“Would you have made anything of it?”
“No,” Hero had to admit. “Not then, anyway.”
“And now?”
Hero smiled a tight smile, which turned to a grimace of pain as the Regulator with the egg-shaped head cinched a rope up between his legs just a little too tightly. “Hey, I have tackle down there, my man—watch it, will you?” he grunted.
“A pair of real comedians, you two,” the man jerked the rope tighter yet. “Quester? Jesters, more like! I’ve seen carnival dancing clowns who weren’t half so funny. No, not a patch on you lads.”
“It’s you who’ll need patching, friend,” Hero gaspingly returned, “if ever we meet on terms a bit more even.”
“Daydreams. within dreams,” the other replied, and he laughed and spat in Hero’s face. And Hero unable even to wipe the spittle away.
“Ex-waking worlders,” Eldin growled his opinion of them. “You have to be. Or else your fathers were Lengites! Lord, there’s some real rubbish finding its way into the dreamlands these days. Now how did such a cute and cuddlesome pair of chaps like you two ever get to be roughy-toughy Regulators, eh? I mean, Bahama’s police force has something of a glowing reputation, doesn’t it? It certainly used to have—under your current boss’s father.”
The bandy-legged, narrow-eyed thug whirled on the Wanderer and drove a knotted fist into his belly. Eldin said “Oof!” and bent a little, but seemed otherwise unhurt: bindings and good cloth and sheer mass had absorbed the blow like a huge block of rubber. Hero found it surprising that the gray-clad hadn’t broken his hand; Homo ephemerens weren’t normally all that substantial, so perhaps Eldin had been right about these lads being ex-waking worlders. Except that unlike the questers, they worked for the wrong boss. And on the wrong side of the law? That seemed more possible, however paradoxical, by the moment.
“No more arguments, no snide comments, no lip whatsoever!” Narrow-eyes coughed out the words. “You just come along with us to the well and do exactly as you’re told,” he indicated the door, propelled Eldin in that direction with a boot up the backside, “and hop to it!”
Hopping, as means of locomotion, isn’t overly dignified—but it beats boot-propulsion to a frazzle.
Tight-lipped, each one of them promising a terrible revenge, albeit mutely, the questers hopped.
The well …
In the old days, when Regulating HQ had been a slave-harboring area, the well had served a triple purpose. It had provided water for the slavers when (often) they were thirsty; a threat if ever (rarely) they should prove rowdy or in any way ungovernable; a last embrace, however dark and dank, on the occasion (regular) of a sudden demise. Housed in a room half virgin rock—literally a cave—and half rough porphyry blocks, located deep under the cliff’s overhang where the light scarce filtered at all, the well was now Hero and Eldin’s destination. The second of its ancient functions was about to be resurrected. And depending on the outcome, possibly the third.
There was no door to the room of the well, just half an arch of raw rock and half of roughly cemented blocks, containing a yawning cave with uneven floor and inward-curving walls that met overhead in gloom, cobwebs, and spindly aeon-formed stalactites. And in the center of the floor, the well.
As the eyes of the questers and those of their Regulator guards grew accustomed to the gloom, so Hero felt the cold: a continuous stream of icy air flowing up out of the well and passing knee-deep outward and away. Eldin felt it, too, and couldn’t quite stifle an audible shiver. Then Egg-head struck flint to a prepared flambeau in its rusty iron bracket on the wall, and at once the shadows were driven flickeringly back. Their guards pushed the questers stumblingly closer to the well’s rim.
It had no parapet, that gaping fissure, and so the pair held instinctively back from it. They could see now that it was a natural rent in the bedrock, a split whose ends tapered to mere cracks while its center was roughly oval or almond-shaped—like a half-open eye in an old, seamy face. The eye’s iris was jet black, a hole that went down to … where?
“Tide’s turned,” said Narrow-eyes, his voice echoing hollowly. He sniffed, then breathed deep. “Smell the salt?”
