Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (31 page)

Bales were loosely wrapped in dirty sacking, banded with rusty metal strips and stamped with lead seals. Great bunches of garlic hung in braids from the rafters. In a separate, barred enclosure were stored enormous casks and kegs of wine, beer, and brandy.

Guttering torches lit the cavern just enough to show the slaves where to lay down their loads. Without allowing their panting charges any rest, the overseers drove them back up the stairs at a run.

“Radishes!” exclaimed Marbleheart softly as he examined the newly arrived stores. “Fresh, too! I didn’t realize that Witches ate good stuff like this!”

He nibbled hungrily at the peppery red roots, offering several to Douglas. Fresh produce was welcome after weeks of camp fare, even with the occasional meals magically imported from Wizards’ High.

“What did you think Witches ate?” Douglas asked, taking a bite out of a radish. It burned his tongue pleasantly.

“Don’t have the slightest idea,” sniffed the Sea Otter. “Nasty, slimy things, I suppose, like roasted lizards and toasted toads. Have some new cabbage.”

Douglas ate a quarter head of raw cabbage while he carefully roved back and forth across the storeroom floor. Was the stair the only access to the room? Behind a stack of barrels oozing sticky black-strap molasses he discovered a trapdoor.

“Stand back,” he warned, and shook his fist at the hatch. Slowly it rose, making horrible creaking sounds. It wasn’t opened very often, he was certain.

“Whew!” gagged Marbleheart, jumping backward. A rush of stale, damp air almost knocked them over, but after a moment it blew away, to be replaced by the dank odors of rotted wood and stagnant water. The sound of dripping echoed from far below. A wooden ladder allowed them to clamber slowly down, after Douglas had gestured the trap closed again, to a landing along the course of a narrow winding stairway.

“At least we’re going in the right direction,” growled Marbleheart. “Down! Give us a light, Wizard!”

Douglas floated a tiny, bright flame over their heads and by its light they could see the steps going down, down, to a wetly gleaming stone floor. As they neared the bottom, a swarm of large, black Rats with bare, pink tails rushed by.

“On their way up to check out the fresh food,” guessed the Otter, watching them with distaste. The Rats paid them no heed at all, except the very last and least, who stopped long enough to peer up at them for a moment.

“Follow our example and get out of this place, too,” it said, not unkindly. “It’s not food we run for. There’s great danger here!”

It dropped to all fours and dashed off up the stair.

“Hey,” called Marbleheart after it. “Wait up! We need some directions here.”

“They won’t help you much,” said a squeaky voice near Douglas’s ear. “Rats are single-minded when it comes to desertion.”

Looking up, the travelers saw a number of Bats hanging upside down from the ceiling.

“I’m a Wizard,” Douglas told them. “Can you give us some information?”

“Wizards...explains why we can’t see you, just hear you,” said the largest Bat. He blinked solemnly. “Name’s Tuckett, young Wizard. What’s yours?”

“Douglas Brightglade,” Douglas answered, switching off the invisibility spell. “Pyromancer.”

“Ah, yes. I’ve heard about your kind. A long time ago a friend of mine spent his days in a Fire Wizard’s cave.”

“How’d you come to raise your family in this frightful place?” asked Marbleheart.

“It seemed like the ideal place to hang out at first,” explained the Bat. “Damp and dark enough to be comfortable. Quick access to the outside. Swarms of tasty bugs everywhere. Witches’ castles are usually good places for bats, as they generally leave us alone. However...”

“You regret moving here?” asked Douglas

“We’re beginning to,” said the Bat’s wife, joining the conversation. “Hush, children! We’re talking, the nice Wizard and your mama and papa!”

The Batlings peeped softly among themselves and stared, fascinated and horrified, at the huge, ugly Man and his terrifying companion-beast.

“Better nor Hollowe‘en,”
one whispered to his sisters.

“This Witch’s castle is so noisy! Grumblings and rumblings and groans and rocks shattering all of a sudden,” confided the Bat wife with a shiver. “But worst of all, they shut a prisoner in the wettest part of the basement without even fixing the bad leaks. The poor man is knee deep in hot water and can hardly sit himself down.”

“Wouldn’t be so bad, were he to hang by his toes like normal folk,” put in one of the Batlings with a sniff.

