She shuddered. "I have had to endure his foul imagina-tion for two years. Would that I could have gone mad."
"Why." Ethan swallowed, tried again. "Why did you stay here? Why didn"t you try to escape him?"
Now Teeliam found reason to laugh. "I do that sev-eral times a year, skyoutlander Ethan. Always I am caught, or bought back from those who find me. What Rakossa then does to me drives out all thoughts of escape for daytimes. As will doubtless happen again after this. If I did not resist him, he would tire of me and kill me, for none can have a woman that Rakossa has had. And when I resist, he - imagines things."
"It won"t happen again, woman," said a deep, an-gry voice. September had come up behind Ethan and was staring compa.s.sionately at Teeliam. He had al-ready examined Elfa professionally and chose not to stare at her.
"It does not matter. I would have done this only to anger him no matter what you do for yourselves or me, no matter what had been done to her." She in-dicated Elf a, who had not moved.
"There is another thing. I believe you would wish to have these. I stole them." She swung the small pack from her back, brought out their beamers.
"How long until the new cellmaster comes on duty?" Ethan clipped his own weapon back to his waist, tried to peer through sooty darkness up the cor-ridor and stairs. Teeliam mentioned Tran time units.
"Maybe that"s long enough for us to slip up the stair-ways and fight our way back to the ship."
"Are you offworlders truly the fools RoVijar claims?" Teeliam eyed him disbelievingly. "You can-not go back through the castle. There are soldiers on every level above. You could not reach the courtyard before every warrior on the island had been a.s.sembled. I do not think your magical weapons which RoVijar whispered of to Rakossa would be enough to repulse a thousand or more fighters in close quarters."
"Gal"s got a point." September bent his white-maned head down to her. "What you have in mind as an alternative?"
"I will cut the face of my father into his back and he will curse his manhood," said a voice cold enough to match the atmosphere above ground. Elfa spoke at last.
"Surely you will." Sir Hunnar had been standing in the shadows for an indeterminate length of time, watching Elfa. Now he moved into the light, speaking gently as he took her arm. "But not now, later. We must free ourselves first."
She tried to pull free of his grasp. For a moment the green cloak and wraps she was wearing slid loosely aside. Ethan saw scars and markings he wished he had not.
"I will remove his fur one hair at a time," she con-tinued, in a tone that chilled Ethan"s heart. She made no move to cover herself.
"Yes, but later, later. I promise." Hunnar fixed her cloak. How he kept his voice low and easy was some-thing Ethan was never able to figure out. Now he slid an arm around her shoulders.
With an effort, Teeliam replied to September"s question. "Faint hope lies this way." She started down the corridor, toward the cells farthest from the stair-way. Ethan and September followed. With Hunnar"s support, a glaze-eyed Elfa stumbled uncertainly in their wake.
At the far end of the dungeon they found another doorway. It was low for a Tran, blocked up with masonry and cordoned off with braided pikapina cable.
"It is told that in ancient times the worst offenders of the laws were put through there. A tunnel lies be-yond. Where it leads to is not spoken of. But it is a place far from here."
"Good enough for me," said September, approving the plan. "Why is it sealed up?"
"Four Landgraves ago, the histories say, it was de-cided the punishment was too severe for even the murderers of children."
"Wonderful," Ethan murmured, eying the doorway as if some inconceivable horror might at any moment burst through the stones to devour them.
"Where does it go?" A prosaic query from the _Slanderscree"s_ reluctant, but ever-curious Captain Tahoding.
Teeliam turning, told him. "It goes down to h.e.l.l."
"Fine." September smiled. "Then I don"t expect we"ll be followed. At that moment he looked a bit like a daemon of the underworld himself. "Stand away."
After adjusting his beamer, he turned it on the sealed portal. The blue energy beam dissolved stone, cement, and pikapina cable alike. There were mut-ters of awe from the _Slanderscree"s_ sailors. They had seen the light knives of the outlanders in action before, but they hadn"t known they could burn through the unbreakable, fire-resistant pikapina.
Once he"d cut several horizontal lines in the barrier, September turned off the beam to conserve its charge and kicked out the remaining stones. They fell through with surprisingly little effort, though, as the old knight Balavere Longax commented, there was no reason for a really solid barricade, since no Tran would want to go through that doorway of his own free will.
