Trust! That trembled in him just as his heart did, and he wondered if that quaking heart would be enough to cause the magic to collapse or worse, to change into something the woman couldn’t control. Again, she laughed. Her voice sounded like jays in the trees, raucous and challenging. Suddenly, it had nothing to do with jays at all, but became the voice of a storm. Wind and rain and driven leaves whirled along the ground.
Jai cried out-or tried to. He had no breath, no words, and no sight. The last sense to fail was his hearing, and the last thing he heard was his mother’s voice, frail and thin in the storm-wind of magic, crying, “Jai! Emeth! Hold on to-!”
“Hey,” said a voice, low and very deep.
Jai groaned, and then he shut his mouth. He simply lay still, in pain. He must have fallen hard. His chest hurt as if all the air had been blasted out of his lungs and only recently returned. His head hurt. Worse, pain screamed through his knee. The joint felt as if it were on fire. The ruined muscles that once supported him twitched feebly.
“Hey.” A finger poked him, once and then again. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
Jai opened his eyes to see a dwarf crouching near, a glowing lantern on the ground beside his knee.
A dwarf.
The lantern light flickered and moved, but not like a candle’s flame. It pulsed. The dwarf leaned closer, his bearded face so near Jai could see the blue flecks in the irises of his dark eyes. “I said can you hear me?”
Jai closed his eyes again. “I’m not deaf.”
The dwarf grunted. “That’s good.” He kept silent for a heart’s beat, then, “Your ears work. How about the rest of you?
Jai’s belly clenched, but he refused to groan as he moved his leg. Pain lanced through the knee, shooting up his leg to his hip, yet in that pain he found a measure of comfort. Even all these years later, he remembered what broken bones felt like, he remembered how ripped muscle screamed and burned. His breath eased through clenched teeth. He had broken or torn nothing.
He opened his eyes again. “I’m all right.”
“If you say so.” The dwarf shrugged, sitting back on his heels, deeper into the shadows beyond the lantern light. In his muscular left hand he gripped the haft of a throwing axe. “I’m Stanach Hammerfell. You’re Jai Windwild, I take it.”
Jai frowned. “How did you know…?”
Relaxing his grip on the axe, Stanach nodded toward Jai’s knee. “I’ve been told to keep an eye out for you- a lame elf named Jai.”
For a long silent moment, the dwarf looked at the ruin of Jai’s knee, the poorly knitted bones, the swelling of new bruises. He gave Jai a sidelong glance as to say, Well, that’d be you, wouldn’t it?
But aloud, he only said, “You might like to know your mam and your da are all right.”
“My what?”
Stanach looked at him as if he’d had a few wits jogged loose by the fall. “Your mother and father,” he said with exaggerated care. A sly smile tugged at his lips. “You were concentrating on something when the lady did her magic, eh? That pretty emerald in its pretty nest. Not concentrating on keeping still and trusting, which is what you were supposed to do. Damn magic. I hate it when they have to use it. It’s always me got to go searching miles of tunnel for the ones who fall out of it too soon or too late.”
“Where am I?”
“Underground.” Stanach sat back again, and this time Jai noticed that his strange eyes changed, as a dwarfs will when the light recedes. The irises opened wide, all black now, no blue flecks to be seen. “Underground, and nearer to Qualinost than Thorbardin.”
Thorbardin?
At Jai’s puzzled expression, the dwarf nodded. “Thorbardin, which is where you’re headed. Didn’t they tell you that?”
Flatly, Jai said, “No one tells anyone all of anything about escape plans.”
“All right, then, I’ll tell you. I suppose you or your parents did something to catch the eye of the dragon’s underlings, yes?” Jai let his silence be the answer. “Thought so. Well, you’re near the route you elves take when you’re leaving Qualinost in the dark of night.
Dwarves have been delving a tunnel between Thorbardin and Qualinost — ”
“Delving? Why?”
Stanach shrugged. “Kings don’t tell me why they do things. The elf-king and our thane put their heads together one day and said, ‘Delve!’ and off we went, digging a road between Qualinesti and Thorbardin.”
Plainly disbelieving, Jai said he doubted Gilthas would look up from his poetry long enough to make such a plan.
“Really? Well, likely you know him better than I do.”
Jai, who knew the king not at all, said no more.
“This place is a work-tunnel. We stashed gear and tools here when we were digging out this part of the main tunnel. The work began at Thorbardin, and once the job is done, there’ll be a dark-road that starts about five miles from Qualinost and ends right at Thorbardin’s cellar door. Till then there are ways into the finished part. Magic’s one of them, and hunting you lostlings who fall out of the spell the gods know where gives me a way to pass my days. But the easier way is through one of the secret entrances.” Stanach looked up, no sign of humor in his blue-flecked dark eyes. “Why did the lady warrior not lead your party to the Mianost entrance?”
Bitterly, Jai told him what had happened, and how it ruined his plans.
“Your plans? Promising as you say you are, there’s got to be more scribes than you in Qualinost. I suppose they can find someone else to patch up the parchments now that you’re gone.”
“It’s not about patching, it’s about keeping.” Jai put his palms flat to the stony floor and pushed himself up to sit. “I have to get back to Qualinost.”
Stanach’s left hand dropped to the haft of his axe. He looked right into Jai’s eyes. “No. You’re here now-”
“You don’t have to take me. You don’t have to do anything but point me in the right direction. I’ll get there myself.”
“No, you won’t. Even if you could manage it, I can’t let you. No one roams the tunnels alone. You’re coming with me, and you’re going to Thorbardin.”
The hair prickled on the back of Jai’s neck. A cold bleakness lay behind the dwarfs eyes, like the far stretch of a winter plain.
“And besides, what’s to keep, back there in your Qualinost? A few books and papers, some old songs…? For how long? Might be your homeland is still in one piece tonight. Maybe it will be tomorrow, but the end is coming, and no one’s thinking it’ll be a long time happening.”
In his low deep voice, Stanach Hammerfell said much the same thing Annalisse had. The echo chilled Jai to the heart. Was there nothing, then, but ending? Was there nothing but the road away from the golden kingdom and all the long years of elven glory?
There had to be more!
A sound, like far-off thunder, rumbled in the stone beneath him, vibrating through his spine and painfully in his knee. Jai looked around, seeing the strange pulsing lantern-light shining on a high ceiling of stone, roughly hewn, and piles of rocks shoved up against the glistening walls.
“What’s that noise?”
“Worms.” Stanach said.
“Worms? How could worms-?”
Stanach waved the question away. “Better showing than telling.” He peered closely at Jai, then stood and offered his hand. “You reckon you can get up and walk?”
Jai grasped Stanach’s hand. The dwarf had a surprising strength. He stepped back and pulled Jai right up to his feet. He bore Jai’s weight while he found his balance and didn’t seem to feel it at all. When Jai was steady again, Stanach handed him the lantern. Jai almost dropped it. The light moved like it was alive-and then he saw something living did reside in the little lantern cage.
