He was not there. There was not even a ripple in the water or a footprint from his waders. Whoever the man was, he was clearly a very powerful magic user. Blade had not even felt the power it must have taken to vanish like that. Meanwhile Reville was towing Sukey along the lakeshore to the spit. Both of them were pink and happy and full of energy. “Up there to that low part then?” Reville said to Blade.

“Did you see anyone?” Blade asked.

“No,” said Sukey. “But that’s where you were pointing, wasn’t it? You know, you look a lot younger without your beard.”

She and Reville set off at a joyous run up the hill. Blade plodded after, still wondering about that fisherman. But before long he was thinking more about the energy being in love seemed to give to Sukey and Reville. The hill was not only steep but covered with the kind of mountain grass that is nearly as slippery as ice, but they were at the top before Blade was two-thirds of the way up. He was thinking that being in love might just be worth trying when Reville threw himself flat and made urgent motions to Sukey to do the same. Blade came up the rest of the way on his hands and knees.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Reville motioned him to stop talking and crawl to look over the top of the hill. Blade wormed his way there, expecting to find the road again and the kidnappers standing in it, waiting.

He saw the road, certainly. It curled around beneath him and led into a messy sort of hole in the mountainside, below and to the right. He saw men in black armor, too, but not the ones who had carried off Sukey. These had on armor so old that it had mostly gone back to brownish black leather. Blade only recognized it as soldier wear from the style. These men—ten or so of them—had nasty-looking whips with which they were threatening three groups of ragged, skinny people who were bowed down and straining to push three large covered metal trucks along three lengths of metal rails. Each set of rails came out of one of three more messy holes in the mountain, then ran for a hundred yards before it just stopped. Blade puzzled about this. He also puzzled about why the struggling people did not just turn on the men with whips, until he saw they were chained.

As he saw the chains, the puzzle about the rails was solved, too. Each truck had now struggled its way to the very end of the rails and stopped. A cheerful figure in a billowing robe sauntered up to stand level with them, ran a hand through his gray curls, and then made the sort of weary, practiced gesture that Blade knew rather well. Three curious slits appeared in front of each truck. They seemed to be slits in the very nature of things, because they ran through the moors, mountains, and the road and yet seemed to float on top of the landscape at the same time. The slits writhed about a bit, settled, and became openings into somewhere else. Blade peered, but all he could see beyond the openings were more metal rails continuing the ones the trucks were on. The men in old-soldier armor shouted and cracked the whips. The bowed people in chains heaved. And the trucks ran through into somewhere else. The openings vanished, and the overseers urged the prisoners back to the mountain again, where, if Blade craned, he could see three more trucks waiting.

He did not wait to watch anymore. He slithered down the hillside to join Sukey and Reville on a sort of ledge. They stared at one another. “That was Barnabas!” said Blade.

“I know. Does Querida know?” Reville said. “That’s quite an important question, because it could be that everyone at the University is in on this. In that case, where’s the money going?”

“What money? What do you mean?” Sukey and Blade asked, almost together.

“That’s a mine, more or less inside this hill we’re sitting on,” Reville explained, “and it’s run nice and cheaply on kidnapped slave labor. Whatever they mine is going offworld. By the ton truck. Someone is making money out of it, and I don’t think it’s only Wizard Barnabas.” He dived around on Sukey. “What’s in those trucks? Any idea? What does your world get?”

“I haven’t a clue,” she said. Her eyes were wide and worried among her tangled curls. She suddenly looked older and shrewder and more like Reville. “And I want to know,” she added.

“Then we’ll go and find out.” Reville stood up, looking very determined.

“Why?” Blade objected. It was unexpectedly warm on the hillside ledge. He wanted to sit there and rest.

But Reville turned to him in a way that surprised Blade, because it was like Titus or King Luther when they were being royal. “Someone,” said Reville, “is robbing my world. I want to know who, why, and what. Because it’s illegal. I’m the only person around here who’s allowed to steal stuff. Guild rules. So how do we best get a look at what they’re stealing? Ideas?”

Blade stared at him, feeling glad that he had not happened to tell Reville about the dwarfs. Sukey looked around thoughtfully. Then she pointed behind Reville. “There may be an opening up there. We could sneak in that way.”

As Reville swung around to look, it occurred to Blade that Reville and Sukey were a good match for one another. Sukey looked—and was—a girlish sort of girl. Yet she had hardly turned a hair at being kidnapped, and now she was as cool and collected as Reville, and far cooler than Blade was, at the idea of sneaking into a mine full of illegal robbers with whips.

“Yes. A sort of cave, maybe,” Reville said, and set off for the dark dent in the hill that Sukey was pointing to. Sukey scampered with him. Blade slithered reluctantly after.

There was a hole in the mountainside there. It was hard to tell if it was natural or someone’s early attempt to dig a mine. It was rocky and earthy, and it led away inward in a passage high enough for them all to walk upright. Before it grew too dark to see, Reville snapped his fingers and, to Blade’s envy, caused a blue tuft of witchlight to sprout from his left hand. He held it up to guide them.

“Reville, you’re marvelous!” Sukey sighed.

“Just go carefully,” Reville whispered. “I can feel a big drop somewhere ahead.”

The drop was simply a hole in the earthy floor. Beyond it the passage came to an end. Reville knelt down and shone his left-handed light into the hole. There was an insecure-looking old ladder bolted to the near side.

“Old mine shaft,” Reville whispered. “Excellent.” He swung himself onto the ladder. It creaked like a dead tree in a gale. “One at a time,” he said warningly. “It won’t carry three.”

Blade had to wait in the dark while Sukey followed Reville down. After that there was no question in Blade’s mind where he was going. He was going with Reville and the light if it killed them all. He arrived at the bottom of the rasping, swaying ladder with his teeth chattering. Just the cold, he told himself. Just the cold in here. He turned thankfully toward the blue light.

It was bigger than he had thought. He could see Sukey and Reville through the sheet of blueness, on the other side of it, staring as if they had been put under a stasis spell. There were three eyes in the blueness, all of them watching Blade sarcastically. He understood why he had been feeling as if he had been plunged into a bath of icy acid.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

Me, agreed the demon. I said we would meet again. Why are you here? Have you come to steal demon food like the other humans?

“Demon food?” said Blade.

They dig it out of the mountain, and they take it out of the world, the demon told him. And they set the place around with wards and demon traps. Take just one ward off for me. I will make you rich.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Derkholm Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net