Water Sleeps

A larger and larger crowd piled up behind me. “River,” I growled, “I said you should have these people do something useful. Tobo, get back from there. You want a boulder to fall on your head?”

A voice behind me suggested, “You ought to get more light on it so you can see if you need to do any shoring.”

I turned. “Slink?”

“There were miners in my family.”

“Then you’re as near an expert as we’ve got.”

One-Eye jabbed a thumb at Goblin. “The dwarf here has sapper experience. He helped undermine the walls at Tember.” His face split in an ugly grin.

Goblin squeaked, a definite clue that “Tember” was an episode he did not recall fondly. I did not remember any mention of a Tember in the A

Two of Croaker’s more immediate predecessors, Miller Ladora and Kanwas Scar, had been so lax in their duties that little is known about their time other than what their successors have reconstructed from oral tradition and the memories of survivors. It was during that era that Croaker, Otto and Hagop joined the band. Croaker says little about those days himself.

“Am I to take it, then, that I shouldn’t invest unlimited faith in Goblin’s engineering skills?”

One-Eye cawed like a crow. “As an engineer our bitty buddy makes a wonderful lumberjack. Things fall down wherever he goes.”

Goblin growled like a mastiff issuing a warning.

“See, this here ski

Goblin grumbled, “And about five days later somebody remembered the miners.”

“Somebody was just plain damned lucky he had a friend as good as me to dig him out. The Old Man just wanted to put up a gravestone.”

Goblin growled some more. “Not so. And the real truth is, the tu

“Of course I did, you nitwit. Every chance I get, I try to die just so’s you can’t backstab me no more. You want to be that way? I saved your ass and you want to be that way? Ain’t no fool like an old fool. Bring it on, you hairless little toady frog. I maybe slowed down a step the last couple years but I’m still three steps faster and ten torches brighter than any lily-white-”

“Boys!” I snapped. “Children! We have work to do here.” They must have driven the whole Company crazy when they were young and had the energy to keep it up all the time. “As of this moment, all the slates are clean of anything that happened before I was born. Just open me a hole so I can go see what we have to do next.”

The two wizards did not stop growling and muttering and threatening and trying to sabotage one another in small ways but they did lend their claimed expertise to the effort to open the gap.

82

Once the opening had been expanded enough to use, there was a brief debate about who would use it first. The accord was universal: “Not me.” But when I squatted down to duckwalk forward into the shadows, in hopes I could get a look at what might eat me a few seconds before its jaws snapped shut, several gentlemen turned all noble and chivalrous. I suspect it was significant that two of them, Swan and Suvrin, were not Company brothers.

Goblin grumbled, “All right. All right. Now you’re making us look bad. All of you, get out of the way.” He bustled forward.

He did not have to duck.

I did, just slightly, as I followed him through.

I did not need anyone to be noble or chivalrous or to go in before me.

“There is no God but God,” I muttered. “His Works are Vast and Mysterious.” I was five steps inside and had just bumped into Goblin, who had stopped to stare as well. “I presume that’s the golem demon Shivetya.”

“Or his ugly little brother.”

Murgen had not kept me posted on the golem’s state. At last report it had been just a single earth tremor short of plunging into a bottomless abyss, still nailed to a huge wooden throne by means of a number of silver daggers. I observed, “It appears the plain has been healing itself in here, too.” I eased forward.

There was still a vertiginous abyss. I had to close my eyes momentarily while I regained my equilibrium. Shivetya remained poised over it but the gap clearly was narrower than Murgen had described. In closing, the surface had pushed the wooden throne upward somewhat. Shivetya was no longer in momentary peril of falling. It looked like a few decades would see him lying there with his nose pressed into healed stone, the overturned throne on top of him still.

Willow Swan invited himself to join me. He said, “That thing hasn’t moved since last time.”

I countered, “Thought you couldn’t remember anything.”

“Whatever the short farts did, it seems to be working. I recognize things when I see them.”

Goblin told Swan, “Considering what could still happen if Shivetya starts jumping around, holding still seems like a pretty good idea. Don’t you think?”

“Could you hold still for fifteen years?”

I said, “He’s held still a lot longer than that, Swan. He’s been nailed to that throne for hundreds of years. Or even thousands. He has to have been nailed down since before.

Deceivers fleeing Rhaydreynak came here on their way to other worlds and hid the Books of the Dead.” That observation got me some looks, particularly from Master Santaraksita. I had not yet shared the tales I had gleaned from Murgen. “Else he would’ve stomped them good at the time. They would’ve looked like the kind of thing he was put here to guard against. I think.”

“Who nailed him down?” Goblin asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Might be a handy piece of information. You’d want to keep an eye on a guy who could do that kind of thing.”

“I would,” Swan agreed. He gri

“It’s listening,” I said. I moved along the edge of the abyss several steps, squatted. From there I could see the demon’s eyes. They were open a crack. I could also see that there were three of them instead of two, the third being in the center of the forehead above and between the other two. This point had not come up before, though it was the sort of thing you would expect of a Gu

The oversight became self-explanatory as soon as the demon sensed my scrutiny. The third eye closed and vanished.

I asked Swan, “That throne look like it’s solidly wedged?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering if we could move it without losing it down that crack.”

“I’m no engineer but it looks to me like you’d really have to work at it to dump it down there now. Obviously, it could go. One really stupid move... it’s a hell of a deep hole. But...”

The curious kept piling up behind us. Their chatter was becoming a

“How come you’d want to do that?” One-Eye asked. “Quit shoving, Junior.”