Egg-head nodded. “Sea’s coming in,” he agreed. And to the near-mummified questers: “Sweet water goes out—well, brackish water, anyway—and when the tide turns salt water comes in. It’s a river, see, underground. Sunless, never breaks the surface. There’s a story how long ago a troublesome black jumped down there hugging an empty barrel. He was never seen again, but the barrel surfaced miles out to sea. When the tide’s fully in, you can fish in this hole, and it stinks of weed. When it’s right out, the air comes up fresh as a field of daisies. Well, maybe not that fresh. Whichever, it’s always cold: a cold, dark place to die. You fall—or get pushed——down there, and you drown, of course …”
“If you can’t swim,” said Eldin, after a moment.
“Oh, it’s swimming, is it?” said Narrow-eyes quietly. “In the dark? In the cold, cold, midnight water? There are many would just let themselves sink. Quicker that way, you know?” He chuckled low and evilly.
The questers were prodded closer to the hole, found themselves leaning backward away from it. Then—
Footsteps, and the echoing protests of well-known female voices. Raffis Gan arrived, dragging Ula and Una after him. The girls were blindfolded, their wrists bound to their bodies at the hips, else unfettered. Both sounded very weary, close to hysterics, but seemed otherwise intact and unharmed. Hero breathed a sigh of relief.
“Easy, girls, easy!” he spoke up, anger vibrant in his voice.
“Hero, is that you?” cried Ula. “Oh, David! The brute kept us chained and in darkness all night!”
“Aye, well he’ll answer for it, never fear,” growled Hero, “when all of this comes out.”
“That’s where’ you’re wrong, my friend,” said Gan at once. “You see, it’s not going to come out!”
“Oh?” said Eldin, from where he stood too close to the well’s rim, his head cocked to one side and bushy eyebrows arched. “Murder, Chief Regulator? All four of us? And what good will that do you?”
“The Wanderer’s right,” Hero added with a nod. “How will killing us get you into Yath-Lhi’s treasure chamber, eh?” The words had sprung to Hero’s lips as by inspiration. Half an idea had taken shape in his mind, triggering a question he couldn’t even be sure had an answer. In any case, its effect was immediate and dramatic.
“So!” Gan hissed, stepping jerkily forward. “You do know, after all, do you? But how much do you know?”
Eldin wanted in on the game. “Everything,” the Wanderer growled. “We’re not Kuranes’ top men for nothing, bent Chief Regulator Gan!”
“Bent?” Gan frowned.
“I meant crooked,” Eldin corrected himself, though “bent” had certainly seemed right just a moment ago. Some left-over phrase from the waking world, he supposed. “Like a corkscrew.”
Gan was now the whitest they’d ever seen him. Even in the flaring light of the torch, his skin was waxy as a corpse-fat candle. “I was right,” he said. “Kuranes sent you to investigate me—my exploration of the ruins on Yath’s far shore!”
Now the questers knew it all. At least, with the exception of a few finer details. And now they could think and speak more nearly in Gan’s own terms:
“You don’t think we’re Ooth-Nargai’s only spies in Bahama, do you, Gan?” said Hero. “Kuranes will know soon enough that you have us—and how long then before he puts Bahama’s Elders in the picture, eh?”
“Maybe the Elders already know about you, Chief Regulator,” Eldin worked the knife a bit. “And d’you really think doing away with us will help your case? Better release us now, at once, and make a clean breast of it. It’ll mean resignation from your position as boss of the gray-clads, of course, but—”
“Oh, be quiet!” Gan scowled. “Man, don’t you know when you’re doomed? I couldn’t let you go even if I wanted to—and I don’t. Re
signation? It would mean my job, would it? Hah! Let me tell you it would mean my head! Slavery is forbidden here, which means that working a slave to death is murder. And do you know how many Pargans I’ve had off the Kledan slavers? Or how many of them have died in cave-ins and rock falls or from sheer exhaustion on Yath’s far shore? No, my boats are all blazing behind me—but I’m that close!” he snapped his fingers, making a sharp crack.
“Should you be telling them all of this, Raffis?” Egg-head wanted to know.
“Why not?” said Gan. “They certainly won’t live to repeat it. Or if they do live, their own involvement will silence them. Anyway, thinking out loud helps clarify matters. I see things more clearly when I can talk them over.” Safely distant from the well’s rim, he put his hands behind his back and began a slow pacing, to and fro.
“Must we be blindfolded?” cried Una, who’d been remarkably patient for some little time.
