The huldra whispered to me a word that would send them all away.
I shivered, because for an instant I almost understood it.
I hurried on. A break in the refuse heap on my right revealed a plain wooden door. It was banded with old iron, and showed faint marks from an axe. I decided that Lady Werewilk’s sorcery room lay behind it, which meant only a fool would so much as peep through the key-hole. Bad things happen to those who would trespass a sorcerer’s tool room. Even if the sorcerer wasn’t among the favored in Rannit.
I kept walking. The huldra kept talking. I tried to keep the marching song in my head, but I kept forgetting the words.
Finally, a new tunnel joined mine. I could see it veer off, straight and even more packed with refuse than this one, until it too rose up in a wide iron stairs.
“The laundry room,” I said aloud. Echoes spoke in reply.
I kept going toward the deeper dark.
Lumber, on both sides. A stench hit me then, that of rot and decay. My hand was on Toadsticker’s hilt before I realized I smelled a stack of burlap potato sacks that had been down here a year or two too long.
A bit beyond that, though, were stacks and stacks of squarish flat parcels covered by big canvas sheets.
I paused, lifted the sheet, tore open the brown paper that covered the parcel.
Even the huldra shut up.
It was a painting.
I didn’t need a good strong light and a lecture in fine art to decide it would never grace the walls of a high-priced gallery in Mount Cloud, either.
I’ve never understood the attraction some artists have to a bowl of fruit. It’s a bowl. There is fruit. I fail to comprehend the need to immortalize the scene in oils.
But that’s what I saw. Even my untrained eye aided only by fickle torchlight could see it was a poor effort. The colors were all wrong, the bowl looked more like a sagging gourd than baked clay, and the stacked fruits might as well have been drawn by a child.
I ripped away the paper on the next, and the next, and the next.
Each was exactly the sort of amateurish failure I’d expect out of most young artists. Bowl of fruit. Sad-eyed puppy. Girl in sunset. More fruit with bowl.
The next one, though-woman reaching out and up to release a yellow butterfly. It was breathtaking, even in the torchlight. I spent a few precious minutes checking the names and dates helpfully printed on the back of each canvas frame, and discovered that none other than Serris Eaves had painted both the loathsome bowl of fruit and the stunning butterfly woman, a scant four months apart.
I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it meant something. In the back of my mind, the huldra’s shade chattered and railed. It knew, of course. But we no longer shared a language, and even at that moment I was glad of the lack.
I let the paintings fall back beneath the canvas. So. Lady Werewilk’s artists started out as rank amateurs. Now they were raising ire and eyebrows in the finer galleries of Mount Cloud.
And Lady Werewilk turns out to be a sorceress, with something worth raising a small army for hidden on her estate. She claimed she’d never suspected any old magics lay slumbering nearby.
Which might be true. She had after all hired me.
I hurried on. The tunnel got colder and wetter. The floor was slippery now, and big black blind crickets crept quietly along the walls. They did not chirp. I wondered if they even remembered how. Water began to drip, somewhere ahead.
I’d hated the sound of dripping water, when I was down deep with Petey. The Trolls tended to stay close to running water, even if it was only a drip. Petey could smell them, feel their great wide eyes upon him, but I had no such senses. After a while, I always felt their eyes on me, could always feel their hot breath warm on the back of my neck. I’d spent days down in the tunnels, absolutely sure my next and last sensation would be a Troll claw raking down my spine.
I’d learned early on to ignore my own senses. Petey’s doggy senses never lied.
Mine never stopped lying.
The flames from my torch began to gutter and smoke. The tunnel’s builders hadn’t thought about hiding vent pipes anywhere. I fought back a cough — wouldn’t do to alert some sharp-eared sorcerer that people were sneaking around beneath their heels — and I hurried on.
The brick walls grew coats of slime. Rivulets of water slithered down them. Drips from above sputtered in the flame of my torch.
I came upon the first section of collapsed bricks. Part of the ceiling had caved in, narrowing the tunnel by half. I was able to squeeze through, fouling my clothes as I did.
A few steps, another collapse. The earth was wet, and it stank. I knew the stink well. Though this time, it lacked any hint of Troll.
A few hops over mounds of mud, a few slides through narrow openings, and I was on my hands and knees, pushing the torch forward as I went. My hands were covered with mud. My knees were soaked and torn.
I’m not sure how long I crawled. Time took on that odd quality it had during the War. I stopped being aware of minutes or hours or even days. There was only the present, only the movement at hand. Put this knee here, put this hand there-stop, listen, breathe, move. Hand, knee. Hand, knee. And again. And again, and again.
I was well out into the sudden opening before I realized I no longer needed to crawl.
I lifted the torch. The walls and the ceiling were intact. The floor was muddy, yes, and even puddled with water in places, but it no longer stank of old decay.
I rose. A few dozen steps brought me to a rusty iron stairs, and it cast shadows on a blank wall, right behind it.
I’d made it. I was either under the cornfield or well inside the forest. I wasn’t sure, though I was betting I was in the forest. Judging from the amount of torch left, I’d been crawling for quite some time. I hadn’t seen the place where the tunnels branched. I hoped it wasn’t buried by a hundred tons of fallen earth.
Beside the stairs was another barrel, and in it were fresh torches. I didn’t dare light one to take out into the woods. I’d need to rely on starlight out there.
I mounted the stairs, testing each gingerly before trusting it with my weight. The rust was superficial. I climbed up. Six treads took the top of my head to the bottom of the ceiling.
There was another mechanism here, different from the one at the kitchen end. This one appeared to lift a flat iron panel on a set of epically rusted hinges. The handle and the crank bore flakes of rust too, and though they appeared to be functional I cringed at the thought of the noise they’d probably make.
I crept back down the stairs, hoping some thoughtful Werewilk had left behind a pitcher of grease for just such an occasion. They had not.
So I climbed back up the stairs, seated myself by the crank, and snuffed out my torch on the stairs.
Then I took the crank in both hands, gritted my teeth, and slowly put my weight against it.
It turned. It creaked. It groaned. It made each and every noise one could ever hope to attribute to centuries-old ironwork whose constant companions were moisture and neglect.
I made a few very soft noises of protest myself, but I kept the damned thing turning and hoped the din wasn’t drawing every well-armed murderer from here to Rannit to a spot right by my hapless head.
It took me half an hour to lift that bloody trap door high enough for me to squeeze my muscular, youthful frame through it.
But at last, that’s just what I did.
Chapter Fourteen
I was a long way from the cornfield. Towering blood-oaks rose up about me close on every side. The door had been cleverly set in the midst of a ring of oaks. I hoped that had dulled any of the sounds the gears had made.
I lay there for a long time, listening.