“It’s waiting,” said Bane.
“Yes,” said Haplo. “I think you’re right.” The boy edged nearer, looking at him through narrowed eyes. “Tell me what you know about the Kicksey-winsey.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“But you said there was another explanation—”
“I said there could be. That’s all.” He shrugged. “Call it a guess, a hunch.”
“You won’t tell me.”
“We’ll see if my guess is right when we get there, Your Highness.”
“Grandfather put me in charge of the machine!” Bane reminded him, scowling.
“You’re only here to protect me.”
“And I intend to do just that, Your Highness,” Haplo replied. Bane darted him a sullen, sidelong glance, but said nothing. He knew it would be useless to argue. Eventually, however, the boy either forgot his grievance or decided it wasn’t suited to his dignity to be caught sulking. Leaving Haplo’s side, Bane ran up to walk with Limbeck. Haplo sent the dog along, to keep an ear on both of them.
As it was, the dog heard nothing interesting. In fact, it heard very little at all. The sight of the Kicksey-winsey motionless and quiet had a depressing effect on all of them. Limbeck stared at it through his spectacles, his face grim and hard. Jarre regarded the machine she had once attacked with fond sadness. Coming to a part she had worked on, she would sidle close and give it a comforting pat, as though it were a sick child.
They passed numerous dwarves standing about in enforced idleness, looking helpless and frightened and forlorn. Most had been coming to their work every day since the machine quit running, though there was now no work to do. At first they’d been confident that this was all a mistake, a fluke, a slipped cog of monumental proportions. The dwarves sat or stood about in the darkness, lit by whatever source of light they could manufacture, and watched the Kicksey-winsey expectantly, waiting for it to roar to life again. When their shift ended, the dwarves went home and another shift took their place. But by now, hope was beginning to dim.
“Go home,” Limbeck kept telling them as they walked along. “Go to your homes and wait. You’re only wasting light.”
Some of the dwarves left. Some of the dwarves stayed. Some left, then came back. Others stayed, then left.
“We can’t go on like this,” said Limbeck.
“Yes, you’re right,” said Jarre, for once agreeing with him. “Something terrible will happen.”
“A judgment!” called out a deep and ragged voice from the too-quiet darkness.
“A judgment, that’s what it is! You’ve brought the wrath of the gods upon us, Limbeck Bolttightner! I say we go to the Welves and surrender. Tell the gods we’re sorry. Maybe they’ll turn the Kicksey-winsey back on.”
“Yes,” muttered other voices, safely hidden by the shadows. “We want everything back the way it was.”
“There, what did I tell you?” Limbeck demanded of Jarre. “This kind of talk is spreading.”
“They surely can’t believe the elves are gods?” Jarre protested, glancing behind her to the whispering shadows, her face drawn in concern. “We’ve seen them die!”
“They don’t,” Limbeck answered gloomily. “But they’ll be ready enough to swear they do if it means heat and light and the Kicksey-winsey working once again.”
“Death to the High Froman!” came the whispers.
“Give him to the Welves!”
“Here’s a bolt for you to tighten, Bolttightner.”
Something whizzed out of the darkness—a bolt, big around as Bane’s hand. The chunk of metal didn’t come any where near its target, clunked harmlessly into the wall behind them. The dwarves were still in awe of their leader, who had, for a brief time, given them dignity and hope. But that wouldn’t last long. Hunger and darkness, cold and silence bred fear.
Limbeck didn’t say anything. He didn’t flinch or duck. His lips pressed together grimly, he kept walking. Jarre, face pale with worry, posted herself at his side and flashed defiant glances at every dwarf they passed. Bane skipped hastily back to walk near Haplo.
The Patryn felt a prickling of his skin, glanced down, saw the sigla tattooed on his arms start to glow a faint blue—a reaction to danger. Odd, he thought. His body’s magic wouldn’t react that way in response to some frightened dwarves, a few muttered threats, and a thrown piece of hardware. Something or someone truly menacing was out there, a threat to him, to them all.
The dog growled, its lip curled.
“What’s wrong?” asked Bane, alarmed. He had lived among Patryns long enough to know the warning signs.
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” said Haplo. “But the sooner we get that machine started again, the better. So just keep walking.”
They entered the tunnels, which, as Haplo remembered from his last journey, bisected, dissected, and intersected the ground underneath the Kicksey-winsey. No dwarves lurked down here. These tunnels were customarily empty, since they led nowhere anyone had any reason to go. The Factree had not been used in eons, except as a meeting place, and that had ended when the elves took it over and turned it into a barracks.
Away from the whispers and the sight of the corpselike machine, everyone relaxed visibly. Everyone except Haplo. The runes on his skin glowed only faintly, but they still glowed. Danger was still present, though he couldn’t imagine where or how. The dog, too, was uneasy and would occasionally erupt with a loud and startling “whuff” that made everyone jump.
“Can’t you get him to stop doing that?” complained Bane. “I almost wet my pants.”
Haplo placed a gentle hand on the dog’s head. The animal quieted, but it wasn’t happy and neither was Haplo.
Elves? Haplo couldn’t recall a time his body had ever reacted to a danger from mensch, but then—as he recalled—the Tribus elves were a cruel and vicious lot.
“Why, look!” exclaimed Jarre, pointing. “Look at that! I never saw that before, did you, Limbeck?”
She pointed to a mark on the wall, a mark that was glowing bright red.
“No,” he admitted, removing his spectacles to stare at it. His voice was tinged with the same childlike wonder and curiosity that had brought him to first question the whys of Welves and the Kicksey-winsey. “I wonder what it is?”
“I know what it is,” cried Bane. “It’s a Sartan rune.”
“Shush!” Haplo warned, catching hold of the boy’s hand and squeezing it tightly.
“A what?” Limbeck peered round at them. Eyes wide, he had forgotten, in his curiosity, the reason for their being down here, or their need for haste.
“The Mangers made marks like that. I’ll explain later,” said Haplo, herding everyone on.
Jarre kept walking, but she wasn’t watching where she was going. She was staring back at the rune. “I saw some of those funny glowing drawings when that man and I were down in the place with the dead people. But those I saw shone blue, not red.”
And why were these sigla gleaming red? Haplo wondered. Sartan runes were like Patryn runes in many ways. Red was a warning.
“The light’s fading,” said Jarre, still looking back. She stumbled over her feet.
“The sigil’s broken,” Bane told Haplo. “It can’t do anything anymore—whatever it was that it was supposed to do.”
Yes, Haplo knew it was broken. He could see that for himself. Large portions of the wall had been covered over, either by the Kicksey-winsey or by the dwarves. The Sartan sigla on the walls were obscured, some missing entirely, others—like this one—cracked and now rendered powerless. Whatever it was they had been supposed to do—alert, halt, bar entry—they had lost the power to do.
“Maybe it’s you,” Bane said, looking up at him with an impish grin. “Maybe the runes don’t like you.”
Maybe, thought Haplo. But the last time I came down here, no runes glowed red. They continued walking.
“This is it,” stated Jarre, stopping beneath a ladder, shining her glampern upward.
Haplo glanced around. Yes, he knew where he was now. He remembered. He was directly beneath the Factree. A ladder led upward, and, at the top of the ladder, a piece of the tunnel’s ceiling slid aside, permitting access to the Factree itself. Haplo studied the ladder, looked back at Limbeck.