“A prisoner, here?” asked Douglas. “I’m looking for a friend who is Emaldar’s prisoner.”

“Pssssh!
Don’t speak
her
name,” warned Tuckett, glancing about with sudden caution. “She comes down here much too often for our liking. Three or four times yestereve alone.”

“But nonsense, my dear,” said his wife, nudging him affectionately, “this here’s a Wizard, and a Wizard can best a Witch any day—or night!”

“All very true,” said Douglas, “but right now I want to rescue my friend. Have you seen him?”

“Oh, most surely,” said Tuckett, nodding—a bit disconcerting as a Bat’s nod goes in the wrong direction, up and down, instead of down and up. “Last evening—”

“We were going to bespeak him. Sort of buck up his spirits, that would be,” his wife interrupted again. “But we didn’t want to call ourselves to
her
attention. He’s there now, a-setting in water and trying not to fall over in his sleep and drown.”

“He’s whipped up a bit of magic, I believe,” said Tuckett in admiration. “He’s managed to stay above water for a long spell. The problem—”

“Is that the air in there is falling too fast. First it was at his ankles, then it fell to his shins, and now it’s down to his waist, as was said before. By tonight he’ll be setting in it down to his chin!”

“Is Em—er, the Witch drowning him on purpose?” asked Marbleheart; the thought of deep water didn’t bother him all that much, but he could see how it might bother Cribblon.

“Oh, no! It’s springtime on the high slopes, you see,” explained the Bat wife. “The snows are a-melting and the river is a-rising quite fast. We always have some flooding around about now—although, come to admit it, this year it seems greater than usual.”

Douglas smacked his fist in the palm of his other hand. “We’d better go get him out!”

The Bat family obligingly led them to the far end of the right-hand corridor, past a row of empty cells hacked roughly out of solid bedrock, each less than six feet cubed and all heavily barred.

The floor here was six inches underwater. The Witchserver guards had earlier been playing cards on an empty barrel’s head and shouting vile-sounding insults at their prisoner, said Mistress Bat. They’d abandoned this corridor for a higher level when the hot water reached over their boot tops.

As they neared the end cell they heard a voice softly singing in a pleasant tenor:

“O Castle Doom!

Thy towers glower o’er me.

And from afar

I hear the roar of raging fires!

When will he come,

My bonny, bravest warrior?

His lonely friend of so few su-uh-mers

To Save?”

“The poor man!” choked the little Batlings. “He’s suffering great pain!”

Douglas put his face near the cell door grille and called out, “Is that a folksong of your western country, Cribblon, or are you making it up as you go along?”

The song stopped in midverse and the Journeyman heard a frantic splashing approaching the door.

“Is that you, Douglas, old Journeyman? Are you a prisoner like me or are you ‘my bonny, bravest warrior’?”

“Just your friendly neighborhood Pyromancer,” chuckled Douglas. “Stand to one side, old air blower. There isn’t time to pick the lock. I’m going to blast the door open.”

He stood tall and suddenly severe—or so Marbleheart described it to his grandchildren under a gravel bank on the Briney, years later—and, rolling up his wide, Wizardry sleeves, he threw a solid, right-handed blow at the door, shouting a single powerful word.
“Champianawirir.”

His fist hardly touched wood when, it seemed to Marbleheart and the Bat family, a great blue bolt of lightning cracked. When the smoke cleared, the door lay in splinters too small even for kindling, floating on the surface of the slowly rising seep water.

“So
that’s
how it’s pronounced!” cried Cribblon. “I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to remember how to say that dratted word. I did manage to talk the chains into rusting through, hours ago.”

He waded quickly through the smoldering wood chips and joined them in the higher, if not much drier, corridor. Douglas shook his hand and Marbleheart thumped him gleefully on the back, proudly performing his warming and drying spell on the bedraggled former Apprentice. The Bats twittered excitedly about their heads.

“I managed to dredge up a few helpful old spells,” said Cribblon, proudly. “I was trying to remember something that would float me on the water when it got too high. Not much success on that, however. Thank you all! You arrived just in time.”

“Thank the Bats,” said Douglas. “Right now, I’d better get us elsewhere. That blast must have been heard all over the place.”

In fact, sounds of shouts and thuds of running boots came from above them as the Witchserver guards pounded toward the stair to see what had happened.

