Dark Lord of Derkholm (45 page)

“Food!” shrieked Callette. Her beak ran hard into some invisible barrier just in front of the hole. It hurt her. She backed off and rubbed her beak with her wing, while Mr. Addis scrambled out of sight and the hole shut with a
clop
. “I meant that about food,” Callette said to the nearest dwarf. “Perhaps I shall eat you.”

“Wouldn't you prefer cooked food, madam?” the dwarf said anxiously. “We have a roast just ready to serve.”

“Bring it here,” said Callette. She swung her evil, scrawny head around at Querida. “And if
you
bother Dad, I'll eat you, too.”

“I don't think I'd taste very good, my dear,” Querida said.

“I can kill people. I killed the ones who shot Kit,” Callette remarked. “Didn't you think I could?”

“I'm sure you can, but I'm also sure you should never have been put in a situation where you thought you had to,” Querida replied. “Derk, this child needs looking after.”

“I can see that,” Derk said. He unfolded his arms and wrapped them around Callette's thin neck. Callette's head flopped on his shoulder. “My brave Callette,” he said.

Querida watched. She watched Don crawl unhappily up to Derk, too, and Derk realize that Don was feeling as bad as Callette. She watched him spare an arm from Callette to wrap around Don. Querida watched a hurried group of dwarfs bringing what looked like half a roast cow on a huge platter out onto the terrace. She watched Callette's beak swing eagerly toward it. Querida murmured to herself, “I must see Mara. I made a mistake there.” She rapped her stick sharply on the paving stones and vanished.

B
LADE WOKE UP FROM
the unpleasant, blank sleep caused by the smelly stuff, feeling ill. He rolled on his face and discovered that the hand he was trying to pillow his cheek on had a thick iron cuff on its wrist, attached to a cold length of chain. There was iron underneath him, rumbling and juddering with what seemed to be impossibly speedy movement. This made him feel so much iller that it was a while before he could move his eyes around to see where he was. There were iron bars all around him and, beyond those, high banks going by so fast that they looked blurred. The sight nearly made him throw up.

An hour or so later he was well enough to realize what this all meant. He was in an iron cage, only tall enough to sit up in and only long enough to stretch out in if he lay from corner to corner. This cage was roped to the bed of a cart and being towed very fast down a sunken road by the horseless carriage Barnabas had made for Mr. Chesney. To make quite sure that Blade could not translocate out of this mess, his wrist had been chained to the iron cuff. As to where he was being towed, Blade preferred not to think. You got to hear of places where—No.

Blade shut his mind and just lived. He was usually quite good at this, but he had never had to do it before while being constantly reminded by the jarring and juddering underneath how fast he was being dragged off to—No. He felt as if he was covered with little bruises. The wind of the movement blew through the bars and made him deeply cold. And as if that was not enough, it was becoming harder, every time he tried, to fit into the wretched cage from corner to corner. At first Blade thought it was just because he kept losing the exact right position. But by nightfall he had changed his mind. He was growing. His body had chosen this moment, of all moments, to shoot up from boy size to man size, just as Mara had promised it would. Of all the stupid things! Blade tossed and shifted and still found his head and his toes jammed ever tighter against the bars. He began to fear he would end up bigger than Kit.

Well, at least I'd burst the bars open, he thought, and tried not to panic.

About the time darkness fell, the towing stopped, with a sort of croak. Blade almost went to sleep in the blessed peace. Then doors banged, and voices woke him up, in the middle of an argument.

“Just no damned good!” said a man. “What's the hurry?”

“I've told you,” said Barnabas's voice, sounding breathy and frightened, “I need this cargo delivered to Costamaret tonight.”

“Well, it's not going to be,” said another man.

The first man said, like somebody explaining to an infant, “This wizard glow of yours doesn't light up the road enough. Not a rough road like this, going so fast, and towing. You want to risk a spill? Break all our necks?”

