Hag in the Water

By

Barbara Hambly

Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

Copyright 2017 Barbara Hambly

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Table of Contents

Hag in the Water

About the Author

Hag in the Water

When so be that through excessive and promiscuous smelling of rue a man should develop a scorpion in his brain, such that the can not sleep for grief of it, let his friends fill a platter with mole’s blood and, lulling the man to dulness with diuerse songs, enter into his chamber in silence and place the blood beneath his bed. So be it that in the night whilst he lieth wakeful the scorpion will be drawn out through his ear unknowing, and will be found drowned in the blood upon the morrow.

Did Dotys ever actually TRY this? wondered John Aversin, examining, enthralled, the elaborate scene depicted amidst the capital letter’s foliage: helpful friends and dripping platters and entomologically unlikely arthropods (That thing’s the size of a dog, how’d it fit in the poor bastard’s head?).

And does it work on scorpions generated in the brain by means other than sniffin’ excessive rue?

John turned the page over hopefully, but the five pages of the long-missing second volume of Dotys’ Sover Medicia had been bound into a miscellany with what looked like a gnomish translation of Uralius’ Art of Poetry and a series of sermons praising the god Sarmendes, and there was no further discussion to be found on the treatment of cranial infestations. From the garden beyond the wide windows of the chamber in which he lay, John could hear the songs of children, sweet-voiced page-boys in the gold-and-crimson livery of the royal House of Uwanë, rehearsing their part in the masque to be presented tonight to celebrate the wedding of the King.

The final night of celebration, reflected John, sitting up on the window-seat’s plush cushions and propping his battered spectacles on the bridge of his nose. He smiled, torn between his affection for the stooped, scholarly young monarch – not to speak of the month he’d spent bingeing his way through the books in the royal library – and his awareness that summer was fleeting. Winters came on earlier than they had in his boyhood, and even twenty-five years ago they’d come early enough. Scholar though he was, he was warrior enough to be aware of the cloud-patterns in these soft southern skies, and to calculate how many days he and his beautiful witch-wife Jenny would be on the road back to the north, once she returned from her botanical excursion to the Petty Islands a day’s sail south of Bel.

It was time, and past time, to go.

He and Jenny had shared their joy at King Gareth’s marriage, after the death two years before of his first wife Trey. They both loved quiet Danae, the new queen, and her bright-eyed impudent little daughter who was now step-sister to Princess Millença. Jenny had laid magics of health and well-being on both children, on the young King and his bride.

But the road to the Winterlands would be deep in snow, by the time they returned home.

John was calculating how many books he could get through – and make notes on – before Jenny’s return, when he heard voices in the garden above those of the choir.

“…’twill beget trouble,” pronounced the gravelly but oddly childlike tones which John recognized at once as those of Sevacandrozani, Lord of the Gnomes of Ylferdun Deep, the great gnome kingdom whose gates lay half a day’s ride from the walls of Gareth’s royal city of Bel. “Zarbochedronn Blue-Hair, greatest of the Wise Ones of the Deep, hath long said that the secrets of the Deep are no business of they who dwell above the ground. He’ll not welcome the lady Jenny, no matter your opinion of her, my lord, nor all she hath done for our people.”

“And I’ll not welcome,” retorted the light, rather scratchy tenor of the young King Gareth himself, “having this thing get out of your mines and make its way to this city. And if in five days your Mages’ Council hasn’t been able to do anything about it, I should say it’s high time they asked for advice—”

The voices had reached the door of the guest-chamber by this time and John opened it to reveal Gareth II of the House of Uwanë, King of Bel and Lord of the Islands, his lumpy, ink-stained knuckles upraised and his soft gray eyes blinking in startlement behind spectacle-lenses as thick as John’s own.

The Gnome King – who was known to those that lived above the ground as Balgub – executed a profound Boughs of Seven Oak-Trees salaam, befitting his own status as the Lord of Ylferdun Deep but honoring John’s as the man who had rid the Deep of both a dragon and a malevolent sorceress*, worthy of the gratitude of every gnome of the Seven Deeps for life. It was a salutation seldom used and by all rights John should have been much more impressed by it than he was.

Gareth only stood uncertain for a moment, then hastily (and rather clumsily) dropped into a Sable Heron salaam, not appropriate for the occasion (except that any salaam executed by the King was technically appropriate), which would have had the Court gossips whispering What exactly did he MEAN by that choice of greeting? for several years. Rebellions had been started over less.

Fortunately, like Gareth, John couldn’t tell one salaam from another and didn’t care. He executed the all-purpose Winterlands bow and asked, “So what’s this thing you got comin’ up out of the Deep, you’re talkin’ of? An’ what in the name of the Moon-Scribe’s little white dog d’you mean, not speakin’ of it for five days? Back home, a lich-slug comin’ out of the Wraithmire’ll destroy three farmsteads ‘twixt moon-set an’ mornin’, mice an’ all, an’ in the Liever Umbraeorum there’s accounts of waste-wights that’ll turn twenty miles of territory to whisperin’ dust in three nights an’ be damned to all the spells that wizards lay against ‘em. I’ve wine here,” he added, stepping aside to wave man and gnome into the airy, octagonal chamber that overlooked the King’s garden. “An’ gie decent beer.”

He scooped two volumes of Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World and the second volume of Juronal’s Commentaries off the chair nearest the window, and a pile of pale-brown southern paper and seven or eight wax writing-tablets off another beside the wall, then dragged the chair close to the window-seat where he’d been reading a few moments ago. Sevacandrozani – Balgub – was looking around the book-littered apartment with disapproval (It ain’t THAT bad! reflected John protestingly) but Gareth, whose private quarters generally were far less tidy, seemed not even to notice.

“The Council of the Wise Ones,” responded Balgub, “deemed it advisable for the safety of the Deep—”

“Gaah,” said John, who had encountered gnomish secrecy on previous occasions. “An’ how many have been killed, for the safety of the Deep, then?”

The Lord of the Deep did not reply. Gareth said, quietly, “Seven that we know about. And Miss Mab – the Lady Taseldwyn—” He named the powerful gnome-witch who was Jenny’s friend, “—struck down, and lies unconscious. If nothing else, we hope the Lady Jenny will at least be able to revive her, as well as advise us about this… this thing.”

John resumed his seat on the window-bench, a sturdy unprepossessing figure in the faded black robe of a scholar, his long, russet hair straggling loose from the thong that tied it. With his thick spectacles, long nose and secretive, rather sensitive mouth, he looked like nobody’s idea of a warrior, let alone a Dragonsbane – the one person in the west of the world who actually had the first-hand experience of killing a dragon. “Jen’s gone to the Petty Isles,” he said. “She left yesterday, with Brâk Shipsward—”

Gareth nodded; he knew the tattooed trader well.

“I was that tempted to go with ‘em, for there’s herbs grows there I’ve never heard tell on nor read neither, but I just couldn’t—” John’s gesture took in the books now stacked on the floor where the chairs had been. “It went to me heart, but I had to make the choice. Just as well for you, then,” he added quietly. “If there’s a way for me to help your Wise Ones speak to her in a scryin’-stone – them never havin’ laid eyes on her but for a nod in passin’ at the weddin’ t’other day – I’ll do what I can. But you—” He turned back to the young King, “—may want to send along a feller with a letter, just the same. What’s happened?” He flung himself down onto the window-seat again and propped his boots on the lower rungs of the King’s chair.

“Anathagantes, eldest daughter of Krastochilliam, Lord of the Second Deep and Steward of the Northern Mines,” pronounced the Gnome King slowly, “was found dead in her father’s garden on the night of the new moon. She had been most savagely hewn, by what seemed an animal’s claws. Enquiries were made as to who might have hated the lady, for the Steward her father hath not long past wed a widow of the House of Gnebmyalla, and there was no love between the Steward’s daughters and the new Lady Nezbardina. But no sign of a beast was seen, and the Lady Taseldwyn swore the thing smacked of the daemonic.”

“New moon was the night before the weddin’,” pointed out John. “You came down here that day. Did you know there might be a demon loose?”

Balgub turned his silver wine-cup in short, bejeweled fingers for a time, and his pale eyes smouldered. “Zarbochedronn Blue-Hair, Lord of the Mages’ Council, straitly forbade the Lady to speak of her concerns to any save the Council. The gold of the Deep draws men, and a man with knowledge of the Deep may find himself in a position to sell such knowledge. That being said—”

He drew a deep breath.

“That bein’ said,” continued John drily, “you decided to hush the matter up? For the best of all possible reasons?” John dealt well with the gnomes on the whole, and wasn’t one of those men who held them in contempt for their strange speech and alien appearance. On the other hand, the gnomes of Tralchet Deep, far north in the Winterlands, had been known to use human slaves to work the deepest and most dangerous portions of their diggings, and his relations with them had not always been amicable.

By the glance Balgub gave him, he’d clearly heard the Tralchet side of those encounters.

