Water Sleeps (39 page)

I think this’s as far as I can take you,” Swan told me. He spoke slowly, as
though having trouble sorting out his thoughts. “I don’t get it. Stuff keeps
going away. I know I was farther inside than this. I know all the things we did.

But when I try to remember anything specific, I lose everything between the time
I got to this point until sometime during the gallop back. Stuff comes to me all
the time when I’m not trying. I do remember that. Maybe Catcher messed up my
brain somehow.”

“There’s an all-time understatement,” Goblin muttered.

Swan ignored Goblin. He complained, “We were actually off the plain before I
realized that we were the only ones who would be coming out.”

I was not sure I believed that but it did not matter now. I grunted, suggested,

“How about you make a guess? Maybe your soul will remember what your brain
can’t.”

“First you need to get some light in here.”

“What do I have wizards for?” I asked the gloom. “Certainly not anything useful
or practical like providing a light. They wouldn’t need one. They can see in the
dark.”

Goblin muttered something unflattering about the sort of woman who indulges in
sarcasm. He told Swan, “Sit down and let me look at your head.”

“Let me!” Tobo enthused at the same time. “Let me try to make a light. I can do
this one.” He did not wait for permission. Filaments of lemon and silver light
crawled over his upraised hands, swift and eager. The darkness surrounding us
retreated, I thought reluctantly.

“Wow!” I said. “Look at him.”

“He has the strength and enthusiasm of youth,” One-Eye conceded. I glanced back.

He was still astride the black stallion, wearing a smug look but obviously
exhausted. The white crow was perched in front of him. It studied Tobo with one
eye while considering our surroundings with the other. It seemed amused. Then
One-Eye began to chuckle.

Tobo squealed in surprise. “Wait! Stop! Goblin! What’s happening?”

The worms of light were snaking up his arms. They would not respond to his
insistence that they desist. He started slapping himself. One-Eye and Goblin
began to laugh.

Meantime, the two of them had done something to Swan to clarify his mind. The
man looked like he had just sucked down a tall, frosty mug of self-confident
recollection.

Sahra saw nothing funny in Tobo’s situation. She screamed at the wizards to do
something. She was almost incoherent. Which betrayed how much stress she
inflicted upon herself.

Doj told her, “He isn’t in any danger, Sahra. He just let himself get
distracted. It happens. It’s part of learning,” or words to that effect, several
times, before Sahra calmed down and began to look defiant and sheepish at the
same time.

Goblin told Tobo, “I’ll take it till you get your concentration back.” And in a
moment there was light enough to see the walls of the huge chamber. Someone who
is skilled at something always makes it look easy. The little bald wizard was no
exception. He told One-Eye, “Help Swan keep his head clear.”

I thought the place looked like a nice change from sleeping out in the weather.

I wished there was fuel we could burn to heat it.

“Whither now?” I asked Swan. For some time I had been silently regretting not
having caught Murgen while I was dreaming so I could have gotten reliable
directions.

The white crow squawked and launched itself, leaving One-Eye cursing because it
had swatted him in the face with its wings.

I was starting to understand the beast. “Somebody see where it goes. One of you
sorcerer geniuses want to send a light with it?” Tobo had received control of
his light again and had it working in good form but it took all his attention to
manage it. I hoped he outgrew this more-confidence-than-sense stage before he
took a really big bite of disaster.

Uncle Doj trailed the crow at a dignified pace. I supposed I ought to contribute
something more than executive decisions, so I followed him. A ball of leprous
green light from behind overtook me and made a nest in my tangled hair. My scalp
began to itch. I had a suspicion One-Eye might be sneering at my personal
hygiene, which, I confess, sometimes became the victim of a negligent attitude.

Sort of. “This’ll teach me to take my darn helmet off,” I grumbled. I refused to
allow him to flash me his smug, toothless grin by not looking back.

I had not been wearing an actual helmet. God save me, that would have been cold.

I had been wearing a leather helmet liner, which had kept my ears from getting
frostbitten. Barely. Winter. It was one of those things the planning team had
not foreseen.

