Back Under The Stairs - Book 2 in The Bandworld Series (15 page)

"You worry too much." The second voice.

"Anyways, it don't make no difference." The
third soldier.

"You get commanded to do a job, you should do
it." First soldier.

Hearing the nearby, about-face of the pacing
soldier's boots, John took a longer look, only to discover that the
best way to recognize which of the three men was speaking was by
tone of voice. All three were short. All muscular. All dark -- with
black hair. Each in a short, light green, military tunic with dark
green piping.

"And we would have if somebody hadn't hauled
the body off," said soldier number two.

"That's what worries me," replied the first
soldier, still pacing back and forth, if anything, more agitated.
"Who could have done it?"

"But don't ya see, Knab, it don't matter.
Whoever done it, he won't tell." The third soldier's voice was
pitched somewhat lower than the other two.

"Yeah, he'd get in worse trouble than we
would if he did."

"Unless it was some crazy person."

"You worry too much. The way I look at it, we
don't get in trouble if we don't tell. But if we say we didn't bury
him like we were told to, we do get into trouble."

"But it wasn't our fault."

"That don't make no difference to officers.
Why you don't do your job, they don't care. That's why we got to
give it time, wait here, take the same time it'd hav' taken ta bury
him."

"I suppose." A doubtful pause. "Still, it
gives me the creeps not finding the body where we were told it
would be."

"Like I say, you worry too much."

"But it was a Mage. It was the Mage,
Pfnaravin."

"So?"

"So ... what if he came to life again. Just
walked off."

"Then me and you is better off than if we'd
buried him."

"Huh?"

"Sure. What you think a Mage would do to you
if you was to have buried 'im, then he come alive underground. What
you think a Mage would do to the men who buried him alive?"

"But if he's still alive and shows up. What
will the Head do to us for not burying him?"

"We say we done it. That the Mage dug hisself
out again."

"Yeah. That would work, I guess."

"Anyway, the war's won." Second soldier. "Got
that bunch to beat in the Claws, down Realgar way. All that's left
of them."

"And when the war's over?"

"Don' know. We come here because of the dyin'
of the magic over Malachite. Same as what's happenin' here. What I
can't figure is that it don't seem to do no good to win. The
magic's dyin' anyway." Grunts of agreement from the other two.

A pause.

"As for me, I'm tired of waiting here." This
was the first soldier John had heard speak: Knab. "You two can stay
here if you want, but I got a better place to wait."

"Don't let no one see ya."

"I won't."

John felt panic seize him! The soldier was
about to leave!

Boot steps on stone ... coming John's way ...
louder ....!

With no chance to back down the hall, John
flattened himself against the corridor wall, at the same time
reaching back to press Platinia to the wall, as well. If the
soldier swung down their hall, there was no chance that he
......

But he didn't! A flash of shadowy green and
Knab had tramped past them to disappear down the other hall, his
clacking footsteps receding ... to silence.

John stood away from the wall again; used
both hands to wipe sweat from his eyes. It took three deliberate,
but quiet, breaths to slow the beating of his heart.

As for the other two soldiers around the
corner?

Silence. ............

Scraping ......

Creaks from the guards' chairs. .......

Nothing else.

Again, John felt Platinia tug on the back of
his tunic.

Fascinating as the conversation was -- these
men obviously the burial detail sent to inter the poor old man
who'd died in the cage -- John had to admit that Platinia was
right. Though there might be a corridor somewhere beyond the
soldiers that John couldn't see, this tee-corridor was a dead end.
The two of them had to retrace their steps and try another
route.

Quietly, John and Platinia turned to tiptoe
back down the hall, Platinia in the lead again.

Until ... they came to a bisecting corridor,
the child-woman ducking left this time instead of right.

With nothing to do but listen for sounds,
make sure he didn't drop the diagram of Hero Castle, and follow
Platinia, John mulled over what the soldiers had said.

Clearly, they'd been sent to bury the old
man, discovering that the corpse was missing.

The man's body gone?

Why?