In time he said, “The following night a foreman of the North Mines, and two of his work-crew were slain in the same fashion, near torn to pieces. That same night, a widow who lived in the First Deep, and her children, were killed in their home as they slept.”

“That was when Miss Mab – the Lady Taseldwyn—” Gareth corrected himself, his big, clumsy hand twisting nervously at the little golden Half-Emperor beard he’d grown upon his accession to the throne, “—went down into the North Mines after this thing. I only found that out today—”

“She was found unconscious,” said Balgub. “She lay within the protective circle she had drawn about herself, raked as if with an animal’s claws. That same night a servant of the Lord Krastochilliam was killed in the Steward’s own halls. Zarbochedronn himself wrote runes of protection on all the doors of the Steward’s dwelling, and in a circle about his bed. On the following night, Krastochilliam woke to hear the splintering of the door-bolts of his chamber, and the scrape and whisper of the thing as it circled his bed in the darkness. Zarbochedronn was in the house, and came at once to the bed-chamber. The thing was gone when he reached the place, and the Steward unharmed. But the power of the spell-circles had been dissolved, and the Blue-Haired One’s own power was drained away; he lies ill now. Cold, he says, and his power wasted almost to nothing.”

“An’ if this thing can eat spells an’ draw out the magic of the spell-caster through ‘em,” surmised John grimly, “I bet there’s a bit of a strike amongst the other members of the Council about who gets to re-draw those runes tonight.”

Again Balgub didn’t contradict John’s guess, though his face reddened a little under the thick waves of his beard.

“So they want Jen to go draw ‘em?”

“They want her counsel,” said the Gnome King after a moment. “It may be that this is a matter known to the magic of humankind, of which only the Lady Taseldwyn, among all the Wise Ones of the Deep, hath made study.” He looked down for a time at his huge hands, thick with jeweled rings and glittering with long nail-guards wrought of enamel and gold. “Others besides the Lady Taseldwyn have whispered of demons.”

“Was there a smell?” John’s eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. “Like blood poured on red-hot iron?”

“There was no such when I saw the places where these things befell. You have knowledge…” He coughed discreetly, since it was considered good manners not to mention John’s run-ins with the Demon Queen a few years before**.

“If it is a demon,” said Gareth hesitantly, “they… they don’t stay put. And if someone has… has opened a demon-gate, somewhere in the mines—”

“If someone’s opened a demon-gate in the mazes of the Deep, me hero,” said John, getting to his feet and reaching for his sword, “we’re all of us well an’ truly buggered.”

*

They reached the gates of the Deep of Ylferdun just after sunset that evening.

Earthquake, winter, and the passage of the great river Wildspae in some ancient fury had carved a great black cliff on the southernmost end of the mountains that men called Nast Wall, and even their height could not seem to dwarf the power of those iron-girdled doors. In a curved bay against the mountain’s steep flank the town of Deeping had been built, to traffic with the lords of the Deep for gold and coal and gems. This town, six years before, the black dragon Morkeleb had reduced to rubble, and John was interested to see, as the Gnome King’s little cavalcade topped the hill called Tanner’s Rise, how little mark remained of the ruin the dragon had wrought.

Lights of re-built houses dotted the footslopes beneath the cliffs. Even in the blue of early evening, fires glowed beneath the refining-furnaces and forges; the mountain-slopes were denuded for miles of trees. The pale trace of a road led down to the landing on the river Clae, that came from the east to meet the Wildspae at Bel, and John guessed from the smell of the smoke that in daylight it was crowded with traffic from the coal-boats. John shivered a little at the sight of the place.

At the memory of the dragon?

Or the thought that it might be a demon, stirring in the darkness of the Deep.

He sorely wished Jenny was at his side. Facing a demon alone was not something he wanted to do, under any circumstances, no matter what was at stake.

Yet few knew better than he, that this was a matter which couldn’t wait.

Gareth had sent a messenger running to the harbor of Claekith, to take ship for the Petty Islands. Beyond that, nobody knew precisely where Jenny and her hosts were likely to be. John’s previous encounters with demons still gave him nightmares, but the thought of them coming into the human world – slipping out into Deeping, and so down-river to Bel – was worse.

The Wise Ones of the gnomes were already assembled in that portion of the Deep known as the Yellow Halls. This lay above and behind the vast cavern of the Great Market, the only area of the Deep where the sons and daughters of humankind were suffered to enter, and because even in the face of the dragon’s invasion the gnomes had given him deliberately inaccurate maps of the Deep John wasn’t terribly surprised – once they’d left their horses in the vast stables outside the gates themselves and crossed through the Market halls – to be blindfolded as he was led up the gold-and-malachite Great Stair. He’d learned that arguing the point with gnomes never got anyone anywhere.

His eyes were uncovered in a handsome vestibule, paved with patterned wood and walled with tapestries against the constant, clammy cold of underground, and he counted a dozen guards around him as the black-bearded captain of the company struck twice on the bronze door to the hall beyond. A gnome who unmistakably had to be Zarbochedronn Blue-Hair rose from his chair as the King’s company entered the inner hall, and in truth his thick, seamed face looked ashen and haggard. His expression of weariness changed to annoyance when he realized that the guards brought him not a mage-woman who understood the spells of both dragons and demons, but by a bespectacled amateur scholar who gawped like a bumpkin at the delicate arches, the glittering pale traceries of the ceiling and asked the nearest guard in a whisper, “What do they spend on candles, d’you know?”

The Wise One gave the most minimal of salaams (The Lion in Triumph) that would acknowledge that his disappointing guest had done him a great service (getting rid of the dragon that had killed hundreds of gnomes, had nearly destroyed the Deep, and had cost the merchants of Ylferdun and Bel hundreds of thousands of gold pieces in property damage). “Wilt thou allow of it, for the mages to scry into thy heart, in the hopes that we can bridge from there to the mind of your Lady Jenny?”

And when John looked askance at the short, skinny figure whose pale-blue beard flowed down nearly to his knees (How much time does he spend combin’ it every mornin’, then?), Zarbochedronn added, “None among us – save Taseldwyn only – hath acquaintance of the Lady.”

That’s ‘cause you wouldn’t give her but a glance in passin’, John managed to keep himself from saying. The possibility of a demon-gate was too terrible, and too frightening, for his usual foolery, and he knew it.

Instead he asked, “Will that work, then? You bein’ gnomes, an’ all?”

“So we hope and trust,” replied another mage, a lady small even for a gnome, and so bent with age that her little head was carried almost below the level of her shoulders. Her myriad of snowy braids nearly reached the floor. “In truth, such hath ne’r been tried, not even amongst our own, still less amongst thine.” She grasped John’s hand in short, powerful fingers that had a grip like a blacksmith’s, and led him to a stool that had been set among them.

John had encountered, often enough, the spells that some gnomes set on their slaves, to draw back from letting the greatest of the Wise Ones go poking around in his thoughts. But if we stand here sayin’ ‘I won’t let you know the way through the mines’ an’ ‘I won’t let you look into me thoughts’ we’ll be here all twilkin’ night…

So he took the low seat, removed his spectacles, and closed his eyes. Thick little fingers, with their long metal-sheathed nails, touched his eyelids and temples and jaw.

The images that rushed through his thoughts were frightening, and for a time he fought back the tears of his childhood, the savage rages that had governed him as a young man. He saw again his father sweating and red in drink, the face of the first man he’d killed, the moon above the cold tors of the Winterlands.

Jenny.

His son Ian, new-born and covered with blood. The shocking beauty of the dragon he had slain. His grief then, and the smell of the beast’s poison.

Then the sensation of falling from a great height, back onto the stool, fighting to breathe, as if all the air in the world could not fill his lungs.

Hard jeweled hands grabbed his wrists as he thrashed for a moment, and someone put a wet cloth, ice-cold, against his face until his breathing steadied. He heard one of the gnomes mutter, in their own tongue, “Huh – children of men. Minds like—” and some other word whose meaning John didn’t know.

“Be at peace,” creaked the ancient gnome-lady. “Be at peace.”

John opened his eyes. By their faces he could tell the probe of his mind hadn’t yielded anything useful. THAT’ll learn you to go snubbin’ people just ‘cause they’re not of your kin.

He could see, also, the way their eyes went to each others’ faces. What the hell do we do now? Knowing it might take days to even find Jenny, among the Petty Isles, much less for her to return.

He drew a deep breath, said, “You want to take me to the place where this happened, then?”

They looked at one another, nonplussed and a trifle dismayed, that one not a mage should even think of inquiring into a matter of magic.

“Look, do we even know it’s a demon?” asked John reasonably. “That’s the first thing we need to find out, an’ it doesn’t take a wizard to learn it. Your lord king said there was no smell of burnt metal.”

“What else could so easily pass the runes of protection?” demanded Zarbochedronn.

“You tell me, you’re the bloody wizards.” John stood up, and put on his specs again. “An’ even if a demon-gate has opened, somebody’s got to have opened it, y’know. They can’t open the things themselves. So why would somebody do such a thing?”

