A Mankind Witch (24 page)

"Do you ever get flooding problems?" he asked, changing tack, while carefully making yet another wax impression of a coin face.

His kobold assistants nodded gloomily. "All the time. Much heaving of buckets," said one. Cair was a high-status slave. But that still meant that working for him was not something any kobold but the lowest of the low would do. Cair didn't mind. It was easier to extract information from them, and they were far more inclined to do exactly what they were told. They were used to it.

"Ah. Perhaps I can fix this. Send all this water out to the place these
björnhednar
go."

"You can magic water?" The kobold was impressed. "Haw, haw, make it run uphill to troll lands?"

Cair shrugged confidently. "I could send it all the way to Jotunheim if I wanted to."

That was too much. The kobold snorted disdainfully. "You lie too much, slave. Get back to work."

Cair held up the lead coin. "Did I lie about this?"

The idea took a while to penetrate the creature's pointy little skull. "No . . . so you really mean that you can send water to Jotunheim? It is . . ." He looked at his fingers and then at his bare toes, and decided that even with the toes it was too much. He settled for "many many leagues."

"Sure. But big hard magics, that job. Much work," said Cair making a show of wiping his brow. "We can rather send it to the Bakrauf."

"Hur. Good enough." By the looks of it the "much work" had put the guard off. Kobolds and humans felt much the same way about some things.

"But such magic takes much planning," said Cair. "Do you have maps?" he asked calmly.

His answer came with a knotted brow. "What is maps?"

"Drawing of where all the tunnels go. And how deep they are."

The kobold shook his head. "No. What would a kobold do with something like that? We can smell our way!"

"Well," said Cair, keeping his tone bored. "I will have to see the places. The water. The way to Bakrauf's kingdom."

The guard nodded. "If the king says so."

He'd just have to make his own map. He'd already made his own key to the crude locks on his manacles. He'd realized that all of them were identical, fairly rapidly. Simply a bar with a rectangle on the end. He was no expert on locks—the subject had never interested him, but with access to tools he'd modified a piece of thin iron sheet with a bit of patient cutting while his bored guards looked on. He'd hidden it in his hair. That evening, when locked in his cell, Cair had tried it on the manacles. He'd known a moment's real panic when it had stuck. But brute force had triumphed and with a bit of filing he now had "ornamental" bangles that he could lose at will.

Later, the guards brought in another prisoner. He was naked. Cair had glimpsed one other human prisoner in this state in the distance. This man was generously covered in filth. He was big, but he wasn't Manfred of Brittany. His dirty hair had once been Scandinavian blond. Cair recognized the face—the man had once been part of Vortenbras's guard.

He also recognized Cair. "So you were in league with these creatures of the underworld, thrall."

Cair stared at him coolly. "No. I traffic in more powerful sprites. Get him some water to wash in. He smells."

By the time food came, Cair was convinced that Orm, his new assistant, was the stupidest thing on two legs. His reaction to being given a hammer had been to try and attack the kobolds. Cair had been obliged to hit his arm with his manacle chain and knock him down. The hammer went flying and broke several clay molds. Sitting on top of him, Cair hissed, "Idiot. Behave and I'll get you out of here. Do anything more stupid and you can go back to where you came from. Now get up and behave before we get speared." Indeed, dozens of sharp spears surrounded them already. Cair had no delusions. He was being well guarded. A sullen Orm was set to work cleaning up the mess he'd generated. "Thrall's work," he muttered.

"You are a thrall," said Cair crossly. "Now, can you behave with a hammer, or do I send you back to where you were?"

Orm nodded sullenly. Cair set him to hammering gold. Looking at those greedy eyes Cair was glad that the man was still naked, with no place to hide the gold. Here Orm was, half starved and a prisoner—and he saw gold as something to be stolen for sheer greed's sake.

Cair saw a lot more than mere gold that needed to be stolen. But greed didn't even come into the equation.

It was difficult to tell the time down in the kobold warrens. One judged it by meals, which, if one was a slave, came once a day. Orm goggled at their bread and snatched it. Cair let him eat. The kobolds fed him more than he needed anyway.

