traps in here?” There were echoes again, though with a different timbre. We were inside a large chamber. The floor and walls were all ice that had been cut and polished by the flow of frigid water. I presumed the invisible ceiling was the same. The place did have a feel of the holy to it—even though that was the holiness of darkness.

“No traps that I can sense. I’d think they’d leave that sort of stuff outside, don’t you?” He sounded like he wanted to convince himself.

“You’re asking me to define the psychology of those who worship devils and rakshasas? Vehdna priests would guarantee you that there’s nothing so foul or evil as to be beyond the capacity of those most accursed of unbelievers.” I thought they would guarantee it. If they had heard of the Stranglers. I had not heard of them before I became attached to the Company.

Suvrin said, “Sri, I don’t think you should—”

Master Santaraksita had recognized the ancient books as something remarkable and just could not resist going up for an up-close look. I agreed with Suvrin. “Master! Don’t go charging—”

The noise sounded something like someone ripping tent canvas for half a second, then popped like the crack of a whip. Master Santaraksita left the floor of the unholy chapel, folded around his middle, and flew at the rest of us in an arc that admitted only slight acquaintance with gravity. Suvrin tried to catch him. Goblin tried to duck. Santaraksita bounced Suvrin sideways and ricocheted into me. The lot of us ended up in a breathless tangle of arms and legs.

The white crow had something uncomplimentary to say about that.

“You and me and a stew pot, critter,” I gasped when I got my breath back. I snagged Goblin’s leg. “No more traps, eh? They’d leave that sort of thing out in the caverns, eh? What the devil was
that
, then?”

“That was a magical booby trap, woman. And a damned fine example of its kind, too. It remained undetectable until Santaraksita tripped it.”

“Sri? Are you injured?” I asked.

“Only my pride, Dorabee,” he puffed. “Only my pride. It’ll take me a week to get my wind back, though.” He rolled off Suvrin, got onto his hands and knees. He had a definite green look to him.

“You’ve enjoyed a cheap lesson, then,” I told him. “Don’t rush into something when you don’t know what you’re rushing into.”

“You’d think I’d know that after this last year, wouldn’t you?”

“You might think, yes.”

“Don’t anybody ask how Junior is doing,” Suvrin grumbled. “He couldn’t possibly get hurt.”

“We knew you’d be fine,” Goblin told him. “As long as he landed on your head.” The little wizard limped forward. As he neared the point where Santaraksita had gone airborne, he became very cautious. He extended a single finger forward one slow inch at a time.

A smaller piece of cloth ripped. Goblin spun around, his arm flung backward. He staggered a couple of steps before he fell to his knees not far from me.

“After all this time he finally recognizes the natural order of things.”

Goblin shook his hand the way you do when you burn your fingers. “Damn, that smarts. That’s a
good
spell. It’s got real pop. Don’t do that!”

Suvrin had decided to throw a chunk of ice.

On its way back, the missile parted Suvrin’s hair. It then hit the cavern wall and showered the white crow with fragments of ice. The bird had a word to say about that. It followed up with a few more. I began to wonder if Lady had lost track of the fact that she was not, herself, the white crow, and in fact, was just a passenger making use of the albino’s eyes.

Goblin stuck his injured finger in his mouth, squatted down and considered the chamber for a while. I squatted, too, after taking time out to keep Suvrin and Master Santaraksita from making even greater nuisances of themselves.

Swan slithered into the chamber, disturbing the crow. The bird said nothing, though. It just sidled away and looked put out about all existence. Swan settled beside me. “Wow. Kind of impressive even though it’s simple.”

“Those are the original Books of the Dead. Supposedly almost as old as Kina herself.”

“So why is everybody just sitting here?”

“Goblin’s trying to figure how to get to them.” I told him what had happened.

“Damn. I always miss the best stuff. Hey, Junior! Run up there and show us your flying trick again.”

“Master Santaraksita did the flying, Mr. Swan.” Suvrin needed to work on his sense of humor. He did not own a proper Black Company attitude.

I asked, “Why not try it yourself, Willow? Take a run at the books.”

“You promise to let me land on you?”

“No. But I’ll blow you a kiss as you fly by.”

“It’d probably help if you people would shut up,” Goblin said. He rose. “But by being blindingly, blisteringly brilliant I’ve worked it out anyway, already, in spite of you all. We get to the lecterns by using the golden pickax as a passkey.
That
was why Narayan Singh was so upset when he saw what we had.”

“Tobo still has the pick,” I said. A minute later I said, “Don’t everybody stumble all over each other offering to go get him.”

“Let’s just go together and all be equally miserable,” Goblin suggested. “That’s what the Black Company is all about. Sharing the good times along with the bad.”

“You trying to con me into thinking that this is one of the good times?” I asked, crawling into the cave right behind him.

“Nobody wants to kill us today. Nobody’s trying. That sounds like a good time to me.”

He had a point. A definite point.

Maybe my Company attitude needed attention, too.

Behind me, Suvrin grumbled about starting to feel like a gopher. I glanced back. Swan had had an attack of good sense and decided to bring up the rear, thereby making sure that Master Santaraksita did not stay behind and tinker with things that might cause a change in Goblin’s opinion about this being one of the good times.