“Where does the corridor go in the other direction?” Marbleheart asked Tuckett.

“Under the mountain, a long, hot way,” answered Tuckett. “Calm down, children! The fireworks are over. There are ways to the outside, however, that we use.”

“Now, we should let them make all the noise they can and we should help,” said the practical Mama Bat. “To cover the sound of our friends’ retreat, you see.”

And they did so, acting just like Bats disturbed by all the racket. Waving a hurried good-bye to them, Douglas lead the ex-Apprentice and the Otter past the foot of the stair and down the narrow dungeon passageway in the opposite direction.

They ducked around the first bend. The floor was suddenly dry underfoot. They heard the dungeon guards hit the bottom of the stair and start cursing the Bats, who flew in frantic circles about their heads, screeching at the bottom of their Bat voices. One of the little Batlings flew boldly against their torch, plunging the corridor into sudden darkness.

Following his example, the other Bats streamed away, pausing to snuff out all the other torches in the vicinity, laughing gleefully as they went.

This left the Witchservers running wildly about, bumping into each other and the hard rock walls, long enough for Douglas to lead his friends to the far end of the other corridor. They were stopped by a heavy bronze grill.

“There’s time for lock picking,” Douglas decided. He brought his floating headlight close and, taking a thin, hooked instrument from his right sleeve, began to tease the tumblers back and forth as the Dwarf Bryarmote had long ago taught him. After two very long minutes the old bolt rasped back and Douglas swung the heavy grille open.

“In! In!” he urged. Once they were all through, he swung the gate closed and relocked it.

The air here was considerably warmer and dry. The walls themselves felt warm to the touch.

Cribblon nodded. “Blueye is, after all, a volcano.”

“Volcano!” exclaimed Douglas. “I should have seen it! The blue lake that gives her the name—a crater lake, eh?”

“I was thinking, while I was sitting in the water listening to the guards tell dirty stories,” said Cribblon, “that somewhere I read volcanoes are often riddled with—”

“Of course, tunnels and passages. To carry off molten lava during an eruption, and steam and hot gases at other times,” said Douglas. “What kind of a Pyromancer am I to have forgotten that!”

Marbleheart was bewildered by their elation. “Dangerous, isn’t it? There is a mud volcano north of the Briney. It blew a lot of smelly steam and spewed out lots of boiling-hot goo. Nasty thing, I thought and still think.”

“But if there are passages within
this
volcano,” explained Cribblon, “we should be able to follow them to the outside and make our escape.”

“That explains what the Bats meant, that there were ways to the outside,” Marbleheart said with a quick nod of understanding. “Let’s be on our way, then!”

They trotted along, following the rough-cut tunnel on a slightly upward trend. After five minutes they came to a great, domed room from which several vents led in different directions.

Marbleheart walked a dozen Otter paces into each, sniffing the air carefully. Of five, two smelled faintly of fresh air. He chose the larger, mostly because it tended upward at a right angle to the course of the Coventown vale.

“This way,” he said, and the others followed. Marbleheart hesitated only once, glancing back down the way they had come. Sounds carried far in these enclosed spaces. He heard distant running steps and then frustrated curses.

“They’ve reached the gate,” Douglas guessed. “They must not have the key to that one. That’ll slow them down considerably.”

“Plus,” said Cribblon, beginning to pant a bit from their fast trot. “I gather they’re all terrified of the mountain; the Fiery Furnace, as they call it.”

“Be that as it may, we’re all running out of steam in this heat,” panted Douglas, pausing to wipe his face and neck with his handkerchief. “I’d better whip up a Levitation Spell to carry us out of here soon. It’ll be a long, hard climb otherwise.”

The tunnel shortly took a right-angle turn upward. The shaft had smoothly polished walls offering hardly any handholds. They could hear no sounds from behind except a whisper of hot air moving rapidly past them, up the chimney.

The Journeyman Wizard drew a wide circle on the cave floor with a piece of red chalk he plucked from his left sleeve.

At his command, they all sat down within the circle. Douglas replaced the chalk in his sleeve, produced his magic kit from the other sleeve, and mixed two quarter pinches of tiny white crystals and a drop of viscous amber liquid—it reminded Marbleheart of pancake syrup—on the smooth stone floor between them.