The Wanderer's Tale (42 page)

But there was also a feeling in him that he could not shake off: that, in some inexplicable way, this old silver mine had something to do with his destiny.

He continued down. Soon he sensed new passages branching off to either side of him. He held the torch, now little more than a candle-taper, out into the left-hand opening, shielded his eyes and peered in. There must have been some residual gas in here that he could not smell, for the torch’s flame suddenly turned a greenish-yellow, bloating and undulating strangely like a thick syrup. By its garish light he could see old wooden rails reaching back along the length of the passage, wherever they were not covered with heaps of fallen earth. There was also an old derailed mine-cart, overturned, broken and decayed, its wooden wheels smashed and its brass bindings green with age.

Bolldhe backed out of this passage and turned around to investigate the other. This one was darker, reflecting back none of the torch’s light at all, despite the fact that the additional gas here was causing it to burn even brighter. He peered into the strangely dense darkness in fascination. It was so totally lightless in there that when he extended his hand into it, torch and all, it simply disappeared, and he was back in darkness once again. It was as if he had immersed his arm in a pool of tar.

In his bemusement, he failed to notice that even the Knockers had gone silent.

Then a white hand lunged out at him from the wall of darkness and slapped him hard across the face. Bolldhe screamed in terror, and an entire chorus of high-pitched laughter erupted throughout the mine. He struck out instinctively, lost his balance, and the torch fell from his hands and bounced away down the incline. In its sudden flare he caught a glimpse of a dark figure leap out of the side passage and scramble away from him up the steep shaft.

Despite the bells of panic that were clanging in his reeling mind, Bolldhe knew that any danger from his attacker was now over. It was just the thief, still on the run from him. But this consoled him little, for he now found himself tumbling head over heels into the pit below – down into the very source of the fear.

With a jarring impact that drove the wind out of him, he landed in the chamber underneath. He rolled over painfully on the jagged, splintering surface of the floor, leapt back onto his feet in the same movement, and stumbled in blind hysteria over to his fallen torch. He snatched it up in violently shaking hands, and stared around himself.

The chamber – or whatever it was – fell away from the pool of torchlight into darkness; its size could not be guessed. All that could be seen was a large, empty, wooden chest with a smashed lock and its lid open.

But there
was
something else in this room. Just on the very edge of darkness. The fount of all the instinctive fear assailing Bolldhe all this time, that fear that he had been so determined to overcome. This had nothing to do with the thief or even the Knockers, but was something
entirely
different. He could sense an overpowering aura of evil down here with him, could feel its age-old malignancy boring into his mind. It was so potent he could almost smell it.

There was the briefest of movements, like the fluttering of a departing soul, and Bolldhe was gone.

‘So basically,’ Nibulus stated patiently, ‘what you’re telling us is: you’ve lost your axe.’

Bolldhe glowered and turned away from the big man in contempt. He should have known better than to try telling this lot. As far as they were concerned, the drunken idiot had simply allowed his axe to be stolen, failed to recover it, and now wanted them to provide a new one. All this talk of hidden mines was about as relevant to them as yesterday’s weather forecast.

It had taken Bolldhe less than half an hour to reach Myst-Hakel. Gasping for breath and dripping with sweat in the humidity of the night, he had finally reached the sanctuary of the temple. All the others awoke blearily from their inebriation and stared up at him in alarm. But he had merely waved a dismissive hand at them and staggered over to his mattress. Within minutes, he was fast asleep.

In the morning they were woken early by Job Ash. He had brought them a breakfast of raw tentacled mollusc in fish-oil (which the green-faced diners had picked their way through with a kind of stunned disbelief) and cheerfully asked them if they had enjoyed their night out. None of them had been inclined to enlighten him but, later on, Bolldhe drew the boy aside and asked him what he knew of the mines.

But Job’s dumbly smiling expression did not waver.

Stupid bloody savages!
Bolldhe snorted irritably.

