Loch Luichart. I recognised the place with a sudden jolt at remembering that this was where—as Jeanna had told me—Fergal worked and the tinkers made their strange stone computers. The old power-station, at which Druin was pointing, was a large, dark, block-shaped building at the foot of the slope below us.

“What’s this about?” I asked Druin, as quietly as I could.

He grinned at me and began walking slowly up the ridge.

“Thought you might want to hunt more than deer,” he said. You’re after your man Fergal, and your lassie Menial. Down there might not a bad place to look.”

I gasped, and not with the exertion of keeping up with him. “We can’t just march in there!”

“Why not?” he grunted. “But anyway, we won’t just ‘march in’.” He stopped, and took a few paces off to the right, into a clump of bushes. “Ah, here it is.”

He’d arrived at a cylindrical structure of weathered, creeper-covered ceramic, about a metre high and a metre across. As I approached he leapt up on top of it and began scraping away the overgrowth with the side of his boot. In a moment he’d exposed a rusty hatch.

Not so rusty it didn’t open, though. I looked in and saw a series of rungs disappearing into the blackness. Druin dropped a pebble in and cocked his ear.

“It’s only about twenty metres deep,” he told me.

“Good grief, man, you’re not talking about going down there, are you?”

“Aye, I am that,” he said. “It’s safe enough, so long as you hang on.”

“But do you know what’s at the bottom?” I looked at him suspiciously. “And how do you know about this, anyway?”

Druin sighed theatrically. “What’s at the bottom is a tunnel—I don’t know if it’s part of the original hydro- station or something that got added later. This whole hill has been tunnelled and mined; it was used as an underground base by the British army, and by the Republicans during the civil war before the First World Revolution—changed hands a few times, I think. As to how I know about it—” He laughed. “There’s a map and a diagram of it all in the museum at Jean town! Mind you, I guess the tinkers will have made yon diagram out of date, one way or the other.”

“Looks pretty dark,” I said.

“Ach, there’ll be some kind of lighting down there. And I’ve got a torch.”

“Was this on your mind all along?”

“Aye,” he admitted. “But I didn’t want to tell you beforehand, in case you got cold feet from worrying about it before we even got here. As it is, I’m just beginning to wonder if I was right in thinking you had a spirit of adventure. You’ve done nothing but raise objections this past five minutes. Do you want to go after this woman, or no?”

“Of course I do,” I said, stung into action—as he no doubt intended—by his hint at cowardice. I slung the rifle across my back and scrambled up and set my feet on the rungs as I lowered myself in. “You’ll be coming too, will you?”

Til be right above you,” Druin said.

For the next couple of minutes I concentrated entirely on descending the laddered steps. The rungs looked rust-free, as did their bolts—in fact, the metal and the ceramic of the shaft were both unknown to me. But I could not be sure that every rung had survived the centuries, so I tested each one before putting my full weight on it. The slung rifle made it even more awkward. One upward glance confirmed that Druin was following. Above him the hatch was visible as a small, bright hole.

After what seemed a long time my foot encountered empty air where a rung should have been. After a moment of fright I lowered the foot further, cautiously, and touched a floor. I grunted with relief and stepped down and away from the ladder, still taking care where I placed my feet. Druin completed his descent a moment later and we stood together in dark and silence.

On the descent my eyes had adapted to the diminishing light and even here, at the bottom of the shaft, it was not entirely dark. I became aware, without quite knowing why, that we were indeed in a tunnel and that it sloped fairly sharply. Looking around, I could see a brighter area lower down. I peered at Druin and gestured in that direction. The pale oval of his face made a bobbing motion which I interpreted as a nod. Together we turned and headed down the slope.

After a few steps I stubbed my toe on something hard. “Damn,” I muttered, pulling up short. Druin bumped into my back and we both swayed dangerously.

Tuck this for a game of soldiers,” said Druin. He undipped the torch from his belt and switched it on. A powerful beam of white light illuminated the tunnel in front of us. It revealed that the floor was indeed littered with obstacles—oddly shaped seer-stones of various sizes. It also revealed that the tunnel was full of people.

Druin yelped a curse and brought his rifle to bear in a surprisingly smooth and swift movement. The torch- beam wavered hardly at all. I was still stiff with shock; the instant I recovered from it I looked over my shoulder and saw more figures crowding behind us, dim in the backwash of the torch’s light. One such figure was apparently in the act of reaching out for me—I struck wildly at his arm, and almost fell over because my fist passed right through it. Druin whirled around at the same moment, and the torch-beam cast my shadow grotesquely on the figures before me. They responded neither to the shadow nor the light. Druin let out his breath in a gusty gasp, then laughed.

“They’re just hollows, man!”

“Ah.” I stood looking at them in amazement. “Aye, like the tinkers scare children with at fairs.”

“That’s it. God, they had me scared enough.”

“No wonder Jeanna said the place was haunted.”

“She said that, did she now?” Druin pondered. “I’ll have another chat with yon lassie sometime. Anyway. Let’s go on. Keep the voice down a bit though.”

Neither of us had spoken loudly at all, but the slightest sound seemed magnified by the tunnel’s acoustics. We turned again and walked on, the pool of light from Drum’s torch enabling us to avoid the stones on the floor, and almost to ignore the apparitions they cast. Almost—for the still faces of the men and women depicted in this intangible statuary were caught in a moment of anguish and alarm, which, as they repeatedly loomed out of the dark and passed us—or passed through us—was enough to inspire, in me at least, a creeping sensation of disquiet. They looked uncannily like the lost souls, the damned of the Christian and Mohammadan superstitions, and it would have taken a stouter faith in Reason than mine to have walked that dark path unshaken. Irrational as it may be, I drew some comfort from the fact—known to any child old enough not to be frightened by the “ghost tent” at a fair —that hollows have no existence outside the light, and that, therefore, there was not an unseen crowd of them in the darkness behind us.

Presently we passed beyond their eerie company, and closer to the source of light at the end of the tunnel (an expression whose full force I for the first time appreciated). The air smelt damper, and at the same time fresher. We had reached the foot of the slope; the rocky floor of the tunnel here was flat. Druin switched off his torch and we proceeded very slowly and silently for the remaining few metres. The reason for the light’s vagueness turned out to be a sharp bend in the tunnel; we crept around it, keeping close to the outer side of the crook, rifles gripped (though not, I recalled at that very moment, loaded).

I nudged Druin and, taking a shell from my pocket, made to put it in the rifle. He shook his head, firmly, and I desisted, reassuring myself with the reflection that the pistols on our belts were ready for immediate use. We rounded the bend and found ourselves looking out at a brightly lit space of great size—at least twenty metres across, I guessed, and ten high. The lighting came from overhead panels, and seemed like sunlight. The walls curved over to the ceiling, all stone; a cavern then, and not a natural one. Its full length was not obvious from where we stood, at one corner of it.

It contained row upon row of stone troughs, connected with stepped open pipes through which rivulets of water trickled; some arranged to feed the troughs, others to carry away waste—or so I guessed, from the fact that no channel that came out of a trough went into another. I could make out half a dozen people working there, moving from trough to trough, making undetectable adjustments to the flow or sifting some powdery material in. They looked like hydroponic gardeners, and I thought at first glance that they were following this familiar trade, possibly for some recondite component of the tinkers’ food-supply. Then I noticed the contents of the troughs farther to my right, and—as I quickly realised—of more mature growth. They were growing seer-stones—I could distinctly see the larger ones lined up, five to a trough.

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