Tapp grimaced and spit on one of Leddie’s boots. She laughed, leaned against a stone statue of a sleeping lion, and closed her eyes.
We did not converse again until Halla and Whistler returned half an hour later, each of them toting two buckets filled with bent horseshoes, rusty brackets, nails, broken knife blades, and various pieces of scrap iron.
“Back away, friends.” I handed Halla my lantern and hoisted a bucket. I heaved the iron pieces down the steps, and then I ran. A rolling hell of clanking echoed up through the doors, followed by ten seconds of distinct clicks, swishes, and scraping stones. The opening went silent. I walked back to the doors and listened. “To hell with disarming traps by hand.”
I tossed another bucketful through the doors just to be scrupulous. Soon, the clashing and jangling died away. Halla nodded at me, so I eased down onto the first step with my sword drawn. I stopped and spoke over my shoulder. “Tapp, will you guard the top so that somebody doesn’t come along and lock us in here forever?”
“Well, that means I have to miss inspecting eighty lockers and beds, but for you, I’ll make the sacrifice.”
The steps dropped down through a shaft wide enough for one person. It was hardly tall enough for my head to clear. I smelled dry earth, mold, and faint rotting, which I did not welcome. Twenty-four steps took me to the bottom, and I didn’t welcome that, either. It’s an especially ill-omened number. An open doorway stood in the wall opposite the stairs.
“Leddie, guard that door,” I said.
I hadn’t expected the chamber at the bottom to be quite so large, about eight paces square, with a stone floor, brick walls, and a vaulted brick ceiling. Dust hung thick in the air, doubtlessly raised by all the iron scraps I had tossed in. The iron lay scattered everyplace, along with a dozen crossbow bolts, two deep pits, and a long, thin blade sticking out of a wall at waist height. Four skeletons in dusty clothes lay about, and two mostly dried-up corpses slumped in a corner, one of them cut in two.
We examined the room and its contents, but we kept quiet. Nothing seemed to merit comments.
I peeked around the edge of the open door while Halla held out her lantern. The next room was similar to the first but about half as big. Most of the bricks had fallen off the walls and ceiling, and they lay in piles. The soil behind the walls had crumbled, leaving several long heaps of brown dirt that came to my waist. I examined the dirt ceiling from a distance, and it appeared to be intact.
“Whistler, bring up that bucket,” I said.
Halla, who was a considerably more powerful individual than me, selected a horseshoe. Standing outside the room, she hurled it at the ceiling. A bit of dirt fell off, but nothing more. She flung ten more iron pieces at different parts of the ceiling, to no effect.
I could see a wooden door in the middle of the far wall, partly blocked by fallen bricks. Easing into the room, I crept across it toward the door, and the others followed. When I had walked most of the way there, something heavy smashed my shoulders and head, driving me to my knees and then flat onto the ground. I tried to yell at the others to go back, but I couldn’t get any air. I realized that enough dirt to cover me up had dropped onto me, and it sounded like the dirt was still falling up above.
If the women I have lived with taught me anything, it’s that I possess flaws in abundance. If I were a squash patch, I’d have a lot of bug-filled squash, maybe more than the squash that you might ever want to eat. One of my most inconvenient flaws is a mindless fear of getting trapped underground and eaten by something nasty. That flaw nearly killed all of us there in Caislin.
I thrashed, cried, and tried to shout for a hundred years or so, and I at last forced myself to lay still. I wiggled three fingers side to side, pulled a white band, and sent it whirring out into the world. Within seconds, it showed me a few hundred tons of dirt that hadn’t fallen on me yet, thousands of earthworms, snakes, beetles, and other bugs, ten terrified groundhogs, and a great cluster of roots from the mahogany tree, some of which stretched lower than the chamber.
I can make a tree grow fast. By that I mean I can make it grow a season’s worth in a couple of days. I wish I could make a tree root grow fifty feet in ten seconds. That would be handy at times, but the magic doesn’t work that way.
However, I can make a tree root move fast enough to shock most people. It doesn’t have to grow longer. It just has to stretch on one side while it squeezes down on the other. Once a Caller gets the knack of making a root or limb corkscrew, some nice feats become possible.
I pulled four bands and sent them to the closest four roots. I admit to getting frustrated with how slowly they moved at first, but it took time for them to loosen the earth that was in their way. Less than three minutes after the ceiling fell, a root started thrusting through the dirt above me, spreading and shifting it. Soon, all four roots were working around me, and dirt began sloughing away. Once I could breathe again, I sent the roots off to unearth the others.
Still trapped, I pulled a green band and ran it across everybody. Halla was dazed, Whistler was unconscious, and Leddie wasn’t breathing. I examined Leddie and found she wasn’t hurt too much yet, so I got her breathing again. Since
