The cat thing slowed, bent its path around the old Knight, and ran full tilt into the stone wall with a wet, crackling sound.
Robert looked once, looked away, then looked back. It had killed itself through its own momentum.
At once one of the cats was on the old man's left arm, biting, rending, burning in the white light of the lantern. With a quick, painful move, Robert broke the grip of the thing, hurling it across the room. It tumbled into a wine rack, then, dazed, scooted off into the dark.
Unfortunately, the lantern, too, went flying from Robert's hand as he fell. It clattered onto a shelf, rocked there for a moment, its wick sputtering, and then- miraculously-remained lit.
"Thanks be to Huma," Robert breathed, then looked to his damaged hand as the cats circled slowly.
And unaware of the danger below her, Marigold set foot on the floor of the chamber.
They looked like ghosts from her vantage of height. Like phosfire or moonlight rippling on gray water.
And yet they are substantial, Enid thought. Brandon's bow had shown us that.
Substantial and fierce, for the one who latched itself to her father's arm had emerged from the shadows and weaved about him with the rest of its kind.
There were more of the things every time Enid looked. Though Brandon had fired again and again, dropping creature after creature with his flawless aim, it seemed that at least one more came to take the place of each one that fell.
She shook her head as Brandon fired again, the bolt passing through two of the screeching things below him. As for Robert…
Robert di Caela had stretched his injured hand toward the boiling rock beneath him, felt warmth, uncomfortable warmth and wetness, and drew his hand back.
Now up with the sword hand he reached, touching the hilt of the broken sword to the swimming surface of the rock. Across the floor, Marigold approached him, her skirts lifted, the square-sailed vessel nodding atop her head. One of the cats broke out of the darkness, rushed at her madly, then balked at her heft and her withering stare. It seemed that even starvation and generations of inbreeding had not deprived the animal of its most basic instincts of survival.
Robert snorted in amusement, scooted himself against the cap, which was warm but not uncomfortable against his back. The way up the rock face lay ironically at a distance over Marigold's shoulder, the cat-things milling behind her.
Soon they would have the numbers.
Wearily Robert drew up his gauntlets from where they dangled by a rawhide cord at his belt. He put on the iron-studded gloves, wincing painfully as the leather pressed against cut and blister.
I am beyond rescue, he thought. Even if Brandon and Bayard rise to their highest heroics, they cannot possibly get to me in time. And so these gauntlets, which will be better than bare hands when Mariel's cats close in.
He smiled and braced himself, and as the lantern dimmed, he silently prepared himself for Huma's breast.
Above Sir Robert di Caela, things unraveled steadily. His friends looked on as the floor of the chasm milled with white, larval creatures.
"What is going on down there?" Bayard muttered with a rising fury. He had been picking up stones, heavier and heavier, and dropping them upon the flitting pale things below him. Now, winded and clutching at his leg, he leaned against Sir Andrew, his eyesight spangling with pain.
Turning from Bayard and Andrew, Enid looked desperately to her father. He leaned against the well cap, smiling grimly, resolutely, as Marigold approached him and stood beside him bravely, giving but one sidelong glance to the possibly fatal sausages she had come to retrieve. Meanwhile, the white hissing things crawled nearer.
As Enid watched, the air seemed to go white about her, and for a moment, she reeled unsteadily at the edge of the chasm.
It was Raphael who reached her first, but he lacked the weight to pull her back from the ledge. Together, locked by the arms, the two of them hovered over the gray and pooling darkness. An eager chittering rose from the swarming things below them.
And Brandon Rus's strong arm closed about the boy, dragging the two of them to safety.
For a moment, the three of them, Brandon and Raphael, with Enid atop them both, lay in a shivering heap on the solid stone of the ledge. Bayard and Andrew rushed to them, lifting the woman to her feet as Brandon scrambled up.
"Where… Father!" Enid shouted at once, broke from Sir Andrew's grip, and rushed back to the edge of the fissure. For a moment, Raphael, lying on his stomach, looked up and became furious as he saw her totter again, saw all his courage and risk about to amount to nothing.
Then she gained balance, squinted, and looked to the far edge of the cellar.
A light was spreading across Robert's face.
Four days ago, when he had sat half-dozing in the castle infirmary, watching as the servants danced attendance about his son-in-law and the engineers fretted in their oily sobriety, there was something… something…
"For the great well," they had said, "that lies under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, is no doubt brimming and bubbling in deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave us awash in our own cistern."
And what, indeed, might this humming crack in the well cap beside him be but deliverance?
Robert laughed as Marigold swatted away one of the cats who hurtled at her and at Sir Robert's knapsack.
Well, then, Sir Robert thought. This might be a chamber of miracles, after all! And mustering his strength, he drove the hilt of his sword solidly against the crack in the casement.
Not even old Sir Andrew had seen its like. Water surged forth into the fissure like a deluge, and before he could even begin to strip off his armor, Sir Robert found himself knee-deep in a warm sulfurous tide from the artesian well.
He caught himself, rose suddenly from idleness, and slipped off Marigold's knapsack and his breastplate.
Around him, white spectral forms scurried into the cracks of the rocks, screeching and yowling. Whatever they had become through the years and the permanent darkness, Mariel's cats were still cat enough to harbor a healthy fear of water.
Now, stripped to a linen tunic, Sir Robert rose with the water, looking once beneath him to see if Marigold was following. The lantern went out as the water reached its shelf, but in his last glimpse of the girl, he saw her neck-deep, straining to remove her knapsack of cosmetics, wedged between two solid rocks.
Robert caught his breath and tried to swim for her, but the light was gone and he could no longer locate her. Instead, his lungs burning and his muscles cramping, he treaded water, floating toward the faint light above him until, as bereft of worldly goods as a man can be without being completely naked, Sir Robert di Caela rose to the surface of the fissure, where Brandon's strong arms reached out and dragged him onto the stone.
"Marigold?" he gasped as the waters continued to rise, reaching the edge of the crevasse and brimming over. Painfully Robert gained his footing and stood beside his friends and family. Enid embraced her bedraggled father, and Bayard lifted high the lantern he was holding, its light fracturing on the surface of the rising water.
Five minutes they waited. Then ten.
Then, in the middle of the newly formed underground lake, a yellow lacquered schooner broke the surface of the water, floating absurdly at a middle distance atop the drowned, mountainous girl, who clutched her bag of cosmetics in a terrible grip that would no doubt last forever.
"The device, sir!" Brandon muttered, his voice uneasy and puzzled.
"What of it?" Bayard asked impatiently, staring across the rocking surface of the pool. The darkness swirled and congealed, permitting no vision.