Under Fragile Stone (20 page)

‘Harprag and his crew show up on the border, sayin’ they’re makin’ for Old Man’s Cave. Say they’ve got some
rescuin
’ to do down there. But it’s just a cover, see? They’re really here to find their precious Orgarth and return him to Absaleth. That mountain’s like a … a mother to ’em. Now, the Parsinor’s out in the forest searching’ for the cubs, finds some o’ my boys tusslin’ with this possessed metal, and takes it off ’em. But we’ve got those cubs and he has to trade to get them back. So he brings it along, but he hides the most important bit of junk and we miss it when we truss ’im up. You did your thing, but you couldn’t finish the job because the brute didn’t give us the whole hog. The Parsinor’s still got Orgarth’s heart!’

Harsq listened helplessly. A few moments ago, Orgarth’s heart had been something he’d made up to escape from Ainsdale. Now Ludditch had managed to use it to explain everything that had happened over the last day and night. The man was truly mad.

‘The god-heart is still in Absaleth,’ Harsq tried again. ‘If you let me …’

‘No.’ The Reisenick shook his head, looking around at his clansmen. ‘It’s right here in Ainslidge, and we’re going to track it down. I can smell it. I’m gettin’ a feel for how you operate, priest. You got instincts; well, I think I’ve got ’em too. And mine’re tellin’ me to give chase to that Parsinor and his Myunan toads and where we find them, we’ll find the
heart. You want to know about the krundengrond? Give me a couple o’ days and I’ll show it to yuh.’

Harsq sank lower in his chair, the metallic taste strong in his mouth, his arms folded to hide his trembling hands. At the mercy of the Reisenicks, haunted by Absaleth’s ghost and under threat of death from the Myunans, the eshtran felt as if his sanity was sliding away from him on smooth, hard ice. All he’d ever wanted to do was carry out Brask’s good work. But now everything was going wrong, as if all that power had slipped out of his control and turned against him. He managed a reassuring smile at Ludditch and excused himself, hurrying from the room.

13
D
ALEGIN
C
HASES THE
L
IGHT

Draegar stopped the group when he spotted something further down the track. Motioning them to stay back, he advanced cautiously. There, in the branches of a tree above the path, was a cobweb made of bones. The spiralling net was about an arm’s length across and swayed gently in the hint of breeze that passed through the trees. The bones were strung together with wire and seemed to be from the feet of some small animal. They could smell the faint bite of bleach from the macabre web.

‘It’s a Reisenick sign,’ Draegar called back to them as he studied the web. ‘We’re in a trapping area. The way ahead is going to be laced with animal traps, all set up so that one catches what another misses. They leave signs so that other clans don’t go wandering into them.’

‘That’s a nutty way to make a sign,’ Lorkrin said from right behind him.

Draegar turned to him.

‘You were supposed to stay back,’ he scolded the boy. ‘Why don’t you ever do what you’re told?’

Lorkrin shrugged.

As they walked, Draegar described the array of methods the Reisenicks had of catching their quarries. He would find one trap and point out how escape from it would lead an 
animal straight into another. Often, they found dead or maimed animals caught in snares, or pits, or hanging from ropes. There were spring-loaded wooden spikes, nets, nooses, tripwires, cages, swinging battering rams and
poisoned
darts. The group walked painstakingly slowly as Draegar guided them through the array of hazards, avoiding what they could, disarming some and setting off others to clear the way.

Eventually they came upon another bone cobweb
hanging
over the path and the Parsinor told them they had reached the other side of the trapping area.

‘Now it’s just the normal snares and things we need to watch out for,’ he said lightly.

He grimaced and leaned over, first to one side and then the other.

‘Here, one of you have a look at my back,’ he said to the Myunans, pulling his bag aside. ‘There’s something caught in my armour.’

Lorkrin ran his hands over the knobbly, hinged armour plates that covered the Parsinor’s back.

‘Can’t see anything,’ he said.

‘Try higher up, under the top joint.’

Draegar kneeled down so that the boy could reach and Lorkrin ran his fingers under the joint in the carapace. His fingertips came up against something and he pulled out his knife.

‘Yeah, there’s something here, all right,’ he said, digging at the obstruction with the tip of the blade.

It popped out and fell to the ground. Taya picked it up.

‘Rusty old nail,’ she said. ‘You could have picked it up when we were caught in the landslide.’ 

‘Or maybe from that pile of scrap I carried up to the Reisenicks,’ Draegar guessed, shrugging his bag back into place.

Taya tossed the nail away, but Rug, who had been
watching
with interest, went after it and bent down to fish through the grass for it.

