Water Sleeps

87

T he rescue was running smoothly, like a well-greased siege engine missing only a few minor parts. Goblin had Murgen and Croaker headed toward the surface aboard makeshift litters.

Croaker had not said a word, nor had he made any effort to do so, even though he had been awake and aware. He stared at me for a long time. I had no idea what was going on inside his head. I just hoped he was sane.

Before he departed, Murgen did give my hand a small squeeze. I hoped that was an expression of gratitude or encouragement.

I was not at all happy about his being unable to provide information or advice. I had not thought much about what role I would play after the Captured were wakened. I had operated on the unspoken assumption, more or less, that I would retire to my Annals—or even farther, to the Standardbearer job, if Murgen wanted to be Annalist again.

More and more people kept coming downstairs even though I had tried to send word up to warn everyone that they faced a horrible climb going in the other direction.

The white crow continued to curse and jabber semicoherently until it lost its voice. I was concerned about Lady. She had managed that feathery spy quite well for a long time, never giving herself away even when she did try to clue me in, but now she seemed to be losing control. Of herself. I assured her repeatedly that she would go upstairs as soon as I had bearers capable of getting her there. Doj, Sahra and Gota had Thai Dei ready to travel. I gave them the go-ahead. One-Eye would follow him, then Lady would go. The Prahbrindrah Drah would be the last, this time.

Tobo seemed fascinated by his father, apparently because he could not quite believe that the man was real in a fleshy sense. Circumstances had kept his parents separate almost since his conception.

The boy started to tag along after the rest of the family. I called out, "Tobo, stay down here. You have a job to do. See about your dad after we get Lady and the Prince moved out. Hello, Suvrin. Why're you down here?"

"Curiosity. Sri Santaraksita's curiosity. He insisted that he had to see the caverns. He drove me crazy reminding me how storied they are in religious legend. He couldn't be this close to something like that and not explore it personally."

"I see." I noticed the old librarian now. He was working his way up the line of old men, examining each and murmuring to himself. Occasionally he would bounce up and down in excitement. Swan had gone back to make him keep his hands to himself. He wanted to finger and sniff every bit of ancient metal and cloth. He seemed to have trouble understanding that those old men were still alive but very vulnerable.

"Swan. Bring him up here." I did want the benefit of his expertise just a while ago. In a softer voice, I told Suvrin, "You're the one who's going to carry him back upstairs if he can't make it on his own. And I'll be right behind you, giving encouragement by poking you with a spear."

Suvrin seemed to have thought about the climb already. He was not looking forward to it, either. "The man has no concept—"

I interrupted. "What about Shivetya?"

"He's back right side up and safely away from the pit. I can't say he seemed particularly grateful, though."

"He say or do something?"

"No. It was his expression. And that was probably because we dropped him on his nose once. In think I'd have trouble being grateful for a pop in the snoot myself."

Santaraksita was puffing when he joined us. He, was excited. "We're walking the actual roads of myth, Dorabee! I have begun begging the Lords of Light to let me live long enough to report my adventures to the bhadrhalok!"

"Who will call you a liar over and over again. Sri, you know the Right People don't become involved in actual adventures. All of you, follow me now. We're going to have another actual adventure traveling into mythology." I headed on up the steepening slope.

I soon discovered that someone had gone this way before me. At first I suspected Tobo had gotten farther than I had thought. Then I decided that the disturbances in the frost were too old for that, so concluded that Soulcatcher must have gone back this way, just to see what she could see.

Back there, small side caves entered the main cavern, few of them large enough to permit passage of an adult body. The main cave dwindled in diameter. We had to hunch down, then we had to crawl. Whoever had gone before us had done the same.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Swan asked. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Of course I do." Leadership tip: Sound confident even when you have no idea. Just do not make a habit of it. They will find you out.

I had been through here in my dreams. But only sort of, evidently, because every few feet I ran into some detail I did not recall from those nightmares. And then we stumbled onto something that was far more than a mere detail.

The sole of a boot nearly smacked me in the face because I was concentrating on trying to decipher the story encrypted in the frost on the cave floor. That was the story of someone who had been moving wildly, maybe in a panic. Not only had the frost been rubbed away, in places the stone itself was bruised or chipped.

