knap

He knew, somehow, that the sword was above him, just as a mole beneath the ground knows which way to dig to reach the surface. In other lucid moments he had worried that perhaps he was grown so sensitive to the sword's song that it was leading him upward to the king's very throne room, where he would be caught and slaughtered just as a mole would be if it dug its way up into the kennels. But even though he had been moving steadily upward, he had started very deep. He felt sure the rise had not been anything so great as he feared. He was also certain that in his roundabout way he was moving ever outward, away from the core of the castle. No, the beautiful, terrifying thing that drew him, the living, singing blade, must be somewhere here beneath the earth, coffined in rock just as he was. And when he found it, he would not be lonely any more. He only had to decide which of these tunnels to follow.... Guthwulf raised his hands and reflexively rubbed at his blind eyes. He felt very weak.

When was the last time he had eaten? What if the woman gave up on him and stopped putting out food? It had been so nice to eat real food.... But if I find the sword, if I have it all to myself, he gloated, I won't care about any of that. He cocked his head. There was a scratching noise just beyond him somewhere, as though something were trapped inside the stone. He had heard that noise before—in fact, he heard it ever more frequently of late—but it was nothing to do with what he sought. The scratching ended, and still he stood in painful indecision before the forking tunnels. Even when he put down stones for markers, it was so easy to become lost, but he was certain that one of these passages led upward to the heart of the song—the crooning, sucking, soul-drowning melody of the Great Sword. He did not want to go the wrong way and spend another endless time trying to find his way back. He was weak with hunger, numb with weariness. He might have stood for an hour or a day. At last, beginning as gently as a dust devil, a wind came tugging at his hair, a puff of breeze from the right-hand turning. Then, a moment later, a flurry of somethings welled up out of the tunnel and floated past him—the spirits that haunted the dark nether-roads. Their voices echoed in his skull, dim and somehow hopeless. ... The Pool. We must seek him at the Pool. He will know what to do ... Sorrow. They have called down the final sorrow ... As the twittering things blew past, blind Guthwulf slowly smiled. Whatever they were, spirits of the dead or bleak products of his own madness, they always came to him out of the depths, from the deepest, oldest parts of the labyrinth.

They came from below... and he wished to climb. He turned and shuffled into the left-hand tunnel. The remains of Naglimund's massive gate had been plugged with rubble, but since it was lower than the surrounding wall and the piles of broken stone offered purchase for climbing feet, it seemed to Count Eolair the logical place for an assault to begin. He had been surprised when the Sithi had concentrated themselves before a blank and undamaged stretch of wall.

He left Maegwin and the contingent of anxious mortal warriors under Isorn's command, then crept up the snowy hillside to join Jiriki and Likimeya in the shell of a broken building a few hundred ells from Naglimund's out-wall. Likimeya gave him a cursory glance, but Jiriki nodded. "It is almost time," the Sitha said. "We have called for the m'yon rashi—the strikers." Eolair stared at the contingent of Sithi before the wall. They had stopped singing, but had not moved away. He wondered why they should risk the arrows of the Norns when whatever their singing was intended for seemed finished. "Strikers? Do you mean battering rams?" Jiriki shook his head, smiling faintly. "We have no history of such things, Count Eolair. I imagine we could devise such an engine, but we decided to fall back on what we know instead." His look darkened. "Or rather, what we learned from the Tinukeda'ya." He gestured. "Look, the m'yon rashi come." A quartet of Sithi were approaching the wall. Although he did not recognize them, Eolair thought they looked no different than the hundreds of other Peaceful Ones camped in Naglimund's shadow. All were slender and golden-skinned. Like most of their fellows, no two seemed quite alike in the color of either their armor or the hair that streamed from beneath their helms; the m'yon rashi gleamed against the snow like misplaced tropical birds. The only difference the count could see between these and any other of Jiriki's people was that each bore a dark staff long as a walking-stick. These staffs were of the same odd gray-black stuff as Jiriki's sword Indreju; each was knobbed with a globe of some blue crystalline stone. Jiriki turned from the Hernystirman and called out an order. His mother rose from her crouch and added words of her own. A contingent of Sithi archers moved up until they surrounded the group near the walls.

The bowmen nocked arrows and drew, then froze in place, eyes scanning the empty walls. The leader of the m'yon rashi, a female Sitha with grass-green hair and armor of a slightly deeper green, lifted her stick and slowly swung it toward the wall as if she forced it against the flowing current of a river. When the blue gem struck, all the m'yon rashi chanted a single loud syllable. Eolair felt a tremor in his bones, as though a tremendous weight had struck the ground nearby. For a moment the earth seemed to shift beneath him. "What?.." he gasped, struggling to find his balance. Before him, Jiriki raised a hand for silence. The other three Sithi stepped forward to join the woman in green. As they all chanted, each in turn brought his staff forward to strike in a rough triangle around the first; each syrup-slow impact reverberated through the earth and up through the feet of Eolair and the other observers. The Count of Nad Mullach stared. For a dozen ells up and down the wall from where the m'yon rashi stood, the snow slid off the stones. Around the jeweled heads of the four staffs, Eolair saw that the stone had turned a lighter shade of gray, as though it had sickened somehow—or as though it were covered with a web of fine cracks. Now the Sithi lifted their striking-rods away from the wall. Their chanting grew louder. The leader struck again, a little more swiftly this time. The silent thunder of her blow rolled through the icy ground. The rest followed suit, each strike emphasized by a loudly chanted word. As they struck for the third time, bits of stone began to shiver loose from the top of the high wall, falling down to vanish into the high snow. The count could not contain his astonishment. "I have never seen the like!" Jiriki turned, his high-boned face serene. "You should go back to your folk. It will be only a moment more and they should be ready." Eolair could not take his eyes from the strange spectacle. He walked backward down the hill, steadying himself with his arms outstretched whenever the shifting ground threatened to topple him from his feet. At the fourth impact, a great section of the wall crumbled and fell inward, leaving a hole at the top that looked as though some huge creature had taken a bite from it. Eolair at last realized the imminence of what Jiriki had told him and hurried the rest of the way down to Isorn and the waiting Hernystiri.