WALPURGISNACHT 1684
Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
JACK SAT ON A DEAD tree in the woods for a time, feeling hungry, and, what was worse, feeling stupid. There was little daylight left and he thought he should use it wisely (he was not above being wise as long as there was no preacher or gentleman demanding that he do so). He walked through the trees over a little rise and down into a shallow basin between hills where he was fairly certain he could light a fire without announcing himself to the citizenry of Bockboden. He spent the remainder of the daylight gathering fallen branches and, just as the sun was setting, lit a fire—having learned that the tedious and exacting work of flint, steel, and tinder could be expedited if you simply used a bit of gunpowder in lieu of the tinder. With some pyrotechnics and a cloud of smoke, he had a fire. Now he need only throw sticks on it from time to time and sit there like the lost fool he was until sleep finally caught him unawares. He did not want to think about the witch he’d seen burnt, but it was hard not to. Instead he tried to make himself think about brother Bob, and his two boys, the twins Jimmy and Danny, and his long- and oft-delayed plan to find them a legacy.
He was startled to find three women and a man, their faces all lit up by firelight, standing nearby. They looked as if they had ventured into the woods in the middle of the night expecting to find some other vagrant sitting by a fire sleeping.* Jack’s first thought might’ve been Witch-hunters! if not for that they’d had longer to react to him than he to them, and they looked worried (they’d noticed the sword)—besides, they were mostly females and they were unarmed, unless the fresh-cut tree-branches that they used as leafy walking-sticks were meant as weapons. At any rate, they turned and hustled off, their sticks giving them the look of a group of stout chamber-maids going off to sweep the forest with makeshift brooms.
After that Jack could not sleep. Another group much like the first came by a few minutes later. This forest was damnably crowded. Jack picked up his few belongings and withdrew into the shadows to observe what other moths were attracted to the flame. Within a few minutes, a squadron of mostly women, ranging from girls to hags, had taken over the fire, and stoked it up to a blaze. They’d brought along a black iron kettle that they filled with buckets of water from a nearby creek and set up on the fire to boil. As steam began to rise from the pot—illuminated by firelight down below, vanishing into the cold sky as it ascended—they began to throw in the ingredients of some kind of stew: sacks of some type of fat dark-blue cherries, red mushrooms with white speckles, sprigs of herbs. No meat, or recognizable vegetables, to the disappointment of Jack. But he was hungry enough to eat German food now. The question was: how to secure an invitation to the feast?
In the end, he just went down and got some, which was what everyone else seemed to be doing. Traffic through this part of the woods had become so heavy that he could not rely on going unnoticed anyway. First he used his sword to cut a leafy branch like everyone else’s. None of these persons was armed, and so he stuck the sword and scabbard down his trouser-leg and then, to conceal it better, fashioned a false splint of sticks, and rags torn from his shirt, around the leg so that he would look like a man with a frozen knee, hobbling round with the aid of the staff. Thus disguised, he limped into the firelight and was politely, not to say warmly, greeted by the stew-cookers. One of them offered him a ladle full of the stuff and he swallowed it down fast enough to burn his insides all the way down to his stomach. Probably just as well—it was foul-tasting. On the principle that you never know when you’ll find food again, he gestured for more, and they somewhat reluctantly handed him a second ladle, and uneasily watched him drink it. It was as bad as the first, though it had chunks of mushrooms or something on the bottom that might give some nourishment.
He must have looked lost, then, because after he’d stood near the fire for a few minutes warming himself the stew-makers began helpfully pointing in the direction that all the other people were migrating. This happened to be generally uphill, which was the way Jack planned to travel anyhow (either it would take him to the Doctor’s tower, or to a height-of-land whence he could see the tower come morning) and so off he hobbled.
