Sleepy?”
My soul wanted to leap up and flail around in terror. My flesh was incapable and quite possibly indifferent. I was so stiff and I hurt so much that I just could not move.
My mind still worked fine. It ran as sparkling swift as a mountain stream. “Huh?” I continued trying to get the muscles unlocked.
“Easy. It’s Willow. Just open your eyes. You’re safe.”
“What’re you doing way down here?”
“Way down where?”
“Uh—”
“You’re one landing downstairs from the cave of the ancients.”
I kept trying to get up. Muscle by muscle my body gradually yielded to my will. I looked around, vision foggy. Suvrin and Master Santaraksita were still asleep.
Swan said, “They were tired, guaranteed. I heard you snoring all the way up in the cave.”
Twinge of fear. “Where’s Tobo?”
“He went on up top. Everyone went. I made them go. I stayed in case . . . The crow told me not to come down. But what’s one landing? You think you can get moving again? I can’t carry anybody. I can barely keep going myself.”
“I can manage one flight. Up to the cave. That’s far enough for now.”
“The cave?”
“I still have something to do there.”
“Are you sure you want to go out of your way?”
“I’m sure, Willow.” I could tell him it was a matter of life or death. For a whole world. Or maybe for multiple worlds. But why be melodramatic? “Can you get these two moving again? And headed toward the top?” I did not think Master Santaraksita could bear seeing what I intended to do next.
“I’ll get them moving. But I’m sticking with you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes, it will. You can hardly stand up.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“You go right ahead and talk. It’ll get the kinks out of your jaw. But I’m staying.”
I stared at him hard for some time. He did not back down. Neither did he betray any motive but concern for a brother he suspected of failing to be in her right mind. I closed my eyes for half a minute, then opened them to peer down the stairs. “God was listening.”
Swan was working on Suvrin. The Shadowlander officer had his eyes open but seemed unable to move. He murmured, “I must be alive. Otherwise I wouldn’t hurt so much.” Panic flooded his eyes. “Did we get away?”
I said, “We’re getting away. We’ve still got a long way to climb.”
“Goblin’s dead,” Swan said. “The crow told me when it came up to get something to eat.”
“Where is that thing?”
“Down there. Watching.”
I felt a chill. Paranoia touched me. There had been a connection between Lady and Kina ever since Narayan Singh and Kina had used Lady as a vessel to produce the Daughter of Night. That had created a connection, a connection Lady had hammered into place cleverly, unbreakably, so that she could steal power from the goddess indefinitely. “Forgive me, O Lord. Drive these infidel thoughts from my heart.”
Swan said, “Huh?”
“Nothing, part of the ongoing dialog between me and my God. Suvrin! Sweety. You ready to do some jumping jacks?”
Suvrin offered me an old-fashioned, storm-cloud glower. “Smack her, Swan. At a time like this, cheerful ought to be against the laws of heaven and earth.”
“You’ll be cheerful in a minute, too. As soon as you figure out that you’re still alive.”
“Humph!” He began to help Swan waken Master Santaraksita.
Upright now, I did a few small exercises to loosen up even more.
“Ah, Dorabee,” Santaraksita said softly. “I have survived another adventure with you.”
“I’ve got God on my side.”
“Excellent. Do keep him there. I don’t think I can survive another of your adventures without divine assistance.”
“You’ll outlive me, Sri.”
“Perhaps. Probably, if I do get out of this and I don’t tempt fate ever again. You, you’ll probably graduate to snake-dancing with cobras.”
“Sri?”
“I’ve decided. I don’t want to be an adventurer anymore, Dorabee. I’m too old for it. It’s time to wrap myself up in a cozy library again. This just hurts too much. Ow! Young man . . . ”
Swan grinned. He was not that much younger than the librarian. “Let’s get going, old-timer. You keep lying around here and whatever adventure you found down there is going to catch up and have you all over again.”
A possibility that posed a fine motivation for us all.
When we finally got moving again, I brought up the rear. Swan wrangled my companions. I gripped the golden pickax so tightly my knuckles ached.
Goblin was dead.
That did not seem possible.
Goblin was a fixture. A permanent fixture. A cornerstone. Without its Goblin, there could be no Black Company . . . You are mad, Sleepy. The family will not cease to exist simply because one member, unexpectedly, has been plucked out by evil fortune. Life would not end because of Goblin’s absence. It would just get a lot harder. I seemed to hear Goblin whisper, “He is the future.”
“Sleepy. Snap out of it.”
“Huh?”
Swan said, “We’re at the cave. You two. Keep climbing. We’ll catch up with you.”
Suvrin started to ask. I shook my head, pointed upward. “Go. Now. And don’t look back.” I waited until I saw Suvrin actually guide Master Santaraksita over the tumbled stones and onto the stairs. “We’ll catch up.”
“What’s that?” Swan asked. He cupped an ear.
“I don’t hear anything.”
He shrugged. “It’s gone now. Something from upstairs.”
We entered the cavern of the ancients. The wonder had been polished off it by the trampling about of a horde of Company people. I was amazed that they had managed without damaging any more of the sleepers. As it was, almost all the wondrous ice webbing and cocooning had broken up and collapsed. A few stalactites had fallen from the ceiling. “How did that happen?”
Swan frowned. “During the earthquake.”
“Earthquake? What earthquake?”
“You didn’t . . . there was one hell of a shake. I can’t say exactly how long ago. Probably when you were all the way down. It’s hard to tell time in here.”
“No lie. Oh, yuck.” I had discovered why the white crow had all that energy. It had been dining on one of my dead brothers.
Some evil part of me tossed up the thought that I could follow the bird’s example. Another part wondered what would happen if Croaker found out. That man was obsessed with the holy state of Company brotherhood.
“You never know what you’ll do until you’re in the ring with the bull, do you?”
“What?”’
“A proverb from back home. Means that actually facing the reality is never quite like preparing to face the reality. You never really know what you’ll do until you get there.”
I passed the rest of the Captured, not meeting any open eyes. I wondered if they could hear. I offered up some reassurances that sounded feeble even to me. The cavern shrank. When it came time to get down and crawl, I crawled. I told Swan, “Maybe it’s good, you being here after all. I’m starting to have little dizzy spells.”
“You hear anything?”
I listened. This time I did hear something. “Sounds like somebody singing. A marching song? Something full of ‘yo-ho-ho’s.’ ” What the devil?
“Down here? We have dwarfs, too?”
“Dwarfs?”
“Mythical creatures. Like short people with big beards and permanent bad tempers. They lived underground, like nagas, only supposedly big on mining and metalworking. If they ever did exist, they died out a long time ago.”
The singing was getting louder. “Let’s get this handled before somebody interrupts.”