Dark Lord of Derkholm (42 page)

“This is not going to do any of you the slightest good, you know. Where do you think I'm going to run to, anyway? You've all got great long legs. You could catch me at once if I ran away.”

None of the men seemed to attend much to Sukey. They treated her more like a valuable animal than anything else. But during the second day of sneaking after them along the road, Reville nudged Blade as they lay behind some dead blackberry bushes, and pointed. Blade saw that Sukey now had only one rope on her, around her waist. It was also clear that the men had expected to get wherever they were going before this and were running out of food.

“We can manage one more day, with luck,” one of them said. “How far is it now?”

“Take us at least two days more,” replied another, who had a tattered map. “More like two and a half at the rate she walks.”

Blade felt he had known these two men for a long time. He had first seen both of them when he and his family had helped Barnabas get the newly arrived army to the camp near Derkholm. He had pushed past them on Nancy Cobber and noticed that they seemed less drugged than the rest. Meanwhile Reville was plucking at Blade's sleeve in an alarmed way. After the party had heaved to its feet again, cursing and grumbling, and hauled the arguing Sukey off down the road, Reville said, “We're running out of time. As soon as they get to their hideout, we'll have
no
chance.”

This was certainly true. “What do you suggest?” Blade asked.

“I think,” said Reville, “that I've got the hang of this translocating now.” Blade stared at him. Reville grinned. Despite the big yellow and green bruise on his face, it was almost his usual jaunty smile. “I'm a magic user,” he told Blade. “Most thieves have to be. I've been watching fairly closely what it is you do when you translocate. And if I can do it, too, then we can both jump in among them, cut that rope, grab Sukey before any of them can stop us, and jump out again with her. Mind if we practice a bit?”

They spent the rest of that day practicing. At first Reville could only move himself a few feet and his direction was unpredictable. Blade got used to dodging fast. But Reville's face set in stern, determined lines. “It'll come,” he panted. “I was like this over picking pockets, and now I'm up with the best. I'll fetch up by that rock over there by this evening, you'll see.” And he did. Blade was impressed.

At sunset Blade took himself to the bank above the place where the kidnappers were camping in the road. After a pause Reville arrived, too, muddy down one side. “Slight mistake. Ditch,” he explained. “Where is she?”

To their disgust, Sukey was once more attached to four ropes for the night. They waited anxiously for daybreak. At dawn they shared a hard, greasy end of cheese and watched the kidnappers share much the same between themselves and Sukey. Then someone tied a rope to her waist, and the band moved off.

“Thank
Wiksil!
” whispered Reville.

“Who's Wiksil?” Blade asked.

“God of thieves. Are you ready?” said Reville. Blade supposed he was. “Then
go!
” Reville cried out.

He went. Blade went a scared instant later and found himself in among black armor, sweaty smells, and startled, unpleasant faces. Sukey was partly behind him. He grabbed her by her travel-stained blue silk and, as his fingers met in it, he heard Reville shout, “And
go!
” So he took off again. After that it was highly confusing. Sukey screamed all the time, which made it even more confusing. Blade rather thought that he tried to translocate in one direction while Reville went in another. However it happened, they went in a set of wild zigzags. Blade saw moor, mountainside, different moor, a sucking marshy place, and—for one terrifying instant—the men in black all around him in the road again. He and Reville leaped frantically away from that—road, bank, more bank, another stretch of road—bundling and wrenching the screaming Sukey between them. And at this point Blade sorted out that it was no good expecting Reville to get it right and tried pushing the next time Reville pulled. He pushed hard, to get as far away as possible.

They ended up staggering and splashing in the edges of a barren little mountain lake, high in a cup of khaki-colored hills somewhere. Blade realized he had hold of Sukey by the seat of her trousers and let go quickly. Sukey stopped screaming and flung herself on Reville.

“Oh, Reville,
darling!
I
knew
you'd rescue me!”

“I was behind you all the way, my love,” Reville said. “Now I'll never let you go.”

The two of them stood kissing passionately in the water, regardless of wet boots.

Well, well, thought Blade. Perhaps she wasn't just leading him on after all. Feeling rather let down, he waded and squelched among spiky rushes until he reached drier turf, where he stood and looked around the barren lake for some clue to where they might be.

It was not so totally deserted as he had first thought. A low green spit prodded out into the water just below a place where the mountains formed a kind of saddle. There was someone fishing from the end of the spit. He must have been very much engrossed in his fishing because he had not even turned around to see what the screaming and splashing had been about. Blade squelched along the lakeside toward him. It was, he found, one of those confusing landscapes where everything is smaller than you think. He reached the spit of land quite quickly, and the mountain rearing above was only a hill really.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The man fishing turned around with an inquiring smile. He was wearing huge wading boots and clothes the color of the hills surrounding them. He seemed young and good-natured. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “Can I help?”

“We're a bit lost,” Blade explained. “Can you tell us the best way to go?”

“The nearest big place is Costamaret,” the fisherman said. “It's more than a hundred miles southeast of here.”

“Oh,” said Blade. He thought about translocating there and realized, just by thinking about it, that his ability to translocate had been completely drained for the moment by the mad zigzag struggle with Reville. “Is there anywhere nearer than that?”

The fisherman shifted his rod carefully into his left hand and pointed with his right at the khaki saddle of hill above them. “Up there. You'll find somewhere on the other side of that.” He smiled, obviously feeling for the dismay on Blade's face. “It's the only way really. I'm sorry.”

Blade looked up along his pointing hand. It was not so far to that lower part of the hill, though it looked steep. He looked back at the fisherman.