The next time he was really aware of anything (he seemed to be walking and sleeping at the same time, though everything had a dreamlike quality now, so the whole thing might be a dream) he had evidently covered a couple of miles uphill, judging from that it was much colder and the wind was blowing so hard that he could hear trees being struck down all over, like reports of guns in a battle. Clouds stampeded across the face of a full moon. Occasionally something would rip through the branches overhead and shower him with twigs and brush. Looking up, he saw it was broken-off tree branches, or maybe even small uprooted trees, propelled through the air by the hurricanoe. He was working his way uphill, though not sure why anymore. Others were all around him. The forest was very tall skinny black trees closely packed together like the massed pikes of a military formation, the eruptions of moonlight between fleeing clouds like the bursting of bombs, and Jack heard, or dreamed, the tramping of feet and blowing of trumpets. Forgetting why his leg was splinted, he supposed he must have been wounded in action (possibly in the head as well as the leg) and the wound dressed by a barber. For a while he was almost certain he was still fighting Turks in Vienna and all of the Eliza stuff just a long, elaborate, cruel dream.
But then he was back in the woods above Bockboden. Branches and heavier things were still ripping through space above his head like cannonballs. He looked up at the moon trying to see them, and with the torn clouds streaming by, it was difficult to make out their shapes, but he was fairly certain now that people were riding on those branches, as Winged Hussars rode on chargers. They were charging the hilltop! Jack finally stumbled out onto a path that wound up the mountain, and was nearly run over by the infantry part of the charge: a river of people with cut branches, and other ornaments, such as the forks farmers used to shovel manure. Forgetting about the splinted leg, Jack wheeled and tried to run with them, but fell, and took a while getting up.
He reached the collection of outcroppings that was the mountain-top somewhat after the main group, but in time to see them chasing away half a dozen musketeers who had apparently been posted there, and who were not welcome. None of them fired his weapon, as they had no desire to kill a few people only to be surrounded by hundreds of their stick-brandishing friends. As this occurred, people farther from the action were shouting threats and offering sour comments in much the same vein as the spectators at the witch-burning had earlier, except that they were using the word Wächer, which (Jack’s murderously overtaxed mind guessing wildly here) perhaps meant “Watchers.”
Battle won, the Hexen (no point in denying it any more) quickly lit up the whole mountain-top with fires (many people had carried faggots on their backs), which burnt with white heat in the continuing wind-blast. Jack hobbled around and looked. He could see that many ages ago a tall stone column had risen from the top of the mountain, bifurcated at the top into what might have been shaped like a pair of goat’s horns. It might’ve looked something like a crossbow standing up on end. But it had been toppled so long ago that it was now covered in moss and dirt. A couple of dozen standing-stones had ringed it; most of them had been toppled as well. The Hexen had led a black goat up onto the ruin of the high column and leashed him there to look out over the whole fiery prospect.
People, frequently naked, danced around those bonfires. Many spring flowers had been brought up and used to decorate rocks, or people. A certain amount of fucking went on, as one would expect, but at least some of it seemed to be ceremonial fucking—the participants, actors in a sort of immorality play—the woman always bedecked with garlands of spring wildflowers and the man always donning an eye-patch. Certain small animals might have died unnatural deaths. There was chanting and singing in a language that wasn’t exactly German.
Of course, presiding over the entire thing was Satan the Prince of Darkness, or so Jack assumed—as what else would you call a jet-black figure, horned and bearded, maybe a hundred feet high, dancing in the boiling, smoky, cloudy sky just above the summit, sometimes visible and sometimes not, occasionally seen in profile as he lifted his bearded chin to howl, or laugh, at the moon. Jack fully believed this, and knew beyond doubt that every word the preachers had ever said about Lucifer was true. He decided that running away wasn’t a bad idea. Choosing the direction he happened to be pointed in at the moment he panicked, he ran. The moon came out a few moments later and showed him he had one or two strides left on rock before he would find himself running in midair—a fantastical gorge plunged straight down for farther than could be seen by moonlight. Jack stopped and turned around, having no other choices, and with a forced and none too sincere calmness, looked at the entire panorama of fire and shadow hoping to find a route that wouldn’t take him too near Satan—or actually any of the several Satans of different sizes who seemed to be huddling in council around the mountain-top.