“So we wait out the night here and go on in the morning,” said the second man. “I could use some sleep.”

“I want a guard on the cargo then,” said Barnabas. “One of you sleep in the trailer.”

Cargo, thought Blade. That's me. It was not good to know that someone who had been like an uncle to you all your life could talk of you as cargo. And mean it. Costamaret was even less good to think of. It was one of those places—No. Blade listened to one of the men climbing up beside the cage, snorting and grumbling as he wrapped himself in layers of coats against the cold. Don't offer me one, will you? Blade thought. He listened and waited. The man in the cart fell asleep quickly, but Barnabas wandered in the road for a while, smoking a cigar. At last he climbed inside the horseless carriage and there was silence. Get drunk again, why don't you? Blade thought. Very cautiously he reached up with his free left hand and began trying to undo the cage.

It fastened with a long bolt that had a padlock on the end of it. For a moment Blade thought he could undo it easily. Then his fingers closed around the padlock and were flung off by a feeling like an electric shock. A spell on it. An iron padlock, too. It took real wizard skills to bespell iron. Yet again Blade cursed the way Dad had refused to let him go to the University. He crouched with his face on the floor, wondering what to do.

Light feet landed on the roof of the cage, two pairs of them. Reville and Sukey? Blade thought, in a surge of hope he had not dared feel before. But there had been the faint
ting
of a claw on iron as the second pair of feet came down. “Blade?” whispered a well-known voice.

Blade nearly hit his head on the roof. “
Lydda!
Lydda, what are you doing here?”

“Ssh!” The man by the cage was stirring. Lydda waited until he had settled down again and then stuck her beak between the bars. It was an advantage griffins had over humans. They could direct a whisper with their beaks so that only one person could hear it. “I've been following you for hours,” Lydda whispered. “I smelled you in there.”

Lydda had always had the most acute sense of smell of all the griffins. What luck she was near! “But what are you doing here?” Blade whispered. “This is the road to Costamaret. I heard them say.”

“Flying about. Having fun,” Lydda replied. “I'd never been on my own before. I like it. Making campfires, cooking things I caught. Fun. But how do I get you out? There's a spell on this padlock.”

“Try. It's a bit like a stasis spell,” Blade whispered. “You could undo the ones in the kitchen.”

“Usually. Elda's better at that than me. But I'll have a go.” Lydda, by the faint sounds, sat back on her haunches and took a look at the padlock. At last, Blade heard a tiny scratching as Lydda put out one cautious talon and plucked at the spell. He felt the spell yielding.

And Barnabas exploded out of the carriage, shouting, in sheets of wizard fire.

Lydda screamed. Her wings whupped. And whupped again. Then she was gone, but whether she was safe or badly burned Blade had no idea. He touched the roof of the cage, and his fingers fizzled. He snatched them away. Oh, damn. Poor Lydda. Poorer me.

“What was
that?
What was that creature?” the man in the cart was demanding.

“I didn't see. A small dragon, I think,” Barnabas said. “I just felt it fiddling with the lock spell. While you snored. Get up on top of the cage and sleep there.”

“No fear,” the man said earnestly.

“Do it, or I'll burn you, too,” Barnabas said. “You've got a gun, haven't you? Then get up there. Shoot the thing if it comes back.”

Blade listened to the man spreading coats on the hot roof and then climbing up there himself. There was no chance of anyone undoing the padlock now. He almost cried. He wished he knew where Lydda had gone, but there was no sign of her. Perhaps she had been very badly burned. He waited, hoping she would come back all the same, and fell asleep in the end, out of sheer misery.

At dawn the vehicle started off again. The men were complaining they were hungry and saying they could get breakfast in Costamaret. Barnabas said, “You could have been back in the mine by now,” as he checked to see if Blade was still crouched inside the cage. He did not speak to Blade. Just cargo, Blade thought.

The juddering and jolting were worse this time. The driver was going fast, causing the cart to slew about sick-makingly. Blade went back to just living again, with his chained arm wrapped around his head. It seemed to go on for hours.

