"Ride him," muttered a voice at her ear. Or "Ride him" she thought she heard in the hoofbeats and rush of the wind.
But there at her shoulder was Birgis only, his eyes closed and his nose tucked into her hair.
There was neither rest nor movement beneath the cellars of Castle di Caela. Bayard and the Knights picked through rubble in a futile search for the buried Gileandos, coming up instead with a boot and a pair of spectacles and shards of a ceramic flask that carried upon it the faint but unmistakable odor of gin.
They gave up soon, with leaden and downcast faces. The tutor was never a favorite of any of them, especially Andrew, who knew the old man best of all. Nonetheless, there was a real reluctance to their leavetaking-especially to Bayard, who felt that Gileandos was in some way his responsibility.
"'Tis all we can do, Sir Bayard," Sir Robert consoled, laying a bracing hand on the commander's shoulder. "The next order of business is finding us another way out, if there's one to be found."
"Oh, but that's not it at all, Robert," Bayard protested, turning his reddened eyes toward the older man, both of them dappled in shadows by the wavering light from the lantern young Raphael held. "The next order of business is to keep the worm from turning. It is as simple as that. And now that I cannot send the rest of you back, it's all of us down to the heart of these tunnels, if that is where we find the Scorpion's device."
They were all silent at the thought of the dread mechanism. It had lurked in their worst imaginations for a day now-perhaps two days, for the hours bent and broke in the unchanging subterranean darkness. Each of them, no doubt, had an elaborate, monstrous machine in mind, whistling and rumbling and flinging sparks and oil like a gnomish nightmare.
On the other hand, Bayard remembered the Scorpion well and knew that no device he had fashioned would be a loud dramatic thing. Or if it was loud, it was only to call the wrong attentions to the wrong places. The one cog or gear or mechanism that seemed to run all the others could in fact be nonessential-even irrelevant-and to the last the trouble would be where you least expected it.
"Wherever it is to be found," Bayard offered, "the one way we can go is farther down the tunnel. Brandon?"
He extended his arm, and the young Knight slipped beneath it, offering himself once more as a crutch for the older man. Slowly the party began to collect itself.
Enid glided to the other side of her husband, the lamp-carrying Raphael in tow.
Muttering something about mulish nieces, Sir Robert pushed the hefty, reluctant Marigold into the marching order behind the bunched Brightblades and their escort. Only Sir Andrew tarried, sinking into the darkness as the others turned into the corridor and became a fading light in the distance.
"Damn you, Gileandos!" he whispered. "If you hadn't been fool enough to get yourself buried…"
He spun on his heels and strode off to join the party.
"I'd give you the moathouse if you'd only had the sense to come out alive!" he muttered.
Somewhere a million years beneath them, where distances tie themselves together and height and depth are swallowed in darkness, the big god stirred.
He is only a hundred yards from the Scorpion's device, this Brightblade, Sargonnas thought, and a gust of stagnant air smelling of stone and carnage buoyed him to a higher level of the darkness. Only a hundred yards.
There was something in the huge raptor's eye of the god that wavered for a moment. If you were to see it in a human eye, you would recognize it as misgiving, but a god is not accustomed to misgive, and the wavering soon subsided, dispersing like smoke into the Abyss around him.
A hundred yards or a hundred miles, Sargonnas mused. It is all the same when one proceeds in the wrong direction.
He hummed contentedly, and a glaze of ice formed at the rim of the Abyss.
Within the hour, despite Enid's better judgment and the urgings of the older Knights, Bayard had led the party even farther below the foundations of Castle di Caela. The tunnel now widened into a huge, vaulted hall littered with stalagmites and stalactites, both upright and broken, glistening yellow in the light of the lanterns.
Brandon gasped under Bayard's arm and stopped suddenly. Sir Robert, plodding along absently behind them, walked straight into their backs before Enid could stop him. All three men jostled, started…
Then stood still, looking down into the crevasse not a yard in front of them. A narrow bridge of rock, scarcely a toot wide, spanned the yawning gap in front of them and led away into the thick and climbing gloom.
They could not see the bottom of the pit in front of them. Sir Robert picked up a small fragment of limestone and tossed it into the darkness.
The sound returned with surprising speed, for the fragment dropped quickly into the bottom chasm. It was not thirty feet deep.
Then why," Bayard asked aloud what they all were asking to themselves. "Why does it seem so bottomless?"
All of them looked into the crevasse, seeing only a short way into its abiding darkness.
The room felt palpably colder. Somewhere in the distance, near the other side of the stone catwalk, there was a faint whirring sound, like a distant chorus of cicadas. Bayard squinted toward the source of the noise but saw nothing.
"It is the device, sir," Brandon stated matter-of-factly, shielding his eyes against the lantern light and peering across the breadth of the chamber. "By the gods, it could be nothing other."
"I… I am afraid that the light in Raphael's hand has blinded me momentarily, Brandon," Bayard said, flushing. "Would you be so kind as to describe the device in question? I mean, for the benefit of those behind us."
"It's… it's… glittering, shining, crafted of metal, I believe," the young man ventured, "though it is impossible to tell at this distance. No doubt of dwarven make, to have survived this long in the dampness of these caverns."
"Of dwarven make, you say?" Sir Andrew huffed, joining the other Knights at the lip of the mysterious chasm. "How can you tell from fifty yards?"
"A hundred yards," Brandon corrected. "And 1 cannot tell. My eyes aren't as good as they were when I was a boy."
Andrew and Bayard glanced at one another, hiding embarrassed smiles.
Brandon smiled himself, shook his head.
"Then again, I'm quite the one for 'dwarven make' and 'cunningly wrought,' aren't I, gentlemen? As if the blasted thing is not fabulous enough just being down here."
"Go on, Brandon," Sir Robert urged. "Describe the apparatus. This is no time to come down with a case of self-knowledge."
Brandon Rus snorted in amusement.
"Well…" he began again, his eyes intent on the veiled shadows as the older men hung on his arm and words. "There are concentric circles on the thing. Not unlike an archer's butt."
For the first time, Marigold showed an interest in the conversation. Facedown in a bag of silks and cosmetics, her hair newly fashioned into the shape of a sailing ship, she looked up in passionate curiosity. "Whose butt?" she asked innocently.
"'Tis only an archer's term for a target, Cousin Marigold," Enid explained curtly, never lifting her eyes from the murk beyond the huddled party.
"Oh." Somewhat disappointed, the big woman sank back into contemplating her sundries.
"Or like an eye," Brandon continued. "Indeed, quite like an eye. About the target is an old stone painting, that of the scorpion who swallows his tail, the circle and cycle of life, as the old legends have it." His voice rose in excitement at the mythology. "It is the center of the thing that draws your attention, though. Within those concentric circles there is a dark, immoveable center, a darkness next to which the surrounding blackness is gray, almost light."