They looked at each other again, presumably under the impression that his question had been as rhetorical as Zarbochedronn’s.

“No, really,” he reiterated patiently. “Why would somebody open a demon-gate – if that’s what happened. So rather’n argue in a vacuum, I’d like to take a look at the site of the most recent killin’, an’ then I’d like to have a word with this Krastochilliam, that’s Steward of the Second Deep whose daughter was killed.” And, when none of them responded, but all looked to Zarbochedronn for his decree on the subject: “Well, we can’t just sit round on our hands ‘til somebody locates Jen, y’know. The thing’s gonna come out again, an’ we have no idea what it’s after or what it can do if it doesn’t get what it’s lookin’ for.”

He added, “An’ can one or t’other of you lend me a shawl? It isn’t half freezin’ in here.”

*

There was a certain amount of discussion about whether John should be blindfolded, to be taken into the deep and secret delvings of the gnomes, to which he said only, “Don’t be daft.”

The captain of the king’s bodyguard, a very large, black-bearded gnome called Brabishanjo, glared at John as if he suspected him of carrying away the treasury of the Deep in his pockets, but led him – in company with Zarbochedronn and four of the Wise Ones – along the corridors, and through the astonishing caverns which constituted the inner heart of Ylferdun’s realm. They moved in a ball of blue-white witchlight, and a dozen guards, armed to the teeth, brought up the rear.

The First Deep, so far as John could calculate, lay below and behind the Great Market. Though it was now well into the night, there was as much coming and going, buying and selling, in that zone of shops and ateliers as if it were afternoon. Lamps burned from every archway; huge, white, short-faced cats flitted from shadow to shadow or watched their passing with passionless blue eyes. The noise of harps echoed in the great tunnels, and now and then the air grew pungent with the scent of spiced gnomish cooking, or the whisper of incense from the temples.

The dwellings of ordinary gnomes – as John knew already, from the small familiarity he had gained with the place six years before – often had no roofs, or roofs only of retractable layers of thick cloth, stretched above the walls of their houses like semi-circular sails. Warrens of these houses were built in the vast limestone caves, great and small; the cavern of the First Deep was so huge that even the brilliance of the mages’ witch-light didn’t carry to its farther end. The servants of the gnomes, male and female, stopped on the winding paths of shallow steps among the glittering columns or stalactites, or on the high bridges that joined the grotto’s upper levels, and stared as the cats had done. John wondered if the human slaves, if there were any in Ylferdun, had been bundled away out of sight.

Among what looked like a grove of stalagmites – gold and pink and cream-colored, and flecked with crystals that glittered in the witch-light – the stone house of the widow Vashwedtha stood, who together with her three young children had been ripped nearly to pieces, on the first night after the new moon.

“Those who lived near saw nothing,” said Captain Brabishanjo, as he and his guards followed the Wise Ones to the door of the tiny dwelling. He gestured about him at the thick clusters of similar houses – like stone-walled tents – that crowded this end of the cavern. Even the cunning network of ventilation tunnels with which the gnomes surrounded their living-spaces couldn’t disperse the faint smells of garlicky cooking, of coal-fires, of privies, and though many of the lamps hereabouts had been extinguished, children still played among the houses and voices could be heard through the doors. “Nor heard any sound, ‘til Vashwedtha screamed.”

“An’ no one saw anyone run away?”

“’Twas deep in the night,” said the little white-braided gnome-lady, Periozames, stumping crookedly along at John’s elbow like a bleached cricket. “Of ourselves, the folk of the Deeps care not, whether the sun lights the sky outside, or the moon. But those who traffic with humankind do sleep in the nighttime, that they may be wakeful in the hours of commerce and trade.”

John had to duck a little, to get through the door of the house that stood a little distance from the others, but when the Wise Ones entered behind him and blue-white witchlight flooded the room, his eyes widened in surprise.

Exquisite tables, chairs, and cupboards, furnished two of the rooms, proportioned to the stature of the gnomes and carved with breath-taking artistry. Tapestries, or hangings of gilt leather, mitigated the cold of the windowless walls, and intricate tiles of wood covered the floors. In the chambers where the widow and her children had slept, most of the furnishings had been stripped away, but in those few hangings which remained John smelled no trace of the horrific, unmistakable stench of demons.

“Gie fine plunder for a house this size.” He put up one of the low stools onto the dining-table and climbed up, to get close enough to the tent-like roof-cloth, to confirm that no demon-stench had risen to overlie the ground-in odors of greasy cooking and low-quality coal fires. “I knew you folks was all rich—”

He hopped down, and bent to look at the wrought-gold emblems that decorated the table’s legs. Three stars surrounding a flame – the mark of one of the great houses of the gnome elite – but the arms embroidered on the wall’s velvet hangings were different.

He could almost hear the Wise Ones trade glances again, and Zarbochedronn glowered.

It was the Captain of the Guards who spoke. “The Widow Vashwedtha received many gifts of Krastochilliam – and others,” he said.

John’s eyebrows went up. “Did she, then?”

“She was a low-born person,” snapped Zarbochedronn, “who made it her business to befriend her betters for profit.”

“Her husband was one of those who fell to the dragon Morkeleb,” explained the Lady Periozames in her kindly voice. “She was left in destitution for a time. Later she came to be betrothed to a scion of one of the lesser houses of the Deep of Wyldoom—”

“’Twas years ago,” added Brabishanjo. “E’en had the rumor been true, concerning her and Krastochilliam—”

“’Twas rumor only.” Zarbochedronn’s voice was flat as the strike of a hammer on rock. “The Steward knew then what was due the dignity of his house.” He stepped back, to let John bend nearly double to examine the terrible stains which had soaked through the rugs to the wooden floor. “Would he recalled it more recently.”

“Was there scandal, then?” John scribbled notes to himself on the wad of paper which never left his doublet, and followed the Wise Ones from the house again, pulling his shawl closer around his shoulders.

“And nothing worthy,” growled the Blue-Haired One, “of the notice of people of dignity.”

He quickened his stride, as if to out-walk the discussion, but John, two and a half feet taller and far longer of leg, kept up with him easily.

“Well, it wasn’t a demon, anyways,” said John cheerfully. “And it can’t have been anythin’ natural, like a cave-grue or a skelk – floors would’ve been scratched for one thing, an’ for another somebody round here would’ve seen it, or smelt it anyways.” He gestured about him at the forests of stalagmites, the graceful frozen waterfalls of flowstone and alabaster, half-concealed in the lamplit darkness of that echoing space. “Did somebody try to wash away the blood?”

“The rugs were soaked in it,” returned Captain Brabishanjo impatiently. “There are vermin in the deep caves – blood-maggots and white glunches – and the smell of decay bringeth them forth in swarms. But none hath tried to wash out the stains, once the rugs were gone.” His black brows pulled down sharply over his huge, round, golden eyes, but whatever he might have surmised was interrupted by their arrival at the platform at the far end of the cavern, where the great water-powered carrier-chain grumbled its way down into the deeper levels of the realm of the gnomes.

John had heard of the Great Chain, which bore small carts along the tunnels, swiftly, to the inner mazes of the Deep. Though he’d seen stranger things in the Hells of the demons, and in the worlds that lay beyond them, still it filled him with delight. He made a mental note to look for mention of it in the Royal Archive at Bel: how and when it had been constructed, and how far it reached. It was a long way to the lower cavern of the Second Deep, and he now understood why gnomes had a reputation as tireless walkers.

“What was this scandal about, then?” he asked Brabishanjo, who shared the cart with himself, Periozames, and the Blue-Haired One, the other Wise Ones and the guards filling the next several of the train. “If it happened at all—”

“Idle talk,” sniffed Zarbochedronn, but the Captain replied, stroking his black beard.

“The Steward had to pay a great deal to the family of the Widow Vashwedtha, when rumor spread of his affair with her. She was betrothed then to a cousin of the House Jopellon of the Deep of Wyldoom, and the match was broken off. Whether the affair was truth or not, the lady’s reputation suffered, and that of the Steward also, for of course ‘twas no question of his wedding – e’en for a short time and for respectability’s sake – the daughter of a paper-maker. But ‘twas two years ago.” Brabishanjo’s golden eyes gleamed thoughtfully beneath those inky brows.

“And ‘twas not,” added the Wise One drily, “as if the lady’s reputation had not suffered ere that. Or since.”

John opened his mouth to speak his next thought, then looked back at the Wise Ones in the cart behind them: bulging pale eyes, flattened cheekbones marked with the tattoos of power, white hair and long white beards and ringed and jeweled fingers, nail-guards glinting softly with gold in the dim aura of their witchlight.

And closed it with his thought unspoken.

Not this far below the ground, he thought. An’ me not knowin’ the way out.

*

The house of the Steward of the Second Deep was a dozen times the size of that of the Widow Vashwedtha of dubious reputation, though John noticed, when frightened servants showed them into its great hall, that the carven furniture there also bore the inlaid mark of the flame and three stars.