Ethan took one of the torches from its wall holder, stuck it through the opening. "It looks higher inside.
There"s a tunnel, all right. It slopes downward."
An uncertain susurration sounded from the tightly packed crewmembers. Hunnar faced them. "To stay here is to die. All who wish certain death may remain. Those who desire a chance for life, and revenge, may follow. Our human friends say there is no danger. They have not lied to us before. I do not believe they do so now."
Turning, he took a second torch and ducked be-neath the low lintel.
"I never said there was no danger," Ethan told him.
"Nor did friend September or Williams," Hunnar replied, moving his head so as to see further down the tunnel. "I am not worried about danger ahead. Our sailors and knights will fight when they have to, but it is more dangerous to let them stew in their own imaginings."
The two started downward. They were quickly followed by September and Williams, Tahoding, Balavere, and Hunnar"s two squires. When Teeliam and Elfa went in turn, the murmuring among the crew changed from fearful to embarra.s.sed. In twos and threes, they grabbed torches, muttered of lost hopes, and followed after.
The tunnel was just high enough to permit an adult Tran to walk upright. Though an icepath led steadily downhill, the crew did not take advantage of it to move rapidly. They picked rather than chivaned their way downward and were quite content to follow the cautious pace of the chivless humans.
Huge stone blocks formed walls and ceiling.
Without references, time rippled-it became blurry and indistinct. "How deep do you think we"ve come?" Ethan asked Williams later.
"Hard to say, Ethan." The schoolteacher missed a step, caught himself, and stared meaningfully at the ceiling. "Sixty, maybe seventy meters below the castle. Maybe more. And we"ve come a fair linear distance as well."
Continuing to descend sharply, the tunnel showed no sign of ending. They stumbled on and on. No mysterious spirits of the underworld materialized to torment them. A breeze blew steadily at their backs, pungent with the odor of the now distant dungeon.
Unexpectedly, the character of the tunnel changed. The roof overhead and the walls flanking them gave way from hewn stone to a material the color of creamy ceramic. Ethan touched the wall nearest, sc.r.a.ped at it with a gloved finger. It came away in reluctant splinters: ice.
He could see the stones behind the layer of ice. Once again the sailors began conversing worriedly among themselves. They were a brave group, but they were walking into the nightmares of their cubhood, and it shook the most stalwart among them.
"Nothing to be gained by going back," said Sep-tember quietly. He pulled his beamer and they con-tinued downward.
Several times the marchers paused to rest. Hunnar and Balavere were convinced it was safe to do so.
Even if their escape had been discovered, the Poyos were unlikely to organize pursuit, convinced that the denizens of the underworld would rid them of their former prisoners. That belief was shared by the ma-jority of the _Slanderscree"s_ crew.
Before long they began moving again. "No telling how deep we are now," Williams muttered to himself. "Pressure appears unchanged."
September halted abruptly, his head c.o.c.ked to one side. He had his face mask open and appeared to be listening intently. The line backed up behind him.
"Hear something, feller-me-lad?" Ethan strained to pick out an unknown sound from the background noise of several hundred respirating humans and Tran.
The sound he settled on was difficult to distinguish because it sounded something like breathing itself.
A faint, distant groaning and gurgling. "We can"t go back now." He took over the lead, extending his torch ahead of him. The noise grew louder. Despite know-ing better, he had to admit it sounded very much like a sleeping daemon softly snoring.
They reached a bend in the tunnel, turned it. The pathway leveled out. Ethan stopped. Anxious queries came from behind him. Turning his beamer on, he set it for the widest possible, most diffuse beam. It lit up an incredible sight.
At some unguessable time past, tremendous heat had melted out the vast cavern they gazed upon.
Col-umns of ice did not so much support as decorate the ceiling, which was festooned with dead icicles.
The roof itself was only five or six meters above their heads, but it stretched off into distances unreached by the blue glow of the beamer.
No snuffling efreet or djinn lay waiting to greet their eyes. The sound came from black water-unfrozen, liquid, freeflowing water that stretched off to merge into a black horizon with the far reaches of the ceiling. It lapped gently, echoing through the cavern, against an icy beach a few meters away. Ethan identi-fied the subtle odor that he"d been smelling for the last several minutes: salt.
Williams" gaze was focused on the ceiling forma-tions. "We"ve come down through the ice sheet and emerged outside the island proper. There must be one or two hundred meters of solid ice above us."
