Bazil Broketail (52 page)

Eventually they came to a stair that returned them to the first level of tunnels, and from there they soon came to a junction they remembered from their trip to and from the higher floors of the keep.

They returned to their earlier path once more. This time they found no patrol on the upper level of the deep tunnels. But deeper still, on their way to the hiding place, they heard more noises, very distant but undoubtedly on the same level as themselves.

They reached the chamber where the cat and its horde of rats had come upon them. It was not easy to locate the cleft in the wall and then find the low passage into the hidden chambers. The rats had nibbled away the slime weed here to keep it dark.

But after they had fumbled around in the dark for a while they heard sharp squeaking sounds, and then with the soft light of the blue stone ring they saw rats darting around the cleft beside them.

Some of the rats then ran under the rocks and disappeared. Relkin bent down and found the low-set passage once again. Shortly after that they were back in the secret chamber.

The black cat was there, staring gravely down upon Lessis’s body. As they approached it turned to regard them with big, solemn eyes. There were a handful of rats there, but of the living carpet that had filled the place before there was no sign.

Relkin nodded to the cat and showed it the mushroom. He didn’t know why but he felt he had to, as if to ask the cat’s forgiveness for being so tardy.

The cat blinked once and looked back to Lessis. She was deathly pale; in fact, she seemed quite dead to Relkin.

“What?” He turned to Lagdalen, horror rising in his heart. Were they too late?

Lagdalen crouched by the frail figure of the Lady.

“Lady, we have returned. We have what you requested.”

The cat gave a sudden call of complaint. It turned around and called again and arched its back. They looked at it, but it returned to staring at Lessis’s face as if it were a lamp illuminating her eyes.

“I don’t know. Sometimes she goes into a trance that lasts for days. She speaks to beings we cannot see. I have seen things, Relkin, things that I cannot explain.”

Relkin felt that eeriness again. The small, pale woman lying there on the mound of hay was at the center of a whirlpool of forces and events—she was the tiny pivot of enormous actions. It made him giddy to contemplate them at all.

“But is she still alive?” he murmured, for she did not seem to be breathing.

“Her heart beats, but slowly,” said Lessis.

“How is the wound?”

“Still clean, there is no rot.”

“Then we must try to wake her.”

Lagdalen was uncertain. “I do not know if that is wise. Let us wait a little while.”

“But does she not need this mushroom?”

Lagdalen shook her head. “It is not medicine, Relkin. She must harbor her strength in order to be able to work with it. We had best wait a while. The lady has always told me that patience is the first and greatest virtue in these things.”

Relkin shrugged. “Then we wait, while they search the tunnels.”

“We wait.”

Time passed. Relkin didn’t think at first that he could sleep, but he chewed some more oats, drank some water, rested his head on a rock, and awoke only to a shake from Lagdalen.

“Wake up, Relkin. Something is happening, they’re back.”

Groggily he sat up, wiping his eyes.

Rats were returning in great numbers. He looked over his shoulder and saw many more streaming in from small holes and crevices around the chamber.

The hair on his neck rose again at the sight, but in his heart he also felt a strange sense of relief. For some reason it was damned good to see all those rats coming back.

The rats were gathered around them once more as if they were an audience come to hear a concert recital from the woman, apparently dead, who lay on the hay.

The old black cat had greeted the rats with its familiar display of ill temper, knocking them flying with swats from his paws, but as before the rats made no attempt to fight back. They flowed around the cat and formed up in a dense mass, covering the entire floorspace of the cave. In the dim greenish light Relkin saw a sea of little beady eyes, all intent on Lessis.

Once more that force built up, slowly growing in intensity, until with a gasping intake of breath Lessis awoke. Her eyes opened first, and then slowly, very slowly, animation returned to her face.

The slowness of it chilled Relkin, for it suggested to him that she was indeed very weak and close to death. But at length she was looking up at them, breathing and clearly alive.

She moistened her lips, then spoke. Her voice was very soft now, remote, little more than a whisper.

