The Wanderer's Tale (36 page)

THEY ONLY JUST GOT
out in time. Stumbling through the pitch blackness of the mine, it had been Wodeman’s instinct alone that had guided them. The light from Bolldhe’s lantern had disappeared altogether, and they had been forced to grope their way after the fleeing men in total darkness. (Orders were orders, Nibulus realized, but did they have to obey them with such zeal?) Moments later, however, the Peladane found that his senses too had become ‘heightened’.

Through all the creaking, snapping, crashing din, he yet managed to discern the sounds of running and shouting from ahead and, together with the shaman, fair propelled the wounded Nahovian up the steep gradient that opened before him now.

A moment later he could feel the chill swamp mist upon his face, and within seconds they were out in the open, out on the moors again,
above
ground at last, and back amongst the rest.

There was one final, tremendous groan and a second later the entire shaft caved in with a thunderous crash. Thick clouds of dust and debris billowed out like a Giant’s phlegmy cough, then all settled into a troubled silence. The mine was sealed forever.

It was about an hour before dawn, and they were back out on the Rainflats again. The faintest hint of silver glimmered above the dark eastern horizon, and the first tentative chirping of birdsong heralded the beginning of a new day. Nibulus filled his lungs with the euphoric sweetness of clean, fresh air, the first he had breathed for nearly thirty hours. It smelt of wetlands, rain and sedge. A few miles off to the north, low clouds grumbled.

. . . Thank You, Lord, for granting me the occasion to deliver these men, Your servants, from the Underworld.

For one brief moment, one meanest sliver of time, Nibulus fancied he saw, formed in the shifting wreaths of mist before him, the dumb, bespectacled face of his esquire; the boy was lost and alone, drifting through a morass of damnation, carried along in an icy, ethereal current, down and down. Then, just as he was swept out of sight, he turned, caught sight of his master, and with one glance, punched an auger of guilt straight through the Peladane’s armour and into his soul.

Nibulus instantly looked away, shook himself in the cold, predawn air and wrenched his mind away from such thoughts.
. . . Pity it couldn’t have been
all
of them.

None of them felt like saying a word. Paulus lay moaning upon the damp ground and shivering convulsively. In all the furore he had forgotten about his condition, but now it was coming back to him and he shook spasmodically in the first stages of a monster fit. Wodeman was squatting beside him, weary and even more bedraggled than usual, dispirited at losing his ‘Greyboots’. And the two priests lay flat out, coughing and wheezing and spitting out gobbets of black and yellow slime. Only Bolldhe was still on his feet, but even he looked fatigued enough to drop. Their baggage was scattered all around and appeared to have been lying there for some time, for it was soaked through. It was as though Nym had hurled it all out of her underground realm as soon as she had the men safely in her clutches. The Tengriite armour, Nibulus noted with pride, had been hurled the furthest.

‘Bolldhe!’ Nibulus breathed. He never thought he would be so pleased to see the old wanderer again. ‘What can I say? I don’t know how or even
why
you came back to us, but thank you . . .
Thank you
. We all owe you a debt we’ll probably never get the chance to square up with you, but I for one am going to make sure I repay you one way or another.’

He grasped the traveller’s hand tightly, and looked deeply into his eyes. Bolldhe returned the handshake uncomfortably, but without reluctance. ‘Don’t thank me,’ he replied. ‘Just decided to stop wasting time and get on with this job. If you really want to pay me back, make sure I get an extra slice when we return.’

Nibulus smiled fondly at the wanderer’s request. But, for now, more words would have to wait. They still had a fair way to go before they reached Myst-Hakel, and their rations were every bit as depleted as they had been two nights ago.

Nibulus kept the fixed smile on his face as he turned away. That smile was all that was keeping him together.

Oh, Gapp
, he lamented,
whatever am I going to tell your mother?