The only reason John could come up with was
that someone had stolen the cadaver to strip it of the modern,
"otherworldly" clothing the old man was wearing. John tried to
think of an analogous situation in his own world. If he'd run
across the body of an alien from another planet, wouldn't he be
tempted to take something off the body? To keep as a souvenir?

Maybe.

Without enough data to solve the "case of the
missing corpse," John gave up trying. Was content to plod along
behind the sylphlike girl, not that the rest of the trip was
entirely uneventful!

Before getting to Zwicia's second level
apartment -- where John had established her before he'd gone home
-- they had two more scares. Both, from almost running into small
groups of soldiers, Platinia getting John out of the way each time
-- first, down a parallel corridor, the second time, finding them a
hiding place behind a dark abutment built into a massive,
load-bearing wall.

Finally, both of them breathing hard -- more
from strain than from exertion -- they were at Zwicia's door -- in
the middle of another dark, damp, depressing, limestone hallway.
Were there any other kind?

Platinia knocked. Gently. Like Platinia did
all things. ...

Knocked again. ...

No answer.

Lifting the latch, Platinia nudged the door,
the heavy barrier -- once started -- creaking open all the way.

Looking over Platinia's shoulder, having to
concentrate in the flicker of a single, ceiling level torch on the
other side of the narrow room, John saw Zwicia, seated to the right
before a small table. Her crystal lay in front of her, the disk's
chain hidden in shadow.

Crystal-gazing.

The old woman was stroking the watery looking
disk with one "talon," waving the other "claw" in the air, the
Weird making her usual, moaning sounds.

Though Platinia entered, John lagged
behind.

Why?

He had to admit to himself it was because he
was afraid of the Weird's crystal. Afraid of that overlarge,
purplish disk because it had "trapped" him the last time he'd
stared into it, John coming "out of it" to learn he'd lost a couple
of months; had traded that time for tantalizing fragments of ...
what? The past, present, and future? That's what the Weird-disk was
purported to show, at least.

It was only when John's friends had forcibly
"removed" the crystal from him, at the same time locking John in a
small room to "sober him up," that he'd "come to himself" enough to
realize that months had passed him by.

Bad as it had been to have caught the
"crystal-sickness," what was worse was that John had become
afflicted at a critical time. The period when, denied John's
leadership, Stil-de-grain had almost lost the Malachite War. Did
lose a substantial part of the Stil-de-grain Navy.

Not only from a military perspective, but
also from a personal one, ogling the Weird-disk had dealt John a
devastating blow. Had cost John ... independence of action. To put
it more bluntly than John liked to think of it, a single session of
crystal-gazing had made him a gem-junkie.

What had kept him from succumbing to the
disk's allurement -- what had given him the strength to resist
another crystal-fix -- was Platinia's presence. Just having
Platinia in the room with him, he'd believed, reduced his obsession
with Zwicia's disk. The girl beside him made ... everything ...
better. Made food taste better. Made discussions with others go
more easily.

Silly.

But that was the way it had seemed at the
time.

So much so that, at the last, John had
arranged to have Platinia with him every minute of the day and
night.

Feeling that way at the end of his former
"stay" in Stil-de-grain, it was no wonder John didn't want to get
too close to Zwicia's crystal now. Was ... reluctant ... even to
enter the Weird's room.

Then ... John had a thought. If there was any
truth to his former belief that Platinia's presence reduced his
need to look into that intriguing disk -- and there probably wasn't
-- it was stupid to be afraid of entering Zwicia's room right now.
Platinia was inside!

Feeling dumb -- dumb about being
superstitious -- about being cowardly -- about having developed a
mental dependence on Platinia -- John forced himself to enter
Zwicia's cubbyhole of a room.

Felt, as he did so, no increased attraction
to the disk.

Not much ... anyway.

Safely inside, John swung about to close the
door.

Turning back, saw that nothing in the gray
rock cubical had changed since his first glance from the hall,
Zwicia still seated at a small table to John's immediate right.
(Now closer to the Weird, John could see that her disk was still on
its chain around her neck, the flat, thin crystal laid out on the
table before her.)

