Barbara Hambly - Dragonstar

The man’s voice cursed again. “I’m not going after it, I can tell you.…”

“Folcalor will go, and you’ll go with him or I’ll know why. With these here and the ones he’ll bring, that should give him the power to see through whatever blinds she can weave.”

These what? Jenny’s mind groped, and she wondered if she’d missed something in the shifting echoes, and the voices faded as the speakers moved away.

“… two days …” and “… Kings … damned glad to get the gnome-witch at last …”

Folcalor.

Jenny sat up, straining to follow the voices, but only the whisper of air moving in the vent shafts met her ears, and the cluck of subterranean streams.

Two days.

She felt absolutely cold.

Another two hundred slaves … seven hundred HERE. Here in the mines? Obviously in concealment with the collusion of one or several of the Lords of the Deep, but … seven hundred?

Those will give us power …

Those what?

Shakily, Jenny pulled on her skirt and her boots. To get to her feet she had to lean on the curve of the wall. The hip she’d twisted when she fell in the pit-trap twinged hard, making her stagger, but that, too, was already responding to the spells of healing Mab and Morkeleb had laid. Mab had brought a staff so that Jenny could limp as far as the latrine-bucket. Its tip was muffled in leather. Jenny groped it from beside her nest of blankets and hothwais, and stood.

Those will give us power.

Seven hundred slaves.

She listened in the darkness again but heard nothing. Not breath, not the murmur of voices, not weeping, not curses, not cries. Wherever the seven hundred slaves were, it was nowhere near where the two demons had been. So what were “those”?

From beneath the blankets she dug the little chip of hothwais Mab had left for light, and wrapped the cold-glowing stone in the folds of her overskirt, two and three thicknesses deep. So piercing was its light that by unwrapping a fold or two she could keep a muffled glow, like the faintest starlight, just enough and only enough to see.

I was once able to see in darkness , she thought. I should be keener-eyed now in dim light, even if not nightsighted as once I was. She focused her mind on calling that power to herself, calling it out of herself, and wrapped another fold of skirt around the stone. Then she slipped out of the chamber past the layers of straw mat, listening along the corridors for the direction in which she’d heard the voices.

It wasn’t far. In the long hours of silence and listening, she’d heard voices coming from that direction before. This was a section of the mines that had been worked out, short tunnels cut like the legs of a centipede off the long main lode. Jenny worked her way carefully from tunnel to tunnel in the darkness, listening and scenting. Even the most silent of slaves must sweat and breathe and piss. The smells of the mine were thin and cold around her, wet rock and clay and the old wood of the props. The sulfurous drift of blasting powder. Now and then the breath of the vent-shafts brushed her face, or riffled the silky black-silver stubble of her hair. She neither heard nor smelled demons, but wrapped another fold of her skirt over the hothwais nonetheless, fearing even the farthest glimmer of light that might alert them—or the mine-guards—to her presence.

How could they POSSIBLY have seven hundred slaves here? Bring them here, feed them, keep them silent …?

She smelled straw. Wet straw and clay.

And the next instant sensed the presence of others around her, other souls, other thoughts. It was as if she’d walked suddenly into an immense crowd, silently watching. But the thin stream of air along the walls had not altered. The echo of walls close on either side of her was unchanged.

No sound of breathing. No scent of sweat. Only the echo of weeping in her mind, the broken clamor of terror and grief and pain.

Utterly silent in the dark.

No smell of demons, either, nor the whisper of claws on rocks. Nothing of the faint shivering chime that their glass shells made when they scraped against stone. Cold air eddied out of the denser darkness of a tunnel mouth, and Jenny made note of her directions, counting right and left by notching the side of the staff with her knife. She slipped around the corner and advanced into the almost absolute dark.

People. The tunnel was filled with people. She knew it. Impossible, she could touch the walls with her hands! Yet she sensed people all around her, felt their presence. But not a whisper did she hear, not a sound. And no smell save that of damp baskets, of clay pots.

Fearing yet to risk more light, she strained her eyes, shifting the focus of them as once she’d learned to as a mage. The tunnel took another turning, and opened into a little chamber of the kind to which Mab and Morkeleb had carried her, a sort of catacomb whose ceiling made her stoop. The movement of the air there spoke of a small space, not a large one.

A few pots and baskets stood against the wall.

And that was all.

Kneeling, Jenny went to the nearest basket and removed its lid.

It was full of jewels.

Jenny blinked. A dream-vision came back to her … when? At the Hold? In the night-camp in the Snakewater Marshes, when she and Morkeleb were on their way here? It had been a dream of Folcalor, whom she’d recognized through Amayon’s memories of the demon rebel: Folcalor dipping his hand into a dish of jewels. A gnome’s hand, she recalled, powerful, the short fingers adorned with huge rings, slabs of opal and turquoise. She saw again how those stubby knotted fingers had stirred and rubbed the jewels, savoring them. This vision had made no sense to her when she’d had it: Folcalor had imprisoned the minds and souls of the mages he’d enslaved in jewels, Jenny’s mind and soul among them, but in her vision there were far, far too many jewels for that.

There hadn’t been that many mages born in all of time.

Hundreds …

She crawled a little farther and opened the next basket. It, too, was full of gems. Rough-cut crystals, glittering coldly in the darkness.

They mine gold in Ylferdun , she thought. Not gems. She scooped up two or three for a closer look.

And nearly dropped them in shock.

Dear gods!

The souls were in the jewels.

Not mages’ souls. She would have felt the magic there, the minds still clear and thinking and aware. But souls nonetheless. Weeping, some of them, as she had wept in her prison. Calling out to their husbands, or wives, or children, or parents, or friends, as she had called John’s name in despair.

She felt their deaths, too—deaths in agony and horror. She recalled enough of her demon sensibilities to recognize that.

Seven hundred , she thought, first blank, then burning with an all-consuming rage. SEVEN HUNDRED …

She sat down between the two baskets in the dark, feeling as if she could not breathe.

“Any who wish to rid themselves of old folks, or cripples, or the simpleminded,” the innkeeper at Eldsbouch had said to her not so long ago, “can earn good silver by giving them over to the brother Kings.…” And as the northern winds had whipped and screamed at the walls of that old stone inn, Jenny and her son Ian had looked at each other in bafflement, wondering why the twin Kings of the Deep of Tralchet would purchase slaves so patently useless. “I think you should let Lord John know of this,” the innkeeper had added.

Dear gods, if only I could!

Jenny’s small hands shook as she pressed the jewels between them, held them close to her lips. Your cries are heard. Your cries are heard. Be at peace. She tried to will comfort to them, but she understood that they were dead, and they could not hear. Tortured by demons, murdered by demons, the moment of death prolonged and suspended in the jewels …