“Jal!” A sharp reprimand from Kara, protective of her young charge.
“You don’t have the key?” Snorri asked in an even voice. “Without the key I’ll agree, we might well all die down here.”
“The key!” I reached for Loki’s black little blessing, feeling over my chest for the lump of it beneath my jerkin. My moment of relief proved short-lived. Nothing! “It’s somewhere. I put it somewhere!” Fear-blunted fingers began a wild search.
“Just wait!” Kara snapped. “I have the orichalcum. Let me get it out and we can see—”
“Got it!” I found the key. It had slid around on its thong and hung almost under my armpit. I pulled it out, lifted the thong over my head, and got a good grip on the key’s glassy surface. As my hand tightened about it a distant laughter, perhaps imagined, seemed to mock me from the dark. “Hurry up with that light!” I held the key before me like a weapon, ready to ward off any unseen horrors, and stepped forward, swinging it. Somehow I’d managed to lose my bearings and the twenty-ton door was proving elusive.
Something ahead of me made a soft thump on the floor. I froze. Silence, save for Kara’s muttered cursing in Old Norse again as she hunted her skirts for the orichalcum.
“What’s that stink?” Snorri sniffed. “It smells like the hold of a longship in high summer.”
I could smell it too. I had to pat myself to make sure it wasn’t something those moments of blind terror had squeezed out of me—but this was something even less pleasant than sewage. It put me in mind of the rear dungeons at the debtor prison in Umbertide. The stink of death.
“Ah!” Light blossomed from Kara’s hand, revealing the chamber once more.
The gleaming door stood behind me. Directly before me lay the remains of the rotting Builder corpse, now in a loose heap on the floor. I gagged and took a sharp step back.
“How did . . .”
“You unlocked him!” Hennan pointed at the key in my hand.
“Try it on Taproot.” Snorri nodded toward the doctor still frozen in his own moment.
I glanced back at the door, wanting to secure our exit first, but Snorri waved me on. I shrugged and advanced on Taproot. Kara and Hennan stepped aside to give me access. “Do what you did over there,” she said.
I jabbed the key at Taproot, expecting to hit something but feeling just empty air. “Well, it worked with the dead one . . .”
Kara frowned and reached out toward the motionless man in front of us. Her eyebrows lifted as her hand encountered no barrier. “I don’t understand.”
“He blinked!” A shout from Hennan at my side. “I saw him.”
Kara stepped forward, extending her reach and set her fingers to Taproot’s arm.
“Dear lady!” Taproot pulled his arm back and swept into a bow that she narrowly avoided by means of a quick retreat. “Delighted to meet you. Prince Jalan Kendeth! Snorri ver Snagason! An unexpected pleasure. And who is this young man? A likely-looking fellow to be sure.” He stepped smartly into the space vacated by Kara and out of the booth. “Now that is an interesting key, Prince Jalan!”
“What the hell are you doing down here, Taproot?” I waved my arm at our surroundings in case he might have missed them.
“Ah.” He frowned and glanced across our number again. “Trapped by a witch. Minding my own business one moment and hexed the next. Happens to the best of us.” Stepping past me with the fluid motion of an eel, Dr. Taproot angled for the door.
“We have a box with your image in it.” Kara interposed herself. “That image directed us here—”
“That’s right!” I raised my voice above hers, strug-gling to regain control of the conversation. “A little talking you. Younger, and speaking a lot of nonsense, but it said you were in danger and told us to come here.”
“Really?” Taproot turned to peer at me as if I might be unwell. “A tiny me? Sounds like more witchcraft. I was trapped though, so you’ve been an enormous help. Now, if we could just get out of here—”
“You were in the Builder box, Taproot?” I made it a question.
“Yes, yes.” Somehow he slipped between me and Kara and reached the door.
“You’re a Builder,” Hennan said. The words managed to stop Taproot where physical obstruction had failed. He froze, one hand halfway to the button pad at the centre of the door.
“Don’t children have the strangest notions?” Taproot spun on a heel and faced us all, a wide smile on his narrow face.
“You were in Gholloth’s court when my grandmother was younger than Hennan, and you’re scarcely changed,” I said.
“I have a common type of face. People are always mistaking me for . . .” Taproot slumped, his animation vanishing mid-sentence. “Well, you caught me. Knowledge is power. What do you plan to do with your power, Prince Jalan?”
I opened my mouth but no words came. I’d thought I was the one asking the difficult questions.
“You sleep years away here?” Kara pointed to the glass-walled cubicle Taproot had emerged from.
“Decades, madam. Once I spent a century in stasis. But I like to get out and about most generations, even if it’s just for a week or two. In more interesting times I’ll spend a few years topside, even take up a job maybe.”
“To what end?” Snorri’s first words since Taproot came back to life.
“Ah, Master Snagason, good question.”
“And why,” I interrupted, “don’t you say ‘watch me’ any more?”
“A less good question, Prince Jalan, but still valid. Watch me!” A grin spasmed across his face. “An affectation. People remember such things long after they forget a face. It helps to adopt some quirk for each of my ventures into main time. If I stumble across some long-lived individual who has met me on a previous emergence they are more easily convinced that any resemblance is coincidental if the quirk has gone, replaced by something different.” Again the grin. “I do worry that I overplay them sometimes. In your great-great-grandfather’s employ I was an ear-puller. Watch me!” His hand came sharply to his ear and made a slow retreat, pulling the lobe between finger and thumb.
“To what end do you visit us?” Snorri repeated.
“Dogged! Dogged he is! Watch me!” Taproot spun to look up at the Northman. “I observe. I guide. I do what little I can to help. I wasn’t chosen for this task—fate’s fickle finger came to rest upon me on the Day of a Thousand Suns and I survived. I do what I can here and there . . .”
“And yet, when disaster threatens, here you are back in your hideyhole,” Kara said. “Did you think to sleep another hundred years and escape the second Ragnarok?”
Taproot’s hands began his reply ahead of his mouth, signing their disagreement into the air between them. “Madam, there will be no hiding to be had if the Wheel turns past omega. Time itself will burn.” He brushed at invisible nothings on the chest of his broad-collared shirt. “I came here to talk to the deepnet. Primitive, I know, but these days the mountain must go to Mohammed. When I tried to leave the upper door was jammed and the exterior sensors were dead. Satellite feed indicated an explosion of some sort. I hadn’t brought any food down with me so I had little choice other than to put out a distress call then go into stasis and wait to see if help came.” He spread his hands. “And here you are!”