Bazil Broketail (47 page)

“He was right about the hot water.”

Relkin took their only waterbag and a kerchief of Lagdalen’s, then adjusted his boots.

“Don’t go too far, Relkin. Hurry back.”

He grinned at her suddenly, all doubts forgotten.

“I wish I were old enough to tell you that I love you, Lagdalen of the Tarcho.”

She snorted. “Fortunately you are not, so get along with you. And don’t forget that our mission is more important than our feelings for each other.”

Her face softened, however, even as she said this; she could not be angry with Relkin for long.

He laughed. “You wish I was the captain now, don’t you?”

“No. You wish you were the captain. Go on, we need water.”

He was still looking back.

“I’m too old for you, Relkin Orphanboy, and I won’t wait for you to grow up either.” She was smiling. “Besides it doesn’t look as if we’re going to live long enough to grow up anyway.”

Still he lingered.

“Go away!” she snapped. “And find some food if you can.”

He had located another tunnel mouth, dark and ominous, on the other side of the cavern. Inside this tunnel the gentle luminescence of the slime weed continued, and with the addition of the blue stone ring’s light Relkin was able to make much faster time.

Still the tunnel seemed endless. For a mile or more he went on into the dim light. This tunnel was not as straight and broad as the first. In places the floor had collapsed into, a mass of boulder-sized chunks of lava. Small side passages and holes opened up in the walls and ceiling.

And then he noticed another light, a warmer, redder light coming from somewhere ahead. And with it came dim, muffled sounds. In particular, the sound of metal ringing on metal.

Eventually he found a patch of reddish light on the floor of the lava tunnel. The light was coming in from a hole in the wall high up near the ceiling. Tumbled rock beneath the hole indicated a way to climb up high enough to reach it.

He scrambled up and looked through the hole.

It was a vent into another world. The passage above was cut and fashioned, with a tiled floor. The light came from one direction, as did the noise. The passage was not in good repair. Tiles and bricks had fallen from the ceiling. Rubble was piled knee-high in some places nearby.

Relkin pulled himself through the hole with a great effort and then recovered by lying on the floor for a few minutes. The air was hot in this passage, with a sulfurous smell.

Slowly Relkin pulled himself to his feet and went on, towards the red light. Soon he turned a corner and the light grew much brighter and the sound grew thunderous.

Then ahead he saw an opening to one side of the passage—this was the source of the light. A minute later he emerged onto a tiny gallery, carved into the rock, high above the floor of a vast chamber.

Below blazed the fires of the forges of the Blunt Doom. With astonished eyes he saw several great trolls at work hurling gigantic shovel loads of ore into a small lake of molten metal. At another point a gang of men, naked but for leather aprons, worked at casting swords and pikes and axes. Smoke rose in clouds from the sizzling steel as it flowed across the sand into the molds.

Beyond this were arrayed dozens of benches on which other men hammered the steel, and then sharpened it and placed it on wagons that took the new weapons to be fitted with hasp and hilt and shaft and made ready for the new armies of the Blunt Doom.

Huge doors crashed open, and from another great chamber came a long wagon laden with ore and dragged by a team of sweating slaves. An imp of evil countenance cracked a long whip over their heads.

The wagon rolled to a halt beside the trolls with their shovels. The slaves ran to tip the wagon over and dump the ore on the pile from which the trolls fed the lake of metal. The whips cracked over them as they were sluggish in righting the wagon once more and turning to pull it back out of the forge.

In the crush Relkin saw a man stumble and fall. The imps began beating him. He rose to his knees but then collapsed once more.

The wagon rolled out, but the imps continued beating the fallen man for a minute or more. Then they seized his limp legs and dragged him to a hole above the fires of the mountain. A thin, constant trickle of smoke rose from this vent. Without hesitation the imps threw the man’s body into the hole. There was a momentary flash of light, Relkin imagined the smoke grew a little thicker, and the imps turned away and followed the wagon out of the forge.

The great doors slammed close again.

Relkin shivered.