I hurried past Doj, who was startled when he saw my hair. Then he grinned as big
as ever I had seen him do. I tossed him a bloodthirsty scowl. Unfortunately, to
do so I had to turn around far enough to see One-Eye and Goblin suddenly stop
exchanging handslaps and snickers. Even Sahra turned slightly sideways to
conceal her amusement. All right. So suddenly I am the clown princess of the
Company, eh? We would see. Those two would . . .

I realized that they had lured me into accepting their system of thought. Before
long I would be setting traps so I could get even first.

The crow cawed. It was down on the cold stone floor. It danced back and forth,

suddenly impatient. Its talons clicked softly. I dropped to my knees. It let me
get almost within touching distance before it flopped farther into the darkness.

More light took life behind us as people and animals came inside, making the
predictable racket. Every new arrival had to know what was going on.

The crow became a silhouette if I lowered my head and looked at it with my cheek
against the floor.

I told Doj, “There’s light coming from somewhere. This must be where the
Captured got into the inner fortress.” I got down on my belly. There was a
definite gap in a wall of stone so dark it seemed unseeable even in the
available light. I could not make out anything on the other side.

Doj got down and placed his own cheek on the floor. “Indeed.”

I called, “We need some more light over here. And maybe some tools. River.

Runmust. Have those people start setting up some kind of camp. And see what you
can do about shutting out the cold.” That would be difficult. There were several
large gaps in the outside wall.

Goblin and One-Eye stopped grinning like fools and came forward dressed in their
business faces. They kept Tobo right there with them, determined to teach him
their trade quickly, hands-on.

With more light it was easier to see what the bird meant me to see, which had to
be the crack Soulcatcher had sealed after working her wicked spells on the
Captured. “There any spells or booby traps here?” I asked.

“The Little Girl’s a genius,” One-Eye grumbled. His speech had grown a little
slurred. He needed rest badly. “The bird strutted through and didn’t go up in
smoke. Right? That suggest anything?”

“No spells,” Goblin said. “Don’t mind him. He’s just cranky because him and Gota
haven’t had no privacy for a week.”

“I’m gonna fit you out for all the privacy you’ll need for a couple of eons,

Runt Man. I’m gonna plant your wrinkled old ass—”

“Enough! Let’s see if we can make the hole any bigger.”

The crow made impatient noises on the other side. It had to have some connection
with the Captured even if it was not Murgen operating from some lost corner of
time. Certainly I hoped it was not Murgen from the future. That would imply a
less than successful effort on our part now.

I grumbled and snarled. I stamped back and forth while half a dozen men expanded
the hole, every one of them grousing about the shortage of light. I did not
contribute much as a human candle, either. Maybe the thing in my hair was Goblin
and One-Eye offering commentary on how bright I was. Though I doubted that after
only two hundred years they could yet have developed that much cleverness and
subtlety.

A larger and larger crowd piled up behind me. “River,” I growled, “I said you
should have these people do something useful. Tobo, get back from there. You
want a boulder to fall on your head?”

A voice behind me suggested, “You ought to get more light on it so you can see
if you need to do any shoring.”

I turned. “Slink?”

“There were miners in my family.”

“Then you’re as near an expert as we’ve got.”

One-Eye jabbed a thumb at Goblin. “The dwarf here has sapper experience. He
helped undermine the walls at Tember.” His face split in an ugly grin.

Goblin squeaked, a definite clue that “Tember” was an episode he did not recall
fondly. I did not remember any mention of a Tember in the Annals. Reason
suggested that the referenced event must have taken place long before Croaker
became Annalist, which he had done at an early age.

Two of Croaker’s more immediate predecessors, Miller Ladora and Kanwas Scar, had
been so lax in their duties that little is known about their time—other than
what their successors have reconstructed from oral tradition and the memories of
survivors. It was during that era that Croaker, Otto and Hagop joined the band.

Croaker says little about those days himself.

“Am I to take it, then, that I shouldn’t invest unlimited faith in Goblin’s
engineering skills?”