The garden in which the Lady Anathagantes had been slain was a sort of dell, occupying a portion of the small, beautiful cavern that was the Steward’s sole property. The garden held neither flowers nor trees, but was rather a fairyland of intricate curtains of alabaster, stalagmites and stalactites that joined in a lacy barring of delicate pillars. Thickets of glass-fragile helicite half-hid flowstone terraces, which spiraled down to a bottomless black well. A few feet from the edge of these terraces, the great dark stain of the murdered lady’s blood had soaked into the porous limestone.

“We can’t look at it,” whispered Sellymanjes, the second of the Steward’s three grown daughters. “Zurkymella and I – we used to love walking in the gardens. We three…”

She shook her head, and John, looking down into her face, saw terror in her pale-green eyes. “I… I’m not sure we ever will go there again.”

“Will you tell me of it?” He lowered his voice, and taking the little gnome-lady’s elbow, led her into one of the smaller chambers that opened off the hall in which the Wise Ones sat with Krastochilliam. The Steward, a stocky and enormously wrinkled gnome with vast quantities of gray hair elaborately braided, looked little better than the pale and haggard Zarbochedronn, and he eyed John with distaste, as if the Wise Ones had somehow defrauded him. “What was the time, where were you, where was your father? What you heard, what you saw?”

John was aware of the gnomish mages’ eyes on his back – and the Steward’s as well – as he led Sellymanjes away from them, and half-expected Captain Brabishanjo to call him back into the main hall.

He was aware, too, of the lady’s cautious glance back into the hall behind them, and the way she led him to the farthest corner of the small chamber’s carved depths.

“’Twas late in the night,” she said. “Our father, and the Lady Nezbardina, had retired to sleep.” Her wide mouth flexed a little as she spoke the name of her step-mother, as if she’d bitten into rotten fruit. “Our step-mother…”

“How long since your father wed?”

“Four months.” Her voice, sweet as a child’s whisper, sank lower still. “We begged him, my sisters and I, to choose any other lady for his wife, if he must needs replace our poor mother in his bed. The lady is barely a year older than Anathagantes, and hath a son of her dead husband, a poisonous brat, spoilt and overbearing. She hath, as well, the name of a wanton, a spendthrift who has always managed to find a lover or husband to pay her debts for her, and buy her trinkets and toys. But my father would hear nothing against her. None will hear aught against Nezbardina the Beautiful, when they have been in her presence, and under the spell of her charm. For ‘tis a spell,” she added bitterly. “No lady of the Seven Deeps is more fair, and my father said – to us, to his daughters! – that all we had heard of her was the lies of the envious, and that we must come to love her, as he did.”

She shivered again, and looked around her, at the traces and fragments of Zarbochedronn’s runes of protection, still scribbled on the door-frames and floors.

“This is why Anathagantes did walk in the garden that night,” she went on after a moment, “when all the Deep lay in slumber. ‘Twas our mother’s garden. The lady Nezbardina took it for her own, and our father forbade it to us, that she alone – and her brat of a son! – might have the joy of it. When she and the lad went to bed, we who had grown up in that garden would walk there, in memory of our mother, and of the joy we had known on its paths.”

“Were you with her that night, then?”

“Earlier,” she said, “aye. We returned to the house, Zurkymella and I, and lay reading in our bed – when The Beautiful One came she demanded of our father the chamber that had been Anathagantes’s, the finest in the house, and so all our chambers were moved, and my sister and I put in together. Anathagantes…”

She swallowed, and her breath caught on a sob. Framed in silky hair the hue of celery, her round, thick face was haggard with nights of sleepless listening.

“Zurkymella woke,” she continued after a moment. “She – Zurkymella –was ever closest in her heart to Anathagantes. She’d fallen asleep whilst yet I read, and woke up crying our sister’s name. ‘Twas not five minutes after that, that we heard Anathagantes scream.”

“What of your father?” asked John. “An’ his servant that was killed?”

“’Twas Llorykon,” whispered the gnome-lady. “Porter of the door that looketh out onto the garden. He’d been on duty when Anathagantes was… when it happened.” The white showed all around the pale-green iris of her eye, and she shivered, though the room was warm with the soft heat of the hypocaust below the floor. “Two nights later, ‘twixt midnight and morning, we were waked by his scream, and found him on the garden pathway, a few feet from the open door of the house. Like Anathagantes, he had been most savagely mutilated where he lay.”

“An’ what of this rumor I’ve heard,” he asked, as gently as one could ask such a thing, “concernin’ your da’ an’ this Widow on the First Deep that was killed? Did you – or your sister – ever meet her?”

Sellymanjes looked quickly away from him, and her wide mouth tightened to a thin line. “A woman of the First Deep?” She collected herself swiftly after that first incredulous reaction and added, “No. Never. And ‘twas all lies and rumor, to get money out of my father. Her family are tunnel-rats.”

He was doin’ her, all right, reflected John, returning to the hall where the Steward and the Wise Ones awaited him. But why come after him two years later, if the affair was over? Why come after his daughter?

Krastochilliam’s account added little to what Sevacandrozani had told him already. The dim night-lights that had burned in his chamber had been doused, when he was jerked from his slumber by the splintering of the door-bolt. He had heard the rustle of something passing close to him, following the circle of protective sigils Zarbochedronn had drawn around the bed. “Ere I slept, I saw them,” he whispered, his huge orange eyes shifting with dread. “Like a chain of dim light, right around the bed. They were gone, snuffed out, as the lamps had been. I could smell it, hear the drip of water—”

“Water?”

“It came through the gardens,” explained Brabishanjo. “Water falls there perpetually, and trickles across the paths. Puddles and dribbles of water were all around the Lady Anathagantes’s body, and that of the porter.”

John opened his mouth to ask, again, an obvious question, but again his eyes went to the faces of the Wise Ones – flat-nosed, thick, pop-eyed in their long swirls of beard and hair – and he said only, “Oh, aye? And the servants heard nothing? Nor you ladies?”

The two daughters shook their heads. John was conscious, again, of the glances that the Wise Ones traded behind his back. Of the sweet, treble whisper in their own tongues that they exchanged as Zarbochedronn took him by the elbow and led him down the corridor to Krastochilliam’s chamber, Captain Brabishanjo following behind.

*

The bedchamber itself told him little that he hadn’t learned at the house of the widow Vashwedtha. The bed stood in the midst of the room; the rugs had all been rolled back, so that sigils of protection could be drawn around it on the wooden floor. This floor – like the rest of the house – was raised a little above the underlying stone for warmth, and John felt the comforting whisper of heated air rising through the oak planks from the hypocaust beneath.

“Can I get into the hypocaust, then?” he asked, a little surprised that gnomes would be uncomfortable in the damp cold beneath the earth.

“I see no need for thee to do so,” returned the Blue-Haired One. “Its only entrance is outside the house, and the thing undoubtedly entered the chamber through the door.” He nodded toward the broken door-bolt, white oak, and as thick as John’s thumb. “As thou canst see,” he went on, pointing to the glass-smooth boards, “water dribbled all across the spell-circle here, so that the signs themselves, which no gnome nor human should have been able to cross, were eaten away. ‘Twas as if this thing leached power from them. And from me,” he added quietly, and crossed to one of the lamps, a wick set in a sort of oil that had been drawn from the rocks, rather than the candles one found in the dwellings of humankind. He stood for a moment, staring at the flame.

It snuffed to nothing. A thin line of white smoke curled into the soft-glimmering gloom of the lamplit chamber.

Zarbochedronn stared at the wick for (John counted) the count of seventy, before a pinprick of flame sparked to life at its tip. The old gnome relaxed a little, seemingly comforted by this proof that his powers were slowly returning.

“What’s this sound like to you, then?” John lowered his voice, and cast a quick glance toward the door, outside of which the Captain stood guard. “Anythin’ familiar about it?” And I’d better not be askin’ the wrong person about this…

“I think—” The Wise One’s azure brows knit as he sifted through the memory of all the names, all the spells, all the lore that the mageborn must study, to harness and channel their powers. “There are things about it…”

John touched his lips for silence, opened the door for a moment and examined the vestibule side of it. Unmarked, as if pressure had been applied with steady power rather than a sharp blow. The small vestibule contained little more than a chair and a shelf of books, and the rugs had been turned back here as well. Sigils of protection showed in the corners, where they hadn’t been wiped away.

“Was there water in here, too?”

“Aye, a little,” replied Captain Brabishanjo. “Servants wiped down the floors this morning, while word was sent to my lord king.”

“Tracks, or just dribbles?”

The guard’s yellow eyes narrowed with thought, and he said, “Drips only. Smeared, like as if a garment had been dragged over them.”

John thanked him, and closed the door again, and made a note of this, as he had of Sellymanjes’s tale, and of what he’d found in that half-stripped nursery in the First Deep.