An hour later they started off. They had only one beast of burden now. Quintessa and Paulus’s mare had disappeared sometime during their incarceration, leaving no tracks or any clues as to where they had gone. Presumably they had been scared off by all the
not-naturalness
, as Bolldhe put it. Only Zhang remained, who currently stood with his backside to them, letting fall a veritable landslide of excrement in their direction (he had deliberately been holding it in for hours for just this occasion) and steadfastly refusing to look at any of those who had so rudely banished him and his rider two days previously.

So, after Wodeman had bandaged up their wounds with spider’s web and strips of sable, and after all the remaining gear – Nibulus’s armour included – had been loaded onto the sulky slough-horse, the company set off on foot. There were still miles of trackless marsh ahead of them, but for the first time in days as they tramped the lonely wilderness, their way lit by a golden, crisp light from the east, they marched as a team, united – at least for the present – by the ordeal they had somehow contrived to come through.

A full day’s travelling was all it took for the company to leave the worst of the marshes behind them. Though chill and misty to begin with, the day soon warmed up, and as they left the lower ground, with its hollows, depressions and mires, they found themselves staring about them at a land of unique, unexpected beauty, its very remoteness lending it a strange tranquillity. As far as they could discern there was not the slightest hint of habitation here – human or otherwise. All that could be seen were the gentle undulations of the land: the small and oddly shaped knolls clad in broom and capped with solitary hawthorns, and the hollows and dells filled with a dense, white, low-lying mist.

At times they were forced to enter these hollows, an experience not unlike journeying into a Giant’s cauldron. But for the most part they kept to the higher ground. Above, the sky was a pleasant, hazy blue, and swirling about their feet was a knee-high blanket of white mist, out of which the taller grasses poked like rushes in water.

At other times, when the sun shone out clearly, they witnessed a most unusual weather phenomenon, one that none of them had ever experienced or even heard of before: all of a sudden the pale mist, lit up by the sun, seemed to ignite somehow, shining out a pure white that obscured everything else in the world, as if the entirety of existence had ceased. The resulting glare was of such brilliance they would be forced to stop exactly where they were and entirely cover their eyes lest they be blinded. Such moments happened several times that day, usually lasting less than a minute, but once or twice continuing for nearly a quarter of an hour. At first it was unnerving, but eventually they began to adjust to it.

In weary silence the six men travelled on through this land, all of them in an odd, dream-like torpor. Save for Nibulus, they felt their hearts eased in a way, their minds displaced from the horrors of the past few days, but it was still a strange land they had come to, and through it they travelled in a disquieted wonder. No birds could they see, yet from all around them came a continuous chorus of bizarre calls unknown even to Wodeman; high descending whistles, a rapid chattering, a plaintive
eep-eep
, trilling barks, a deep honking, low rasps . . .

Sinkholes suddenly opened before them, partly concealed by their fringes of thick vegetation; tree roots and trailing plants reached right down into their black, freezing depths, from which came the eerie, stony echo of running water and the occasional flurry of monstrous, squealing bats. Small pools of black water they found, too, at which they sometimes refreshed themselves; the water was surprisingly icy and black, and rippled with currents that suggested they were bottomless. Through his divining, Wodeman informed them that these pools and caves were all connected by deep subterranean streams, and could run for hundreds of miles.

During the afternoon they finally came upon the dyke of Enta-Clawdd that Gwyllch had promised ran ‘strayte and trewe’ to the town of Myst-Hakel. There was little evidence of a highway upon it now, the old trade route having long since dried up, but it was the first sign of civilization they had encountered for far too long and it injected a definite spring into their step.

Striding along it, the company now began to notice other evidence that the wilderness was falling behind them. At first they could just see the occasional standing stone or ancient tumulus with weird petroglyphs from forgotten, primordial civilizations, or indecipherable graffiti from more recent ones, etched rudely upon their mossy surfaces. But by late afternoon, as the flies and midges began to bite and foreheads began to run freely with sweat, they would come across small square patches of bare earth, and the little paths that the peat-cutters made, winding through fields of bulrushes and along the banks of wide streams. Here, where the kingfishers darted from their earthy holes, the company passed several mooring posts, and even the occasional flat-bottomed boat.