One-Eye cawed like a crow. “As an engineer our bitty buddy makes a wonderful
lumberjack. Things fall down wherever he goes.”

Goblin growled like a mastiff issuing a warning.

“See, this here skinny little bald-egg genius sold the Old Man the notion of
sneaking into this burg Tember by tunneling under its walls. Deep down. Because
the earth was soft. It’d be easy.” One-Eye snorted as he talked, his laughter
barely under control. “And he was right. It was easy. When his tunnel caved in,

the wall fell down. And the rest of us charged through the gap and sorted them
Temberinos out.”

Goblin grumbled, “And about five days later somebody remembered the miners.”

“Somebody was just plain damned lucky he had a friend as good as me to dig him
out. The Old Man just wanted to put up a gravestone.”

Goblin growled some more. “Not so. And the real truth is, the tunnel never
would’ve collapsed if this two-legged, overripe dog turd hadn’t been playing one
of his stupid games. You know, I almost forgot. I never did pay you back for
that. You should’ve never brought it up, you human prune. Damn! You almost went
and died on me before I got you paid off. I knew you were up to no good. You had
that stroke on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did, you nitwit. Every chance I get, I try to die just so’s you
can’t backstab me no more. You want to be that way? I saved your ass and you
want to be that way? Ain’t no fool like an old fool. Bring it on, you hairless
little toady frog. I maybe slowed down a step the last couple years but I’m
still three steps faster and ten torches brighter than any lily-white—”

“Boys!” I snapped. “Children! We have work to do here.” They must have driven
the whole Company crazy when they were young and had the energy to keep it up
all the time. “As of this moment, all the slates are clean of anything that
happened before I was born. Just open me a hole so I can go see what we have to
do next.”

The two wizards did not stop growling and muttering and threatening and trying
to sabotage one another in small ways but they did lend their claimed expertise
to the effort to open the gap.

O nce the opening had been expanded enough to use, there was a brief debate
about who would use it first. The accord was universal: “Not me.” But when I
squatted down to duckwalk forward into the shadows, in hopes I could get a look
at what might eat me a few seconds before its jaws snapped shut, several
gentlemen turned all noble and chivalrous. I suspect it was significant that two
of them, Swan and Suvrin, were not Company brothers.

Goblin grumbled, “All right. All right. Now you’re making us look bad. All of
you, get out of the way.” He bustled forward.

He did not have to duck.

I did, just slightly, as I followed him through.

I did not need anyone to be noble or chivalrous or to go in before me.

“There is no God but God,” I muttered. “His Works are Vast and Mysterious.” I
was five steps inside and had just bumped into Goblin, who had stopped to stare
as well. “I presume that’s the golem demon Shivetya.”

“Or his ugly little brother.”

Murgen had not kept me posted on the golem’s state. At last report it had been
just a single earth tremor short of plunging into a bottomless abyss, still
nailed to a huge wooden throne by means of a number of silver daggers. I
observed, “It appears the plain has been healing itself in here, too.” I eased
forward.

There was still a vertiginous abyss. I had to close my eyes momentarily while I
regained my equilibrium. Shivetya remained poised over it but the gap clearly
was narrower than Murgen had described. In closing, the surface had pushed the
wooden throne upward somewhat. Shivetya was no longer in momentary peril of
falling. It looked like a few decades would see him lying there with his nose
pressed into healed stone, the overturned throne on top of him still.

Willow Swan invited himself to join me. He said, “That thing hasn’t moved since
last time.”

I countered, “Thought you couldn’t remember anything.”

“Whatever the short farts did, it seems to be working. I recognize things when I
see them.”

Goblin told Swan, “Considering what could still happen if Shivetya starts
jumping around, holding still seems like a pretty good idea. Don’t you think?”

“Could you hold still for fifteen years?”