"I think I've found Mather, Willow." It was one of those odd moments when you discover the trivial. I noticed that Cordy Mather really needed to have his boots resoled. I did not immediately wonder how a man's leg could stick out like that, with the toe pointing halfway upward above horizontal while the man himself was lying on his stomach. "We'd better stop right here and take a good look. I don't see the man doing this to himself."

Swan said, "I'll get Goblin. Don't do anything till he gets here."

"Don't sweat it. I'm fond of my hide. If I lose it, I'll miss out on our honeymoon." I drew my sword, for what good that might do, then raised up slowly till the top of my head bumped the cavern roof.

Cordy Mather had crawled over a hump in the floor. And something fatal had happened to him before he could get all of himself onto the downward side.

Suvrin eased up beside me. Inexplicably, I found myself painfully aware of him as a masculine presence. Luckily, he was even less interpersonally adept than I was. He failed to notice my flustered and uncomfortable reaction.

Odd. The urge was not something I would pursue, certainly. I just wondered why I sometimes suffered these sudden, random impulses, some of which were extremely difficult to resist. Ninety-nine percent of the time I did not so much as think about the possibility of combining myself, a man and a bed in a search for adventure.

Maybe I should not have been teasing Swan.

Suvrin said, "That sure doesn't look very appetizing. What do you think happened?"

"I'm not even going to guess. I'm just going to sit here and wait for the expert to show up."

"May I look?" Santaraksita asked.

Suvrin scooted back. He discovered that the older man was too broad to pass by him there. So we all had to retreat twenty yards so Santaraksita could get past us in turn. I admonished him repeatedly not to go farther forward than I had. "I definitely don't want to have to drag you out of here." Though I will grant that the man was a great deal leaner now than when I had worked for him. "And because you want to get home to tell the bhadrhalok all about this."

"You were right about them, Dorabee. They won't believe a word I say. And not only because they're the Right People but because Surendranath Santaraksita never had an adventure in his life. He never had the urge until this adventure had him."

"Rich men have dreams. Poor men die to make them come true."

"You persist in amazing me, Dorabee. Who are you quoting?"

"V.T.C. Ghosh. He was an acolyte of B.B. Mukerjee, one of the six Bhomparan disciples of Sondhel Ghose the Janaka."

Santaraksita's face lit right up. "Dorabee! You are a marvel indeed. A wonder of wonders. The pupil begins to exceed the master. What was your source? I don't recall ever having read of a Ghosh or a Mukerjee featured in the Janaka school."

I snickered like a prankster kid. "That's because I was pulling your leg. I made it up, Sri." And that seemed to leave him even more amazed.

Goblin broke it up. "Swan says you found a dead man."

"Yes. It looks like Cordy Mather from this end. I didn't see his face, though. I wasn't going to move anything anywhere until we had a good idea what happened to him. I'd rather it didn't happen to me."

Goblin grunted. "Pudgeman, you want to back down here so I can get past you? This tunnel gets pretty tight, don't it? Watch out you don't let your chubby butt plug it up. For how come do you want to go slithering around back here, anyway, Sleepy?"

"Because if I keep going this way far enough I'll get to the place where the Deceivers concealed the original Books of the Dead."

Goblin gave me a funny look but took my word for it. I talked to ghosts in mist machines. Birds talked to me. A talking bird was following me right now, at a distance. At the moment it did not have much to say because its throat was sore but it did manage to rip out a curse or two whenever it had to dodge somebody's flailing feet. "That's interesting."

"I thought so."

"Ah. Yeah. It's not sorcery, though. It's your basic mechanical booby trap. Spring-loaded. Stabs you with a poisoned pin. There're probably twenty more between here and where you want to go. What do you think Mather was trying to do?"

"If he woke up and found himself down here and didn't know where he was or what had happened to him, he might have panicked and taken off and just went in the wrong direction. I bet it's his fault all those guys back there are dead. He probably tried to wake them up."

Goblin grunted again. "There. That's disarmed. I'd better go ahead and see what else is waiting. But first we need to get Mather pulled back so you all can get past him."

"If you can weasel past him so can I."

"Yeah, you can. But what about your boyfriend and your sugar daddy? They've got a little more pork on them." He grunted and cursed softly as he fought Mather's remains back over the hump in the floor. I noticed, for the first time, that the echoes were different in this more confined space, jammed with bodies. They were almost nonexistent.