As he put the notes away, Zarbochedronn spoke, his voice doubtful: “’Twas not the lore of my master, Dragonsbane, nor that which I have pursued. Yet something someone said to me, years ago now… I will ask among the Wise—”

“I’d really rather you didn’t do that.” John laid a hand on the puffed and padded shoulder, as the gnome would have passed him to the door. “I look at it this way,” he explained. “The Lady Anathagantes, an’ her father’s – friend, or former friend – an’ whoever else happened to get in this thing’s way, were killed by somethin’ summoned up by a mage.” He expected the Head of the Council of the Wise One’s to snap a denial, but Zarbochedronn said nothing, though his sapphire eyes burned with some unspoken thought.

“Now, either one of the Wise Ones had a down on these ladies – an’ it sounds like, Krastochilliam besides, because the thing’s come back here twice – or somebody else who hated ‘em hired one of your lot to do their dirty work for ‘em. In either case, late as it is – an’ it must be long after midnight – I’m goin’ to be spendin’ the night here in the Deep. If any one of ‘em out there—” He nodded in the direction of the hall where the Wise Ones sat with the Steward and his daughters, “—even starts to think I’m askin’ questions like this… it’s my life. An’ maybe yours, if it still takes you seventy seconds to light a candle… Always assumin’,” he added quietly, “that you ain’t lyin’ about all this, an’ it’s really you.”

Zarbochedronn’s thick moustaches lifted a little with his wry smile. “It isn’t me,” he said.

“That’s a load off me mind,” said John, expressionless, which made the gnome’s smile widen.

*

As Zarbochedronn had said, the only way into the hypocaust was from outside. John crawled on his elbows past the furnace and the wood-stores, to the place where slivers of lamplight, shining through the floor-boards above him, marked where the bedroom rugs had been taken up. There was water down there, which had dripped through the floor the previous night, and it held no smell of demons. Only a cold, sour pong, almost metallic, like very deep water which has not stirred in a thousand years.

He soaked a corner of his shawl in it – with mental apologies to the Lady Periozames, whose property it was – and crawled forth again dirty and covered with soot, to follow Zarbochedronn and the Captain once more into the stone garden, to see the place where the porter had been found. And indeed, John observed, there were a dozen streams trickling down among the pools and craters, through which the night attacker could have walked.

But none smelled like the water he’d found beneath the house.

Taking the Wise One a little aside, he offered him the wet silk to sniff, and asked quietly, “Whatever it is, it comes up from deep water. I’m guessin’ it doesn’t materialize fully ‘til it’s near its prey. Leastwise, the rugs in the corridor, an’ in that parlor that opens into the garden, weren’t wet, nor the rugs anywhere in Vashweda’s house, except in the room where she was killed. The blood-stains on the floor of that room were thin – watered – where they’d soaked through the rugs. It couldn’t’ve come up from that pool in the garden, could it?” He nodded toward the black well, beside which the Lady Anathagantes had been found. “It looks gie bottomless.”

“Nay. A mark of some kind – a circle of summoning, and of protection – must needs have been writ there, to call forth a wight from deep water.” He frowned again, berry-blue eyes gazing into distance, as if his mind chased a thought. Then he lost it, and shook his head. “E’en were the marks scrubbed out, trace of the magic would remain, and Anathagantes would have felt them, when she passed by the place.”

“Felt them?”

The old gnome nodded. “Aye, Dragonsbane, the Lady Anathagantes was a pupil of the Lady Taseldwyn. Had she… had this not befallen—” His heavy brow creased with a weary grief. “—I think she would have grown to a mage of considerable skill. Myself, I think ‘tis why Taseldwyn feared that this creature was of the Hellspawn. Anathagantes had power enough, even with but six months’ tutelage, to turn aside such a thing as a fetch or a grue. She may even have feared ‘twas as you said – that the Lady was killed by one of the Wise.”

He sighed heavily. “As you have drawn me to fear that you are right. Yet I cannot believe one of the Wise would have stooped to take payment—”

From everything he had learned of gnomes, John could believe it – easily. It surprised him, in fact, to hear one of that treasure-hoarding people lament the almost-universal trait of gnomish thirst for wealth. But he said, “Payment isn’t the only reason someone’d go against their teachin’ – their deepest instincts, even. There’s blackmail, an’ jealousy, an’ the conviction that your actions are right.”

He glanced back in the direction of the house, where the lamps were being put out. Witchlight flickered around its doors, glittering in the crystals that sprinkled those huge columns of fluted limestone, as if the sulfur-hued rock had been sprinkled with salt.

“An’ though I can’t see what connection Anathagantes would’ve had with this Vashwedtha bird – other’n the rumors about her father – Would any of the Wise have seen her as a threat? Or seen her father, or the widow? Or,” he went on, as the gnome mage shook his head, “would any of the Wise have seen Taseldwyn as a threat?”

“Ridiculous!”

Knowing the gnome-witch’s kindly nature, John completely agreed, but persisted. “You know it’s nonsense, and I know it – but is there jealousy within the Wise? Some hatred there that’d make her, an’ her pupil, targets?”

“It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard!”

“You rule a couple of villages in the middle of nowhere for awhile, if you want to hear absurd things,” remarked John wryly. “I take it any one of the Wise would be able to summon… something…”

“The Lady Taseldwyn was the only one who made a great study of wights,” replied Zarbochedronn slowly. “There are other creatures in the dark places of the world – shuggoths, and skelks, and the great cave-rats that swim in the underwater pools – and these can be called forth by means of spells.” Again, he shook his head, and the distant witch-light sparkled in the gold ornaments of his beard. “Yet ‘tis clear the creature can pass through spells of protection, and as you said, left no water save when near its prey. There are several among the Wise…”

He, too, looked back toward the house. Then he clapped John firmly on the arm, and said, “Fear not. Of this I shall not speak; not to them, not to any. You sleep here tonight, Dragonsbane?”

“They’ve put me up in that guest-house on the other side of the garden.” John gestured in the direction of the little structure, barely to be seen among the pillars and the glistening hedges of helicite. “An’ I hope they’ve left me somethin’ to eat there, since I didn’t get any dinner nor lunch either… You wouldn’t happen to know who’ll get old Krasto’s property, an’ his shares in the North Mines an’ all that, if anythin’ should happen to him, would you?”

“I know not,” said the gnome. “By custom, unless a gnome will it otherwise by written testament, property is divided, with half going to wife or husband outright, and the other half divided amongst the family. Yet many there are, who dispose of their goods differently, when widowed, or re-married, or to reward those not of their blood who have done them service.”

“Y’wouldn’t know if Krasto’s made this kind of disposition to Nezbardina, would you?”

The blue eyes glinted. “I know not. Yet t’would not surprise me, did he leave her the whole of his goods. The first husband of Nezbardina the Beautiful did so, though by that time – the way she wastes riches – ‘twas little enough left of his goods, they say. Her beauty is as a spell, laid on all who look upon her.”

“Where is she, then?” inquired John. “An’ more to the point, where was she last night?”

“She is in Deeping. She fled there when the Lady Anathagantes was killed, and dwells in the house of her brother there. In the morning she shall be sent for.

And with any luck, reflected John, as he climbed the steep windings of the path that led to the little guest-house, Jen’ll be here tomorrow…

An’ I’ll be gie curious to see what Nezbardina the Beautiful’s got to say for herself.

The night, he guessed, was far advanced. In the great black skies above Nast Wall, the waxing moon would be sinking. Most of the lamps in the garden had gone out, and only a thread of gold shone ahead of him, where the guest-house stood on the far side of the pool. Looking back, he could see the witch-light around the Steward’s house, bobbing away in the direction of the great artery-tunnel that led to the Third Deep. Beyond that, in the utter, terrifying blackness of the great cavern, tiny spots of firefly light crawled around the cluster of cottages where the Steward’s servants lived.

The silence was absolute, and frightening. When a cat slipped by, round gold eyes flashing in the reflected gleam, John nearly jumped, though the next instant he wondered, What do they eat down here?

Fish in the pools?

Well, the gnomes bring down food from the surface, an’ where there’s food, there’s bound to be rats an’ mice…

Movement to his left, and his instincts told him this wasn’t a cat. Had he not been gazing for a long time into darkness, John didn’t think he’d have seen anything at all. A flicker of reflected light from the guest-house door caught threads of pale gold, and a moment later he saw her. Tiny, like all the gnomes, but beautiful; a fragile feminine shape wrapped in wraith-like gray, hair like tumbled electrum. Delicate features and a mouth like a rosebud. Only her hands, clutching the whispering gray garment around the slender shoulders, betrayed kinship with the gnomes by their size, but even these were exquisitely shaped, long and white as lacemakers’ spindles.

Without the slightest doubt who he was looking at, John moved closer, keeping behind the crystal hedge of the helicites. But his despite all his care, his foot must have crunched the gravel, for she turned dark eyes upon him. Stepping swiftly from her path she climbed towards him, holding out her hand, and her dark eyes were sweet as unremembered dreams.

