Will Power (16 page)

“Run!” I shouted. “This way.”

There was nothing else for it. There was one way out of the chamber, since the enemy had blocked the way we had come, and that was out toward the other side, to the pass where we had been attacked the previous day. Barely waiting for her, I fled down a corridor of doors and tunnels, not knowing where I was going but running as if every devil in Hell was on my tail. For all I knew, that was exactly what was happening.

A black-flighted arrow whistled over my head and clattered against the wall, and I heard Renthrette’s bow gasp back its defiance. There was a cry of pain, harsh and loud as the bellow of a bull, but it was a token retaliation on our part. We knew we could not stand and fight. One of the doors ahead of me opened, and a goblin stepped out, curious about the commotion. I ran right into it and hacked at its neck once, barely breaking stride as it slipped to the ground, foaming blood.

Renthrette was immediately behind me now, but the pursuit had slowed. They were organizing themselves. If we were going to get out
of here, we had to do something before they were on our heels again. I tried a door. It revealed a chamber full of shelves laden with pots, so I slammed it shut and moved on, trying the next: another storeroom. Then a third, and the sound of the door reverberated hollowly. It was dark inside, but I could hear the slosh and trickle of water: a great deal of water.

Renthrette grabbed a torch from the corridor, pushed me inside and pulled the door shut behind us. We stood on a rock platform in a huge square and high-ceilinged chamber cut out of the rock. The platform was only a few yards long. The rest of the room was filled with water.

“A cistern,” said Renthrette, looking quickly about her. “There must be a spring or something that brings in the water. Maybe we could use it to get out.”

“It’s probably under the surface,” I said. “Or it just seeps in through channels in the rock. Most of it is probably melted ice from the mountaintops.”

“Then why doesn’t it flood the whole fort?” Renthrette demanded.

“Good question. There must be some kind of overflow drain to stop the level from getting too high. Look around the edge.”

She paced the platform with her torch outstretched, peering into the water to see how deep it was. I did the same but could see nothing under the surface.

“Quick!” I said. “They’re coming!”

“There!” she said. “Over on the far wall.”

There, barely visible in the torchlight, was a small rectangle of darkness: a channel cut into the stone right at the water’s brim. My heart sank.

Renthrette jumped in without another thought. For a moment I thought she was standing on the bottom, but then she started to bob up and down as she treaded water, somehow managing to keep the head of the torch above the surface.

“Come on!” she hissed.

“I can’t swim!” I whined, awash with self-contempt and horror.

“Yes you can!”

“No . . .” I began.

“You have to! Now get in! I’ll help you get across. It’s not far. Come on! They’re coming!”

I sat on the shelf and lowered my feet and legs into the still, freezing water. “I can’t!”

She reached over and tugged at my boots, pulling me in. I sank into the cold and silence, bobbing up a moment later, terrified and gasping for air. I began to go under again and she caught me, dragging me along as she began to swim.

“Hold the torch and kick!”

I tried, but my legs were too stricken with cold or the paralysis of fear to respond. All I could think about was the depth of water beneath me. Then the door into the cistern clicked and opened.

I pulled the torch underwater and it hissed briefly. Then all was dark and quiet, save at the door, where a pair of goblins stood framed in the flickering light of the corridor.

Renthrette’s hand slipped over my mouth and her legs began to kick silently. I let the torch go and began to move my arms and legs to her rhythm, my heart thumping. The goblins came in and looked around, but the chamber was pitch black and even their night eyes would have difficulty seeing us if we kept still.

If
. I flapped my arms like a wounded duck and prayed not to break the surface with my hands or otherwise make some telltale ripple that would leave us floating here shot full of black arrows.

It was only a few seconds, of course, but it seemed like an hour before the goblins stepped out into the corridor and closed the door. Renthrette uncovered my mouth and began to swim for where the hole had been. I got a mouthful of water, spat it out as if it was acid, and began flailing my way after her like some hyperactive puppy.

Fortunately her sense of direction was better than mine. She swam to the wall, pulling me after her, then began testing the stone with one hand till she found the space which marked the mouth of the drainage channel. It was a rectangular hole cut into the stone about five feet high, its floor no more than an inch below the waterline of the cistern. She swung herself up and in, then offered me her hand. Once in, I lay on its wet stone floor and breathed.

“There’s no time to lose,” said Renthrette. “They’ll notice the missing torch and be back soon enough.”

And so we set off, stooping, hands in front of our faces and still trying to run, though we were utterly sightless. I hit my head, painfully skinning my right temple, and the roof got steadily lower. After only a few yards we could go no farther upright.

“We’ll have to crawl,” Renthrette breathed.

We did so, and the passage descended gradually, just enough to
keep the chill water around our hands and knees flowing. But soon the walls narrowed and the roof dropped still lower and I began having to squeeze myself through the tunnel. The water level had risen proportionally, and over half my body was now beneath its surface. I was freezing, but I desperately wanted to slip out of my jerkin and cloak, which were now taking up valuable inches of space. I tried to shrug myself out of my cloak, but there wasn’t enough room. A horrible, fearful sense of paralysis came over me. I flexed my back against the dripping rock overhead as if I could somehow push through it, expanding the way. When I couldn’t, and the passage seemed almost to contract against me, I felt the urge to scream building in my throat. My eyes closed tight and my fists clenched and, for a second, I thought I would go mad. Then the sound of Renthrette splashing and scrambling in front of me came to an abrupt halt and I got hold of myself, bracing for some new development.

“What?” I stuttered, desperately. “What’s the matter?” My words boomed in the tight, dank passage.