His eye was caught by a tiny black silhouette outlined in a brilliant hairy fringe, elevated above the whole scene: the black goat, tilting its head back to bray. One of the vast Satans duplicated the move precisely. Jack understood that he had been running from shadows of the goat cast against clouds and smoke by the light of the fire.
He sat down at the point where he’d almost hurled himself into the gorge, laughed, and tried to clear his head, and to get his bearings. The cliff, and the somewhat lower bluff across from it, were craggy, with great big shards and flakes of rock angling crazily into the air—and (by the way) exploding the Doctor’s idea of how these rocks had been formed, because the grain of these rocks ran straight up and down. Obviously it was the remains of a giant, killed in some antediluvian rock fight, who’d died on his back with his bony fingers thrust up into the air.
Jack drew nearer to a fire, partly because he was cold and partly because he wanted a closer look at one particular naked girl who was dancing around it—somewhat on the fleshy side and clearly destined to become another broom-wielding hag in the long run, but the least columnar German female Jack had recently seen. By the time he got close enough to have a good look at her, the fire was uncomfortably hot, which should have warned him that the light was very bright, on his face. But he did not consider this important fact at all until he heard the fatal word Wache! Turning towards the voice he saw, almost close enough to touch, one of those women who had woken him up earlier in the evening, down below, when he’d been sleeping by his little fire with his sword in view. His sword was exactly what she was looking for, now that she’d gained everyone’s attention by uttering their least favorite word. Concealing the weapon in a leg-splint had worked when it was dark, and people were not specifically looking for a sword, but here and now it did not work at all—the woman hardly needed do more than glance at Jack before screaming, in a voice that could probably be heard in Leipzig, “Er ist eine Wache! Er hat ein Schwert!”
So the party was over for everyone and most of all Jack. Anyone could’ve given him a smart shove and sent him into the fire and that would’ve been the end, or at least an interesting beginning, but instead they all ran away from him—but, he had to assume, not for long. The only one who stayed behind was the one who’d fingered him. She hovered out of sword-range giving him a piece of her mind, so furious she was sobbing. Jack had no desire to draw his sword and get these people more angry than they were, but (a) they couldn’t possibly get much more angry no matter what he did, and (b) he had to get the damn splint off his leg if he were going to do any serious fleeing. And fleeing was the order of the night. So. Out came his dagger. The woman gasped and jumped back. Jack controlled the urge to tell her to shut up and calm down, and slashed through all the rag bands around his leg so that the splint-sticks fell away from him. Then he freed his leg by pulling out the scabbard and sword. The woman now screamed. People were running towards Jack now, and cries of “Wächer!” were making it difficult to hear anything else—Jack had absorbed enough German by now to understand that this meant not “the Watcher” but “the Watchers.” They’d made up their minds that Jack must be only one of a whole platoon of armed infiltrators, which of course would be the only way his presence there would make any sense. Because to be here alone was suicide.
He hadn’t been running for long before he understood that the Hexen were generally trying to drive him in the direction of the cliff—an excellent idea. But, as yet, they were not very organized and so there were gaps between them. Jack sallied through one of these and began to lose altitude the slow, safe, and sane way. The commotion had dropped a couple of octaves in pitch. At first it had mostly been shocked females spreading the alarm (which had worked pretty well), and now it was angry males organizing the hunt. Jack had to assume it wasn’t the first time they had hunted for large animals in these woods.
Even so, the hunt lasted for perhaps an hour, making its way generally downhill. Jack’s only hope was to get out in front of them and flee through the darkness. But they had torches and they knew their way around, and had spread the alarm down the mountain and so no matter what Jack achieved in the way of running, he found himself always surrounded. There were any number of near-escapes that ended in failure. The million poky branches of the alder trees clawed his face and threatened to blind him and caused him to make more noise than he wanted to as he moved about.
