‘How close is it to sundown?’
‘Less than an hour, perhaps two to full darkness.’
Arutha nodded and settled in to wait. Jimmy dropped past him to the floor of the upper cavern and foraged through his pack for some jerked beef. His stomach had been reminding him he had not eaten for the last day, and he decided that if he was going to die tonight, he might as well eat first.
Time passed slowly, and Jimmy noticed that something beyond the normal tension expected in this situation had infected the mood of each of Arutha’s company. Martin and Laurie had both fallen into deep, brooding silences, and Arutha seemed introverted almost to the point of being catatonic. Baru silently mouthed chants and appeared in a trance, while Roald sat facing a wall, staring at some unseen image. Jimmy shook off distant images of strange people, oddly dressed and engaged in alien undertakings, and forced himself alert. ‘Hey,’ he said with just enough authority to jar everyone and turn their attention to him. ‘You all look … lost.’
Martin’s eyes seemed to focus. ‘I … I was thinking of Father.’
Arutha spoke softly. ‘It’s this place. I was … nearly without hope, ready to give up.’
Roald said, ‘I was at Cutter’s Gap again, only Highcastle’s army wasn’t going to arrive in time.’
Baru said, ‘I was singing … my death chant.’
Laurie crossed to stand next to Jimmy. ‘It’s this place. I was thinking Carline had found another while I was gone.’ He looked at Jimmy. ‘You?’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘It hit me funny, too, but maybe it’s my age or something. It only made me think of strange people dressed in weird clothing. I don’t know. It sort of makes me angry.’
Martin said, ‘The elves said the moredhel come here to dream dreams of power.’
Jimmy said, ‘Well, all I know is you looked like those walking dead.’ He moved towards the crevice. ‘It’s dark. Why don’t I go and look about, and if things are quiet, then we can all go.’
Arutha said, ‘I think perhaps you and I should go together.’
‘No,’ said the boy thief. ‘I hate to show a lack of deference, but if I’m to risk my life doing something I’m expert in, let me do it. You need to have someone crawl about inside that place, and I’ll not have you tagging after.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ said Arutha
‘I’ll not deny that,’ answered Jimmy. ‘I’ll guarantee that Dragon Lord shrine will need some skill cracking, and if you’ve any sense you’ll let me go alone. Otherwise you’ll be dead before I can say, “Don’t step there, Highness,” and we might as well not have bothered in the first place. We could have just let the Nighthawks skewer you, and I’d have spent many more comfortable nights in Krondor.’
Martin said, ‘He’s right.’
Arutha said, ‘I don’t like this, but you are right.’ As the boy turned to go, he added, ‘Have I told you that you put me in mind of that pirate Amos Trask sometimes?’
In the darkness they could sense the boy’s grin.
Jimmy scampered up through the crevice and peered out. Seeing no one, he made a quick run for the building. Coming up against the wall, he edged around until he was before the door. He stood quietly for a moment, judging the best way to approach the problem. He studied the door once again, then quickly clambered up the wall, finding finger-and toeholds in the moulding next to the door. Again he studied the anteroom through the window. Double doors opened up into darkness beyond. Otherwise the room was empty. Jimmy glanced upwards and was confronted by a blank ceiling. What was waiting inside to kill him? As sure as dogs had fleas, there was a trap inside. And if so, what sort and how to get around it? Again Jimmy was visited by the nagging itch of something odd about this place.
Jimmy dropped back to the ground and took a deep breath. He reached out and lifted the latch of the door. With a shove, he leapt aside, to the left, so the swinging door, hinged on the right, would shield him from anything behind it for an instant. Nothing happened.
Jimmy peered cautiously inside, letting his senses seek out inconsistencies, flaws in the design of the place, any clue to reveal a trap. He saw none. Jimmy leant against the door. What if the trap were magic? He had no defences against some enchantment meant to kill humans, non-moredhel, anyone wearing green, or whatever it might be. Jimmy stuck his hand across the portal, ready to snatch it back. Nothing happened.