He was not there. There was not even a ripple in the water or a footprint from his waders. Whoever the man was, he was clearly a very powerful magic user. Blade had not even felt the power it must have taken to vanish like that. Meanwhile Reville was towing Sukey along the lakeshore to the spit. Both of them were pink and happy and full of energy. “Up there to that low part then?” Reville said to Blade.

“Did you see anyone?” Blade asked.

“No,” said Sukey. “But that's where you were pointing, wasn't it? You know, you look a lot younger without your beard.”

She and Reville set off at a joyous run up the hill. Blade plodded after, still wondering about that fisherman. But before long he was thinking more about the energy being in love seemed to give to Sukey and Reville. The hill was not only steep but covered with the kind of mountain grass that is nearly as slippery as ice, but they were at the top before Blade was two-thirds of the way up. He was thinking that being in love might just be worth trying when Reville threw himself flat and made urgent motions to Sukey to do the same. Blade came up the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

Reville motioned him to stop talking and crawl to look over the top of the hill. Blade wormed his way there, expecting to find the road again and the kidnappers standing in it, waiting.

He saw the road, certainly. It curled around beneath him and led into a messy sort of hole in the mountainside, below and to the right. He saw men in black armor, too, but not the ones who had carried off Sukey. These had on armor so old that it had mostly gone back to brownish black leather. Blade only recognized it as soldier wear from the style. These men—ten or so of them—had nasty-looking whips with which they were threatening three groups of ragged, skinny people who were bowed down and straining to push three large covered metal trucks along three lengths of metal rails. Each set of rails came out of one of three more messy holes in the mountain, then ran for a hundred yards before it just stopped. Blade puzzled about this. He also puzzled about why the struggling people did not just turn on the men with whips, until he saw they were chained.

As he saw the chains, the puzzle about the rails was solved, too. Each truck had now struggled its way to the very end of the rails and stopped. A cheerful figure in a billowing robe sauntered up to stand level with them, ran a hand through his gray curls, and then made the sort of weary, practiced gesture that Blade knew rather well. Three curious slits appeared in front of each truck. They seemed to be slits in the very nature of things, because they ran through the moors, mountains, and the road and yet seemed to float on top of the landscape at the same time. The slits writhed about a bit, settled, and became openings into somewhere else. Blade peered, but all he could see beyond the openings were more metal rails continuing the ones the trucks were on. The men in old-soldier armor shouted and cracked the whips. The bowed people in chains heaved. And the trucks ran through into somewhere else. The openings vanished, and the overseers urged the prisoners back to the mountain again, where, if Blade craned, he could see three more trucks waiting.

He did not wait to watch anymore. He slithered down the hillside to join Sukey and Reville on a sort of ledge. They stared at one another. “That was Barnabas!” said Blade.

“I know. Does Querida know?” Reville said. “That's quite an important question, because it could be that everyone at the University is in on this. In that case, where's the money going?”

“What money? What do you mean?” Sukey and Blade asked, almost together.

“That's a mine, more or less inside this hill we're sitting on,” Reville explained, “and it's run nice and cheaply on kidnapped slave labor. Whatever they mine is going offworld. By the ton truck.
Someone
is making money out of it, and I don't think it's only Wizard Barnabas.” He dived around on Sukey. “What's in those trucks? Any idea? What does your world get?”

“I haven't a clue,” she said. Her eyes were wide and worried among her tangled curls. She suddenly looked older and shrewder and more like Reville. “And I want to know,” she added.

“Then we'll go and find out.” Reville stood up, looking very determined.

“Why?” Blade objected. It was unexpectedly warm on the hillside ledge. He wanted to sit there and rest.

But Reville turned to him in a way that surprised Blade, because it was like Titus or King Luther when they were being royal. “Someone,” said Reville, “is robbing my world. I want to know who, why, and what. Because it's illegal.
I'm
the only person around here who's allowed to steal stuff. Guild rules. So how do we best get a look at what they're stealing? Ideas?”

Blade stared at him, feeling glad that he had not happened to tell Reville about the dwarfs. Sukey looked around thoughtfully. Then she pointed behind Reville. “There may be an opening up there. We could sneak in that way.”

As Reville swung around to look, it occurred to Blade that Reville and Sukey were a good match for one another. Sukey looked—and was—a girlish sort of girl. Yet she had hardly turned a hair at being kidnapped, and now she was as cool and collected as Reville, and far cooler than Blade was, at the idea of sneaking into a mine full of illegal robbers with whips.

“Yes. A sort of cave, maybe,” Reville said, and set off for the dark dent in the hill that Sukey was pointing to. Sukey scampered with him. Blade slithered reluctantly after.

There was a hole in the mountainside there. It was hard to tell if it was natural or someone's early attempt to dig a mine. It was rocky and earthy, and it led away inward in a passage high enough for them all to walk upright. Before it grew too dark to see, Reville snapped his fingers and, to Blade's envy, caused a blue tuft of witchlight to sprout from his left hand. He held it up to guide them.

“Reville, you're marvelous!” Sukey sighed.

“Just go carefully,” Reville whispered. “I can feel a big drop somewhere ahead.”

The drop was simply a hole in the earthy floor. Beyond it the passage came to an end. Reville knelt down and shone his left-handed light into the hole. There was an insecure-looking old ladder bolted to the near side.

“Old mine shaft,” Reville whispered. “Excellent.” He swung himself onto the ladder. It creaked like a dead tree in a gale. “One at a time,” he said warningly. “It won't carry three.”

Blade had to wait in the dark while Sukey followed Reville down. After that there was no question in Blade's mind where he was going. He was going with Reville and the light if it killed them all. He arrived at the bottom of the rasping, swaying ladder with his teeth chattering. Just the cold, he told himself. Just the cold in here. He turned thankfully toward the blue light.