Wardragon (16 page)

Chapter 11

Drip/click – Sluicing Blood

D
aretor never knew what hit him. He had ridden slowly down a steep slope of shifting scree, angling his horse across the hillside and zigzagging his way to the bottom. There he followed a narrow brook that led into a rocky defile that itself snaked back and forth like a knotted rope. He had just emerged from this defile when he heard a noise to his right. He turned that way, eyeing some trees twenty yards away. Then he toppled forward into darkness.

The first sensation that returned to him was a gut-wrenching feeling of sickness. The whole world seemed to swing first one way then the other, a reaction he vaguely remembered from his recent bout with cheap wine.

He finally managed to open one eye, inducing a blazing shaft of pain in his skull. He was almost blinded by the light. When he had overcome the sheer dizziness, his stomach threatened to return his previous meal. He was hanging from a pole strung between the saddle horns of two horses, hence the swinging sensation. They were wending their way along a narrow goat trail, on one side of which was the steep mountain flank. The other featured a drop of several thousand feet. Never one to enjoy heights he shut his eyes tightly. That brought a snort of laughter from nearby.

‘Enjoy the view, Daretor,’ said a voice. ‘Enjoy it while you can.’

Daretor craned his neck to see the speaker, who was a sweaty, overweight merchantman with florid cheeks and an obsequious manner. The man gave Daretor a mock bow, and pressed his hand to his chest by way of introduction.

‘I am called Obsol, and I will be your guide into the afterlife.’ He chuckled loudly, as if he had made a fine joke.

Daretor let his head swing back down as though weakened. An underestimated opponent was always the most dangerous of adversaries.

Zimak had taken the left-hand turn at the border, but was not regretting it. He was aware of what Jelindel and Daretor thought of him where women were concerned: easily led, like a pig to the market. Once at the market, there was either a long career in helping produce piglets, or a very short contract producing bacon. The thing that would really irk Zimak was that he had
liked
Ethella, and he would be genuinely hurt if her advice led him into a trap, especially if he ended up dead.

The trail led up and over a ridge of wooded hills north of Argentia. From this vantage point Zimak was able to gaze down at the town and see just how futile the attempt to penetrate the place would have been. The town itself was built partly into the side of a hill, which rose some three or four hundred feet. The hill was an outlier of the same foothills through which Zimak now made his way. Argentia, once easily approached by several land routes, was currently bordered by a high stone wall. It was several yards thick at the base, and constantly patrolled by heavily armed guards. There appeared to be only two gates to the town, and both were even more strongly defended than the walls. Nor was this all. Guards with exotic but vicious-looking paraworld beasts on spiked leashes patrolled the area outside the walls. Archery platforms jutted out over the wall at strategic intervals, giving the archers unrestricted coverage of all approaches. Somebody’s taking no chances, thought Zimak.

Inside the town, in what had once been the town square, rose a huge stone building of a design Zimak had not seen the like before. It was a ziggurat, a squat layered pyramid with stone steps on one side, which reached to the third level. In the centre of this level was a tall tower that rose sheer for a hundred feet. There were two similar ziggurats around the town, forming a perfect triangle. Each tower was linked to the others by stone walkways, and to a central tower. These also were patrolled, but the guards here were not human. They were Farvenu, and the very sight of them froze Zimak in mid stride. A wagonload of questions erupted in his brain. What were they doing here? If not by magic, which they loathed, how had they arrived?

Zimak suddenly realised he was exposed on the crest of the hill, and quickly spurred his mount down into a steep-sided canyon. This wound into the hills for some way and was crammed with birch and pine trees. The scent refreshed him, and even went some way to dispel his gloom.

‘Perhaps I need to be more trusting,’ he muttered, almost reluctant to admit that his enchantment-bound friend might have been honest with him. A shame she hadn’t mentioned the Farvenu. Still, if she had, he would not have come. He was crazy, no doubt about that, but he wasn’t insane.

Zimak came to a fork in the canyon, turned right and was soon in a murky fissure between high walls of rock that flanked pools of pungent-smelling water and sported great spongy patches of lime-green fungus. The fungus smelled like a week-old battlefield. In places it had a warty texture that made him feel queasy.

Overhead, the defile grew so narrow that sometimes the sunlight was completely shut out and he moved in what might have been a tunnel deep underground. Soon he found what he sought: the ventilation shaft for a mine. Zimak dismounted and peered into it. It was as dark as pitch, and as silent as a grave. All right, he thought, maybe
grave
wasn’t such a great word. Zimak dropped a stone into the darkness and listened for a long while till it struck bottom. The wait did nothing to calm his nerves.

According to Ethella, he did not have to climb down all the way to the bottom. A cross shaft, some sort of miner’s access tunnel, intersected the ventilation shaft about a hundred feet down. This was just as well, Zimak reflected, since the rope that he carried was barely one hundred feet in length.

He quickly unpacked and prepared himself for the descent. He did not want to tarry long here, thinking about what he had to do. There wasn’t much to think about, and besides, he was afraid he might change his mind. He smacked his horse’s rump and sent it clattering back down the defile. He would not be needing a horse for some time, and when he did, he would be able to steal one from within Argentia.