I said, “He’s held still a lot longer than that, Swan. He’s been nailed to that
throne for hundreds of years. Or even thousands. He has to have been nailed down
since before Deceivers fleeing Rhaydreynak came here on their way to other
worlds and hid the Books of the Dead.” That observation got me some looks,

particularly from Master Santaraksita. I had not yet shared the tales I had
gleaned from Murgen. “Else he would’ve stomped them good at the time. They
would’ve looked like the kind of thing he was put here to guard against. I
think.”

“Who nailed him down?” Goblin asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Might be a handy piece of information. You’d want to keep an eye on a guy who
could do that kind of thing.”

“I would,” Swan agreed. He grinned nervously.

“It’s listening,” I said. I moved along the edge of the abyss several steps,

squatted. From there I could see the demon’s eyes. They were open a crack. I
could also see that there were three of them instead of two, the third being in
the center of the forehead above and between the other two. This point had not
come up before, though it was the sort of thing you would expect of a
Gunni-style demon.

The oversight became self-explanatory as soon as the demon sensed my scrutiny.

The third eye closed and vanished.

I asked Swan, “That throne look like it’s solidly wedged?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering if we could move it without losing it down that crack.”

“I’m no engineer but it looks to me like you’d really have to work at it to dump
it down there now. Obviously, it could go. One really stupid move . . . it’s a
hell of a deep hole. But . . . ”

The curious kept piling up behind us. Their chatter was becoming annoying. Every
single whisper turned into a gaggle of echoes that made the place seem more
haunted than it was. “Everybody be quiet. I can’t hear myself think.” I must
have sounded nastier than I intended. People shut up. And gawked. I asked, “Does
anyone see a way to get that thing turned right side up and pushed back away
from the gap?”

“How come you’d want to do that?” One-Eye asked. “Quit shoving, Junior.”

Suvrin asked, “Using equipment we have on hand?”

“Yes. And it would have to get done today. I want the majority of these people
back on the road south at first light tomorrow.”

“That means using brute force. Right now. Some of us would have to get on the
other side of the fissure and lift the top of the throne enough so people and
animals on this side could get the leverage to pull it on up. Using ropes.”

Swan said, “You try to stand it up the way it is there, the bottom end will just
slide off the edge. Then it’s a grand ride off to the entrails of the earth.”

“How come you’d want to do that?” One-Eye demanded again. I ignored him again.

I concentrated on the argument spreading outward from Suvrin and Swan. I let it
run for several minutes. Then I announced, “Suvrin seems to be the only one here
with a positive view. So he’s in charge. Suvrin, draft anybody you want. Help
yourself to any resources you need. Sit Shivetya back up for me. You hear that,

Steadfast Guardian? Gentlemen, if you have any ideas, feel free to share them
with Mr. Suvrin.”

Suvrin said, “I can’t . . . ! don’t . . . ! shouldn’t . . . ! guess the first
thing we’d better do is get a solid idea of how much weight we’re dealing with.

And we’ll have to rig up some way to get across the gap. Mr. Swan, you handle
that. Young Mr. Tobo, I understand you’re skilled at mathematics. Suppose you
help me calculate how much mass we’re dealing with here?”

Tobo grinned and headed for the throne, not at all intimidated by the demon.

“One adjustment,” I said. “I need Swan with me. He’s been here before. Runmust,

you and Iqbal figure out how to get across. Willow. Come with me.”

Out of earshot of the others, Swan asked, “What’s going on?”

“I didn’t want to remind anybody that the Company got this far once before.

Somebody might recall a grudge against the man who made it impossible for our
predecessors to go any farther.”

“Oh. Thanks. I guess.” He glanced at the clot of Nyueng Bao. Mother Gota
continued to nurture her grudge. She had a son somewhere down under this stone.

“I may just have a strange perspective. I do believe all of us should accept
responsibility for our actions but I’m not sure we ever understand why we do
some things. Do you know why you cut Soulcatcher loose? I’d bet you’ve spent the
odd minute here and there trying to figure that out.”

“You’d win. Except it’d be more like the odd year here and there. And I still
can’t explain it. She did something to me, somehow. Just with her eyes. All the
way across the plain. Probably manipulating my feelings about her sister. When
the time came it seemed like the right thing to do. I never had a doubt until it
was all over and we were on the run.”