‘What are you doing?’ Lorkrin asked. ‘It’s useless. It’s not even straight.’

‘I’d like to keep it anyway,’ Rug replied, as he found it and put it safely in a buttoned pocket. ‘Just in case.’

‘In case you need a bent, rusty nail?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘You’re a strange one and no mistake.’

Evening was setting in and the light was failing. The wind picked up and brought rain with it, a lazy fall of hazy damp that slowly but surely wet them through. Taya and Lorkrin were starting to feel the cold, worn out by the last couple of days. They shivered as they trudged through the wet, the grey clouds visible through the trees turning their moods sombre and their thoughts to their parents. Rug had said little all day, content to be led along, but disturbed by a growing unease. The talk of Old Man’s Cave had stirred something in him. He was sure that if he had ever
possessed
memories of that place, then not all of them had been pleasant ones.

The trail brought them to the foot of a rocky hill. It was a steep climb, and they had to use their hands to clamber up in places. The rocks were slippery with the rain and their
fingers
cold and numb. Draegar reached the top first and grunted with satisfaction. The rest of them struggled up the last stretch of levelling ground and came up beside him. 

There below them, in a sheltered glade, surrounded by apple trees, was a wood-and-hide building with warm, glowing windows and a chimney that gave off the welcome smell of wood smoke and baking bread. There were three wagons parked around the side, as well as a row of stables that no doubt housed horses and other mounts.

‘Is it safe?’ Taya asked uncertainly.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Draegar told them. ‘That Reisenick at the mill said the Maggitch clan have no love for the Ludditches; they have been feuding for years. There could be others there who might give us away, but this is our best chance of hitching a ride to catch up with Emos.’

‘We could disguise ourselves,’ Lorkrin offered, looking up at Draegar. ‘But there’s no way to hide what you are. You’re going to stand out like a third ear. Maybe you should stay outside.’

‘Not likely,’ Draegar snorted, and started striding down the slope. ‘Let us make the Maggitchs’ acquaintance and see what kind of storyhouse they’re running here. We take this risk now or wander through this forest for days, maybe weeks. We have a cave to get to.’

They each descended with that tentative scramble that steep slopes force on two-legged creatures and reached the bottom in a last, shuffling run. Draegar strode up the road to the terrace and swung open the double doors of the storyhouse. Everyone in that rough, dark, smoky room looked up as he entered.

‘My name is Draegar, of the Aknaradh Tribe,’ he announced. ‘And I have travelled further than any man here and seen more strange things then most men will see in ten lifetimes. I have stories to tell to a kind host with a tankard of 
mead and some hot food for myself and my friends. Lend me your ears, friends, and I promise you tales that will warm your hearts, chill your blood and stand your hair on end!’

The colour of the walls of the passageway seemed to have changed; they were paler, more mottled and there was a dampness in the air. Paternasse ran his finger down the stone and put the tip of it in his mouth, and then spat out the dust.

‘Limestone,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’re under the
mountain
any more.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Nayalla asked.

‘That mountain’s laced with iron. I’ve never seen anything like it myself. It’s the richest source of iron I’ve ever heard of. You can’t tell me you didn’t know?’

‘We’ve always known there was iron in Absaleth,’ Mirkrin told him. ‘Amorite, the metal we use for our tools, comes from the ground high up on the mountain. You can’t get it anywhere else in this land. But we’ve never mined the mountain for iron.’

‘Oh, right. I forgot,’ Paternasse sniffed. ‘You’re all against mining. Except for making your
tools
, of course.’

‘We’re not against mining. Just
your
kind of mining. The kind that leaves great holes in our territory and poisons the ground,’ Nayalla retorted. ‘And we don’t mine iron on Absaleth, because any fool can see that it’s important to the land around it. You can feel it when you stand in its shadow. Absaleth’s iron is special. Or at least it was.’

Paternasse would have laughed at the idea a few months before, but he just nodded now. Even without the strange world they had found beneath its skin, there was something 
special about the mountain.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘You just don’t find pure iron in large quantities. You find patches of the metal around, but only in small deposits. Some say it falls from the sky, but I’ve no time for such fables myself. Normally, if you want to find iron, you have to dig it out of the ground as ore, hematite or magnetite or the like. Then you smelt it – you heat it all with charcoal in a furnace to separate the metal from the slag.’

Dalegin and Noogan listened quietly with the Myunans. Unlike the old miner, they knew little about the ground they worked; they just dug where they were told to dig.

‘Now, that mountain, it’s mainly hematite on the outside,’ Paternasse continued. ‘With some magnetite and that red jasper. But the lads who did the surveys a couple of years ago said that the core of the mountain could be pure iron. And that’s unheard of. That’s why the Noranians are so keen to mine it, ’cause their armies use iron like it’s goin’ out of fashion, for everything from weapons to medals.’

