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Aurelianus smiled, and raised the lantern to show Duffy's face in sharp chiaroscuro. 'Will you?' he asked softly.
The creature - which, a part of Duffy's mind had time to reflect, had probably once been a man - stared for a full minute, then whimpered and abased itself full length on the stones of the tunnel floor.
Aurelianus turned to the Irishman and, waving a hand forward, stepped around the would-be toll-taker. Duffy followed, and heard the degraded thing mutter, as he edged past, 'Pardon, Lord.'
For the next dozen yards they could hear it whimpering behind them, and Duffy shot the old man a venomously interrogative look. Aurelianus just shrugged helplessly.
When the stairs finally came to an end, widening out into a chamber whose walls and roof the lamp was powerless to illuminate, Duffy thought it must be dawn in Vienna, or even noon. And, he told himself grimly, there's about a mile of tangled tunnels between you and your bed.
Aurelianus was striding forward across the chamber floor, so Duffy wearily followed, and saw ahead of them the coping of a well wide enough to drop a small cottage into. The old sorcerer halted at the edge, fumbling under his gown. Duffy peered down over the stone lip, wrinkling his nose at a faint smell that was either spice or clay. He could see nothing, but the deep pounding seemed to emanate upward out of the well.
Aurelianus had produced a little knife, with which he. was carefully cutting a gash in his own left forefinger. Reaching forward, he shook the quick drops of blood into the abyss for a few moments, then drew his hand back and wrapped the finger in a bit of cloth. He smiled reassuringly at Duffyand folded his arms, waiting.
Minutes went past. The Irishman had again begun to confuse his own pulse with the barely audible bass vibration, and so his stomach went cold when it abruptly ceased.
The lean hand of the sorcerer clamped on his shoulder.
'Now listen,' he breathed into Duffy's ear, 'I am going to recite some sentences to you, quietly, a phrase at a time, and I want you to shout them into the well after me. Do you understand?'
'No,' returned the Irishman. 'If you're the one that knows the words, you shout them. I'll stand by.'
The warm draft from out of the well was stronger now, as if something that nearly filled the shaft was silently ascending.
'Do as I say, you damned idiot,' Aurelianus whispered quickly, his fingers digging into Duffy's shoulder. 'They'll recognize your voice - and obey it, too, if our luck hasn't completely flown.'
The well-draft slowed to what it had been before. Duffy got the impression of something poised and attentive. He kept his mouth resolutely shut as long as he could bear it
- perhaps thirty seconds. Then, Very well,' he breathed weakly. 'Go ahead.'
The words Aurelianus whispered to him, Duffy realized as he called them out after him in a strong voice, were in archaic Welsh, and after a few moments he recognized them. They were lines from the hopelessly enigmatic Cad Goddeu, the Battle of the Trees, which his grandmother used to recite to him when he was a child. He began to translate the lines in his head as he pronounced them:
'I know the light whose name is Splendor,
And the number of the ruling lights
That scatter rays of fire
High above the deep.
Long and. white are my fingers,
It is long since I was a herdsman.
I have travelled over the earth,
I know the star-knowledge
Of stars before the earth was made,
Whence I was born,
How many worlds there are.
I have travelled, I have made a circuit,
I have slept in a hundred islands;
I have dwelt in a hundred cities.