Zimak ate a quick meal and drank some water, then tied off the rope and dropped the other end into the shaft. Clasping the rope tightly in both hands, he backed into the opening and started lowering himself into the blackness. The pendant that Ethella had placed around his neck now burst into light, producing a soft green glow that illuminated the smooth walls of the shaft. It restored Zimak’s spirits immensely. At first, as the walls were smooth as glass – a deterrent against interlopers – Zimak swung free, then about twenty feet down his feet encountered the unfaced wall of the shaft. The rough stone outcroppings that jutted from the walls provided good footholds. Zimak half-climbed and half-dropped down for the next seventy feet or so. The air here was quite breathable, although he had to share the space with thousands of spiders whose webs stretched across the chasm. Soon he was thickly lathered in their sticky filaments. Fortunately, the spiders seemed more afraid of him than he was of them, though it took some time to convince himself of this.

While he was trying to estimate how far he had descended, Zimak’s fingers encountered the knot he had tied in the rope to indicate that less than his own body length remained. By this time his hands and arms were aching and, although the knot at least gave him some slight relief from having to grip the rope more tightly, he was feeling apprehensive. If the passage was not close by, it was going to be an atrocious climb back. Provided he
could
climb back. For the first time, Zimak cursed himself for putting quite so much weight onto Daretor’s body. Breathing heavily as he hung there, Zimak peered down between his feet, searching for the side passage that Ethella had told him about.

‘Gah,’ he spat. ‘It’s not here.’

He had not wanted to consider what would happen if he did not find the passage. In particular, he had not wanted to think about climbing back up the rope. Now he realised why. After no more than a few feet he was forced to stop through sheer exhaustion. There was no way he could reach the top. His tired muscles would not permit it. This had been a one-way trip and deep down he had known it; even deeper perhaps, he had simply hoped that Ethella had spoken truly.

Zimak worked his way back down to the knot again, and stared anxiously around at the shaft walls. Where was the side passage? Knowing his luck it was one hundred and
ten
feet down. People misjudged distance all the time. The pearly light of the pendant showed uniformly grey rock. The walls were not smooth, but they did not feature any openings that would be useful to anything larger than an underweight mouse. Ethella had lied to him, Zimak decided. She had sent him to his death. Why did he always have such rotten luck with women? Why had he never managed to meet someone like Jelindel?

‘Because you never looked for such a one, you fool,’ he admitted with a burst of bitterness that surprised him.

He was thirsty, too. His throat burned. But if he took one hand off the rope he would lose his grip and plummet to his death.

‘Damn your body, Daretor,’ he gasped. ‘I used to be able to eat anything I wanted and never did I put on so much as an ounce!’

Had he been in his own lithe body, he could have clung to the rough rock on the side of the shaft. But now his hands and feet were too big, and he weighed too much to support himself. He cursed himself again for not having looked after Daretor’s body. With two or three dozen pounds trimmed off, he might have had an easier time of it.

If only there was something to rest on. He could recuperate, climb back up, and attempt to enter Argentia in a more traditional way. He could also go back to the lake and wring Ethella’s petite but treacherous neck. He bet she even knew about the Farvenu, but had simply not told him.

Zimak tried to get a toehold in the sides of the shaft, but the tips of his boots kept slipping off and his hands and arms had to take the sudden extra surge of weight. After five attempts, he gave up, sickeningly aware that he could feel the strength of his arms getting perilously close to their limit, his fingers growing numb and unresponsive. In a few more moments he would lose his grip on the rope and follow the stone he had dropped earlier all the way to the bottom. He wished now he hadn’t dropped it. Some things were better left as surprises.

Sweat trickled into his eyes, stinging them as he slowly revolved on the end of the rope. He noticed a spider the size of his fist crawling across the shaft wall, its shadow shortening and lengthening as he swung in a lazy circle.

‘I wish I was a spider,’ he whispered. ‘Four more limbs would be a big help.’

When he spun around again the spider had gone. He looked up and down, to the left and to the right. Nothing. He wondered for a moment if it had lost its grip and dropped silently into the void. Did spiders scream? Would he scream when he fell? Would it matter? No one would ever hear it. No one would ever know what had happened to him. Except Ethella of course and he tried not to think of her.

His hands slipped off the knot. Sweaty as they were, they could not check his slow but remorseless slide down the rope. Why hadn’t he tied a final knot right at the end? Why hadn’t he tied himself to the rope? Gah, he was an idiot.

Then, not two feet in front of his face, the spider crawled out of the wall. Zimak’s eyes bulged as he realised the meaning of this. With this thought came a rush of adrenaline. With the last of his strength he checked his slide, trapping the rope between the sole of his left boot and his right ankle. He flung his arm wildly at the wall where the spider had appeared. Wincing in anticipation of hitting hard rock he let out a whoop of joy as his hand tore through a screen of spider web. In seconds, he had ripped most of it away, exposing a side shaft some four feet in diameter. An iron tie-bar ran across the middle of it, and he seized this and pulled himself into the tunnel.

For a long time Zimak lay on the tunnel floor and breathed. In, out, in, out. Long deep glorious breaths. He didn’t even care about the cramping pains in his arms and shoulders, or the stinging pins and needles in his fingers. Because he was alive to feel all that discomfort. So he just lay there, stroking the ground as if it were a lover.