Toward the end, he got into situations where he could have escaped, or at least added a few minutes to his life, by killing one or two people. But he didn’t—an act of forbearance he wished could have been observed and noted down by some other sort of Watcher, a lurking mystery with a mirror on a stick, so that news of his noble decisions could be provided to Eliza and everyone else who’d ever looked at him the wrong way. Far from earning him universal admiration, this only led to his being surrounded by some half a dozen men with torches, standing just out of sword-range and darting in to sweep flames past his face when they thought they saw an opening. Jack risked a look back over his shoulder and saw no one behind him, which seemed a poor way to surround someone. He wheeled, ran a couple of steps, and hit a wall. A wall. Turning back around, he saw a torch-flame headed right for his face and reflexively parried the blow. Another came in from another direction and he parried that, and when the third came in from yet another direction he parried it with the edge instead of the flat of his blade, and cut the handle of the torch in two. The burning half spun in the air and he snatched it while slashing blindly in the other direction and hurting someone. Now that he’d drawn blood, the other hunters stepped back, knowing that reinforcements were on their way.* Jack, keeping his back to the building, crept sideways, sword in one hand and torch in the other, occasionally taking advantage of the latter’s light to glance over his shoulder and gain some knowledge of what he’d run into.
It was an old wooden building. The door was closed by a padlock the size of a ham. Wooden shutters had been pulled shut over the windows and bolted from the inside. A gentleman would’ve been stymied, but Jack knew that the weakest part of any building was usually the roof—so as soon as he found a wood-pile stacked against the wall, he climbed up it and got up on top, and found clay tiles under his boots. These were thick and heavy, made to withstand hail-storms and tree-branches, but Jack with the strength of panic stomped until a few of them cracked. Fist-sized rocks were pelting down around him now. He stopped one that was trying to roll off, and used it as a hammer. Finally he created a hole through the tiles, threw in the torch, squeezed through feet-first between the wooden laths on which the tiles were mounted, and dropped through, landing on a table. He snatched up the torch lest it set fire to the place, and found himself looking at a portrait of Martin Luther.
His hunters—several dozen by now, he guessed—had surrounded the building and begun pounding, in an exploratory way, on its doors and shutters. The booms in the dark gave Jack a general idea of the building’s size and shape. It had several rooms, and was therefore probably not a church, but not a mere cottage either. No one had tried to pursue him through the hole in the roof and he was certain no one would—they’d burn it. It was inevitable. He could even hear axes thudding into trees out in the forest—more fuel.
This particular room was a rude chapel; the thing he’d landed on, the altar. Next to the Luther portrait was an old and not very good rendition of a woman proffering a chalice with a communion wafer levitating above it, suspended by some ongoing miraculous intervention. It made Jack (who’d had enough, for one night, of accepting mystery drinks from eerie females) shudder. But from having spent too much time lately around miners, he recognized the woman as St. Barbara, patron of men who dug holes in the ground, albeit with all of her Catholic insignia filed off. The rest of the room was striped by plank benches. Jack hopped from one to the next to the back, then went sideways and found a kind of sitting-room with a couple of chairs and one of the towering black iron stoves favored by Germans. Turning on his heel and going the other way, he found a very heavy scale dangling from the ceiling; weights for it, the size of cheese-wheels; a cabinet; and, what he most wanted to see, a stairway going down.
It was getting smoky in there, and not just from his torch. Jack mauled the cabinet open and grabbed a handful of kienspans. He’d lost his hat while running through the woods and so he stole one of the miners’: a conical thing of extremely thick felt that would soften impacts of head against stone. Then he was down the stairs, and none too soon as the old wooden building was burning like gunpowder. They’d make a big fire of it, throwing on whole trees: a fire that could be seen by the burghers of Bockboden, sending those Hexen-hunters a powerful message by which they’d be completely baffled.
The stairway went down for perhaps two dozen steps and then levelled off into a tunnel that went at least as far as Jack’s torch (which had consumed most of its fuel) could throw light. He lit a kienspan, which burnt a little brighter, but he still could not see the end of the tunnel, which was good, and to be expected. He began running along in a kind of crouch, not wanting to smash his head on the ceiling timbers, and after a minute, passed by a hand-haspel crammed into a niche in the tunnel wall, its ropes descending into a shaft. A minute later he passed by another, then another, and finally he stopped and decided he should just go down one of those shafts. He’d been down here long enough to stop being so proud of his own cleverness, and he’d begun to worry. The Hexen knew the territory better than he. They couldn’t not know that the building was a mine entrance, and they must have anticipated that he’d find the tunnel. Perhaps the mine had other entrances, and they’d soon be coming down with torches and dogs and God knows what, as when they hunted burrowing vermin with their sausage-shaped dogs.