Knowing there was nothing for it, John stepped into the open: “Lookin’ for someone, luv?”

She hesitated, a slight pucker tugging butterfly-wing brows. Then she advanced, and stretched out her hand.

The sudden flash of lantern-light from the direction of the house made the crystal straws of the hedge sparkle like frost. Swift as a startled deer she turned and fled. “Here!” called out John, and sprang after her. He caught sight of that apricot cloud of curls far up among the rocks, and scrambled in her wake, boots slipping in the thousand trickles of springs that threaded among the knobby clusters of cave-coral. She was light, and must have known the ground well, for he saw no mark of her feet. But the only possible path up the sharp slope of the cavern side ended in a black little rift nearly hidden among the twisting folds of an alabaster curtain.

A breath of cold brought him the whisper of metallic sourness, as of deep water that has never stirred.

The topaz gleam shone far down behind him among the columns of the Steward’s garden; he thought he made out the stooped form of Zarbochedronn. Scrambling, sliding, skidding again in those thousand streams, John was dripping wet and slightly bloody-handed from scrapes and falls when he finally reached the place again.

“What was’t?” asked the Wise One. “Seest thou aught?”

John opened his mouth to reply – surely there couldn’t have been two gnome ladies that beautiful – then closed it. Though he was inclined to trust Zarbochedronn, he remembered the old gnome’s disdain for the luckless widow Vashwedtha, and the sour glint in his eyes when he’d spoken of the Beautiful One.

And having, as he’d said, spent years governing the small community of Winterlands villages, he knew the deadly effects of rumor and gossip.

So he said only, “I thought there was somethin’ up there, but found no trace of anythin’. Where’s that little tunnel up there go, then?”

“Tunnel?” The old gnome shook his head. “I know of no tunnel. But in that direction lieth the North Mine – the ancient diggings, long disused. Perchance thou didst see one of the mine’s ventilation shafts?”

“Perhance,” said John thoughtfully. And then, with a glance at the witchlight that still glowed halfway along the way that led to the Third Deep, “You came back lookin’ for me, m’lord?”

“Aye.” Zarbochedronn set down his lantern. At the reminder that the old gnome was still obviously unable to summon witchlight – and must be as exhausted as John was himself – John guided him to a seat carved of the cream-yellow limestone at the side of the path, and sat beside him.

“It seemed to me, Dragonsbane, when we did speak of wights before the door of Krastochilliam’s house, that I recalled aught… they are not my study, understand, and ‘tis long since I read the catalogs that list them – that list the sorcerers (for Wise Ones I will not call them) who summoned such creatures into being. Yet I recalled the Lady Taseldwyn, years ago now, speaking of one of the ancient sorcerers – Firienfel the Dark? Reschar Bone-Singer? – who wrought such a creature… I do not remember the circumstance of the thing.

“But the Hag-Wight was called out of deep water, that much I do know – a deformed and hideous thing, and death to any that stayed it from its target. And I recall the Lady saying, that such things can draw power from the spells that are used against them, as well as from the power of their maker. The more powerful the mage, the greater the resistance of the wight to spells turned against it.”

“Deep water,” said John thoughtfully, and fingered the still-wet fringes of the shawl over his shoulders. “You said you’d be able to read who called it, from the circles an’ things he drew… Could a mage call up a wight from a distance? Like, stand in his own chamber, or in some hidden place, or clear up in Deeping for that matter, an’ draw circles on the floor an’ burn the right powders, an’ the wight’d come out of its pool or cave, an’ go after whoever it’s supposed to go after…”

“No.” This time there was nothing of contempt, or of a high-born gnome’s scorn for gossip and rumor, in the firm shake of his head. “The making of a wight is a delicate and tricky business. E’en more so, the summoning of one made by another. Wights – unlike golems, or fetches – are not mindless. But their minds are only shards – fragments – of the minds of the living souls that once they were. For this reason they are stronger, but the instructions given them, tangled and twisted within the spells of summoning – these must be exact. It taketh great skill, and great power, to summon, and to use, a wight, particularly a wight of this power. I would judge that the sorcerer who called the Hag-Wight – if indeed ‘tis she – did so beside the pool where the Wight herself dwells.”

“An’ you’ve no idea where that might be?”

“None. Surely, ‘twill be writ in the Lady Taseldwyn’s books.”

“A job for me tomorrow, then,” sighed John. “But we may beat Jen to the quarry yet, m’lord, magic or no, if the marks by that pool will tell you which of your Council whistled the thing up out of the water.”

“But why any of the Council—” began the old mage, shaking his head in distress.

“Huntin’ a killer, you can’t go by why,” said John, feeling a kind of pity for the disillusioned, weary anger in the gnome’s voice. “It may point you in the right direction, but I’ve governed people an’ sat judgment on their court-cases an’ I’ve heard tales that no ballad-maker would touch for fear of bein’ disbelieved. There’s a million tom-fool whys in the world, an’ it comes down to how. Only one person could have drawn the marks that summoned this thing, whatever it is… God knows for what reason. We find the marks, we find the summoner. Then we can ask why.”

*

John spent most of the following day digging through Miss Mab’s library. Though Zarbochedronn assisted him in his quest, it yielded him little. His command of gnomish script was limited: indeed, the runes and letters of the gnomes changed not only from Deep to Deep, but from family to family, and altered greatly over time. Even working together, they found no volume, among the scrolls and codexes that stacked the shelves of the tiny rock-cut hole where the Wise One lived, that cataloged wights and those who had summoned them over the ages.

With the Blue-Haired One he also visited the place where Miss Mab – the Lady Taseldwyn – had been found, unconscious, bleeding, and cold as death, on the second night after the new moon. It was, as Sevacandrozani had said, at a hub of passageways just within the North Mines, several miles – by twisting tunnel – from where the mine opened into the main cavern system of the Second Deep. The remains of Mab’s spell-circle still marked the floor, nearly eradicated now by the passage of many feet.

“These northern delvings are the oldest in the Deep,” the old gnome told him, standing with arms folded at his side. “They follow the gold-seams deepest into the earth.” He looked better today, and seemed able, at least, to summon witch-light to illumine their search, though John noticed he still carried a lantern, in case weariness overcame him. “Parts indeed were closed off, when ‘twas found grues were breeding in them, coming in from none knew where. Ragoshar – who with the Lady Periozames wove the spells about the Steward’s bed and house last night – hath made a specialty of the lore of the North Mines, and knoweth their every tunnel and shaft.”

“An’ I take it the spells were successful last night? I didn’t hear a peep…”

“No wight or evil entered the house, nor e’en approached, so far as can be told. Yet the Steward still walks in dread, though he hath sent for his wife, and his daughters are in pitiable state of fear.”

“Can’t say I blame ‘em.” John looked down again at the Lady Taseldwyn’s half-eradicated rune-circles on the tunnel floor, smeared with the stains of her blood.

Especially as there’s no tellin’ whether the spells worked, or whether the Hag-Wight didn’t just have other fish to fry last night…

Taseldwyn herself still lay in deep stupor, in the Grotto of Healing in the Yellow Halls. When John and Zarbochedronn went there, they found the Lady Periozames and another of the Wise Ones – a young and relatively slender gnome called Ekrekodare – at her side, weaving sigils and charms now not merely to bring her to consciousness, but to keep the life within her tiny body.

“She is cold,” whispered the younger gnome, as John stood looking down at that withered little form among the pillows. “’Tis as if the thing that drew forth the magic from the spells of her protection, draweth it still, and with it the warmth of her life.”

John glanced across the bed at Zarbochedronn, who was quietly in conference with Periozames; then at the dark archway that led further into the other chambers of the grotto. Shadow moved there. The gleam of pale, bulging gnome-eyes.

He shivered. Was it Mab who was the target after all, an’ the wight just came after Anath because she was her student? Or was it t’other way round?

An’ where does the poor widow come into it?

An’ why does it keep goin’ back to the house of the Steward?

When the guard captain Brabishanjo came, to lead him – by what he was certain were circuitous routes – back to the guest-house in the Second Deep, he was made again uneasily aware that he had not the slightest idea how to get out of the Deep of Ylferdun.

That he was completely at the mercy of the gnomes.

But the next things to do, obviously – he thought as he brought his notes on the hunt up to date in the guest-house – was to follow the ventilation tunnel itself (not something he wanted to do without Jenny at his side) and to have a look around the Lady Anathagantes’s room. With this in mind he crossed through the lamplit crystal garden, and descended its stairs and terraces to the house of Krastochilliam. He found the lamps there still lit, though the hour was again growing late, and two more of the Wise Ones were renewing the marks of protection about the Steward’s bed, and across the thresholds of his doors.

“True, the spells of protection worked last night,” grumbled the Steward in his resonant alto voice. (How well did he sleep last night? John wondered). “Yet how can I be sure they will do so tonight, or tomorrow?”