“Lagdalen, my dear, this is going to be more difficult than I had expected—my strength is failing. You, my dear, will have to cast the spell and weave the magic numbers. If you have the candle and the mushroom it should be possible. I will tell you what to do.”

Lagdalen felt her heart freeze in her chest. The responsibility for this was to be hers? It was too much; she was so bad at declensions. What if she made a mistake? What if the lady were to die because of an error?

But there was no escape from it. No one else was there to take this burden from her. Lagdalen cut away the remains of Lessis’s clothing. Numbly, she watched as her hands crushed the mushroom into a small ring of crumbs on the center of Lessis’s chest.

How thin and worn the lady was; her breasts were withered, her ribs gaunt. Lagdalen had never seen her naked before and now the sight of her flesh made her want to weep.

She steadied herself and placed the candle, which Relkin had laboriously lit with flint and stone and the little pile of straw shavings, into the center of the crumbled mushroom.

Lessis awoke once more, again with the deadly slowness.

“Now, my dear, we need to begin the declensions, and we must hurry for they have to be completed before the candle burns out. Are you ready?”

Lagdalen shrugged. “I am ready, lady.”

“Recite the seventh and ninth redactions from the Birrak.”

Lagdalen knew those from memory, but she also had the lady’s small pocket Birrak for the more difficult sections. The trouble was reading it; the characters were tiny and the light was poor.

Slowly her voice strengthened and the words of power filled the chamber with resonance. Carefully, brick by brick she built the spell; the curves of magical power began to harden in the air.

The very weft of the world was in play here now, and Relkin stared at Lagdalen with amazement as the long strands of poetry rolled from her lips and caressed the magic from the fabric of the world itself.

As it went on, Lagdalen felt herself being subsumed into the play, her essence dissolving into the words as they built up the outlines of the spell.

She had to make haste with it, the Lady Lessis was clinging to a black wall that was itself sliding into eternity. Her fingers were weakening and if they gave way she would be gone, lost forever. But Lagdalen could not afford to make a mistake, and despite the need to hurry she had to be letter perfect.

There was sweat running down Lagdalen’s back and sides now; she was working into the high passages, using cadenzas
creata
and
voluminate
, modes she had never used on her own.

These words were hard to say; they caused physical discomfort in the mouth, especially the
voluminata
, which she did not know how to control. At one point the breath was sucked from her body and she was left gasping for air when a volume formed a fraction too soon, before it had even left her lips, for she did not know the techniques for shaping the mouth and lips.

Fortunately this slipped volume had no effect on the curves of the high power since there was a tolerance there now, as the weight of the spell had now formed.

Relkin’s hair was on end as he heard the strange growls and roars of the volumes as they were expelled. This was more witchcraft than he had ever imagined being witness to.

The candle was burning low—a long time had passed. Lagdalen’s tongue moved thickly in her mouth, the words were less well-pronounced, but the rats were still there, as intent as ever on this moment of strange drama.

At last it was almost done. Lagdalen set down the Birrak. Her tongue and the roof of her mouth hurt, her throat was sore, her eyes were prickling, she was exhausted.

But she was filled with a sense of exultation. Lagdalen of the Tarcho, so terrible at declension in Abbess Plesenta’s classroom had made it all the way through a spell of the greatest magnitude without a mistake.

A hundred lines of cadenza! And forty volumes!

She recovered her wind. Lessis was looking up at her.

“No time to lose, my dear,” whispered the witch. “I can barely hang on any longer.”

The cat moved, miaowed plaintively.

“Take him. He is ready,” said Lessis.

Lagdalen reached out to the old torn cat and picked him up in her arms.

His body was hard and stringy, his claws sank into her forearms with instinctive reaction. She winced but did not drop him or release him, and in a moment he relaxed a little with a sad miaow and retracted his claws.

She said the final words of power and then held the cat above the small flickering flame of the candle. There was a vortex of invisible pressures flowing in; the whole cave seemed to shake on the primordial level.

