They hesitated, then nodded as one.
“That,” Abernathy declared triumphantly, “is the one who has the mind’s eye crystals! So go talk to him!”
He let go of them and stepped away, hands on dog hips. The G’home Gnomes looked at each other uncertainly, then back at Horris Kew, then back at Abernathy.
“There are no crystals here?” Fillip asked, sounding hurt
“None?” Sot asked.
Abernathy shook his head. “You have my solemn word as Court Scribe and servant to the King. If there are any crystals to be found, that is the man who can find them.”
Fillip and Sot wiped dirt-encrusted fingers across damp snouts and teary eyes and stared down at the conjurer with increasing interest. They sniffled rather anxiously, and their jaws worked to no discernible purpose. They stepped back.
“We shall speak with him, then,” Fillip announced, taking the lead as always.
“Yes, we shall,” Sot reinforced.
They started to turn away and move back toward the stairwell. In spite of himself, Abernathy called them back. “Wait!” he hailed. “Hold on a moment.” He walked over to them. He didn’t owe them this, but he couldn’t let them go unwarned either. “Listen to me. These men, the one in black particularly, are very dangerous. You cannot just walk up to them and ask for crystals. They are likely to cut you into tiny pieces for your trouble.”
Fillip and Sot looked at each other.
“We will be very careful,” Fillip advised.
“Very,” Sot agreed.
They started away again.
“Wait!” Abernathy called a second time. Something had just occurred to him, something he had missed before. The G’home Gnomes turned. “How did you get in here?” he asked suspiciously. “You did not come over the bridge. And you do not look like you swam the lake. So how exactly did you get in?”
They exchanged another in that endless series of furtive looks. Neither spoke.
Abernathy came right up to them then and bent down. “You tunneled in, didn’t you?” Fillip bit his lip. Sot clenched his jaw. “Didn’t you?”
They nodded. Reluctantly.
“All the way from the far bank?” Abernathy was incredulous.
Fillip sulked. “The forest, actually.”
Sot sulked harder. “Back in the trees.”
Abernathy stared. “No, how could you? That would take days, weeks.” He stopped himself. “Wait a minute. How long has this tunnel of yours been in place?”
“A while,” Fillip muttered, and scuffed the stone rampart with the claws of his feet.
“And where does this tunnel come out?”
Another pause, this one longer. “The kitchen larder,” Sot admitted finally.
Abernathy straightened once more. Memories of food mysteriously disappearing from the larder surfaced like dead fish at moonrise. Cooks’ helpers had been blamed. Accusations had been made. No resolution had ever been reached.
“So,” he said softly, drawing the word out like a hangman’s noose. “The kitchen larder.”
Fillip and Sot cringed and waited for the blow to fall. But Abernathy wasn’t even looking at them. He was looking away, toward the ramparts and beyond. He was not considering retribution against the G’home Gnomes; he was weighing instead the prospect of getting even with Horris Kew. With the glow of the watch fires dancing off the shadowed stone of Sterling Silver, he stood poised on the brink of a decision that would either redeem him or cost him his life.
It took him only a moment to make up his mind. He bent down again and asked pointedly, “Is this tunnel of yours big enough for me?”
Gnome Time
Abernathy was not by nature compulsive in his behavior or even remotely venturesome, so it was with some surprise that he found himself contemplating squeezing into the narrow tunnel hollowed out by Fillip and Sot far back in a corner of the kitchen larder, intent on crawling its length to the woods behind the siege lines ringing Sterling Silver, there to undertake some precarious and probably foolhardy effort to capture and squeeze information out of Horris Kew. It wasn’t that he didn’t realize what it was he was doing or appreciate the danger involved that disturbed him; it was that he would even consider such madness in the first place.
He consoled himself by determining it was his dog side taking over and therefore entirely the fault of Questor Thews.