scrambled up.
'Where… Father!' Enid shouted at once, broke from Sir Andrew's grip, and rushed back to the edge of the fissure. For a moment, Raphael, lying on his stomach, looked up and became furious as he saw her totter again, saw all his courage and risk about to amount to nothing.
Then she gained balance, squinted, and looked to the far edge of the cellar.
A light was spreading across Robert's face.
Four days ago, when he had sat half-dozing in the castle infirmary, watching as the servants danced attendance about his son-in-law and the engineers fretted in their oily sobriety, there was something… something…
'For the great well,' they had said, 'that lies under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, is no doubt brimming and bubbling in deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave us awash in our own cistern.'
And what, indeed, might this humming crack in the well cap beside him be but deliverance?
Robert laughed as Marigold swatted away one of the cats who hurtled at her and at Sir Robert's knapsack.
Well, then, Sir Robert thought. This might be a chamber of miracles, after all! And mustering his strength, he drove the hilt of his sword solidly against the crack in the casement.
Not even old Sir Andrew had seen its like. Water surged forth into the fissure like a deluge, and before he could even begin to strip off his armor, Sir Robert found himself knee-deep in a warm sulfurous tide from the artesian well.
He caught himself, rose suddenly from idleness, and slipped off Marigold's knapsack and his breastplate.
Around him, white spectral forms scurried into the cracks of the rocks, screeching and yowling. Whatever they had become through the years and the permanent darkness, Mariel's cats were still cat enough to harbor a healthy fear of water.
Now, stripped to a linen tunic, Sir Robert rose with the water, looking once beneath him to see if Marigold was following. The lantern went out as the water reached its shelf, but in his last glimpse of the girl, he saw her neck-deep, straining to remove her knapsack of cosmetics, wedged between two solid rocks.
Robert caught his breath and tried to swim for her, but the light was gone and he could no longer locate her. Instead, his lungs burning and his muscles cramping, he treaded water, floating toward the faint light above him until, as bereft of worldly goods as a man can be without being completely naked, Sir Robert di Caela rose to the surface of the fissure, where Brandon's strong arms reached out and dragged him onto the stone.
'Marigold?' he gasped as the waters continued to rise, reaching the edge of the crevasse and brimming over. Painfully Robert gained his footing and stood beside his friends and family. Enid embraced her bedraggled father, and Bayard lifted high the lantern he was holding, its light fracturing on the surface of the rising water.
Five minutes they waited. Then ten.
Then, in the middle of the newly formed underground lake, a yellow lacquered schooner broke the surface of the water, floating absurdly at a middle distance atop the drowned, mountainous girl, who clutched her bag of cosmetics in a terrible grip that would no doubt last forever.
'The device, sir!' Brandon muttered, his voice uneasy and puzzled.
'What of it?' Bayard asked impatiently, staring across the rocking surface of the pool. The darkness swirled and congealed, permitting no vision.
'The device, sir. It remains unchecked for all this water and commotion.'
Slowly, Bayard slid from the young Knight's grip and knelt on the pooling floor of the cavern.
They had lost Marigold and gained in return less time in which to figure out the workings of whatever machinery lay across the fissure in the blackness. Disconsolately, Bayard lifted his eyes and stared into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thing he needed to see.
'If it can't be seen, it can't be managed,' he murmured.
And below him and above him-indeed on all sides of him and somehow, unexplainably, even within him-a low rumbling rose, as though the whole subterranean world was laughing.
Chapter XX
The vaulted room wherein Ramiro and I found ourselves was lined with nearly empty shelves, littered only with an occasional ledger, scroll, or manuscript. Leather volumes sat precariously high out of reach, their spines scrawled with lines and patterns that were either some incredibly random form of decoration or an indecipherable alphabet. Some were moldy from the ever-present damp.
It made Gileandos's library look small and shabby. What was more, since the leather was regularly oiled on most bindings, I gathered that these volumes had been read at one time or another, unlike those we had back home in the moathouse, which our tutor had collected for their thickness and mustiness and ponderous-sounding titles.
Under Gileandos's tutelage, I had never been all that much of a book lover, so for me, these volumes, too, were just interior decoration. Far more to my interest were the Que-Tana themselves, the dreadfully pale creatures who glided in and out of the room on obscure duties.
They were not much more attractive in daily activity than they were as hillside assailants. They were sort of blue-skinned, with bulbous eyes and sparse waxen hair-at first glance, more like exotic tubers than humans. Their speech was indecipherable when they addressed each other, though it sounded, as you might expect, faintly like the language Longwalker had spoken to his followers, full of hard consonants and little breathing. Yet it was no longer Que-Nara Plainsman that was spoken, but a darker tongue, filled with enormous silences and echoes and deep watery vowels that rose from the depths of the throat.
I heard the same music in their common speech when they spoke to us, their fluency drawn into the dark undertow of their subterranean accents. I thought of hot springs and geysers.
Quite abruptly, the business and noise around me died down. Adorned more formally, with beads and necklaces and carrying a tall hooked staff, Firebrand himself approached me from the far end of the porch.
'I trust you have been made comfortable?' he asked, pulling a reed chair to my bedside and seating himself.
Ramiro sidled casually within earshot. The Que-Tana, on the other hand, moved quickly away before the man was seated, attending shyly to some task on the other side of the room.
'Oh, as comfortable as can be expected,' I answered in common speech.
'I see,' Firebrand replied. 'I fear there's little I can do regarding either your departed brother or the vespertiles, but perhaps we can see to it that your… remaining brother is restored to you.'
'It would be about time,' I said. 'A whole day and a half we've been confined here, by my reckoning. And after all, my brother's release
Firebrand gestured dramatically, and through the door strode Brithelm, as disheveled as ever, but looking all right considering kidnap and submergence. Brithelm smiled amiably, bumped into a lectern, and sent rolls of parchment flying about him.
'Excuse me,' he murmured, as Plainsmen rushed to retrieve the skittering rolls. Brithelm bent over, picked up one leaf of a manuscript, and scanned it as he walked to a sconce on the wall to get some light firmly at his back.
'Brithelm!' I shouted. 'Thank the gods you're alive!'
He lifted his eyes from the page in front of him, and stared reverently toward the rock ceiling of the room.