One of the trolls turned its head and its red eyes seemed to be looking directly at him. Relkin crouched low, his heart pounding.

But no alert came, and after a few seconds he peeked back over the edge of the natural rock wall of the gallery.

The troll had resumed shoveling ore, another great bucket’s worth splashed into the frothing white hot metal. Workers positioned below opened a vent and released another stream of liquid steel. It roared and hissed as it poured into the sand.

Relkin crept away and returned to the passage. He understood that he had seen the heart, in a way, of the power of the Doom. To manufacture weapons on this scale would allow the Doom to arm such a horde of imps and men that it would overwhelm the legions of the Argonath. Once more the cities of the Argonath would be surrounded by a sea of enemies.

A little further on from the gallery the tunnel opened into three passages. One went straight along, one went downwards and one went off to the right.

He decided against the descending passage, in case it led to the forge and those trolls. The passage ahead went on into darkness, the passage to the right had a faint light somewhere down it.

He chose the light and quite quickly came to a slit window in the wall illuminating a narrow stair that wound downwards out of sight.

Through the slit window Relkin could see another great space, but it was lit very dimly—a sort of grey-yellow twilight though which drifted a reek of smoke and stench.

With some trepidation he went down the steps and found himself at the bottom of a well facing an empty wall.

The only break in the smooth wall was where a pair of bricks had been laid on end to purposely project from the surface.

Relkin touched them and then pushed on them. Nothing happened. He tried pushing on them one after the other, still nothing happened. He was about to give up and return up the steps when he tried pulling on them instead.

Immediately a narrow section of the wall pivoted inwards and he found himself standing in a storeroom, lit only by the light that entered from an opening about thirty yards further along.

On one side were barrels of fresh water. On the other were bins filled half full with oats.

With a prayer of thanks to the goddess, Relkin opened a spigot and let fresh water gush into his mouth. When he had drunk his fill he loaded his kerchief with the oats and tied it up and stuffed it inside his joboquin. Then he filled the water bag from the nearest butt.

He pressed on the bricks and went back through the door to the hidden staircase where he cached the food and water. Then he passed back through the door to the storeroom and continued his exploration of the place.

He found, in fact, a series of storerooms of different sizes and purposes. One was quite small and filled with the reek of rum, which was stored here in hundreds of small barrels.

There were men on guard at this room, too, tall men of sober mien, dressed in black and carrying pikes and bows. Relkin turned back at the sight of them and tried another.

This contained wax, in blocks three feet long and one foot wide and deep. Another was filled with tubs of pitch, and he had to hide while a party of slaves was driven in by some imps and made to load a cart with a heavy tub of pitch and then tow it away.

Eventually Relkin decided he had seen enough; Lagdalen needed water and food too and he had been gone a long time. He found the storeroom with the oats and water and worked the hidden door again.

He slipped back down the long tunnels, past the forge and then to the hole in the floor that lead to the lava caverns below. He climbed through the hole with the food and water and scrambled down the rocks into the slime-weed light of the lower tunnel.

He did not observe the yellow eyes that watched him from the darkness and which followed him, keeping always to the shadows.

Bazil awoke from a deep dreamless sleep. It was like a slow climb up a vertical well from a deep dark pit. Eventually his eyes opened. There was light but it was dim. There was a foul odor on the air.

He tried to move; metal clanked all around him and he felt pressure at wrist and ankle and all along his tail.

He let out a great groan of woe. He remembered now. The desperate fight in the kitchen doorway and then the Hogo, the black thing that exploded like an unwholesome balloon, a sausage loaded with corruption.

He was chained to a wall, each limb encircled by five great steel bracelets, locked and welded to heavy chains that were sunk into the wall on metal pins. Even his tail was restrained, with more chains and cuffs.

“Ah,” said a dragon voice from nearby, “the Broke-tail wakes at last.”

“Nesessitas!”

“The same.”

At least he wasn’t alone.

“Where the hell is this?”

The green dragon was chained nearby, spread-eagled against the wall.

“No idea. When I woke up I was already here, like you.”