While Orm was cramming his mouth with bread, guards came to take Cair back to the kobold king. "You claim to do water magic?" the kobold asked.

"I do, yes, Highness," said Cair. "That is what I do. Metals and waters. Mine magic. I was on my way to work on a flooded mine in Germania when I was captured and made a thrall. It is possible to move and part waters. But it is a power-demanding working, requiring some time and a great deal of ritual. The working must be planned and balanced. Protective sigils need to be placed strategically throughout the mine."

The king thought about it. Well, either he thought about it or he just sat there making faces. "And how goes the coin production?" he asked the guard.

"Good, King. He has made over two hundred coins. We'll have the tribute by the end of the week."

The kobold king rubbed his bony hands together. "Then we'll have our hostages back, and Hel take Bakrauf. She fooled us with a seeming in that attack, but never again. We have her smell now. Good, take him to see the flooded shafts."

"I have not named my price," said Cair, calmly.

The king goggled at him. So did the other kobolds. "You thrall. You have no 'price.' We beat you if you don't fix it. Throw you into the pit," threatened the king.

Cair never flinched. "And then I die. Only I can make the gold coins you need. Only I can do the draining spells. If you kill me all my magic is lost to you. But if you pay me I work hard, and well. Because you pay me only when I have done what I promised to do."

The king snorted. But it was a measure of Cair's value that he asked, "What price do you want?"

"My freedom, when I have finished. When the mines are dry."

The kobold king probably thought he was succeeding in looking innocent. "Very well."

Cair bowed low. "Lead me to it. I am eager to begin."

The king did his best not to snigger.

Cair was far better at keeping a straight face.

Manfred was in a hole. Literally. He'd fought the kobolds just a trifle too well. Or maybe they were just furious because his koboldwerk jerkin had wrecked a few knives. So they'd put him to work where his strength would be no danger to them. Where his weight would keep him a prisoner. The rope he had to attach his buckets to—both of water and ore—would not carry his twenty-three stone. And he'd tried climbing the walls to no avail. The blue clayey ore was a broken and shattered mass at the bottom of the volcanic pipe. Water that seeped down and oozed into it also had to be bucketed out. Manfred's current project was to build a tower of the rubbish and climb out . . . before he died like the previous prisoners. He had their skeletal remains for company.

It was extremely odd to look up and see the thrall he'd left unconscious after the avalanche trapped them, staring down at him as he trudged with a bucket of seep water.

The thrall had clothes and seemed to be talking cheerfully to his kobold escort.

It would appear that Erik had been right. Well, he usually was.

Cair found the prince of Brittany's bodyguard-companion shortly after seeing the prince. Erik was fast asleep, and did not appear to wake as they walked past. Cair knew that men like that one were quite capable of feigning sleep. It was something he might have done himself. He did contrive to drop something into the prisoner's empty bowl in passing.

In the long-term aspect of his escape plan, there was a space for Manfred of Brittany. When he got Princess Signy out of this place, Manfred could be either a grateful escort, or a valuable hostage. Cair had plans for either role. If rumor were true, the Hohenstauffens were exceptionally loyal to their bodyguards. Perhaps they understood that loyalty begat loyalty, something that seemed to pass so many people by. Or maybe they just were like that. Cair made a space in his plans for Erik, too. Besides, the man was an exceptional fighter. He could be useful.

So, he noted Erik's position and, besides leaving him some encouragement, simply went on with the map of the passages. It was proving more complex than he'd thought. Still, the kobolds were quite happy to let him measure, pace, and make marks on the parchment in the belief that magical processes always involved a great deal they didn't understand. They sniggered behind their hands at his eager comments about being free when he was done. You don't bother to watch a prisoner who believes that his good behavior will see him free in a few days. Not too closely anyway.