Soon the dyke all but disappeared, and they found themselves again in lower, wetter country. Here, even the bird-life was more familiar to them: the grey heron flying overhead with ponderous wingbeats; the egret, lanky, white and with crest a-bobbing; dancing cranes; barking crakes; the sedge warbler, the marsh harrier, the merlin, the godwit and the teal, all coming out to feed now that the heat of the day was waning.

At one point they passed a wooden signpost. Standing over seven feet high it was plainly visible in this flat river-land they were now traversing. There was a large, black, evil-looking stork perched atop it, which made no move to fly away at their approach, but eyed them steadily in a sinister way. The signpost was very old and partly rotted, but its inscription was just legible.

‘. . . “
Bac
” . . . “
Bermak
” . . . It’s in a dialect similar to Grass-land-Polg,’ Finwald informed them, ‘one I’ve come across in my studies. Though I’m not sure . . .’

‘What’s it say?’ asked Nibulus.

‘All I can make out is “silver”, and some word like “hole”,’ Finwald replied, ‘though it seems unlikely there’d be any mines of
any
description round these parts.’

The sign pointed along a narrow track, away from the burn they now walked beside; they decided to ignore it, and its ill-favoured occupant, and continued along their current path.

As they progressed along the winding course of the stream, they noticed other channels joining it. It began to widen, and its colour turned from a dark but clear peaty-brown to a milky, muddy grey. There were now so many other tributaries, new channels and interlinking waterways that it became impossible to discern which was the main flow, if indeed there was one at all. The stream eventually became a network of clogged and swampy channels, none appearing to flow in any particular direction. There was a stagnant smell, and the biting of midges intensified.

Dusk approached, while the travellers trudged wearily, mechanically, onwards, urged on by the necessity of finding Myst-Hakel before nightfall.

Suddenly Finwald spoke. ‘You’re the travelled one, Nibulus. What do you know of this Myst-Hakel?’

All day they had travelled with hardly a word between them, and the mage-priest’s conversational tone offered a welcome distraction from the constant squelch of trudging feet. Nibulus himself was not in high spirits at all; he had walked ahead in silence all through the day’s march, refusing to let the others see his face, and ceaselessly brooding on the deaths of his friend Methuselech and his esquire Gapp. Nevertheless, after the day’s hard slog, the worst of his bitterness had died down, and he was finally willing to get his mind off this gloomy treadmill.

‘None of my clan has ventured this way for decades,’ he began, ‘because there’s no real reason to now, at least not since the old trade route moved on. Even in those days Myst-Hakel was fairly isolated, because it so often got cut off by floods or outbreaks of swamp-fever. But since the visiting merchants died down to a trickle, so did the town; and it really went to the dogs. All the locals who couldn’t get out just stayed and stagnated. It’s a place you end up in, not go to, and there’s nothing here to attract people, unless they’re on the run, and even then they’d have to be pretty desperate . . .’

‘What about the silver mine back there?’ asked Finwald. ‘That’s got to be worth something, surely?’

‘You saw how old the sign was,’ Nibulus reminded him. ‘They probably scraped the last of the lode years ago. Anyway, as far as I know, Myst-Hakel’s just a small town – a village, really – about a day’s march south of the fringes of Fron-Wudu. I think it’s built on stilts, or something, I’m not sure. But the inhabitants are said to be a real mixed bag: humans, Haugers, a few Polgrim and their Boggarts, even the occasional giant. And half-breeds, too – plenty of mongrels. Pretty much a law unto themselves, really; since nobody comes to them, they’ve sort of gone their own way, independent of any sovereign lord or city state. They’ve even got their own homegrown religion, a sort of fire cult, from what I can gather.’