A Shadow on the Glass (14 page)

S
he was cunning, the little one. The Whelm gave Karan grudging respect, that she had led them such a chase. But it would not be long now, and there would be a price, when they took her.

“Find her! Take her—alive or lifeless! Do not return without the Mirror!” So Yggur raged, when at last he broke Maigraith and freed himself.

Hours had passed, and Karan was lost somewhere in the labyrinth beneath Fiz Gorgo. “Flood the tunnels!” and Yggur’s servants opened the floodgates, though the lower passages had been partly full of stagnant water for centuries. Eventually the waters went down. Then they searched all the traps and rusty gratings for a small pale creature flung up against the iron, the flesh flattened and protruding through the bars, the fire gone out of the limp hair, and all covered in rust and brown muck. But they did not find her.

* * *

Karan collapsed on the landing outside Yggur’s library. Her shoulders throbbed; she could still feel the imprint of his fingers on her flesh. Such iron will she had never encountered. Her mind so burst with him that no thoughts came, save for the menace of the Whelm. Who were these Whelm, that just their name wrenched her so?

She lay in the dark, oblivious. To be sensitive could be a blessing or a curse. Eventually the screaming in her head subsided and Karan recalled the danger just a wall away. Blind fingers found the precious light Maigraith had given her, a globe of polished rock crystal the size of her eye, partly enclosed by five fronds of silver. A touch brought milky light welling out.

The light revealed her hazardous refuge. She had forgotten that the small landing had no rail; had not considered the long fall beside the spiraling stair. But Karan was bred to the mountains and the height did not bother her, just the realization that she might have run straight off in the darkness.

She got to her feet. The Mirror, coiled once more, was still clutched in her other hand. Momentarily she was tempted to drop it over the edge, but that was no answer; it would just be there when she got to the bottom. It fitted easily into the special pocket inside her shirt, under her arm. Karan fastened the opening securely and tried to put the Mirror out of her mind.

Down the staircase she went, along the corridors. It felt better to be walking. At last she emerged from the dusty secret corridor into the main passage. There she stalled. Her head had begun to throb and a sick pain suffused her belly. The aftersickness was beginning again, the penalty for using her talent. This would be a bad one. Even had she been well she was not sure that she could find the cistern again among this labyrinth of tunnels. And if she did, and somehow got out, the dogs were waiting, and the guards. She was trapped.

What confidence she had gained ebbed away. She walked slowly along, dragging her feet. How pathetic her boast seemed now. No, don’t even think about that; the only goal that mattered was to get out of here. And as the aftersickness grew until it was like the worst migraine she had ever had, until her head boiled and her sight faded and her stomach felt as though it was filled with burning foam pushing back up her throat, even that goal was of no importance.

Afraid to use the light, she groped her way along the wall. At a crossway she squatted silently in the dark, clutching her stomach. No path offered more hope than any other. Then a lantern flared in the distance, shocking in its brightness and suddenness. Karan fell to hands and knees and almost cried out.

There was nowhere to hide, no crevice large enough to conceal a rat. Further on, another corridor went off to her left. Without thinking Karan scuttled up it, fleeing from the light. The movement made the pain worse; her head pulsed in time with her racing heartbeat. Crawling along in the dark she struck her temple on a fallen block of stone and had to bite her wrist to stop herself from shrieking. She lay on the floor, blind, totally disabled, oblivious.

Eventually the worst of the aftersickness was over, though her head and stomach would be tender for hours. Karan sat up, astounded that they had not found her. A distant rattling, as of great chains, echoed down the tunnel then. She took no mind of it, just wandered silently in the dark, arms out in front of her.

In her fear of the light she went further and further away from the passage she knew, walking randomly: up steps, along tunnels, down narrow adits, down and up again. She was hopelessly lost.