Jimmy sat. Then he lay down. From the low angle everything looked different and he hoped he might see something. As he rose, something did register. The floor was made of marble slabs of equal size and texture, with slight cracks between them. He lightly placed his foot on the slab before the door, slowly permitting his weight to fall upon it, feeling for any movement. There was none.
Jimmy entered and moved around towards the far doors. He inspected every stone slab before he stepped upon it, and decided none were trapped. He inspected the walls and ceiling, gauging everything about the room that might provide him with some intelligence. Nothing. The old, familiar feeling plagued Jimmy: something was wrong here.
With a sigh, Jimmy faced the open doors into the heart of the building and entered.
Jimmy had seen many unsavoury characters in his former occupation, and this Jaccon would have fitted in perfectly. Jimmy lay flat and rolled the corpse over. As the dead man’s weight landed upon the other stone before the door, there was a faint snapping sound and something sped overhead. Jimmy examined Jaccon and found a small dart stuck in the man’s chest near the collarbone. Jimmy didn’t touch it; he didn’t have to: he knew it contained a quick-acting poison. Another item of interest on the fellow was a beautifully carved dagger with a jewelled hilt. Jimmy plucked it from the man’s belt and stuck it inside his tunic.
Jimmy sat back upon his heels. He had walked through a long, blank hall, with no doors, down into a subterranean level of the building. He judged he stood less than a hundred yards from the caverns where Arutha and the others waited. He had stumbled upon the corpse at the only door leaving the hall. The stone slab directly beyond the door was ever so slightly depressed.
He rose and stepped through the door, diagonally to the stone next to the one before the door. The trap was so obvious it shouted for caution, but this fool, in his rush towards fabled wealth, had walked into it. And paid the price.
Something bothered Jimmy. The trap was too obvious. It was as if someone wanted him to feel confident in defeating it. He shook his head. Whatever tendency towards incaution he’d had was gone. Now he was fully professional, a thief who understood that any misstep would likely be his last.
Jimmy wished for more light than was provided by the single torch he had brought along. He inspected the floor below Jaccon and saw another displaced stone. He ran his hand along the door-jamb and found no trip wire or other triggering device. Stepping across the threshold, avoiding the stones before the door, Jimmy passed the corpse and continued on towards the heart of the building.
It was a circular room. In the centre of it a slender pedestal rose. Upon the pedestal sat a crystal sphere, lit from above by some unseen light source. And within the sphere rested a single branch with silver-green leaves, red berries, and silver thorns. Jimmy walked cautiously. He looked everywhere but where the pedestal rested. He explored every inch of the room he could reach without entering the pool of light about the sphere, and found nothing resembling a trap-springing device. But the nagging at the back of Jimmy’s mind, which had been with him all along, kept shouting that something was wrong about this place. Since discovering Jaccon, he had avoided three different traps, all easy enough for any competent thief to spot. Now here, where he expected the last trap to be, he found none.
Jimmy sat down on the floor and began to think.
Arutha and the others came alert. Jimmy came scrambling back down into the crevice, to land with a thud on the floor of the cave. ‘What did you find?’ asked Arutha.
‘It’s a big place. It’s got lots of empty rooms, all cleverly fashioned so that you
can only move one way from the door to the centre of the building and out. There’s nothing in there but some sort of little shrine in the centre. There’re a few traps, simple enough ones to get around.
‘But the whole thing’s too off-centre. Something’s not right. The building’s a fake.’
‘What?’ said Arutha.
‘Just suppose you wanted to catch you, and you were worried about you being very clever. Don’t you think you might just add one last catchall in case all the bright lads you hired to catch you were a mite slow?’
‘You think the building’s a trap?’ said Martin.
‘Yes, a big elaborate, clever trap. Look, suppose you got this mystic lake and all your tribe comes here to make magic or get power from the dead or whatever it is the Dark Brothers do up here? You want to add this one last catchall, so you think like a human. Maybe Dragon Lords don’t build buildings, but humans do, so you build this building, this big building with nothing in it. Then you put a sprig of Silverthorn in some place, like in a shrine inside, and you rig a trap. Someone finds the little hellos you put along the way, gets around them, thinking they’re being very, very clever, wanders about, finds the Silverthorn, pulls it, and …’
‘And the trap springs,’ said Laurie, his tone appreciative of the boy’s logic.