‘And the fact that the mountain doesn’t belong to them doesn’t bother them in the slightest,’ Nayalla said bitterly.

‘Not a chance,’ Paternasse shrugged. ‘The way they look at it, their iron’s stuck under your mountain, and tough luck to anyone who thinks different.’

‘Why do you work for the Noranians,’ Nayalla asked, ‘if you think so little of them?’

‘Because I’m a miner; I’ve got seven mouths to feed and I have to put food on the table. The mines near our town closed down a couple of years back. Now I go where the work is.’

They emerged from the even, chiselled walls of the passageway into a cavern whose walls glistened with 
moisture, the ceiling and floor lined with stalagmites and stalactites.

‘You were right,’ Mirkrin said. ‘Limestone. I wonder where we are?’

‘I lost my sense of direction long ago,’ Nayalla admitted.

‘Still headed north of the mountain,’ Paternasse grunted.

‘How do you know?’ Nayalla frowned.

‘He just does,’ Noogan answered her. ‘He’s like a mole, old Jussek.’

Mirkrin was kneeling down, studying the floor.

‘It might be the end of the passageway, but this floor is well travelled. It’s worn smooth, and there’s recent wear on this step here.’

‘Those little terrors, probably,’ Dalegin sniffed.

‘No, they climbed walls as easily as walking along the floor, and this is a scuff, from a hard, heavy foot …’

‘Does anybody else hear a noise?’ Nayalla interrupted him.

They all went quiet.

‘I hear it,’ Mirkrin nodded. ‘A rumbling, or grinding or something.’

‘Don’t hear a thing,’ Paternasse said. ‘Your kind must have good ears. Is it a tremor?’

‘No, it’s constant,’ said Nayalla. ‘Like a machine, or a waterfall. I can’t place it.’

‘Water would be a good thing about now.’

‘Can we get a move on?’ Dalegin urged them, switching his torch to his other hand and putting the free one in his pocket. ‘I’m getting cold. And I’m bloody starving.’

‘I’m thirsty too,’ Noogan spoke up. ‘Has anybody got any water left?’

Mirkrin handed him his canteen. 

‘I’ll have some too, if you don’t mind,’ Dalegin said, moving up beside Noogan.

‘That’ll be the end of it, then,’ Mirkrin told them.

‘Aye, the same for the rest of us, I think,’ Paternasse added. ‘We need to find water soon. Maybe that sound you’re hearing?’

‘Let’s see if we can follow it. It’s as good a chance as any,’ Nayalla suggested.

‘What was that?’ Dalegin whispered, squinting into the darkness ahead of them.

‘What?’ Noogan asked.

‘Don’t you see it? There!’

‘By the gods, yes!’

Far back in the gloom, the swaying light of a lantern could be seen. Dalegin suddenly took off, scrambling up the path through the stalagmites after it.

‘Wait, lad!’ Paternasse yelled.

They rushed after him, getting in each other’s way, the limestone spikes forcing them to file one by one along the path. The shadows from their torches played on the
limestone
pillars, casting sharp-toothed shapes on the walls of the cave. In their hurry to catch Dalegin, they failed to notice that the path branched and were confounded when they lost sight of his torch in the labyrinth of stone columns. Noogan was out in front. He stumbled to a halt as he came to a place where the path petered out and could have led in any direction.

‘Where did he go?’ he snarled in frustration.

‘The damned fool!’ Paternasse swore. ‘The damned, blind fool!’

‘Well, we’d better just wait here for him to come back and 
find us,’ Mirkrin breathed. ‘No point running off all over the place. We’d just end up getting split up.’

‘I think there’s another path back here,’ Nayalla called from behind them. ‘He might have gone this way.’

‘We stay together. Wait where he can find us,’ Paternasse told them. ‘But if he’s not back soon, we’ll go looking for him.’

‘What was that light? Did you see it? It was a lantern, wasn’t it?’ Noogan panted, leaning on his knees.

‘I thought it looked like an old woman,’ Nayalla said. ‘They ran for it, whoever they were.’

‘Aye, well, you would too if some stranger came rushing at you, shouting and waving a torch,’ Paternasse grimaced. ‘If it is an old woman, he’s probably scared her halfway to Noran.’

He sat down and propped up his torch.

‘I’m tired, tired as a hard-worked dog.’

They all sat down to rest, miserably wishing they had some food and water and the means to make a fire. Nayalla shivered, huddling up to Mirkrin, and Paternasse gazed at them and brooded about how much he missed his own wife.