Terrified, childish mewings were coming from some of the crew members. A few dropped to their knees and began imploring whichever G.o.ds they believed in to take pity on them. Ethan saw resignation and the antic.i.p.ation of death in several furry faces.
Even the knowledgeable, unsuperst.i.tious EerMeesach was shivering with fear. It is one thing to dis-miss stories and legends of fanciful places as inventions utilized by adults to frighten and compel children. It is quite another to confront them as reality.
Balavere Longax, Sofold"s greatest general, announced easily, "We shall all die."
"Not unless we have to swim." September"s habit of confronting danger with humor hadn"t left him.
The greater the threat, the more irreverent his comments. He left the tunnel and strolled carefully across the ice to the water"s edge. "Maybe it"s h.e.l.l to you, but I find the quiet and openness kind of attractive."
To his surprise, Ethan had discovered he was also trembling. The giant"s words brought him back to nor-mal. This was a Tran conception of h.e.l.l, not his. It was only a cold, dark place.
Holding his torch firmly he moved to join Septem-ber. A glance over the frozen berm showed nothing but fluid blackness. It was as if he were staring up-ward at the night sky instead of down into the bowels of some primeval ocean. And like the night sky, this subterranean sea blazed with stars and nebulae of its own.
Thousands of tiny luminous creatures darted and jerked their way through the inky water. Green, hot pink, bright yellow, crimson, and cherry red-every imaginable color indentified some small blazing bit of existence. Compared to this well of magnificence, where every creature no matter how small was cloaked in gems, the atmospheric world above seemed drab and dull.
Ethan grew aware of another figure come up along-side him, but did not shift his gaze from that shim-mering palette of life. "How can they live down here, Milliken, beneath the ice?"
"Perhaps there is vegetation which releases oxygen slowly, or volcanic production of gases." The teacher shrugged. "Evidently there is enough to sustain a mult.i.tude of forms."
"It is very beautiful." Ethan spun. Elfa was stand-ing behind them, peering almost shyly into the gla.s.sy blackness. She smiled hesitantly at Ethan. He couldn"t help but smile back. She was not fully recovered, but she was no longer in shock.
His gaze traveled to the glistening icicles, false sta-lact.i.tes, to the columns that exploded torchlight into a thousand tiny replicas of its source, none of which could match for diversity and beauty the swimming bead-shapes of the water dwellers. How lovely is Hades, he mused, when it is other than one"s own.
Why, it was neither hot nor fearsome here, and there was no wind at all.
A whirlpool of luminescent life eddied ecstatically in the pale blue light of his beamer. He turned it downward, piercing the water to a depth of several meters. It was as if the beamer were a vacuum, suck-ing up ever more delirious dancers from the depths below.
The water erupted, sent them stumbling or falling backward.
Ethan saw a mouth. Rubies and emeralds, tormalines and topazes, ozmidines, ferrosilicate crystals mirror-bright decorated the cavern within a cavern. Stalac-t.i.tes and stalagmites of vitreous, transparent teeth lined the jaws. Around it was a face wide and fat like a toad"s, with a single searchlight of a mad vermilion eye above the bejeweled mouth. Black, slick flesh rip-pled in folds around eye and mouth, a pulpy envelope to hold organs loosely in place.
Whatever it was, it had been drawn from familiar depths by Ethan"s bright beam. Brave as they were some of the sailors fainted in place. Others forgot dis-cipline and command in their rush to squeeze them-selves back up the tunnel.
September and Williams already were firing at the apparition with beams tighter and more deadly than Ethan"s, while he strove frantically to readjust the set-ting on his own. Each time a blue beam touched the creature"s flesh the hallucination-made-real produced a gargantuan grunt. The humans fired as they re-treated back toward the tunnel.
Mouth and eye rose roof high above the water and hunched after them. Several more bolts struck it.
The tumorous shape came down on the ice beach with a crash that echoed energetically "round the cavern, generating a low splintering sound. It lay still and unmoving, quartz teeth shining in the torchlight, the single round eye with its absurdly small black pupil staring blindly at them.
Screaming still sounded from up the tunnel, how-ever, Hunnar had his sword out and was trying to force his way through the panicked mob.
