The Waterstone (19 page)

The stone-cored mountains do stand yet

And, staunch as they, we do avow

To keep the faith between us now

And stand together, kindred-true
,

Though world and time divide us two.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It is called the
Magelith
,” the soft voice answered. “Spoken in the Old Tongue of the Diggers. It is a password and a pledge, taught by parents to their children generation after generation, always kept secret, known to the Diggers alone. With the
Magelith
, I make you a member of my Tribe. We are as brothers, you and I, and your sons must be as mine, for tomorrow —”

Tad thrust the words away from him in a sharp gesture of denial. “A thousand Foreshadows never come to pass,” he said.

“Perhaps nor will mine,” the familiar voice said, a fur-warm murmur in the darkness. “But Great Rune has whispered in my ear, old friend. Speak the
Magelith
and any Digger in the land will welcome you and give you aid, for now you, too, are of the line of Burris. Remember.”

Furred fingers closed briefly over his.

“Sleep, Sagamore . . .”

Time shuddered and dissolved. He was in the Council Chamber once more, all eyes watchfully upon him, the stone floor cool under his feet. He felt dizzy and disoriented. The Remember was over. Except . . .

“Burris did me a great honor,” Tad said. “He made me a member of his Tribe.”

Edelbert —
It
would
be Edelbert
, Tad thought — gave an incredulous snort, as if to say that no Digger would ever stoop to such a thing.

Tad began to speak, softly at first, then louder. The foreign words this time felt utterly familiar in his mouth, as if he had recited them many times before. They echoed in the high stone chamber like chords of music, as if the stone itself recognized and welcomed them. When the last echo died away, the Councilors were staring at him goggle-eyed. Edelbert’s mouth was sagging open. Pegger wore a broad gleeful grin.

“The
Magelith
,” Furgo said in a shocked whisper. “How did you come to know this?”

Birdie tugged at Tad’s sleeve. “The
what
?” she whispered.

Tad kept his eyes on Furgo.

“I am what I say I am,” he said, “and I have come to ask for help from the Diggers of Stone Mountain, as is my right as a man of the line of Burris.”

“That it is,” Pegger said robustly. He shot a triumphant look sideways at Edelbert, who was staring fixedly in the opposite direction and looking as if he had just stepped on a weaselpat. The other Councilors murmured excitedly among themselves.

Furgo slowly rose from his seat, stepped forward, and placed his hands on Tad’s.

Then the moment shattered.

A shrill squeal cut through the air, followed by another and another. It sounded as if someone had caught a mouse and were stepping meanly and repeatedly on its tail.
Squee! Squee! Squee!

The heads of the Councilors jerked up as if pulled by strings. Tad ducked, Pippit dodged behind his legs, and Birdie dived off the stone bench and wrapped her arms around her head. Something huge and dark flashed past, high above them. It zipped around the Council Chamber, still squealing, and then abruptly plummeted to the floor. It was a bat. Clinging to its back, looking embarrassed, was a Digger boy who seemed to be about the same age as Tad. He had rusty-red fur with brown-tipped ears and nose. An enormous bulging bundle was strapped to his back, giving him the peculiar look of a furry turtle.

“I’ve tamed my own bat, Grandfather!” he said. “I’ve tamed him! Everybody said that I couldn’t do it, but I have!”

He slid awkwardly to the ground.

“He comes when I call and everything,” he said. “I’ve named him Skeever.”

“This is my grandson Willem,” Furgo said. He sounded resigned.

He directed a repressive look toward Willem. “And what if you had fallen
off
the bat; had you thought of that?” he demanded sternly. “You could have been killed. Or worse, you could have fallen on top of someone else and killed
them.
“

“I did think of that,” Willem retorted. He reached behind him and patted the bundle on his back. “That’s what this is for. I invented it, Grandfather. It works like a sort of air brake. The cloth unfolds and spreads out and just floats you down to the ground like an umbrella seed. That’s what I’ve been calling it — a floater. Here, I’ll show you.”