‘And the trap springs,’ said Jimmy. ‘I don’t know how they did it, but I’ll bet the last trap is magic of some sort. The rest were too easy to find, then, at the end, nothing. I bet you touch the sphere with the Silverthorn in it and a dozen doors between you and the outside slam shut, a hundred of those dead warriors come out of the walls, or the whole building simply falls on you.’
Arutha said, ‘I’m not convinced.’
‘Look, you’ve got a greedy pack of bandits up there. Most of them aren’t very smart or they wouldn’t be outlaws living in the mountains. They’d be self-respecting thieves in a city. Besides being stupid, they’re greedy. So they come up here to earn some gold looking for the Prince and they’re told, “Don’t go in the building.” Now, each one of these clever lads thinks the moredhel are lying, because he knows everyone else is as stupid and greedy as he is. One of these clever lads goes up there looking around, and gets a dart in the gullet for his efforts.
‘After I found the sphere on the pedestal, I doubled back and really looked around. That place was built by the moredhel, recently. It’s about as ancient as I am. It’s mostly a wood building, with stone facing. I’ve been in old buildings. This isn’t one. I don’t know how they did it. Maybe with magic, or just a whole lot of slave labour, but it’s no more than a few months old.’
‘But Galain said this was a Valheru place,’ said Arutha.
Martin said, ‘I think him right, but I think Jimmy right as well. Remember what you told me of Tomas’s rescue from the Valheru underground hall by Dolgan, just before the war?’ Arutha said he did. “That place sounds much like this.’
‘Light a torch,’ said Arutha. Roald did so, and they moved away from the crevice.
Laurie said, ‘Has anyone noticed that for a cave the ground is fairly flat?’
‘And the walls’re pretty regular,’ added Roald.
Baru looked about. ‘In our haste we never examined this place closely. It is not natural. The boy is right. The building is a trap.’
Martin said, ‘This cave system has had two thousand years or more to wear away. With that fissure above us, rain comes through here every winter, as well as seepage from the lake above. It has worn away most of what was carved upon the walls.’ He ran his hand over what seemed at first glance to be swirls in the stone. ‘But not all.’ He indicated some design on the walls, rendered abstract by years of erosion.
Baru said, ‘And so we dream ancient dreams of hopelessness.’
Jimmy said, ‘There are some tunnels we haven’t explored yet. Let’s have a look.’
Arutha looked at his companions. ‘Very well. You take the lead, Jimmy. Let’s backtrack to that cave with all the tunnels, then you pick a likely one and we’ll see where it leads.’
In the third tunnel they found the stairway leading down. Following it, they came to a large hallway, ancient from the look of the sediment upon the floor. Regarding it, Baru said, ‘No foot has trod this hall in ages.’
Tapping the surface of the floor with his boot, Martin agreed. ‘This is years of buildup.’
Jimmy led them along, under giant vaulted arches from which hung dust-laden torch holders, long rusted to near-uselessness. At the far end of the hall they discovered a chamber. Roald inspected the giant iron hinges, now grotesquely twisted lumps of rust, barely recognizable, where once huge doors had hung. ‘Whatever wanted to get through the door that was here didn’t seem willing to wait.’
Passing through the portal, Jimmy halted. ‘Look at this.’
They faced what seemed a large hall, with faint echoes of ancient grandeur. Tapestries, now little more than shredded rags with no hint of colour, hung along the walls. Their torches cast flickering shadows upon the walls, giving the impression that ancient memories were awakening after aeons of sleep. What might have once been any number of recognizable things were now scattered piles of debris tossed about the hall. Splinters of wood, a twisted piece of iron, a single gold shard, all hinted at what might have once been, without revealing lost truths. The only intact object in the room was a stone throne atop a raised dais halfway along the right-hand wall. Martin approached and gently touched the centuries-old stone. ‘Once a Valheru sat here. This was his seat of power.’ As if remembering a dream, all in the hall were visited with a sense of how alien this place was. Millennia gone, the power of the Dragon Lord was still a faint presence. There was no mistaking it now: here they stood in the heart of an ancient race’s legacy. This was a source of the moredhel dreams, one of the places of power along the Dark Path.
