Anthology - The Search For Magic

“They haven’t made the second pass yet. It’s going to be hard going. Hold on to me if you want, elf.”

Jai didn’t, and didn’t even thank him for the offer. He concentrated on the way ahead, lurching along unassisted. He was looking for something, an opportunity.

They went that way for a time. Jai looked at the walls when they stopped to rest. Stanach called them the ribs of the runnel, and he said the ceiling was the spine, the floor the belly. Like we’ve been swallowed by some horrible beast, Jai thought. At these ribs, spine, and belly he looked, trying to find some sign of the Mianost entrance. He saw nothing but stone. All the while the earth vibrated beneath them, the rumbling growing stronger the farther they went. The vibrations rattled Jai’s knee, sending fiery lightning lances shooting through the joint.

“That can’t be worms,” he said, his words coming through gritted teeth as he leaned up against a damp wall, again forced to rest.

“If you say so.”

Lanterns hung at intervals on the walls, settled snugly in iron brackets. By their glowing light Jai saw the tunnel here was strewn with debris, boulders half as high as Jai stood, many looking like they’d been flung to the ground by some giant hand and shattered.

To balance, he put his hand on one of the piles. His fingers closed round a stone the size of his fist. His belly clenched suddenly. That might be one way to get rid of the dwarf.

“Larvae?” Jai said, speaking of the lanterns, getting a good grip on the stone.

“Lots. We’re almost there.” Stanach untied the leather water bottle from his belt and held it out. Jai let go the stone and took what he offered. “It’s not water. Go easy.”

Jai would have known what the bottle held the moment he unstopped the mouth. The pungent odor of dwarf spirits stung his nose. He took a sip, the liquor burning past his lips and down his throat, finally sitting like fire in his belly. Standing there, the spirits afire inside him, he imagined he felt pain ease. He took a step, his knee wobbled beneath him, but for the moment it didn’t hurt.

“Just the lying spirits,” Stanach said. In the light and the shadow, he looked like he knew those lies and maybe had believed them for a while. He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and returned the leather bottle to his belt. “Rest. It isn’t far to the work camp now-just beyond the bend. There’ll probably be a healer there to slap some poultice or something on your knee. It won’t help the pain, but if anything’s inflamed, it might help that.”

Again, Jai felt the stone beneath his hand. Again, he closed his fingers around the roughness of it. “You don’t sound like you have a lot of faith in healers.”

Stanach grunted. “Magic was better, but gods come and gods go, and this latest going of theirs isn’t the first. I had the bad luck to get my fingers broken the time before, during the War of the Lance, while the crowd of them was shuffling around on the doorstep, trying to decide whether to stop by again. Friends tried to help…” Again, he shrugged. “Healer-craft is good for cuts and boils and colds, but you probably notice it doesn’t do much for the big things.”

The ground beneath their feet shook again. Stanach braced with his feet planted wide. Jai caught his balance against the wall. From behind came voices, several shouting in Dwarvish. A great rumbling filled the tunnel, sounding like thunder. With gestures and words Jai couldn’t hear, Stanach made him understand that he should get right up against the wall.

“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.