*   *   *

“Where did he go?” I mused aloud. People were still working in the cave of the ancients, getting Lady and the Prahbrindrah Drah ready to go upstairs. But Tobo was not among them. “He wouldn’t just run upstairs, would he?” He had the energy of youth but nobody was so energetic they would just charge into that climb on impulse.

While I tromped around muttering and looking for the kid, Goblin did the obvious and questioned witnesses. He got an answer before I finished building up a good mad. “Sleepy. He left.”

“Surprise, surprise … what?” That was not all of it. The little wizard was upset.

“He turned right when he left, Sleepy.”

“He … oh.” Now I did have a good mad worked up. A booming, head-throbbing, want-to-make-somebody-pay, real bad mad. “That idiot! That moron! That darned fool! I’ll cut his legs off! Let’s see if we can catch him.”

Right was downward. Right was deeper into the earth and time, deeper into despair and darkness. Right could only be the road to the resting place of the Mother of Night.

As I started out, with intent to turn right, I collected the standard. The white crow shrieked approval. Goblin sneered, “You’re going to be sorry before you go down a hundred steps, Sleepy.”

I was tempted to abandon the darned thing before we had gone that far. It was too long to be dragging around in a stairwell.

89

“This stair has no bottom,” I told Goblin. We were puffing badly despite the direction we were headed. We had passed openings into other caves the stairwell had pierced. Each appeared to have been visited by human beings sometime in the past. We discovered both treasures and boneyards. I suspected Sri Santaraksita, Baladitya and I could not live long enough just to catalog all the mysteries buried beneath the plain. And every darned unknown ancient thing I glimpsed in passing called to me like the sirens of legend.

But Tobo was still ahead of us and seemed deaf to our calling. Perhaps just as we did not waste time and breath responding to Suvrin and Santaraksita, who kept calling down to us from ever farther behind. It was my devout hope they would be smitten by good sense and abandon the pursuit.

Goblin did not respond to my remarks. He had no breath left over.

I asked, “Can’t you use some kind of spell to slow him down or knock him out? I’m worried. He really can’t be so far ahead that he can’t hear us. Darn!” I had gotten tangled with the standard. Again.

Goblin just shook his head and kept moving. “He can’t hear.” Puff-puff. “But he don’t know that he can’t hear.”

Enough said. There
was
a bottom to the stair. And the Queen of Deceit was napping down there, with just a whisper of awareness left for manipulating a cocky, know-it-all boy who had a touch of talent and had taken possession of an instrument that could become a nasty weapon in the hands of those who would disarm her and have her slumber continue never-ending.

After a while we had to slow down. The unnatural light faded until it became too weak to provide a reliable forecast of our footing. The occasional breezes rising past us were no longer cold. And they had begun to bear traces of a familiar, repugnant odor.

When Goblin caught that smell he slowed way down, worked hard on regaining his breath before he had to suck that stench down in its full potency. “Been a while since I’ve come face-to-face with a god,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to wrangle one anymore.”

“And what would that be? I never realized that I was in the company of an experienced god-wrangler.”

“It takes youth. It takes confidence. It takes brashness. Most of all, it takes a huge ration of stupidity and a lot of luck.”

“Then why don’t we just sit down here and let those sterling qualities carry Tobo through? Though I confess I’m a little nervous about his supply of luck.”

“I’m tempted, Sleepy. Sorely and sincerely. He needs the lesson.” Troubled, perhaps even a little frightened, he continued, “But he’s got the pickax and the Company needs him. He’s the future. Me and One-Eye are today and yesterday.” He started picking up the pace again, which meant a rapid heightening of the intensity of my skirmish with the standard.

“What do you mean, he’s the future?”

“Nobody lives forever, Sleepy.”

The burst of speed did not last. We encountered a mist that complicated the hazards of darkness. The visibility turned nil and the footing became particularly treacherous for a short person trying to drag a long pole down a tight and unpredictable stairway. The moist air was heavier than anything I had experienced since the fogs above the corpse-choked flood that had surrounded Jaicur during the siege.

A chilling shriek came from far back up the stair. My mind flooded with images of horrors pouncing gleefully upon Suvrin and Master Santaraksita.

The shriek continued, approaching faster than any human being could possibly descend that stairway. “What the hell is that?” Goblin snapped.

“I don’t—” The shrieking stopped. At the same time, I stepped down and there was no more down to step. I staggered, betrayed by the darkness. The Lance banged into overhead and wall. We had reached another landing, I assumed, until I felt around with my toes and the standard and could find no more edge. “What do you have over there?” I asked.

“Steps behind me. A wall to the right that goes forward about six feet, then ends. All level floor.”

“I’ve got a wall on the left that just keeps going on and a level floor. Gah!” Something slammed into my back. I had only an instant of warning, the sound of wings violently flapping as a large bird tried to stop before it hit.

The white crow cursed as it landed on the floor. It flopped around for a moment, then started climbing me. That would have been a sight, I am sure, had there been any light to reveal it.

I fought down an impulse to bat the creature into the darkness. I hoped it was here to help. “Tobo!”

My voice rolled away into the distance, then came back in a series of echoes. The heavy air seemed to load those up with despair.