Dorrin could smell the stink of blood magic from where she stood, ten paces away. She went closer. “Someone cursed it.”
“It was—” Sennet gulped. “It was the old Duke, my lord. Said the likes of us had no right to water like that, said we was lazy. Please don’t be angry, my lord …”
Anger filled her as water filled a bucket. “It is not you I am angry with,” Dorrin said. “And those I am angry with are dead.” As they deserved.
“We tried to get the stones out,” Sennet went on. He still sounded scared. “But twice when we sent someone down with a rope, more stones fell and killed—and we did not want more to die.”
“You did not ask me for help with this,” Dorrin said. “I will ask you—will you permit me?”
“What can you do?” Sennet said.
What could she? She had no idea, but that the magery was tugging, shoving, telling her something. “I am not sure,” she said. “But will you let me try?”
“You are the Duke,” Sennet said. “I could hardly stop you.”
“True, but you are the elder here. If I can get the stones out, can you rebuild the wall?”
“If the Duke permits—but my lord, there was also—the blood.”
Naturally, there would have been blood.
“Did he sacrifice something here?”
“A—a woman, my lord. A woman with child, near her time.”
Dorrin shivered. Most potent sacrifice, she had been taught, for this kind of magery. “I must go down,” she said.
“No, my lord! No, we don’t want to lose you! We can do without the well.”
“You cannot,” Dorrin said. “It cannot be left unclean; it is why your gardens bear so little. Not just the lack of water, but the presence of so much malice. I know this is not what you intended, Sennet, but it is my judgment—and you invited me here to give judgment—that this well must be cleansed, and to do that I must go down.”
He looked horrified; she left him there and went back to her escort. “Find me stout ropes,” she said. “And I need you all to lift and lower on my command.”
“My lord?”
“It is urgent.”
The only ropes in the village were gray with age and frayed—no time to ride back to the house for better. Dorrin loosed her magery enough to mend them, and led the escort back to the well. Everyone who had not gone for more food now stood around it, a careful distance away.
“Back more,” Dorrin said. “I do not know how good my control is, and you all know it takes magery to heal mage-dealt wounds.”
They backed until most were behind their pitiful hovels. Dorrin took off her cloak, her armor, all but her shirt and trousers and boots, her sword, and her ducal chain of office. “I’m going down that well,” she said to her escort.
“You’re not!” More shock than refusal. “Let one of us—”
“None of you have magery,” Dorrin said. Her heart pounded; her skin felt tight. “My uncle cursed this well, and with it, the village; I am going to heal it or die in the attempt, but I need people I can trust on the ropes. I may be able to move the stones by magery—or not. I’ve never done this before. Make me a sling and some loops for climbing.”
They had used ropes like this in the Company, tying in fixed loops for hand- and footholds, making slings for lifting and lowering burdens and people. Dorrin checked the knots and again touched the ropes with magery. They should be sound … she went to the well and sent some of her light into it. The well had been made long ago, lined with hand-cut stone. That stone was still sound, tightly knit in place, in part by its revulsion at what had been done to the water. No water showed, only the jumble of stones thrown down from above. She sensed below them the evil intent that had killed a woman and her unborn child to spoil the well.
Dorrin touched Falk’s ruby. “Lord Falk, help me,” she murmured. She would try to move that one, there at the top—she sent her power down. The rock screeched, twisting, and jammed deeper. The one next to it broke in two, and the broken piece landed on top of it. A gout of malice surged out of the well; Dorrin staggered, but threw her power at it, imagining a net, and then a scythe, to cut it loose from what was left below. A writhing half-visible shape outlined by whirling dust rolled about her, knee-high. Dorrin drew her sword and touched its glowing blade to the mass … and the mass vanished.
“That was … interesting,” she said.
“Was that … it?”
“Not all, I think.” She looked in. A sullen menace filled the well now; she could sense it sinking lower as she let her magery strengthen. She tried to move the rock fragment now on top; it rose so fast it almost hit her in the head, bursting out the roof over the well and then landing with a jarring THUNK just short of a cottage wall. Again she sent a scythe stroke of magery to sever the power that propelled it, and again dispatched the remnant that threw up a cloud of dust in its struggles.
“It’s too dangerous,” Black Sef said.
“Too dangerous to try that again,” Dorrin said. “Some of those rocks are much bigger. I will have to go down.”
“Today?”
“Today. It will be stronger tomorrow, now it knows someone’s trying to destroy it.”
36
Once she was down below the rim, the heat was even worse, stifling. The stench was both physical and magicaclass="underline" stagnant, polluted water, blood and death and decay, sour and sickly sweet all at once. The walls seemed to be closing in on her; the thick, stinking air clogged her nose, her lungs. Dorrin reached out with her free hand and stroked the old stone lining. “You want to be clean,” she said to the stone. She had only a few phrases of dwarf-tongue, and wished she’d learned more; a dwarf would know how to comfort this stone. “You are dross,” she said, one of the few words she remembered. Strong, it meant. Healthy. Brave. “Help me,” she said to the stone. She felt something change, just a little; the smell of clean stone touched her nose. “Help that broken stone, if you can; it was once whole, as you are, and clean.”
At the bottom, in the dimness, she made her light again. The stones there seemed locked in a hopeless jumble, each blocked by others, each blocking others. No way at all to put a rope sling around any of them and lift. Dorrin created with magery what she hoped was a secure lining for the entire shaft, in case the stone lining had been undermined. Then she put the tip of her sword on the stone below her foot and poured magery into it … lift slowly, she thought.
The stone rose, and with her standing on it, came slowly, steadily, up out of the well until she could see out, step out, off the stone and onto the ground. The stone followed her sword; when she pushed a little, it sank to the ground an armspan from the well. She withdrew her magery and then her sword, then nodded to her escort and they lowered her again.
One after another, the stones obeyed her magery, and one after another she stacked them ready for rebuilding the well’s coping. She found under one the body of a man, desiccated, shrunken to skin over bones. She touched it, brow, eyes, mouth, and spoke Falk’s prayer of dismissal and Alyanya’s blessing. Lifting it in her arms, she carried it up, standing on the stone on which he had lain, not noticing that this time the stone rose at her command without the sword’s touch. She laid the body on the ground, heart full of sorrow.
She found another body a layer below that and brought that, too, to the surface. The next stones were harder. Here the malice returned; the stench of blood and death intensified. She felt squeezed in a vile embrace, struggling to breathe, to move. Nedross, she remembered. These stones were nedross, evil in essence. Paks had been trapped under nedross stone, tormented.
The thought of Paksenarrion brought hope, an easier breath. Her magery flashed out, beyond her control; she felt the clash of two magicks as the blow of a thunderclap; she staggered and fell as the stones beneath her shattered, crumbled, disintegrated entirely to dust that plastered her face, clogged her nose. The dust vanished even as she choked on it. She was standing on a rough uneven surface of dry rock, not hewn stone. At her feet, a bloated stinking shape—the dead woman and child, magically preserved in gross decay. Pity filled Dorrin’s heart; hot tears ran down her face. Not only such a death, but to be locked into this shape forever—