to Harry, who was waiting for it.
“Do you need help?” asked Miro. He had asked Harry this every time they had run the drill in preparation for this moment; Harry had never admitted needing assistance, and indeed, seemed not to.
But this time Harry said, “Sure, Estuban. Double-check each connection, will you?”
Miro agreed, tugged on and inspected each point where Harry had fastened the tow-line to his harness with D-rings. Then Miro took the device to which Lefferts had attached the wire-ends, which looked like nothing so much as a scissor with a spring resistor against easy closing. “The electrical connections look good, Harry.” He handed back the odd scissors. “Test the handset.”
Harry clicked through three long contacts, then a long-short-long combination. Dah-dah-dah, dah-dit-dah chattered the receiver nestled between Doc Connal’s knees. He looked up and smiled, “‘OK’ indeed, Harry.”
Lefferts nodded. “Then let’s do this.” He swung a leg over the edge of the gondola. “You have all the slack reeled in, Doc?”
“I do. Remember, we can let you down a lot more quickly than we can pull you up.”
“Ain’t that the terrifying truth.”
“And remember: you have extra cable coiled in five one-foot spools at the first harness attachment point; you can give yourself a little more drop if you need it, Harry.”
“Doc, you’re starting to sound like my momma. Anything else?”
Miro simply nodded. “Godspeed, Harry.”
He nodded back and swung his other leg over the side of the gondola. “Well, guys, it’s been a slice.” He turned slowly until he faced back toward the center of the airship, keeping his weight on his arms. He smiled, and said, “Geronimo!” And he let go-gradually.
Harry did not fall, but eased down into a position where he dangled four feet beneath the gondola; a smaler cable-just a cord, really-was attached lower on his back, which helped to stabilize him against spinning or tumbling.
“How are you, Harry?” Miro called down.
“I’m good to go,” came the up-timer’s reply, faint over the hum of the throttled-back engines. “Let’s stop dawdling.”
Miro smiled. “As you wish. Virgilio, can we get back into the cloud bank with engines?”
“Maybe,” answered the pilot, “but a quick burst from the burner would be a great help. You can use the burn-shield to conceal most of it.”
Miro turned back to Eubank again. “Do it,” he said.
The Irishman, moving nimbly despite his cuirass, produced three pieces of thin tin plate and inserted them vertically in slots fixed along each side of the burner, leaving only the southern, seaward side uncovered. The panels had an excessive stove-piping effect, and had a slight tendency to overconcentrate the hot air flow up into the envelope, but they also reduced the visibility of the burner’s flare considerably.
Eubank engaged the burner briefly; the airship climbed back toward the irregular gray fleece overhead.
Miro came to stand alongside his pilot. “We are on instruments only, now, Virgilio, so keep me apprised of wind direction and velocity. I will need that to revise our bearings if we are being pushed off course.”
“Ah, Harry can always put us back on track,” Virgilio pointed out as he throttled the engines back even more.
“I heard that,” Lefferts’ voice announced from ten feet below. “Just don’t go too low, okay?”
“We will not, so long as you tell us what we need to do in order to keep you just below the clouds, and us just above.”
“Count on it,” the up-timer drawled. “Give me a little more slack; the top of the balloon is up in the clouds already.”
Miro looked up; Harry was right. “Ten more feet of slack, please, Doctor.”
Connal nodded. “Down you go, Harry,” he said as he played out the line.
And then suddenly, they were encased in cool gray cotton again.
The tunnel had grown progressively narrower but now rewidened, opening into an irregular oval chamber with a low ceiling and detritus scattered about its dusty floor: ill-cut paving stones, half a belt, a forlorn and ragged shoe. In the shifting light of the lanterns, the men’s bodies threw monstrous shadows on the wall.
The master of the llaut — ghostly from the gray-pink dust of the mining tunnels through which they had entered-pointed toward what Thomas guessed was the north end of the chamber. “We are here,” he said quietly.
North squinted in that direction: stairs, leading up. They were not solid risers, but rather thin slabs of stone that had been set into grooves cut in the facing walls. They ascended toward a heavy-timbered, iron-bound trapdoor seven feet above them. North nodded, checked his up-time watch: they were on time-just. The summons could come at any time, now. “Weapons out,” he murmured. “Check your actions; make sure there’s no dust on or in them.”
“Rearguard, sir?” asked Donald Ohde.
“Perhaps, but I-”
From behind them came the distant sound of feet slapping down against a wet section of the cave floor. Thomas North swung up his weapon; half a dozen of his men followed suit. But listening more closely, the Englishman allowed that it might be water dripping down through the porous sandstone. They had seen plenty of evidence of that on the way in. They waited, guns ready, for almost a minute. The regular sounds ended as a hasty patter, then nothing: water, certainly. “Stand down,” muttered North.
“What was it, Colonel?”
“It was nothing, Hauer. Just water.”
“Or maybe the witch,” offered the master of the llaut, who suddenly discovered himself under the intense scrutiny of sixteen pairs of eyes belonging to heavily armed and already somewhat anxious men.
“I beg your pardon,” said North sweetly, “but maybe it was the what?”
“The witch,” repeated the master of the llaut. “ Na Joanna. The one that inhabits these caves.”
One half of the group-including two of the three Wild Geese-stared about balefully.
In contrast, Donald Ohde was grinning and shaking his head. “There just had to be something.” He almost giggled. “There just had to be something we didn’t learn about or consider. But an attack by a witch? Now, that will be a story worth telling.”
“Yes,” North agreed, “it will be a story worth telling-to scare naughty children. Now let me make a few guesses.” He aimed his chin at the xueta. “First, the legends of this witch probably have to do with moaning on stormy nights, do they not?”
“Often, yes.”
“You mean the kind of moaning that occurs when wind is forced through a narrow ravine, like at the head of this valley?”
The xueta shrugged. “Yes.”
“And let me further conjecture that the witch’s nocturnal harrowings are proven by sudden health afflictions visited upon wandering children and occasional disappearances of goats, followed by the eventual discovery of their skeletal remains.”
“Yes.”
“The former of which is simply parental terror-tactics, while the latter would be consistent with the action of wild dogs, wild pigs, poachers, or all three. And last, I’m going to go out on a limb here and make the wild surmise that the witch was responsible for the deaths of untold workers at the mines and the quarries, correct?”
The xueta smiled at last. “Yes, some stories claim that.”
“And of course one couldn’t possibly explain these purported deaths as being the consequences of mining accidents, malnutrition and disease, surreptitious murder by guards or rival workers, or missing persons who simply, in fact, escaped?”
“All true,” said the xueta.
North finally smiled back. “And of course you, personally, don’t believe in the legend of this witch at all, do you?”
“Not a word of the drivel,” their guide affirmed with a nod. “But it is always worth a smile watching grown men shiver like little boys for a minute or two.”