Then suddenly there were houses whipping past outside and people getting out of the way. None of them seemed troubled at the sight of Blade rumbling by inside his cage. He got the idea that this was something they were quite used to seeing. But this part did not go on for long. The vehicle surged into a huge chilly shed, where a crane of some kind swung the cage off the cart and clanged it down on a stone floor.

“… so he can't translocate,” Blade heard Barnabas saying breathily, not far away. “And I want this one dead as soon as possible. Understood?”

“Perfectly, Lord Wizard,” someone answered oilily. “We have the very thing.”

Barnabas left then. Blade was hauled out of the cage by cheerful brown men in loincloths. He was so jolted and cold and cramped that he could hardly walk. But they supported him expertly and rushed him to a small cubicle with a high bed in it, where one of them snapped the end of the chain into a fastening on the wall, and they left Blade alone there.

But not for long enough. Blade was still trying to get either his hand out of the cuff or the chain out of its lock when he was interrupted by another cheerful man in a loincloth. This one was twice the size of the first two.

“Oh, no, you won't get loose like that!” this one told him jovially. “Stop wasting your strength, boyo, and turn over on your front.”

“Why?” Blade asked suspiciously.

“Because I've got to massage you to get you combat-fit. You go in the arena this afternoon,” the man told him. “This is Costamaret here, where we love to watch a proper fight. And we love the Pilgrim Parties for bringing us the idea. Of course we've improved on it. Got contests you'd never dream of. You're booked for one of those. So lie flat, boyo, because I've only got four hours, and by the look of you, I'm going to need every minute.”

Blade looked at the man's size. He sighed and wriggled flat on the high bed. “I've not done anything wrong,” he said. “I was kidnapped.”

“They all say that,” the large man said cheerfully. “Makes no difference to us. They all go in the arena, just the same.”

He set to work spreading Blade with oils until Blade felt like a salad—which made him think yearningly of Lydda again—and then pummeling and squeezing and bending Blade. It was not unpleasant. Blade could feel every single one of his muscles being made to work without using any energy. A bit later it was punishing. Then it got pleasant again. But the worst part was the way the man talked.

“Only two ways for you to get out of here, boyo,” he said, swatting at Blade's stomach with the edges of his hands—
bang, bang, bangbangbangbang
. “Get carried out in a bucket or get the other man carried out. Kill enough of your opponents and they let you go free.”
Bang, bang, bangbangbang.

“How many?” Blade managed to ask.

“They keep putting the number up. Not sure what it is this week. Fifty?”
Bang, bang, bangbangbang.

I am dead, Blade thought. He felt strange, as if he were not really present in the body the big man was so carefully kneading into shape.

“Starting your growth spurt, aren't you?” the man remarked as he pulled and bent at Blade's legs. “Lucky we got you at this stage. Much more impressive if you're small in front of someone big. Much better show. Do well at it and we put a plaque up on your grave.”

At long last, the kneading and pummeling were finished. “There,” said the man. “Now you get a good meal. It's up to you whether you eat it or not, but I advise you to try. More strength, better show.”

Blade was, in a remote, indifferent way, extremely hungry. When they brought the food, he propped it on his knees and ate it all. Then, rather to his own surprise, he fell asleep.

“Well done, boyo,” the large man said, waking him up. “Done everything right. Time to go. Get into these clothes.”

The clothes were of shoddy cloth, but very bright, scarlet breeches and crimson vest. Blade put them on, with the large man holding the chain and threading it through the vest for him, and then he was taken by other people down a corridor smelling of illness to a huge iron door. Just beside the door was a long coil of very thin chain attached to a sturdy staple. Blade watched, feeling depressed, while his own chain was fastened to the end of the thin chain. Beyond the door he could hear the noise of a large crowd of people chattering cheerfully. The audience, he thought. If I kill fifty opponents, he thought. No.