Bent over, the old woman's humped shoulders
hunched even more, her partially denuded head flopped down, Zwicia
was staring into the foot-wide disk of shimmering glass, the
crystal radiating an aura of pulsing, purple light. John's
imagination? A reflection from the flickering torch on the far
wall?

On Zwicia's other side was little Platinia,
the girl's childlike hand on the Weird's ample shoulder.

"Zwicia," Platinia said in her young girl
voice.

No response from the old woman but
crystal-mumbling.

"Zwicia," Platinia said more urgently, at the
same time shaking the Weird's purple clad shoulder hard enough to
wiggle the Weird's loose-flesh arm, Zwicia's head lolling back, her
eyelids fluttering.

Slowly opened her scummy, clear-colored eyes,
she saw John for the first time. Recognized him. ... Screamed!

John almost dropped the blueprint! "Quiet,"
he urged quickly, putting his finger to his lips, the elderly woman
able to shut off her high pitched, old-crone shriek as quickly as
she'd begun it.

Fortunately, after entering the room, John
had the foresight to close the room's thick door.

"It's just me. I've come back."

"Com' bak'," the old hag said, shaking her
head from side to side, her thin gray hair resembling an African
fly whisk in the hands of a whirling dervish. "Knew, com'
bak'."

Still looking at John with her windowpane
eyes, the old lady clawed her crystal off the table to fumble it
inside the front of her shapeless, violet robe.

For his part, John looked across at Platinia
for an interpretation of Zwicia's babble. Got only a puzzled
frown.

"Zwicia. The soldiers in the castle are
dangerous," John continued, trying again to communicate with the
aged Sorceress. Generally, a losing proposition.

"Dange'us. Zwicia kno'." Whatever Zwicia
"kno," she seemed to be tracking.

"I think I've got a way to get us out of
here."

John waved the map, nothing about Zwicia to
indicate she understood the paper's significance.

"There's a secret passage under this
moldering keep. If Platinia can get us into the basement, or
subbasement, or dungeon or whatever you call the lowest part of
this ruined pile, I think I can find a way out. A way that no one
knows about."

"Zwicia go."

"Something else I wanted to ask," John added.
Since Zwicia wasn't "with it" very often, you must make the most of
having her attention. "The torches. Unless I'm badly mistaken, the
torches seem to be failing here as they failed in Malachite. Is
there now a loss of magic in Stil-de-grain?"

"Som'." Testimony that backed up what John
had heard from the soldiers and what he'd seen for himself in the
flicker of the building's torches.

Not only in Malachite, then, but also in
Stil-de-grain, the magic failed.

Because of the evil influence of the Azare
Mage. At least, that's what everyone believed.

Nothing John could do about that at the
moment. More likely, nothing he could do about it ... ever!

"If we get started, there should be enough
light to get us out of the castle before down-light."

John turned to Platinia who had drifted off
to the side while he talked to Zwicia. "Can you find us some
provisions? I don't want to get far from the castle, but we all
need to be free of the soldiers." Platinia nodded. "It would help
if you could also borrow a torch or two. I'd go with you except
that you know the castle and I don't. Also, the soldiers expect to
see you in the halls. But not me. I'd better stay here with
Zwicia."

The minute John said that, he had second
thoughts. Staying with the Weird and, in particular, with the
Weird's disk -- without Platinia there as a buffer -- still didn't
seem like a good idea. "I have a better suggestion," he added
quickly. "Down-light coming fast, why don't you and Zwicia both go.
Split up to get us what we need. Food. Maybe some warm blankets.
Torches. Spoons would be good. And maybe a knife ....."

"Yiiiiiiii!"

Zwicia!

Screaming!

Startling both John and Platinia!

The scream over as suddenly as it had begun,
they were again "treated" to the fly whisk whirling of Zwicia's
hair as she shook her head. "No tak'! No tak' knif'!"

"What?" John had always had trouble making
sense out of Zwicia's brogue.