Magic had one other plus: He could demand exotic materials. In fact, to be plausible he had to. Human weapons for instance, to affix to the roof, painted with sigils and surrounded with symbolic items, along with suitable Latin mumbo jumbo. Such a powerful working required a great deal of material and preparation. A great many magical diagrams had to be drawn—in the symbolically varicolored inks that the "water magician" demanded. Cair was finding coming up with difficult and rare items to imperiously demand quite a challenge to his imagination. But, well, that was what magic workers were believed to do, so he did it, and talked inventively about the symbolism and sympathy of each ingredient. At the same time he'd simply had to up Orm's level of knowledge of what he did with the coins. He just didn't have the time to do it all himself, and although the kobolds and Orm could handle the lost wax casting by themselves by now, getting the gold leaf in place had been something Cair had been reluctant to show them how to do. But he could only do so much . . . The idiot was stealing and hiding "gold" coins on his person—in the only orifices available. Did he think that Cair couldn't count? Or cared? At least his looking like a constipated squirrel stopped him talking too much. Cair had promised him escape to get his cooperation.

Cair slept like the dead that night. It wasn't surprising—he felt as if he had walked several hundred miles, most of it stooping. And he couldn't physically fit down a lot of their tunnels. The ones near the surface tended to be narrow, bar a few. Still, he'd been close, close enough to get the scent of pine on the air, and close enough to the place this Bakrauf's bear-people went to, to see gray sky. It played hob with his maps. He'd thought that they were heading deeper underground, and then he saw sky outside. The guards that side of the kobold's warren kingdom had been rare—to the point of being invisible, unlike the area where he'd caught the scent of pine trees. His escort, too close to what they termed "Midgard," had watched him carefully. The ones who had taken him to "Trollheim gate" had been watchful too. But it hadn't been him they'd watched. It had been a lookout for trouble.

"Where are the guards?" he'd asked casually.

One of the escort had pointed. "In the scampers, watching."

"But how do you defend your lands?"

"Fight? Against trolls?" The escort shook his head. "We runs. We hides. Trolls, even when they shrink, are too big for our holes."

Gradually he'd figured it out. The kobolds didn't use the tunnels humans could stand in here, close to Trollheim. They didn't even try and resist, let alone fight back when the trolls came. All the guards did was scamper for safety and give warning. "They sneaked up on us last time," grumbled the escort. "That Bakrauf is a twisty one. She changes. You never know what she'll look like next. We thought they were Midgarders like you."

Cair had said nothing, and just continued mapping. It might take him several more days. There were the deep channels to visit still. Apparently the ore barges sailed down these and out onto the River Gjöll, wherever that was. So far what he'd seen said that the kobolds were not great planners—they'd simply followed ore bodies. The rock was at least in part volcanic, if he was any judge. He'd seen the same structures on Stromboli and Etna when they'd been scouting for raids. The ores tended to accumulate in water fissures. Some of the ones here steamed ominously.

By sheer bloody-minded discipline Erik woke earlier than his captors arrived for work. The staple in the wall was definitely moving a little. It was now a question of whether the soft iron broke, it came out of the wall, or he starved to death first. Or died of thirst. The kobolds seemed convinced that the liquid he got out of that bowl of what was either thin gruel or soup, would do to keep him alive. He felt for the bowl. He determinedly left himself a mouthful each feeding time. He found it. Tipped the bowl into his mouth. There was no liquid forthcoming. He tipped desperately.

Something soggy hit his nose.

He tasted it, cautiously. It was, or had been, a lump of sour rye bread. It was now full of the remains of his soup. And it had a scrap of something thin and hard in it. Flexible but leathery. Erik was already chewing it when it occurred to him that it might just be a scrap of parchment.

That was what it felt like.

Of course he had no light to see.

Bread . . . and a message.

Erik didn't want it lying around, so he tucked it behind his ear. He didn't have many other hiding places. The only thing that this imprisonment and slavery had going for it was that he hadn't—so far—encountered any women while all that he was wearing were a few rusty iron chains. But knowing that somehow someone had sent him a piece of bread and a message, gave him something more precious than food. It gave him hope. He set to work on the staple with a will.

He was able to examine the scrap behind his ear later, while carrying lumps of ore. It was parchment—or had been.

But the soaking and chewing had made the writing illegible.