One of the hand-haspel’s buckets was at the top, the other down below. Jack climbed into the one that was up, and hugged the opposite rope, and by letting it slide through his arms was able to descend smoothly for a short distance: until he relaxed, and the rope slid too fast, and he hugged it tight out of panic, so it burnt him and made him let go, causing the same cycle to repeat, except worse. The only thing that interrupted this round was when, at the halfway mark, the lower bucket came up and caught him under the chin and caused him to let go entirely—which was fine, as he would have been stuck at that point anyway. He dropped, then, with only the empty, ascending bucket as counterweight, and what saved him was that the impact of his chin against same had set it swinging briskly back and forth, its rim biting into the rough wall of the shaft faster and faster as it rose higher and higher, throwing sparks and dislodging fusillades of jagged rock in Jack’s direction with every impact, but also slowing his fall with a corresponding series of violent jerks. Jack kept his head down and his kienspan up in case this shaft terminated in water, a possibility he should have considered earlier.
Actually it terminated in rock—the bucket landed unevenly and ejected Jack. Loose bits of stone continued to clatter down from above for a little while and hurt his legs, which was welcome as proof he hadn’t been paralyzed. The kienspan still burnt; Jack held it in a death-grip and watched the blue flame pour out of it and turn yellow as it moved sideways along the shaft, contrary to the normal habit of flames, which was to tend upwards. Jack kicked the bucket out of the way and did some moving about, and found that there was a rapidly building draft, approaching a breeze, moving toward him along the tunnel. But when he backed up to the other side of the shaft opening in the ceiling, the air was moving the opposite direction. Two flows of air converged at this point and moved up the shaft, starting now to make a certain wailing noise that Jack could not fail to liken to damned souls or whatever. Now he understood why the Hexen had gone to work felling trees up above: they knew that with a sufficiently enormous fire they could suck all of the air out of the mine.
He had to find a way out, which did not seem all that likely now, as he’d made the (in retrospect) mistake of going down to a lower level. But he chose the direction from which there came the strongest flow of air, and began to move as quickly as he could. The faster he ran into the wind, the more brightly his kienspan burnt. But it burnt less brightly as time went on. He tried lighting a fresh one, but it, too, burnt feebly unless he waved it in the air, and then the light flared up and shone between the heavy bars of the wooden cage that kept the rocks from crushing him on all sides, and cast rapidly moving shadows, sometimes looking like angry faces of mangled giants, or huge ostrich-skeleton-monsters with scimitar teeth: all of which went together neatly with the deafening chorus of moans and wails made by all of the passageways as the breath was sucked out of them.
Around this time Jack also noted that he was on his hands and knees skidding the dully glowing kienspan along the floor. From time to time he’d see the low portal of one of those side-tunnels go by him to the left or right. Going by one of these he felt a strong cool breeze, and the kienspan flared up; but when he went past it, the air became dead and the kienspan went out entirely. He was breathing very fast, but it did him no good. With what strength he still had, he backtracked through absolute darkness until he felt the wind from that side-tunnel on his face. Then he lay down flat on the rock for a while and simply breathed.
Some time later his head was working more clearly and he understood that the flow of air implied an exit somewhere. He groped around on the floor until he found one of those elbow-planks, and then crawled sideways, headed upwind. He followed the air for an amount of time impossible to guess at. The low side-tunnel opened out into a smooth-floored space that seemed to be a natural cave. Here the river of air had been broken up into many trickles curving around rocks and stalagmites (tricky to follow), but (nose to floor, tongue out) he followed them for what seemed like a mile, sometimes standing up and walking through spaces that echoed like cathedrals, sometimes squirming on his belly through spaces so close that his head got wedged between the floor and ceiling. He sloshed through a pond of dead water that froze his legs, climbed up the other shore, and entered a mine-tunnel, then passed through tunnels of low and high ceilings, and up-and-down vertical shafts, so many times that he lost track of how many times he had lost track. He wanted badly to sleep, but he knew that if the fire went out while he slumbered, the air-current would stop and he’d lose the thread that, as with that bloke in the myth, was showing him the way out. His eyes, not satisfied with total darkness, fabricated demon-images from all of the bad things he’d seen or thought he’d seen in the last days.