John noticed the gray-haired gnome was dressed in what had to be his best – crimson velvet so dagged and embroidered that he resembled nothing so much as an ambulatory rose that had been dipped in gold sequins – and that he kept glancing at the great ivory-gold-and-lapis clock in the hall, and at the doors, as if he expected someone’s arrival. His daughters, likewise adorned, with their braided hair wired two feet high, looked pale and shaken under their paint.

Krastochilliam knew nothing of any jealousy or enmity towards his eldest daughter among the Wise Ones, or indeed towards her mentor. “She spoke naught of any such thing to me.” He stroked for a time the long gray braids of his mustache, and John was conscious of the glance Sellymanjes traded with Zurkymella then. Conscious of the sickened fear in their eyes. “But in truth,” went on the Steward after a time, “’twas only a six-month since my daughter entered into her studies in earnest, and in that time I have been… much taken with other matters.”

He avoided the eyes of the two young ladies as he said it, and when he left the hall where they sat – the hall in which the Wise Ones had sat yesterday, though John found the count of days below the ground rather disorienting – Sellymanjes murmured, “Taken with that slut Nezbardina, he means!” Her heavily-jeweled hands twitched with nervousness. “No time hath he had for any of us, not the four-month since she entered this household, not the year that he hath been in her thrall.”

A servant in the dining-chamber near-by dropped what sounded like a plate, and cursed as only gnomes can curse, and Zurkymella whirled about in terror, her hand going to her throat. She turned back the moment she realized what it was, but John saw that both daughters trembled, and when the great clock in the hall struck the hour, both pairs of bulging green eyes flicked from its gold-and-ivory dial to the garden door.

“Our sister’s chamber is locked,” said Sellymanjes, when John asked to search it. “’Twas her custom, since Nezbardina has been in this house.”

“She would go through both of our rooms,” added Zurkymella. “Looking for Mother’s jewelry – which was ours of right, though Father told her she might take of it what she would.”

“Come, Zurkymella.” Sellymanjes took her sister’s hand. And to John, “Await us here. We shall fetch the key, and show you the way.”

They pattered off into the lamp-blazing gloom, and were still gone, when voices came from the garden. A servant exclaimed, and the high, squeaky voice of a gnome-child cried, “May I sleep in my own bed to-night, Mama?”

Krastochilliam swept into the parlor in a great swirl of velvet and bullion, and executed a majestic Jasmine In The Moonlight salaam – with a dozen grace-notes and floreos – as a gnome woman stepped through the garden door. His face aglow with love, the Steward exulted, “Nezbardina!” and held out his hands.

The gnome-lady returned the salaam, with the polished lightness of a dancer.

She was the ugliest gnome-lady John had ever seen. Her broad, flat-boned face gave the impression of having been glued together from the contents of a sack of potatoes. Her hair, the color of bluish-gray clay, was thick and brushy, for all it was braided, pomaded, and twined with enormous pins of gold and cloisonné. Her short, round body was heavily muscled under its flower-like layers of silk and her arms and hands were like those of some powerful beast.

She and Krastochilliam fell into each others’ arms in an ecstasy of nose-rubbing and murmured words.

John turned his eyes from them to the two stocky, green-haired, green-eyed little gnome ladies who stood in the arch of the hallway – their faces transfigured with jealous fury – and thought, I’ve been a fool.

Quietly, he left the house.

Quietly he strode through the garden with its trickling dark streams, and stopped in the guest-house only long enough to take up a lamp, and his sword.

Quietly he climbed the slippery steep terraces to the exquisite tangle of fragile stone curtain that hid the cleft in the rock, into which that strange golden-haired vision of last night had disappeared.

I’ve been a fool.

He thought through what must have happened, as he followed the steep tunnel down.

It was Mab’s special lore: wights, golems, fetches… an’ the sorcerers who called ‘em up to do their dirty-work. Evil mages whose spells rooted in hatred an’ jealousy an’ the fear of losin’ what they thought was theirs by right. What they thought should remain theirs forever.

Of course she’d have a spell or a catalog or a grimoire of some kind. Academic, to her; the record of emotion and wickedness as far from her kindly soul as the beauty men see is from the beauty that calls to the hearts of the gnomes.

Of course Anathagantes would pinch it the minute Mab turned her back.

He wondered if he should have searched Anathagantes’s room before coming here but knew that whatever had been there, the dead lady’s two sisters would have taken away and hidden: ‘We’ll fetch the key’ my arse.

Six months’ trainin’ – no wonder she got it wrong.

He wondered what small cantrip of limitation, or of summoning, that angry, jealous young amateur had mis-applied or neglected, when she’d worked the spells to summon the worst and most powerful wight she could find record of, to destroy the one who had stolen her father’s love. John knew there were pigs on his farm more mageborn than himself, but he had watched his beloved Jenny study and practice and work with magic for over twenty years. Had listened to her as she taught their son. He was well aware how precise an art it was, and how devastating could be the consequences of carelessness or error.

After a skidding descent of a final pitch-dark tube within the rock, he found himself in a wider tunnel littered with miners’ debris – broken baskets, fragments of shoring, dropped hunks of ore. He followed the slope of it downward, and, when it branched, sniffed the air in each separating tunnel. One smelled of rock and dirt and – distantly but disturbingly – of the musky stink of cave-grues. The other, the sour pong of still water that has never seen light.

His heart pounding, John dug in his pocket for a piece of chalk and marked the way, its ceiling so low he had to walk stooped, his boots slipping wetly on the stone underfoot.

I should turn back….

I will when I’ve had a look round the place. When we come back here to deal with this thing, we may not have time to check the lie of the land.

The cavern, when he reached it, was very small, a sort of blow-hole deep beneath the mountain whose steep sides funneled sharply to black water. Edging close, he found the one place where the ground leveled somewhat, and there he found a red silk shawl – gaudily embroidered with the flame and three gems of the Steward’s house – and the scratched remains of a protective circle drawn in iron and salt.

Mab must’ve guessed. Known of Anathagantes’s hatred of her step-mother, an’ missed the grimoire or scroll or book her pupil had lifted.

Guessed somethin’ went wrong with the summoning. Guessed somethin’ hadn’t been completed, when it killed another woman the daughters had been jealous of in the past. Guessed when it was drawn after the father they must have hated as well, for turnin’ his back on them.

He knew he should be angry or disgusted or think, Serves the little bitches right. But the only thing he felt was a deep sadness, and pity for Anathagantes, and Sellymanjes, and Zurkymella, who could not imagine sharing their father’s love.

Jen’ll know what to do…

The lamp in his hand went out.

Turning, he saw her like the faint luminosity of a cave-fungus, a skeletal bluish non-light.

The Water-Hag.

Delicate, slender, golden-haired, standing between him and the only path that led back up from the pool’s brink, reaching out her hand for him.

He flung the lamp at her, fearing to touch her with his sword. Demon-killing runes were written in the blade and she might well draw strength from these. In any case a blade would have no effect on such a creature. He sprang up the rocks to his left and nearly slipped on the wet, slick limestone back down into her arms, leaped and grabbed for hand-holds, foot-holds, anything to get himself around her and onto the path again – Though God knows what I’ll do if I get far enough away that I’m not seein’ by the light she sheds…

She grabbed at his ankle and the touch of her was icy, death numbing his leg to the thigh. He slithered and fell, barely catching himself on the ledge above the pool; rolled out of her way as she sprang down from the rocks like a panther. He dragged himself to his feet and fell again, and when she lunged planted his boot in her chest and shoved her back – the cold of her touch took his breath away.

I’ll never get up the path…

Witchlight flashed white on the rocks above and the Hag-Wight looked up towards it, and he saw her face perfectly calm, as it had been in the garden. Not mask-like, but simply relaxed, as if nothing of this had anything to do with her.

John lunged for the path, staggered but forced his numbed leg to bear him, and the wight sprang past him up the rocks as he heard Jenny’s voice call out, “John—!”

He flung himself and caught the creature around the thighs, yelling as he did so, “Don’t let her touch you!” He was aware, as she turned in his grip, that her gray garment was suddenly soaked with water, her long gold hair dripping – She must shed water when she materializes fully…

Nails like claws raked his face, knocked his spectacles spinning and barely missed his eyes. The cold was like a knife in his chest. His weight dragged her to the ground and he twisted to get away from those tearing hands, without releasing his hold on her. “Jen, run for it!”

Claws gouged his back. Strength like a bear’s flung him backward onto the rocks at the pool’s edge and she dove at him; he caught her wrists as her hands ripped through the black leather of his doublet as if it had been rag, tearing the flesh beneath. The witchlight brightened and past her, through that seaweed cloud of golden hair, he saw Jenny, still high on the rocks, fling something, something small that arced through the gloom and fell into the bottomless black water of the pool with a soft plink.