Before Furgo could protest, he seized a cord dangling over his shoulder and yanked on it. The bundle on his back promptly exploded, spewing out enormous tangled folds of cloth. Willem looked guiltily over his shoulder.

“Of course, it only works when you’re up in the air.”

Birdie giggled. Furgo sighed gustily.

“Sit down, Willem,” he said, “and try to stay out of trouble while we finish our business here.” He gestured politely toward Tad. “Please continue with your story.”

Tad went on with his tale, taking it up where he had left off, conscious of the bright curious regard of the Digger boy. He told of the meeting with Witherwood and Voice and what they had learned in reading the ancient record books.

“We think the Nixies have regained the Waterstone,” he said. “That’s how they’re taking all the water. Witherwood’s book said that all that time ago, the Sagamore came to the Kobolds of Stone Mountain, and they helped him somehow. But we don’t know how. The words on the next page — the page that would have explained it — were all washed away. So we’ve come to find the Kobolds and ask them if perhaps they could help us again.”

The Councilors put their heads together. There was a buzz of worried chatter.

“But . . . there are no Kobolds,” Sindri said. “Not now. The name is just a fairy tale for children.”

“There are poems about them,” Edelbert said. “They are mentioned — in a wholly legendary sense, of course — in the Elder Epic
The Saga of Stone Mountain.
Verses 346 to 407.”

“How can they be?” asked Pegger. “What rhymes with
Kobold?
” He began to mutter to himself. “Bobold, dobold, fobold, gobold . . .”

“It’s in free verse,” said Edelbert coldly.

“You must forgive us, Tadpole,” Furgo said. “In these modern times, we Diggers have grown away from belief in the ancient histories and the old tales. The Witches returned . . .” He hesitated. “This all comes as a shock to us.”

Tad could hardly listen. He sank down on the stone bench and sat there miserably, staring at his knees. No Kobolds! Such a possibility had never occurred to him. He hadn’t realized just how much he had been counting on finding them.

“But that doesn’t mean,” one of the Councilors was saying, “that there may not be other ways of defeating these creatures. We have, after all, made considerable technological advances over the past centuries.” It was Sidda of the Engineers.

“Periscopes . . .”

“Pumps . . .”

“Mechanical arms . . . We could snatch the stone. It’s a simple engineering problem —”

“Traps!” Bodric of the Leatherworkers said, sounding excited. “What do Nixies like to eat?”

They don’t understand
, Tad thought.
They have no idea what she’s like. She’s not some kind of
animal.

Then Willem spoke. He was crouched on the floor beside his bat, trying vainly to bundle the floater back together again. Billows of cloth seemed to be everywhere. “What about the faces in the rocks?”

A puzzled murmur from the Councilors.

“What do you mean?” Tad said. “What faces?”

“They’re on a cliff on the outside of the Mountain,” Willem said. “Faces frozen in the rock, dozens of them. Old men with beards. I used to pretend that they could come alive, that they were wizards.”

“A game,” Edelbert said dampingly. “A play for children.”

“Faces,” the burly Councilor said. Tad struggled for a moment to remember his name. Hadnar of the Stonecutters. “I remember those faces. Masterful work. Masterful. Wasn’t there some sort of story about them?”

“Pure imagination,” said Edelbert tartly.

“It wouldn’t hurt to take a look,” said Pegger.

It was, in any case, too late to investigate today. As Pegger spoke, a reverberating gong echoed through the stone cavern.

“Day’s end,” Furgo said. “Time for the evening meal.”

He turned to Tad and Birdie. “You will be my guests for tonight, and in the morning Willem will take you to see these . . . rock faces. And we of the High Council must discuss this further.”

The Councilors, again moving as one, rose to their feet and inclined their heads toward Tad and Birdie. Tad bowed awkwardly in return. Then he turned and, with Birdie beside him and Pippit hopping awkwardly behind, followed Furgo out of the room.

