He rode further, slowly around the turning of the road and, by the last light, into the valley beyond, where a great tower was set low beside the stream, its crest rising beside the road.
Men had made it. One hoped that they were men. But there was that stone back there. Gran had never told his brothers about such things. Or if she had, Tamas and Bogdan had never told him. And he had been too young to remember.
Would they go there? he asked himself. Should I?
Master Karoly was with them. Master Karoly undoubtedly knew what he was dealing with, and had planned everything, and knew exactly what he was doing, no matter how dangerous. So here came a boy, a pony, and a silly dog, into the middle of older people's plans that were life and death to everyone—not things he knew how to deal with, like cold and wind and getting food in the mountains—but places with strangers, in towers like that.
I don't belong here, Yuri said to himself. I should have stayed at home and never tried this at all. I can starve or I can go down there and knock on the door, or I can try to get past. What did master Karoly tell my brothers to do? Or why did they come this way, if not to find this place?
The more and less of haze seemed only part of slipping into unconsciousness, except Tamas found his joints stiff and his back numb and realized that he was on the other side of that dreaded sleep. More, something was still hovering near him with the same slithering movement and musty smell he associated with the troll. He saw its shadow loomed between him and the source of the faint light like a huge mass of shredded rags, all hunched down as it was. He did not want to be awake. He shut his eyes all but the least view through his lashes and tried not to betray that he was.
But it did not touch him. Eventually it got up and moved away, a shambling hump that, indeed, had a long tail. Tamas lifted his head and saw it dragging and snaking nervously in its wake, as the troll passed the dim lamp and its shadow crept up to the walls and the ceiling.
It was a nightmare. He heard that thumping sound again, or it was the beating of his own heart. Dizziness overwhelmed him as he let his head down. He was not dead. It had made him sleep long enough that his back was half numb and he could only wish his arms were numb, too. But why would a troll want to keep him here, and sit by him while he slept?
A bolt clanked and thumped somewhere above, a hallway echoed. The troll jumped, leaped, and a flare of its shaggy arm extinguished the lamp. It scrambled toward him, felt him over hastily and shoved his knees up perforce, smothering him with a raggy, massive hand over his mouth. Another clank. The creature settled its long, damp fur over him, and hissed, close to his ear, "Goblins. Husssh."
Goblins. Worse and worse—the troll crushed him into a bent-legged knot in the corner, against the bars, urging him to be quiet, and he lay absolutely still, breathing through the musty fronds as it tentatively let up its hand.
A door creaked. He saw a seam of light through the trailing fur of the troll's arm, past the shadow of its crouching body. Came the gleam of a torch, a silver sheen of weaponry and armor in that light, and he held his breath, ready to call out at any risk of his life, in a heart-clenched hope that it was one of his friends come looking for him.
Then the intruder turned his head, showing an animal's sharp ears in a mane of dark hair, a jutting jaw, a face human and beast at once. His heart froze as its gaze passed over them. It lifted the torch and scanned the vault in other directions, as if it dismissed them as some mound of rags.
Then the goblin slowly turned the other way, along the corridor and around the winding way me troll had always appeared and vanished. Tamas trembled beneath the troll's crushing weight, dreading the goblin coming back—and it did, a martial and dreadful figure in its silver-touched armor. It cast a slow second gaze in their direction, holding the torch aloft.
But it seemed blind to them: it went out by the same door it had come in, and shut it.
A bolt slammed home. The troll shifted its weight very slowly, drew back and left him as another door opened and shut, deeper inside the mass of stone.
Everything was dark and breathlessly still then, except the troll moving about in the utter night of the vault. Tamas slowly, painfully straightened his legs and settled himself, in a depth of despair he had never imagined. Goblins. That put more pieces together: Krukczy Tower, the clouds, the road, the outlook toward the valley, the long slant of loose stones . . .
He realized his horse had been hit, now that he put things together; he remembered its sudden jump before it hit the edge, and he pieced together an attack from the rocks above the road.
But it had not been trolls, in that attack: he had never heard that trolls were clever enough to use archery. Goblins were. And he remembered the stone marker, the dreadful living face he had just seen in torchlight, the doors and the echoes he had heard.
It was no troll's den, it was the cellar of Krukczy Tower itself; and goblins held it, loosed from what hell he did not know: but by all the late-at-night tales that had ever frightened a boy sleepless, he knew they were no solitary bandits, no witless bludgeoners, like trolls. Goblins came from deep and unfriendly places, they were clever and they came in armies, that was what he knew from gran's tales. Sorcerers and wicked powers used them to fight their wars.
What had happened this side of the mountains? Had not Karoly known they were in trouble, the moment he saw that stone—and still he led them toward this place? Had he not known in dreams before that? Had the mountain not told him, that morning on the heights, and he had said nothing to them?
Betrayal and Karoly had never seemed possible in the same thought. But whence this sister? Whence this mysterious sister Karoly had never mentioned to anyone? And whence this plague that Karoly could not stop—except from what was here in Krukczy Tower? Whence the smell of burning that had roused the whole household, but on this mountain? And whence the cries of lost children, if not here, in Krukczy Tower?
Ride quickly, Karoly had said, before the attack. Karoly had known, and he wished he could believe Karoly was free somewhere and plotting his rescue; but Karoly, if he was alive, well knew where he was—in this tower, and in the hands of creatures Karoly had already failed to deal with. He began to hope that everyone else was dead in the ambush-please lord Sun they were dead ...
But if they were, he was not, and since he was not, he had no hope but the troll's slow wits and its intention to keep nun to itself—which meant time to work on the knots, if not to rescue anyone, then to get away and onto the road and up the pass to home, to warn his father what was happening over-mountain, because he saw the next step in the taking of this tower: goblins raiding through the high pass next year, killing and doing in Maggiar whatever goblins did with their victims—which he did not want to think about. How he should escape, how he should survive the cold of the pass he could not imagine, but he could not imagine his father's son lying here and waiting to die, either. That was not what his father had taught his sons, and not what his father expected of the men he had sent over-mountain.
And once he heard the troll's slithering sound dimmish down toward the end of the tunnel, he began to try again to feel out the knots, using what slight movement he had in his fingers, in the case that the troll might have redone its work and left him a knot in reach . . .
There was so little feeling left. He tried and he tried, and eventually decided he could just reach something curious that might be a knot. He stretched as far as he could and worked ever so patiently, tears of exhaustion running on his face, and his arms and back burning with the effort.