Something scurried away from her across the mud floor. Looking up, she saw the underside of the stone slab appear for one instant lit by the red torchlight, and then, with a shocking, eardrum-battering crash, fall back into place; for a few more moments there was a tiny square of dim red light above her, but then someone replaced the metal plate over the peek-hole and she was in featureless, disorienting darkness.
Though as tense as an over-wound clock, she didn’t move, just breathed silently through her open mouth and listened. When she’d dropped in, the close echoes of her fall had convinced her that the sunken room could be no more than fifteen feet across, but after a thousand silent breaths she was certain that it was far wider, in fact not a room at all but a vast subterranean plain. She seemed to hear wind in faraway trees, and every now and then a faint echo of distant singing, some sad chorus wandering far out across the plain … She grew doubtful of her memory of the stone roof above her—surely it was just the eternal black sky, in which any stars seen were— perhaps had always been—just meaningless flashes on the individual retina…
She was just beginning to wonder whether the sound of the surf had always simply been the soft roar of her own breathing projected onto a certain sort of agitation of water—and she knew that there were even more fundamental doubts and losses to be discovered—when an actual noise brought her out of her downward spiralling introspection. The noise, only a tiny grating and a clink, was startlingly loud in that hitherto silent abyss, and it brought the dimensions of her cell back to her original estimate of about fifteen feet across.
It had sounded like the peek-hole cover being removed, but when she looked up she couldn’t see anything, not even a square of lesser darkness. After a moment, though, she could hear breathing, and then sibilant but indistinct whispering.
“Who’s there?” asked Jacky cautiously.
The whispering became quiet, aspirated giggles. “Let us in, darling,” came the whisper clearly. “Let my sister and me in.”
Tears were running down Jacky’s cheeks and she crawled to a wall and braced her back against it. “No,” she sobbed. “Get out of here.”
“We’ve got gifts for you, darling—gold and diamonds that people lost down the sewers since the long ago times. They’re all for you, in exchange for two things you won’t ever need again, like yer dollies after you growed up into a young lady.”
“Your eyes!” came a new, harsher whisper.
“Yes indeed,” hissed the first speaker. “Just your eyes, so that my sister and I can each have one, and we’ll climb up all the stairs there are and take a ship to the Haymarket and dance right under the sun.”
“Soon,” croaked the other.
“Oh yes, soon, darling, for the darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones.”
“Not in it,” put in the harsh voice.
“No, not in it, we mustn’t have my pretty sister and me caught forever in the stones that are hardened night! So open the door.”
Jacky crouched in her corner weeping almost silently, and hoping that when the stone slab had fallen into place it had jammed solidly, and couldn’t ever be opened.
Then there was a faint shuffling from far away, and the two voices chittered in consternation. “One of your brothers comes,” said the first voice. “But we’ll be back… soon.”
“Soon,” assented the other gravelly whisper. There followed a sound like leaves scuttering across pavement, and then Jacky could see, through the uncovered peek-hole, a waxing red glow, and she could hear Dungy nervously whistling the idiotic song Horrabin always made him sing.
After a few moments the torch and Dungy’s ravaged face appeared in the little hole. “How’d you move the cover aside?” the dwarf asked.
“Oh, Dungy,” said Jacky, getting to her feet and standing directly below, for at this point any human company was welcome, “I didn’t. Two creatures who claimed to be sisters moved it, and offered me treasures in exchange for my eyes.”
She saw the dwarf straighten and peer uneasily around; and remembering the extent of the chamber above, she knew how useless such an inspection was. “Yeah,” he said finally, “there are such things down here. Unsuccessful experiments of Horrabin’s—hell, there may even be some of mine still around.” He looked down into the pit again. “Doctor Romany and Horrabin think you’re a member of some group working against them. Is that the case?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Still, it’s enough if Horrabin does.” The dwarf hesitated. “If I… let you out, will you help me kill him?”
“I’d be delighted to, Dungy,” said Jacky sincerely.
“Promise?”
The dwarf could have asked nearly any price and Jacky would have paid it. “I promise, yes.”
“Good. But if we’re going to work together you’ve got to stop calling me Dungy. My name is Teobaldo. You call me ‘Tay.’”
The dwarf’s face disappeared, and Jacky heard a grunt of effort and then the stone slab lifted away from above her. He peered down through the wider hole, and she could see that he held a stout stick with a length of rope knotted around the middle of it and trailing away out of sight. “I hope you can climb a rope,” said Teobaldo.
“Of course,” said Jacky.
The dwarf laid the stick across the hole and pushed the rope into the pit. Excess loops piled up on the muddy ground at Jacky’s feet. She took a deep breath, stepped up to the dangling rope, locked her hands onto it as high as she could reach, and then began yanking herself up, hand over hand. In two seconds she had one hand, and a moment later both hands, locked on the stick.
“Grab the coping,” said Teobaldo, “and then I’ll move the stick and you can pull yourself out.”
Jacky discovered that she could also chin herself and scramble out of a hole with no footholds. When she’d got to her feet she stared somberly at her rescuer, for she remembered now where she’d heard the name Teobaldo. “You used to be in charge here,” she said quietly.
The old dwarf gave her a sharp glance as he hauled up the line and quickly coiled it around his palm and elbow. “That’s right.”
“I… heard you were tall, though.”
The dwarf set down the coiled rope and stood on the edge of the hole opposite from the stone lid. He flexed his arms and then said, reluctantly, “Push that down, will you? I’ll try to catch it and lower it into place quietly. I’m supposed to be bringing you your dinner, and I’d just have pitched it in through the peek-hole, so if they hear the slab fall they’ll all come running.”
Jacky braced herself against the block, wedged her sandalled feet into a channel between two paving stones, and heaved.
The dwarf caught it against his outstretched palms and let it fold him down to a low crouch. He took several deep breaths and then heaved it up a little, got out from under it and caught the descending edge in his hands. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of extreme effort, and Jacky could see sweat popping out on his forehead as he lowered it, his arms trembling; then he let go and leaped back. The slab dropped into place with a sound like a heavy door slamming.
Tay sat on the floor panting. “That’s… good,” he gasped. “They’ll… not have heard that.”
He got painfully to his feet. “I was tall once.” He pulled the torch out and looked across the slab at Jacky. “Can you do magic?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, we’ll trick him. I’ll go back upstairs now and tell him you want to talk—but not to Doctor Romany, who would only kill you. I’ll say you want to buy your freedom by telling Horrabin so much that he’ll be equal to—hell, stronger than—Romany. You’ve got Words of Power, I’ll say. He’s become a fair sorcerer, Horrabin has, in the eight years he’s been Romany’s right-hand man, but he’s always trying to get the old man to give him a Word of Power or two. Romany’s never done it. And we’ll say that your group knows all about Romany’s plans in Turkey; ‘cause that’s
