Wild vines and rubble hid the entrance. The Prince was the first to force his way down into the bowels of the earth. Farid hesitated when he saw how steep the climb down into the darkness looked. “Come on!” whispered Dustfinger impatiently. “The sun will soon rise, and the Adder’s soldiers aren’t going to mistake you for a squirrel.”
“But it smells like a burial vault,” said Farid, and he looked longingly up at the sky.
“The boy has a good nose!” said Snapper, before pushing his way past him, grim-faced. “Yes, there are many dead men down there. The mountain devoured them because they dug too deep.
You don’t see them, but you smell them. People say they stop up the galleries like a cargo of dead fish.”
Horrified, Farid looked at him, but Dustfinger just pushed him in the back. “Look, how often do I have to tell you it’s not the dead but the living you should fear? Come on, make a few sparks dance on your fingertips to give us a light.”
The robbers had settled in those galleries that were not buried in rubble. They had given the roofs and walls additional props, but Farid didn’t trust the beams now braced against the stone and the ground. How could they support the weight of a whole mountain? He thought he heard it sighing and groaning, and while he made himself as comfortable as he could on the dirty blankets that the robbers had spread on the hard ground, he suddenly remembered Sootbird again. But the Prince only laughed when he anxiously asked about him. “No, Sootbird doesn’t know about this place or any of our hideouts. He’s often tried to get us to take him along, but who’s going to trust such a wretched fire-eater? The only reason he knew about the Secret Camp was because he’s one of the strolling players.”
All the same, Farid did not feel safe. Almost a week yet to go before the Adderhead freed his prisoners! It would be a long wait. He was already wishing himself back among the mouse droppings in the Badger’s Earth. During the night he kept staring at the rubble closing off the galleries where they were sleeping. He thought he heard pale fingers scraping at the stones. “Put your hands over your ears, then!” was all Dustfinger said when Farid shook him awake to say so, and he put his arms around Roxane again. Dustfinger was having bad dreams, the kind he had often had in the other world, but now it was Roxane who calmed him and whispered him back to sleep. Her quiet voice, soft with love, reminded Farid of Meggie’s, and he missed Meggie so much that he felt ashamed of his weakness. In this darkness, surrounded by the dead, it was difficult to believe that she was missing him, too. Suppose she had forgotten him, the way Dustfinger often forgot him now that Roxane was here? Only Meggie had made him forget his jealousy, but Meggie wasn’t with him now.
On the second night a boy came to the mine. He worked in the stables of the Castle of Night and had been spying for the Black Prince ever since the Piper had his brother hanged. He said that the Adderhead would let the prisoners go along the road leading down to the harbor, on condition that they boarded a ship there and never returned.
“The road to the harbor. Ah,” was all the Prince said when the informer had gone again – and he set out with Dustfinger that same night. Farid didn’t ask if he could go, too. Fie simply followed them.
The road was little more than a footpath leading through the trees. It ran straight down Mount Adder, as if in a hurry to slip under the canopy of leaves. “The Adderhead pardoned a troop of prisoners once before and let them go along this road,” said the Prince, when they were under the trees at the roadside. “And they did reach the sea without mishap, just as he had promised, but the ship waiting for them was a slave ship, and they say the Adderhead got a particularly fine silver bridle for those prisoners, a scant dozen of them.”
Slaves? Farid remembered markets where people were sold, and buyers gaped at them and felt them as if they were cattle. Girls with blonde hair had been in great demand.
“Don’t look as if Meggie had been sold already!” said Dustfinger.
“The Prince will think of something – won’t you?” The Black Prince tried to smile, but he couldn’t conceal the fact that he was eyeing the road with great concern. “They must never reach that ship,” he said. “And we can only hope that the Adderhead doesn’t send too many soldiers to escort them. We must hide them quickly – in the mine at first, that will be best, until everything’s quieted down again. And very likely,” he added almost as an afterthought, “we shall need fire.”
Dustfinger blew on his fingers until flames as delicate as butterfly wings were dancing there.
“What do you think I’m still here for?” he asked. “Fire there shall be. But I will not take a sword in my hand, in case that’s what you’re hoping. You know I ‘m no good with such things.”
Chapter 68 – A Visit
“If I cannot get me forth out of this house,” he thought, “I am a dead man!”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow
When Meggie woke, she didn’t know for a moment where she was. In Elinor’s house? she wondered. With Fenoglio? But then she saw Mo bending low over the big table, binding a book.
The book. Five hundred blank pages. They were in the Castle of Night, and Mo was to have the book finished tomorrow… A flash of lightning illuminated the soot-blackened ceiling, and the thunder that followed sounded menacingly loud, but it wasn’t the storm that had woken Meggie.
She had heard voices. The guards. There was someone at the door. Mo had heard it, too.
“Meggie, he mustn’t work such long hours. It could bring back the fever,” the Barn Owl had told her that very morning, before they took him down to the dungeons again. But what could she do about it? Mo sent her to bed the moment she began yawning too often. (“That was the twenty-third yawn, Meggie. Go on, bed for you, or you’ll be dead on your feet before this damned book is finished.”) Then it would be ages before he went to sleep himself. He stayed up cutting, folding, and stitching until it was nearly dawn. He’d done that tonight as well.
When one of the guards opened the door, Meggie thought for a dreadful moment that Mortola had come to kill Mo after all, before the Adderhead let him go. But it was not the Magpie. The Adderhead stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. Two servants stood behind him, their faces pale with exhaustion, carrying silver candelabras from which wax dripped to the floorboards.
Their master, treading heavily, approached the table at which Mo worked and stared at the book. It was almost finished.
“What are you doing here?” Mo still had the paper knife in his hand. The Adderhead stared at him. His eyes were even more bloodshot than on the night when Meggie had made her bargain with him.
“How much longer?” he demanded. “My son is crying. He cries all night. He feels the White Women coming close, just as I do. Now they want to fetch him away, too, him and me at the same time. Folk say they’re particularly hungry on stormy nights.”
Mo put down the knife. “The book will be finished tomorrow, as agreed. It would have been ready sooner, but the leather to cover it was full of tears and holes made by thorns, so that held us up, and the paper wasn’t as good as it might have been, either.”
“Yes, yes, very well, the librarian has passed on your complaints!” The Adderhead’s voice sounded as if he had been shouting himself hoarse. “If Taddeo had his way, you’d spend the rest of your life in this room, rebinding all my books. But I will let you go – you, your daughter, your wife, and those good-for-nothing strolling players. They can all go, I just want the book! Mortola has told me about the three words that your daughter so cunningly failed to mention, but never mind that – I shall take good care that no one writes them in its pages! I want to be able to laugh in the Cold Man’s face at last – laugh at him and his pale women! Another night like this and I shall be beating my head against the wall, I shall kill my wife, I shall kill my child, I shall kill all of you. Do you understand, Bluejay or whatever your name is? You must finish the book before dark falls again! You must!”