He heard a bubbling, hissing sound, such as a dragon or Worm might make, but followed it, and the air-current, along a slowly descending tunnel until he came to water’s edge. Knocking off a few sparks from his flint and steel he saw that the air he’d been following this whole time was boiling up out of a subterranean lake that filled the tunnel before him and completely blocked his way out. Having nothing else to do, he sat down to die, and fell asleep instead, and had nightmares that were an improvement on reality.
NOISE AND LIGHT, BOTH FAINT, woke him. He refused to take the light seriously: a green glow emanating from the pool (which had stopped bubbling). It was so unearthly that it could only be another of the mind tricks that the broth of the Hexen had been wreaking on him. But the noise, though distant, sounded interesting. Before, it had been drowned out by the seething of the water, but now he could hear a rhythmic hissing and booming sound.
The green light grew brighter. He could see the silhouettes of his hands in front of it.
He’d been dreaming, before he woke up, about the giant water-pipes, the hubbly-bubblies that the Turks smoked in Leipzig. They’d suck on the tube, and smoke from the tobacco bowl would pass down through the water and come back upwards into the tube, cooled and purified. The dream had, he guessed, been inspired by the last sound he’d heard before falling asleep, because the cave had made a similar seething and gurgling noise. As he considered it (having no other way to spend the time), he wondered whether the mine might not have acted like a giant water-pipe, and the fire like a giant Turk sucking on its tube, drawing air downwards, through a water-filled sump, from the outside, so that it bubbled up into this tunnel.
Might it be possible, then, that by swimming for some short distance through this water he would come up into the air? Could the green light be the light of sunrise, filtered through greenish pond-scum? Jack began to work up his courage, a procedure he expected would take several hours. He could think only of poor brother Dick who had drowned in the Thames: how he’d swum off all active and pink, and been pulled up limp and white.
He concluded he’d best do the deed now, while the witch-brew was still impairing his judgment. So he took off most of his clothes. He could come back for them later if this worked. He took only his sword (in case trouble awaited), flint, and steel, and his miner’s hat, which would be good to have if he smashed his head against any underwater ceilings. Then he backed up the tunnel several paces, got a running start downhill, and dove in. The water was murderously cold and he almost screamed out his one lungful of air. He grazed the ceiling once—the light grew brighter—the ceiling wasn’t there any more, and so he kicked against the sump’s floor and burst up into fresh air! The distance had been only three or four yards.
But the light, though brighter, was not the light of the sun. Jack could tell, by the echoes of the trickling waters and of the murmur of voices, that he was still underground. The strange green light shone from around a nearby bend in the cavern, and glinted curiously off parts of the walls.
Before doing anything else, Jack slipped back into the water, swam back through the sump, retrieved his boots and clothes, and then returned to the glowing cavern. He got dressed and then crept toward the light on hands and knees, trying but failing to control a violent shiver. The glint he’d noticed earlier turned out to come from a patch of clear crystals, the size of fingers, growing out of a wall—diamonds! He had entered into some place of fabulous riches. The walls were fuzzy with gems. Perhaps the light was green because it was shining through a giant emerald?
Then he came round a bend and was nearly struck blind by a smooth disk of brilliant green light, flat on the floor of a roundish chamber. As his eyes adjusted he could see that a circle of persons—or of something—stood around the edge, dressed in outlandish and bizarre costumes.
In the center stood a figure in a long robe, a hood drawn over his head, enclosing his face in shadow, though the light shone upwards against chin and cheek-bones to give him a death’s-head appearance, and it glinted in his eyes.
