Birgis licked the mud from her ear, snorted, and nodded off to sleep atop her. No doubt he dreamed of rabbits, of scraps under a table in a great and generous hall.
Propping herself up on her elbows, Dannelle muttered an oath famous among infantrymen regarding cavalry horses and their imagined ancestry. It was not a pretty phrase. Galen would be astonished to know that she even knew such words, much less that she found occasion to use them. Even Birgis stirred at the sound of it, his hackles rising at its venom and anger.
"This is a sorry excuse for a rescue," she confessed and started to rise, but the weight of the relaxed dog held her down.
When the tremors around Castle di Caela had caved in part of the underground labyrinth and trapped Sir Bayard and his followers, there were others who fared better for the disruption.
The engineers, for example, exhausted with inspections and miffed at being sent back to the surface by the liege lord, had agreed to take the afternoon off and, having hauled a barrel of Thorbardin Eagle into their quarters on the ground floor of the Cat Tower, rode out the quake in singing and the swapping of lies, and none worried about anything for several days afterward.
Then, of course, there was Carnifex, Sir Robert di Caela's celebrated stallion.
In the close confinement of the castle stables, the big animal had been restrained by his own size. Where a smaller beast could turn in its stall and find purchase for bucking or kicking, Carnifex was forced to settle for standing there, shifting his weight, and contemplating the biting of passing grooms.
That is, until the quake rocked the grounds, shaking the door of the stall off its hinges.
It was as though he had planned what followed for years, rehearsed it in his imaginings and refined it to a brutal economy of three swift movements. Smoothly the big horse stepped from the stall, backed toward the door of the stable, and with one resounding kick, the whole damned means of access-lock and bolt and thick board-erupted in splinters across the rain-soaked courtyard.
The grooms outside the stable froze, as though they had been caught in some capital theft. Carnifex turned again and cantered out of the hay-smelling darkness, snorting and nodding, his black eyes glittering.
The four young men assigned to the livery did not look back until they were safely up stairs or ladders and shivering atop the battlements, braving tremor and misstep and rusty or frayed ladder in the process of climbing.
One of the young fools scaled the west wall by the chain of the drawbridge. The boy was clinging to the latticework above the great gate when Carnifex backed up to it and, like some powerful walking siege engine, subjected the thick oaken portal to the same deadly motion with which he had dismantled the entrance to the stables.
"Whoa, 'Fexy boy! Geel Haw! Settle down…" the groom began weakly. Then he gritted his teeth as the great door splintered below him, and Carnifex was through and into the moat, whinnying and breasting the thick water with an almost lunatic calm, stepping out on the far side dripping stagnant water and moss, then striding into the Solamnic distances at a full gallop, erasing the world under his long, effortless strides.
"It's just as well," the boy mused as the big stallion galloped away, a red shape dwindling into a speck on the western horizon. "You was always too fierce for the keeping."
Of course they had to meet. It is the way of adventures and of stories.
Only a few hours passed before the jubilantly free Carnifex, capering across the wet lowlands, came to a stand of blue aeterna where rested a strange, swearing, ten-legged entanglement of girl and pony and dog. He stopped, whether in confusion or curiosity, or simply to catch his breath.
And the muddied girl wobbled out of the puddle and walked toward him, a large, ungainly, and oddly dry dog strapped to her back.
"You are what brought me here," Dannelle said to the stallion. "No. Not you, as much as it was knowing you were there that caused all the problems."
She fumbled with the elaborate network of ties and straps and knots by which Longwalker had bound her and Birgis together.
"For all the times I have said to my Uncle Robert that I was bound and determined to ride you, I suppose I never thought that the chance would come and the options would narrow to the point that I could do nothing else but ride you."
Birgis growled over her shoulder, a lazy, short-lived growl with little or no conviction. Slowly the girl approached Carnifex, lifting her hand.
"You were much less… daunting in the wish world."
She stretched across uncertainties of space, her fingers flexing, extending. Finally she stroked the long, threatening, velvety muzzle.
"They say you run faster in flesh than you run in the legends," she mused. "That words cannot surround the speed of your coming and going."
Her hand was at his withers now.
"You must prove to be faster than words, my Carnifex. You must prove to be faster than time and catastrophe."
With graceful indirection, as though she were approaching a viper, Dannelle sidled to the great horse's flank, and in one strenuous vault, straddled the back of the steed never mounted, never bridled or saddled.
It astonished the both of them. For a moment, Carnifex planted himself solidly in the middle of the muddy road, his ears pricked and his eyes wide in his stiffened, high-borne head.
Then, beyond his own expectation, and certainly beyond that of Dannelle, the big horse turned and galloped toward the castle, the strides lengthening until Dannelle felt as though the two of them hovered above the drowned land itself and a hundred miles had collapsed into one.
"Ride him," muttered a voice at her ear. Or "Ride him" she thought she heard in the hoofbeats and rush of the wind.
But there at her shoulder was Birgis only, his eyes closed and his nose tucked into her hair.
There was neither rest nor movement beneath the cellars of Castle di Caela. Bayard and the Knights picked through rubble in a futile search for the buried Gileandos, coming up instead with a boot and a pair of spectacles and shards of a ceramic flask that carried upon it the faint but unmistakable odor of gin.
They gave up soon, with leaden and downcast faces. The tutor was never a favorite of any of them, especially Andrew, who knew the old man best of all. Nonetheless, there was a real reluctance to their leavetaking-especially to Bayard, who felt that Gileandos was in some way his responsibility.
"'Tis all we can do, Sir Bayard," Sir Robert consoled, laying a bracing hand on the commander's shoulder. "The next order of business is finding us another way out, if there's one to be found."
"Oh, but that's not it at all, Robert," Bayard protested, turning his reddened eyes toward the older man, both of them dappled in shadows by the wavering light from the lantern young Raphael held. "The next order of business is to keep the worm from turning. It is as simple as that. And now that I cannot send the rest of you back, it's all of us down to the heart of these tunnels, if that is where we find the Scorpion's device."
They were all silent at the thought of the dread mechanism. It had lurked in their worst imaginations for a day now-perhaps two days, for the hours bent and broke in the unchanging subterranean darkness. Each of them, no doubt, had an elaborate, monstrous machine in mind, whistling and rumbling and flinging sparks and oil like a gnomish nightmare.