And many of the lower galleries were flooded. After the
first encounter she had kept the globe in her pocket, creeping along by feel, but that was as dangerous as using the light, for there were other openings in the floor. Once as she splashed along she fell into icy water. Not long after, passing the black mouth of another shaft, stale air rumbled out of it in a great flatulence, the water rose swiftly, overbrimmed the hole and made a dark stain as it crept away along the floor.

This brought all Karan’s woes to the surface again and she sat down on stone with her feet in the water and wept. She wept for the dark and her hopeless situation. Wept for her foolishness in agreeing to help Maigraith in the first place. It took her back to her childhood, weeping alone in the dark, and she wept as well for her beloved father Galliad, who used to hold her hand in the night and smooth the bad dreams away. Then she was twelve again, her father four years dead (and her mother Vuula as well, taking her life in grief and madness), living in misery with her mother’s family. The days were spent in drudgery and abuse, the nights in lonely tears. But one night, as she lay awake in her room under the roof, watching the moon and the stars, Karan remembered her father’s people, the Aachim, and resolved to go to them.

Perhaps Galliad had foreseen her trials, for at his knee he had given her the secret of his people and where they could be found at need. Karan had no money and few possessions, for her inheritance was in the hands of a steward, but she sold a bracelet her mother had left her, bought the things she needed for that long journey and, one night, when the moon had set, she bundled up her clothes and treasures, climbed down the stone wall and set out to find the Aachim in their remote mountain fastness of Shazmak. She walked all that night, fearful on the road, terrified off it, and hid before dawn until the hunt had gone by. After a day or two the
search shifted away from the mountains. What was up there for a girl of twelve?

Three weeks it took before she found Shazmak, long hidden from the world, over passes where the snow lay even in summer, after much searching and not a little terror. And somehow, incredibly, the Sentinels did not sound when she came across the pass; did not sound when she made her way along those interminable ledge paths with the Garr gnashing the rocks far below and the cliffs rising high above. She emerged from a tunnel and the sun touched the slender towers and gossamer walkways of Shazmak to silver and gold. Only when she crossed the last bridge and stood in the walled yard outside the gate did they sound, and then a single bright peal.

In her mind’s eye she saw herself as the Aachim must have seen her at the doors of the city—a tiny dirty figure dwarfed by her mountain clothing; starving, exhausted, and her hair a flaming riot about her round face. Impossibly shy, but with a quiet dignity beyond her years. Suddenly afraid of these stern folk—terrified of being taken in by them, terrified of being rejected—she wanted to run away again. Then she saw that among the big-bodied, dark-haired people staring at her were one or two who were smaller, with pale skin and red hair like hers.

“I am Karan Elienor Melluselde Fyrn, of Bannador,” she said, enunciating her names with care and pride. Fyrn was her mother’s family name; Elienor a long-dead Aachim heroine of her father’s line to whom Karan bore a singular likeness; Melluselde—another family name. “My father Galliad is dead. I have come home.”

And she was so like her grandmother, beloved Mantille, tragically dead as well, that the Aachim wept for the sight of her. Yet unlike, too. They loved her for the echoes of her ancestors, even more for herself, and took her into Shazmak
and into their hearts. And though the Aachim were a melancholy folk, wrapped up in a culture and a history that she could never understand, she was happy there for the first five years. Happier than she had ever been save when her father was alive. But the sixth year had changed all that. Unbearably harassed by the half-Aachim, Emmant, and feeling let down by the other Aachim, she had fled in her eighteenth year and never returned.

The memories gave Karan enough heart to think of ways of escape. Such a labyrinth of tunnels, built over centuries, built and rebuilt, might have many exits. She struggled to remember what she knew of Fiz Gorgo; what Maigraith had told her on the journey. But Maigraith had been close-mouthed, even about things that Karan needed to know.

Think! The Aachim were incomparable engineers and they built to last forever. Shazmak had been a similar place and she knew every part of it. There would be huge water pumps below, and furnaces to heat the water, and a sewer to take it away again. Doubtless the pumps had failed and no one had the skill to repair them; the furnaces burned out long ago. But the sewer, the great cloaca of Fiz Gorgo, must still be there, if she could find it. It would empty into the estuary.

