May a h’san’kor eat his tongue! What is this jester pestering me about now? All I need is to lie down for half an hour, and I’ll be as good as new. Let him go and pester Eel instead. Yes, I wonder how he’s getting on.
I had to make a real effort to look away from Kli-Kli, who was trying to tell me something, and turn my head toward the spot where I thought the warrior must be.
Aha! Eel was there beside me, only an arm’s length away. His face was covered with blood and he was leaning on the sword he had captured, trying to get up from his knees. I admired the Wild Heart more than ever. Our Eel was a stubborn lad, all right.
“Run, Kli-Kli! Warn them!” the warrior hissed.
Run? Who from? And warn who? When he heard the warrior’s order, Kli-Kli’s face clouded over in fright.
“I’m not going to leave you!”
“Go on, jester,” I said. My voice certainly didn’t sound any better than Eel’s. “Warn everyone who needs to know and we’ll have a glass of carrot juice together.…”
My throat was so dry, I could have drunk the entire Cold Sea dry, even though it is so salty.
“Try to stay alive, Dancer!” Kli-Kli gave me one last glance and disappeared from my field of view.
“Where has he gone to? Ah, yes, of course. He’s gone running off somewhere to warn someone. He moved so fast, he must really want that juice. Well, good luck to him. And all the best…”
The Garrakian wasn’t allowed to get to his feet. Some men surrounded him, knocked the sword out of his hands, and hit him on the back of his head. Eel fell down onto the ground and stopped moving. I tried to get up, but my arms and legs wouldn’t obey me and I closed my eyes to let these bad men know I was too well brought up to talk with people like them.
A thousand devils of darkness! We smashed into a house that was standing in the wrong place! Why couldn’t it have gotten out of the way? Darkness! That wasn’t what I should be thinking about.
“Is this one alive?” asked someone standing over me.
“Aha! But he’s out cold,” someone else said, and gave me a kick under the ribs.
I knew they were bad men.
“You halfwit. You let the shortass get away.”
“Well, how much trouble can a goblin cause?”
“He can cause us a whole wagonload.”
“Shall I send the lads after him?”
“Ha! Now you think about it. There’s no way you can catch him, we’ll never find him in the alleys now. No more talk. Load these two before the guards turn up and a crowd gathers.”
They tossed me onto a hard surface. Someone swore, a door slammed, the floor jerked and creaked. It seemed like I was in a carriage. But why had they dumped me into it like that? The lads could at least have invited me to take a drive with them. I’m so polite and obliging, surely they didn’t think I would refuse to get into the carriage?
I heard someone groan close to my ear. Eel?
I had to open my eyes to satisfy my curiosity. I discovered that I was lying on the floor of a carriage beside the unconscious Eel. The other people in the carriage were the lads with crossbows who five minutes earlier had been trying to shoot down Harold and his companions.
The orcs have a wonderful saying: “Curiosity led the goblin into the maze.” One of the bad lads noticed that I had opened my eyes and exclaimed, “Hey, this one’s come round.”
I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t done anything of the sort, and I had a name, but somehow my tongue wouldn’t obey me.
“Then knock him out again,” someone advised the crossbowman indifferently.
The last thing I saw before I plunged into nothingness was the bludgeon descending on my head.
5
Conversations In The Dark
I walked along a wide, dark corridor with walls of rough-hewn stone, covered with either moss or lichen. There was practically no light at all and I had to keep my hand on the wall in order not to miss a sudden turn.
The ceiling danced up and down like an earthworm trying to fly. Three times I hit the top of my head against it, but then after I took a few more steps I could stretch my hand up as far as I could reach without feeling any obstacle—there was nothing but empty darkness and a slight draft.
A thousand questions came swarming into my mind. How had I gotten here? Where was I walking to? Why? What was I looking for in the darkness of this underground cellar? And was it really a cellar?
That didn’t seem very likely, especially bearing in mind that every twenty-five paces my hand ran into a metal door with a small barred window in it. Twenty paces of crude stone and moss under my fingers, then they felt cold metal, dewed with the underground dampness. And then another twenty paces of stone. It all gave me the impression that I was on the lowest level of some immense prison.
The corridor seemed endless. Sometimes I heard groans and muttering from behind the doors, but mostly all there was behind them was a deafening silence. Who were the inmates of those underground cells? Prisoners, madmen, or the souls of people barred for all eternity from taking the path into the light or the darkness? I had no answer to these questions, and no real desire to find out who was actually in those cells.
As I walked past yet another door, I heard insane, cackling laughter from behind it. It took me by surprise, and I sprang away, recoiling to the opposite wall, and starting to walk faster in order to leave the insane prisoner behind as quickly as possible. But the sound of that laughter came after me along the walls and the ceiling, beating me on the back and forcing me to hurry on my way.
After three eternities, when I had completely lost count of my steps, I thought I caught a faint scent of the sea.
Yes, that was what the Port City in Avendoom smelled like, when the wind was blowing from the direction of the docks. It was the smell of salt and seaweed, of drops of seawater thrown into the air by waves crashing against the pier, the smell of the seagulls who meet the fishing boats in the evening. The smell of a cool freshness, the smell of fish, the smell of the sea breeze and freedom.
The inky blackness receded slowly, dreadfully slowly, revealing the ghostly outlines of the corridor. There was a timid beam of daylight shining down from somewhere up above.
I stopped and raised my head to look at the small spot of blue sky that I could see through a little window in the ceiling far beyond my reach. A ray of sunlight fell on my face and I involuntarily narrowed my eyes. I could hear a loud, regular sighing, as if a weary giant were resting somewhere nearby after a long day of hard work. The sea was somewhere close, and the sound of breaking waves was very clear.
The sea? But how was that possible? How could there be any sea here? Where was I then? And most important of all,
I certainly wasn’t going to find any answers loitering, so I said good-bye to the light, dove back into the unwelcoming gloom, and walked on along the corridor. It took a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and once I almost lost my footing and took a tumble. I stopped and stretched out my right foot, feeling at the floor.
Just as I thought.
Steps.
Unfortunately, they led downward, into a blackness that was even darker and more impenetrable (if that was actually possible). I stood there, wondering what I should do next.
Going down into the lower vaults of the prison was not a very attractive option. Sagot only knew what I might run into down there. And I could wander around in the dark for a very, very long time. There were only two things I could do: go back to the very beginning of my journey, or walk down the steps and look for a stairway leading up.
The first choice was actually more rational than the second, but I simply couldn’t face the long and tiring journey back. Which meant I could only go on. I gathered myself and started walking down slowly. I didn’t have an oil lamp, or a torch, let alone a magical light, and I had to grope my way along. On the way down, I kept one hand on the wall and counted the steps. There were sixty-four of them, steep and well worn. They led me into another