“It gets narrower,” she said. “I don’t know if we can get through.”

“If it’s worse than this, I don’t see how we can. But I can’t turn round here. I don’t think I can get back this way. I can’t move.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time. We stayed where we were, still in the darkness, and the icy water flowed around us.

“We’ll have to go on,” she said eventually.

And then she was gone. I crawled a little ahead and found that the ceiling of the tunnel stepped down abruptly. I knelt at this new gateway with growing fear. There was only an inch or two of space between the stone and the top of the water. And farther inside even that might be filled.

Renthrette had gone. She might have been drowning only a few feet away from me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could try to inch my way back, but I was unsure that I could get all the way to the cistern without getting stuck. And even if I did, then what? What mercy could I expect at the hands of the goblins after our little assault? They would have found the way we got in and it would be guarded even if I could get that far unseen.

Loneliness, if that is not too tame a word for the crippling sense of isolation that struck me, won out. I could not stand to be left there by myself or to attempt to escape without Renthrette. I lay down in the water. Then, with infinite care, I rolled over onto my back. For a
terrifying second I was completely immersed in the black water, then I thrust my neck and shoulders up on my elbows and lifted my face out into the ribbon of air between the water and the rock. I breathed, then inched backward, walking crab-like on my elbows, into the smaller tunnel. My face was pressed up against the stone and the water lapped around my cheeks and ran into my ears. I put my lips right against the granite, inhaled, then held my breath and continued my backward crawl.

I had been making my painstaking and nightmarish passage like this for several minutes when the water closed over my face altogether. I spluttered and pulled back, jerking involuntarily toward a sitting position and cracking my forehead hard against the rock. I retraced a few feet of my slithering steps, surfaced, and breathed, calming myself. Then I filled my lungs to capacity, rolled onto my face and clawed my way along the bottom of the channel. In so little water buoyancy was hardly a problem, and I was able to wriggle against the walls of the now tube-like tunnel, but the rock was closing in. The water above and around me was running faster, and, as I pulled myself along, nearing the end of my air, I hit my shoulder hard against a stony outcrop.

I gasped, swallowing water and losing what little air remained. My stomach contracted and my knees snapped hard against the rock beneath me, then the outcrop ground into my waist and I stuck fast. The gorge in my throat rose and I fought against it, stretching out as much as I could, flattening myself to the floor of what had turned into a pipe less than two feet in diameter and full of rushing water.

I remained lodged there and panic overcame me. I began to thrash as much as I could, but the sides of the pipe were quite smooth and I could get no purchase to drag myself through. I lunged forward with the little strength I had left and a strong, slender hand took mine, tightened and pulled. Sinews in my shoulder cracked and a flash of pain went through my arm, but then I was sliding forward and out. The water and darkness fell away and I found myself retching into the weedy pools of a waterfall on the western side of the mountain.

Renthrette watched me with her usual detached curiosity, as if she was looking at something in a museum case, while I continued to vomit water onto the grass: not a technique renowned for impressing women, but that was, for once, far from my mind. She didn’t speak, but she looked stern. Our survival, harrowing though it had been, had not taken away from her awareness that our mission had not been a
raging success. I sat up, coughing. The swollen stream into which the waterfall flowed wound through the wetlands we had crossed that morning, and squinting in the noon light I thought I could just make out the smoke from the Last Refuge Inn. I suppose I was grateful to be alive, but I had been so close to
not
being that all I felt was my customary petulant anger.

“There are only a couple of them, she says,” I wheezed bitterly. “Sorrail knows this place like the back of his hand, she says. Has he ever looked at the back of his hand? It’s probably crawling with goblins.”

“Shut up, Will,” said Renthrette. “Well, at least we know Mithos and Orgos are alive.”

“If our little visit doesn’t change that,” I replied grimly.

All peril and near-death experiences aside, I was puzzled. I still didn’t understand how we had got in, why the side door wasn’t better protected. Maybe the goblins had only been there a little while, but . . .

“Mithos was trying to tell us something,” Renthrette added, pensively. “I wonder what it was.”

“We may never know,” I answered. “I hope it wasn’t important.”

Renthrette prowled the inn, brooding, muttering curses and shooting me black looks. We had to go back, she said. We hadn’t tried hard enough. We could still get them out. I let her rant and pace for a while and then told her she was talking nonsense, that we were lucky to be alive, and that going back was like taking a swan dive off the Cliffs of Doom or whatever they called that damned mountain that was full of teeth, scimitars, and other nasty, spiky things I wasn’t about to get stuck through my throat. Amazingly enough, she actually listened, and eventually nodded in silence.

That evening, over a melancholy dinner of meat and potatoes utterly devoid of flavor, we came to the obvious conclusion. We couldn’t get Mithos and Orgos out alone, presuming they hadn’t already been killed in reprisal for our botched “rescue,” and the locals were too concerned with protecting their own property to consider helping. We needed to go somewhere where we could mount a less suicidal rescue attempt with real soldiers instead of relying on incompetents like yours truly. The idea that the locals were “concerned” with protecting their farms and houses was an understatement. There was a frenetic mood approaching paranoia in the tavern’s sitting room that night, the men sitting armed and talking about how best to defend their houses and barns against the “hand of evil” which was expected to extend from the mountains. They feared, they said, for their wives and children, it having been confidently reported that the goblins had a taste for human flesh, raw or broiled. Moreover, the goblins, foul and twisted though they were themselves, prized human females as their concubines, and their brutal lust was legendary.