Roald said, ‘There’s not much left. What caused this? Looters? The Dark Brotherhood?’
Martin looked about, as if seeing ages of history in the dust upon the walls. ‘I don’t think so. From what I know of ancient lore, this may have endured from the time of the Chaos Wars.’ He indicated the utter destruction. ‘They fought on the backs of dragons. They challenged the gods, or so legends say. Little that witnessed that struggle survived. We will probably never know the truth.’
Jimmy had been scampering about the chamber, poking here and there. At last he returned and said, ‘Nothing growing here.’
‘Then where is the Silverthorn?’ Arutha asked bitterly. ‘We have looked everywhere.’
Everyone was silent for a long minute. Finally Jimmy said, ‘Not everywhere. We’ve looked around the lake, and’ – he waved his hand around the hall – ‘under the lake. But we haven’t looked in the lake.’
‘In the lake?’ said Martin.
Jimmy said, ‘Calin and Galain said it grew very close to the edge of the water. So, had anyone thought to ask the elves if there have been heavy rains this year?’
Martin’s eyes widened. ‘The water level’s risen!’
‘Anyone want to go swimming?’ asked Jimmy.
Jimmy pulled his foot back, it’s cold,’ he whispered.
Martin said to Baru. ‘City boy. He’s seven thousand feet up in the mountains and he’s surprised the lake’s cold.’
Martin waded into the water, slowly, so as not to splash. Baru followed. Jimmy took a deep breath and followed, wincing every step as the water reached higher. When he stepped off a ledge, he plunged in up to his waist and opened his mouth in a silent gasp of pain. Upon the shore, Laurie winced in sympathy. Arutha and Roald kept watch for any sign of alarm on the bridge. All three crouched low, behind the gentle slope down to the water. The night was quiet, and most of the moredhel and human renegades slept on the far side of the bridge. They had decided to wait until the hours just before dawn. It was likely the guards would be half-asleep if they were humans, and even moredhel were likely to make the assumption that nothing would occur just before sunrise.
Faint sounds of movement in the water were followed by a gasp as Jimmy ducked his head underwater for the first time and came right up again. Gulping air, he ducked back under. Like the others, he worked blind, feeling along. Suddenly his hand smarted as he stuck himself on something sharp among the moss-covered rocks. He came up with what seemed a noisy gasp, but nothing at the bridge indicated he was heard. Ducking under, he felt the slimy rocks. He located the thorny plant by sticking himself again, but he didn’t jump up. He took two more punctures getting a grip on the plant and pulling, but suddenly it came up. Breaking the surface, he whispered, ‘I’ve got something.’
Grinning, he held up a plant that gleamed almost white in the light of the little moon. It looked like red berries stuck onto the branches of a rose branch with silver thorns. Jimmy turned it in appreciation. With a tiny ‘Ah’ of triumph, he said, ‘I’ve got it.’
Martin and Baru waded over and inspected the plant. ‘Is this enough?’ asked the Hadati.
Arutha said, ‘The elves never told us. Get some more if you can, but we wait only a few more minutes.’ Gingerly he wrapped the plant in a cloth and stowed it in his pack.
In ten minutes they had found three more plants. Arutha was convinced this was enough and signalled it was time to return to the cave. Jimmy, Martin, and Baru, dripping and chilled, hurried to the crevice and entered, with the others keeping watch.
Inside the cave, Arutha looked a man reborn as he inspected the plants under the faint light of a small brand Roald held aloft. Jimmy couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering as he grinned at Martin. Arutha could not take his eyes from the plant. He marvelled at the odd sensations that coursed through his body as he regarded the branches with their silver thorns, red berries, and green leaves. For beyond the branches, in a place only he could see, he knew a soft laugh might be heard again, a soft hand might touch his face, and the embodiment of every happiness he had known might somehow be his again.