As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard’s sight, saw at once that the gnome who had admitted them was old Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.
Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed, upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tenements of the neighborhood had later been erected. In places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gracious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heating fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosaics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery. It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these intruders from the hostile world of men.
In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, “Thy name is not unknown among us, John Aversin.”
“Well, that makes it easier,” John admitted, dusting off his hands and looking down at the round head of the gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes under the flowing mane of snowy hair. “Be a bit awkward if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could sing you the ballads.”
A slight smile tugged at the gnome’s mouth—the first, Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incongruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the legends. “Thou art the first,” he remarked, ushering them into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk robes whispering as he moved. “How many hast thy father sent out. Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they might know of the dragon’s coming—we, who saw it best.”
Gareth looked disconcerted. “Er—that is—the wrath of the King...”
“And whose fault was that, Heir of Uriens, when rumor had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?”
There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth reddened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his head and said in a stifled voice, “I am sorry, Dromar. I never thought of—of what might be said, or who would take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn’t know. I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the way around.”
The old gnome sniffed. “So!” He folded his small hands before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded, and said, “Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let it go undone, Gareth of Magloshaldon. Another time thou shalt do better.” He turned away, gesturing toward the inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on the floor in the fashion of the gnomes. “Come. Sit. What is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming of the dragon to the Deep?”
“The size of the thing,” John said promptly, as they all settled on their knees around the table. “I’ve only heard rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete measurement?”
From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome woman piped, “The top of his haunch lies level with the frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the doorway arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the measurements of men.”
There was a moment’s silence, as Jenny digested the meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, “If the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty feet.”
“Aye,” Dromar said. “The Market Hall—the first cavern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length.”
John folded his hands on the table before him. Though his face remained expressionless. Jenny detected the slight quickening of his breath. Forty feet was half again the size of the dragon that had come so close to killing him in Wyr, with all the dark windings of the Deep in which to hide.
“D’you have a map of the Deep?”
The old gnome looked affronted, as if he had inquired about the cost of a night with his daughter. Then his face darkened with stubborn anger. “That knowledge is forbidden to the children of men.”
Patiently, John said, “After all that’s been done you here, I don’t blame you for not wanting to give out the secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can’t take the thing from the front. I can’t fight something that big headon. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing.”
“It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the first level of the Deep.” Dromar spoke grudgingly, his pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller, weaker race that had been driven underground millennia ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. “It lies just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates. The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt within the Deep—the King’s ambassadors and their households, and those who had been apprenticed among our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there. There he will bring his gold.”
“Is there a back way into it?” John asked. “Through the priests’ quarters or the treasuries?”
Dromar said, “No,” but the little gnome woman said, “Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane.”
“By the Stone!” The old gnome whirled upon her, smoldering rage in his eyes. “Be silent, Mab! The secrets of the Deep are not for his kind!” He looked viciously at Jenny and added, “Nor for hers.”
John held up his hand for silence. “Why wouldn’t I find it?”
Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly and a little sad. “The ways lead through the warrens,” she said simply. “The caverns and tunnels there are a maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee the turnings thou must take, one false step would condemn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched now.”
“Can you draw me a map, then?” And, when the two gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their eyes, he said, “Dammit, I can’t do it without your help! I’m sorry it has to be this way, but it’s trust me or lose the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!”
Dromar’s long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower over the stub of his nose. “So be it, then,” he said.
But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The ambassador’s eyes blazed. “No! By the Stone, is it not enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?”
“Tut,” Mab said with a wrinkled smile. “This Dragonsbane will have problems enow from the dragon, without going seeking in the darkness for others.”
“A map that is drawn may be stolen!” Dromar insisted. “By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep...”
Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that filled one comer of the dim hall. She returned with a reed pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her hand. “Those whom you fear would steal it know the way to the heart of the Deep already,” she pointed out gently. “If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not to offer him a shield.”