Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

“Second pass!” he shouted, his words sounding small and distant. He pointed back the way they had come, and Jai’s blood ran cold. He gripped the stone now.

Something huge lumbered through the tunnel from the direction he and Stanach had just come, something nearly six feet thick through the middle, and so long Jai couldn’t see the end of it. It came hungry, eating all the stone and rubble in its path, chewing boulders with the same placidity as a cow chewing grass in her green pasture.

“Worm!” Stanach shouted.

His heart pounding, Jai thought the last thing you could name that creature was worm. And yet it did look like an out-sized worm, its hide glistening with slime in the light of lanterns, advancing as worms do, slithering in a gigantic sort of way. It had horns, and atop its back a basket sat, maybe where the neck was if, indeed, it had a neck. In that basket a dwarf stood, thick leather reins in his hands.

“Attached to the horns!” Stanach roared as the worm came nearer and the sound of the earth rumbling beneath it grew even louder. “See!”

Jai saw, and he understood that this was how the handler in the basket directed the creature, even as other dwarves jogged along beside it, poking it with long sticks when it paused in its journey or lumbered off and threatened to eat its way through the wall. Stanach warned Jai to keep still, not for fear that the worm would harm him. The thing had no eyes and no interest in anything but eating its way to some dwarf-directed destination, but it would be easy to slip in the slime of the worm’s passing and fall beneath the beast.

“Then,” he said, “we’d be sending to Thorbardin for sponges to sop up your remains.”

The worm passed to the shouting of a parade of dwarves, hooting and poking to keep the worm in a more or less straight line. None of them looked to the side or even seemed to be aware they passed one of their fellows and an elf. It was worth the life of each of them to keep their eyes on the worm and keep the worm itself moving. It was a slow passing, like a mountain strolling by. Stanach stood a moment looking after it.

Jai pushed away from the wall, getting a better grip on the stone in his hand. Somewhere along the way he’d find the Mianost entrance. It wouldn’t be an easy thing alone in the tunnel, trying to find his own way. Adrenaline shot through him in the instant he made his decision. In a brilliant moment of clarity he saw just where he would bring the stone down on Stanach’s skull-there, in the center.

He cocked his arm and the dwarf turned, his own arm coming up with arrow swiftness. Stanach grasped his wrist so hard that Jai’s fingers went numb.

“Now why,” the dwarf said, his words edged with ice, “why would you want to do that, elf?”

Stanach’s grip tightened. Pain shot through Jai’s wrist to his elbow, to his shoulder.

“Drop the stone,” the dwarf whispered, “or I’ll break your wrist.”

The stone fell, but not by an act of will. Jai’s fingers had no feeling in them to hold. Stanach eased his grip, a little, but didn’t release Jai’s wrist. “Answer me. Why?”

In the pulsing light and the shifting shadows, Jai took a long breath against the pain in his arm. “I’m not going to Thorbardin. I’m going back to Qualinost.”

Stanach laughed, a hard, harsh bark. “You are, are you?” He looked pointedly at Jai’s knee. “And how do you reckon you’re going to get there?”

Jai hated him in that moment. His blood burned with hate. “I’ll get there walking.”

“By Winter Night, maybe.” The dwarfs eyes darkened. “You’re a fool to go back up there now. Your people are running these tunnels as fast as we can build them, as fast as we can bring them in. Soon there’ll be nothing for you to go back to. Nothing.”

“You’re wrong! Up there is all there ever was of us. Every tale of who we are, every song, every story, all the history of us. It’s up there, and-”Jai stopped, shivering. “And if all that were lost, Stanach, here is one more tale that needs telling. The tale of the end. Someone needs to know how it ends, so they will know how to begin again.”

Stanach let go his wrist. Jai looked at the flesh there, already bruising, then he looked away.

“Please, let me go. What’s it to you, Stanach? Nothing, so just… let me go.”

As swiftly as he’d turned before, that swiftly did Stanach turn again. His eyes took Jai’s and held them. “I feflte being here. I hate being out of Thorbardin. I was too long away in older days.” He glanced at his ruined right hand, then away. “I came home broken and saw the city and the kinship broken after that. I hate being out of Thorbardin.”

“Why? If you leave the city, will it fall apart without you?”

“No. No, if I leave the city, I fall apart without it.”

He looked away. Jai saw nothing of his face, his blue-flecked dark eyes. He saw no sign of what the dwarf was thinking or feeling, only one small twitch of his thick shoulders.

“All right,” Stanach said, his eyes still on some point south, some point in the direction of Thorbardin. “All right. It’s all falling apart, elf, but if you want to stand in the ruin, off you go.”

You, he said. He bent and picked up something from the shadows: a broken stick one of the worm-handlers had discarded. With one swift stomp of his booted foot, he sheared off the splintered end. The stick he handed to Jai, with two words of advice. “Use it.”

Then he walked away, back south toward Thorbardin. Jai smiled, following. Before Thorbardin, or even the crossway, they would come to the way out of the tunnel, the way through and up to Mianost. It was all right. He could manage the walk. He’d come this far.

He was bleeding by the time he got there-cuts from falls, scraped hands, torn knees, his cheek ripped raw by a rock. He was bruised, and the muscles and bones of his knee screamed. He fell again, he didn’t think he could get up again, but Stanach said, not gently, “Come on, elf. You said you could do it. So do it.”

“Shut up,” Jai snarled, and he wasn’t sure it was only sweat running down his cheeks. “Shut up and give me your hand.”

Stanach did, gripping hard, laying bruises on top of bruises as he hauled Jai to his feet. Wordless, he put the stick back into Jai’s hand, and he pointed to the stone wall, the rocky ribcage of the tunnel. “There,” he said, but Jai saw nothing other than worm-chewed stone and moisture running down in rivulets made golden by the lantern light.

Stanach touched the wall, just a gentle nudge, and the stone swung inward-a slab as long as an elf is tall, and as wide. It moved silently, smoothly, and there was no magic attached to it, just good dwarven engineering. When Stanach held the lantern close to the entrance, he illuminated rough stone stairs winding upward. He did not, however, illuminate anything that might remotely resemble guards or any kind of watch. “Not at this end,” Stanach said. “The guards are above, and they’re your folk. We delve; they ward.”

They stood quiet a moment and then Stanach said, “That’s your last climb up. Just hang around looking suspicious and some elf or another will find you and fetch you home.”

Jai drew breath to speak, then held it. Thin light slipped suddenly down the stairs, pale and silvery. A whiff of rain drifted in on a vagrant breeze. A woman’s voice wafted softly down from above, speaking in Elvish. The voice sounded familiar, distant whisper though it was. When it came closer, Jai knew it. Annalisse!

Another party of refugees was coming through, but why was Annalisse with them? His heart sank. Had she fallen foul of the Dark Knights? Had the Marshal learned of her connection to the resistance?

Annalisse’s footfalls came closer. Another followed her, this one’s tread heavier. A dwarf, Jai thought, and then he heard the chime of ring mail, the clank of armor.