Dark Lord of Derkholm (Derkholm 1)

“I—I’m afraid I don’t know how to,” Blade said.

Or I could kill you if you don’t, the demon suggested.

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“But that wouldn’t help you,” Blade answered through clenched teeth.

Then what reward would persuade you? wondered the demon. Let me see. Blade felt it pressing all over his mind, sickeningly. He could not think of any way to stop it. He just had to stand there, shaking all over, until the demon seemed to have finished. Then he felt its laughter pulsing through him. He wants Deucalion to teach him magic! I could arrange that.

But the White Oracle said Deucalion would teach me anyway, Blade thought. That was a comforting thought, until Blade realized that the Oracle had not said how it would be arranged. Sweat came popping out all over Blade at the idea that Deucalion actually might be a demon. He opened his mouth to protest again that he had no idea how to take demon wards off. And he realized the demon had gone. Strange.

“Phew!” said Reville. “That was nasty! What is demon food?”

“I really don’t know,” Blade said.

“I think the poor thing was hungry,” Sukey said. “It wasn’t going to do anything to Blade. It was just letting him know they were stealing its food.”

“Poor thing—nothing!” said Reville. “Don’t ever get sorry for a demon, love. It will eat you.”

“Then are people demon food?” Sukey asked. “It’s not people in those trucks, is it?”

“No, they just eat souls usually,” Reville said. “We must get a look in those trucks.”

They hurried along the earthy gallery the ladder had brought them to. Shortly there was another hole and another ladder, this one in much better repair, with dim light shining from below. Reville dismissed his tuft of witchlight, and they all clambered quietly down. Halfway to the next earthy floor the demon wards began, strung across the shaft like cobwebs made of nearly nothing. At least most of them were warding against demons, but Blade saw others that seemed to be warding the mine against being found by other people. Sukey found all of them fascinating. She stretched a hand out to the nearest.

“Don’t touch them!” Reville and Blade whispered, both at once.

Sukey snatched her hand back and climbed on down, looking chastened. Reville went very cautiously from then on, because the ladder brought them down into what was clearly a side passage in the main mines. At the end of the passage trucks were being pushed past in a much wider space that was properly lit by electric lights in wire cages. Chains clinked. Ragged people grunted and strained, and the lighted part was filled with the rumble, rumble, squeak of heavy wheels moving on metal tracks. After one cautious look Reville led them along the passage the other way.

“Too many overseers out that way,” he said. Blade lost touch with where they were after that. As Shona had pointed out, his sense of direction was not the same as other people’s. He simply went where Reville went. He thought they might have gone parallel with the main part, until they came to a slanting place, where smaller trucks were squealing slowly downhill under a raw-looking ceiling propped up by girders and beams. To Reville’s delight, these trucks were not covered. Each one seemed to be heaped up with earth and broken rocks.

“What is it?” Reville wondered. “Some kind of ore?”

He and Sukey both took a handful and went upslope to the nearest wire-caged light. The place where it hung was probably weaker than the rest. The walls and ceiling here were entirely lined with iron girders, making it rather narrower than the rest of the sloping track. When Blade squeezed up beside them, Reville and Sukey were sorting knowledgeably through their handfuls of dirt. Sukey seemed to know as much about minerals as Reville did. But they were both puzzled.

“Bit of iron ore, shale, limestone—a lot of nothing really,” Sukey was saying.

“Not even gold-bearing,” Reville agreed. “Not volcanic. So no diamonds.”

“It could be some kind of valuable chemical,” Sukey was suggesting when they all heard the squealing rumble of another truck coming. They pressed themselves against the iron wall to let it go past, and Sukey said, still inspecting her handful, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was just what it looks like—any old earth and stones.”

“It must be something valuable,” Reville said as the truck came rumbling past.

Blade understood then. Sukey was right, right about the demon and right about the stuff in the trucks. The demon had been trying to tell them, in its demonic way, and no demon could ever do anything without threats or laughter. But he never would have realized what it had been trying to say if they had not been standing inside the narrow place surrounded by iron. As the truck came through, rumbling the walls and the tracks, with its pile of cold earth almost brushing Blade’s face, he found himself receiving a blast of solid magic—magic that seemed like part of the very smell of the heaped-up earth and stones. And he remembered that iron insulated magic. “Got it!” he said. “It is just earth and stones, and it is valuable! Our whole world’s magic. The magic’s part of the earth. That’s what they’re stealing—magic!”

Reville gave a little whistle. “So demons eat magic!”

“They must do,” Blade was saying when Reville’s whistle seemed to be taken up from further down the passage, loud and shrill. Someone along there shouted.

“I see them! Intruders in shaft twenty! Up there in the arch!”

Sukey and Reville threw down their handfuls of earth, and they all three ran. And ran, and ran, with whistles and shouts urging them on to dodge around corners, whisk up side passages, or double back the other way, stumbling on stones, splashing through at least one underground river, stubbing toes on iron tracks, tripping over spades, and racing bent over behind rows of big metal trucks. Reville was good at this. He was trained for it, Blade thought, struggling to keep up, with his robe flapping around his knees and getting in his way. Deeper and deeper into the mines they went. They pelted through wet yellow mud in front of rows of chained people, who all leaned on their spades to watch them.

“Tried that. Been there,” Blade heard as he splatted past. “Bet you my next meal they’ll be caught in gallery five.”

And Blade was. He was not sure if it was actually gallery five or somewhere else. He only knew that he somehow lost Reville and Sukey, turned down the way he thought they had run, and ran full tilt into a pair of overseers. He was grabbed in an instant, and his arms were twisted behind him. Blade struggled and fought and tried to translocate, but his ability to do that was still not there. All he could do was put his cold spell on them, but they were used to the chill of the mines and hardly seemed to notice. They ran him along the wide earthy tunnel to a metal door and shoved him into a small room like an office. The door clanged shut behind him. Blade, half dazzled by the much brighter light in there, found himself blinking at Barnabas.

Barnabas was blinking, too, and breathing heavily. “You can’t be allowed to leave, you know,” he said, in his usual jolly way. “Sorry about this, but this is a highly secret operation, Blade. It beats me how you ever got inside the secrecy spells over this area. They were some of my best.”