“What about the others, Captain Kesepton, dragon-boys?”

“You know as much as I do, my friend. It’s been pretty boring in here, until now of course.”

Bazil snapped his jaws together. This was a damned terrible situation for a dragon to be in.

“What can we do?”

Nesessitas’s voice grew weary. “Nothing very much. I suggest we wait.”

So they waited, for what seemed an eternity to Bazil but was just a day and a night, judging by the slow waxing and waning of the light that entered from a single small window high above.

And then the door crashed open and a group of imps in black uniforms trimmed with gold and scarlet came bouncing in with an arrogant air.

They used tin whistles to summon a quartet of heavyset trolls, but these were trolls unlike any Baz had seen before. Their skins were milky white and their hands and ears and feet were bright pink. Their eyes were pale, colorless, and in their mouths bristled heavy tusks.

Behind them they had a heavy two-wheeled cart.

The imps strode about the cell, examining the chained-up dragons with an exuberant display of insolence. Then they grouped around Bazil and gesticulated among themselves while keeping up an intense gabble in their thick-throated tongue.

“Looks like you’re to be first course, Broketail.”

“I have news for them. This is one lobster that won’t go in their damn pot alive.”

Nesessitas chuckled. “I don’t think you’ll fit into a pot anyway. Maybe they eat you raw.”

“Damn tough meat to chew. Old dragon here, been in the wars.”

The huge trolls lumbered forward and began to work the locks on the cuffs. This was difficult for them; their fingers were too clumsy for such keys. Bazil felt the cuffs loosening, one by one freeing his legs and arms and finally his tail.

As they released his cuffs the trolls seized him by the arms and legs and lifted him smoothly off the floor. Two imps seized the tail and gripped it under their arms. Without his feet he was helpless, or almost.

“They tell me dragons hiss a lot when they go into the boiling water,” said Nesessitas.

“They haven’t got me to the pot yet,” he shot back.

He tensed and then tried to break free from the grip of the four albino trolls.

He heaved and shook, and for a moment took them by surprise with his strength, but then they held him again. The imps gripping his tail, however, were not prepared for the unusual strength in that twisted and broken end piece. With cries of woe the imps flew through the air and slammed into the wall with dull thuds.

With his tail free, he grabbed a troll’s ankle and tipped it onto its side, bringing down the whole group in a tangle of heavy limbs and stocky bodies.

The dragon was the first on his feet. The rest of the imps in the cell let out shrieks of fear and jammed in the doorway.

Bazil grabbed the first troll that got to its feet and swung it head first into the door. Imps flew out the door and the troll was stuck fast in their place. The other trolls were up now, and while Nesessitas urged him on, Bazil the Broketail gave them the fight of their brutish lives.

The odds were in their favor, of course, except that they were slow. He battered them, knocking loose tusks and opening up long gashes on their heads and shoulders. Their pale blood, as colorless as the rest of them, soon made the floor wet and slippery while the air filled with its peculiar sweet-salt smell.

In the end they cornered him, slowly wrestled him down and kicked him in the guts to subdue him. By this time two fresh trolls, also albinos, had come in to aid them and the narrow cell was packed with the hulking creatures.

Swathed in chains once more, Bazil was lifted up and carried out to the waiting cart. The cart was then wheeled through the great underground city of the Doom.

Bazil observed the stone walls and ceilings, the wide prospects and narrow adits. On the wide thoroughfares there were well-lit spaces on either side, shops and work places. A constant traffic of rickshaws and small carts went past, all pulled by human slaves chained between the shafts.

Riding in the carts were men and women for the most part, a people self-selected as servants of the Doom. They were of all races and types but shared a common hardness of the features and a certain arrogance.

Then his troll escort came to a huge black gate. This opened for them and they went on into a darker area with much greater rooms and corridors. Another gate, and another until at last they entered a large hall dominated by a great black sphere that hung from the ceiling like a spider the size of a house. On three sides the space in which the black ball hung was surrounded by a filigree of steel. On the fourth side it was open.