“And is it really necessary that our hands be bound like this?” Ula wanted to know. “We’re only girls, after all!”
Hero and Eldin knew better: Ula and Una weren’t “only” girls at all, but very brave and highly resourceful girls, as they’d long since proven in the affair of the Mad Moon. But Gan had other things on his mind, and the twins were a distraction—to him they were just girls.
The Chief Regulator paused in his pacing, said: “Let them see and free their hands—but one of you guard the arch.” And as the girls’ blindfolds and ropes were removed, he continued to pace up and down. Finally:
“Of course, I know quite a bit about you two, really,” Gan stated. “Indeed I spent most of last night catching up on your alleged exploits. Personally I find them farfetched. From what I’ve seen of you, I’d say you’re a pair of buffoons! Luck has doubtless played a great part in your successes. That, and your apparently natural roguish inclinations. But I think you’d agree your luck seems to have run out on you, and I wonder: just how much of the real rogue do you have in you, eh? Questers now, aye, but before that thieves and sellswords, if I’ve had it aright.”
“Oh?” Narrow-eyes was apprehensive. “Well the way I’ve had it is that they only play the fool, these two. You go up against them—or run with them—at your own risk!”
What Gan had said earlier, about the possibility of Hero and Eldin’s own involvement in his scheme, had made connections in Hero’s head. And threats, it appeared, were about to turn into offers. But as yet it was difficult to see what the questers had that Gan wanted. “What are you getting at?” Hero was suspicious. “What’s on your mind?”
“Why, that’s obvious!” Eldin snorted. “He’s thinking it might be possible to buy us off!”
The Chief Regulator’s face twisted into a sneer. “Oh, and is that so unlikely? Every man has his price, Wanderer, as I’m sure you’re well aware. And what I can offer is … Why, you could buy half of Celephais!”
Hero only scowled—and scowled even harder at Eldin, who seemed to have brightened a little and was actually beginning to look interested!
Eldin pointedly ignored his friend’s glower, asked: “Just what are you offering, Raffis Gan? And what is it you want from us in return?”
“Want from you … ?” Gan mused. “I’m not quite sure. But let’s first get things in their proper perspective. Which is to say, we should talk about choice—or lack of it.” He indicated to Narrow-eyes (Egg-head was standing, hands on hips, guarding the exit through the arch) that he should move the questers closer still to the well’s rim. Obediently, the bull-chested thug shuffled his near-helpless charges to the very edge of the hole, where they stood licking their lips and peering nervously into dark and unknown depths.
Now Gan grinned, said: “Not much of a choice, is it? You can co-operate, or die. Quite simple, really. So now, in light of your fresh perspective, we can more properly ask what it is that I want. Well, first let’s see what you’ve got:
“Are you, for instance, talented? It would seem so—at first glance, anyway. You did break into a keep of the First Ones, penetrating its mazy ways to the core and setting free the Beings you found trapped in stasis there. Now that, I have to admit, is talent—or extraordinary good fortune! Not the setting free of the First Ones, which I can only consider sheerest folly, but certainly the breaking-in and the maze-managing; for making one’s way through mantrap labyrinths is at best a hazardous business, as I’ve learned well enow. Aye, for it’s taken me a three-month and all those poor Pargans just to find my way into Yath-Lhi’s maze and reach its center! Oh, yes, this maze-maneuvering is a talent indeed. But which one of you has it? Was it you, Eldin the Wanderer, who broke the seals on that lair of the First Ones, or you, David Hero?”
Hero shrugged. “We both did our bit. Keep-cracking isn’t so hard. We’ve a knack, that’s all.”
Gan nodded, stroked his chin. He seemed fully recovered now from the shock they’d given him. Or perhaps resigned to the idea. “Equally skilled,” he murmured. “Both of you. And what of the reading of glyphs, runes, the ‘Ancient Dreamlands’ in which Lord Kuranes couches his bird-borne directives? Is this another mutual accomplishment?”
“I’m not entirely unskilled,” said Hero, “though it’s true that in that department Eldin has the edge on me.”