Finwald suddenly called out from his vantage point at the window. ‘You’re not going to find out anything from that boy. He probably knows as much about those mines as I know about peat-cutting. I’ve been talking with some of the locals here, and I don’t think anyone goes near the various mines or holes around here. Remember those deep sinkholes we passed on the way here? And all the bottomless pools? From what I can gather, this whole area’s dotted with them, and apparently they’re considered taboo. Something to do with those huge bats, I think; the locals see them emerging at dusk, as if they’re flying straight out of the underworld itself.’

It was clear that Bolldhe would discover nothing of the mines – or more specifically the evil down there – from the locals.

‘If you like, I’ll go with you,’ Finwlad suddenly offered.

‘What?’

‘To the mine. You need to get your axe back, remember?’

‘My . . . The thief’s got that,’ Bolldhe replied, puzzled by Finwald’s offer. ‘What d’you care, anyway?’

‘It just sounds interesting, that’s all,’ Finwlad protested. ‘Mazes and hidden chests . . .’

‘Empty, I said, not hidden,’ Bolldhe corrected him, surprised that anyone had actually been listening to his story earlier that morning sufficiently to remember that bit . . .

He paused. Finwald was staring at him rather intensely all of a sudden. The mage-priest’s hands had balled into fists, and it looked as if he were not breathing.

Suddenly he leapt up.

‘Come!’ he urged as he strode across the room. ‘There’s something not right about all this. I think we should take a look at this mine of yours, right now.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Bolldhe stammered.

‘A feeling,’ Finwald said, ‘a presentiment. I do have them, remember?’

He wrenched the door open and shouted out to the others, ‘Nibulus, get your armour on. And you, Paulus. We’re going hunting.’

Without so much as a backward glance, Finwald marched off into the clammy heat of the morning.

The others stared at each other in bewilderment. What was all this?

But obviously Finwald had ‘seen something’ again, just like he had ‘seen something’ two and a half months ago, which had induced them along on this mad adventure in the first place.

Out of curiosity more than anything else, they helped Nibulus on with his armour and hurried after their precious augur, wherever he had got to by now.

A while later they all stood at the bottom of the mine’s entry-shaft, glancing around uncertainly. Each one of them now carried a flambeau that had been steeped in pitch so that it burned with a strong, oily heat, giving off a steady emission of black, acrid smoke. All except Bolldhe, who held the bull’s-eye lantern, which he had been much relieved to find safe in the temple-dormitory. Nibulus, rather eccentrically to Bolldhe’s mind, had strapped his torch to one side of his helm, in the way of the adventurers depicted in the woodcuts back home in the Wintus Hall of Trophies. He led the way boldly, filling the whole passageway with his Tengriite-clad bulk.

‘You certainly do pick the most charming places for your late-night wanderings, Bolldhe,’ Appa snapped as he extricated one of his shoes from a patch of sucking muck.

‘Not my choice, old man,’ Bolldhe replied tartly, training his lantern’s beam suspiciously on every bump and niche in sight. ‘Beats me why any thief would choose it, either.’

Even with company this time the constantly shifting shadows were making him so jumpy that after barely two minutes he was almost a nervous wreck.

‘Look to your back, Paulus,’ he warned the man at the tail end of the line. ‘You don’t know what might be lurking down here.’

Paulus, however, merely paused to adjust the weight of his bestudded leather cape upon his shoulders. He maintained his silence, and continued with his black sword waving before him like a cockroach’s antenna.

Of all of them, Finwald looked the most serious. His face was set in concentration, his brow furrowed like those leathery old farmers he drank with at The Chase, and his black eyes stared intently ahead into the path of the lantern-light. He uttered not a word.

The party splashed along the freezing tunnel slowly, carefully picking their way.

‘Down here,’ Bolldhe said quietly, pointing to the hole that opened up to their left. His heart raced madly.

‘You went down there on your own?’ Nibulus wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.’

Bolldhe was by now too scared to register the compliment. He was hearing those screams in his head again, and with them the far-off rumbling of the sea. He directed the lantern’s beam down into the shaft, and the others crowded around to look.