The wight stepped back from him then, her delicate face turned aside. Her eyes were on the water, and had she been anything resembling a mortal John would have taken that moment of her inattention to spring up and push her into the pool. Hammered, beaten, bleeding as he was he could do nothing but lie on his back on the wet rock, trying to breathe.

She gave neither him, nor Jenny, so much as a glance: not as if she had lost interest in them, but as if they had both ceased to exist. She took a step toward the rock edge, and seemed to collapse on herself, like a fountain when the pipe is cut. A crumpling column of water in which John had the fleeting impression of half-dissolved bones tangled with yellow hair.

The water trickled down over the edge into the pool, and was gone.

*

“Poor child.” Taseldwyn turned over in her stubby hands the brown, brittle volume that Jenny had found, hidden in the chamber of the two younger daughters. With it had been the little mammet of hair and bones that Jenny had flung into the pool, the mammet that Anathagantes had made to conclude the summoning and release the wight. “Poor Anathagantes.”

“Did you guess?” asked John. Zarbochedronn and Periozames, whose skills lay in healing, had restored strength and feeling to his leg, though in truth the numb coldness had been gone even when Jenny had scrambled down the wet rocks to him beside the pool. Taseldwyn, who had struggled to a kind of clouded consciousness under Jenny’s spells – almost in the hour that John had realized that the thing he’d seen in the garden had been the Hag-Wight and not Nezbardina the Beautiful – had waked fully, clear-headed, at the same moment that the wight had returned to the pool. Thus she had been alert when, a few moments later, Jenny had tried to speak to her through her scrying-stone. She it was, who had sent Brabishanjo and his guards to the place, to bring John back to the Second Deep.

After a long moment the old gnome-witch nodded. “Anathagantes had not been with me but two months,” she said, “when her father wed the Beautiful Nezbardina. He had doted upon his daughters. They had been the whole of his world in his grief, as they had been the whole of their mother’s. Such was her anger and her chagrin – for she and her sisters had done everything in their power to prevent the match, as they had argued him out of marrying the Widow Vashwedtha two years before – that for weeks she could not clear her mind to meditate. Every spell she attempted went awry. But she worked like a very demon to focus her mind and her powers, and the trouble seemed to pass. Anger is a perilous thing – heat in the soul is a perilous thing – when one weaves power from the earth and deep water, and the strength of one’s own heart.

“Aye.” She sighed. “Aye, when Anathagantes was killed, ‘twas clear to me that some powerful spell she was weaving had gone amiss. Then when the foreman and workers in the North Mine were killed, upon the same night as the Widow Vashwedtha… Then I sought this book, the Dark Annals of Yl.”

Her stubby fingers stroked the crumbling black leather of its cover.

“An’ there is wasn’t?” John raised his brows, but Miss Mab only shook her head in sadness.

“As thou sayst, There it wasn’t. But I well remembered from it the tale of the Hag-Wight, who had been formed from the bones and hair of a child whose step-mother had treated her with such cruelty – while the father, and the child’s brother, were on a journey to the north – that the child had died. The step-mother threw the child’s body into a well, deep in the North Mine, and on returning, the brother hired a mage to summon a wight, for the father believed his new wife’s tale, that his daughter had died of sickness, and would do nothing. ‘Twas writ in the ancient tongue of House Tcharprexis, but the first wife of Krastochilliam was of that House. Anathagantes knew enough of the old writing, that ‘twas the first of the spell-hands that she studied.”

“Twilkin’ lucky for me—” Through the neck of his shirt John touched the bandages that bound his chest and back, “—Jen happened to turn up the very day I figured out that what I’d seen was the wight, an’ where it had come out from.”

“Lucky nothing.” Jenny shifted in the great carved chair beside the gnome-witch’s bed, and put her arm around John’s waist, where he sat on the chair’s arm beside her. “Don’t you think I scry for sight of you in my crystal, many times each day? I saw you riding to the Deep amid a great company of armed gnomes, with the King at their head, and guessed there had to be trouble of some sort brewing. I started back then.”

John bent down a little (at the cost of a dart of pain in his bandaged back) and kissed the black heavy midnight of his wife’s hair. “I been twilkin’ lucky for years.” He looked back at Miss Mab.

“Then the thing kept comin’ back here—?”

“‘Twas confused,” said the gnome-witch. “The spell was not properly done – not properly concluded. I think ‘twould have killed Krastochilliam himself, for his eldest daughter’s hatred was ‘gainst him as much as her beautiful step-mother.”

John remembered, when they had carried him back to the house of Krastochilliam, that the Lady Nezbardina had kept her head and hadn’t fussed or gone into hysterics when Jenny had told the Steward that it had been his daughter who had summoned the wight – unlike her two surviving step-daughters, who had wailed their confessions in oceans of terrified tears. Sellymanjes and Zurkymella had unhesitatingly poured all blame for the murders upon Anathagantes, which did not adequately explain why they’d hidden the Dark Annals of Yl in their own chamber, after their sister’s death.

“Many wights,” Miss Mab went on, “–and the Hag-Wight of the Water was one such – do not realize their task is done until their summoner releases them. Anathagantes at least knew this, and prepared the mammet which Lady Jenny found with the book and the salt and the vessel of blood, and the other things my poor Anath used to call this thing.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I loved her,” she said. “They call us – the Wise Ones – uncanny, and cold, when we put aside the concerns of family and friends, to follow the hard road of power. ‘Tis a grief to do so, and still greater grief, if we do not.”

*

The following day – before they left the Deep, to return to Bel and thence to take the road again for the Winterlands – John went with Jenny down the windings of the North Mine to the lightless blow-hole where the Hag-Wight’s pool lay. They took the longer route through the active sections of the mine, for the ventilation tunnel through which the wight had climbed to Krastochilliam’s stone garden had been blocked up, and at dinner the previous night Krastochilliam had said that the whole ancient quarter of the Mines would be walled off.

This was one of the few things that he did say. The bluff, sturdy gnome looked shaken and haggard, for he had said good-by to his daughters that day, before sending them off to dwell with their kindred in the Deep of Wyldoom, hundreds of miles away in the Gray Mountains. Nezbardina, glorious in the silk-dagged gaudiness which to the gnomes was good taste, had proved a skilled and charming hostess, and John had noticed that under its incrustation of jeweled rings and cloisonné nail-guards, her left hand was bandaged.

“Nezbardina was kind enough,” said Jenny, “to let me draw blood from her hand to soak the mammet which I cast into the pool. To tell the poor Hag-Wight she had completed her task.”

“Poor Hag-Wight nuthin’,” grumbled John. “I for one don’t have many tears to shed over her.”

Now, picking their way cautiously down the slippery hairpin turns of the path by the glimmer of witchlight, Jenny said, “Wights take shape when a part of a ghost – a part of a soul – is given material being again to accomplish some task. One doesn’t exactly give them instructions. Rather, the summoner weaves a dream for them – for what is left of their minds. They think they’re accomplishing, what is closest to their hearts – usually hatred and revenge. Only when they think it’s done can they rest.”

They reached the tiny space where Anathagantes had scribbled her circles of protection, when first she’d gone down to summon the Hag from the water; scribbled them with a rage in her heart which had transmitted itself to the thing that had slept there, all those centuries in the darkness.

“It is all they can feel,” Jenny went on quietly, standing with her arms folded under her heavy cloak, almost as tiny as the gnomes themselves, her black heavy hair like a second cloak around her shoulders and her blue eyes somber in the witchlight. “As a person obsessed by drink or self-righteousness cannot feel beyond the dark circle of thought that sees only one question, and one answer. They cannot be reasoned with, cannot be spoken to, save in the ritual of the summoning spell. Nothing else remains of their thought. What they are aware of, we do not know.”

John was silent, looking down into the blackness of that stagnant pool in the heart of the earth. Cold seemed to rise up off the water, to breathe on his face the wet, sour smell of depths that had been stirred by no life since the mountains had been born. Fishless, bug-less, sunless. Yet the black water was clear, and the white glow of Jenny’s witch-light penetrated it for a distance. Far down, he thought he could make out something floating, suspended at the edge of sight. Drifting in a cloud of electrum hair, and the gray rags of a gown.

The thought that she might in some fashion be conscious – of something, of anything – was more horrible than he could imagine.

“There’s no way we can free her?” His voice echoed queerly in the toothed ceiling, the frozen spines of the floor.

“None that anyone knows of.”

On the floor around his boots John saw his own blood, dried now among the scrawled sigils of summoning. A tale writ in a tongue unknown.

“So she’ll just go on lyin’ there,” he said softly. “Dreamin’ of whatever it was her step-mum did to her. Dreamin’ maybe, on top of that, of all the spite an’ poison Anathagantes wove into the spells that called her up. Never rottin’, never dyin’…”

“Or it may be that she sleeps,” said Jenny. “Until such time as someone calls her forth again.”

After a long time they turned, and climbed silently back towards the light.

*See – Dragonsbane

**See – Knight of the Demon Queen

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 – The Time of the Dark – Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series – short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way – with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna – in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.