“Indeed,” said Gan, pausing in his pacing and nodding his interest. And again, more slowly, “Indeed.” He casually motioned to Narrow-eyes, who at once moved up closer to Hero. “But in that case I can cut my costs at once, wouldn’t you agree?” Gan continued. “If your friend the Wanderer has everything I require, then what need have I of you?” He motioned again to Narrow-eyes, but more certainly, conclusively—And the thug at once thrust his shoulder into Hero’s back.
Toppling forward, Hero gave a cry of outrage and horror combined. Eldin, too, eyes bulging in disbelief as he stood cocooned. Ula, no longer blind or bound, flew to her man, grabbed wildly at his slowly toppling form. She caught his shoulder, wheeled him sideways so that he’d crash down on the rim and not into the hole. But Gan merely nodded to Narrow-eyes. “His woman, too!” the Chief Regulator snapped.
Again Narrow-eyes pushed, this time at both Hero and Ula, and at the same time Una gave a wild shriek and hurled herself on to the thug’s back—but too late! By the time the bow-legged Regulator had dragged the snarling, spitting, clawing girl over his shoulder in a tangle of fiercely kicking, biting, scratching arms and legs and teeth, Hero and his lady had already vanished into the maw of the rock. Only their cries echoed up—those and the distant splash which finally cut them off.
“Hero!” Eldin hoarsely bellowed. “David, lad …”
Sobbing, the Wanderer stumbled and hopped forward, made as if to throw himself down after the younger quester. “Stop him!” said Gan to Egg-head, who’d abandoned his position under the arch, the better to see. The stocky gray-clad grabbed Eldin’s jacket, turned him from the well.
“What—?” bellowed Eldin, as if astonished by this interruption. His wide, horrified, disbelieving eyes lit on the face of the man who held him. All vacancy and horror went out of the Wanderer’s eyes in a moment, were replaced by the red light of revenge. Trussed as he was, still he battered at the squat Regulator with his head and shoulders, knocked the man down, fell on him and bit into his shoulder with square teeth and great jaws like those of a steel trap.
Gan took Una, who had now collapsed in shocked tears, off Narrow-eyes’ hands; and as the trapped Regulator began to scream where Eldin held him pinned to the floor as if trying to chew him to death, the Chief Regulator said to Narrow-eyes: “Finish it—but don’t kill him! One good clean clout should do it.”
Narrow-eyes stepped to where Eldin was snarling through his chomping as he tried to transfer his grip from collar-bone to throat, bent down and struck one perfectly calculated blow with his truncheon. Eldin fled at once into lightning-shot dreams within dreams; but even dreams full of pain were better than the nightmare he’d just witnessed …
Hero and Ula plunged deep, came up slow an
d gasping for air. The shaft of dim light from above blinked out as a swift current caught them up and rushed them headlong into black bowels of rock. Hero floated on his back, turned into that position by Ula, and she swam alongside, one hand in his hair, buoyed up by the air trapped in her skirt and blouse.
“Ula,” he finally managed to gasp against the gurgle and slap of black water. “Are you a good swimmer?”
“The best,” she answered. “And swimming—uh!—will keep me warm, at least for a little while. But what about—uh!—you?”
“Now listen carefully, lass,” he ignored her query, fought desperately to stay face-up, “and do exactly as I say. See, there’s a trick I learned long ago from Eldin: it’s called, ‘always keep a sharp knife in a scabbard strapped to your left ankle’! The gray-clads started to search us, but after they found a note in Eldin’s pocket they searched no farther. Which means I still have my—” Before he could form the word “knife,” a wavelet slapped him in the face, set him rolling. He went facedown, gulped brine, was righted by Ula in the next moment. He coughed and spluttered, knew suddenly what it must feel like to drown.
“You’ll have to—uh!—take a deep breath,” Ula said, “while I—uh!—try to get it. Then if you go bum-up again—”
“Listen,” Hero hastened to instruct, “there’s another part of the—uh!—trick, and it’s the most important!” But she had already floated him ahead, was desperately treading water while groping and fumbling around his feet.
“Thank goodness—uh!—they didn’t tie your feet together!” she gasped. And: “What’s most important?”
“That you don’t—urk!” Another wavelet had slopped into his mouth, setting him rolling again. Still groping for his knife, Ula managed to right him. “Don’t drop the—uh!—bloody thing!” he finally got it out.