The Peladane stroked his blade, weighing the sword in his hands. Bolldhe studied his face and tried to gauge the temper of their leader, and whether or not he was taking this escapade seriously. But the Peladane’s features remained impassive. After a quick readjustment of his armour, he said, ‘All right, Bolldhe, keep close behind me, and keep that lamp directed ahead of us at all times. The rest of you, keep your wits about you, and be ready to act swiftly and precisely; I don’t want you crowding any more than—’

He never even finished the sentence. All eyes were now staring fixedly at the horror rising out of the shaft towards them.

‘
Shit!
’ cried Nibulus in alarm, and leapt back from the hole.

Immediately panic gripped the company. Torches swept about wildly or were dropped to the floor, weapons swung, men screamed and bodies writhed in a melee. Exactly what happened in those brief moments none of them would ever know, but afterwards all they could remember was the panic, the insanely dancing flambeaux and the sound of the Beast. Deep and liquid, it snarled its way up out of the darkness in savage, shuddering breaths, as terrible as the Rawgr itself.

Nibulus truly came into his own that day. Deprived of space and bereft of the light Bolldhe should have been providing, the Peladane nevertheless somehow managed to keep his head while all around him turned into pandemonium. Channelling every scrap of his training and experience, his great strength and a barrelful of fear-induced fury, he threw himself at the Beast and brought his Greatsword to bear in a series of vicious, well-placed blows. He never caught sight of the nightmare clearly, only brief flashes of some terrible apparition in the frantic light: great fangs, huge, blood-hued talons, a mane of black hair flailing about behind it. It was probably fortunate that Bolldhe had dropped the lantern.

Then the clash of metal – green sparks flying into his face and smouldering in his stubble – a sword being wielded with great strength but little skill – the crackle of magic from behind – moans of terror and despair – hastily babbled prayers – the stench of sweaty terror . . .

Then Bolldhe, screaming something in his own language, hurling a flask of torch-oil full into the face of the monster – the arc of a flaming torch flying overhead – a flash of fire – a hideous howl of agony – the smell of boiling oil, singeing skin, ignited hair that thrashed about in a whirlwind of smog-belching flame –

And the horror was gone.

Gone in an echoing, gibbering wail; gone in a trail of smoke as its bristling mane trailed fire behind it. Down into the depths of its lair. Sobbing in misery and defeat.

Silence . . .

Then a voice, straining to hold itself steady:

‘Just grab that sword, and let’s get the hell out of here!’

Finwald’s voice. No one disagreed.

Three days later, Bolldhe was still feeling sick. The day after their ordeal in the mine he had woken up in a state of deep malaise, which during the course of that day had waxed into a black depression. The following day had seen no improvement, and by the third it had developed into a physical illness. No efforts on the part of the healers made any difference.

His companions, by contrast, exuded vitality: they were positively twitching with energy and vigour. The sudden excitement of the conflict – though it had terrified them at the time – had both thrilled and animated them, and by the time they had arrived back at the temple they were suffused with the kind of dynamism none of them had expected in this torpid little swamp town.

Shouting and chattering excitedly in the safety of their dormitory, the first thing they had done was to allot the monster’s sword to Nibulus, in recognition of his valiant deed. But the Peladane had insisted that it should be Bolldhe – who had inflicted the only real injury upon the beast with his flask of oil – who should receive the trophy.

This had surprised everybody, not least Bolldhe, for it was not like their leader to be so self-effacing. But then there was also the suspicion that Nibulus was merely being practical; he would not give up his beloved Unferth for anything, and the already encumbered warrior was not about to further weigh himself down with another burden.

Finwald had at first seemed a little put out by this. As far as he was concerned, the sword was too good for the likes of Bolldhe. But he could see this decision was out of his hands, and did not raise any serious objection.

Bolldhe, though, had wanted nothing to do with the weapon at all, and had regarded it with a distrust that bordered on loathing. But in the end he had relented. This was not because of Nibulus’s persuasions, nor due to any sense of pride in his prize. It was simply for the pragmatic reason that he had clearly lost his broadaxe for good, and this finely crafted weapon was the best he was likely to come across in these uncivilized lands.