A voice spoke out in French—Eliza’s voice! She was angry, distressed—the others turned towards her. This was Hell, or Hell’s side entrance, and the demons had captured Eliza—or perhaps she was dead—dead because of Jack’s failure to return with medicine—and she was at this moment being inducted—
Jack plunged forth, drawing his sword, but when he set foot on the green disk it gave way beneath him and he burst through it—suddenly he was swimming in green light. But there was solid rock underneath. He jumped back up, knee-deep in the stuff, and hollered, “Let her go, ye demons! Take me instead!”
They all screamed and ran away, including Eliza.
Jack looked down to find his clothes saturated with green light.
The hooded figure was the only one left. He sloshed calmly up out of the pool, opened a dark-lantern, took out a burning match, and went round igniting some torchières stuck into the ground all around. Their light was infinitely brighter, and made the green light vanish. Jack was standing in a brown puddle and his clothes were all wet.
Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, “What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible—you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?”
Jack was still too puzzled to take umbrage at this. “Who, or what, were those—?”
“Wealthy gentlefolk who, until just moments ago, were thinking of buying Kuxen from Doctor Leibniz.”
“But—their freakish attire, their bizarre appearance—?”
“The latest fashions from Paris.”
“Eliza sounded distressed.”
“She was interrogating the Doctor—demanding to know just what this conjuror’s trick, as she called it, had to do with the viability of the mine.”
“But why even bother with mining silver, when the walls of this cavern are encrusted with diamonds?”
“Quartz.”
“What is the glowing stuff anyway, and while I’m on that subject, what does it have to do with the mine?”
“Phosphorus, and nothing. Come, Jack, let’s get you out of those wet clothes before you burst into flame.” Enoch began leading Jack down a side-passage. Along the way they passed a large item of machinery that was making loud booming and sucking noises as it pumped water out of the mine. Here Enoch prevailed on Jack to strip and bathe.
Enoch said, “I don’t suppose that this story shall ever be told in the same admiring way as the Strasbourg Plague House Takeover and the Bohemian Carp Feast.”
“What!? How did you know about those?”
“I travel. I talk to Vagabonds. Word gets around. You might be interested to know that your achievements have been compiled into a picaresque novel entitled L’Emmerdeur, which has already been burnt in Paris and bootlegged in Amsterdam.”
“Stab me!” Jack for the first time began to think that Enoch’s friendly behavior toward him might be well-meaning, and not just an extremely subtle form of mockery. Enoch shouldered a six-inch-thick door open and led Jack into a windowless crypt, a vaulted room with a large table in the middle, candles, and a stove, which happened to look exactly like the sort of place Dwarves would inhabit. They sat down and started smoking and drinking. Presently the Doctor came in and joined them. Far from being outraged, he seemed relieved, as if he’d never wanted to be in the mining business anyway. Enoch gave the Doctor a significant look, which Jack was fairly sure meant I warned you not to involve Vagabonds, and the Doctor nodded.
“What are the, er, investors doing?” Jack asked.
“Standing up above in the sunlight—the females trying to outdo each other in swooning, the males engaging in a learned dispute as to whether you were an enraged Dwarf come to chase us away from his hoard, or a demon from Hell come to seize us.”
“And Eliza? Not swooning I assume.”
“She is too busy receiving the compliments, and credentials, of the others, who are all dumbfounded by her acumen.”
“Ah, then it’s possible she won’t kill me.”
“Far from it, Jack, the girl is blushing, she is radiant, and not in a dipped-in-phosphorus sense.”
“Why?”
“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I’m mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”
“So that’s what they’re all after,” Jack mused.
Eliza backed through the door, unable to use her arms, which were hugging a bundle of letters of introduction, visiting-cards, bills of exchange, scraps with scrawled addresses, and small purses a-clink with miscellaneous coinage. “We’ve missed you, Jack,” she said, “where’ve you been?”
“Running an errand—meeting some locals—partaking of their rich traditions,” Jack said. “Can we get out of Germany now, please?”