“And she kept her word.”

He understood. “She gave me everything her eyes promised. Everything I could
never have from the sister I really wanted. Whatever her failings, Soulcatcher
keeps her word.”

“Sometimes we get what we want and find out that it wasn’t what we needed.”

“No shit. Story of my life, Sleepy.”

“Around fifty people came onto the plain. Two of you got away. Thirteen died on
the road, trying. The rest are still out here somewhere. And you helped put them
where they are. So I’m going to need you to show me. Are you still blind in the
memory or have you started to remember?”

“Oh, those spells took. It’s coming back. But not necessarily organized the same
way that it happened. So bear with me when I seem a little confused.”

“I understand.” I kept an eye on the others as we talked. Sahra seemed to be
putting herself under a lot of unnecessary stress. Doj looked ferociously ready
to seize the day should an opportunity pop up. Gota was nagging One-Eye about
something while keeping one grim eye aimed Swan’s way. Goblin was trying to get
the mist projector set up amidst a jostling crowd. I noted, “There seems to be
more light than Murgen reported.”

“Tons more. And it’s warmer, too. If I was allowed a guess, mine would be that
it has something to do with the healing that’s going on.”

I did feel overdressed for the indoor weather. It was not hot but it was warmer
than the plain outside and there was no wind biting.

“Where are the Captured?”

“There was a stairway over there. We must have gone a mile down into the earth.”

“You carried thirty-five unconscious people down there and got back in time to
get away from the evening shadows? Without killing yourself?”

“Catcher did most of it. She has a spell that makes things float through the
air. We roped the people together and pulled them along like a string of
sausages. She did the pulling, actually. I stayed on the uphill end. More or
less. At first. Because the stair has some twists and turns. We had trouble
getting them around the corners. But a lot less trouble than if we’d carried
them one at a time.”

I nodded. I knew of other instances when Catcher had used the same sorcery.

Seemed like a handy one to have. We could use it right here, right now, to hoist
my future buddy Shivetya.

Curious. Once upon a time Murgen said that name meant “Deathless,” although more
recently I had been given the meaning “Steadfast Guardian.” But I had been
provided with whole new sets of creation myths and whatnot, too.

I fought off an urge to charge off and plunge down the stairway right then. I
hustled back to talk it over with the others. Most of the crowd were preoccupied
with an effort to get Shivetya’s throne turned right side up by the power of
talking about it. Suvrin told me, “It’s a way to keep warm.” And a way to work
off some tension, no doubt. I heard plenty of traditional-style grumbling
questioning the intelligence of any leader who wanted to play around with
something like that great ugly thing over there on that throne.

I gathered everyone interested. “Swan knows the way down to the caverns. His
memory is getting better all the time.” Goblin and One-Eye preened. I gave them
no chance to congratulate themselves publicly. “I’m going down there to scout. I
want the rest of you to get camp set up. I want you to work out specifically how
we’ll divide up tomorrow so the majority can scoot on across the plain to
safety.” We had discussed this time and again how we could break up the party,

leaving the minimum number of people with the maximum stores to bring out the
Captured while the rest moved on to, it was hoped, a more congenial clime.

Doj’s position, so perfectly rational, was that we should ignore the Captured
until we had crossed the plain, had gotten ourselves established in the Land of
Unknown Shadows, and were capable of mounting a more thoroughly prepared and
supplied expedition. But none of us knew what we would face at that end of this
passage, and way too many of us were emotionally incapable of walking away from
our brothers again now that we were this close.

I should have gotten more information out of Murgen while we still had some
flexibility. Time was winnowing our options rapidly.

Sahra’s response to Uncle’s repeating his suggestion was blistering enough to
melt lead. She might be reluctant to have her husband back but she was not going
to delay any crisis.

Swan leaned over my shoulder and whispered, “If you hang around here waiting for
all these people to agree on something, we’re going to get very old and very
hungry before anything happens.”

The man had a point. A definite point.