Karan followed the tunnel a little further but it ended in a wall of stone, and so did the other turnings that she took, as though that part of the labyrinth had been blocked off a long time ago. Finally she came to a crossways and a passage that led the way she sensed she should go. Twenty or thirty paces along she froze. A whisper echoed down the corridor and two figures, one tall and gaunt, the other squat, moved slowly by along the main tunnel. It seemed that the tall one turned its head in her direction as they passed, but the light of their lanterns did not reach her, crouched down in the blackness.

Then they were gone. The shock of them was less this
time. Perhaps these ones were not Whelm. Karan darted the other way. Down; she must get lower down.

Again that distant rattling. Now the cold, the tiredness, the hunger and the fear all combined to leave her mind a blank. She stumbled along in the dark, not caring where she was going as long as she went forward. When she came to a junction she turned one way or another without conscious thought, allowing her intuition to guide her and, hours later, long after dawn (though there was no dawn here), in a distant corner of the labyrinth at last she did find a way down, a simple hole in the floor. Once there had been a metal lid but now only the hinges remained.

The globe, just a brief flash, showed rungs leading down; below that, nothing. The rungs were badly rusted. Karan hesitated but a light in the distance took the choice from her. She put her foot on the first rung. Rust came off in thick flakes, and she went down swiftly and dropped about a span onto a slippery floor. Holding the globe out before her, she saw another shaft. Karan climbed down it until her eyes were at the level of the opening. A circular patch of light appeared, a lantern at the top of the upper shaft. But they could not have seen her. If she stayed still…

For a moment it seemed possible. Then a murmur from above, the light grew suddenly in the opening, feet on the rung, an arm thrust down holding a bright lantern; a harsh cry; a hand pointing. Her footprints were clear in the mud on the floor, but no one came down the shaft. Then Karan heard a hollow rasping and the light was shut out. She crept back and held up her globe. The opening was closed with a block of stone and she was trapped below.

Yggur’s leg throbbed unbearably, and his back. The old injuries felt as though they were aflame, Maigraith had hurt him so. All he wanted was to he down and take the weight
off his bones, but he kept on, driving even the Whelm who needed no supervision. He could not show weakness before them.

The pain had made his speech even more halting than usual. “Lost her? How lost her, fool?”

The break-in, the insult, could not have come at a worse time for him, just as he was finalizing preparations for his next campaign, his march on the rich eastern states. How had they managed it? How could he have allowed the little one to get away with the Mirror, crucial to spying out the strengths and weaknesses of his enemies?

“There are twenty of you,” he raged. “She is nothing; just a girl!” No, it was fatal to underestimate even the least of his enemies!

The Whelm at his side, whose name was Idlis, made no excuses. That was not his nature. Neither did he point out that she had escaped from Yggur himself. But the rigidity of bis posture told that he felt the insult.

“We know not where she is.” His voice was a glutinous roiling, the phrases coming out like bubbles rising through a vat of syrup. “But well where she is not, and that is most of the labyrinth now. She is isolated in the Skurrian quarter. All paths out of it are sealed save the main one. But it is a slow business. The water hinders us more than her. It goes where it wants and we cannot direct it; the workings are unfathomable.”

Yggur smiled, though he knew the pun was unintended. The Whelm were utterly humorless. “What else is in that quarter?”

“Empty storerooms; empty cells. Beneath, the ancient sewage duct.”

Yggur permitted himself another brief smile. “And that is sealed.”

“Yes. The outlet gates are checked each month. They are sound.”

Just then a runner burst in, a young woman dressed in drab; one of the toilers. Yggur saw a pinched face in a dark cowl, and sandals that were too big and flapped as she ran. She checked, then came the long way round, keeping well clear of the Whelm.

“What news, Dolodha?”