The flame went out, there was a seething hiss in the room as if from a wave washing back out through fine sand, and a slight smell of ozone stung their nostrils.

Gradually their eyes readjusted to the murk without the candle. The cat lay on Lessis’s chest; Lagdalen reached out to touch him and found that he was dead, already stiffening.

And then Lessis opened her eyes with a snap. Life blazed within her and she rose in an instant, cradling the dead cat to her bosom. She broke into a low-toned song with words in an unknown tongue.

As she held him her body seemed to inflate slightly, and her skin took on a glow of health while the lines and creases that had been so evident in near-death were banished.

Her song came to an end and she laid the body of the black cat down on the hay where she had lain.

She looked to Lagdalen and Relkin and held out her arms.

“I am different now—I am very fierce, filled with a rage like nothing I have known for a long, long time.”

“The spirit of your friend, lady?” said Lagdalen looking to the cat.

“Yes, the spirit of Ecator, a prince of cats. I made him, long ago, and now I have taken him into me, forever. ”

The rats were now milling around the body of the cat. In a moment they had borne it up on their backs and were carrying it away.

“Tend to him well, little ones, for I love him still and he has repaid his debt in full.”

She stretched again, from corner to corner of her body, with a grace that seemed at once quite feline and yet very human. Lessis seemed abruptly much younger now, although still of an indeterminate age, but perhaps in her thirties or forties rather than her sixties as before.

And where her wound had been there was now only a livid scar, a long pink line along her side.

“I am hungry, and I want to eat rat,” she said. “I hope such desires will not last for long.”

“We have some oats and water.”

The witch made a face.

“I suppose it will have to do.”

The deep tunnels were on no maps. Not even the Doom knew all the ways of this warren.

Increasingly frantic, Thrembode led the search for the witch. She was down here somewhere, he could feel it in his bones. But although they had found some traces of the fugitives in the tunnel beneath Mt. Mor, they had discovered nothing since.

What would the Doom do if he was unable to find the hag? Thrembode came close to panic when he thought about this. The Doom had a passion for cruelty. It was said the thing did not enjoy its existence. It was trapped forever in a rock, a thing of mind alone, and yet it knew the bitterness of envy and the pain of desire for what it could not have—life itself. In rage at this fate it fed on cruelty and power.

There was a secret laboratory somewhere in the depth of the Doom’s Tube; the rumors of what went on in there were stark and terrifying.

To die as an experimental animal for the Doom was a horrible fate indeed. Thus Thrembode drove on his imps and troopers, sending parties to work through the entire warren.

Still nothing was found.

Thrembode went out himself with a crew of imps and men and worked down the passages, level by level. His desperation was becoming obvious. The men knew well the sort of pressure he was under—they became surly, difficult, and slow to obey. The imps would know eventually, and he would be left down there staggering up and down after the witch alone, until the Doom sent a patrol to collect him and bring him to the Tube.

And then, in a deep place, he suddenly felt the tension of a power field. A great spell was being said, and the world itself was warping under the influence of the highest magic. Thrembode felt it at once and understood the strength and quality of it, and he knew it was her, the hag, very close by.

She was doing something on the greatest scale and this perturbed him, for what could it be but the destruction of the Doom and the city. She had to be stopped!

Frantically he ran back and forth, tracking the power he could feel. It was to his right, low down but on this level.

He ran until he came to a cavern that the imps had explored several times. The source was behind the rock wall, close. He searched up and down the wall but found no entrance.

There was no time to waste. He pulled back the imps and sent messengers to fetch mine trolls with pick and drill. But before the trolls arrived, the power rose sharply to a crescendo of pulses and the air seemed to wobble and then it was finished.

The power disappeared.

Thrembode listened intently. Somewhere back there he heard a faint singing. He tracked it to a wide crevice that ran into the wall for a couple of yards. He bent down since it seemed to be coming from somewhere below him.