"We can hold them back only a little while," he said merrily, a curious smile spreading over his face. "And after all, who better to send burrowing after vermin than a weasel?"
He pushed me again, and this time I was on my way, straight toward the ponderous shelves at the end of the chamber.
I slipped behind Brithelm and Ramiro, the bluish arms of the Plainsmen reaching for me, clutching, grabbing. Brithelm had spread a green, unnatural spellfire through the chamber, and for a minute, our adversaries recoiled, overwhelmed by light.
Blinded a little myself by the brilliant glow, I staggered until my eyes adjusted, until the shadowy outline of the shelves emerged from the dazzlement. Recovering my bearings, I raced toward the far entrance.
But I had lost valuable time.
Ahead of me, racing to cut off my escape, a lean, fierce-looking Plainsman half again my size positioned himself and raised a glistening onyx war hammer. I took a long, gathering step and leapt into him, and the two of us crashed to the floor, the hammer skittering harmlessly into the wall in front of me.
Then, for the first time in a long time, I had my eldest brother Alfric to thank. For in the forgotten arenas of the moathouse, he had sharpened my wrestling well, in a childhood when to be a little brother was to dodge, to scramble, to grapple with things larger than yourself.
Larger the man was, but also surprisingly fragile. In a moment, I was atop him, his head in my hands. I twisted my arms abruptly, and the snapping sound that followed seemed to echo in a deep and silent chasm far from the shouting and clash of metal around me.
As I knelt there, the imagined silence gave way to the outcry behind me. Then two strong hands lifted me, and I recognized my brother Brithelm's voice as he coaxed and assured me with words that I could not recognize then nor remember now, and together we rose and raced from a land of chaos and knives into the far shadows and the cold corridor beyond.
Chapter XXI
"Steep" and "formidable" were indeed the words for it.
With Brithelm leading, we took every downward path imaginable, all of which seemed to circle as though we descended through the whorls of a shell. My brother guided us through the torchlit passages that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves, and when a sudden gust of wind from a side corridor extinguished the flames ahead of us, he guided us by an unexpected glow from the tips of his fingers.
The walls of the corridor were scratched with graffiti in the swirling alphabet of the Plainsmen. Names, Brithelm said they were mostly, as we hastened by them-names and religious slogans in which he said he could find no clear theology.
As we descended even farther, the letters gave way to pictographs and drawings of bats and tenebrals. There was one disconcertingly deft drawing of an enormous vespertile closing its monstrous, leathery wings around a band of Que-Tana. The drawing was abstract, almost childlike, and it summoned a deep and rousing fear within me, and evidently also in Brithelm, for he clutched the front of my tunic when I stopped to stare at the scene, then pulled me onward.
I thought of Oliver, shuddered, and doubled my pace.
Those drawings gave way to yet others of surface animals such as horses and leopards and, occasionally, birds. The two moons, red and silver, careened over a herd of pegasi, Finally a city lay toppled to its foundations, surrounded by designs and patterns only, abstract and geometrical, squares and spheres and rhomboids and a strange, geometrical man astride it, his head among the clouds and a swath of soot from a nearby sconce obscuring his face and eyes.
It was the final drawing; the walls were bare as we descended even farther. We had gone too deep for tenebrals, into the very core of the mountain.
Deeper still we went, past where vespertile guano caked the walls and floors of the corridor, to a depth where bone and shards of strange pottery were all that kept the tunnels from a sort of smooth sameness of milky brown rock. Then even bone and broken earthenware gave way to clean tunnels that were unnaturally dark and quiet, as if at some point we had crossed a border into a region where living things could not long abide.
"So this leads us to Firebrand, you say?" I asked my brother, who weaved in and out of the light.
"Surely it does, Galen," he replied. "I've been in those very quarters, but they blindfolded me on the way there and back. So instead of firsthand experience, I shall rely on a sort of… scholarly pursuit."
He smiled and looked at me directly.
"I saw the maps in that library back there, and I have pieced together the directions from the library to Firebrand's quarters with only a little research and common sense. This is the way, I am reasonably certain. It leads not only to Firebrand, but to his quarters and no doubt to the Namer's Tunnel and the secret passage back up to the surface."
He stopped in the tunnel, pausing in movement and thought until I nearly lost balance trying to keep from running into him. He looked at me wryly and frowned.
"At least I suppose so," he concluded.
"At a thousand feet beneath the surface," I snapped, "one does not rest well with supposings, Brother."
To that he was silent, dodging ahead of me like something frayed and insubstantial.
Now, Brithelm was never all that reliable in a library.
To him, a wealth of books was like a mountain range tunneled through by an army of mad dwarves-much like the terrain we found ourselves in at the time. For just when he would get going in his research, would follow a fact or a thought or a phrase from one book to the next, something new and more interesting in that next book would catch him off guard and lure him away as though he had followed an interesting side tunnel, until he would lose himself in the maze of his own interests, having forgotten entirely what had brought him to the library in the first place.
As a result, my brother believed that the Cataclysm was the result of the "double cellars" popular in Istar almost three centuries ago, and that although legend blamed the Kingpriest of that city for the disaster, true blame resided in the architect who, in a reckless attempt to create space in cramped properties near the center of town, chose to build one basement under another and undermine the foundations of block after block of ancient buildings.
Brithelm also believed there were walking trees in Estwilde and that the men of Ergoth had eyes in the back of their heads, through which they could see the past. He believed in a third black moon.
Nor was my brother's research any better on things closer to home: As a boy, growing up in a house where religious observance was rare, he decided that he would celebrate major religious holidays, but he never could figure out or understand the idea of movable feasts. Yes, the feasts moved, but not according to anyone else's calendar. Sometimes we would celebrate Yule in summer, sometimes in spring.
It turned out that Brithelm began to confuse regular holidays with those movable feasts, until he would wake each of us on odd days with the announcement that "Today is your birthday." And though each of us recognized the mistake full well, none of us ever corrected him, eager as we were for the presents. Brithelm, after all, was the only generous Pathwarden.
Though I am not quite twenty, by his tally and because of my greed, at last count I have celebrated fifty-seven birthdays.
All of this is a long way of saying that I was afraid that the research had misfired again. Here we were, a quarter of a mile below light and fresh air, trusting in a common sense that had not displayed itself as all that prominent a Pathwarden quality, and a sense of direction that might well lead us back into the jaws of vespertiles or worse.