"Cowards of Sofold! The daemon is dead, slain by the light knives of our friends who are half your size!" The mad rush upward slowed, ceased. Screams be-came anxious or uneasy murmurs. "When you are finished whimpering, you may rejoin us." He sheathed his sword and deliberately chivaned downward at top speed, showing blatant disregard for what might await him within the cavern.
Gradually the sailors drifted after. They spread out below the tunnel mouth to gaze in delicious horror at the h.e.l.lbeast resting on the ice. It was no less fearsome and not the least bit comical for having a body that was one-third head.
Displaying utter indifference to post-dying reflexes, September strode up to the creature which EerMeesach had already dubbed _Kalankatht_ (which translates from the Tran roughly as "beastwhichisallteethandnotail") and stuck his head into the gaping mouth. Frozen open, the upper jaw was still a meter above his hooded head.
Though two meters long on average, the transparent teeth were no thicker around than a man"s finger.
There were hundreds in the chamber-sized maw. Short, delicate-looking fins projected from back and sides, while the blunt tail was flattened vertically for swimming and steering. It could not be very fast in pursuit of its prey, but it could bite at a lot of ocean. Williams was examing the corpse with fine scien-tific detachment, though as a strong believer in the lingering independence of certain muscular functions he chose not to stray so near the jaws as had Septem-ber. "Eye, mouth, and stomach. No waste s.p.a.ce or organs." He moved behind the nightmare, out of sight. Ethan and Hunnar had joined September before the gaping mouth. "What more natural than that there be devils in h.e.l.l?"
Hesitantly, the knight reached out to touch the wet black skin. "Then you believe it a daemon of the underworld also?"
"Skua likes to fancify," said Ethan. "There are similar, natural creatures living in the deeps of my own world"s seas. Some are bigger than this one, though none quite as outlandish." As life-fluids ceased flowing within the body, the phosph.o.r.escences around mouth and sides were beginning to fade, lights and life going out together.
"This water is only part of your liquid ocean, the same kind of water that forms the ice above us, the ice that rafts chivan across, and that surrounds Sofold." Ethan touched his torch to the floor, tasted of the water it produced. "Ice to liquid, just as you drink it aboard ship or back in Wannome."
"Then the philosophers are right," the knight said. "The inside of the world is fluid."
Ethan smiled. "Oddly enough, that"s right, but the liquid is metal and not water. Williams can explain it better than I can." He turned, called out. "Milliken?"
"This ends our exploring the sea." September clipped his beamer back to his waist. "Next cousin of this mobile mouth we lure up is liable to be bigger still. What"re you yellin" at, young feller-me-lad?"
"We can"t find Milliken. I thought he"d be studying this body, but-."
"Over here!" They looked to their right. The teacher was standing at the far edge of the cavern, where the ice gave way to sloping rock. As they moved toward him, he ducked back out of sight.
"Another cavern?" Ethan wondered aloud. Other Tran moved to follow them.
When they turned the bend he"d vanished behind, Milliken was still further ahead. The ice remained several meters from the gravel and stone.
"What is this?" September looked at the nearby ice wall curiously. "Another tunnel?"
"No." Puffing, the schoolteacher had run back to rejoin them. "It seems to continue endlessly in a gen-eral northwesterly direction. In places the ice draws nearer to the island, in others it moves farther out. It may run around the entire circ.u.mference of the is-land." He gestured back toward the now hidden cavern.
"At this depth, in this particular region anyway, volcanic heat from the island"s interior has spread out-ward instead of upward. We are probably at a level parallel to some horizontal flow of magma."
"Then if we follow the curve of the island," Sep-tember pointed out, "we could come out under the harbor where the ship is moored."
"Of what good is that?" asked Hunnar.
Ethan checked his beamer. "Our weapons are still three-quarters charged, Hunnar. We can cut our own tunnel upward. We couldn"t manage it through solid rock, but we"ve plenty of energy to melt ice."
He faced Williams. "Think you can judge when we"ve come near the _Slanderscree_, Milliken?"
"Dear me. I don"t know. The angle of our descent from the castle? I really don"t know."
"Do the best you can. No matter where we come up, we"ll have a chance."
When communicated to the rest of the crew, strung out back into the cavern, this information raised spirits considerably. Tran who had long since conceded soul and spirit to the Dark One found hope in the prospect of again confronting flesh and blood enemies.