Furgo’s house was large and rambling. Stone rooms led into stone rooms in confusing order, and much of the furniture — large, blocky, and massive — was carved in place. Stone tables and benches seemed to grow right out of the floor. Tad and Birdie had thought that so much stone would be cold and uncomfortable, but instead the house was beautifully welcoming and warm. A fire blazed in the big hearth, and the stone seats, worn into comfortable polished hollows by generations of Digger bottoms, were invitingly heaped with squashy cushions.

The house was full of people. There were Furgo and his wife, Freyda, a comfortable round-faced Digger in a puffy cap shaped like a muffin; an elderly aunt with white circles around her eyes that gave her the look of a surprised owl; a couple of grown cousins; and Willem’s mother and father and his four little sisters, who all ran around a good deal and had high piercing voices. They reminded Tad of the bat.

They were fourteen at dinner, after which Pippit fell asleep in a corner (on his back with his mouth open), and Tad and Birdie — who had eaten too much — could barely keep their eyes open. Even so, Tad, who was sharing a bed in Willem’s room, found himself staying awake to talk to the Digger boy in the dark.

“The faces,” Willem said softly. “Councilor Edelbert is all wrong about them. I’m sure of it.”

“He didn’t seem to like me much,” Tad said tentatively.

“Skalds!” Willem said. “They’re all like that. Snooty. And the things they make you learn in school. Verses and verses of the great epics, and if you make one little mistake . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“But he’s wrong about the faces,” Willem repeated. “They’re not frozen all the time, exactly. I’ve heard them.” He paused for a moment in the dark. Then he said, “They
whisper.
“

There were hundreds of faces. They were carved in the rough brown stone of the cliff, and they looked as if they had been there for centuries. Some of the faces were so weathered that they were almost worn away, their features blurred as if someone had tried to scrub them smooth with a handful of scourweed. In some places, swallows had nested among the faces, daubing the stone heads with bottle-shaped nests made of damp clay.

Tad, Birdie, Pippit, and Willem stood looking up at them.

“They’re all different,” Birdie said, pointing. “Look, that one’s sort of smiling. And the one next to it — the one with the big bulgy nose — just looks mean.”

No two of the faces were alike. Some had wrinkled foreheads and thick bushy beards; some were bald; one or two seemed to be wearing tight caps that buckled under their chins. One had a jutting hooked nose that reminded Tad of the hawk’s beak; one had a pursed-up mouth that made him look as if he had just taken a bite of a very sour pickle. Two or three had their mouths open and their eyes closed and looked as if they were asleep.

“They whisper?” Tad asked. It didn’t seem possible.

Willem shrugged.

“Sometimes,” he said. “At least I thought they did. I was up here at night once. It’s pretty spooky in the moonlight. There were all these funny shadows and things, and all the faces looked sharper. It felt . . .” He gave an embarrassed little giggle. “It felt like they were all looking at me. All those eyes, staring. The longer I stood here, the less I liked it, and pretty soon I got so scared that I ran away. That’s when I thought I heard them. Lots of little mumbly voices, whispering.” He shrugged again. “When I got back home, my father said it was probably just the wind. But it didn’t sound like wind. It didn’t.”

He looked up at the faces consideringly.

“And they move around too. At least I think they do. Every time I come here, they look a little different. See that one, with his mouth open? He wasn’t like that the last time, I could swear it.
They move.
“

The little faces didn’t look as if they had ever moved. They looked like rocks. Tad reached up and touched the nearest face on the tip of its beaky nose. It felt like rock too.

“Maybe we need to come back at night,” Birdie said.

Tad still stared up at the crowd of faces. There were big ones, small ones, all splotched with dots of light and shadow. If he just stared at them without blinking, Tad discovered, the whole cliff began to shimmer and sparkle, and little spots jumped around in front of his eyes. Willem and Birdie were still talking behind him, but he found that if he concentrated hard enough, he ceased to hear the sound of their voices. He stared harder and harder at the sun-dappled stones. If he let his eyes drift out of focus, he found that all the little faces changed somehow: the features became sharper; the carved eyes glittered with little points of dancing light. And had one of them — two of them? — moved? He could swear the faces were shifting position, turning toward him, their empty eyes winking into awareness.